Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  She raised her hand to knock, but saw through the window that Amos was asleep and let herself in, setting on the floor a cloth-covered basket with a thermos protruding from it. Tommy Dorsey’s band was swinging on the radio, and she shut it off. He must have been sleeping for a while, she thought, he hated “that boogie-woogie music.”

  Maggie was dressed for open water—in wool pants, rubber boots, and a tweed coat with a Very pistol riding heavily in the inside pocket. Amos’s lips were parted slightly, and his face, smoothed by sleep, looked ten years younger. The poet was right, she thought: sleep is a blessed thing.

  Should she wake him with a kiss, she wondered? No. It would scare and confuse him. If the soft affection they had once shared was going to be revived, it would take time. Twenty years without tenderness, and all because of unfortunate timing and a vindictive sister.

  Maggie shook his shoulder gently with the hand that held her cap.

  “Unh?” Amos came up from a deep sleep. “I only sat down just now.”

  “Yes,” she said. She could tell by his eyes that he was glad to see her. “And well you should get some rest. You don’t get enough.”

  “I’m not so old, you know.”

  “I didn’t say that. Any man half your age would tire doing as much as you do. I’m tired too, tired of Iris Weed going on and on. I think she’s found her calling in all these auxiliaries. She belongs to every one. Now she can do her talking with an audience and do it all day long. I need some air.”

  “Air you’ll get.” Amos stretched slowly and rubbed his face before he put on his glasses. “What’s all this, a picnic?”

  It was a gentle evening, with a warm land breeze blowing from the west. On their way past the ledges, they saw a solitary summer sailor making his way into Blue Hill Bay in a green schooner, late for cocktails in the harbor, no doubt. The captain was at the helm wearing a long-billed swordfisherman’s hat; a boy in shorts waved to them from the bow chains, where he rode with his feet in the water. There were no other boats in sight. The setting sun was mottled by low, rippled clouds.

  “That’s a mackerel sky.” He knew she knew.

  “Rain tomorrow,” she said. She stood on the deck behind the house, her hands deep in her coat pockets. She thought the island looked larger when seen from the east; the mountain and the spiny ridge loomed huge and dark with the sun behind them. As she watched the cove disappear and the island shrink, the sea began to swell under them, rocking the big Novi boat from side to side like a cradle.

  Amos knew what she was thinking: that this was their boat, his and hers together, and would someday be Gus’s. Maybe she was thinking that this is what they should have done years ago: gotten aboard his boat and sailed off to somewhere, leaving the island behind them for good. Maybe that was what they should have done.

  He asked her to take the wheel for a minute while he went below. When she did, she was surprised by how hard it tugged. She hoped he was not going below for a drink. He was not, or at least he did not smell of it when he came back on deck. He took the wheel from her and reached down to open a little door in the bulkhead, releasing a rush of static that made her step back as if from a sudden swarm of flies. He put on the headset and glanced at her for approval, which he saw. Then he pushed a button on the cord and stopped the rushing noise.

  “Mabel Baker One Nine this is Mabel Baker One One. Radio check.”

  Morales answered, loud and clear enough for her to hear his voice in Amos’s earphone. “One One, this is One Nine. That’s Abie, Amos, not Mabel. Able Baker.”

  He turned to Maggie. “Morales has terrible radio procedure. That was a security violation saying my name, and he knows it.”

  “I see.” She knew she had to learn to work the radio. Maggie was taking mental notes on everything. She was good with details and often thought that she would make a good police witness in a murder trial.

  Amos keyed the mike again. “This is One One. Roger, radio check. I read you loud and clear. I have negative further. Out.”

  He hung the headset on the bulkhead. “You get used to the static after a while,” he said.

  “I’ll need to read the manual, I suppose, if only to learn the language,” said Maggie. “You sound like Buck Rogers and what’s his name.”

  “I didn’t read the manual. Morales and Jake taught me. I can teach you. There aren’t many words. 1 haven’t learned code yet.”

