Reprisal (25 page)

Captain Lowell, in rain-wet jeans, gray shirt, and black rubber boots, stood staring at her. His sharp fox face was flushed with anger, and blood was running along his forearm, soaking his shirt-sleeve and dripping from his fingers to the floor.

"What did you do to her?" Mr. Manning-bulky in a khaki windbreaker--stood by the stove, his broad, padded face calm as pond water.

"Not a goddamn thing, except bring her in."

"Didn' do enough."--Joanna hadn't seen this man. He was standing behind her at the kitchen door, a younger man, crewcut ... and short, almost squat, his torso slabbed with muscle under a worn blue work shirt. His jaw was too heavy for a small-nosed face. "Didn' do enough to this bitch." The young man had dreaming unfocused brown eyes.

"She's bleedin'." Manning shifted by the stove.

"She's bleeding? I'm the one who's fucking bleeding. Took a knife to me. ..."

Lowell went to the sink, rolled up his sleeve, and exposed a neat, small cut in his forearm. He turned his arm over and an identical cut bled on that side as well. "--Through and through, and hurts like sixty. Thank Christ it didn't get an artery. ..."

"Need to put a knife to her." The young man behind Joanna.

"Take it easy, George," Manning said.

"I just want to know what we're goin' to do. Need to finish up right now."

Joanna heard snoring from the other room, the dining room. Bobby Moffit was still in there, sleeping.

Captain Lowell was rinsing the blood off his arm in the sink. "--Shouldn't have parked your car down by the docks," he said to Joanna. "Blue Volvo. We know people's cars, out here."

"No asking permission to come aboard--to come into my house?" Joanna was pleased at the sound of her voice. It seemed important they not know she was afraid, as if knowing that would make it easier for them to kill her.

"Apologize for that, for not asking," Lowell said. He stopped rinsing the wound, still held his arm over the sink, and began searching through the counter drawers. "--Sure wish you hadn't done what you did. And you look tired, Mrs. Reed. How'd you get out of that building?"

"The chimney," Joanna said. "I want you all out of my house."

"The chimney. ..." Lowell shook his head, examined her. "Will you people look at this? Woman went up a damn three-story chimney from the basement. Chewed herself up doing it, too." He checked through another drawer. "Where the hell are your dish towels?"

"Top drawer, on the other side." Joanna wished she didn't look so bad, dirty, wet from the rain, and bleeding where her clothes were torn. If she looked nicer ... was prettier, younger, they might not hurt her.

Lowell took out a dish towel, bound it tightly around his forearm, and using his teeth to hold a cloth end, knotted it. "comThen, I suppose, you climbed off the roof ... but not down that rope of yours." He nodded to the kitchen table, and Joanna saw the length of PMI there, neatly coiled. "--Beautiful line," Lowell said. "Had to go up an extension ladder to get it untied from that vent. Really fine. What is it?"

"It's ... a kernmantle climbing rope," Joanna said. The kitchen light, dull yellow, seemed to vibrate ... fix her and the three men in their places.

"Cost an arm and a leg, I'll bet. So you got off that roof what way?"

"Drainpipe."

"Drainpipe. ... And climbing is how you learned to do that chimney stuff?"

"Caves. I'm a caver." An odd last conversation. Joanna supposed most last conversations were odd.

"Caves." Lowell seemed amused. "I bet you're a pistol down in those caves.

..."

"I want you to get out of my house."

"You shut your mouth." The young fisherman shifted behind her. Joanna knew, as she'd known when men wanted to touch her, sexually--knew he wanted to put his hands on her, but for a different pleasure. And she felt an odd melting, as if it were her proper role to be taken into these strong men's hands. To be taken and held ... to be done to, whether she liked it or not. She felt she might like it in a way, even to death. It was a dream feeling, frightening, sickening, and sweet.

"I just talked to the deputy, downtown," Joanna said, and remembered saying the same thing to Bobby Moffit, when he'd come up to fix her window.

"You dirty liar," the young fisherman said behind her. An enraged boy's insult, and all the more frightening.

"George. ..." Lowell adjusted his towel bandage. It was spotted with blood.

