Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  But I resisted: Nothing I could say would have helped me. Al­ready my memory was being revised and edited by my fear and guilt. I remember Kevin was falling and I was standing back be­cause I didn’t want Blossom to go into the water with Kevin. But all I could reconstruct was Blossom, and Kevin’s expression as he thrust her toward her mother. Then there was churning wake and Blossom in Jane Marie’s arms. I felt sick and scared and was willing to give up the truth of the situation to the old man in authority.

  “Accidental drowning. I’m with you all the way on this, son.”

  I hated the sound of his voice. It was both cloying and ac­cusatory. I thought of Kevin Sands disappearing under the water, falling three thousand feet in a slow descent to the ocean floor. His body would be there on the bottom for fish and invertebrates to feed on; he would not be made buoyant by the rotting of his own flesh. Without some buoyancy to keep him out of the intense cold and pressure of the deep ocean, Kevin Sands would not rise. George Doggy knew that the only substantial things left of him were words—our words about what had happened—and George Doggy was now ordering these words into a script as the Winning Hand churned through the outgoing tide.

  I heated some canned tomato soup on the oil stove as we crossed Sitka Sound, heading to harbor. All of us ate silently except Todd, who slurped and rattled his spoon against the plastic mug. Jane Marie stood at the helm taking occasional sips from her mug. We tied up to the Winning Hand’s slip in the harbor in the pitch dark. As soon as the bumpers nudged the dock, George Doggy jumped off the boat and walked directly over to the Naked Horse. As he started to step onto Jonathan’s sailboat, I yelled over to him, “I’ve got a call in to Pomfret. I figure the Sitka P.D. is going to want to go over Jonathan’s boat.” I said this even though I had no intention of calling Pomfret.

  George Doggy looked up at me and he seemed indecisive. He balanced his weight back and forth until finally he stepped back down onto the dock. He walked away quickly up the ramp.

  Jonathan was still sound asleep on board Jane Marie’s boat and he couldn’t be roused. I called Clem at his house from the harbor pay phone. I told him that his patient Jonathan was here on board the Winning Hand. The doctor had just gotten in from moving band gear back to the practice room. He was happy to hear Jonathan had survived the storm and told me he would come down to the harbor later that night and check on him.

  Jane Marie set to work cleaning up the boat and storing the running gear. She had called the harbormaster and was given permission to move the Naked Horse into an empty slip near the Winning Hand. Jonathan would have to move her to her own slip or out to the shipyard in the next few days, but the harbormaster didn’t make us deal with her during the night.

  I crawled into the Naked Horse to make sure she was secure for the night. Some of the wiring was dangling so only one of the cabin lights worked off the weak battery. Scattered around the cabin were gloves and rain gear, needlenose pliers, a couple of toothbrushes, boxes of noodles and freeze-dried soup. There were equipment manuals and boxes of clips and hardware, broken mugs and saucepans. There was a copy of The Odyssey and the complete works of Shakespeare. There were two Hornblower novels by Forester and a novel by Jean Genet, but I didn’t see any of the money that Jonathan had insisted would not be there.

  Finally I walked toward the stern and looked to the side of the engine compartment. I had seen a flashlight in the sink and after shaking it a while was able to turn it on. With the flashlight I could see the lead flashing Jonathan had tacked over the leak. I pried my way into the space by pulling with my hands. Holding the flashlight in my teeth, I came to the flashing. When I ripped it back, a thick smell washed over my face. I picked up the flashlight again. There, in the narrow compartment surrounding the shaft, was a tarry mass of currency stuffed down into the hull to plug the leak: hun­dreds of twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills, black as rotted leaves.

  This had been an expensive repair.

  I reached down into the sticky mess. The bills were a com­posted goo. I pulled my hand out of the mess and scraped what was probably a thousand dollars off onto the edge of the engine com­partment. I wedged myself around looking for something to clean my hands on and I was almost overwhelmed by a smell so strong it pushed me back against the hull of the old sailboat.

  In the far corner of the engine compartment was a green waterproof pack, the kind that’s commonly used by river guides or skiff outfitters. The heavy rubberized fabric is waterproof, and the bag itself has a large volume in one main compartment. With one hand covering my nose and mouth against the stink, I ex­tended the other to pull the bag closer and by using my foot I was able to open the folded-over flap and look inside.

  The warm smell of sour blood eased out of the bag. I tried to push away from it. I shined the light down into the mouth of the bag and saw blood crusted in thick folds around the sides of the bag. In the very bottom, maggots swam on a shallow puddle of blood.

  I pulled myself out from the narrow space in the stern and headed to the bow to see if I could find a towel to wipe my hands. Just under the V berth in the bow was a scattering of 9mm ammu­nition. This was not for the rifle I had seen. Just above the bunk, attached to the hull by a rubber strap, was a 9mm revolver with heavy rubberized grip. It seemed to be an odd handgun for a painter to keep within reach during his sleep at sea.

  I found a towel, wiped off my hands, left the Naked Horse, and hobbled back to the Winning Hand. Both boats were secure, and Jane Marie sat nursing Blossom at the chart table. We didn’t speak. I started to reach out to touch the baby’s head but just as I did I caught a whiff of the rotted smell on my sleeve and yanked my hand back.

