“Want to help me pick a spot for the grave?”
“Okay.”
They got a spade from the barn. A cairn of pebbles held upright the tiny cross that marked the grave of Elvis, the deceased parakeet. Elvis had had the freedom of the house and was up to two words when Bucky, four years old then, had stepped on him. Bucky’s feeling of guilt and horror had lasted for so long they had begun to worry about him.
Sam got the hole well started and then let Jamie take his turn. The boy worked with dogged violence, grim-faced. As Sam stood watching, Nancy came up to him, walking slowly.
“This is a good place,” she said. “Did you bring her back?”
“Doc Lowney is going to bring her.”
“I saw you from my window. Damn it all, anyway.”
“Easy, girl.”
“Mother thinks that man did it.”
“I know she does. But there’s no proof.”
Jamie stopped digging. “I could dig a bigger hole. I could dig a hole for him and drop him down in it with snakes and things, and fill it with rocks and stomp it all down on him.”
Sam could see the boy was winded. “I’ll take a turn now. Let’s have the shovel.”
They stood and watched him finish it. Lowney arrived. He had the dog wrapped in a tattered old khaki blanket. Sam lifted her out of the car and carried her to the hole. She was extremely heavy. He covered her quickly and shaped the mound with the shovel. Dr. Lowney refused the offer of a drink and drove on back to town.
Dinner was a cheerless affair. During dinner Sam outlined the new rules. He had half expected objections. But the kids accepted them without comment.
After the children were all in bed, Sam and Carol sat in the living room.
“It’s so hard on them,” Carol said. “Bucky most of all. He was two when we got her, and she was sort of his dog.”
“I’ll do a little slave-driving tomorrow. Make them all work on the boat. It’ll take their minds off it.”
“And some target practice?”
“You sound eager. You were pretty reluctant the last time.”
“Because there didn’t seem to be much point in it.”
They read for a while. He got up restlessly and looked out at the night. There was a distant grumble of June thunder. It sounded as though it came from the north, out over the lake. Marilyn had always had a standard reaction to thunder. The head would go up and tilt. Then the ears would go back. She would stand up and give a vastly artificial yawn, lick her chops, eye them in a side-long way and saunter in the general direction of the couch. With one more apologetic glance she would crawl under the couch. Once when a loud clap of thunder had come without previous warnings from the distance, she had shot across the room and miscalculated the clearance and banged her forehead mightily on the bottom edge. She had rebounded, staggered, recovered, and scrambled under, and everybody had laughed except Bucky.
“It was like a charmed circle,” Carol said.
He turned and looked at her. “I think I know what you mean.”
“The untouchables. And now something has come in out of the darkness and struck one of us down. The charm isn’t working any more.”
“The business of living is a very precarious occupation.”
“Don’t be philosophical with me. Let me have my ridiculous little superstitions. We had a nice little fool’s paradise.”
“And will have again.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“You’ve had a grim day.”
She stood up and stretched. “And I’m going to put an end to it right now. This was a real whistler of a day. A doozy.” The thunder sounded again, closer. “Let’s lock up the joint,” she said.
“I’ll do it. You run along. I’ll be right up.”
After she had gone up he stood in the back of the house and watched the northwest sky. There were pink flashes below the horizon line. It would have been easier for all of them, he thought, if Marilyn had been a valiant, brave and noble animal. But she had been such a hapless creature, full of alarms and forebodings, yelping at the mere threat of pain, constantly in a state of apology. It was as though all her fears had come true, as though she had always known of the special agony awaiting her.
Four
ALL FIVE BOWDENS HAD BREAKFAST, for once, at the same time. There was discussion of the violence of the storm that had struck in the night. Jamie and Bucky had not heard it at all. Nancy said it had awakened her and she had put her robe on and sat by her window and watched it. Neither Sam nor Carol mentioned that Carol, wakened by the storm and timid of lightning, had slid over into Sam’s bed, cuddling in fragrant closeness to still her fears. Marilyn was not mentioned. But Bucky had shadowy hollows under his eyes.
