Shooting at Loons (6 page)

“They’re growing oysters on leased bottoms, too,” Barbara Jean said between mouthfuls. “On ladders.”

She was prepared to go into more details, but I didn’t want to hear. “Will your Alliance continue without Bynum?”

She considered. “Who knows? Short-term? Maybe. Long-term? Till somebody’s oars don’t reach the water and Andy’s not here to lift the ocean for them. Till all commercial fishing gets pushed slam out of the sound and off the banks, or the trawlers hear that they have to keep using turtle excluders and shrimpers don’t. Jay can do the paperwork and maybe keep up with all the rules and regulations that keep rolling in till they can find some man to sit in Andy’s chair, but finding someone that everybody trusts—”

Barbara Jean’s words trailed off as her attention was diverted. I turned to see a stocky male stride through the crowded restaurant, jostling tables and diners and nearly causing a waitress to drop her tray. It was the same man who’d almost barreled me over at the Clerk of Court’s office and he seemed even angrier now than he had earlier as he made his way over to a table halfway across the room from us.

It was occupied by a lone woman, another blonde (ash, this time), very petite, with oversized pale blue glasses that covered much of her face. Her hair fell in a loose pageboy along her chin line as she tilted her head toward the man, but her slender hand held its place in the papers she had been reading when he interrupted. No smile on her thin lips; no encouraging or conciliatory body language either. She sat absolutely motionless until he began to run out of steam, then turned back to her papers, clearly dismissing him.

He glared at her, thick hands on his hips, and anger deepened his voice. Everyone quit eating and flat-out stared.

“By God, I’ll sue you for criminal fraud!” he shouted. “You knew I was going to turn it into a party boat.”

She turned those pale blue glasses on him again. “You bought the
Lucky Linville
as is,” she said calmly. “What you planned to do with her was not my concern.”

She never raised her voice and if the room hadn’t gone so silent, I wouldn’t have been able to hear her. The manager and two hefty busboys surrounded the stocky man who by now was nearly apoplectic with rage.

As they hustled him out, the rest of us pretended we hadn’t been staring. The woman returned to her reading completely unruffled. After an eternity, the usual flow of conversation ebbed back into the room with the tinkle of ice in tall glasses and the clink of utensils against china.

“She sold Zeke Myers the
Lucky Linville?
” Barbara Jean asked Chet just as I asked, “What was all that about?”

Chet shrugged, but suddenly I was remembering last night’s phone call. “Is that Linville Pope by any chance?”

“You know her?”

“Not really. She invited me for cocktails tomorrow night. Said she was a friend of Judge Mercer’s.”

“I do hope you thought to pack a bulletproof vest,” Barbara Jean said sweetly.

Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife?
When the strong tides lift and the cables strain,
Will your anchor drift, or firm remain?

—Priscilla J. Owens

With daylight saving now in effect, the sun was still high as I left the courthouse that afternoon and drove toward Harkers Island through a countryside less green than in other years. Only last month, a late-winter storm had left whole stretches of coastal pines, yaupon, azaleas, and live oaks so coated with salt spray that their needles and leaves had turned brown on the seaward side. Branches had shattered off and in more than one yard women were piling brush and men were still busy with chainsaws on trees uprooted by the storm.

Occasionally as I drove eastward, I spotted boarded-up windows, trailers that had shifted on their footings, and sheets of plastic tacked over gaping holes in the side of a house or roof.

For the first time, it belatedly registered just how much damage the coast had sustained. I remembered hearing radio bulletins that the “storm of the century” was headed our way, but then it had skipped over Dobbs and Raleigh so gently that I’d almost immediately quit paying attention.

True, Dwight Bryant, Colleton County’s deputy sheriff, had done a lot of mouthing about the snows up in western Virginia (his ex-wife and young son lived in Shaysville and had been snowed in for several days), but late snows aren’t uncommon in the Blue Ridge. If Channel 11’s “Eyewitness” weatherman ever called it a hurricane—hurricanes in
March?
—I’m sure I’d have noticed; yet listening to Chet and Barbara Jean Winberry describe how the bottom seemed to have dropped out of their barometer, the ninety-miles-per-hour winds, gusting to over a hundred, what else could it have been?