  “Are we authorized to learn code?” she asked. “I know Morse Code, but I don’t suppose ... I have a lot to learn.”

  “It’ll be easy for you. I’ve been taking a heading of a hundred and ninety-two degrees when I have the nesting island behind me like we do now. In a sea like this, with low swells and not much head wind, I try for ten knots, which will put us off Seal Island in an hour and ten minutes.”

  He pointed to penciled figures above the windshield. “Those are the headings: first leg, second leg, third leg, home.”

  “A hundred and ninety-two for the first leg,” she said. “Roger.”

  Beyond the mouth of the bay, the swells—thick, with long but shallow trenches in between—marched evenly toward their port bow. Amos put Maggie at the wheel, and standing behind her, showed her how to ride up one side of each swell, over and down the other. She took to it easily, though the strain of the wheel was hard on her shoulders.

  “The thermos is tea,” she said. “Pour us a cup, would you?”

  He took the wheel when Seal Island came into view, and Maggie scanned the surface with the binoculars. If a U-boat was on its way out to the shipping lanes, Amos explained, it would probably be coming from the west, to starboard. He gave the wet, desolate rock a wide berth and brought the bow around to sixty degrees in the swells.

  “See? There.” He pointed straight over the bow. “There, you’ll see it flash again. Wait. That’s the lighthouse; that’s Jake. On this heading we’re following the shoal up to it; the shallow water is off there, to port, about a half mile. They turn the light on at seven o’clock, and on a night like tonight you can steer for it. Only you can’t count on seeing it; a thick of fog might come up at any minute, but you know that.”

  “Out here it seems even more ridiculous that they keep the lighthouses working,” she said.

  “God only knows why they don’t turn them off. Jake says that the people running this war are idiots, only he used a different word.”

  A half hour later, with the sea down and the sun setting through a crack in the low clouds, he cut the boat’s speed back to five knots, and Maggie brought out their supper. They ate in companionable silence.

  She wondered how long it had been since they had been alone and as close as this, without a chance of someone surprising them. He must have had the same thought, as he looked away—suddenly awkward—fumbling with something above the wheel. Seeing his shyness opened the doors of longing and memory at once for Maggie; she felt all the old vulnerability and need. With a certain quiet joy she did not understand, she allowed herself to risk memory, wondering if Amos was doing the same thing.

  It was one of the spring mornings, before the lilacs, when they were alone in her father’s kitchen, eager for each other, afraid of the sound of her sister Clytie’s steps on the stairs. As always, he was packing his dinner pail, and she was making breakfast while Clytie, Amos’s wife, and their daughter, Leah, slept. He was as anxious as he seemed now, and Maggie as vulnerable. They did not speak then, either, but came together slowly, in warm silence. He would turn and take her face in his hands or, from his chair, take her by the waist to pull her into his lap, his hands rising timidly to her breasts, her mouth warm and wet on his.

  • • •

  Would he turn to her now? No, she knew he would not. The source of their guilt was dead but not gone; Clytie would always hover between them. Maggie’s sister was more potent now as a spirit than she had been then as a woman, because now she could come between each of them and their memories. Their only comfort was that Clytie had not been able to c
ome between them and their desire, then or now.

  While Amos was finishing his cake, Maggie wandered aft on the deck with the binoculars around her neck. He cleaned his glasses on his shirt and watched her. He remembered another morning, in the same kitchen, when she had come to him, opening her robe, her hair and warm body smelling of flannel sheets. Now, with his glasses off, her figure back on the deck was as vague and ageless as it had been in his memory, and he wanted to touch her once more.

  “Amos?”

  He put his glasses on. She was facing out to sea, the binoculars in her hands, her eyes closed.

  “Do you hear that?” She held her head still, her neck craned, as though listening for Clytie’s feet on the stairs.

  “What?” He pulled the throttle back, his hands shaking, telling himself that she did not really hear anything. He held his head out over the washboard. If there was anything, he did not hear it and shook his head at her in relief. The swells were starting to turn them.

