Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “Lord, Lord,” said Fuddy.

  “If I knew more than what was in the papers, I couldn’t tell you anyway.” Rich’s belt was pulled so tight that Fuddy thought the chief looked like a cinched marshmallow, lightly toasted the way he liked them.

  “Well, you could tell certain ones of us.” Richard sat up and adjusted his weight.

  “How’d you get this ink off?” Gus asked Dickie.

  “Get some of this sand here,” Dickie said. “How many more people you got to register, Chief?”

  “Miss Bowen figures fourteen more of those that have any business being on the water. We’ve done a hundred and seven, including the summer people, the ones that aren’t yachting. It seems there are some people down here who weren’t counted in the last census.”

  “And you probably won’t see those same ones coming in to register with you today, if it’s who I think it is,” Richard said. “They say the census is an attack on their freedom. Getting fingerprinted and having to carry an identification card—they’d probably call that slavery. The last census fellow didn’t even bother to go down into Squeaker Cove.”

  “Lucky he didn’t,” Fuddy said. He held one nostril closed with a forefinger and cleared the other one onto the ground.

  “When Satan stood up against Israel, he incited David to number the people,” said Dickie.

  “You sound like Cecil,” Richard said.

  “What makes you say that?” asked Gus.

  “The Bible,” Richard said. “Quoting the Bible.”

  “My father doesn’t quote the Bible.”

  “No? Well he talks like the Bible. Don’t get your hair up, Gus. I didn’t mean anything insulting.” Richard rubbed his chin stubble and shook his head. “If you’re wondering why I haven’t been in to register yet,” he said to the chief. “It’s because I don’t have to.” He watched for a reaction. Dickie rolled his eyes at Gus.

  “And why is that?” the chief asked.

  “Because last week I signed on with the Coastal Picket. I took the oath for the Temporary Reserves. This month I’m going to Rockland for a school and to get a radio for my boat.”

  Gus flinched slightly and stared at Richard for a long, surprised second before he made his face go slack again to cover his wonder. Never let a Snell see that he’s surprised you.

  “The Coastal Picket needs all the men down here it can get,” Richard explained. “Men with seaworthy boats that is.”

  “Well, that’s true, and that’s good of you for signing up,” said the chief, “but I still have to get you to register like the rest. I have my orders, and there’s nothing in them about any exceptions.”

  “Well, I don’t mind.” Richard heaved himself up off the merry-go-round and hitched up his trousers.

  Gus glanced at Dickie, who made a face to show that he hadn’t heard anything about this. The boy watched Richard and decided that he was telling the truth. He would need to talk to Maggie—she would be surprised too—and hear what Jake had to say about it. He had been wrong—they all had—to think that Richard was only meanness and only out for himself. “Yeah,” Amos would have said. “But look at him all swelled up with importance like he just won the Battle of Midway. That’s Richard Snell for you.”

  Even so, Gus thought as he watched Richard light his cupped cigarette and the chief’s, even so, it’s time for us to get over our differences and work together for a greater cause. He was glad to have another Barter Island boat patrolling, even if it meant trusting the Richard Snells of the world.

  Fuddy, who could hear a clam burrowing from twenty paces, looked up suddenly toward the crest of the town hill, where a truck had slowed and shifted into first gear for the descent. Dickie looked up, too, when the truck began to sputter.

  “You jinxed us, Dickie,” Fuddy said. “Talking about Satan and his senses. Listen. That’ll be Basil.”

  “Coming to register?” Richard wondered.

  “Coming this way at least,” Dickie said. “That’s the Squeaker Cove boys we were talking about, Chief, easing down the hill with nothing but a hand brake and low gear between them and glory—or them and the alder swamp. Stick around. If he’s coming here, he’ll use that boulder as a nudge to stop himself with. I’ll bet you a soda he’ll need it.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” said Richard. “You watch, Chief. Basil can stop that thing where he wants to without brakes or any boulder, and when he does there’ll be a drink in it for us.”

  “For you, anyway.” The chief flicked his cigarette into the bushes. “I got to go back in; I’m on duty.”

