Black Duck Read online

  “Now, Carl, what is it you’ve done to deserve this?” she’d ask, raising an eyebrow.

  He’d shake his head like it was nothing, and never answer.

  My father was tough on me growing up. He was an old-fashioned believer in discipline and hard work, far beyond what was fair or necessary, it seemed to me. There never was much warmth or fun between us, the way some boys have with their dads, but one thing I was sure of: he was an honest man. Whatever mischief was going on along our shores at night—and you’d have had to be both blind and deaf back then not to know there was a lot—it wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

  Jeddy knew it, too. “Your dad wouldn’t break any law,” he admitted. “I was only saying that.”

  “I knew you didn’t mean it,” I said.

  We almost never fought. Whatever Jeddy thought or felt, I understood and respected, and I’d step back and make allowances for it. He watched out for me the same way. I guess you could say we’d sort of woven together.

  Our mothers had grown up in town and been friends themselves all the way through school. When they married our dads, they became friends, too. In the early days there was a steady stream of lendings and borrowings, emergency soups and neighborly stews between our houses, the sort of thing that goes on so easily in a small town. Then, in the middle of one winter, Jeddy’s mother got sick. It turned out to be the flu that took so many that year.

  Her death stunned everyone in town, but it struck the McKenzies like an iron fist. Eileen was her name, and she’d been the heart of the family, the strong one in the house. Jeddy’s dad just collapsed. For a while, he didn’t go anywhere or do anything.

  Jeddy was seven at the time, in the first grade with me. I remember how I’d walk over in the afternoons after school and sit on his front porch in case he wanted to come down and play. Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. I’d stay awhile—the place was too quiet to even think of knocking—then go off if he didn’t appear. We both knew without saying it that I’d be back the next day. It was a way we’d worked out to help him get through.

  Jeddy’s dad had been head man on a local chicken farm, but soon he quit that and began to commute over to Portsmouth to train for police work. The state force was just starting up. It pulled him away from old connections, including my parents, and maybe that’s what he wanted. Even when he was hired a year later for the job of our police chief, he kept his distance from us. He never spoke to anyone about the blow he’d suffered, but thinking back, I wonder if he wasn’t still trying to depend on his wife for a strength he didn’t have. Anyone visiting at the McKenzies’ could’ve seen it. He was keeping her around, strange as that sounds.

  Her coat and hat hung on a hook in the hall, as if she’d only stepped out for a moment. Her wedding china was on display in the parlor cabinet. Her sheet music sat on the piano. Her bold handwriting filled the book of recipes that lay open, more often than not, on the counter in the kitchen where Marina, Jeddy’s older sister, was now in charge. She’d been a frightened nine-year-old when her mother had died. Seven years later, at sixteen, she was running the house.

  It was Marina who served us supper when Jeddy asked me to stay over evenings. It was she who washed up after, darned her father’s socks, hung the laundry and took it down. She changed the beds, swept the floors, hauled in coal for the stove. With the sleeves of her school blouse rolled tight above her elbows (at this time, she was still only a high school sophomore) and one of her mother’s cotton aprons wrapped double around her waist, Marina handled all the jobs a grown woman would. I couldn’t get used to that, seeing a girl that age taking on what she did. Only a certain watchful gaze she leveled at the world gave a glimpse into what it must have cost her.

  “I’d tell you if I knew who it was at Tyler’s, really I would,” I said to Jeddy that day on the beach, to make things right between us.

  He nodded. “I know you would. And I wouldn’t tell my dad.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’d be just between us.”

  “Always has been, always will be,” I announced. I couldn’t meet his eyes though. I’d already broken that trust. There was something I wasn’t telling him, something I couldn’t.

  Maybe he suspected, because he gave me a long stare. Then he let it go, didn’t say any more about it. I wonder, though, when he thinks back—as I know he has done plenty of times over the years, just like me—does he remember that conversation the way I do, as the first crack in our friendship? I wish I could ask him.

  What happened next that spring afternoon is something I know Jeddy remembers. I can see us standing there, two raw-boned boys beside the bootleg crate, seagulls wheeling overhead, making dives on a tidal pool up the beach from us. Almost as an afterthought we wandered toward this pool, not expecting to see anything. It came into view with no more drama than if it had been a sodden piece of driftwood lying on the sand: a naked human leg.

  A DARK-RIMMED HOLE

  IT’S ODD HOW A SHOCKING SIGHT CAN SHAKE your mind so you don’t at first register the whole, just the small, almost comical details. Like the hand complete with fancy gold wristwatch, wedding band and neatly clipped fingernails we saw bobbing on the water’s surface as we came toward the pool. Above it, swathed in a shawl of brown seaweed, a rubbery-looking shoulder peeked out, white as a girl’s. Above that, a bloated face the color of slate; two sightless eyes, open. And there in his neck, what was that? I saw a small dark-rimmed hole.

  The body was surrounded by floating shreds of what had once been a fancy evening suit. The feet were bare, with the same wrinkly soles anyone would get who stayed in a bathtub too long.

  “Looks like he’s been in the water awhile,” Jeddy said. “Is it somebody?”

  He meant, “Is it somebody we know.”

