Shooting at Loons (7 page)

Like their human counterparts, each had their own agenda for the water. Netters, tongers, dredgers or trawlers—according to Barbara Jean, the Alliance Andy Bynum had started wasn’t so much a cooperative effort as a self-serving attempt to hang on to the particular niche each group considered a personal birthright.

Out in the channel, an expensive late-model sports boat headed for the Beaufort marina, and its running lights gleamed a rich red and green in the gathering dusk. A few moments later, its wake broke against the shore, scattering gulls and rocking the little homemade skiffs moored close in.

I turned and saw Mahlon’s new trawler. More than half-finished now, it stood outside on blocks and dwarfed the small house. There was nothing sporty about it, but its lines were clean and solid, and the empty utilitarian cabin rose starkly against the dying light of the western sky.

And there was Mahlon himself, a gaunt wiry form half-hidden by the end post of his boat shed, standing motionless in the twilight as he stared at me. When he realized I’d seen him, he stepped forward. A caulk gun was in his hand and his fingers were coated with the yellow adhesive.

“Still like to feed the birds, do you?” His thick accent turned
like
to
loike
.

“How you doing, Mahlon?” I said, with more geniality than I felt.

“Just fair. Carl coming down?”

“Not this time.”

“Ain’t seen you down for a while. Staying long?”

“Just till the weekend.”

He had to be over sixty now, and he’d lost weight since that shirt and work pants were new; but his corded forearms were still muscular and he still made me uneasy, Mahlon did. Only once had he ever acted out of the way with me and I’d never actually seen him hit his wife or deliver more than a casual swat to Guthrie’s backside, yet I knew the violence his easygoing, laid-back exterior belied. His mother, Miss Nellie Em, seemed to be the only one who could face him down.

There were tales of monumental drunks, of neighbors’ set nets deliberately torn or their boats rammed; his own boats wrecked through reckless misuse; and in the water straight out from his house, you could still see the last rusty remains of a car that had so angered him back in the early sixties that he’d driven it out as far as he could and then attacked it with his steel adze, smashing every piece of glass on the thing.

“Oi wore that mommicked,” Mahlon would say whenever anyone asked him about it.

Men usually told these things with humorous zest and with the sneaking admiration a law-abider sometimes has for an outlaw.

Women were usually less amused.

Take that midsummer day. My cousins and I were thirteen or fourteen, and we were frolicking in the sound, enjoying our newly developing bodies, when Mahlon Davis staggered down to the shore on unsteady legs and stood on the sand to watch. For several minutes he swayed in the warm breeze and laughed to see us splash and dive and then erupt from the waves several yards away.

“Mermaids!” he suddenly bellowed. “Here’s your king of the sea!” Next thing we knew, he was wading in to join us—fully dressed, leather shoes and all. We were astonished because we’d never seen an adult islander play in the water. He made a clumsy lunge for Carlette, who was the oldest and prettiest, but she easily eluded him; and his feet slid out from under him. He sat down up to his chest, then his head tilted backward and he was laughing so hard that we saw half-rotted teeth and gaps where several were already missing.

As one, we dived and swam away into deeper water until he finally staggered back to shore, retrieved the bottle he’d dropped on the sand, and disappeared around the corner of his house.

Later that evening, I had gone down alone to feed the gulls when I heard an incoherent roar of anger from inside his house. I heard Mahlon’s wife cry, “No, don’t!” Then the screen door flew open and a white cat slammed into the side of the new boat Mahlon was building and fell to the ground like a broken bottle of bloody champagne.

Horrified, I fled back to the cottage.

Yet when he was sober, his skill fascinated me.

He might not be the equal of Brady Lewis, great-grandfather to both young Mark Lewis and Makely Lawrence and a boat builder of undisputed genius—he originated the unique Harkers Island flared bow—but Mahlon Davis was still a skilled craftsman.

When he wanted to be.

Trouble was, most of the time he didn’t want to work that steadily.

I looked at the keel of the forty-foot trawler he was building now. Hundreds of pieces of juniper wood, two inches wide, no two curved exactly the same, yet each edge lay snugly against the other, nailed on the face to the heart pine ribs and again through the edge.

