Kiss River (8 page)

T
he sun was still high in the sky when Clay pulled into the short gravel driveway of the small cottage, which, like many other soundside cottages, was set on stilts above the water. Getting out of his car, he could see that the front gutter was a bit askew and a section of the deck railing was missing. He would have to spend a day over here soon working on those repairs and the other inevitable problems with this house that were not immediately visible. The old cottage took a great deal of his time—much like the old man living inside it. But these days, he loved nothing better than to fill up his time to the mind-numbing brim.

Standing on the front porch, he rapped his knuckles against the frame of the flimsy screen door, leaning close to peer inside the small living room of the cottage. Henry quickly appeared in the living room, obviously champing at the bit to get out of there. Clay pulled the screen door open, and the dapper old man stood in front of him, dressed in his usual white shirt and dark tie. He had to be the only Outer Banks resident who wore a tie every sin
gle day, Clay thought. With the exception of Henry’s three-day hospital stay after having his appendix removed, Clay couldn’t remember ever seeing him without one. Or without his hat.

“Hey, Henry,” he said, resting his hand on the man’s shoulder. “How are you doing?”

“Got ants in my pants.” Henry placed his straw fedora on his head and stepped onto the porch. He flexed his knobby, arthritic hands. “Need a good game of chess at Shorty’s,” he said, and Clay knew he’d been waiting all day for this outing. He wished now that he’d stopped his work on the cistern to pick him up earlier.

“What happened to the railing there?” Clay pointed to the spot where the two-by-four was missing.

“Woke up one morning and it was gone.” Henry shrugged his shoulders. “’Twas the day after I caught twenty-two crabs, so I think their pals must’ve up and took it to get back at me.” He chuckled. Henry could crab without even leaving his house. All he needed to do was walk around the deck and scrape the crabs off the pilings with a net. Even at seventy-nine, Henry could make some of the best crab cakes Clay had ever tasted.

“You be careful there,” Clay said, pointing to the railing again. “I’ll come over soon to fix it.”

Henry liked to boast that he lived in a house as old as he was. In theory, he was right. The house had been built sometime in the twenties. But it had suffered a massive fire in the forties, and flooding off and on over the years, with a bit of the house being replaced here, another bit there, until very little of the original structure still stood.

The old man still had a bounce in his step, and he walked ahead of Clay toward the car. He was lively and sharp-witted—and he was now Clay’s responsibility entirely.

Henry Hazelwood was Terri’s grandfather, and she had taken on his care as he’d aged. Her father, Henry’s son, had died four years ago, and her mother lived in California, so she had been the only relative nearby. She’d adored Henry, though, and had never complained about that obligation falling on her shoulders. Clay liked Henry, too, but at the age of twenty-nine, he had expected to be creating a family of little rugrats, not caring for an old man. He was all Henry had, though, and letting him down was not part of his nature. Henry’s eyesight was going, and he’d
been wise enough to give up driving a couple of years ago. That meant that Clay frequently had to take time off from work to drive him to doctor’s appointments, the grocery store, and most important to the old man, Shorty’s Grill, where he could play chess and visit with his old friends, Walter Liscott and Brian Cass.

The one thing about Henry that Clay simultaneously loved and hated was that he reminded him of Terri. Both Terri and her father had had a slant to their eyebrows above steel-gray eyes, and those features were mirrored in Henry’s face. Clay saw his wife there every time he looked at his grandfather-in-law.

“What did you do this morning?” Clay asked once they were in his car and crossing the island to the beach road.

“What do you think?” Henry asked him.

“Crabbed?”

“What else?” Henry chuckled again. “Snared my dinner. And how about you?”

“Oh.” Clay sighed. He was always caught off guard when Henry asked him about himself. “I worked on the cistern.”

“Sounds like a better use of time than catching crabs,” Henry said.

Clay smiled. “Can’t eat a cistern, though.”

