Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “Hello, Richard. We’ve been all afternoon at the Nitsom-sosom Club, where your mother, please, was duly elected treasurer.”

  Claire, president emerita, was the founder of the Nitsomso-som Club and the source of its clever name. They had begun as four, knitting socks and vests for the British Relief; now they were twenty ladies strong, sewing and knitting for the Red Cross.

  Richard congratulated his mother and leaned into the icebox for a bottle of beer.

  “There’s a nice chowder I can heat up, and you’re lucky because there’s still plenty left of the bean salad I took to the meeting.” Lucille stood and smoothed her dress.

  “I’d like that.”

  “Did you see Mr. Webb’s new garage?” Lucille asked. “Today was the grand opening; they unveiled the sign with the flying red horse and showed off his new pumps.”

  “I was just down there,” Richard said.

  Claire, who was known for her uncanny ability to smell drink on a man, sniffed twice audibly to say that he and Russell Webb had downed a few, hadn’t they? Lucille and Richard ignored her.

  “You sit down while I set you a place,” Lucille said.

  “It’s time I went home.” Claire squeezed the darning egg out of the sock into her basket and speared the ball of yarn with her needle.

  “You don’t have to go,” Richard said. “I need to make a phone call.”

  “Stay and have some iced tea,” said Lucille.

  At the stove, stirring milk into the chowder, Lucille leaned toward the door to the front room to better hear Richard on the phone with Carl Topp in Blue Hill. He had to talk loudly because of the connection, but he was turned away from her in the far corner of the room. She heard him tell Topp that there was a commotion down on Barter Island over a stranger; when her son asked him if he had heard anything about it, Richard sounded relieved that he had not. There was something, too, about a meeting, and she worried that he and Topp were still involved somehow in America First. She would get the details of the commotion, at least, when Claire left.

  While he ate his supper, blowing on each spoonful of chowder, Richard listened impassively, without reply, to the women as they told him the paper had reported that the Vincennes had been sunk and that Frances Torrey’s son was unaccounted for. They also reported that the quarry was going to close down because the Portuguese were being drafted and were disappearing, no doubt to avoid the war.

  Richard carried his iced tea in to the rocker by the radio, turned it on, and settled sullenly into the chair with a cigarette.

  Claire waited with the dishtowel in hand as Lucille poured hot water over the plates in the sink.

  “What’s he listening to?” Claire asked.

  “It sounds like the A1 Jolson show—you know, with Martha Raye and Parkyakarkas,” said Lucille. “He thinks they’re funny, though I can’t see why.”

  “What a ridiculous name,” Claire said.

  “I know it.”

  “I’m skirting it, uphill,” said Vergil when he and Gus came to the cedar bog. “I’m not going to walk around the rest of the day soaked to the waist. Besides, he won’t be hiding in a bog; he ain’t that stupid.”

  “Maybe he’s that smart,” Gus said. “Maybe he thinks that it’s the last place we’d look for a guy in street shoes and city clothes. I’ll go through it and catch up with you on the other side. It’s mostly sphagnum.”

  “It’s deeper in the middle than you think.” Vergil started through the bay berry toward higher ground.

  The soft moss held Gus’s weight at first but soon gave way, and he sank to his ankles, filling his boots with water. Up to his knees, then to his thighs in the cold, black mire, he felt his way with his feet among sunken stumps and slick bottom mud. watching all the while among the trees and tall skunk cabbage that encircled the bog. When he sank to his waist in a sudden hole, the cold shrank his privates and he gasped aloud. It was foolish to think that the man his mother saw would be hiding in a swamp, but Gus had said he’d walk a straight line and he would. He tightened his belt to hold up his now-heavy trousers and thought how Vergil would laugh when Gus emerged from the bog soaking wet.

  When he reached the red maples at the far edge, their leaves bright, the first to turn, Gus scanned the spruce and boulders above him for Vergil, watching for movement, for the white bands of bedsheet that each of the searchers wore on his hat and sleeve. He waited, dripping, and thought that he must have missed his partner.

