Ben’s skin puckered. Lizards raced on sharp dry claws up his spine. He would know this feeling again when the boxes were all inventoried, and their contents were laid bare. Among the containers, like little children’s coffins, that he had yet to open, one held cargo more cursed than gold. The malignant freight in this box did not have the usual TV movie spray of colored wires in it. No black electrical tape, nor blasting caps, nor even a cell phone trigger. The plans for this engine of mayhem started with the periodic table of the elements. Unlike its conventional cousins, the isotopic bastard article would never tick unless a Geiger counter was placed within range. Ben did not know any of this yet.
He dropped the bar and the wallet in the progging bag where he stowed interesting finds from the Chesapeake. The bag was tied to the front of his dive belt. The extra weight dragged his hips forward and down. Taking the regulator out of his mouth for a moment, Ben dropped the key chain around his neck. He stepped onto the gunwale of the sunken speedboat, and pushed off for the surface toward Miss Dotsy.
Fatigue conspired with the gold’s extra weight to make the short swim feel like breast-stroking up Niagara Falls. The keys clinked together on his chest. Before Ben’s head even broke the surface, his hand groped desperately for Miss Dotsy’s washboards. A vise clamped down on Ben’s arm just above the elbow. With a force that nearly dislocated his shoulder, he was snatched out of the water and landed on Miss Dotsy’s deck like a gaffed marlin. This was Knocker Ellis’s idea of lending the helping hand.
Upon releasing Ben, Knocker Ellis Hogan’s cabled sinews and bone-hard muscles relaxed beneath his deep brown skin. Ben had long accepted that Ellis could handle bushel baskets for hours every day as if they weighed nothing, despite his being somewhere north of sixty. Ben barely hid his surprise that Ellis could manhandle him with equal ease. Not for the first time, Ben scanned Knocker Ellis’s dark eyes for more clues to who his oyster culler really was. As ever, he could read nothing behind Ellis’s impassive face, which seemed carefully arranged to guard a lifetime of wounds.
Knocker Ellis was Richard Blackshaw’s sole crew and culler for over a decade. When Ben’s father disappeared, Ben took charge of Miss Dotsy. It was natural and unquestioned that Knocker Ellis should ship out with her new captain. For a moment, it felt more real to Ben, more poignant, knowing Ellis’s former boss, rather than Ben’s own father, lay dead just feet below Miss Dotsy’s keel.
After his unceremonious boarding, Ben spat out the regulator and peeled off the mask. He recalled how his culler earned his handle, and decided to take care over the next few minutes. Ellis said he was named after his grandfather. As a small boy, Ellis said his gramps drudged for pennies as a knocker, cleaning out the blue crabs’ broad top shells so they could be repacked with fresh-picked lump crabmeat for restaurants. It was one of the jobs a black boy was permitted in his day. In Ellis’s case, Knocker had as much to do with his honored forebear as with his murderous southpaw uppercut. It could hammer a man flat on his ass, or so Ben heard told.
Knocker Ellis turned off the compressor, faked the air hose down into a neat coil, and hauled in the milk crate. Ellis looked askance at the half-empty basket, but said nothing. Nor did he mention the strange keys dangling from around Ben’s neck. This was his way. He quickly culled the few oysters just below regulation size, and dropped them back over the side. Then he cast his eye up at the clouds announcing the outer bands of Polly, the next weather system come to drown them. He always kept a weather eye for the squalls, or flaws, that could make up so quickly on the bay. With Ben closely sizing the oysters on the bottom, most of Ellis’s work revolved around tending the air compressor and the boat’s Atomic Four.
Ben tried to appear relaxed. What to tell this man, if anything? He would have to say something, at least to explain the poor catch. Ben reached into his canvas tote and pulled out a small block of pine he was shaping into a mallard chick. He studied it closely before taking up the razor honed carving knife. For some reason, the last chick he’d created came out with a dopey grin more reminiscent of a Disney character than anything natural. Ellis watched him.
Without taking his eyes off the wooden chick Ben lied, “Leg cramped up on me.”
Knocker Ellis turned his back and with a calloused bare hand checked the searing oil dipstick of the Atomic Four engine. It was rare for him to open his mouth. His posture alone said no sale.
Ben knew there was no way to avoid filling Ellis in. By rights, he was as much entitled to a share of salvage as he was due a share of the oyster catch. Ben never cheated a friend, but what was Ellis to him exactly? Ben’s father had trusted Knocker Ellis implicitly. That was fifteen years ago. As Ben was learning, a lot can happen in fifteen seconds to change a man’s life, let alone fifteen years. Ben shaved a tissue-thin curl of wood from the duck’s bill. The flake spun away on the freshening breeze.
To Ben, this gold was a final bequest from his father. Of course, Ben understood that it had likely not been his father’s to give, but possession was nine tenths of the law. The question remained, for whom was the gift really intended? Just for Ben? For everyone on Smith? Perhaps bringing home this fortune was payback on a hundred years of hard losses that Ben’s family and neighbors had endured. In 1900, the Lacey Act, an early law in a frenzy of well-intended conservation efforts, forbade his great-great-grandfathers from selling waterfowl across state lines. When the Act slowed neither the appetite for, nor the harvest of, ducks and geese, in 1910 their big-bore fowling guns were confiscated by the government because they were still too effective. Where once the Islanders had provided enough waterfowl for tables up and down the eastern seaboard, now they were limited to little more than subsistence hunting with smaller-gauge shotguns. As if not satisfied, in 1954, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service swallowed his people’s prime hunting marshes to the north into the Martin National Wildlife Refuge, turning good men into poachers if lean times forced them stray onto their old grounds. Today, more than forty-five hundred acres were off limits to island gunners, starting within sight of their own front doors. When water pollution and disease from farm runoff and overbuilding condos around the Chesapeake’s shores killed the fish, blue crab, oyster and clam stocks, making vast deoxygenated dead zones in the bay where nothing could live, it was Ben and his people who had to shorten their work seasons to allow the fisheries to survive. Again, they were blamed for being too efficient in their harvest work. Forget that in every war of the twentieth century, Ben’s relations had gone to soldier, fought, bled, and died for a government that seemed determined to starve them. Ben himself had served with distinction.
Two more strokes of Ben’s knife along the wooden duck’s bill. It was closer to the right shape, yet still wrong somehow. No. Ben decided he would not offer this gold back to whoever had it before his father. Not while it might ease some of the suffering on Smith and Tangier. Certainly not while Ben’s father lay drowned just a few feet below. Not while Ben was still breathing.
Another knife stroke. The duck’s bill was still not right. Ben realized why he was putting off telling Ellis about his finds. As long as Ben remained the only one who knew where Dick Blackshaw’s body lay, he had a grim intimacy with his father in death that was long missing between them in life. Tell someone else Dick Blackshaw is dead, speak the words to just one other person, and suddenly the remote truth becomes real. It’s official; you’re an orphan.