Shooting at Loons (2 page)

For several long minutes I just breathed it all in, feeling what Julia Lee’s poodle must feel when it slips the leash and heads for the woods. A whole week ahead of me. Five full days in a place where no one who knew me would have the right to make cracks about the way I dressed or drove or drank.

Like Julia Lee’s CoCo, I don’t get too many chances to run wild these days. Not that I planned to emulate CoCo, who’s never been spayed—despite what my brothers think, I
have
learned a little judicious discretion. Still, if I did take a notion to run through the underbrush, it was nice to know that my nearest nosey brother was more than a hundred miles away.

“That your boat?” I asked Guthrie, pointing to a white skiff with a dark red bottom.

“Naw, that’s Mark’s,” he said, naming another neighboring teenager. “Yonder’s mine.” He gestured proudly.

Sporting a recent coat of fresh white paint, the skiff was flat-bottomed, with a flared bow, two board seats, and a black outboard motor.

“Your granddaddy build it?” I asked, remembering that Mahlon Davis had begun framing a skiff the last time I was down. Now a trawler was taking shape beyond the boat shelter beside their house.

Harkers Islanders are famous all up and down the Atlantic Coast as independent boat builders who use lore handed down from generation to generation. Most boat works are one-or two-man operations. A man needs a fishing boat, he doesn’t have to go buy it. He can build it. Houses may get thrown together, but little skiffs aren’t much challenge to men who can build anything that floats, from yachts to fishing schooners, with no plans or blueprints, just by “rack of the eye.”

“He helped me,” Guthrie said, “but I did most of the work.”

He waded out to the boat and fiddled with the propeller blades with that proprietary air men always seem to have about boats or trucks. Teetering on the verge of manhood now. Fourteen and a half. His preadolescent chubbiness was almost gone, his belly was flattening, his muscles tightening.

But when he splashed back to shore, he was still a diffident kid. “Want to see how she rides?”

Being banged around the sound in a flat-bottomed skiff was a far cry from skimming across the surface in a streamlined power cruiser. Still...

“Wouldn’t know where I could dig a few clams for supper, would you?” I asked.

“Other side of the channel, over near the banks is good.” Boyish eagerness to show off was suddenly tinged with crafty materialism. “Wouldn’t take more’n five dollars worth of gas.”

As I made a show of considering, he added, “Carl’s got two rakes. I’d help you dig ‘em.”

Ten minutes later, I’d changed into shorts, a windbreaker and a raggedy old pair of Sue’s sneakers and we were heading out to the channel, a five-gallon plastic bucket and two clam rakes stowed in the bow. Despite April sunshine, the air was nippy out on the water, but I left the jacket unzipped and the hood down. Wind streamed through my hair and salt spray misted my face. Guthrie sat in the stern with his hand on the tiller and the throttle wide open. If he was chilly in just a tee shirt, he didn’t show it.

A dispossessed gull followed us for a couple of minutes, then wheeled off toward Beaufort and Morehead City.

Sunday afternoon and the channel was still sprinkled with upstate boaters and recreational fishermen—“dingbatters and ditdots” in scornful island parlance. Soon most of them would be swinging in to launch ramps along the shore, pulling their boats out of the water and heading on back up to Raleigh, Asheville, Greensboro. By sunset, Highway 70 West would be bumper-to-bumper with boat trailers, RVs, and shiny pickups, all with a cooler or two of fresh fish and steamer clams.

I knew because I’d been part of that Sunday night exodus enough weekends myself. It always seemed so luxurious the few times I’d stayed over till a Monday or Tuesday.

Instead of bucking Sunday night traffic, I planned to pop a cool one, prop my feet on the porch railing and enjoy the sunset while a big pot of clam chowder simmered on the stove for my supper. Core Sound chowder can taste right thin to folks raised on the Manhattan or New England varieties, but my mouth watered as I wondered if there was any cornmeal back at the house for dumplings. Not that it mattered since I’d probably have to run up to Cab’s store anyhow and buy a piece of salt pork to season the chowder with.

We cut across the wake of a hotshot cigarette and the flat bottom of the skiff smacked the waves as hard as if we were riding on dirt roads rutted like a washboard. My face tingled with the unmistakable combination of wind, salt and sun, and my hair tangled in my sunglasses as it whipped about my head, but I didn’t care. Even jouncing along in a homemade, no-frills skiff, it was exhilarating to be out on a broad expanse of water again, to know that if we headed due east from the lighthouse, the next land we’d hit would be the coast of North Africa.

