Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “No, just dark,” she said. “Were there any lost? Are any of them hurt?”

  “Nobody was killed,” he answered. “U-boats with deck guns and machine guns blew their boats to bits; it’s a miracle they’re all alive. Two have burns. Let me get these guys up and give you a hand; one of them’s a damn good cook.”

  “No, don’t wake them up.” said Maggie. “This is our department. You can help carrying in the rest of it and clearing these tables. Leave the kitchen to us, just keep people out while we’re cooking.”

  “There’s more? asked Jake. “Christ almighty.” He waved to a man who sat up in the middle of the floor rubbing his eyes. “Come give us a hand Akers,” he said. “Where did it all come from?”

  Gus and Betty stood in the kitchen entrance listening wide-eyed to Morales’s solemn account of the rescue.

  “Look at them,” Maggie said, “They are rapt withal.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Maggie. “The casseroles and baked goods are from the island ladies, as fresh as can be, some still warm. The store goods—the coffee, sugar, milk, bacon, butter, cigarettes—are from Gus’s father, Cecil, a contribution, made, I might say, quite sincerely.”

  “Coffee and cigarettes, too?” he asked. “I thought you said Cecil was—”

  She shot him a look and nodded toward Gus.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, he’s damn generous. At least you can let me take your coat.”

  “Thank you.” She pulled her scarf free. “But first take this.” From the Very gun holster inside her coat, Maggie brought forth a bottle in a paper bag. Jake grinned.

  “All ours got drunk up last night,” he said.

  “We thought so,” she said.

  “Is this from Cecil too,” he asked.

  “No, it’s from Amos. Where are those boys with the burns?”

  The patter of shoes, the smell of food, and the sound of women’s voices soon had the crewmen rising from their ghostly sleep on the floor. Guiseppe Clarrutaro’s announcement that the kitchen was off limits while the ladies were cooking only created a logjam of shoulders in the doorway, so he and Jake herded the crewmen outside to wait until they were called. Only Caetano and Akers, in charge of clearing and setting the table—and Dias the biscuit man—were allowed to stay inside. When the men were invited back in, one at a time, to take a plate of bacon and eggs and biscuits and pancakes passed from the women to Dias in the doorway, the house no longer smelled of sweat and cigarettes and fear, but of coffee and bacon and longing.

  While Gus and Morales washed the returning plates, Maggie and Betty served coffee and muffins and dishes of pie to the quiet ones who languished in the front room and to the noisier smokers on the stoop, who begged Betty to sit with them. A skinny man with blue eyes and a salt-starched shirt knelt on one knee clutching a bouquet of uprooted marigolds and asked her to marry him; she turned him down, saying that she was too young.

  George Grindle, whose scalded cheek and hands were freshly wrapped in bandages white as snow, followed Maggie outside and invited her and Harvey to come see the dories; two other crewmen saw Jake headed toward them and fell in behind him. The tide was full; disturbed by an increasing westerly breeze, it lapped and splashed at the dory rudders at the water’s edge.

  Maggie leaned over the gunwale of the dory Grindle said was his. The half-foot of water in the boat’s bottom had ripened in the sun and smelled vaguely of dead sea things and vomit. Jake stood behind her, his feet awash.

  “So much for Richard Snell and those like him who swear that U-boats won’t go after fishermen,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And when they find out that it was U-boats—two of them, and innocent fishermen—Gus’s parents aren’t going to let him fish offshore or go patrolling any more.”

  “How could they keep him from it?”

  “Why, they’d make him promise,” she said, a little surprised. “What could he possibly say to dissuade them?”

  “I guess he could say there’s a war on,” suggested Jake. “What about you? Isn’t that what you’d say if I asked you to quit?”

  Maggie pursed her lips and turned her head, smiling to herself. She had thought while they were feeding the men that she would invite Jake to dinner but realized that she couldn’t entertain him in Amos’s house. She just couldn’t, however nonsensical the reason.