Henry chuckled, and they both grew quiet. Henry was a man of few words. Any conversation between them was usually short and to the point, and that was fine. They had never, not once, talked about Terri. That was fine, too. Clay didn’t talk to anyone about Terri.

He had rejected his father’s suggestion that he see a therapist after Terri died. What could a therapist do? He—or she—couldn’t bring her back. Clay kept his dark thoughts and deepest feelings under wraps, throwing himself into his work, killing time more than filling it. The world thought he was doing fine. He stayed active and he made sure his spirits seemed up around his friends. Lacey was probably the only person who knew he wasn’t the jovial sport he pretended to be. He was around her too much to keep up the act, and he knew she was struggling to find a way to save him, the way she would save a stray kitten. Or a wandering lighthouse historian.

At breakfast that morning, he could see his sister looking
from Gina to him and back again, hope in her conniving blue eyes that he would find the newcomer attractive. Well, he did find her attractive, but that only added to his problems, and he hoped Lacey wouldn’t try to push him too hard. He supposed she needed to focus on some new deficiency in him since she’d failed at getting him back into search and rescue work. He felt sick at the mention of those words:
search and rescue.
Literally sick. The other night, he’d had to turn off the television when a newscaster mentioned a search and rescue team involved in an earthquake in some other part of the world, the wave of nausea sending him to bed. Lacey had been in the room at the time, and she’d said nothing when he turned off the TV and went upstairs. A few months ago, she would have followed him up, trying to get him to talk. But she was learning. She no longer badgered him to open up about his feelings. One of these days, she would give up trying to save him. He was destined to be her one failure.

“Looky there!” Henry pointed in the direction of a new fish market on Croatan Highway. “We’ll have to try that one.”

“Looks like a good one,” Clay said.

Henry had lived on the Outer Banks forever, since being stationed there during the Second World War. He’d fallen in love with a Banks girl and married her, a union that produced one child, Terri’s father. The Outer Banks had grown up around him, but he never complained the way a lot of the old-timers did. He never talked about what things had been like in the old days, or grew crotchety over how crowded it was in the summer or griped about the tourists who acted as if they owned the place. He actually seemed to like the overgrowth of buildings and stores and restaurants that disturbed many of the natives. He’d spend hours in the supermarket, still amazed by all the choices, reading the labels on the frozen foods, which he loved. Clay had learned to bring a book with him when he took Henry shopping; otherwise, he would go out of his tree with boredom. Henry loved his TV dinners, but he had to have fresh seafood as well, so Clay took him to the fish market a couple of times a week. Now that Henry had spotted this new store, he knew it wouldn’t be long before he found himself leaning against the interior walls, reading his book, while Henry took his time sniffing the fish.

Clay had learned of Terri’s death on a Tuesday in late November, and his own shock and horror had been compounded by his need to tell Henry. Henry had already lost his wife and only son. To lose his beloved granddaughter as well seemed a cruel injustice. And Clay couldn’t tell him. It had been Lacey who went over to the rickety soundside cottage to give Henry the news. Clay never asked his sister how the old man took it; he didn’t want to know. All he knew was that, for the next few weeks, every time he picked up Henry to take him someplace, the elderly man’s eyes would be as red as Clay’s own.

They pulled into Shorty’s crowded parking lot. Shorty’s was a dive—there was no other word for it—and somehow the tourists knew to stay away. A few ventured in, those people who thought they’d find a taste of the old Outer Banks in the ramshackle building, but most of them were there only a few minutes before realizing they would never truly fit in. Especially not in the back room.

The back room, which was in reality on the side of the building, was a hangout for fishermen, weathered old-timers and young men with too much time on their hands. There was a battered pool table on one side of the room and chess and checker boards and decks of cards scattered across the tables. Two dartboards hung on the walls. The windows were filmed with years of smoke. An occasional woman or two could be found in the back room. They usually hung around the younger men, playing pool, displaying varying degrees of cleavage as they leaned low over the table and maybe a tattoo of a rose on one shoulder. It was those women, their skin tanned to the color and texture of leather, who were often the smokers.