Mahlon’s lot was too narrow to accomodate house, boat shed and a boat this big and still have room to maneuver, so he’d hacked away some of the weedy trees that covered the property west of his. Mickey Mantle’s cockerel pens were already there—each wire cage held a feisty-eyed bantam rooster, and now the trawler’s bow extended eight or ten feet into the clearing.

“You’re working late,” I observed.

“Just caulking. Don’t need daylight for that.” He turned back with the caulk gun. A bare low-wattage light bulb hung next to the side where he was carefully waterproofing each nail head.

I followed, unable to resist the lure of watching something so beautiful and so practical take shape under his rough hands. No blueprints hung from the back wall of the shelter, not even any photographs. He didn’t need a drawing to look at; it was all in his head. If I scrabbled around through the scraps of juniper, I might find a board with two columns of numbers scribbled on it, one for the dead rise and the other for the center, each figure accurate to the thirty-second of an inch so that she’d ride centered and true as long as she was cared for.

“Who you building this one for?” I asked.

“Me. Me’n my boys.” He dotted a row of nail heads with the yellow caulk, then smoothed each dot with his fingers. “I hear tell you’re a judge now.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me this, if you would. Say somebody didn’t like my mess on their property. Can they have it all hauled off and make me pay for it?”

“Somebody doing that to you?”

“Yeah, some bitch over to Beaufort that bought that field.” He nodded toward the overgrown, debris-littered field. His debris. Behind the chicken cages, there was a broken-down pickup full of junk that’d been there at least eight years. Sticking up from the scrubby bushes were piles of building scraps, aluminum siding, and old pipes and barrels. Further out, a yaupon tree grew straight up through a cast-off stove.

“She says if I don’t get my mess off, she’ll pay somebody twenty-five hundred dollars and put the law on me if I don’t pay it. I ain’t got twenty-five hundred dollars. This boat’s taking every penny and I still got to get the diesel engine for her. Andy was going to let me have one off a old truck of his, but now, I don’t know if his boys’ll still do it or not.”

“Well, she can’t have you hauled off to jail like a criminal,” I assured him, “but she could file in civil court and get a judgment against you.”

“What would that mean?”

“It might mean a forced sale of your house if you didn’t pay up after a certain length of time.”

“I knew it!” he said angrily. “That’s what she’s after. She’s already got title to two or three pieces along here. If she’n get mine and maybe Carl’s—”

“Carl and Sue would never sell,” I said.

“It ain’t been in his family a hundred years,” Mahlon said shortly. “Wave enough money under people’s noses and you can’t tell what they’d do.”

He smoothed on some more caulk dots. “Well, it don’t signify. With this boat, me’n my boys’re gonna get ourselves out’n the hole for good and all this time.”

“How
is
Mickey Mantle?” None of us ever knew whether or not to ask, but since Mahlon had mentioned him first...

His sun-leathered face crinkled with a gap-toothed grin. “Doing a lot of walking these days.”

“Oh?”

He smoothed another row of nail heads. “Yeah. Got his license pulled again. For a year this time. If he can’t get there by boat or thumb, he has to foot it.”

“So you figure that’ll keep his mind on fishing for a while?” I laughed.

“Should do,” he answered dryly. “If I’n get her done by the time shrimping season starts, the money’ll keep ‘em both in line.”

I hesitated. “I hope I didn’t get Guthrie in trouble yesterday, asking him to take me out for clams?”

Mahlon scowled. “Worn’t your fault. He knowed better’n to take my skiff ‘thout asking.”

“That was pretty awful about Andy Bynum getting shot.”

“Yeah.” He laid aside the caulk gun and began to peel the gummy stuff from his fingers.

“I guess you’re in that Alliance he started?”

“Hell, no!” He saw my puzzlement. “Oh, they tried to sign us all up, but I ain’t never joined nothing yet and I’m sure not going to start with something that don’t give a damn about me.”

“But I thought it was to help the independent fishermen.”

He snorted. “Yeah, that’s what was
said
, but I ain’t never seen nothing started by the man that don’t end up with money in their pockets.”

Startled, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Andy linger under Mahlon’s boat shed or seen Mahlon over at Andy’s. “You and Andy weren’t friends?” I asked.

“He was the man,” he said, as if that explained it all.