  Harvey and Akers tacked a faded flag onto the blade of one of the twelve-foot oars and raised it above the dories. While Harvey held it in place, other crewmen brought rocks to shore it up.

  “Where’d Miss Betty go?” asked the blue-eyed suitor as he set down two skull-shaped stones.

  Harvey looked around for brown faces within earshot.

  “Don’t ask,” he said. “You don’t want to know; it’d turn your stomach. You’d upchuck your blueberry pancakes.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said the suitor. “She’s gone off with the guy in the Stetson.”

  “The spick in the Stetson, you mean.” Harvey shook his head sadly and stood back to admire the flag that flapped and rippled in the breeze.

  Jake rolled the paper bag down the neck of the bottle, uncorked it, and held it poised over Giuseppe Clarrutaro’s coffee cup.

  “Hair of the dog?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind if I do.”

  Jake poured slowly, reverently.

  “That’s good,” said the captain.

  Jake kept pouring. “It is, isn’t it?”

  The trawlerman said whoa and held up his hand when his cup was half full. Jake sat down at the table, pushed a brimming ashtray aside, and poured two fingers for himself.

  “She doesn’t look like any schoolteacher I’ve ever seen,” said Clarrutaro. “Schoolteachers are fat and ugly or mean and twisted. If I was in her school, I’d misbehave so she’d keep me after.” The skipper took a sip and flapped his eyelids in appreciation.

  “She’s a fucking saint.” Wakefield stood at the table with an empty cup.

  “You know I hate that,” the captain said. “And I hate a moocher.”

  Jake poured Wakefield a cup and waved him away.

  “She likes you some,” said the trawlerman. “I can tell by the way she looks at you and stands up close when she’s talking to you, brushes against you. I won’t mention how you look at her.”

  “She’s just friendly, and sort of neighborly and polite,” Jake stared into his cup. “She does that with Morales too. She’s too much a lady for a guy like me. More important, she lost the only man she cared about this summer and she hasn’t gotten over him.”

  “She will.”

  “1 don’t believe it,” said Jake.

  A lone gull, on its own evening patrol, scaled along the cliffs eighty feet above the water; the bird passed Maggie and Gus at shoulder height, flapped once, and turned out to the darkening sea. Maggie stopped in a clearing where only a few dead and blasted spruce were left among the boulders. She knew without looking down—something she hadn’t done since he fell—that the tide was high by the sound of the water on the rocks. She and Gus had come to walk the cliff patrol together tonight to see if what they heard was true. They watched seaward and waited, counting the eighteen seconds to themselves.

  “It’s true,” Gus said. “The light’s out.”

  “Yes it is,” she said quietly. “Like the lights of Europe.”

  “It’s creepy. I wonder what will happen to those guys.”

  “I don’t know. Harvey was worried that having lost the lighthouse for navigation, the U-boats wouldn’t have any use for it and would blow it up because of the radio.”

  “Now they have good reason to put up blackout curtains,” said Gus.

  “Look how bright the moon is on the water,” she said. “I’m tired tonight; I wish I’d brought a thermos.”

  They followed Amos’s path, widened by their own use; it favored the stands of birch and maple over the impenetrable spruce, and avoided the more dangerous granite upheavals.

&nb
sp; “She made me promise again this morning, as if I didn’t already,” said Gus. “I got mad.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “That she asked you again, I mean. Try to understand her. You’ll be leaving for Jonesport in less than a month anyway.”

  “She’s treating me like a kid,” he said.

  Maggie laughed. “It’s Fuddy, and the others, isn’t it? You’re worried that they’ll call you a mama’s boy. If Fuddy does, knock him overboard, and when he comes to the surface ask him how many nights he’s spent out on the cold water this year. You’re not a mama’s boy, and you know it.”

  “Who will you take with you?” he asked.

  “I want to ask Betty Chambers—she’s not afraid to get things done—but I know they wouldn’t permit it, two women. I don’t know yet.”

  “You won’t go alone.”

  “I promise I won’t,” she said.

  Maggie sat on the boulder on the cushion moss while Gus went ahead with the light to check the cabin. When he returned in the gathering dark, he sat next to her, reclining on his elbows on the moss.

