Moon Tide (23 page)

When he sees her now in the town, he has visions of Blackwood stealing that taste of her on the meat cutting board in the store behind the Nabisco bins, the shelves above them stocked full of Campbell’s soup and condensed milk—a red-and-white-labeled jury peering down—when he sees her, he sees Blackwood’s huge hands and the imprints they have made, that they still make—the anger caves him in around himself like the white shadow heat makes on a new paved road.

Now digging on the flat, Wes can feel her the way he wants to remember her—the way she was to him that night they spent together in the root cellar—her body soaked around him with the smell of earth and geranium mold. She bled lightly, and he took her blood into his mouth. She marked his throat with her scent and, for days afterward, he could taste everything about her—who she was, where she came from, how she had split into him like a rogue wave that builds suddenly out of itself with no other source. Even now, as the tide begins to turn, he can sense her blood in the cracks between his teeth. He walks through the marsh, stopping where the sand grows soft. He digs down, feeling for the hardness of the clams—he mimics their burrow—it is a route he knows. As the tide begins to flood, his feet push down harder as if he could dig to the heart of things—and he senses her—an impression that might be her—in the reek off the marsh and the tug of the salt air. His skin rises to it.

On his way back to the wharf, he passes a swarm of gulls feeding on schoolie bass in the deep channel. He casts into the rip and catches six in a quarter of an hour.

He ties up at the dock house by the Sinclair gasoline sign. He carries the pail of fish down to the Point Meadows and guts them by the water’s edge. He sharpens the knife tip on a flat rock, lifts each one from the bucket, and eases the tip into the throat. He cuts them down the center, peels them inside out, whittles the scale away from the skin, and then cuts the wings of meat into thin strips off the bone. He sets the fillets down on the higher ground of the bank. The crows come while he is slivering the last of them. They stalk around the bone pile
and then dart in to work what is left. He knows they will always go first for the jellied meat of the eyes, as if they could swallow that different way of seeing.

At ten that night, Wes goes out alone. He takes Mason’s dragger out to the schooner waiting in the Rum Row zone two nautical miles east of the Sow and Pigs. He loads his boat and heads back toward the harbor. One half mile off the Nubble, the engine catches over itself once and dies. He fiddles with the choke and starts her again, but she is limping, and he makes his way in short glib bursts until he reaches the breakwater. He has missed the tide, it has already turned toward the ebb. He sets the boat on drift off the Lion’s Tongue. As he is wrapping the engine head with a tarp to stifle the sound, from the corner of his eye he sees a black shape moving across the channel from the Charlton Wharf toward his starboard side. A six-bitter patrol. He goes on working, tying down the tarp around the engine. He picks up a screwdriver and jams his pistol into his belt. He keeps himself in a crouch and throws the throttle hard into reverse, aiming the stern directly at the mass of shadow moving toward him. The chaser throws her lights, and he can see the lean bright arc of tracers through the dark above his head. One bullet tears into his shoulder, clean through the muscle and out the other side. The hull of the patrol rises up out of the blinding whiteness of the searchlight and, just before impact, Wes swerves hard to the right and then slams the throttle forward, wide open, around the Lion’s Tongue into the deeper water behind the jetty. The dragger engine makes a pathetic slow thrust forward, and the guard boat is just pulling up along his port side as Wes runs the dragger aground on Cory’s Island. He slips off the stern into the black water and pulls himself along the bottom until he reaches the shallows. For two hours he lies belly-down in a gutter of mud between the reeds as they comb the marshes for him.

It is after one
A.M.
when he reaches the Point. He swims in along the west pier, a crippled stroke; his left shoulder aches with the bullet
wound. The pain is erratic. It shudders through his arm—stark and unpredictable. It is the pain that makes him think of her—it chews him down in that same way. He can see the coast guard six-bitter tied up at the wharf and Mason’s dragger tied alongside. In the dock light, he can see the stash. A young guard with a shotgun sits on top of the crates. Wes pulls himself around the west pier onto the beach of one of the summer houses at the end of Valentine Lane. He drags himself along the hedge, across the garden, up the road toward North Kelly’s barn. He finds a tin of gasoline in the shed, wraps it in a horse blanket, and carries it in his good arm. At the end of Main Road next to the dock house is the constable, Jeb Gifford, and two of his officers. They stand with three other men in coast guard uniform. They are waiting for him. He slips through several backyards, crouched with the moon on his back, his shadow thrown against the stone walls. When he reaches the pier, he keeps himself low, close to the boats, until he has made his way past the group of men to the back entrance of Blackwood’s store. With a jackknife he jimmies the lock and slips inside.

He cuts four yards of fishing wire off the spool and five yards of three-quarter line from a coil by the door. He unfolds one of the reinforced seine nets, picks up a spade, and climbs the stairs. He pauses at the top by the closed door, and then slowly, gently, he turns the knob and pushes it open.

Blackwood is alone, asleep on his back, his body washed in the yellow kerosene light left burning on the desk. A tremendous bruise spreads across his chest, its center darkest at the fractured rib bone just below the heart.

Wes closes the door. The lock clicks shut. Outside in the small hallway, with the seine, the line, and the spade, he rigs a trap. He strings it between the stairwell posts and the door handle. Then, he goes back downstairs for the gasoline. He empties a quarter of the tin under the door and leads a trail down the stairs. He douses the counter and the shelves and then backs his way to the door, emptying the tin as he goes. He lights a match and sets it down to the end. The room explodes
around him. As he turns to push his way out the back door, he trips on the coil of rope that he had drawn out to cut minutes before. He falls, striking his head against a dory piled with galvanized pipes.