Kenny Gallo, whom Clay was to meet for a beer, was not yet in the restaurant, so he walked with Henry into the back room to deliver the old man to his friends. A couple of women were playing pool with a guy who had only recently become a regular, a dark-haired young man of about twenty who was elaborately tattooed all the way from his knuckles to the place where his arms disappeared beneath the sleeves of his black Grateful Dead T-shirt. The women looked up when Clay entered the room. He felt their eyes stay on him as he and Henry moved toward Walter Lis
cott and Brian Cass and the chessboard. He was as indifferent to their attention as he was accustomed to it.

“You’re late.” Brian looked up at Henry, his rheumy blue eyes annoyed. Brian could be as prickly as a sandspur. His thick white hair stuck up on one side of his head as though he’d slept on it, and he tapped the chessboard with a long, bony finger.

“Oh, shut up,” Walter said to his friend. “He’s here now, so what does it matter?”

“My fault,” Clay said, even though Henry had not been expected at any particular time. He pulled one of the chairs from a neighboring table and set it adjacent to the chessboard so Henry could sit down. “I was late picking him up,” he said.

“Sit down yourself, Clay,” Walter said, as he always did. The wheelchair he sat in was pulled up tight against the table. Walter had used the chair for the past four years. Something about his legs and diabetes. When it was apparent the chess-loving old man could no longer get around without the chair, Clay and Kenny had built a ramp up to Shorty’s back door so he could get in. Walter’s meticulously carved and painted decoys provided much of Shorty’s decor, so it seemed only fitting that the restaurant should remain accessible to him, of all people. The decoy on which he was currently working now rested on the table, next to the chessboard.

Clay glanced back toward the main room. Still no sign of Kenny. “Just for a minute,” he said, dragging another chair to the table.

“Do ya see that asshole?” Brian nodded toward the guy with the tattoos, speaking far too loudly.

Clay didn’t shift his gaze from Brian’s face. “What about him?” he asked, trying to whisper.

“He’s got a new one Brian can’t get his mind off.” Walter laughed.

“It’s on his back,” Brian said. “He held up his shirt when them girls came in.”

“Don’t talk so loud,” Henry said.

Brian leaned toward Henry. “I’m talking loud so you can hear me, old man,” he said.

“I hear you fine,” Henry shot back. “And so can everyone in the next room.”

“It’s a mermaid,” Walter said.

“What is?” Henry asked. He was studying the board. He would be playing the winner.

“The new tattoo,” Brian said. “A mermaid with the biggest jugs you ever seen.”

Clay had to laugh.

“Ah, you and your jugs,” Walter scoffed.

The conversation continued that way, three old widowers baiting and badgering each other as they had for years. It was clear they loved each other deeply, yet they never spoke of anything weightier than the shifting of the tides. Three old men who had fought and fished and lost loved ones together. Brian’s wife of half a century had died only a couple of years ago, and his eleven children and twenty-seven grandchildren were scattered around the country. Walter had been widowed for a decade. His two children badgered him regularly to move to Colorado where they lived, but he could not bring himself to leave the Outer Banks. Women were supposed to outlive men, Clay thought, but the old regulars in Shorty’s back room hadn’t gotten the word. Must be something in the salt air that kept men alive out here. It was only when Clay left their table to walk back into the main room that the realization hit him: there had actually been
four
widowers sitting around that chessboard.

He found Kenny waiting for him at one of the small tables, and he sat down across from his old friend. The waitress brought them beers without even waiting for them to order. They were well known here.

“How was work?” he asked Kenny, taking a swallow of beer.

“Good, but man, I’m losing more hearing in this ear every day,” Kenny said, rubbing his left ear with his hand.

“Well, you know the cure for that,” Clay said. Kenny did much of the diving for the marine repair business he owned, and hearing loss was part of the job. He’d be deaf in another ten years, but Clay knew that wouldn’t stop him. Kenny was happier underwater than he was on land.