Well, if Andy was, I guess it did, diesel engine or no diesel engine.

Mahlon wrapped a piece of plastic around the tip of the caulk gun, secured it with a rubber band, then reached over and turned off the light bulb.

“Reckon I’d better get on in to eat,” he said, reminding me of the chowder I’d left simmering on the stove.

It was full dark but there were enough scattered lights from nearby houses to guide me the few feet down the shoreline to the main path once my eyes adjusted. I went slowly, thinking about “the man.” Not a purely local concept, of course. There was that old Ernie Ford coal miner song about owing one’s soul to the company store. And sharecroppers certainly knew about never getting out of debt to the man who bankrolled you to the tools or supplies you needed if you were going to work for him.

Andy Bynum had owned a fish house. Barbara Jean could probably tell me exactly how that made him the man.

As I headed up the path to the cottage, the maniacal cry of a migrant loon rang across the sound.

We are waiting by the river,
We are watching by the shore,
Only waiting for the boatman,
Soon he’ll come to bear us o’er.

Though the mist hang o’er the river,
And its billows loudly roar,
Yet we hear the song of angels,
Wafted from the other shore.

—Miss Mary P. Griffin

Tuesday’s court began slowly as we finished off the traffic violations and moved on to various misdemeanors (which I could hear) and some extra probable-cause felonies (which would have to be bucked up the next level to superior court).

Despite Mahlon’s optimistic talk, I wasn’t terribly surprised when a familiar figure came up to the defense table and signed the form waiving his rights to an attorney.

Mickey Mantle Davis.

According to the ADA, he sat accused of stealing a bicycle from the deck of the
Rainmaker
, a forty-footer out of Boston, currently berthed at the dock on Front Street. The state was hoping to prove probable cause to prosecute as a felony burglary.

“How do you plead?” I asked.

He stood up with a happy smile because he had just recognized me. “Not guilty, Judge, ma’am.”

Technically, I could have recused myself right then and there, but Mickey Mantle Davis would’ve had to go over to one of the piedmont or mountain districts to find a judge that hadn’t heard of him. From the time he was fourteen and buying beer with a stolen driver’s license, Guthrie’s father has been smashing up cars and smashing up boats and smashing up every second chance people still try to give him because shiftless as he is, he’s still a likeable cuss. He’d work hard for a week, then lay out drinking for two weeks; steal your portable TV on Friday night, then bring you a bushel of oysters on Saturday—a walking cliché of the good-hearted, good-timing wastrel who had so far managed to stay, if not out of trouble, at least out of a penitentiary.

Good luck to Mahlon keeping him on a trawler the whole of shrimping season.

“Call your first witness,” I told the ADA.

A Beaufort police officer took the stand and, after my recording clerk swore him in, testified how the dispatcher had radioed a description of both the bike and the thief. Within the hour, he’d seen the defendant pedaling such a bike toward the Grayden Paul drawbridge, heading for Morehead City. Upon being stopped and questioned, Mr. Davis had claimed that he’d found the bike by the side of the road and was taking it over to Morehead City to put a found ad in the
Carteret County News-Times
.

“No further questions,” the ADA said dryly.

“Me neither,” said Mickey Mantle.

“Call Claire Montgomery,” said the ADA.

On the bench behind him sat the three fashion plates I’d noticed at lunch the day before. Claire Montgomery was evidently the blonde ponytailed youngster. As she took the witness box, hand puppet and all, I was surprised to see that she wasn’t the eleven-or twelve-year-old I’d originally assumed, but at least nineteen or twenty. I was so busy shifting mental gears that the clerk had almost finished administering the oath before I registered that it wasn’t—strictly speaking—Claire Montgomery’s hand which lay on the Bible held up by the bailiff. Instead, her hand was inside the doll’s body and she manipulated it so that the puppet raised its right hand and touched the Bible with its left. Although the young woman’s lips moved, I assume it was the puppet’s voice that swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“State your name and address,” said the ADA.

The puppet gave me a courteous nod and seemed to say, “Our name is Claire Montgomery and we live at Two-Oh-Seven—”

“Just a minute, Miss Montgomery,” I interrupted. “This is a serious court of law, not a vaudeville stage. I must ask you to put aside the doll.”