"--We know you didn't do any such thing, Mrs. Reed. Had a couple of people over by that station, and one inside, visiting with the duty man, and you didn't call or go in there tonight, and nobody else did either." He pulled out a chair, and sat down at the kitchen table. "So we came up to settle some things before you made any phone calls, talked to anybody."

"What did you do to my husband?" Joanna looked at Lowell, not at the others.

... She'd spoken to him on his boat. And he'd glanced at her breasts, and taken her arm to steady her off the Eleanor II ... walked her past winches and gear, and down the gangplank to the dock.

Tom Lowell was all she had in the kitchen.

"You people," he said, and rested his injured arm carefully on the table. "...

Tourists, summer people, come out here every year. You take pictures of us working, take pictures of the boats and so forth, and you eat a lot of lobster and clams. ... Consider us very quaint out here."

"Right," the young man said behind Joanna. "Fuckin' quaint."

"--ationow, we've been fishing off this island almost four hundred years."

Lowell paused, considering centuries. "... Maybe we got too good at it. Maybe with the Japanese and Russian factory ships, and the Canadians. Maybe we all got too good at it. But whatever, we can't make a living fishing anymore."

"Shippin', processin' either," Manning said, by the stove.

"--We had two men kill themselves last couple of years. Boat captains that couldn't pay their crews, feed their families."

"My husband--"

"I'll get to your husband, Mrs. Reed. ... Now, we had a choice out here. We could sell our boats for next to no money, and then we could get off the island and take our families into a city--Portland or Providence or Boston, in some neighborhood not too good. And we could take a job in a gas station or doing roofing or cleaning up construction sites, if we could get apprenticed in the union."

"Welfare," the young man said.

"--That's right," Lowell said. "We could get on welfare, tide us over a few years in those cities. Real bad for men with families. ..."

"You murdered my husband and my father," Joanna said, and couldn't imagine why she'd said that, when they might not yet have decided to kill her. She couldn't imagine why in the world she'd said it.

"Her father?" There was still no emotion visible on Manning's round face. No expression in the striking moss-green eyes. Joanna wondered how his wife knew what he was thinking, whether he was pleased or not.

There was a sudden blatting, brassy noise from the dining room--a very loud fart, Joanna realized, after a moment. Then a muffled shout, Wow ... wowowow.

Sounds of stumbling, a chair scraping on the pine boards.

Bobby Moffit, looking grimly ill, came staggering into the kitchen, naked, barely wrapped in the brown blanket.

"Hey, people," he said, and stood blinking, blear-eyed, in the light. He looked as if she hadn't bathed him at all.

"You motherfucker," the young man said. "You're the bigmouth around here."

"... Am not."

"We can settle all this," the young man said. "Paul an' me can settle it."

Joanna thought she might take a chance--get past the young man and out the kitchen door again. Run out into the island night--and this time, hide. ...

And if they didn't find her, wait until morning and attempt the police, or the ferry.

She thought of trying it, but some part of her refused. Her body refused; it had done enough, tonight.--Besides, these were fishermen; this was their island. They would net her, tangle her, and winch her in. And she was afraid of the young man; if she ran again, she would give him the excuse he wanted.

"--Me an' Paul can take care of it like it never was."

"George," Lowell said, "--y just take it easy." He picked a loop of the PMI rope up off the table, tested it in his hands, and winced at the sudden pain in his arm. "Line like this must cost a fortune. ..." He set the rope back into its coil.

"Am not a bigmouth." Bobby tried to adjust his blanket, hitch it up. "--Am not."

"Bobby," Lowell said, "we don't need to hear anything out of you. Sit down and shut up. I think you said enough to this lady already."

"It wasn't his fault," Joanna said. "I made him drunk."

"Am not what he said." Bobby pulled a chair out from the table and sat. The blanket slipped to his lap.

"Tom," the young man said, "--listen, Paul an' me can take care of this, an'

there never will be a word about it."

"Why did you murder my husband?" Joanna asked Lowell. She didn't think the others would tell her. They would take her and Bobby out to sea on the Eleanor II, and never tell her.-And certainly she and Bobby wouldn't be the first to be taken from Asconsett Island in four hundred years, taken out to sea. ...

"We didn't kill your husband, Mrs. Reed," Lowell said. "--And no way, George.

We already decided that doesn't happen."

"Mistake," the young man said. "Real bad mistake."

