The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Wade cast an eye up, unfooled. “Not over by a long shot.”

  “No. Just enough for the flatlanders to get in.” It was what downeast Maine natives called inland folk, who retaliated by calling the vicinity a backwater. I supposed it was, too, if you thought of it only in economic terms: so thinly populated as not to be worth ruining with the commercial graffiti of billboards, neon signs, and strip malls. When I came here, it stunned me at first to realize how much of what I had thought of as civilization was really just advertising and marketing, incessant urgings to buy, BUY, BUY.

  At any rate, the storm’s second punch was holding off long enough to let them onto the island: more deputies, state cops, crime scene investigators, and of course the newspeople. By nightfall they would all be holed up in Eastport’s bed-and-breakfasts or at the Motel East, gawking at the locals—who would not deign to gawk back—and wondering how in the world they would get out again.

  “What did you bring?” Wade downshifted, and we made our way up Washington Street past the U.S. Customs building, whose massive granite shape hunkered squarely over the harbor.

  “The Bisley, and a box.”

  Of ammunition, I meant. We rode in silence on 191 out of town, across Carlow Island and onto the two-lane causeway. Close on either side of the narrow, curving strip of road, the heaving waves were black, bannered with grey foam.

  When we got to Route 1, there was a fender-bender sitting crosswise in the intersection. The first vehicle was a white Econoline van with a Bangor TV station’s call letters on the side, its driver wearing a blue suit and tasseled loafers but no hat or gloves, stomping around in the slush. The van had tangled with a scummy-looking green Ford sedan with a bumper sticker that read: Don’t Like Loggers? Try Plastic Toilet Paper.

  “Damn fools,” Wade said grimly, not meaning the drivers. The body of one of the fellows drowned at Lubec had fetched up in some rocks out beyond the Narrows. I could see the icy water reflecting in Wade’s eyes, hear raw sorrow in his voice. He would talk about it when he was ready, if he ever was, and that was fine with me. For some things, a decent downeast silence was the only good response, at least in the immediate aftermath.

  South on Route 1, the pines reared up blackish-green on both sides of the highway, their boughs bending low under heavy loads of white as if shielding the red fruits of the savagely thorned barberry brush beneath, but the pavement itself was mostly clear beneath an iron-grey sky. A couple of miles beyond Pembroke Center the snow stopped entirely, and Wade turned off onto an unmarked road that wound between tiny, picket-fenced cemeteries with small American flags poking up through the snow and widely separated mobile homes set on cleared quarter-acres of brushlot.

  Bud Abrams’ place was a neat, double-wide prefab with a wide, pristine blacktop driveway, perfectly cleared. Nobody was around but Bud’s dogs, a couple of shaggy tan mongrels who charged us, teeth bared and sounding like the hounds of hell, until they caught our familiar scent. After that they trotted back up onto Bud’s deck, satisfied that they had performed their canine duty, and flopped inside the plywood lean-to he had built for them.

  We carried our weapons and ammunition out to the picnic table behind Bud’s shed. Wade unlocked the shed with the key Bud had given him and got out the paper targets and steel fall plates, while I carried the Bisley and cartridges to the clearing behind.

  “Ready?” Wade managed a smile, grateful to be active and outdoors. It was the only medicine that ever worked on him.

  “Ready,” I replied, putting a hand on his arm for a fleeting instant.

  A small laugh escaped him; he knew what I was doing—not cheering him up, exactly, just getting him out here.

  “Think you’re pretty smart,” he said.

  “Sometimes,” I replied, and then we got back to business.

  In the thicket of mixed hardwood and stunted pine that bordered the granite outcropping where Bud had placed his shooting range, a bluejay screamed into the silence as if protesting our disturbance of his peace. I cleared the table of snow, spread a tarp on it, and opened the locked weapon box and the boxes of ammunition. Wade set up the fall plates and thumbtacked the paper targets, tramping a path fifty feet through the snow to the target butt that Bud had built out of two-by-fours and a steel backdrop.

