Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “My God, Richard. What happened to you?” Cecil stood bug-eyed, holding onto the Lucille s washboard with his gaff. Richard had never before seen Cecil surprised.

  “I got robbed in Rockland. Robbed and beaten.”

  “How? By who? What did the police do? Who sewed you up?” Cecil was First Selectman on Barter Island, a deacon in the Congregational Church, and a glutton for news of improprieties.

  “I got jumped in the alley behind the Harbor Inn, the bar. It was three guys, strangers; they followed me out. They took six bottles of Demerara and a dozen lobsters. Two of them grabbed me from behind, but I got a good lick in on one of them; I bashed his goddamned face in with a lobster.” Richard held up his wounded hand.

  “Mercy. And you didn’t report it because of the rum. The wages of sin,” intoned the deacon. He clucked his tongue and straightened his tie. It was just this posture of moral authority that Richard knew so well and had wanted to avoid this afternoon, of all times. He had suffered it at town meetings when he had lived on the island, then heard more just recently in America First committee meetings in Stonington. There Cecil had presided, preaching in high-toned indignation against American involvement in the European war, as if he was Lindbergh himself.

  “I was unconscious,” continued Richard. “Reggie Lombard, the bartender, he took me to the hospital. I don’t know who it was that sewed me up. The ones that robbed me got away, the bastards.”

  “And people complain that we don’t have barrooms in this county,” said Cecil. What he did not say—and did not need to— was that one of those complainers was standing right in front of him with a face that looked like spoiled meat.

  “We don’t have barrooms in this county because the county is run by women,” Richard grumbled.

  “There aren’t any women in the county government,” said Cecil. “I know that for a fact.”

  “Then the men running it are taking orders from their wives like everybody else in this sorry state does,” Richard said. “Do you want your rum? You didn’t pull me over to pass the time of day. Ten quarts.”

  Cecil nodded and took the rum, two bottles at a time, stowing them under a box of canned peas. He did not drink it himself but kept a few bottles in the back room of the island store to sell to fishermen for a fair profit. He hated dealing with Richard Snell, hated himself when he was polite to the man, as he was now. He had heard that Snell had ties of some kind to the German-American Bund, a bunch of shady fellows in Deer Isle. Worse, Richard reminded him of his own father—an unwashed, ignorant, opinionated man.

  “Did you make a delivery to Amos?” asked Cecil. “I haven’t seen him in two weeks; I don’t think anyone has.”

  “I delivered his rum, but I didn’t see him. He was watching me though, I could feel it. He gets queerer and queerer. If he wasn’t your father-in-law, I’d say he was daft, living in a ghost village all alone—miles from anybody—peering out of windows and talking to himself or maybe even to the dead.”

  “I don’t have any cash on me,” said Cecil. “I can give you a slip of credit for the store, or an IOU.”

  “I’ll take the IOU.” Richard knew the storekeeper had the cash; he just could not stand parting with it. To pay Cecil back for the wages-of-sin sermon, Richard wondered aloud about Amos as the two boats drifted apart.

  “What’s he got in that cove? Four or five houses, two wharves, and a coupla hundred acres of good land. He ought to sell it—all but his house—or pass it on to Leah and you to sell if you want; he doesn’t need money. She shouldn’t have to wait for her inheritance till he dies.”

  “You ought to put an ice pack on your face when you get to your mother’s; that’ll bring the swelling down,” Cecil replied.

  The storekeeper pushed the boats apart and opened his throttle. He was glad he had mentioned Amos, whose mere existence galled Richard so. But it made him cringe to think that Richard knew so much about Amos’s affairs, that he was so interested. Like Cecil’s own father, Richard Snell was the kind of man who discovered other people’s weaknesses and filed them away for some future use, some profit, or some meanness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN AMOS CROSSED THE YORK LEDGES INTO OPEN WATER, HE swung the Tuna’s bow into the wind and cut her back to half throttle for a look around. The sun had risen a hand above the horizon and was still a hazy orange. The air was brisk but on so clear a day, when the breeze was light and coming off the mainland, it would soon be warm enough to shed his mittens. There was not another boat in sight, not a soul, just as he had hoped.