  When they heard the cough and sputter of gunfire on the hill, two of the young defenders peeked over the stone wall and ducked back down, betraying their position. Behind the green Pontiac, Ernest Mattingly seized the opportunity and led his squad in a frontal attack on the wall, screaming Charge! behind a hail of stone-sized grenades, waving his flankers in for the kill. Overwhelmed, pelted from two sides, the defenders beat a retreat through Miss Bitterfield’s Victory garden and fell back on her garage, replenishing their ammo supply from the gravel drive as they ran.

  Fuddy, their only audience, turned slowly in his swing to follow the running gunfight that swept around to his right. When the combatants disappeared in the spruce thicket on the shoreline, Fuddy lifted his feet and swung back around to watch Basil bring the truck in.

  Basil did not need to nudge the boulder with his wooden bumper; he did not even steer for it. He eased her over the slight incline in the road past the school-yard drive, dropped her into neutral, and rolled back onto the flat, grassy yard, where he cranked back the hand brake not ten feet from the green Pontiac.

  “He ought to tie her off on that car. She might drift.” Fuddy was worried that Skippy, who was sitting with his legs dangling off the back of the truck, might not have the sense to jump to the side should it start to roll.

  “You owe me a soda,” Richard said, and ambled toward the truck, hands in his pockets. Fuddy followed, swinging his shoulders in the same show of indifference that he used when another boy brought a live critter or a new knife onto the playground. Skippy clambered up onto the truck bed and hefted a five-gallon can to fill the gravity-feed gas tank that was bolted onto a wooden scaffold behind the cab. The others gathered around Basil in the doorless driver’s seat, his bulk overflowing the steering wheel.

  “Well Jesus Christ, if it ain’t Gus Barter.” Basil turned his little head to look over his shoulder. “I haven’t seen you since the funeral. You quit working for your father in the store?”

  “No, I work in the evenings now,” Gus said, thinking, No wonder they called him Sausage Lip. “I’ve been putting my traps back out.”

  “Those are yours then, the red-and-white buoys down by the Battery and in the Turnip Yard?” Basil feigned ignorance. “Those in what was Coombs waters?”

  “In what still is Coombs waters or, more rightly, Gus’s waters now,” Dickie said. “Amos willed him his boat and his gear, and so rightfully he gets the Coombs fishing waters as well.”

  “So they’re Barter waters now,” Basil said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “They’re still Coombs waters, and I’m fishing them. I’m half Coombs.” Gus looked at Dickie and Richard for support and saw it. “I’m painting Amos’s buoys with my colors and setting them out, too. I’ve got three strings of his so far, and three strings of my own bridles, too. I’m in a hurry to get more out; I got three shedders today.”

  “They’re coming all right,” Dickie said. “I got a dozen today. Maybe more.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Basil. “Why don’t you fellas step around to the other side here and open up that door.” With a pretty wave to the shifting group, Rosalyn Owings climbed into the green Pontiac without assistance and drove away.

  “Aaah! You got me!” The youngest defender crumpled in the puckerbrush holding his chest, and Ernest finished him with his bayonet.

  “There’s glasses in the glove box, Skippy. Set
them on the seat to where I can reach them.” Basil uncorked a bottle of Green River and sniffed it before he filled the two glasses. As Skippy reached for them, Basil lifted a heavy butt cheek with one hand and released a muffled poot. Skippy backed away waving a hand in front of his nose.

  “Slipped out like a peeled grape,” said Basil with satisfaction.

  Amos had told Gus about Green River, how it burns and has an oily, kerosene kind of texture. The boy looked past Fuddy’s shoulder and over the truck at the schoolhouse where Maggie might be watching out the window. He stepped behind the cab when the glass came to him, took his drink quickly, and handed it—empty—to Skippy. Compared to Amos’s rum, Green River was bitter and left a foul, moldy taste in his mouth. Basil took his own share straight from the bottle and filled another glass almost to the brim.

  “Watch this,” said Richard. He lit a cigarette, then touched the lighted kitchen match to the glass on the seat. Fuddy and Skippy crowded into the door to watch the dancing flame.

  “Blow that out! Jesus Christ.” Basil waved at the flames. “That’s alcohol you’re burning, goddamn you.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty in there,” Richard laughed.