  We walked up the dock and the half block to our house. The fa­miliar smell of home seemed a balm to me now. I suddenly felt the bruises and a heavy tiredness reached up my spine and tried to force my eyes shut.

  The answering machine was blinking with ten messages. I didn’t want to push the button, so I waited until after I’d given Blossom a bath. She shuddered with what I’ll call delight as I sponged her off in the little bath container we set up on the dish drainer. Her lips made her trademark O and her eyes scanned my face as I sang to her.

  Once I had toweled her off and handed her to Jane Marie, I pushed the message button. Two calls from the police wanting to speak to someone about the report we had filed. Two from the Coast Guard Search and Rescue center. One from a bankcard so­licitor promising to consolidate all my current debts into one rea­sonable and “customer-friendly” monthly payment.

  Then there was a message from Harrison Teller, who said he would be flying to Sitka and needed me to pick him up at the air­port. He said he had something to talk to me about, immediately.

  I looked quizzically at Jane Marie as she passed the open bed­room door putting on her nightshirt. “That first day you went out, I called Teller. I thought he should know what was going on with Patricia,” she said.

  The next message was from Patricia’s parents, telling me in a very stiff tone that they had hired an investigator in Seattle who wanted to talk to me about the circumstances of Patricia’s death. They left the investigator’s number and the message clicked off. The next two messages were from people asking about Todd be­cause they were worried that they hadn’t seen him in the last couple of days and it wasn’t like him to break his routine.

  The last message was from a friend of mine at the Department of Social Services saying that Sean Sands’s funeral was tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. “I just thought you might want to know, Cecil.” My friend’s voice sounded tired and frustrated, for it would not be easy drawing mourners for the funeral of a suspected schoolyard shooter. I called her right back and thanked her for thinking of me, promising I’d be there.

  I made a recording of the two messages having to do with the Ewers family and was about to clear the rest of the messages when the phone rang. I looked at Jane Marie and she
signaled to me that I should let it ring. But I shrugged my shoulders and answered.

  “Oh, Cecil, thank God you are there. Are you okay? Is everything okay? Where is the baby? You didn’t take her out in that flimsy little boat, did you?”

  I immediately recognized my mother’s voice. She was calling from our old house in Juneau. I could picture her sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and a cigarette. Yes, I was fine, I told her, and gave her a highly sanitized version of the events of the last few days. Ever since I started drinking in junior high school, I have always cleaned up my adventures for my mother so that nothing very interesting or life-threatening ever seemed to happen to me. As I was speaking, it dawned on me that my lying about the specifics all these years had given her the impression that I was nothing much more than a kind of dimwitted bumbler. I’m not saying it’s necessarily an inaccurate impression, but I won­dered what our relationship would have been if she had known the spectacular depth of all my mistakes.

  She wanted to talk to Jane Marie, as always, believing I was a to­tally unreliable source of information concerning her granddaughter. Jane Marie sat cross-legged on the couch, holding the sleeping baby, with the receiver cradled against her shoulder as she spoke to my mom for almost half an hour. I closed my eyes and felt the room roll with the motion of a wave. I heard my mother’s muffled voice float above me, calling out back and forth to Jane Marie as if they were two gulls circling my overturned skiff. It frightens me, the connection women have. I’m not even married to this woman, but just by the fact that she has given birth, she is more related to my mother than I’ll ever be.

  Finally she said my name and listened to my mom say something, and then they were both laughing.

  “Here, she wants to talk to you again.” Jane Marie held the re­ceiver out to me.

  “Now what’s all this about you interfering with George?” my mother demanded.

  “Has he called you?” I asked.

  “No, Cecil,” she clicked back as if she were gathering steam. “I’ve been ringing his phone off the hook all day long. When I couldn’t reach you at your house, I called Jane Marie’s sister and she told me you were out in that terrible storm.”

  “Why did you call George?”

  “I called George because I’ve always called George when you were in trouble, Cecil. My goodness, George Doggy has hauled you out of your scrapes ever since you were a teenager. You wouldn’t have survived to adulthood, to the extent you have, if it hadn’t been for Mr. George Doggy. You haven’t forgotten your debt to him, have you? The drinking and driving problems and later that scrape with suborning perjury?”

  “Mom, I served time for that,” I offered in my own defense.

  “Not nearly as much as it would have been without George’s help.”

  “Okay, I understand,” I said, as I tried to ricochet to another subject. “Why do you think I’m interfering with him?”

  “Because I’ve spoken with him just tonight, and he’s worried you are going to get involved in his murder investigation. He says he cannot protect you forever. What does George mean by that, Cecil? For heaven’s sake, what have you done now?”

  I didn’t speak for several moments.

  “Cecil?” she said softly.

  Somewhere out to sea, gulls were flying through the dark. Fish passing near the surface would trace phosphorescent lines causing the gulls to dive down on them. The waves pushed and pulled against the sky. I was listening to all this as my mother waited for my reply.

