Water Dogs (30 page)

“So when did you find him?” he said.

Littlefield shook his head, looking down. “Early the next morning.”

“Not in the quarry.”

“No. He might have fallen off the edge, but if he did, he climbed out. I found him out by the corner of the stone wall.”

“That’s right near the road. Don’t you see? You thought it was your fault, but it wasn’t.”

“I chased him until he couldn’t get out of the woods, Bennie.”

“He made it out of the woods. He made it to his motorcycle, and just as he was getting back on the road, Julian hit him.”

This time, Littlefield didn’t say anything. He looked back at Bennie, squarely. He shook a cigarette from his pack and lit it.

Bennie said, again, “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I can’t talk with you about this.”

“Why not, asshole? Why can’t you talk to me? Who can you talk to if you can’t talk to me?”

“You’re acting like a crazy person,” said Littlefield.

“Yeah? What if I am? Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”

“You wouldn’t have understood,” said Littlefield.

“I’m your brother.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“What matters, then?”

“The things I’ve done,” said Littlefield.

“You didn’t kill LaBrecque.”

“Maybe not. It doesn’t matter now, does it.” He held his head in his hands.

“Will you talk to me about this, Littlefield?”

Littlefield took his hands away from his face and looked up. His eyes were red and wet with tears. “We’re different, Bennie. You and I are different. I can’t hold it together. I really thought something would happen between me and Martha. I’m a fucking idiot. Is that what you want to hear?”

“That’s a start,” said Bennie.

“Here’s what I want, Bennie. I want you to trust me. I can’t talk it through with you. I want you to trust me that I need to leave. I need to get the fuck out of Maine, okay?”

Bennie had never heard his brother ask for something like this. He answered him quickly. “Okay.”

“I also need to know that if I stand up, you’re not going to tackle me again.”

“Okay,” said Bennie.

Littlefield looked down and took another drag from his cigarette. “You’re pretty sure about Julian hitting LaBrecque with the truck?”

“I’m positive.”

Littlefield shook his head. “I am so fucked.”

When they stood up, Bennie took a small step forward and put his arms around his brother. Littlefield hugged him back. “Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t ask you to hug me.”

Bennie squeezed, hard, and Littlefield held on tightly, too.

“Don’t leave, Littlefield,” he said. “I really don’t want you to go. I think things could change here, for both of us. Things could get better.”

“You’ve got to trust me, Ben. You really do this time.” He picked up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ve had a good visit with Mom. Real good. When I leave, I want you to explain it however you feel is right. I can’t say goodbye to her.”

He was crying, still, and Bennie was, too. Littlefield walked past him to the back door. “I appreciate what you’re doing, Bennie. Trust me, though. I’ve got to leave.”

The door shut. Bennie stayed inside and watched his brother walk out to the Chevette. Littlefield started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove away.

Bennie walked through the house to find his mother.

“Did William leave?” she asked.

Bennie told her he had—he said Littlefield had been in love with a girl but it hadn’t worked out, and that he was probably going to spend some time away from the island. He told her Littlefield might try to get a fresh start somewhere else, and he needed to do it on his own.

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You should have seen him, Benjamin,” she said. “He was being very nice to me. Very loving. If he was leaving, he would have told me.” When she looked at Bennie, though, he could see that she knew he had left and wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.

22

E
ven after spending a long string of winters in Maine, it’s difficult to stop thinking spring might come early. They didn’t get a lot of sun that year, but the temperatures started rising, the streams and rivers flooded, everything was brown and sandy and dead, and then all at once—they thought it was a false start—the world was green.

Bennie was working the weekend shift for Handelmann, who’d left early on Friday. In the warm months Handelmann motored regularly in the aluminum boat to Quohog Island, the two-acre crag he owned, to camp for the weekend. Because of this, Bennie worked extra hours at the shelter, which was at its best in early
summer, when everyone adopts. The dogs were spending more time in the outside pen and less time bothering the cats. The indoor cages weren’t getting used, so they didn’t need to be washed.

The last Friday in June, Handelmann put Bennie in charge of the four o’clock appointments. He sped through them, giving a few shots, doling out heartworm meds, and only one dog, a miniature schnauzer, needed to have his anal glands expressed. Bennie was hoping to have the doors locked at five sharp. He’d told Helen to meet him then, so that they’d have time to pick up food and bring it to Singer’s Cove for an early-evening picnic. They still tried to walk out to the water there every afternoon. His leg was feeling stronger than ever, so he only noticed the break when the weather was changing. The walks, and the time he spent with Helen, were helping him heal.

By early May, Gwen and Jamie Swensen had started dating, and by June it seemed Gwen was falling for him. Bennie had been worried at first—he liked Swensen okay, but with Gwen? She said he had a good heart, and he wasn’t nearly as much of a drunk as he’d seemed on St. Patrick’s Day. They liked to fish together. He had his own boat, a little wooden skiff his grandfather had built. She found a subletter, postponed her plans to return to Brooklyn for another few months, and was waiting to hear back from auditions at Portland Stage Company.

Martha went back to her shifts at Rosie’s. She’d found her own apartment in Westbrook. She still spent plenty of time with them on the island, though, and she came up whenever she had a night off. A week after Littlefield left, she’d gotten a letter from him. She showed it to Bennie and Gwen. All he said was that he was going to be missing his regular Tuesday-night visits to Rosie’s. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he wrote. He said he had more he wanted to tell her, and that he’d write again soon. As of early May, she hadn’t gotten another letter.