At the courthouse, during our afternoon break, I heard of a nine-year-old killed when high winds snapped a pine over in Newport and sent it crashing into his family’s mobile home. Roofs were ripped from houses, siding peeled from stores, sheets of tin had kited down the center of Morehead City.

“Lord, yes!” said one of the lawyers standing around the coffee urn. “Boats tore loose from moorings, the docks all along Taylors Creek were awash, and power lines?” He snapped his fingers. “Like two-pound test hit by marlins.”

Much of the area was without electricity for more than a week, they told me, while power crews brought in from all over worked around the clock with local linesmen.

Somehow, it embarrassed me that I hadn’t been aware of their ordeal, just as it bothered me that I hadn’t known doodly about the issues that now inflamed Barbara Jean and others who earned their living from the ocean sounds and estuaries.

“You label the women of Harkers Island standoffish and aloof,” lectured my internal preacher, “yet when have you made more than self-serving perfunctory overtures?”

Shamed, I thought about how I must look from their viewpoint. First as a child, then as a teenager, I’d come down with my cousins, played in the water, then gone juking and cruising around the Circle at Atlantic Beach. I treated their living space like a playground created for my personal pleasure. As an adult, I swam, water-skied, loafed, helped Carl and my younger cousin Scotty set gill nets out in front of the house so I could take home a couple of coolers of fresh seafood for my brothers and their families, then headed back inland to my comfortable life with less consideration than if those women were costumed characters in a theme park.

“Oh, give it a rest,” fumed the cynical pragmatist, who usually starts jeering whenever I get any noble thoughts. “You think anybody down here really feels deprived because one more upstater didn’t try to be their best friend?”

Okay, okay. Even so, just past Otway, I pulled in at a florist that was still open. The young woman behind the counter said she’d heard that Andy Bynum’s body had been released to a funeral home on the island and that the funeral was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. I ordered a basket of silk flowers to be sent: Dutch irises, buttercups, red poppies and lilies of the valley.

“Credit card friendship, the easiest kind,”
whispered a voice inside my head.

Preacher or pragmatist?

When I got back to the cottage, the Bynum house already had a closed-up look to it. His sons live further down the island, near the ‘fish house, and I guessed the wake was probably being held at the funeral home.

I’d barely stepped through the door when the phone began ringing. Yeah, it could’ve been a dozen different people—I would even have welcomed somebody selling aluminum siding—but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be that lucky.

Actually, it could have been one of the mouthier ones. Could have been Andrew or Herman or Will or Jack. Instead, it was only Seth, five brothers up from me, and the brother who always cut me the most slack.

“Hey, Seth,” I chirped. “You want me to bring you and Minnie some clams Friday?”

He didn’t even bother to answer that. “What’d you go and get mixed up in now, Deb’rah?” he asked sternly.

At one time or another, most of my brothers had used this cottage or gone fishing with Carl, so Seth had met Andy and he listened without fussing as I explained the situation and how I was only tangentially involved. “How’d you hear so quick, anyhow?”

“Some SBI agent down there recognized your name and told Terry and Terry told Dwight and Dwight called me.

“I swear, you’d think SBI agents and deputy sheriffs would have better things to talk about. I hope nobody’s worried Daddy with it.”

“Not yet,” Seth said. Concern was still in his voice. “You sure you haven’t stepped in the middle of something, shug?”

I promised him that it was sheer coincidence and he promised that he’d do what he could to keep Daddy from hearing; and yeah, long as I was coming back Friday, a mess of clams might be right nice.

There was still no sign of Guthrie when I carried a glass of tea out to sit on the porch and unwind, but Mark Lewis and Makely Lawrence, two more of the neighboring youths, were headed up the path from the water, each with a bucket of clams they’d dug.

“You wouldn’t want to sell me a half-dozen, would you?” I called.

Mark grinned. “No, but I’ll give you six if that’s all you want.”

“I only want to make a small chowder.”

“You give her three and I’ll give her three,” said Makely, not to be outdone by his cousin.