The light shatters Blackwood’s sleep. A blinding surge of yellow-blue light, and he sits up in bed, his eyes wide, still dreaming, scrambled brain, the bedclothes around him flooded with a raging orange heat. Everywhere color. It seems impossible that there could be so many colors implicit in a single fire. White. Sulfur. Violet. Red. Even the shadows bristle with hue. He had always imagined a death by water—the drag of his consciousness down by the reins through black and heaving waves. The merciless shutting down of light. But this? He had no history for this. He can hear the sudden crackling of skin, the reek of wilting flesh he knows to be his own. He had never dreamed of this. His eyes swivel around the room to grasp it the way he remembered it, the way it was. He can see the breakdown of everything familiar—the dissolution of the wall, the bureau gathered into smoke, his desk and ledger books, papers scrapping up like shredded wings through vertical bursts of flame.

He feels relief. Inside. It is almost a comfort to know that this is how he has finally come to die. There will be no drowning. No squeeze of water in the lungs. He has no fear of this. It is an unknown. The fire will eat him as fire does, from the outside in.

He lies back onto the pillow and gives up his body and his heart to be consumed.

Maggie
.

A sudden dampening thought.

Maggie
.

The only thought.

He springs from the bed, hops across the lapping pools of fire toward the door.

Maggie
.

He grows wild with the thought of leaving her. Only her. He cries out her name, throwing back the door, and he does not see the string
until it is one step under him. He lifts his foot to clear it and watches as his heel melts from the bone to trip that glinting thread of line. The snare falls like loose hair around him. It catches his legs and hoists him in one sudden breathless jolt heavenward toward the falling beams.

Wes hears the cry. Lying facedown with a weight pinned across his back, he hears her name echo down the narrow back stairs as the floor above begins to crack away. He hears it—over and over again—her name howling like a thin electric current through his brain. His head is filled with her name as the wood splinters, charred straight through, and the ceiling crashes down around him.

By the time they find him, forty minutes later, lying by the dory with his head split, the fire has begun to sink. His left hip is trapped under a crossbeam, and it takes two men to heave it loose. The crushed bone of his leg shakes like a rattle in the skin. He is still alive, but unrecognizable. They mistake him for Blackwood, call off the search, and pull his body out into the street.

Jake

W
aiting for Maggie, Jake carves small birds out of wood. A loaf of soft maple. He whittles at it with his jackknife as he sits next to the black scorch of his brother in the root cellar. He carves a storm petrel first, with its sooty wings outstretched, then the soul cry of a rock dove and the white throat of a sparrow. He turns the chunk in his hand and carves the bold heart of the herring gull, the matchstick legs of plovers. He carves the vulnerable wandering of crows.

As the early morning light fills the window, the wood shrinks and the birds gather in a pile of woodchips at his feet, and still he goes on carving: the wind into the feathers of an egret, the erratic flight of wrens, the senseless plummet of a woodcock at dusk. He carves the return of the geese across the river to the cool reek of the let, the breakdown of the flock, the drift of each bird off onto its own. He carves until the wood is gone.

When Maggie does not come, he moves Wes to the spring cot in the corner. Then he lights the rushes in the woodstove and gathers up the woodchips with his hands. The birds snap up in sparks of sap and smoke. The fire melts their flawed bodies until they soar, lighter as they burn.

Past nine, Maggie comes in with her arms full of roots, her face glossed like an oiled leather. He can sense the garden earth on her—the slight and unclaimed density her body still holds. She notices the wrong smell as soon as she comes in. Her nose wrinkles. She glances at the woodstove and then at Jake, the question in her face, and he can see that she knows nothing.

She sets the roots down on the worktable and pulls the scarf from her head. Her hair tumbles down her back like dark water.

“Why’d you come here, Jake?”

“The store burnt.”

She is reaching to place the scarf on the hook. Her arm stops in mid-reach, then pushes on forward. She hangs the scarf, and her arm drops to her side. She does not turn around.

“What store?” she asks slowly.

“Down at the wharf.”

“When?”

“Early morning.”

“Blackwood was in it?”

“Yes.”

She says nothing and her body is still, tense, the way he has seen a doe stand, neck cocked to a sudden, unnatural sound.

Jake clears his throat. “They thought at first they pulled him out.”

“Why’d they think that?”

“It was Wes they pulled.”

“What’d Wes be doing in the store?”

“They told me Wes tried to save him.” He looks away from her as he says this. “Guess they asked him if wasn’t it true he tried to save him. Asked and he nodded, as well as he could, that it was true.”

Maggie knows by now that Wes is behind her, but she does not turn around. She looks up at Jake, then shakes her head and looks away.

“They’re calling him a hero,” Jake says. “I brought him here.”

Maggie stands there, still, as if she is listening to some other voice that has continued speaking even as he stopped; as if she is waiting, gathering
some understanding beyond his range. The raw light through the cellar window fractures her face, but underneath that play of shadow, there is nothing. He can see no change in her expression. No emotion at all. He waits until she turns and sees Wes lying on the spring cot in the corner. Then he folds his knife into its sheath and leaves.