In Handelmann’s office, Bennie sent out the latest round of bills. He did a final check on the overnight animals, though he knew he’d be on duty again early in the morning, so there wasn’t much to worry
about. The Australian shepherd mutt who’d been brought in at noon after being hit by a sand truck was hooked up to an IV, with fluids and a narcotic skin patch, and even though she’d lost a front leg in the accident, she was sleeping peacefully. With Handelmann gone for the weekend, Bennie wanted to catch up with the pile in the crematorium shack so he wouldn’t have to go in there on Saturday or Sunday, when he was the only one on duty.

At five minutes before the hour, he walked out back and was surprised how high the sun was in the sky. It was warm and bright and the grass between the main building and the crematorium shack needed mowing. He’d started the fire an hour earlier, and when he stepped inside he knew right away it was hot enough. All he had left was a Great Dane. He tried putting him in lengthwise, knowing that a dog of his size would normally fit, but he felt one of his legs catch on the metal seam near the back door, so he pulled him partway out—the dog had already started to burn, of course, so he shoved him back in. Bennie scampered to the rear of the kiln to fix the snag. He opened the smaller door in back to find that the dog was caught up in the usual place, the metal seam, so he used a poker to free its legs. Just as he was pulling the poker out of the fire, he spotted two small cylindrical lengths of metal beside the seam, hidden from view when looking into the oven from the front. He scraped them out of the kiln and onto the floor, and saw that they were charred metal screws. When he looked at them on the ground, it was no less shocking to see them, and his first thought was that they seemed like they could have been part of a story Coach might have told: the screws that had once helped repair the leg of a hockey star from Tavis Falls were now blackened by fire in a pet crematorium on Meadow Island.

The kiln was closed, but he stayed near the back side of it, looking down at the screws as they cooled there on the ground. They were a horrifying and very real piece of his brother’s life, his actual experience. He picked the screws up off the ground. They were warm, without
burning his palm, and they were black with soot and the grooves were caked with resin. When he closed his hand around them, they were hotter than he thought, and sharp.

Helen was punctual, as always. Within a few minutes he heard her calling his name outside the door.

“Just a minute. I’m almost done,” he said.

He waited to catch his breath. Littlefield had been all alone, through everything: going back to the woods beside the road, bringing the body out, getting it to the kiln. He had made this decision on his own. He had assumed he was guilty, and that he needed to take care of what he’d done—all of this he had done on his own. And now he was gone, living someplace new, among strangers.

Bennie walked back around the kiln to the door. When he saw Helen, he opened his hand and showed her what he’d found.

23

W
hen Bennie knocked on Vin’s door in June, in the early evening, there was still plenty of light outside, and Elizabeth, Vin’s wife, came to greet him. She was a tired and sour-looking woman; Coach had said on a few different occasions that she’d been pretty in high school, like a Scandinavian model, with round cheeks and long blond hair, but whenever Bennie saw her she looked like she hadn’t been sleeping. She called for Vin, who was watching TV with their granddaughter Sadie, and he called back to her, inviting Bennie in. When he walked into their living room, Vin was stretched out on the couch; Sadie was lying on her stomach on the tan carpet, propped up by her elbows.
Elizabeth yawned, switched off the TV, and offered Bennie a beer. He asked for a cup of water and sat with them for fifteen minutes, long enough to finish his glass; they listened to Sadie tell them about the robot she and her classmates were making at school. It was made of cardboard but could tell fortunes. Vin didn’t say a word to Bennie; they just listened to Sadie’s story, and when she was finished Elizabeth offered Bennie more water, but he wasn’t thirsty, and they sat there for a moment after Sadie skipped into the other room to get some of the drawings she was working on. Vin wasn’t being his normal, boisterous self—he was unruffled and quiet. Before Sadie got back he stood up and gestured for Bennie to come outside with him. Bennie knew he was a smoker, but when they stepped into his yard, past the empty doghouse, Vin didn’t take out his cigarettes.

It was one of those warm, perfect, fresh-smelling early summer evenings, and they stepped down to the lawn, in the blue shadows. “Fucking Benjamin,” he said. “Benjamin Littlefield.”

“I’ll tell you why I’m here,” said Bennie. He felt himself shaking. “I want you to apologize for going after my brother.”

Vin shook his head. He hit Bennie in the stomach, which bent him over. Then Vin kicked him—a quick punt to the groin.

He fell down into the grass.

“Stand up,” Vin said.

Bennie knew it was going to take him a while to satisfy this request. With his cheek in the grass, he wheezed, “What’s your problem?”

“I never got you back for that stunt in the bar,” said Vin. “Okay. Now we’re even. Now I can apologize to you. It’s true. I was wrong about your brother.”

After catching his breath, Bennie tried to climb to his feet, and as he stumbled Vin grabbed his arm, pulled him up, and led him to the edge of his back porch. They sat for a few minutes—Vin took out his cigarettes, lit one for himself, then handed Bennie the pack and his lighter. While they smoked, Vin told Bennie that he knew Littlefield was prone
to trouble but he’d always thought he was a decent person, regardless. “Why’d he leave?” Vin asked.