Nervous Water Read online

  In memory

  Al Blanchard

  “When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

  “What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

  “I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

  Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

  —A. A. MILNE, The House at Pooh Corner

  Author’s Note

  My wife, Vicki Stiefel, and my editor, Keith Kahla, gave me a lot of thoughtful and needed criticism on various versions of this story. I always listen to what Vicki and Keith say. Sometimes they know what I’m trying to do better than I do.

  Anyone who happens to know that my mother comes from a Maine family might suspect that I’ve modeled some of the characters and events in this novel on my own relatives and their lives.

  I did not. I made it all up.

  This much is true: When I was a kid, my father and I sometimes went out with my Uncle Woober on his lobster boat. We helped him haul his pots and rebait them with smelly fishheads, and after we were done, if the stripers were in the river, we went fishing. Those were happy times.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  When I was a kid, we used to drive from our home in suburban Boston to Moulton in southern Maine once or twice every summer, my mother and my father and I, to spend the weekend with Gram Crandall, my mother’s mother.

  The best part of those visits, as far as I was concerned, was going out on the Piscataqua River in my uncle’s lobster boat with my old man. It was one of the few things my father and I did together when I was a kid. We helped Uncle Moze tend his string of lobster pots, and after that, we went fishing. We watched the horizon for clouds of diving birds, which would surely signify a gang of big striped bass chasing and slashing at bait. We scanned the bays and coves where wakes or swirls or what Uncle Moze called “nervous water”—the subtle, barely perceptible trembling agitation of the flat water—would betray a cruising school of predatory fish just beneath the surface. I yearned to spot a swirl or a patch of nervous water before Uncle Moze did, but it never happened.

  My old man left the looking up to me and Uncle Moze. He just went fishing. He’d just grab a rod and troll a plug off the stern. Naturally, I yearned to catch one of those big fish myself, but my old man thought I was too little to hold a rod.

  Uncle Moze would say, “Why’n’t you let Brady catch a fish?” but my father would just mutter, “Stripers are men’s fish.”

  I had to admit, he had a point. Those striped bass were almost as big as I was. They engulfed the plugs behind the boat in a swirl the size of a bait tub. They made my old man’s rod buck and bend, and they zinged line off the reel, and he whooped and hollered and cursed and groaned as he tried to bring them in.

  It was about the only time in my childhood that I can remember being pretty sure that my father was having fun.

  The summer I turned eleven, Aunt Mary, the youngest of my mother’s five siblings, was at Gram’s house when we got there. This was odd, since we’d gone to Mary’s wedding the previous April, and she had presumably moved into a trailer with her new husband, a pipe fitter from Kittery named Norman Dillman.

  Aunt Mary was sixteen that summer. She had curly blondish hair and blue eyes and a chubby face. She was only five years older than me, and she’d always treated me more like a cousin than a nephew. When she was still living with Gram, we used to play gin rummy and listen to rock and roll on the kitchen radio.

  On this July morning, Aunt Mary was sitting in a rocking chair on Gram’s sunporch, just staring out the window. It was nearly noontime, but she was wearing a pink terry cloth bathrobe and fluffy pink slippers. Her arm was in a sling, and her face was kind of yellowish and puffy, and she was twisting a handkerchief in her hands, which were resting in her lap. Or, I should say, on her lap. It looked like she was holding a basketball under that pink bathrobe.

  I said “Hi” to her, but she didn’t even look at me.

  A minute later my mother and father came out to the sunporch. My mother touched my shoulder and said, “Brady, sweetie, we want to talk with Aunt Mary for a minute, okay?” which meant she wanted me to leave the room.

  I went into the living room and turned on Gram’s TV, but I could hear the murmur of voices, my mother’s and father’s and Aunt Mary’s, coming from the sunporch.

  My mother said: “Norman did that to you?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “And he kicked you out?”

  Aunt Mary snuffled. “He was pretty drunk.”

  “When was this?”

  “I dunno. Four, five weeks ago, I guess.”

  “You’re not thinking about going back to him, are you?”

  “He’s my husban’,” said Aunt Mary. “What’m I spose to do?”

  I heard my mother blow out a breath. “You talked to him since then?”

  “Uh-uh. Not since then. Moze and Jake went over a couple times, but Norman wasn’t home.”

  The only thing my old man said was: “You better get yourself a lawyer.”

  About then Gram called from the kitchen, said she had corn chowder with pilot crackers for lunch, so I didn’t hear any more about Aunt Mary.

  I was just finishing up my second bowl of chowder when Uncle Moze came stomping into the house. He was a tall, heronlike man about my father’s age. He had a face like a hatchet, with dark stubble on his cheeks and chin and creases at the corners of his squinty blue eyes. He was wearing black rubber hip boots folded down at his knees, blue jeans, a blue work shirt rolled up over his elbows, and a long-billed fisherman’s cap. He said, “Hey, sonnyboy,” and punched me on the shoulder. He had a half-smoked cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. “Gonna help me haul my pots?” Uncle Moze’s voice sounded like rocks rubbing together.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Stripers’re in the river,” he said, “and the tide should be about right. Where’s your old man?”