  A few flakes were drifting from the sky as we got everything set up. When we were ready, Wade watched as I pulled the hammer back two clicks to the loading position, slotted the cartridges into the Bisley’s cylinder chambers, and took my stance: at a forty-five degree angle, resisting the temptation to turn my body.

  As I pulled the hammer back a third click to the firing position, I took a deep breath and let it out, slowly, getting my sight line, squeezing with my whole hand, as Wade had instructed me to do when I first began shooting the revolver.

  The Bisley’s polished walnut grip felt warm and alive, even in the cold, and through the earmuff-like hearing protector I wore, its report was a distant smack! The gun jumped sharply but not crazily, and I did not attempt to prevent this, but tried not to anticipate it. Then I took another deep breath and stopped trying altogether, just looked and fired, and things went better for the next five shots.

  When I had gotten off all six, I opened the loading gate, dropping the spent cartridges, and lay the Bisley open on the tarp while we went to examine the target.

  “Nice group,” Wade said, sounding less dismal than before, and it was, for me. Five holes bunched in the lower left sighting-in target, two or three inches between them. The first hole was high and wide, almost into the black silhouette of the man-head centered on the target paper.

  “You could work on your sight picture, still,” Wade said.

  The trick isn’t in seeing it. The trick is to keep on seeing it, right through the moment of the event.

  “Dry-fire it if you want, at home. Keep the seeing and firing as one thing, unified.”

  He said this quietly, without any special, heavy import. He was a good teacher, and we’d been coming here once a week for months, since I found out he collected the old Wild West replica handguns. The Bisley was a .45, Italian-made, not as fast as a modern .38 semi-but with a load that would, as Wade said, sit ’em down if you ever had a call to shoot somebody with it.

  Not that I expected to do any such thing. “Again?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “After you.”

  Then I stood back and let him go to it, watching the smooth routine of handling the Bisley, loading and looking and firing, resetting the fall plates, and walking back under a silent sky, wipe the horror of the morning from his mind.

  “It was just a goddamned boat,” he burst out abruptly, reloading for the third time. “It wasn’t worth dying for.”

  “No. It wasn’t. I wish they hadn’t gone out, too.”

  He looked at the fall plates, grimaced, and shot them down.

  “But they did. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it,” he argued.

  Arguing with himself. “No,” I said quietly. “You couldn’t.”

  He lifted his chin, raised his hands, and gripped the weapon stubbornly, sighting over the fall plates. On a deadfall beyond the targets, silhouetted against the snow, the bluejay had settled stupidly, accustomed I imagined to the sound of the firing range.

  Wade’s eyes narrowed purposefully at it. A long moment passed.

  Then he lowered the gun. “But they did,” he repeated, his shoulders dropping. “They did go out, and now it’s over and done with. And damn, but that water was wicked cold.”

  The bluejay flew off. “You got one body recovered,” I assured him. “So his family can have a funeral. You did that.”

  He thought about it. “Yeah,” he said at last, accepting it reluctantly. “And the other one might still show up. At least we know where it didn’t go, so the searchers can rule out some areas. It doesn’t undrown them, but yeah, I guess that’s something.”

  “Under,” I agreed, “the circumstances.”

  Wade is ordi
narily so stoic that the only way you’ll know he has smacked his thumb is by spying his blackened thumbnail. This time, though, it was what he needed: not comfort, but company, and a little talk. Under the circumstances.

  “Thanks,” he said quietly, and went back to shooting. By the time he finished and I’d had a few more turns, the box of cartridges was emptied and the air was peppery with the smell of nitrocellulose powder. And when Bud’s shed was locked securely once more and we were headed back through Pembroke, Wade was himself again.

  “So Alvin spent more on the bad stocks he bought than he got for the good ones he sold,” he said. I felt better, too. Before I came to Maine I’d spent most of my adulthood in competition as cutthroat as any shoot-out. The principles, clear sight and pure, purposeful action, were exactly the same, and nowadays I was content with paper targets.

  Almost. “He spent a lot more,” I said. “A hundred and fifty thousand each time, that didn’t show on any of his 1040s.” A deer stepped delicately from the thicket alongside the road.

  Wade whistled. “Undeclared. So where’d he get it? And what’s it got to do with what’s going on now?”