  “If you get separated,” Dwight had said when he dropped them off, “just keep going. On this side of the ridge, just make sure that your right foot’s walking higher than your left. If that don’t work and you lose your way, walk downhill to the road. But you know that already.”

  Riding shotgun, Dickie had lifted the forefinger on the hand he had stretched out the truck window. “Be wise as serpents, and beware of men,” he had said.

  “Shut up, Dickie,” Dwight had responded.

  Gus watched and listened for a few minutes, but the chickadees were still busy in the lower branches of the spruce where Vergil should pass. The boy decided that he had already gone on, and started out himself, picking his way among the boulders and bushes. Gus would not yell for Vergil; it would warn the stranger and might alarm the others farther up the mountain. He carried his shotgun cradled at the ready across his chest and felt very much alone in the thickening forest.

  • • •

  Dwight turned down the road to Squeaker Cove, where the two old Walker houses and a dozen outbuildings—some collapsed, some leaning toward the same—hunched near the shore and wharf. Basil’s broad-beamed boat, Eliza B., rode on her mooring.

  “I thought he’d be out to haul today,” said Dickie.

  “Not with Fuddy and Skippy, his sternmen, walking the ridge,” Dwight said. “He wouldn’t go alone. He doesn’t have a pot hauler. If he did the work those two guys do hauling and baiting his traps, he’d fill his boots with sweat in an hour. He runs short of breath when he walks to the outhouse. I wonder where he is.”

  They parked at the near house, and as they got out of the truck, Basil hove into view from the garden with an armful of green tomatoes. The slobber-stained bib of his overalls lay limp on his great gut.

  “Let me guess,” said Basil, pointing at Dwight’s pistol belt. “It’s Halloween, and you’re going as Hopalong Cassidy.”

  “You haven’t seen a stranger down around here, have you Basil?” Dickie asked. “We’re looking for a guy—”

  “I know what you’re doing. How could I not know, for Christ’s sake?” He set the large tomatoes out on a sawhorse in the sun. “You’ve got both my sternmen walking around on the mountain when they could be out to haul with me, making some money. They’re so excited, Skippy was up all night preparing for battle.”

  “You’ll make up your day fishing,” Dwight said. He had no use for Basil Walker, and Basil knew it. “All we’re asking is that you keep an eye out for this guy and if he comes down around here—”

  “If he sees that thing, he’ll scamper off so fast I won’t see him.” Basil’s wet mouth formed a smile as he pointed to the wide door of an old garage.

  A man-sized figure—one arm raised, legs wide apart—was outlined in black on the paintless door, its chest and head blasted to splinters by double-ought buckshot and any number of small-arms rounds.

  “He had a Hitler mustache, but it got blowed away,” Basil explained.

  “Target practice?” Dwight asked.

  “More like a warning; lookit here.” Basil caressed the edges of the torn chest cavity with his stubby fingers, “it’s my contribution to the war effort. There’s two dollars’ worth of lead in this.”

  “And another two dollars’ worth of lead in whatever you had stored in the garage,” Dickie said. “I hope you remembered to take the car out.”

  “These here,” Basil pointed to two holes that had missed the figure by inches, “Are Fuddy from the porch rocker with the navy Colt, only two misses out o
f six in rapid fire—some impressive.”

  “I’m surprised you got Skippy to hold still long enough to paint around him like that,” said Dickie.

  “We didn’t,” Basil said seriously. “We tried to. That’s Fuddy. Longer arms.”

  Dwight smiled and shook his head. “I guess if the stranger comes around here I won’t have to worry about taking a statement or any of the other pain-in-the-ass details of my office, like arrest papers or—”

  Basil threw back his shoulders to increase his girth. “All you’ll need is a big old canvas bag,” he said proudly.

  Gus tried to keep to the low shoulder of the ridge, where the boulders were huge and worn smooth, and there were fewer spruces. But growing among the boulders were vast, waist-high thickets of puckerbrush and juniper. Fighting through the cover, trying to keep a footing on the boulders underneath, he could not look around as he moved, and he did not dare cock the hammers on the gun, lest he slip. He took off his flannel jacket and tied it around his waist, but still he sweated through his shirt. He stopped and waited, stopped and waited, breathing through his open mouth to hear better, listening for Vergil—or anyone else.