  Fuddy reached for the glass and covered the rim with his palm to snuff the flame.

  “Let’s see you flatfoot it, Fuddy,” Basil said. “You watch how his Adam’s apple moves.”

  Fuddy stepped back, stood at attention, and slowly, deliberately, poured the Green River into his mouth. As he watched Fuddy’s Adam’s apple rise and fall and rise again, Skippy clapped his hands beneath his chin in gap-mouthed wonder.

  “Noan snop! Noan snop!” He cried in a voice like Betty Chambers’s. “Tsneep on nooin int!”

  With a noise like an underwater explosion breaking the surface, the whisky blew out of Fuddy’s mouth in a bilious brown eruption, directly into Richard’s astonished face, drenching him hat to chest in regurgitated distilled corn and sputum. Fuddy bent over coughing and hacking and laughing, while Skippy danced on one foot then the other, gurgling with delight, an impressive bulge growing in the crotch of his trousers.

  “Bar Har Har!” Basil slapped the dashboard as he would have slapped his knee if he could have reached it.

  His eyes and mouth wide open in terrified disbelief, Richard wiped his face with the tips of his fingers, then lunged at Fuddy, lifting him by his shirt and slamming him, still laughing uncontrollably, into the side of the truck.

  “Laugh, you son of a bitch!” Richard’s forearms shivered with rage, as he slammed Fuddy again, striking his head this time. “I ought to break your fucking nose.”

  “Bar Har! Jesus Christ!” Basil shouted. “Watch you don’t dent my truck. Reach me that glass, Skippy!”

  Skippy dangled his fluttering hands between Richard and Fuddy as if to distract their attention, but Fuddy only laughed harder, and Richard slammed him again.

  “Cut it out, Richard.” As Gus took a step forward, Dickie heard the screen door slam and put out an arm to stop the boy. Maggie issued from the schoolhouse, marching toward them at a quick step, her arms straight at her sides. Gus and Dickie turned in unison and walked toward the road in a casual retreat.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. “Look at you Richard; good God, you’re disgusting.”

  Holding a limp and quiet Fuddy with one arm, Richard mopped his face with the other. Skippy stood aside to watch Miss Bowen give her scolding, a sight that brought back a wave of fond memories.

  “You’re damned right it’s disgusting,” said Richard. “And that’s why I’m about to wring his neck.”

  “Not here you won’t.” Maggie’s voice was cold and condescending. “I do not abide fighting here, nor drinking either.”

  “Come on, Miss Bowen,” Basil pleaded. “Let him wring Fuddy’s neck.”

  “He can wring it elsewhere. Gather up your swill, and get this degraded spectacle out of my school yard. If I have to come back out here, I’ll be accompanied by a Coast Guard officer, and I’ll be carrying a written complaint for the constable.”

  Basil started the truck. Maggie did an about-face and walked slowly back to the schoolhouse. Richard, still angry and now embarrassed, too, gave Fuddy a final shove and released him to join Skippy on the back of the truck, where they giggled and whispered and slapped each other around.

  “Too bad she couldn’t keep somebody else we know from drinking and walking around on the cliffs in the dark a while ago,” said Basil to her receding back.

  “Shut up, Basil. Just shut up.” Richard took off his shirt and folded the slobbered side under.

  “She thinks her shit don’t stink,” said Basil. “How anyone could give a good goddamn for someone that thinks her shit don’t stink, I don’t know.”

  Maggie kept to herself that weekend. She did not feel like seeing anyone, talking to anyone, listening to anyone. On Friday the Sweeneys had gone off on the late boat to visit Louise’s relatives in Deer Isle, and Maggie had Head Harbor to herself. Saturday was a fine, crisp, late summer day, with the first hint of autumn on the land breeze. She rested, puttered around the house, and thought about driving in to the post office to see if the lap table she had ordered from Sears had come. But she decided to save the gas and to save herself the noise of the women in the post office. In the afternoon she lost herself in quiet nostalgia around the house and woodshed, moving things about, blowing dust off the long-neglected tools that her father and then Amos had used. In the garden, the four fattening yellow pumpkins Maggie was growing for the school set off in her a sweet, sad longing that carried her far back, past the war and recent loss. Memory in this form, she decided, was kind, oddly satisfying, even encouraging.