  Maggie wondered if the changes wrought in Gus by the events of the summer would make his last year of high school an easier one.

  “Do you think he’s here?” Gus asked.

  “Only in memory.”

  Gus lay silent for a long minute. “It wasn’t memory that made me see the figure of a man up on the mountain,” he said.

  “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “He didn’t make any noise in the spruce branches when he pushed through them. He didn’t stumble on the rocks. I was so scared I hid on the ground when he walked by,” he said. “I peed my pants.”

  “It was fear that created that shape,” she said. “Though perhaps memory, too, and regret.”

  “What memory? Of Amos’s spirits, of him? It was more than memory,” Gus said. “Besides, you don’t believe in anything after life; you called ghosts ‘hundred-ton potatoes,’ whatever that means.”

  She smiled. Was he teasing her for always quoting things, or did he really hear ‘a hundred ton’?

  “Underdone,” she articulated. “A fragment of underdone potato. Don’t you remember Scrooge and Marley?”

  “Sort of.” He did now. “But not the potato.”

  “He meant that the ghost only existed because of indigestion,” she said. “A dangerous thing to say to a shade, he soon learned.”

  Gus’s eyelids grew as heavy as they did at his school desk. “Uh־huh,” he said. His eyes closed, he slipped his mooring, went adrift, then to sleep.

  She poked him awake with the binoculars and said, “Look at this,” pointing to their left, north of the Sheep Ledges.

  He took the binoculars and focused on the black silhouette of a large lobsterboat making its slow way seaward in the moonlight.

  “It’s not memory?” he asked innocently. “Or fear?”

  “No, smart aleck, it’s a boat,” she said. “Perhaps he’s going to the lighthouse.”

  “If he is, he’s steering too far north. It’s not an island boat; none of the ones down here have that much house on them. Coming from the northwest, he could be from anywhere—Stonington, Castine, any of the Deer Isle harbors. He’s too small to be going fishing—offshore, look how he pitches already—and there’s no shoals where he’s headed, not to fish.”

  “He could be going to Bar Harbor,” she said. “Or somewhere else along the coast. It couldn’t be the Swan’s Island patrol boat; he’s too far south.”

  “Or he could be a new patroller we don’t know about.” Gus put the binoculars in her lap. “I’m going down to the boat and try to raise him on the radio, or call Morales if that doesn’t work. Morales would know; it’s probably nothing, but it won’t hurt to check. You wait here.”

  He was gone for what seemed a long hour. When he returned, he said he had lost the path in the dark, not wanting to show a light. He couldn’t raise the boat on the radio, and Jake knew nothing about a new patrol boat, or any boat for that matter. He certainly wasn’t expecting company.

  “No,” Maggie said. “He didn’t go toward the lighthouse. I lost sight of him ten minutes ago, but he was holding a steady course, a little south of east—ninety-five degrees I’d guess.” She pointed.

  “He could have gone anywhere. Jake says not to worry about it.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m going to stay here to see if he comes back,” Maggie said. “You ought to go home and get some sleep.”

  “I’m not going,” he said. “I want to see for myself. We can take watches.”

  “I’ll go to the house and get some tea and some warm clothes; no need to hide a light now, I guess.”

  When the boat returned in the hour before the false dawn, Maggie used the binoculars to follow him, barely visible in the last of the moonlight. He was on the same heading and would pass just north of the island.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  “What is it?” Gus sat up. “Him? Why are you cussing?”

  “Yes, the same boat.” She passed him the binoculars. “Because if we’d had our wits about us, we would have moved to the northern head and seen him better when he passed by.”

  Perhaps he’s a smuggler of some kind, though I can’t imagine what he’d be smuggling. He can’t have gone to the border and back in six hours; I doubt he even went as far as Bar Harbor.”

  “Or he went to see his girl and traveled by water so no one would stop him for using gas illegally,” he said. “I just thought of that.”

  “How romantic,” she said. “A nocturnal tryst.”