  In a couple of weeks there would be plenty of lobster men, a dozen or more, setting out traps in the waters off the east side of the Barter Island; there would be men from the west side, and more and more were coming each season from Stonington, as well. Years ago, when there had been five Coombs boats fishing in these waters, no one contested the family’s ancestral claims to the best lobstering grounds: the deeper, sandy-bottomed area between the Black Horse and Fog Island early in the season, and more important, the rocky shore along the Battery and Boom Beach, and in the Turnip Yard later in the season, when the lobsters came in to shed. But this year, he had heard, the Stonington men were grumbling that he claimed more territory than he needed with just 250 traps. At the garage in town the boy had overheard Melvin Brill telling somebody he was going to move two strings of his traps into the Turnip Yard this year; to hell with Amos Coombs.

  If he does, thought Amos, he’ll get the same reception his father got twenty years ago when he tried it.

  Amos had to stand on tiptoe to take the top trap down from the pyramid he had built on the stern. These traps had twenty-fathom buoy lines, and he would set the first string of ten in a line running north to south, where the bottom was sand and eel-grass. When the lobsters started to come crawling in toward shore, the oily herring bait would draw them into his traps, and when the Stonington men started to set out their gear east of the island, his buoys—red and yellow and freshly painted—would be there to mark his territory. The first trap that he set on the washboard was sturdy oak like the rest, and having dried out all winter long, it seemed as light as an empty well bucket. He placed two smooth ballast stones, each the size of a splayed hand, in the bottom of the trap; hefted it; added another stone; then baited it, tied it shut, and spat on it for good luck. In moves made so many times they had become instinctive, he pushed the throttle forward, nudged the trap overboard, and watched the coiled line at his feet as it ran out. The trap floated for a minute, tilting slightly, then slowly began to sink. Being so dry and light, it would travel some in the current before it settled on the bottom, but Amos had allowed for that. In two weeks the trap would be waterlogged; then he could remove the ballast stones, and it would sink straight down on its own.

  When he had finished setting the second string, he cut her back to an idle, brought his stool up from below, and poured himself a little drink. From his dinner pail he plucked a bright blue hard-boiled egg that he held up between thumb and forefinger to examine before he cracked it, peeled it, dunked it overboard for the salt, and chewed it appreciatively.

  He hadn’t heard them until they banged on his front door, he remembered. He never did. He had fallen asleep with a Sears catalog open in his lap, so he had not noticed Leah’s Chevy turning around up on the road or heard her when she and Gus tiptoed across the gravelly dooryard. When the banging snapped him out of sleep, he knew immediately what it was; he opened the door, took the May basket from the knob, and shouted into the darkness: “Leah! Gus! I know it’s you! Come back here. I caught you this time.”

  He heard them giggling in the spruce by the creek bridge. He smiled to imagine his girl, Leah—more than thirty years old, with a husky teenage son—scampering around in the dark like a kid. While he looked through the contents of the little woven basket—two blue eggs in a sphagnum nest, a bouquet of swamp buttercups and forget-me-nots tied with a red ribbon, a block of fudge in waxed paper—he wondered once again if she knew that
it had been a May basket that had led to her being born and had led to a decade of misery for him. But she didn’t know, he thought, and she never would. Perhaps if her mother had lived longer, she would have told Leah, but he thought not. Why would she mention it to her daughter when she never said a thing about it to him, the boy who chased her into the Turner graveyard after leaving a basket on her doorknob. What would she say? That two weeks after her sixteenth birthday she and Amos lost their virginity in a cemetery? That their first coupling was clumsy, fully clothed, messy, and over before they knew it had begun? That she, Leah, was born of such an unpleasant experience? That she was named Leah because Leah was the weak-eyed, unwanted daughter?

  Amos shook his head and unwrapped the fudge. He did not like the way his engine was idling, with little in-sucks as if it was catching its breath; he resolved to adjust the butterfly choke when he went in to pick up another load of traps. Riding the coming tide and helped along by a light southerly breeze, he had drifted within sight of the cove. He shook the teabags out of his thermos and—still sitting on the stool for the sake of his legs—turned toward his wharf.