  “Don’t think so,” I said. “Anyhow, he was shot.”

  “Where?”

  “In the neck. See there?”

  Jeddy leaned forward to look. The hole was in the skin just above the collarbone. “Oh,” he said, and stepped back fast.

  “We could check his pockets,” he suggested. “See if he’s got a wallet or something with his name on it.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll hold your hat.”

  He took it off and gave it to me, then bent to touch the body, which rocked a bit under his hand.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t disturb anything.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, as squeamish as he was.

  “My dad would look if he were here.”

  “He’d have to.”

  Jeddy squared himself and went forward again. Reaching into the water, he felt the sodden sides of what remained of the dead man’s pants for where the pockets would be.

  “I can’t feel anything.”

  “Try his jacket.”

  Jed patted down the black floating garment and shook his head. “Guess he lost everything at sea.”

  “Or he was frisked after they shot him,” I said. “Anything in his back pockets?”

  “You do it,” Jeddy said. He’d had enough.

  I went forward and felt around, trying not to brush up against the corpse’s skin. It had a cold, blubbery feel that turned my stomach. My hands ran into something. I brought out a pipe and a sodden satchel of tobacco.

  “Guess he was a smoker.”

  Jeddy took them for a look, then handed them back. “Are you sure that’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “We need to tell someone.”

  “Your dad.”

  “Let’s go back to my house. I can call him from there.”

  After this, though, action seemed beyond us. For a time we stood rooted in place, staring at the dead man, and at the pool of gray water he lay in, and at the gulls who floated on the incoming swells just offshore, watching our movements with cold yellow eyes. Death was no more to them than a ready-made meal. Neither of us had seen a drowned man before, not to mention a corpse with a bullet hole in its neck.

  “I b
et he was with the mob,” said Jeddy, who had no clearer idea than I did at this time what that might be. “Maybe he was in on the landings at Tyler’s Lane.”

  “Wearing an evening suit?”

  “Well, maybe he’s a high roller from Newport and he tried to double-cross somebody and they found out.”

  “Or maybe they double-crossed him.”

  The newspapers were full of such stories. My mother tried to keep me from reading them, but I got around her on that as I did on most things. Al Capone and his Chicago gangsters were in the headlines daily. In New York City, Lucky Luciano was fighting it out with a couple of other gangs, and from all accounts blood flowed regularly in the streets. It was thugs gunning down thugs for the most part, battling over territorial rights to extortion and payoffs.

  Right up in Providence there was Danny Walsh, one of the big-time bootleggers. He was always having people bumped off. You could tip your hat the wrong way at Danny Walsh and that was it, your number was up. To Jeddy and me, all this underworld activity seemed glamorous. We knew the cast of characters, we knew the lingo. Like a lot of kids at that time, we followed gangland murders the same way we read the comics.

  This body was real.

  “Whoever he is, those gulls are going after him soon as we leave,” Jeddy said.

  I examined the waiting flock. “You think they’d eat him?”

  “Sure, why not. Gulls eat everything.”

  “Well, there’s nothing to cover him with.”

  “Scare ’em off,” Jeddy ordered.

  For the next quarter hour, we threw stones and yelled and ran out in the water to make them fly away, which was a waste of time. Not a gull batted an eye. The whole group simply paddled sedately out of reach, then turned to stare at us again. Jeddy flung his cap on the ground. His temper could flare up quicker than mine.

  “Stupid birds!”

  “The only thing is to get somebody back here fast as we can.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  We began to run down the beach, stopping to heave more threatening volleys at the gulls. Even before we reached the first bend, we could see the flock edging closer to shore, getting ready to pounce.

  “Cannibals,” Jeddy panted. “Wish I had a gun.”

  Around the end of Coulter’s Point, we let loose and raced for our bikes.

  The person who answered at the police station was the force’s part-time bookkeeper, Mildred Cumming. She sounded sleepy when she took Jeddy’s call, but she’d snapped to a moment later.

  “A dead man? . . . Shot! Anybody from around here? . . . Right. I’m getting Charlie. Hold on, kiddo, don’t you go anywhere.”

  From the stairs in Jeddy’s front hall, I heard everything. The McKenzies’ telephone was new to the house, a wall model tucked into a special alcove under the staircase. The town had paid to have it installed so Chief McKenzie could take calls at home. Jeddy wasn’t supposed to use it, but this was an emergency.

  There was a long wait while Mildred went to get Charlie Pope, deputy sergeant at the station, who was most likely across the street at Weedie’s Coffee Shop, jawing and reading the papers. Normally, there wasn’t much that went on day to day in a hamlet our size. People knew each other too well. With only one road into town, any suspicious character who didn’t get noticed on the way in was sure to be pulled over on the way out. The whole police force amounted to only two individuals, neither of whom cared to carry a gun.

  “This is me. Yeah, I heard,” Charlie told Jeddy when he got came on. “It’s a man, you say?”

  Jeddy said it was.

  “What’s he wearing, could you see?”

  Jeddy explained about the evening suit.

  “Your dad’s not here. Gone to New Bedford to see a fellow. Back in a couple of hours. I’ll try to get a message to him. You boys stay where y’are. I’ll be at your place soon as I can.”