  “Well, it was a little bit difficult, getting that part out of him.”

  The deer bounded across the road in front of us, through the snow that had begun sifting down heavily again, and vanished into the brush on the other side.

  “I asked him where the hundred and fifty grand came from. Bottom line, he says Mcllwaine gave it to him, along with stock tips. But he’s vague on why. All he would tell me was that it was for old times’ sake, which I don’t understand, and he was in no mood to enlighten me. He’s frantic about what might happen to Ellie.”

  I explained what Alvin had wanted: for me to kick dirt over the fact that Mcllwaine had as good as ruined him.

  “He thought if I did that, it might help get rid of Ellie’s motive, that she was angry over what Mcllwaine had done, that somehow she thought it was deliberate.”

  “Was it? Mcllwaine ruining Alvin, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Alvin says not. But Alvin’s not making a marvelous amount of sense, right now. Besides wanting me to clear what he thinks could have been Ellie’s motive for killing Mcllwaine out of the picture, he also seems to think I can kick a clear, ongoing scheme of insider trading under the rug.

  “All those tips from Mcllwaine,” I explained, “over all those years—that’s big-time illegal. The SEC should have been onto it, bells and whistles should have gone off—the second time for sure, if not right from the start. I have no idea how Alvin and Mcllwaine could have managed to pull it off. But there’s got to be a reason the authorities didn’t nail them. Nobody gets away with being so blatant as that.”

  I frowned at the memory of Alvin trying to persuade me. “As if I could do magic,” I finished, annoyed at Alvin’s simplistic expectation. “As if I could just make it go away.”

  Wade shrugged. “Alvin’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that’s for sure. But he did raise Ellie pretty much single-handed. That’s got to count for something.”

  “Oh, it does. Of course it does.” Ellie had told me how he’d been there every step of the way: sitting with her every night while she finished her homework, helping her with her spelling. Listening, year after year, to her hopes and dreams, and trying to explain why Hedda was the way she was, letting Ellie know Hedda’s meanness was not Ellie’s fault, that it was just something neither of them—not Alvin, and certainly not Ellie—could help.

  Alvin had made Hedda not so terrible as she might have been, and this in the end was perhaps his greatest accomplishment: that Ellie was not an emotional cripple—far from it—on account of her mother.

  “He did a fine job,” I said. “It’s just when people dump their money troubles in my lap, I always wish they’d done it back when they first started making them, instead of now when it’s too late.”

  “Uh-huh,” Wade agreed. He took the long turn out of Pembroke without slowing, then eased back for the straight stretch, which ices up suddenly and treacherously.

  “As for old times’ sake,” Wade went on, “that’s easy. Everyone around here knows they grew up together. Alvin stayed home; he was the steady one. Mcllwaine went off to make his fortune, and people said he was the crazy one of the pair. Now he’s built that big, ugly house out on the point, lawn looks like a damned landing strip, to show the home folks they were wrong. Rub their noses in it, you might say.”

  “Oh,” I said inadequately, struggling to absorb yet another thing that everyone knew around here: that Mcllwaine was not only an Eastport native but Alvin White’s old pal. Sometimes I felt as if life in this state consisted mostly of discovering facts that everyone else had known since the day they were born.

  Or earlier. Soon after I came to Maine, for instance, I’d learned that fresh scallops could be had by the gallon or half-gallon from the Dockside Cafe, so I’d gone in one day and asked about them.

  The decor in the Dockside consisted of red-checked plastic tablecloths, a round-shouldered old Frigidaire, and a galvanized sink crowded in by the smoking grill and the Fryolator. At the tables by the windows overlooking the waterfront, men in boots and overalls hunched over coffee as black as crankcase oil, platters heaped with french fries and onion rings, and haddock sandwiches dripping with tartar sauce.

  “Ayuh,” said Greta Holabird, her muscular arm making sweeping motions as she wiped down the counter. “Wrap ’em in butchah papah, lay ’em in the freezah. Sell you the butchah papah, if you want.”

  She named a price and I allowed as how it seemed reasonable, her downeast Maine twang still sounding exotic to my ears. “When can I have them?”