  After Gus crossed the trickle that would widen into Bridge Creek, he found himself in an unfamiliar, dense thicket of young spruce trees, their lower limbs dead and entangled. The only way through the vicious branches was to go crabwise, leading with a shoulder, squinting his eyes nearly shut to avoid getting them poked out. He had to go the last few yards on his hands and knees, finally emerging in a stand of scrub oaks. He sat on a boulder, brushing himself off, catching his breath, thinking that if he came to another such stand, he would skirt it. To hell with the straight line.

  He either felt or heard the figure moving in the densest part of the thicket, just below him. It was man-sized and dark, and it moved a few steps, then stopped, then moved again, unhampered by the dense brake of limbs. It hitched when it moved, sniffed when it stopped; it was coming straight for him. Gus could not look straight at it, did not dare to, but he knew it was not wearing white bands. When it moved again, his bladder emptied into his trousers, hot and sudden, and he lowered himself into the brush beneath the boulder face down, his cheek pressed into the sharp juniper, the woody little trunks of bay bush digging into this ribs. Drenched in fear, mouth agape like a dead fish, he listened to the wispy footsteps as they came near, stopped abreast of him, then continued in the spruce, receding like a soft sigh.

  After what may have been a half hour, he raised himself onto shaky elbows, his cheek afire from the prickly juniper, thinking that he should shout to warn Vergil, but knowing he would not. He stank of urine and the rich reek of the squashed and warmed salami sandwich in his breast pocket. His hands shook, and his face was wet with sweat and tears. He ran. He scrambled downhill through the brush, bent over as though under fire, oblivious of the granite edges that cut his shins and knees, determined to reach the road before the shape saw him and turned back. Just north of the Needle’s Eye, where the road was washboarded, he emerged in the sunlit stretch and walked ten yards in the road. Then he crawled into the ferns to hide himself, sitting cross-legged in the dark, his head in his hands, catching his sobbing breath.

  Three miles and a mountain away, Richard guided his truck over the gravel and bumps and ruts of the road on the west side of the island. Even in first gear, at less than five miles an hour, he scraped bottom on exposed knobs of granite ledge where the road was only fill. Cecil smoked in the passenger seat, staring down through the woods on the water side of the road. The piece of plank that Richard had fixed over the hole in the cab floor had worked loose, and dust rose between Cecil’s knees. It and his cigarette smoke helped cover Richard’s ripe, protein stench.

  “This is stupid, and you know it,” Richard said as he tried to scan each clump of trees, every jagged cleft of the mountainside as they passed. He steered with is right hand, his shotgun leaning out the window on his left forearm, where it could be seen.

  “For somebody that thinks it’s stupid, you’re taking it pretty seriously,” Cecil said.

  “Well, we might run into him, but it will only be if he wants to be found,” said Richard. “Look at those woods, those crannies; anybody could hide out in twenty square miles of that. It would take teams of bloodhounds, like they hunt niggers down South, to run somebody to ground on this island.”

  “We should have brought more people to ride in back and watch; this is the direction he was going when Lorna saw him coming back from the store,” Cecil said a second time.

  “What difference would it make?” Richard asked. “He isn’t in Moore’s Harbor; we can swear to that. Now it’s only Eli’s cabin and the Hamilton sheds in Duck Harbor; we’ll have to set all afternoon at the Bowens place waiting for the guys to come off the mountain.”

  “Maybe he has a tent, or he built a lean-to.” Cecil handed Richard a lit cigarette to increase the smoke in the cab. “Leah said he smelled like a campfire.”

  “She said he was clean shaven, too.”

  Richard stopped over a mossy creek that ran under the road and got out with a teacup for a drink. Cecil peed in the road, then climbed down to the creek to kneel and drink from his hand. The truck sputtered on idle, and Richard sprang into the seat to rev her up and clear her throat. Cecil stretched his legs and took his time getting back in, pulling the door shut as Richard began to roll.

  His double barrels arranged in the window again, Richard looked at Cecil from the corner of his eye. He said he had been to visit his mother last night, and she had asked after Leah.