“Schedule,” Sam said. “Attention, all Bowdens. Nancy will help her mother swamp out the kitchen and make the beds while you boys help me find the stuff for the boat and load it in the wagon. Then we shall have a spot of target practice. You are in charge of hanging up the cans, Jamie. Then we go work on the boat.”
The range was part way up the gentle hill behind the house. The backstop was a clay bank. Jamie got a half dozen empty cans from the rubbish and tied cord on them and hung them from a red maple limb in front of the clay bank. They used up a box and a half of longs in the .22 automatic. Sam and Nancy were the best shots. Jamie, as usual, became infuriated with himself when Nancy outshot him. Carol did better than she had done in the past. She did not try to give up her turn. She listened with care to the hints Sam gave her. She did not flinch as badly. Sam, standing behind her and off to one side, saw the set of her jaw and her frown of concentration. The kids were much quieter than usual. This had been a game they had played often. Today it was more than a game. There was a new flavor to it, sensed by all of them.
On Bucky’s final turn he hit three of the riddled cans at sixty feet with an eight-shot clip. He flushed red with pride at the congratulations.
“Shall I take the cans down?” Jamie asked.
“Leave them up,” Sam said. “Maybe we’ll get a little more practice in tomorrow afternoon. If we finish the boat.”
“How about their homework?”
“Tonight and tomorrow night,” Sam said.
“I was going to the drive-in tonight,” Nancy said in a complaining tone.
“Forgotten the new rules already?” Sam asked.
“No, but gosh, Dad, I’d already said yes.”
“And just who has a car to take you to the drive-in.”
“Well, his name is Tommy Kent and he’s a senior and he’s eighteen so he can drive at night, and it’s a double date, sort of, and Sandra is going with Bobby.”
“Is that the family that has the furniture store?” Carol asked.
“Yes, and it would be all right, honestly. They’ll pick me up right here and we’ll come right back after the movie. It’s with John Wayne. I was going to ask about it Friday, but … on account of Marilyn I forgot. Can’t I go, please? Just this time?”
Sam looked at Carol and saw the almost imperceptible nod. “All right. But just this once. And how did you do on the history?”
“Pretty good, I think.”
“You kids run along and get ready. We’re going to the boat yard right now.”
They ran down the hill. Sam and Carol followed more slowly. Sam said, “You crossed me up.”
“I know. But I think this will be all right. And you would have no possible idea of how much I’ve heard about Tommy Kent, Tommy Kent, Tommy Kent. Before and during the Pike Foster era. He’s a school figure. A big athlete. It’s quite a coup for a junior-high girl to get a date with him.”
“I suppose. But I wish she’d get tired of the muscle set.”
“This one isn’t as dull as poor Pike. Tommy waited on me at the store one Saturday. When I was buying that lamp for the study last August. He’s quite a poised young man.”
“He’s probably too poised, damn it. Too sophisticated for Nance. She’s only fourteen. I don�
��t want her hot-rodding around in the night, going to those drive-ins. What do they call them? Passion pits. And they make jokes about never seeing the movie.”
“Now stop being the traditional father, darling. If we haven’t given Nance a good set of moral standards by now, it’s much too late to start. She’s nearly fifteen. Sandra will be along. And no two determined young men are going to separate them. She will very probably be kissed.”
“It makes me writhe to think of it.”
“Be brave, darling. She’ll be safe and it will be better than having her gloom around. Pike’s desertion really hurt her morale. And this date built it back up again.”
“The damn car probably has no brakes, weak lights, and bald-headed tires.”
“It happens to be a brand-new Plymouth two-door sedan.”
“I forgot the mark-up on furniture. What’s with Jamie?”
Jamie had let the other two go ahead. He stood by Marilyn’s fresh grave, waiting for them. When they came up to him he said fiercely, “We’re going to have a big marble monument. With dates and her name.”
“We’ll have to have something, Son,” Sam said. “But a big marble marker would be pretentious, wouldn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It ought to be simpler. I’ll bet if you and Mike scouted the creek bed, you could find a good stone with a flat side on it. Then I think we could chisel her name in it.”
When Jamie looked dubious, Carol said, “I think that would look very nice, dear.”
