Black Otter Bay (19 page)

She remembered the severe look the stranger had given her, how cold and heartless he'd acted, even in the face of her vulnerability. She shuddered at the memory and decided Randall wasn't exaggerating much on this one.

She watched him carefully aligning things on the desk. Randall wasn't a big man by any means. Compared to the stranger, he was absolutely tiny. His unshaven beard sprouted thin and scraggly, and with wispy strands of prematurely graying hair hanging to his shoulders, next to the clean-cut physique of the businessman from Chicago he looked downright pathetic. In his late forties, Randall was several years older than her, but Jackie's critical appraisal softened when she considered the benevolent way he'd treated her. He was fair and kind, much in the way that Matthew had been good to her. The big difference was that he offered something her ex-husband and Black Otter Bay could never give: the chance to dream big. And she had to admit that it was very generous the way Randall considered her personal debts to be their shared problem. While he often made fun of her gambling, laughing at her for hanging out with the old folks and drunks at the downtown casino, he never made an issue out of the money. It was almost as if he thought of their relationship like one of his business deals: you agree to be my live-in partner, to accompany me on social outings, and I'll accept your gambling problem and agree to work through whatever debts you incur.

“How long have you been planning to use the Oberg?” she asked. Most of her anger was spent, but she wasn't ready to let it all go just yet. “Were you ever going to tell me, or was it more fun to watch my surprise when he took it?”

Randall paused in his straightening up to look at her. “It just came up this morning, Jackie.”

“I thought you had a deal with them.”

For the briefest moment a shadow passed over his face, and she felt a little sorry for reminding him of the circumstances of his mother's death. But his usual smirking grin soon
returned. “Business deals ebb and flow, honey. They sort of have a life of their own. Over time they often change, especially when nothing is written down.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Randall eased around the desk and took her hands. “Listen, Jackie. We still have the original deal on the table. Once the estate is settled, we'll see if we can get it done. You'll be able to buy two or three Obergs then. We'll take a trip, maybe New York or something. Take in some shows.”

New York. About as far from Black Otter Bay as a person could get. The very idea caused her breath to catch in her throat. She stood up straighter and drew a deep sigh. Randall reached out and wiped a thumb over her cheek. She hadn't realized how many tears her anger had produced.

He said, “I think you should get out there and sell that
Fitzgerald
while you can.”

Feeling emotionally numb, she was grateful for the warmth in his smile. Grabbing her purse out of a desk drawer, she retrieved a tissue to dab at her face.

“It's just a painting,” Randall said, but when she looked at him, he clarified that by adding, “I mean the Oberg. There are many more like it out there. Even better ones. You'll find them in the future, and you'll handle them. You'll buy them and sell them and who knows, maybe someday you'll even hang one on your own wall.”

She glanced at the mirror hanging on the back of the office door, wiped away another smudge in her makeup, and then reached for the door handle. When she turned to look back, it was her intention to leave him with a smile, but she was too worn out to manage it and ended up slipping out the door with no more than a modest nod.

• • • • •

W
ell before dawn on a November morning in 1975, ten-year-old Randall Bengston awoke to the sound of his father's voice. “Randy? Come on, Randy. Time to get up. Let's go.”

He rolled over with a groan and promptly fell back to sleep.

A short time later the old man was back. “Goddamn it, Randy. Let's go now, boy.”

Randall looked up at his father's backlit form standing in the bedroom doorway. His heart sank when he saw the yellow rain slicker and knee-high rubber boots. He carried a lantern in one hand, a lunch pail in the other. This wasn't the nightmare Randall had hoped for. It was worse.

He quickly dressed and went downstairs to find the warmth in the kitchen. A stack of pancakes sat on a plate under a warm dishtowel on the kitchen table. Before he could sit down, however, his father tromped into the room in his extra large rubber boots. “You'll have to bring it along. You slept through breakfast again.” He grabbed a paper sack from a drawer and sloughed it on the table. “We got to go. Barometer's been dropping all night. We got about enough time to get out and back before it sets up good to blow.”