  I jerked my head in the direction of the sunporch.

  I went outside and leaned against Uncle Moze’s pickup truck so he wouldn’t forget to bring me along, and after a while he and my father came out. They were muttering to each other, and I heard Uncle Moze saying, “…always was a useless sonofabitch.” Then he looked up and saw me and said, “Git your ass in back, sonnyboy.”

  So I hoisted myself up into the bed of his truck and found a place to sit amid the tub of lobster bait, the stubby rods rigged with trolling plugs, the stack of mossy old wooden lobster pots with strands of dried seaweed clinging to them, the big coils of thick rope, and the cooler filled with Coke and Narragansett beer. Uncle Moze grabbed two beers, tossed me a can of Coke, and he and my old man climbed in front.

  When we got to the cove where Uncle Moze kept his lobster boat, Miss Lil, moored, we lugged the stuff from the truck to his dinghy, dragged it over the mud to the water, piled in, and
rowed out to the boat, and pretty soon the sturdy diesel engine was thrumming and we were chugging out into the river. Uncle Moze’s lobster boat was broad-beamed and chunky and solid. Miss Lil didn’t go very fast, but you had the feeling she could plow straight through a hurricane without tipping over Uncle Moze’s beer bottle.

  After a few minutes we came to the wide bay in the Piscataqua River where Uncle Moze set out his pots, and for the next couple of hours we were busy hauling them in, culling the shorts and the one-claws from the keepers, rebaiting them, and pushing them back into the water. We ended up with one empty bait tub and two tubs full of seaweed and lobsters.

  Then my old man picked up one of the rods, unhooked the plug from the first guide, dropped it over the side, and let it free-spool back until it was about a hundred feet behind the boat. Uncle Moze cut back the engine until we were barely moving. “Keep an eye out for nervous water, sonnyboy,” he said to me, squinting against the smoke from his unfiltered Camel.

  Maybe ten minutes later, while I was staring at the calm water near shore hoping to spot a wake or a swirl, my father grunted. I looked back in time to see the big hole in the water where the plug had been. Uncle Moze threw the engine into neutral, and my old man heaved up on the rod, then lowered it, cranked the reel, lifted again, and after a while the big striper came silvering alongside. Uncle Moze reached down with the gaff and levered the sleek fish into the boat. It was close to four feet long.

  Uncle Moze and my father were grinning.

  Then, almost as fast as my father could reel them in, there were four more of those three- and four-foot striped bass flopping in the bottom of the boat. Big fish were boiling and sloshing all over the river, and the air was alive with squawking, diving gulls and terns. It was the best fishing I’d ever witnessed, and I yearned to participate in it.

  I guess Uncle Moze read my mind, because he looked at my father and said, “Why’n’t we let Brady give it a shot?”

  My old man narrowed his eyes at me, then shrugged. “You better not let one of those leviathans catapult you overboard,” he said. My father was the kind of man who used words like “leviathan” and “catapult” in everyday conversation. “Your mother would murder me.”

  I grinned and made a muscle for him, then picked up a rod and unhooked the red-and-white plug, and I was just about to drop it off the stern when Uncle Moze muttered, “Now what the hell.”

  I looked up. Another lobster boat had cut across our wake and was coming up beside us. The guy at the wheel was waving his arms and yelling, but over the drone of the engines I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  Uncle Moze said, “Keep that plug in the boat for a minute there, sonnyboy.” He put the engine in neutral and the other boat eased alongside. My father reached out and grabbed onto it.

  A man who appeared to be quite a bit older than my father and Uncle Moze was at the wheel of the other boat. He wore a baseball cap and yellow rubber overalls.

  Uncle Moze said, “What the hell, Lyle? We was into some stripers.”

  “Got us a floater,” said Lyle. “You ain’t got a radio, do you?”

  Uncle Moze shook his head.

  “Me neither,” said Lyle. He took off his cap, swiped the back of his wrist over his bald head, then twisted the cap back on. “I’m gonna go git the coast guard. You better head over there and stay with the goddamn body.”

  “Well, shit and be damned,” said Uncle Moze. “They was bitin’ awful good.”

  Lyle went up on tiptoes and looked into our boat where our five giant striped bass were laid out side by side like big slabs of cordwood. He whistled. “Damn,” he said. “Well, it cain’t be helped.” He pointed off toward the shore. “He’s over by them reeds. I tied a buoy onto him. Tide’s gonna start runnin’ pretty soon. You better git over there and keep an eye on him so’s he don’t git washed away.”

  Lyle put his engine into gear, gave us a wave, and headed across the river to the New Hampshire side, where the coast guard station was. Uncle Moze steered us to the shoreline where Lyle had pointed.