  • • •

  He pushed the last trap of his second load overboard in midafternoon. He had thought that he might finish this early, so he had brought along the box of seed packets and three bottles of rum that he had promised Jake Gardiner, the keeper at Mount Desert Rock light, eighteen miles out. He had only known Jake for about ten years, since he took the keeper’s job, and he rarely saw him. But as Maggie said, Amos had an “affinity” for Jake, which, she explained, meant that Amos enjoyed his company. It was true. When the lighthouse tender from Bar Harbor made its spring delivery, it carried a load of topsoil with which Jake and his crew filled the crevices in the rock around the keeper’s house, shallow troughs that had been washed clean by winter storms. They planted a vegetable garden by the house and put in flower gardens all around the lighthouse; the flowers, which were Jake’s great pleasure, took the hard edge off the bare little rock in the summer. The rum, Amos thought, would do much the same for Jake.

  If he ran the Tuna at three quarters throttle, he could be out to the light and back by dark, or close to it. The weather was calm and clear, there were no signs of the wind backing to change that, and the moon would be nearly full.

  Three years before, when the Coast Guard had taken over the Lighthouse Service, Jake had been offered a commission as Chief Petty Officer and had accepted it. His assistant keeper, Gooden, a Gloucester man with a mouth like a shit house, had not been invited to join the Coast Guard but had stayed on the lonely rock anyway. How Jake, a man who kept himself and his lighthouse buffed and polished and in Bristol fashion, could stand the nasty Gooden, Amos did not know. But with the handing over of the station to the Coast Guard came a 600-meter band radio and Seaman First Class Ernest Morales from Boston to operate it. A handsome, laughing young man with perfect white teeth and an irreverent, big-city manner, Morales was a hero to the boy, who would be sore that he had not been with Amos for this visit. Jake had once told Amos and the boy that Morales was hornier than a three-peckered billy goat, adding that the Coast Guard had sent him out to Mount Desert Rock as a courtesy to the police departments in the major cities of the East Coast and as a way to protect the female population of the entire region. This claim made Morales shine and made the boy gaze at him in admiration.

  Out past Amos’s fishing grounds, eight miles from the lighthouse, the sea gave over to low rolling swells. He passed over Grumpy Ledge and knew the bottom was dropping off to three hundred feet. The sea beneath him was black and dark as night; without the shore to give him some perspective, his boat seemed tiny on the water’s huge, blank surface.

  When he was young, Amos asked Walter why some people kept their houses so hot in the winter: the older the person, the hotter the parlor. Those rooms were stifling. Walter said that such people had had the chill. Once the cold gets into you, he explained, once it seeps into your bones, the chill is always there, and you cannot get warm enough ever again. Walter told his nephew that he, too, would have it one day and understand. Since then, Amos had had the chill, of course—more than once—and his uncle was right: once it set in, it was with you for life. What he did not know at the time, but had learned later, is that the fear of the water works the same way. Once you have had the feeling of complete helplessness, the awareness that only thin planks stand between your feet and the horrible deep darkness beneath, once you had that, it never went away. The older Amos got, the worse it grew, especially in deep water or threatening weather. He could make excuses, but he could not get rid of the fear; he just had to live with it, like the aching arches and the deepening cold in his bones. When the boy was with him, he could hide it pretty well; when he was alone, it was the only thing out there with him, and it was damn poor company. There was no point in complaining about the fear to the ones already gone; cold and dark and death didn’t mean a thing to them.

  Amos held onto the Tuna with both hands. The boat was round-hulled and quite tippy; she was fine for inshore waters, but out at sea she was awfully hard to handle. She bobbed around like a cork, and if Amos did not run along a trough the right way, she would not steer at all.