  “We’ll meet you at the beach,” Jeddy said. “There’s a pack of gulls down there getting at the body. We’ll stand guard till you come.”

  This caused an explosion on the other end of the line.

  “You stay put!” Charlie’s voice boomed out, so loud that Jeddy jerked the receiver away from his ear. “I don’t want you going down on that beach again! Now that’s an order!”

  Jeddy rolled his eyes and said all right. About then, the front door opposite me opened and Marina came in, her dark hair loose and streaming from the wind. A single glance at Jeddy on the phone was all she needed.

  “What happened?” she asked me.

  “We found a body washed up on the beach.”

  “A fisherman?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What beach?”

  “Coulter’s.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “Looking for lobster pots.”

  I avoided her direct gaze. With her hair blown that way and her face glowing from the cold walk home, Marina McKenzie was almost unbearably pretty. I was at the age where it embarrassed me to find myself noticing this.

  “Did you get any?” she asked.

  “No,” I said to the floor.

  Jeddy finished his conversation with Charlie and put the telephone receiver cautiously back on its hook.

  “We’re to wait,” he informed me. To his sister he said, “Charlie Pope’s coming.”

  Marina wrinkled her nose. “That weasel, why him?”

  “Dad’s in New Bedford. They’re calling him.”

  “Is it anybody from around here?”

  “We don’t think so. He’s all dressed up and has a gold wristwatch. A bunch of seagulls were on him. We shooed them off.”

  “Maybe he fell off the New York boat,” Marina said.

  “He was shot,” Jeddy said. He followed his sister down the hall and into the kitchen. “There’s a bullet hole in his neck.”

  Behind on the stairs, I waited for what Marina would have to say about this, but nothing came. That was like her. She was a careful person who tended to keep her thoughts to herself. Not that she was shy. She knew how to speak up when she wanted, even to her own father, the chief of police. She just wasn’t a gabber like some girls her age. It was another thing I’d noticed about her.

  I heard the sound of a cupboard door opening and closing. She was starting supper, as she did every afternoon at about this time. I knew that house, felt easy there, more comfortable than in my own. At home my father loomed large in my sight, and whatever was talked about, whatever was thought, seemed to revolve around him. Often it had to do with the store, where I worked most afternoons, though never hard enough to please him. He’d set a standard of performance that was beyond me, or so it seemed to me then, and though he never expressed it, I was aware of an undercurrent of disappointment in his dealings with me. It was as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and had detected some weakness at my center. Against this flaw, whatever it was, I was in a constant state of struggle.

  At the McKenzies’, the pressure lifted. The family was just this side of poor. Chief McKenzie drew a good deal less salary than what my father made managing the store, and there were few luxuries. The only bathroom was downstairs off the kitchen. There was no hot water. Upstairs, the rooms were still without electricity—Jeddy and I went to bed by candlelight when I stayed over. Everywhere the furnishings were cheap and old.

  None of this mattered to me. I’d come to love the dim light and dusty corners, the worn armchairs and drab curtains. Nothing was ever moved or changed. Marina had barely enough time to keep up with daily tasks, and none at all for the mail-order frills and home improvements my mother was so fond of. Then again, even if there had been time, and money, change was not something those who lived in that house would have wanted.

  On the wall opposite the stairs where I sat that afternoon was an old photograph of Jeddy’s mother. It was a formal studio portrait that had been painted with a wash of color to give her face a more lifelike appearance. Mrs. McKenzie had had dark hair and serious ey
es like Marina. She held her head the same upright way her daughter did, and a wrinkle on her forehead was identical to one that rose on Marina’s forehead in thoughtful moments.

  I’d come across Chief McKenzie staring at this portrait of his wife more than a few times, and I could guess why. She had a gaze that gave you strength. That day on the stairs, I remember how Eileen McKenzie’s eyes seemed suddenly to lock onto mine, as if she’d recognized me and was asking me to stay; as if she’d accepted me as a member of her family. I knew it was silly, but I smiled and nodded back.

  “I’m frying chicken for supper,” Marina’s voice said from the kitchen.

  “Can we have potato salad?” Jeddy’s voice asked.

  “If you peel,” Marina replied severely.

  “Can Ruben stay? It’s Saturday.”

  “If he wants. Tell him he can use the telephone to call his mother. But he has to peel, too.”

  “Ruben!” Jeddy called. “Want to stay for supper? Marina’s frying chicken.”

  I got up and went in the kitchen.

  “What are you grinning about?” Marina asked me, her mother’s stern eyes on my face.

  “I don’t know, nothing.”

  “You’ve just found a body on the beach and now you’re grinning like a hyena and you don’t know why?”

  “Nope,” I said, grinning wider than ever.

  Something about the dopey way I said this must have struck her funny, because she turned her head to hide a smile.

  “Ruben Hart, have you no respect for the dead?” she said, trying for a prudish tone. It was no use; she started to laugh.

  “Marina!” Jeddy exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry!” she cried, and put a hand over her mouth. “I don’t know why it’s so funny. It’s Ruben’s fault for getting me going.”