  “A what?”

  His dinner pail dangling from the handlebars, Gus dragged his feet in the gravelly road to slow his descent into the cove. He had come an hour early this morning to catch her before she left for school at six. He’d gone to bed early, tired from their watch the night before, but had awakened at three and had lain on his back chasing stray thoughts until he rose to wash at five. As he passed his parents’ room, his father’s grinding snore—he felt, or rather knew for certain—that Maggie had not slept either and that she knew he’d show up early, before first light.

  He knocked and let himself in to find her at her writing table, marking someone’s homework with a red pencil. When she rose to greet him, he saw that her eyes were as red as the bright spot on her lips where she’d wetted the pencil.

  “Did you see him again?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did.” She pushed the pencil into her gathered hair. “He went out at the same time, on the same heading. Sit down and I’ll get us some tea; mine’s gone cold.” She gestured at the rocker, but he followed her into the kitchen.

  “And came back?” he asked.

  She lifted the cozy from the teapot and poured two strong cups. “Around midnight it grew hazy and hid the moon, so I went up to the head in hopes that I could hear him returning, even if I couldn’t see him. And I did—hear him, I mean. He woke me up, I must confess. He went around the head, through the Burnt Island Thorofare, and up into the bay. I couldn’t see him; he must have been hugging the far shore, though he sounded so close.”

  “There,” he said. “Damn it. I knew it. I should have gone with you.”

  “What good would that have done? Well, perhaps two witnesses rather than. . . . What are you so jittery about? For heaven’s sake, take your tea and sit down. You haven’t slept either, have you?”

  “Jesus Christ don’t you see what damn fools we’ve been? No, I didn’t either until last night.”

  “Stop swearing and explain, please.”

  He drew a folded chart from inside his shirt, and made room for it on the kitchen table, weighting the folds with two lamps.

  “I’m sorry, but look.” His index finger started at the northern tip of Barter Island and moved slowly seaward. “You go ten miles on a heading of ninety-five degrees, and you either turn north toward Bar Harbor or ...” He tapped the chart. “Or you go five more miles on the same heading, and you end up here.”<
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  He looked at Maggie for some sign of understanding, but she only nodded, waiting.

  “This is the end of the shoal, and this,” he drew an oblong circle, “is the flat, sandy bottom. Remember?”

  “Where Amos saw the U-boat,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he lied. “And it may be where he saw this same lob-sterboat going out and coming back in.”

  “May be?” she asked. “You’re only inferring that, guessing. He didn’t tell you? Why didn’t he?”

  “No, and he didn’t tell me that he was watching the cabin from a distance, either. Maybe he was tired of not being believed and wanted to be sure.”

  Gus watched her as she pumped a rush of fresh water into the kettle and set it back on the stove. In the shaving mirror she saw the red smear on her lip and wiped it away with a washcloth.

  “So, you think,” she said, “that the submarine Amos saw, or another, is using the same hiding place, the sandy bottom, and that this boat is meeting him there as he departs for his nightly hunt in the Halifax lane.”

  “I think he’s taking the Germans supplies—food, water, fuel, I don’t know what—and maybe information about ship movements,” Gus said slowly. “I think there’s a good chance they’ll meet up again tonight.”

  “A spy,” she said. “A traitor. We’ll call Mr. Gardiner and tell him we’ve seen the boat again, going to the same place. He’ll report it to Rockland this time, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not.” Gus folded the chart and turned the lamp down, then cupped his hand over the chimney to blow it out and let the vague morning light increase in the kitchen. “Even if he does call it in, it won’t amount to anything; with the thousand other sightings they can’t do anything about, it won’t even get marked on some coastal chart.”

  “Perhaps we can do something,” she said, “But what?” She closed her eyes, and when she did, Gus smiled, knowing that once he had gotten her this far, she would not turn back.

  “We—the Quahog, and the lighthouse launch—could lie in wait for this fellow and intercept him,” she said, opening her eyes anew. “But no, you promised your mother.”

  “Come with me,” he said.