  Finally she said softly, “Oh honey, you know George was one of your father’s closest friends. He was so much like your father. He knows what he is doing. He’s a professional down to his bones. Whatever it is you are involved in, I want you to leave it to George. And . . .”

  Now my mother was silent and I could hear her taking several sips from her glass before speaking again.

  “And if this has something to do with you still being angry with your father, you should just let it go, honey. Don’t fool around in this investigation of George’s. Don’t mess up other people’s lives with all that old business.”

  I had a lifetime of things I could have said. There was invective and impeccable reasoning, armchair psychology and brutally honest insight. I could have summoned a half-assed sermon on the subject of “old business.” But instead I said, “Okay, Mom.”

  “Good.” Her voice lifted. “I’m glad you are all right, Cecil. You always give me such a fright. When are you going to bring that baby to Juneau?”

  I handed the phone back over to Jane Marie. They chatted for a few more minutes, and when they hung up I was standing by the window watching a Coast Guard cutter lit up like a birthday cake ease up to the dock on the other side of the channel. Her lights streaked in wavy lines across the water.

  Jane Marie came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist.

  “Do people ever really grow up?” I asked her.

  “Some people do, Cecil. Of course, not many men, but some people do.” She kissed me on my ear and squeezed me tight.

  “Cecil, what really matters to you now?” Her cheek was flat on my shoulder. The wind fluttered the banners on the ship across die way.

  I turned her around. “Sleep,” I told her.

  She looked at me and waited, so I felt the need to continue.

  “Sleep, and making sure we’re safe. You, Todd, Blossom . . .” My voice trailed off.

  “Well, that’s a start,” the woman who loved me said, and held on tightly enough so I couldn’t float away.

  “My mom wants me to stop being pesky and leave George Doggy alone.”

  “And what do you think?” the woman who still loved me asked.

  “I think George is involved in a murder. I think I’m going to have to be pesky for a little while longer.” I cupped her cheek in my hand.

  She kissed me lightly and gripped her arms all the way around me, burying her face in my chest. She started to say something, paused to reconsider, then kissed me again.

  That night I dreamed I could see my hand holding the gun. The darkness smelled like gasoline, and blood was spattered up my shirtfront. Schoolchildren were screaming, and the gun in my hand jumped, spitting a flash from the muzzle. Briefly in the flash I could see the frightened face of Tina Sands cowering in her bunk on the Mygirl. I left her there and turned the corner to the next bunk where George Doggy was lying dead. Then I heard the rumble of flame.

  When I woke, I didn’t feel any pain. My body felt like a drift log. But each new movement of the day seemed to tear different bunches of muscles. My tongue felt cottony and swollen, my eyes were puffy, and my head felt like a beehive. It reminded me of a full-body hangover after a night of bar fighting.

  But we were up in time to shower and put on our nicest clothes for Sean Sands’s funeral. I wore a dark blue suit and my slick-soled shoes. We walked across town, where I saw for the first time the snapped tree limbs and lifted roof corners left behind by the storm. I carried the baby and Jane Marie drank a cup of coffee as we walked.

  Sean was to be buried in the small cemetery up against the hill, where many of the old people without families from the state home were put. Some of the graves were sunken in with their mossy headstones tilted at odd angles to each other. Plastic flower petals rimmed with fungus blew across the uneven ground. A milky sunlight filtered down at the gravesite, but just ten feet toward the hill the rain forest darkened into a green wall.

  Four people were gathered around the hole: a minister, a social worker, the school principal, and a reporter from the paper. Each shifted from foot to foot and spoke softly as Jane Marie and I walked up the hill. I handed the baby to Jane Marie and hugged the social worker. The reporter had her notebook open and scrib­bled something. As we walked closer, the preacher hiked up his sleeve and checked his watch, then stood on his toes to see farther down the hill, where
no more mourners were coming.

  “I think we can get started,” he suggested in his baritone voice.

  I knew the minister from around town. He had a small church with a loyal, rather left-leaning Christian following. He had volun­teered to do the funeral when no one else had offered. I was ready to dislike him. I was ready not to argue with whatever he was going to say, but to discount it. Grief didn’t need whatever feeble protestations he could offer on this chilly autumn day.

  He opened his Bible and started to read from the Book of Luke: “‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man. Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are fall now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.’” The preacher lifted his eyes. He looked not at me or the gathered, but straight up toward the dark tree line and up beyond to the hillside dusted with a fine new snow.

  “‘But I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’” He cleared his throat, staring down at the coffin laid out on two timbers on the wet, turned-up earth. He closed his Bible.

  “Sean Sands didn’t leave us many memories of him, and those he did are sometimes painful. All of his worldly keepsakes are now like a foreign currency neither he, nor we, will ever be able to spend. It is only through love that we can make sense of this world, and in this too, young Sean was among the poor. To those who knew him I can only offer this: where we feel deficient, God is full; where we may have failed, God will succeed. Where we may have turned away from justice, God’s eyes are unmoving. This is our faith, our answer to grief.” He stopped speaking. Back in the trees a raven made a hollow kind of knocking sound in its throat. The minister asked if anyone wanted to offer any testimonials for Sean and our small group was silent.