Ellis could have walked the several footbridges connecting his small property to Ben’s. He waited at home because it was a roundabout half-mile trek across the intervening hummocks and islets, and he did not want to run into LuAnna. Ellis could see Ben’s pier and her boat from his second-floor window. Also, Ellis did not want to run into any of his neighbors at that hour. He was usually snug in bed by now, and anyone sighting him would remember, and might become curious. Though he was almost sure the white community had finally, if grudgingly, accepted his presence after a decade and a half, Ben sensed the proverbial dark and stormy night was no time for Ellis to test race relations.
Outside the confines of the streams, guts, and watery thoroughfares of Smith Island, the bay banked into short steep waves with scattered whitecaps. The wind was fluky around the compass, at times gusting to twenty knots. Only now and then did rain mix with the spray coming over Miss Dotsy’s bow. The weather was bad, could get much worse, but was holding. As they cruised, Ellis bent lengths of line to the milk crates. Then he inspected the air compressor, its seals, the motor, the exhaust, the air hose and regulator.
Knocker Ellis asked, “Miss LuAnna okay?”
Ben nipped this in the bud. “She’s fine. And no, I didn’t tell her about it. Not any of it.”
“Seemed like you were slingin’ her the dirty pound for quite a while this evening. No pillow talk?”
Ben countered. “Did you keep things quiet? No late night calls to ex-girlfriends bragging they should’ve stuck with you?” It was spiteful to rub Ellis’s nose in his solitary life, but now Ben was angry.
“Who would I tell? My cat?”
“You got a cat?”
Ellis spat, “Exactly.”
Ben concentrated on navigation, and took slow, deep breaths. Before heading in to sell their catch that evening, he had taken mental bearings on several cellular towers on shore. A blight on the landscape by day, the towers were useful at night. When their lights lined up properly, Miss Dotsy would be over the oyster rock, the wreck, the gold, and the body once again. Ben and Ellis reverted to their customary silence. The trip took just over half an hour. When the alignment of lights was perfect, Ben lowered the anchor. He dragged on the cold wetsuit. Knocker Ellis started the air compressor.
Before Ben dropped over the side, Ellis patted him on the shoulder. “Good luck.” Ben nodded acknowledgment.
Then Ellis said, “What about the keys?”
Ben pointed to his chest.
Ellis held out his hand. “It’s Joe Chilly. Diving at night can be dangerous. Especially alone.”
Catching Ellis’s point, but not liking the implications, or the tone, Ben handed off the keys to Ellis. “No sitting on my air hose.” Ben slipped into the inky bay.
Ben loathed diving at night. To him, the murk was full of dark eyes and saw-toothed maws gaping just beyond his flashlight’s beam. His fear was not unfounded. Sometimes sharks made their way into the Chesapeake with a long ocean of hunger behind them. Ben dared a shark to bite him. All it would get was a mouthful of gristle and fear. He played the beam around. Still silted, but shining the light down his own body length as a yardstick, he figured visibility was a tolerable four feet.
After a few moments descending into the dark void, his rubber boots sank into the bottom. No boat in sight. He was sure of his bearings. Maybe storm surge shifted it. The wreck was gone, and all the problems with it. Now he could go home, collapse into sleep, or grieving. He had not wanted to leave a buoy to mark the site that afternoon on the slim chance someone got curious. Times were tough, and the oystering hard. Right now not putting out a buoy seemed either overly cautious, or a blessing in disguise.
Ben shifted a step backward. Something tapped him on the shoulder. He swung completely around during the beat his heart skipped. The monster had come for him. His father’s corpse tethered to the boat did nothing to calm the Black Watch Pipe and Drum tattoo hammering in his chest.
The corpse, once known as Pap, still had the vague outline of a human being. After a few days in the water it was otherwise unrecognizable. Scraps of meat. Clumps of hair. Soup bones and tattered clothes. The eye that first glared at Ben that afternoon still blazed with uncorrupted clarity. Before he quit high school, Ben had read Poe’s The Telltale Heart. Despite the title, he remembered it was an old man’s cold staring eye that drove the narrator to kill.
Ben was not sure what impelled him, but he reached out and touched the dead man’s eye. Very strange. It was hard, calcified. Unable to rein in the bizarre urge, he dug around the orb. The eye popped out of the socket in a small puff of thick blood. It was smaller than a golf ball, and oddly rough like pumice. Cupping the front of the bony sphere was a smooth portion, perfectly rendered with an iris, a pupil, and a white delicately riven with uncanny naturalness by thin red blood vessels. It stared at him from his gloved palm. Then he understood. This was a prosthetic eye to replace the one Pap had lost in the knife fight. The fight that had spurred his father to flee Smith Island.
Ben dropped the ghoulish memento into his progging bag. Emotion-tight bulkhead doors that had momentarily been pried open in his mind slammed shut again. Back to business.
First thing, move this body out of the way. Ben untied the canvas strap holding the cadaver’s foot to the boat. That’s when he brushed against something solid in the coat’s side pocket. The unyielding weight he had noted before. Now he had a good idea what it was. He opened the pocket. A two foot American eel curled out, slipping into the darkness.
After making sure the pocket was not serving as a hidey-hole for some other sea creature, Ben reached in and pulled out a gold bar. It lit up the water when his flashlight beam struck it. He turned and placed it in the nearest milk crate. When he turned back, the body had disappeared. It was gone, like a phantom. Ben played the light around in a full circle. Nothing but silt.
Then he raised the light. Like an undersea resurrection, Ben’s father floated toward the surface, now just disembodied pants disappearing into the murk above. Ben reached up, grabbed at a shoe, snagged it, and yanked downward. The decayed foot disarticulated at the ankle. The shoe and foot came off in his hand.
He gripped the pants leg more gently and eased the body back down. It was like wrangling a ghastly helium balloon. Ben removed the tarp from the cargo and wrapped the body, as well as the loose foot, in it. Then he wound several lengths of the canvas strap around the impromptu shroud, lashing the entire parcel to the bow of the Nantucket Lance. It was a hasty piece of work. A few quick tugs assured Ben the body was secure for now.
Standing in the wreck where the footing was firm, Ben grabbed one of the metal boxes, and tried to lift it into a milk crate. The thing barely budged. He strained. Spinal disks compressed into Smuckers preserves. Using every ounce of strength, he gradually slid one box off the top of the stack. It fell in slow motion, smashing onto the deck. One down. Nineteen to go.
It took two hours. Ben loaded boxes into the five tethered milk crates. Then he surfaced and helped Knocker Ellis haul them aboard. They lined the boxes along Miss Dotsy’s keel to keep her in trim. They repeated the process four more times while the weather deteriorated. Miss Dotsy squatted in the waves under the new weight.
Ben was worn-out. Nearly killed by the cold. Knocker Ellis passed him rags heated on the air compressor motor. Ben stuffed them in his armpits and near his groin to warm his icy core. A damn long day in Nordic waters.
Ellis took the keys from around his neck. “Let’s see what we have.”