Not that I’m all that comfortable when I’m totally out of the sight of land. In some ways the empty inland deserts of North Africa would be no more incomprehensible to me than these coastal waters once I get too far offshore to pick out landmarks. Desert nomads, Arctic Eskimos and Core Sounders have been firmly linked in my mind ever since I heard that nomads can read dust clouds and Eskimos can differentiate between more than forty separate types of snow.

More than once when I was a girl, my cousins and their little brother and I would be lolling out in the warm shallows, the air hot and still, the sky above as cloudless as an empty blue bowl, too enervated by the still air to do more than keep our sunburned skin under water and out of the reach of stinging dogflies.

Suddenly we’d see a half-dozen men come striding down to their boats with quick urgency, splashing past us in boots and waders to hoist themselves up over the sides.

“What’s happening?” we’d call.

“She’s a-turning,” Mahlon Davis would grunt as he lifted anchor and lowered his motor to head out to his favorite set. “Don’t you feel her turning?”

We’d look at each other blankly while the little boats roared out to the channel, leaving us tossed in their wake. A few minutes later, we would feel a tentative stirring, nothing more than a promise of breeze. Then would come that gradual but steady push as the wind freshened and turned and blew straight in off the water.

“How did they know?” we asked ourselves in wonder.

As we left the channel and angled over into the shallows, Guthrie throttled back on the Evinrude and the boat lay flatter in the water till I could feel the gentle surge of slow waves. Within minutes, we were coasting across undulating grasses only inches below the surface as we drifted in toward Shackleford. I sighted a familiar-looking sandbar that I seemed to remember from an earlier trip although I didn’t recall those stakes sticking up above high-water level.

“What’s that?” I called back to Guthrie.

“Leased bottom.”

“Huh? You can rent the sea bottom?”

“Got enough money, you can do anything you dang well feel like.”

We circled closer and I saw now that the stakes defined about three acres of the sandbar and were posted with signs from one of the state’s governmental divisions stating that this was a shellfish bottom leased by a Heston Hadley for the cultivation of clams. I seemed to remember now some mention of this new practice in the
News and Observer
, but it hadn’t affected me, so I hadn’t paid much attention.

Guthrie had. “Danged old Marine Fisheries,” he huffed. “You can rent you a square mile off ‘em if you got the money. Then you can keep everybody else off even if they’ve been clamming or oystering in that spot their whole lives.”

He spat overboard in disgust. “Gonna be so proggers can’t take a fish or clam anywhere in the sound. Whole dang place’ll be leased out.”

Clearly, Guthrie didn’t approve of leased bottoms. Didn’t sound fair to me either, for that matter.

Several hundred feet away, at the far side of the stakes, we saw another skiff bobbing at its anchor line. Its motor had been raised to keep the propeller from dragging on the bottom.

To my eye, it could have been the twin of the skiff we were in, but Guthrie took one look and said, “Andy Bynum’s.”

I brightened. Andy Bynum was a semi-retired fisherman who lived across the road from the cottage and often walked through Carl’s yard to get to his boats when any were moored out front. In fact, Carl had bought the cottage with the deeded stipulation that Bynums yet unborn would have access to the water in perpetuity.

Out of courtesy, when Carl and Sue were down, he often dropped off a bucket of crabs or a bushel of oysters—whatever was in season; and he would perch on the edge of their porch if offered a beer and tell wonderful stories about life on and around the water. My cousins and I never knew if he was stretching the truth or not, but we’d be laughing so hard it wouldn’t matter.

I was grinning now, hoping he’d come back for his skiff before Guthrie and I finished clamming, wondering if I could tempt him to sit a spell on his way past the cottage. He was of that older generation that sometimes thinks it’s improper to visit with an unchaperoned woman. Then I glanced at Guthrie’s face and my grin faded at his scowl.

“What’s Andy up to out here?” he asked. “Andy wouldn’t take clams off’n Hes Hadley’s lease.”

Was he implying that we would?

Not that the whole sandbar was staked off. There was still an unmarked wedge of grassy bottom beyond the stakes, over where Bynum’s skiff was rocking in the gentle surges.