  “Mother thinks her grief for Amos was made worse by the way he treated her in his will; but I told her no, she’s not that kind of woman.”

  “And what kind of woman would that be?” Cecil acted offended to show that he had taken the bait, a little tug on Richard’s line.

  “Not the kind of woman to care more about inheritance than her father’s death, that’s all; not the kind to take being left out of his will the wrong way.” Richard tugged back and thought he set the hook.

  “Leah wouldn’t want anyone to know, but your mother is right, at least about her being hurt—deeply hurt—to be left out like that.”

  Cecil confessed in a meek, crestfallen tone to let Richard think that he had been landed. He had traded places in the trucks with Dickie that morning in order to be alone with Richard, knowing full well that the lobster fisherman would bring up the subject of the will at some time just for the pleasure of feeding his rage. Cecil hadn’t thought it would come this easily. What better way to play on Maggie’s conscience than to have her hear that even the women in Stonington believed Leah was wasting away not only from the loss of Amos, but also because of Maggie’s greed? What better way to retaliate to Richard’s meanness than to use it to get that store in Blue Hill? Cecil was nothing if not practical. He lit a cigarette.

  “Mother asked because she cares about Leah,” Richard said. “She always has. Lots of people do. You hate to see someone like her, not a nasty bone in her body, brought so low.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Cecil confided. “She’s eating regular again. She worries about Gus fishing alone; she’s afraid that he won’t finish school.”

  “You ought to get her off this island—move off, all three of you,” Richard said sympathetically. “She could put her sorrow behind her and put that boy in school before he knocks up some dimwitted island girl and gets trapped down here.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” Cecil said, satisfied. “Here’s the path to Eli Creek. Pull over there.”

  Richard followed Cecil down the windy path to the cabin, his shotgun loaded and riding in the crook of his arm. He wondered out loud to Cecil’s stiff, unresponsive shoulders, how old Eli’s cabin must be. He guessed fifty years. Richard said the last time he had been down here, an easy ten years ago, the place was leaking, and the chinking was dried and falling out. “Who the hell was Eli anyway,” he asked, not expecting a reply and not getting one.
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  The path came out behind the cabin, which faced down the ledge toward the mouth of the creek and tide. Before he reached the little window, Cecil stopped suddenly, one hand up to signal a halt, and drew his revolver from his belt. Richard smelled the smoke, too, and stepped backward, surprised and nearly unmanned by fright. He took a deep breath, raised his shotgun to the level of Cecil’s back, and followed slowly.

  The door was propped wide open by a smooth brown stone. Without a blink, Cecil stepped inside and whispered “Nobody here,” before Richard had joined him.

  The dark little room had been dusted and swept; the ashes in the fireplace were still too hot to touch. Richard watched, amazed, as Cecil climbed the ladder to the loft and peered over, exposing his helpless head to who knows what.

  “Not here now,” Cecil whispered.

  “Christ God!” Richard said. “Look Cecil, a half a cabbage and store bread. It’s him.”

  “He must have heard the truck,” Cecil whispered. “He can’t be far, but look—there’s no gear, no clothes around. We should go get some help.”

  “No,” said Richard abruptly. “No. Let’s look around. Let’s go down to the shore; he might have a boat.”

  At the edge of the creek, Cecil stopped to look upstream, then down toward the stony shore. The water, icy and clear and shallow, flowed from a dark pool in rivulets over a wide swath of granite onto the beach. On the far side, not twenty feet away, a man stood up suddenly from the brush, his arms limp at his sides.

  “You’re looking for me,” he said, with a tone of finality.

  Cecil raised a shaking pistol and pointed it at the man; Richard hopped away, leveled his shotgun at Cecil’s back, and cocked both hammers.

  “Put your hands up,” Cecil said.

  “I’m not armed.” Pale and thin and clearly harmless, the man—or boy—hunched his delicate shoulders. “I won’t give you any trouble. I’m ready to turn myself in. I have a suitcase.”

  “Leave it there and come out in the open, on the creek ledge,” Cecil said, still covering the stranger, unaware that the muzzle of Richard’s twelve-gauge was aimed at the small of his back.