  He heard a low groaning noise—or felt it in the planking under his feet. Amos thought there was something wrong with his engine and stuck his head in the cabin door to listen. But the sound, or the feeling of sound, was all around. He came up and looked out again to see a shiny black pipe rising straight up out of the water, making its own little wake, not more than a hundred yards to starboard. The sea moaned and lifted beneath him, raising his little boat on a slow, sinuous swell. Then the rest of the giant machine broke the surface in a splash and heave of water. First he saw the conning tower of the submarine, then the deck and glistening black hull, as it surfaced and steamed south by east away from him, as indifferent as a passing humpback.

  Amos ducked beneath the gunwale and on his knees watched her sail away. The sub was a German, he knew, and it was huge. After the vessel had been up on the surface for a few seconds, it let out a great gushing blowing noise, like a sleek, black iron whale. Amos shivered in terror and stared, his mouth wide open, his bowels loosening dangerously. Pushing the Tuna up to full speed and making for the lighthouse, he never took his eyes off the sub as it shrank out of sight on its way offshore.

  Harvey Gooden was on the upper gallery of the light, polishing the glass, when he saw the Tuna pull into the slip and tie off on the launch. He watched her skipper scamper up onto the rock, headed for the house; from fifty feet up Amos looked like a little toy soldier wound up too tight and let loose. Harvey cupped his hands over his mossy teeth and hollered:

  “What’s the hurry, Cappy? I never seen you move so fast!”

  Amos stopped at the foot of the lighthouse and leaned back. “You see anything to the south? You got binoculars up there?”

  “Sure I do,” said Harvey. “Just you wait. What am I looking for?”

  Amos did not wait. He found Morales in the radio room, giving the hourly weather report. Amos shook his shoulder. Morales turned around grinning, still talking into the headset, “wind southwest, five to ten knots; waves two feet,” and shooed him away.

  Amos hurried through the kitchen, where supper was cooking, and ran headlong into Jake, coming out of the pantry with an armload of tin cans and a pie. Thrown off balance, the lighthouse keeper lost control of the cans but managed to save the pie. He flattened his hand against Amos’s chest to steady him and stop him from doing more damage, feeling his friend’s heart sputtering like an old one-cylinder engine. Jake had just bathed and had combed his hair with Wildroot Cream Oil.

  “Jesus, Amos, you stink of bait.”

  “I just got nearly run over by a goddamn German submarine. Right out there.” Amos pointed out the kitchen window.

  Jake set the pie on the shelf and collected the cans. He held out one with a dented rim. “This one’s going to be a bitch to open.”

>   “You didn’t hear what I said.”

  “Yes I did. I’m no psychiatrist, but I can tell by the look on your face that you’ve sure as hell seen something. What you need to do right now is settle down. Let’s go to the radio room. I thought you’d be delivering rum; we looked for you yesterday.”

  “I am delivering your rum—and your seeds too, for that matter; it’s a piece of luck that they’re not blown to bits and me and my boat with them.”

  Harvey followed them into the radio room. “I didn’t see nuthin. What was it I was looking for anyway?”

  “Let’s find out,” said Jake. “Those binoculars are supposed to stay up in the light; you know that.”

  Jake sat Amos down in Morales’s chair, cleared a space on the table, laid a large black book before him, and opened it to “German Ships: Submarine.” Harvey and Morales exchanged a look and closed in to look over Amos’s shoulder.

  On the second page, the lobster man put his finger on a silhouette labeled Standard Atlantic Boat, Type VII. “Sure,” he said, and sat back. There it was. Right there. It eased him somewhat to see his apparition in a Coast Guard book. Now he knew he had seen it.

  “That’s the bridge I saw, with a gun inside the railing aft of it, and that bigger one on the deck forward. Two hundred twenty feet long? I tell you it looked every bit of it. He can travel at seventeen knots? He was going maybe six or seven. I’ll tell you the reason I thought it was a whale—it blew like a whale. Pfooo! And instead of smelling like metal or fuel oil, it stank of living things. No not living . . . dead things, things rotten, stale food, meat that’s gone by. ...”

  This made Morales mutter solemnly in Spanish and Jake rub his hands together as if he were drying them.

  “Jesus, how can you be so calm. You might have got your ass killed,” said Harvey.