  “Shut off the engine,” she said.

  “I can’t. We’ll get turned side to.”

  “Amos, please, just for a second. It’s a humming.”

  Like an electric motor, he thought. Oh, God. He shut off the engine and stared out at the empty sea, immobilized by dread. It was a humming noise, off the stern now and heading straight for them. Now running away was no longer an option; starting the engine would make too much noise.

  “Out there,” she said. She pointed to starboard with the binoculars. “Can you see anything? His periscope?”

  They stood apart, staring, too frightened to move, as the sound grew louder and louder until it was almost directly under them. It was a huge moaning noise, all too familiar to Amos, that made the sea vibrate. He waited for the U-boat to break the surface underneath them and hurl them through the air.

  “Now there’s nothing,” she said. “Can you still hear it? I’m not sure I do, wait, yes. Amos,” she said excitedly. “Turn out that way, and let’s follow it. Or I will and you get on the radio.”

  “Like hell. Not with you aboard.”

  The Quahog, dead in the water now, had swung around with her side to the swells and was rolling dangerously. The bait barrel slid across the deck and bumped against the side, a sound that would reverberate a mile through the water, like the boom of a drum. He started the engine and turned back on course, away from the humming.

  “It was a submarine,” she said.

  “Well?”

  “What else could it have been?” asked Maggie. “No creature hums like an automobile.” She stood staring after it, still too excited to be afraid.

  Amos was well past excited and deeply involved in afraid. He kept his eye on the lighthouse, his hands on the wheel, and the boat at a steady ten knots.

  “It could have been your imagination,” he said. “Our imagination.”

  She set her face against him. “What do you mean? Did you hear a humming noise traveling in that direction or didn’t you?

  “Yes I did. I thought I did.” He saw Walter standing in the path by the house once in a while, too. He saw Ava in the window again just the other day. He saw bobbing human candles from thirty miles away. Sure he saw them; he thought he did.

  “We did hear it. We did not imagine it, Amos.” She knew the look: his head slightly bent, his eyes averted, the posture of strict attention to the task at hand. He was getting ready to duck something, and this time he would not get away with it, she decided. The wind, a little stiffer from the west now, blew fine, cold spray in her face and this encouraged her.

  “Sometimes, he said, “you see what you want to see. Sometimes what you need to see. And it’s real. That noise, now that I think about it—”

  “Oh no, Amos Coombs. You’re afraid they’ll laugh. But you can’t dodge this because of what you think people will say. This is war. Remember those empty lifejackets you brought in? That’s where the sub is going. To kill more of our boys. And when it’s done, the Germans will enslave the rest of us.”

  “We’ll call it a vessel heard in the distance,” he said. “When we stop at the lighthouse we can explain to them what we heard. You’re right. It was a U-boat.”

  There was no one in sight at dusk when they tied up at the slip below the boathouse, so Amos went ahead and started pumping his fuel. In a minute, the door of the keeper’s house opened, and Jake and Morales came down the long wooden walk, Jake still munching a saltine. In the yellow window behind them, Harvey’s face was up against the glass, wearing a foul expression of disapproval.

  Pleased to see Maggie, Morales helped her up onto the landing. When Amos had his back turned, she beckoned to get Morales’s attention, then opened her coat to show him the Very pistol he had given her. Morales leaned forward and whispered in her ear, then patted her shoulder. From his window, Harvey saw the woman open her coat to Morales to show him her wares, and he saw the spick’s face light up when he had a look. It made him sick what this world was coming to, plain sick.

  Maggie told Jake and Morales what they had heard. She described it carefully, trying not to sound like an alarmist or someone prone to wild tales. Amos nodded steadily in agreement.

  “It probably was a U-boat,” allowed Jake. “I’m not surprised. I’m just surprised that we haven’t heard one here on the rock. I’m surprised one hasn’t stopped to ask directions yet.”

  Maggie thought he seemed resigned to failure, defeat. She wanted to encourage him, boost his spirits. Was there another woman who might? She did not think so. Jake said he would record it as a possible sighting, and she gave Amos a look.