  “Well,” Greta replied, “it depends. Y’see, some days the men go out scallopin’. And other days, they go out whorin’.”

  Taken aback, I was about to agree that this too sounded eminently reasonable, when a rumble of men’s laughter began rising behind me, and after a moment even dour Greta cracked a smile.

  “That’s what they call the sea urchins,” she explained. “Whore’s eggs.”

  A sea urchin is a creature about the size of a baby’s fist, round and covered with green spines; a less edible looking item could not be imagined, but there is a market for them in Asia and when there is a market, a downeast fisherman knows what to do.

  “You come along when the season opens,” Greta said, “bring a bucket, take your scallops home in. For a pretty girl like you, I expect even these boys can leave the whores be, day or so.”

  I’d felt the men’s eyes following me out into the bright, salt-washed morning. Across the street, Henry Wadsworth had been unrolling the green-striped awning in front of the hardware store his ancestors had founded, back around the time their cousin was writing Hiawatha. Margaret Smythe was setting chrysanthemums in the bent-twig planters on the sidewalk outside Fountain Books, where you could buy the latest issue of Wired magazine or a copy of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, depending on what you were feeling short of that day.

  On the dock, yellow forklifts beetled between the Rustoleum-red quonset warehouses and the dangling, many-hooked grappling cranes of a Swedish container vessel, the Selander, her cargo holds gaping and her flags snapping in an onshore breeze. Half a mile off, the lighthouse on Deer Island twinkled in the sunshine, under a cloudless sky.

  I walked home slowly, feeling a realization form and storing it away for future use, like a scallop on ice. Over the months since then I had told the sea urchin story many times, always with pleasure and amusement.

  But I’d never confessed the rest of my downeast tale, the verdict in the laughter at the Dockside. For while I was accepted pleasantly enough when I came here, and everyone was friendly and helpful in the extreme, the undeniable fact was that I was from away, and could not ever be expected to understand some things.

  “The first two times,” I went on to Wade as the low frame building of the Wabnaki store with its ocean sunrise mural came in
to view, signaling the turn to East-port, “Mcllwaine’s stock tips panned out and Alvin made a bundle on takeover rumors that ended up being true: Mcllwaine bought the companies, and the stocks rocketed.”

  Wade slowed for the turn. The fender-bender was cleared, with only a sprinkle of orange taillight glass to show where it had been.

  “Alvin never changed his way of living,” he said. “That’s standard in this neck of the woods, not lettin’ your neighbors know you’ve got money. Bet he never spent a dime of it, or even told Ellie or Hedda.”

  “Right. They were comfortable anyway, on account of the lumberyard—Alvin closed the business early enough so that ending it didn’t bankrupt him, not by a long shot. And he said he kept thinking the money he made by following Mcllwaine’s advice would disappear, that it was all too easy. Which it did, because the last time,” I went on, “Mcllwaine changed his mind, found out the company was a loser before anyone else did and canceled his takeover plans. Trouble was, he didn’t tell Alvin about it, and Alvin took a bath. That was about six months ago.”

  Wade raised his eyebrows. “And Ellie found out about it, thought Mcllwaine double-crossed her father.”

  Out over Moose Island, clouds bunched together like dark fists mounded one on top of the other, ready to hammer down.

  “Nearly half a million is a lot of money for old times’ sake,” I said, “no matter what good buddies they used to be; that part still doesn’t make sense, and that’s how much Mcllwaine gave Alvin. But what I do know is, Alvin didn’t invest only Mcllwaine’s contribution. He bet his whole stake, all three times—including this last one.”

  “So now he’s in trouble.”

  “Right. Serious financial trouble. I’m going to have to take another look at his situation, but at a glance I’d say he’ll be lucky to hang onto his house.”

  Wade digested this as we came back into town, past Shead High School and the ruins of Fort Sullivan where the War of 1812 was lost—at least for Eastport—without a shot fired, the British having simply engulfed the strategically crucial location with a massive armed fleet. After that, the town languished under British rule for six years, the only piece of post-colonial-era U.S. soil that has ever been occupied by a foreign power.