"It's decided, George," Lowell said. "And that's that--unless you want trouble with me and Murray Wainwright, and I don't think you do."

"Big mistake," the young man said, and Joanna realized they weren't going to kill her. It came as change, rather than relief--a change so sudden and important it was difficult to comprehend. The kitchen light seemed to alter with it, become part of a different spectrum, more orange--as if that were the color of a future.

She needed to sit down, she felt a little sick, but there was no place to sit but at the table, and she hadn't been invited. She leaned back against the refrigerator, instead. ... The young fisherman turned his head and stared at her with a bull's dull murderous gaze, thwarted by fencing.

Bobby Moffit began to snore sitting up, then slowly slumped forward until his forehead rested on the table, and slept ... as if to demonstrate that possible tragedy was turning to only melodrama, and perhaps farce.

"Look at that," Manning said, from the stove. "Sound asleep."

"My husband. ..."

"We didn't hurt your husband," Lowell said, and checked the towel around his forearm. More of the cloth was blotched with red.

"Some people came out from Providence," Manning said. "Asked if we were interested in pickin' stuff up for 'em."

"Ten years ago," Lowell said, "we'd have told those clowns to get off the island real quick. Even five years ago, maybe."

"Not now." Manning shifted by the stove, too big, too heavy to be comfortable standing for long.

"No," Lowell said, "--n now." He retied the dish towel tighter around his forearm. "Hurts like a son of a bitch. Middleton's going to have to take a look at this, give me a shot.--She bit me, too."

"I'm sorry," Joanna said.

"Don't be sorry. You were scared. ... Tell you what goes on, Mrs. Reed--what some of us do is go on up the coast and meet factory ships out there, maybe once in the summer, once later in the year. Most of those vessels are from one of the republics or whatever was left when the Soviets broke up. We go up there, meet them early--in fog, if we can--and take those bales of marijuana off them."

"Why tell her everything?" the young man said.

"George, she was in the basement, and that's that. But it may be helpful if she knows the why of it. --Anyway, those bales get trucked out of here on the ferry ... three, four trips, with whatever fish we've been catching."

""Whatever fish" is right," Manning said. "Then people from the mainland take the stuff from there."

"For fuckin' short money, you bet," the young man said.

"And," Lowell said, "what that does for us, is give a lot of fishermen and processors out here enough extra, with their catch, so they can salary their crews, or make boat payments, or maybe just feed their families."

"I want to know about my husband." A courageous Joanna Reed now--who would live, and was demanding answers.

"Mrs. Reed, about four weeks ago, that Bo-Peep came up the coast in the morning-all the way to Nattituck Cove. She must have got a real early start."

"Too fuckin' early," the young man said.

"--Came sailing up there," Lowell said, "and the first we saw her, she was out of that fog and right in our laps while we were loading. Maybe three, four hundred yards off." Lowell sat stroking the coil of PMI rope with his good hand as if it were a pet, some calm, slender, perfectly patterned snake from South America. "--We meet and load in those early fogs. That's ... just the way we do things, ducking the Coast Guard. And I have no idea what the hell your husband was doing coming up so far."

"Told Hollis Porter he was fishin'," Manning said.

"My father was fishing," Joanna said. "My father was with him."

"Didn't know that." Lowell paused, recalling. "Knew your husband had the Peep; didn't look close to see anybody else on her."

"Fishin'?" the young man said. "Fishin' from a fuckin' sailboat?"

"Why not?" Lowell eased his towel-wrapped arm; more of the cloth was stained red. "Our great-granddads did it--and on back before them, out whaling."

"What did you do to him?"

"Not a damn thing, Mrs. Reed." Lowell apparently exasperated by the question.

"We didn't do a damn thing to your husband!"

"Hollis talked to him," Manning said.

"That's right," Lowell said. "Hollis Porter spoke to him next day, after he came on us out there. Spoke to him at the Hatch."

"Spoke to him. ..."

Manning, tired of standing, pulled a chair out from the end of the table and sat with mild grunt. "Hollis mentioned to your man about seeing him up at that cove--and Mr. Reed told him he must have been mistaken. Said he never was at Nattituck that morning, had sailed south an' didn' know what the hell Hollis was talkin' about."