Jamie sighed. “Okay. We’ll look. Ever since I got up I keep feeling like I see her around. Sort of over to the side. Like if I turned my head quick enough I could see her.”
Carol hugged him against her side. “I know, dear. We all feel the same way.”
Jamie looked at his father from the circle of his mother’s arm. “We could find where he eats and sneak in the kitchen and put something in his food and then when he eats it we could be looking through those round windows they have in the doors of the kitchens in restaurants and he’d be rolling around knocking tables over and everybody screaming until he’s all quiet and dead.”
“Those pants are too good for boat work,” Carol said. She gave him a little push. “You run in the house and put on the rattiest pair of jeans you can find in your closet.”
“The ones you said were too far gone to patch?”
“Those will be perfect.”
Jamie ran off. Carol said, “I wonder if it’s healthy, the way his imagination works. Some of the things he comes out with are shocking.”
“At eleven civilization is still a thin coating. Underneath is all savage.”
“Sir, you are speaking of the children I love.”
“They run in packs, pick on the weak ones and the different ones, gloat on thoughts of dreadful torture. It’s part of survival, darling. In wartime, in the big cities, they survive, when the ones a little older, softened up a little more by the moralities, perish.”
“Sometimes you get ridiculously objective. I’m thinking of Jamie. He has such violent ideas.”
“Speaking of violent ideas, can you manage to keep the automatic handy without being obvious about it?”
“I think so. My big straw bag.”
“It won’t make you feel too melodramatic?”
“I am not going to let you make me feel self-conscious about it. It’s a gun. It shoots. And I am not squeamish a bit. You’ve showed me how the safety works. I’m going to keep one shell in the chamber. My brood is threatened, Samuel, and I’m turning just as primitive as Jamie. While I was shooting up there I kept wondering if I could point it at a human being and pull the trigger and keep the sights lined up and not flinch. And I thought about Marilyn and I know I can.”
“You impress me.”
The New Essex Yacht Club is four miles east of the city. It has an ample yacht basin, dock space, its own breakwater, a long club building, with terraces, bars and ballroom. The motor-cruiser owners call the devout sailors the Magellan Set. The sailors call the cruiser owners the Stinkpot Group. Large yachts stop at New Essex because the facilities are good. In the summer there are visitors from Miami and Fort Lauderdale. In the winter several of the local owners of the big cruisers head south.
After Sam and Carol graduated from the Sweet Sioux II—a converted lifeboat from an obsolete lake ferry—to the Sweet Sioux III—a cranky twenty-six feet of day cruiser about sixteen years old, with convertible navy top—they joined the New Essex Yacht Club. The dues were high, and the social schedule was intensive. The Sweet Sioux, no matter how fresh her current paint and varnish job, never looked at ease tied up in the middle of all that teak, brass, chrome and mahogany. She had a beamy and disreputable look, like a dressed-up washer-woman at the opera.
She seemed actively to resent her new environment. On each departure she tried to swing and bash one of the grand craft tied up near her. She had a single screw and a sixty-five horse power marine engine of a make few people had ever heard of. The engine was stolid, reliable and unaccountably quiet. It could push the Sweet Sioux along at a waddling ten knots. But at the New Essex Yacht Club the engine also revolted. Twice it quit in the middle of the basin as they were headed in. And twice they had to accept a tow. After that Sam kept a five-horse outboard motor wrapped in a tarp stowed forward.
The club was expensive and too many of the members were excessively stuffy. And it was a long way from Harper. When it came time to pay dues for the second year, Sam and Carol talked it over and were each pleased and surprised to find how willingly the other person would give up the club.
They joined the Harper Boat Club. It was ten miles closer, on the lake shore between New Essex and Harper, at the end of a road that turned off Route 18. The club building could more accurately be called a shack. The boat basin was small and crowded. Jake Barnes’s boat yard was next door to the club. It was a cluttered, informal enterprise. He sold boats, gas, oil, gear, fishing tackle and cold beer. He was a fat, sleepy man who had inherited the business when his father died. He was a good but indolent craftsman. He had rickety ways on which he could haul anything up to forty feet out of the water. He had a good touch with marine engines and outboards and, when pressed, could do major hull repairs. His yard was an incredible clutter of timbers, corroding hardware, empty oil cans, hulls too far gone for repair, rotting lines and sagging roofs over his covered storage area.