  He slowed down as we approached the reedy area, and then my old man said, “Jesus H. Christ,” and then I saw it. I’m not sure I would’ve known it was a man’s body if Lyle hadn’t said it was. He was floating on his belly with his face in the water and his arms and legs stretched out just under the surface, so that only his back was out of water. He looked like a big white basking turtle. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and khaki-colored pants, and the skin on his neck and face and arms was shiny and swollen and white as lard. A crab had latched onto the side of his face, and a rope of seaweed was hooked around one of his legs. Lyle’s buoy was looped around the other leg.

  My father leaned close to Uncle Moze and mumbled something.

  “Ayuh,” Uncle Moze said. “That there’s fuckin’ Norman, all right.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. I suppose I was staring at the body. I probably looked like I might puke. “That’s right, sonnyboy,” he said. “Norman fuckin’ Dillman. Mary’s new husband, the sonofabitch who punched her face and busted her arm. Your goddamn uncle.”

  We idled there beside Uncle Norman’s body for a few minutes, and then Uncle Moze said to my father, “Tide’s gonna take him out. Grab the boat hook.”

  My old man picked up the long-handled hook they used for snagging the lines attached to the lobster buoys, reached out, and tried to catch it around Uncle Norman’s swollen leg. The curved point sank right in, and I could see little pieces of flesh puff off and form a greenish white cloud in the water.

  “Avert your eyes,” my old man said to me over his shoulder.

  Not likely. No way. It wasn’t every day you got to see a dead body.

  We drifted on the outgoing tide, my old man hanging on to the boat hook stuck in Uncle Norman’s leg, for nearly an hour before a coast guard boat came speeding across the river and pulled alongside us. Uncle Moze seemed to know the coast guard men, and they talked for a while. Then my father pulled the boat hook out of Uncle Norman’s leg, and Uncle Moze started up the engine, and we pulled away.

  I watched as they looped ropes around Uncle Norman’s bloated body and pulled it over the transom of the coast guard boat.

  By then the tide was ebbing hard and the birds had disappeared. We trolled around the bay for a while—my old man let me hold one of the rods for the first time in my life—but the fish had moved on. So Uncle Moze headed in, and we moored his boat, loaded the lobsters and stripers into his dinghy, and rowed to shore.

  I got a lot of attention when I told my friends back home about finding Uncle Norman’s body in the Piscataqua River. In my version of the story, I was the one who spotted the floater, and it was I who rammed the boat hook through his leg and held on until the coast guard arrived. The girls, especially, loved hearing my story.

  Later my old man told me that when the coast guard brought Uncle Norman’s body onto their boat, they saw what appeared to be a bullet hole in his forehead.

  One

  The end of a muggy Thursday afternoon in early July. Thunder grumbled from the direction of the western suburbs, and the air hung still and heavy and moist over the city.

  I’d shucked off my courtroom pinstripe, slipped into a pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt, and made myself a tall gin and tonic, and I was sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs in the walled-in patio behind our town house on Mount Vernon Street reading the Globe sports section and waiting for Evie to come home.

  Henry David Thoreau, our middle-aged Brittany spaniel, lay under the picnic table with his chin on his paws eyeing a pair of evening grosbeaks, which were jabbing at sunflower seeds on one of the hanging birdfeeders.

  I’d finished my drink and was pondering a refill when I heard the kitchen phone ring. I figured it was Evie. She was a little late.

  When I stood up, the grosbeaks burst away in a bright flash of yellow and black.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to Henry, who’d lifted his head and was frowning at me. Brittanies are
bird dogs. Their genes carry the powerful instinct to point grouse and woodcock and quail for the hunter. Poor Henry, the city dog, had to be satisfied with grosbeaks and finches and titmice.

  When I answered the phone, a gravelly voice said, “Hey, sonnyboy.”

  Only one person ever called me “sonnyboy.” I hadn’t heard that voice for over thirty years. But I recognized it instantly.

  “Moses Crandall,” I said. “Jesus Christ. What’s up, Uncle Moze?”

  “Just wonderin’ how you’d feel about helping me haul my pots.” I heard him take a wet drag on a cigarette. “Maybe go fishin’ afterwards. Stripers’re in the river. Gittin’ some blues, too. They ain’t gonna hang around much longer.”

  “Is everything all right?” I said.

  “Why the hell wouldn’t it be?”

  “Well, okay, good,” I said. “When did you have in mind?”

  “Saturday okay with you?” he said. “Git here around noon, we’ll catch the turn of the tide.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “Your boat still moored in the same place?”

  “Same river, same mooring, same boat,” he said. “Mostly the same string of pots. Nothin’ much changes, sonnyboy. We just keep gittin’ older. See you then.”

  I was back out in the Adirondack chair when Evie came out through the back door a half hour later. She bent down, hooked her forearm around the back of my neck, and gave me a long juicy kiss on the mouth.

  She’d snagged a bottle of beer from the refrigerator on her way through the kitchen. She flopped down in the chair beside me, pried off her high heels, propped her feet up on the table’s bench seat, hiked her skirt up to the tops of her thighs, and pressed the bottle against her cheek. “Hot one, huh?” she said.