Shooting at Loons Read online

  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.

  2

  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.

  Except for those open blue eyes, his face was peaceful and serene, a face as weathered as this piling I was perched on. I hoped death had been instantaneous for him. That he’d been dead before he inhaled a single drop.

  A good man. Someone liked and respected by his neighbors.

  “So far as you know,” reminded the cautious preacher who lurked at the edges of my mind. “There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good and sinneth not.”

  “True,” nodded the pragmatist that kept him company.

  Okay. So what did I actually know of Andy Bynum?

  Not much, now that I considered.

  Probably in his early sixties. His wife had died eight or ten years ago and he’d lived alone since then in a sturdy, unpretentious brick house across the road from Carl and Sue’s cottage. Two sons who were both older than me. I’d never heard of any friction between father and sons; and the last time Carl had mentioned Andy to me, he said Andy’d turned his two big boats over to the sons and was cutting back on his hours at the fish house his own father had started back in the thirties.

  What else?

  Well, he’d liked an occasional beer. Had never said no when Carl offered him one. “Just don’t disfurnish yourself,” he’d say, making sure Carl wasn’t handing over the last one in his cooler.

  And he liked to make people laugh with tales of his younger, roguish days. Even though it’d been years since he’d aimed a gun at a loon or turtle, Andy had once hunted both endangered species with enthusiasm.

  “But I shot my last loon twenty years ago,” he told us. “There’d been a piece in the paper about how they was dying out and I’d been feeling right bad about it even though we all knew them Canadians was the ones really hurting the loon population. They used the eggs for glue or something. Didn’t even give the babies time to hatch out. Anyhow, it was March and me and some fellows was over on Shackleford freezing our own tailfeathers off and I had this fancy new Winchester I give a man in Portsmouth three hundred dollars for. Raiford and me, we was ‘way down the dune ready to fire when we heard two gunshots, then nothing. It’d commenced to rain a little and Raiford walked up on the sandbank and looked over to see what was happening, and there was the game warden writing everybody out a ticket. Raiford sort of slithered back down the sandbank and commenced scooping us out a hole and we buried both guns ‘fore you could say ‘magistrate’s court’ three times.

  “Then we got back in my skiff and was sitting there all innocent like when the game warden come around that hummock of grass. ‘Y’all part of this loon hunt?’ he yells out to us. ‘Loon hunt?’ says Raiford. ‘Ain’t that against the law?’

  “‘Bout then, that drizzle started getting serious and game wardens always did make Raiford nervous, so he started the motor and we come on back to the island and waited till it slacked off and the game warden was gone. And don’t you know we couldn’t remember exactly where we’d buried them two guns. Took us three days ‘fore we scratched ‘em out again.”

  Like many a reformed rogue, Andy had become a staunch upholder of the law, even game laws. Nevertheless, the last time I was down, he ruefully admitted it was still hard for him to refuse an invitation to pull up a chair when the table held a dish of stewed loon.

  As water ballooned his shirt, I saw a moon snail emerge from beneath the collar. It must have been trapped when we turned the body. As soon as it pulled itself free, it dropped down into the green undulating grasses that intertwined with his hair. Small dark shapes scuttled across Andy’s chest.

  The crabs were back.

  Without a watch, there was no way to know how long Guthrie had been gone. Ten minutes? Twenty?

  As my eyes strained for shore, they were suddenly caught by a speedboat that was heading straight out toward me from a point further down the island. One person, a slender figure in a blue shirt, stood at the wheel and held a fast course that implied intimate familiarity with this particular stretch of the sound. Guthrie had already cut his engine by the time he was this far beyond the channel, but this boater was either suicidal or else knew to the precise second how long to keep the propeller down.

  The motor cut off just as I was expecting to see churned sand and fouled blades, and the continued impetus carried the boat across the shallows to end up less than thirty feet away.

  It was a woman about my age, mid-thirties, in white shorts, short blonde hair and those mirrored sunglasses that I hate because you never get a reading on the person’s eyes. I particularly hate them when the wearer’s carrying a .22 rifle like this unsmiling woman was. She held it loosely, with a casual ease that implied the same expertise as she’d already shown with her boat handling.

  “Mind telling me what you’re doing out here?”

  “Waiting for the police,” I answered, in case she decided to start pointing that thing. I gestured toward Andy Bynum’s body, but his skiff blocked her view and she didn’t immediately grasp the situation.

  Although the volume was turned way down, I could hear the staticky chatter of a CB radio from the dashboard as she propped the rifle on the seat of her boat, swung over the edge into thigh-deep water that would have had me flinching and moaning, and pulled her boat over to tie up at a marker stake near me.

  “What’s the law got to do with Andy’s—” That’s when she saw him.

  “Good Lord Jesus! What happened?”

  She waded nearer. Tiny minnows darted in and out of the dead man’s white hair and an ooze of red continued to flower from his chest.

  “Looks like someone shot him,” I said.

  “So that’s why Mahlon Davis took off so fast and left you out here by yourself.”

  “That was Guthrie, not his grandfather.” I eased down from the piling and faced her. “Mind telling me how come you were watching us so closely?”

  She gestured toward the line of stakes that enclosed most of the sandbank. “My husband Hes and me, this is our leased bottom.”

  Before I could ask why that required an armed investigation, she splashed back to her boat, pulled herself in and reached for her CB mike. “Hadley to base. Over.”

  Through the static, I heard a female voice. “What’s happening, Mom? Over.”

  “Call Marvin Willitt. See if he’s heard he’s needed out here. Out.”

  She replaced the mike and those mirr
ored glasses reflected my image. Well, two could play that game. My sunglasses were perched up in my hair and I pulled them down over my eyes like a mask as I asked, “Who’s Marvin Willitt?”

  “Sheriff’s deputy for down east. Assigned to Harkers Island. You staying on the island?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew Andy?”

  “Yes, I knew him.” My feet were starting to go numb again. “Look, you mind if I sit in your boat?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Not the most gracious invitation I’d ever had.

  She watched my ineffectual effort to hoist myself gracefully over the side, then grudgingly said, “Give me your hand.”

  I was hauled up onto cracked vinyl seats of sun-faded blue with lumpy foam. After that rough-topped piling though, they felt like goosedown cushions.

  “I’m Jay Hadley,” said the woman, suddenly pushing her glasses up into sun-streaked blonde hair. Sea-green eyes squinted in the sudden brightness and I saw that they were pooled with tears.

  “Deborah Knott,” I said.

  The radio crackled into speech.

  “Willitt to Hadley. Jay? You out there, over?”

  Her voice didn’t quaver.

  “Yeah, Marvin. Over.”

  “Guthrie Davis says there’s been a accident out by your bottom lease. He telling the truth, over?”

  “Yeah, this time. Over.”

  “Sit tight then. We’ll be right out. Out.”

  A minute later, the same young woman’s voice spoke through the static. “Base to Hadley. Mom? Who’s hurt? Over.”

  “Tell you later, Becca. Over and out.” She hung up the mike with finality.

  “Your daughter?”

  Again the brusque nod. “Where you staying on the island?”