Most members of the Harper Boat Club were ardent do-it-yourself addicts. This seemed to please Jake. He charged a nominal fee for hauling the boats out. He seemed happiest when he could stand in dirty tee shirt and soiled duck pants drinking his own beer and watching the clientele work on their boats. The children of the members of the neighboring club adored Jake. He told them all kinds of monstrous lies of his adventures.
The Sweet Sioux took kindly to the change. Here she looked almost modern. After the opera the washer-woman had returned to the neighborhood saloon and was content. The marine engine no longer conked out. And Sam and Carol had a lot more fun at club affairs. The group was younger.
Sam parked the station wagon in the rear of Jake’s boat yard and checked off the things they had brought. Sandpaper, calking material and calking compound, antifouling marine hull paint, deck paint and varnish.
Jake, with a can of beer in his large dirty hand, ambled over to meet them as they came around the side of the main shed.
“Hi, Sam. Howya, Mizz Bowden. Hello, kids.”
“Did you get her out?” Nancy asked.
“Sure did. Right down there on the last cradle. She needs some work, all right. Looked her over yesterday. Want to show you something, Sam.”
They walked down to the Sweet Sioux. Out of the water she looked twice as big and half again as ugly.
Jake finished his beer and threw the can aside, took out a pocket knife, opened the small blade and went around to the transom. As Sam watched, he dug the blade into the rear of the keel just forward of the prop. The blade went in with alarming e
ase. Jake straightened up and gave Sam a significant look.
“Rotten?”
“It’s rotted some. The last two, three feet of the keel.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“I’d say if a fellow let it go too long it might give him some trouble after a while.”
“Should I do something right away?”
“Now, I wouldn’t say right away. Busy as I am this time of year, it would be some time before I could get to her. Then I’d say cut it back to about here. Cut this whole section right out. Then cut a good choice piece to fit and bolt it up right here, and then put some plate braces on both sides along here and bolt them all the way through. I checked the rest of her over and she’s still sound.”
“When should I do it, Jake?”
“I’d say after I pull her out in October is time enough. Then you’ll have the use of her all summer. Now, come around here and I’ll show you where the bad leak is. Right here. See. The planking is a little sprung and it opened up this here crack. Water run out of her real good right at that place.”
“Isn’t that a little wide to calk?”
Jake reached under the boat and picked up a thin piece of wood off the crossbar of the cradle. “I whittled this piece out and it seems to fit okay. I was going to soak it good with waterproof glue and pound it in there, but I didn’t get around to it. I guess you could handle that okay. I’ll show you where the glue pot is, Sam. Now, I want to see you kids turn out some work today. No runnin’ off like the last time, Bucky. You sand good and you’ll raise yourself a crop of muscle. You bring old Marilyn along to help you? … What’s the matter? I say something wrong?”
“Let’s go get that glue,” Sam said. On the way up to the shed he told Jake about the dog.
Jake spat accurately at an empty oil drum. “Take a special mean kind of son of a bitch to poison a dog.”
“I know.”
“There was a fella here before your time, when my daddy was alive. Most folks say fish got no feelings. Cold blood and all. But he used to clean his fish here, and he’d take them alive out of the bait well and scale ’em and fillet ’em still wiggling. Seemed to get a kick out of it. We run him off the place finally. Lost a bait customer. Some people got a mean streak all right. It’s surely hell on those kids. That wasn’t much of a dog for fight, but she sure liked friends. Here’s the glue. Let me get that top for you. Use this here rubber mallet and don’t try to get it in too fast. Little taps, and keep it even. Don Langly’s setter bitch had another litter couple of weeks ago. She jumped the fence again. Don thinks it was a chow dog got to her this time, but those pups are sure cute. He’s trying to find homes for them for when they’re weaned.”
Cape Fear Page 5