  But that evening, while she sipped a glass of sherry at the radio, Walter Winchell revived her thoughts of the war, and the weather report warned of gale-force winds moving up the coast. Boston was getting heavy rain, and the winds there had been clocked at seventy knots. Hull and Natick were flooded; all boats at sea were seeking safe berths up the coast. It was an early hurricane, one that should hit the Maine coast sometime Sunday evening.

  Maggie loved a storm, especially the dark and wild nor’east-ers, though a hurricane would do. Clytie had hated them—all storms—even a glorious blizzard. She had thought her sister queer and somehow masculine for not being afraid that the house would blow down or the roads would wash out. But Maggie liked being snug in the house, with the wind howling and the sea thundering outside. Her father worried about his boat and gear, as did Amos, who had fretted even more when the Tuna was in Head Harbor.

  She thought of the Quahog’s mooring chain, how badly it was worn near the toggle, and shuddered to imagine what would happen if it did break loose. There would be nothing left. Perhaps Gus had riven the hawser through the chain as he had said he would. The boy might be in the cove now, she thought, having heard the gale warnings. He was alone so much these days.

  She hoped that the storm was a huge one and that they would not have to go out patrolling tomorrow night, as planned. No one would. Maybe the hurricane would halt the war for a while and save some lives. The merchantmen would stay in harbor, the airplanes would get tied down, and the U-boats would settle on the bottom. The heavy seas would make it impossible for anyone to come ashore on the island. Even Clytie might have liked a storm in wartime.

  The night was warm and still, but from her bedroom window Maggie could hear the sea making up outside, striking Cape Anne ledge with a distant thump. In the morning, out the kitchen window, the sky was dull with low, slow-moving clouds, and the day darkened before it began. The air grew damp and salty, making a haze on the windows and her reading glasses, which smeared when she wiped them with her hankie.

  She draped a wool blanket over her head and shoulders, and gathered it around her before going out to find which of the back doors was banging in the wind and to check the others. Behind the chicken coop, the flock of crows that had been riding the wild spruce tops
in the wind erupted, the birds squawking, cawing, screaming in panic as they scattered in every direction. She turned in time to see a bald eagle—an immature male— landing on the rocks uncertainly with a struggling crow in his talons. He settled, his wings flayed and spread, and with a swift strike, broke the crow’s back. The other crows returned to the trees and watched him in silence, riding the wind. The eagle shivered to adjust his feathers, flapped once, and looked around at everything but the crows behind him. Maggie saw him look at her.

  He turned the crow over, and with several sharp thrusts of his beak, ripped open its breast. He looked around again, then with a jab, tore off a piece of flesh and gulped it down. The first crow floated off its branch, as quiet as the approaching cloud layer, and landed ten feet from the eagle on the same rock. The raptor did not look at the crow, though he knew it was there, but continued to eat—slower now—enjoying his meal. Another crow alighted on the rock, then another, until six of them encircled the eagle to watch him eat. One walked around lifting its legs and swinging them out like Popeye the sailor, and they all croaked quietly among themselves. In a minute the crows stood still, watching the eagle enviously. One or two, their heads lowered in submission, approached the eagle, then backed away. Now he looked around himself, and in a sudden lurch that sent the crows scurrying, lifted off with his food and flew to the point of rocks across the harbor, where he could eat in peace.

  Maggie thought for a moment that she had seen that very thing happen before, though she knew she had not. Who ever heard of an eagle eating a crow, especially when a nice fish would taste so much better? Her mother called a flock of crows a murder of crows.

  That afternoon, as the wind picked up steadily, she filled both the wood boxes and barred the garage door. By three the rain had begun to fall in earnest, and by four night had set in. The wind moaned outside, and as Maggie sat in her chair by the front window, she listened to the rain striking the side of the house. Though she knew that there could be no one out on the water in this weather, she put up the blackout curtains. Tonight she tacked them along the sides and the bottom, too, to help keep out the wind. The leeward windows she left uncovered. Through them she could see the vague shapes of the spruce trees trying to crouch in the wind.