  “A hundred ten degrees, you said?” Jake asked.

  “Right out toward the shipping lanes,” said Amos.

  “You should have chased him, Amos.” Morales said. “You could have poured a bottle of that Cemetery rum down his periscope and thrown a match behind it, though that probably wouldn’t have been necessary.”

  “It’s Demerara,” Amos corrected. “Dem-Er-Rare-A.”

  On the way home they were quiet, thoughtful. The sun had long ago gone down over the islands and the mainland in the distance, but there was still enough light to see the gray shapes of lounging seals on the ledges they passed.

  “I suppose it would be better not to say anything to anyone on the island about what we saw or heard,” she said.

  “God no.”

  “Imagine what they’ll say when they hear we were out here alone. ‘Wickedness’ is the word Iris will use,” she said.

  He looked at her, half amused, half elsewhere. “After what we’ve been through on this island, you still care what they think? They believe what they want to believe—you know that. And when it comes to what they say to each other, it don’t matter what they believe, because they say what they think others want to hear.

  “And who cares? They’ll never say anything to our faces; they proved that after Clytie died. It’s been how many years since? And still nobody has said a word directly to either of us.” He shook his head. Then he smiled, almost beamed, as if he could see the memory in the darkness.

  “Remember years ago when they were whispering about Harold and Katie? They had them living in sin right away, condemned overnight: no trial, no questions, no nothing. Just wickedness. They’ve been talking them down for years.”

  She was reflective. Why was he carrying on like this? “Yes, I know. But you’ve picked a bad example. In this case what they believe and say are true. I know it. I saw his car parked in the road by her drive every Friday night for months. His wife was still alive, and her husband was still warm in his grave. That’s fact.”

  “It’s also fact that me and Lew and Walter put his car there. It was seven Fridays. We pushed it out of his yard as soon as he was asleep, drove it down the road to her drive, parked it, then drove it back in the wee hours, and rolled it back into place in his yard. He never realized it, and she didn’t either. Everybody else on the island knew the car was there, and believed they were making thunder in her bedro
om, but nobody ever said a thing to either of them.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Didn’t what?

  “You didn’t really do that, did you? You’re making this up to tease me.”

  “Sure we did,” he grinned.

  “I don’t think that’s funny! I don’t think that’s one darn bit funny. Look what you did to Katie’s reputation—and Harold’s.”

  “We owed him one, and it didn’t hurt her any. Come on, Maggie. Everett married her anyway. If he believes that about her—and I don’t know whether he does or not—he married her anyway, which means he loves her, don’t you see? He does. Look at them. They’ve been married as happily as anybody I know, for years.”

  “How old were you then?” she asked. “You were almost thirty. A thirty-year-old teenager.” She thought that he must not see the irony in the story; if he did, he would not take such pleasure in it.

  “I don’t remember. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  “No,” she said bitterly. “I suppose it doesn’t, and that’s the lamentable part.”

  She had to be pretty mad, he thought, to use words that he didn’t understand when they were alone. To hell with her if she couldn’t take a joke. Now she would be icy the rest of the night. He never should have told her.

  Over tea at his house, she paced back and forth in the parlor—her coat off, sweater open, flannel cap still on—making plans out loud. Watching her, seeing again the beautiful determination in her eyes under that foolish cap, made him remember why he had loved her back then, at such risk.

  “What are you smiling at?” she asked. She knew, he could tell by her face that she did. “You’re not making fun of me, are you?”

  “You know I’m not. Keep talking; I’m listening.” He stirred his tea carefully.

  “I’m more convinced now than I ever was that you should not be going out there alone. I won’t let you go by yourself any more. That’s out of sight of land, and the seas are heavy—they were even tonight, when you admitted it was calmer than usual. Where do those swells come from?”

  “That’s the sea coming in against the shoal, where the bottom comes up. You won’t let me? Even if we were man and wife you wouldn’t be talking like that.”