They set their buckets on the porch and each picked out their three biggest. The clams had been dug out of the mud, but they were the size of coffee saucers. As I should have suspected, the boys didn’t want money, so much as they wanted details about Andy Bynum’s death.

“Didn’t Guthrie tell you?” I asked.

“Yeah, well—” said Makely.

“How come everybody says that?”

Makely looked at Mark, who said, “He got into trouble for taking his granddaddy’s skiff out.”

“What? I thought it was his.”

“Ain’t,” Makely said tersely.

I let it pass and told them about going out with Guthrie, finding Andy lying dead, then Jay Hadley’s arrival, followed by the police boat.

“Who do you think could have shot him?” I asked, curious to know what their elders were saying.

Again the shrugs.

“Drugs,” Makely grunted. He was younger and almost as imaginative as Guthrie.

Mark was more thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Lots of people were mad at him ‘cause he was for making everybody buy a license to sell their fish. Like, if that happens, we wouldn’t be supposed to sell you a mess of crabs or anything unless we had a license.”

“Yeah,” said Makely. “Heard tell shrimpers wanted to burn his house down.”

“Just talk,” said Mark, dismissively.

Perhaps. But as I was scrubbing the clams later, I thought about the island’s reputation for settling its own scores. Even outsiders like me remembered the bitter anger and deep, deep hurt when Shackleford Banks was declared a wilderness area under the US Park Service.

Shackleford was the ancestral home of most islanders until the hurricanes of 1896 and 1899 forced them to relocate, and almost every island family maintained a rough fish camp over there. Unfortunately, few had clear deeds to the land. The two or three who did were given lifetime rights, but they fared no better than those with no deeds. When the untitled cabins were confiscated in 1985, some of the dispossessed went over and torched all the camps.

Had Andy Bynum angered some hot-tempered islander so thoroughly that a simple house-burning was not enough to settle the grudge?

The telephone rang as I finished gutting the clams and chopping them into small pieces. This time it was Carl, wanting to know if I found everything okay.

“Yeah, once Guthrie and I figured out your new water pump system.”

“Same system it’s always been,” said Carl.

I sighed. “That Guthrie’s got himself a reality problem, hasn’t he?”

Carl laughed. “He been stretching the truth on you, too?”

He was startled to hear about Andy and I had to go through all the details again.

“Say it was out at Hes Hadley’s leased bottom?”

There was a significant silence.

“What?” I asked.

It took some prodding, but eventually he repeated some gossip he’d heard from Mahlon Davis: “Said Hes warned Andy off his wife.”

“
Andy?
” I was astonished.

“Oh, heck, yeah. Andy Bynum liked the ladies almost as much as Mahlon does. He just wasn’t as crude about it.

He told me to be careful and not to go sticking my nose into anything that wasn’t my business, a piece of advice every man in my whole family feels free to give, then he put Sue on so I could get her to go over the recipe for Core Sound cornmeal dumplings. (“One part plain flour to four parts cornmeal.”)

“Did Andy ever make a pass at you?” I asked.

“Well, sure he did,” she drawled. “I’d have been insulted if he hadn’t, the way he used to flirt with every grown woman. Didn’t mean anything. It was just his way of being polite. Now if it’d been Mahlon Davis...”

There was no need to elaborate.

She told me there was a little piece of salt pork in the freezer if I wanted it for my chowder and rang off without giving me any advice at all. Yet, paradoxically, it was her words that left me disoriented. Nothing sends you straight back to childhood quicker than getting an unexpected insight into how things—relationships—really were when you lived in Eden, a child oblivious to the Serpent.

While the clams simmered on the stove’s lowest setting, I carried the shells and wastes down to dump at the water’s edge. The fresh shell of a loggerhead turtle floated in the wash. Somebody not far away was probably enjoying a hot turtle stew at the moment—hot in more than one sense, because loggerheads are a protected species.

Almost twilight, yet gulls still came shrieking over, pushing and shoving and elbowing each other aside to be first at whatever was going down.

A line of brown pelicans flew by on their way to roost, as indifferent to the gulls as the sandpipers further down the sand.