Randall grabbed the top pancake, folded it in half, and bit into it like a sandwich. Still warm, it emanated a comforting glow as it slid down his throat. Rosie's pancakes had achieved legendary status in Black Otter Bay. Some folks claimed they didn't even need butter or syrup, that's how light and moist they were. He dropped the remainder of the pile into the bag and followed his father out the back door. In the mudroom entryway he grabbed his raincoat and shoved the bag of pancakes in an oversized pocket. Unlike his father's yellow rubber boots, his were black with red soles, and so big they came up to the tops of his knees, making sitting down, or even walking, a hazardous undertaking.

Through the open door he heard his mother's laughter coming from the bait shop. A pickup truck with a boat and trailer was parked out back. A couple men wearing insulated
coveralls stood in the driveway, the yard light illuminating them, hands in pockets, caps tilted up and back, a yellow lab sniffing around their feet. Rose was giving directions to some inland fishing lake.
Why would anyone do this?
Randall asked himself. Icy snow granules lit up as they shot past the flood lamp. It was the middle of the night. Why would anyone want to be out in this weather to catch a slimy old fish?

His father nodded at the fishermen and set his lantern on a table just inside the bait shop door. When he began pumping up the lamp's gas chamber, Randall seized the moment to grab another pancake from the sack. He stood out of the wind in the entryway. This was the way his Saturday mornings had begun since before he could remember. From early spring until late in the fall, while his classmates were sleeping in and planning football or basketball games, he was traipsing around half asleep in the cold and dark. As long as the shoreline remained free of ice, he helped his father with his commercial fishing nets.

He looked out at his mother chatting with the customers. She'd thrown on a woolen sweater over her housedress and apron, but it was easy to see she was getting cold as she lightly rocked on the balls of her feet, arms folded tightly under her breasts. She looked at him and smiled, but he wasn't about to leave this last bastion of warmth even one second before he had to.

The fishermen turned to leave, and Rose joined her husband in the bait shop. The lantern was lit now. Randall grabbed things off a shelf: a woolen stocking cap, a pair of light gloves he stashed in his pockets, and a heavier pair of lined leather choppers. The pancakes had settled warm and heavy in his stomach, returning his thoughts to the comforts of bed and sleep. Then his father called, and he stabbed around in the darker corners of the entryway to find his flashlight.

His mother met him halfway across the driveway. She took him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. Embarrassed, he looked to the side to see his father's lantern heading toward the path around the bait shop.

“You be careful now, Randall,” his mother was saying. “Don't stand up in the boat like your father does. You hear me?”

“I don't want to go, Mom.”

She patted his coat pocket. “You have your pancakes?” They'd done this before.

“He doesn't need me, Mom. Please don't make me go.”

Rose pulled her son closer. “But he does need you. And even more, I need you to be there to keep an eye on him.” She reached out to pull his cap down snug over his forehead, and then zipped up his heavy raincoat. She said, “You understand what I'm saying?”

He nodded.

Rose placed her hands back on his shoulders and patted him one last time. “You do a good job now, Randall. That big boat will keep you safe. You make your father proud.” And then she scooted around him to disappear into the warmth of the house.

He watched her leave, standing still in the driveway as the back door closed. Sometimes he hated her. Why couldn't she stand up to the old man? She ran the household with a military-style precision and kept the bait shop profitable all by herself. Everyone in town thought the world of Rose Bengston, but Randall knew she'd never challenge the actions of her husband. They were only a generation away from the hand to mouth, sustenance existence of the early settlers, a world where husbands were never questioned, even when it meant championing the safety or wellbeing of an only son.

When the yard lamp over the bait shop door turned off, he hastily grabbed for his flashlight. The backyard and driveway suddenly fell into a terrifying black darkness. Clouds filled the sky, covering up and blotting out any light emitted from the stars or moon. The combination of absolute darkness and shivering cold scared him, like one of the vampires in his comic books, threatening to suck the breath out of him. It frightened
him in the same way that the dark depths of the big body of water out there scared him.