Water barely covered the propeller blades as Guthrie poled us over to the empty skiff. Something about the set of his body and wary eyes made me start to tense up even though I didn’t see any cause. On the other hand, I don’t always understand island etiquette. Was clamming around the edges of a man’s leased bottom anything like poaching crabs from someone else’s pots or tearing through someone’s set nets? In the years I’d been coming down to this seemingly peaceful area, I’d seen short tempers flare over the dumbest things. Some had even ended in fist fights, warning shots and outright feuds that persisted for two or three generations.

We rounded the skiff and Guthrie cut his motor. Into the sudden silence came the ever-present sound of lapping water and something else. A hollow bumping noise.

A white plastic five-gallon bucket lay on its side between a water-soaked log and the deserted skiff, and it bumped against the wooden stern with every surging swell of incoming tide.

Then we drew closer and I realized that the half-submerged log was a human figure lying face down in the shallow water.

Guthrie threw out his anchor and was over the side a half step ahead of me. “Andy must’ve fell on his rake,” he said as we nearly tripped on the long-handled tool ourselves. Together we rolled him over and off the prongs. A half-dozen small crabs fell from his bloodied shirt to scuttle back into the chilly water. A gush of pink flowered in the sand where gouts of blood had been trapped by the weight of his body. Any idea I had of resuscitation disappeared as soon as I saw sand and grass in his open, unblinking eyes. I felt the stiffness of rigor in his arms and legs, saw the ashy paleness of his skin, and knew that the salty water had helped to leach away most of his life’s blood.

“We can put him in his skiff and tow it back to shore,” said Guthrie.

“No,” I said. All that blood on Andy Bynum’s waterlogged cotton shirt had not been caused by the blunt prongs of any clam rake. “We better not disturb things any further. You go call the police. Tell them Andy Bynum’s been shot.”

He didn’t blink an eye. Fish aren’t the only creatures brought home bloody on the boats; and at fourteen-going-on-fifteen, he’s probably seen his share of violent death.

“Tide’s coming in,” was all he said. “Reckon you can hold him here?”

“If I have to,” I answered.

I’ve seen my share of violent deaths, too.

Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
See! he is sinking; O hasten today—
And out with the Lifeboat! away, then, away!

—Edward S. Ufford

For several minutes after Guthrie roared back toward Harkers Island, I continued to stand indecisively on the edge of the sandbar until my feet were nearly numb from the chilly water washing over them.

I’d heard so many horror stories about goof-ups messing over a crime scene that I really hated to touch Andy Bynum’s skiff. Reason said he’d probably been shot from another boat while he was standing on the sandbar digging for clams. Reason said that even if the killer had waded right up to the body, the incoming tide now covered every footprint. But reason could say till my feet fell off and I’d still feel skittish about getting into that skiff.

A creosoted piling stuck up like a sawed-off telephone pole near the corner of Heston Hadley’s boundary. Barnacles and mussels had cemented themselves all the way up to high-water mark. Once upon a time the piling’d probably had a flat top; now it had been gouged by storms and surging tides. Nevertheless, I scrambled up to sit with my legs dangling. My bottom protested as I eased myself down. It felt like sitting on a handful of uneven pencil nubs. The water was only a few inches below my wet sneakers and beginning to wash higher with each passing moment.

A variety of sea birds swooped past—every time I come down to the coast, I swear that I’m going to bring along a book next time and learn the names of the different gulls and terns. Channel traffic had dwindled off, and although it dried my shorts and still warmed my legs and thighs, the sun was starting its long slide down the sky.

A perfect lazy April Sunday on the water.

Except for Andy Bynum’s body.

The wavelets that lapped my piling, that were lifting the beached skiff from the sandbar, that emptied the bucket’s clams and oysters and banged it against the skiff with steady rhythm—those same wavelets were breaking against Andy’s body and I couldn’t not look.

When we’d first turned him over on his back, his face was out of the water. Now his white hair fanned out around his head like mermaid’s hair algae and only his mouth and chin were still clear. If help didn’t come soon, he’d be totally awash and the prospect horrified me. I’ve always had a fear of drowning. In my worst nightmares, I’m sinking down, down through fathoms of dark water, my lungs bursting with the need for air; and even though I knew Andy Bynum would never breathe again, it was all I could do not to go kneel beside him and lift his white head clear.