Far off through the woods he spotted his father's lantern bobbing between the trees toward the shore. Following the meager glow of his flashlight, Randall made his way around the bait shop and picked up the pathway to the boathouse. He'd hardly started out, however, before he stopped at a sound coming up through the woods. It took a moment to identify, and even after he did he couldn't believe his ears. A dull, intermittent roar rolled over the land, like a giant sea monster coming ashore. It was the surf pounding the black sand beach, pulverizing it with rhythmic violence. He couldn't remember ever hearing the waves so loud up here, so far away from the shore. He scrunched his head down to avoid overhanging branches and stumbled along as quickly as he could.

The only entrance to the boathouse faced the lake. Carefully edging his way around the building, the glow from Randall's flashlight reflected off wet logs on the front wall. “But it's not raining,” he thought out loud, just as the spray from another wave crashed against their homemade breakwater, splashing over him and landing high up against the wall. The roar of waves pouncing on the beach sent a shudder through him, and fear prodded his boots over the boat rails and into the dim lighting and relative safety of the boathouse.

His father was in the boat arranging equipment and lashing down loose items like oars and his wooden box of tools. The boat itself was huge, eighteen feet long and made of thick slabs of white cedar over solid oak ribs. Hand-crafted by the Aasen Brothers Boatwrights in town, it boasted an extremely deep V-hull and a long-handled wooden tiller attached to the outboard motor. Randall's father bragged to anyone who'd listen that it was the most seaworthy boat afloat.

“It's a storm out there,” Randall said, but his voice blew away in the roar of the surf.

“Hand me up my bucket,” his father called, pointing to his lunch pail on the floor.

Randall lifted it over the transom, where Henry Bengston was tying down his seat cushion near the twenty-year-old outboard. With the boat resting atop the rail cart, the gunwales were as high as Randall's head.

Louder this time, he said, “Dad, it's storming out there.”

His father reached over the transom to give him a hand up. “Hell, this ain't no storm, son. It's just loosening up. Give it a day or two and you'll see it blow.”

Pulling on his father's arm, Randall climbed atop the rails and scaled the vessel's transom. The wide-open middle section of the boat was lined with narrow wooden planks running the length of the keel, used as a walkway and platform for nets and gear. The only seats were two wide boards spanning the width of the boat, one in back for the person running the motor and a smaller one up front. Using the long-handled tiller, a fellow could work his nets from the middle of the boat and still control the direction of travel.

Randall stepped out on the planking, but his father held him back. He draped a coil of rope over his head and cinched it up tight under Randall's arms. On the other end of the rope was a heavy snap ring. “Clip this on the eye of that cleat up there,” his father said, nodding at the bow of the boat.

“But, Dad . . .”

“It's just a precaution,” he said. “I promised your mother.”

“But it's really bad out there, Dad. I've never heard it so loud before.”

Henry Bengston knelt on one knee and made a show of going over Randall's work clothes, tugging on the raincoat's zipper and pulling his collar up tight around his neck. “It's not even raining yet, son. And this boat will take any wave that lake throws at her.” He chuckled. “It's not like the old days when we went out in them shallow fourteen-foot skiffs. No, sir.” He stood up and nodded toward the bow. “Go ahead now and get your seat.”

Randall slowly made his way along the narrow floorboards, feeling like a pirate walking the plank. Behind him his
father shouted instructions. “We'll not be wasting time sorting fish today. Everything comes in. It's time to mend nets, so in a day or two when this weather has blown over, I'll put them back out.”

Randall took his seat in the bow facing the stern and his father. He pulled in ten feet of the rope tied around his torso and, taking hold of the slip ring, clipped it to one of the bow cleats. He hadn't done this since he was five years old, since that first season on the lake when his mother insisted that he be clipped to the boat. But he wasn't a kid anymore, and it would have been embarrassing if he weren't already scared to death.