The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay Read online

  The cabin seemed smaller than it had been in his mind. And then he measured twelve steps from its front door due south toward the Dorchester marsh, and then six steps near due west toward the sun. Breaking a thick branch off one of the pines, he began to dig into the damp ground. He dug about a foot deep and began to widen the circle. After a while he struck something hard. He dug around it and knocked away the soil. It was the old steel box, sealed with a frozen combination padlock. Working it out of the earth, he set it aside and filled the hole with loose dirt and leaves. He then carried the box back to the beach and out into the river, hoisting it over the side of the boat. Once on board, he stashed the box in the cabin and got under way. The current ran swift in the cut between the island and the Eastern Shore.

  It was late afternoon when he pulled into his shortcut home, the channel at Knapps Narrows that separated Tilghman from the broader delta above. He tied up at Morrison’s, went inside, and sat at the bar to order fried clams and beer. Afterward the waitress refilled his thermos with hot coffee. He went to pay his bill. Behind the register stood Buddy Morrison, the proprietor.

  “You’re George Wakeman’s son, Clay.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Sorry about his disappearance, son. He was good company.”

  Clay thanked him and waited for his change.

  “Hard on the family. For a good waterman to lose himself awash like that. And then not be found.”

  “Yessir.”

  Morrison counted out the bills. “She takes some slow and some sudden, but she takes all who give themselves over, don’t she?”

  Clay nodded and accepted the money.

  “He may wash up soon. Most do. But I am sorry, son. Truly am.”

  Outside, the air had stilled and the sky was clear. Clay breathed in deeply. Angling southeast, the bateau pierced the mirrored surface. Off the mouth of Broad Creek, he cut the motor and coasted into the current. He used the crowbar from the engine locker on the metal box. The lock held, but he was able to pry open the steel top, bending it back. Inside lay his father’s Navy Cross, wrapped in stained brown paper. There was a photograph also, of his father and him, and his mother, Sarah. Pappy was seated on a chair and Sarah was kneeling next to him, her arm around their young son. He turned it over. There was no inscription. In a brittle envelope there was money—five hundred dollars—and folded up behind the bills, the chart his father had made and showed him, years before. Pappy had marked the chart where he had found the wreck while tonging for oysters, where he’d pulled up the antique battle-ax. Clay remembered the books Pappy brought home from the library in Washington, convinced they proved the wreck was a Spanish frigate. Pappy had written its name and the date it was lost on the chart. “The Buena Ventura, 1688.” The ax had disappeared en route to New York for study by the Peabody Institute, an offense that Pappy had often recounted and never forgave. Still, Pappy had kept the chart, and when the mood struck him he would spread it across the dining room table, swearing to find and salvage the sunken ship. But the Bay had not provided for that.

  Clay folded the chart back up, returned all of the contents to the box, and stored it above the cabin berth. It wasn’t the chart he’d been after. That had been Pappy’s pipe dream, or one of them, though it was a pleasant enough fancy. Rather than the chart, rather than the money, he had hoped for a letter. From his father to him. Or even a note.

  3

  “I’m thinking about going on the river,” Clay said. He sat holding his beer, looking back at his friend.

  Byron shook his head. “I was worried you were leanin’ that way.” His tone was unsympathetic.

  “Refurbish the bateau. Now that she’s mine. She’s solid enough. Good for potting. If the summer works, then I might try to oyster this winter. Maybe even take out some fishing parties.”

  It was Tuesday. Clay’s father had kept a spare set of oyster tongs in the garage in Oxford, and Clay and Byron had taken them out and tied them to Byron’s pickup and driven down to the workboat. Off Cook Point there was a bar Clay had fished with his father, and he and Byron had ridden out to it on flat water. The late afternoon sky was clear, and way south they could see the twin white rotundas of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant on the far shore of the Bay. Anchoring in about twelve feet of water, Byron had worked the tongs for a while. The rakes brought up dozens of mud-caked oysters. Then Clay had taken a turn. Standing on the rail, he worked the long wooden stiltlike tongs down to the river bottom. The muscles in his shoulders and arms had gotten soft at college and then sore over the days of dragging, and he had felt them strain as he worked the rakes through the mud of the oyster bed. He filled the rest of the bushel, though. Using a canvas bucket on a line, they had washed the oysters down and then cleaned the rakes. A range of purple cloud stretched across the western sky.

  “I thought you had brains, man,” Byron said. Byron had brought his navy corpsman’s knife, clipped to his belt. He pulled it out and flipped open an oyster, severing the muscle that attached it to the shell, and offered it to Clay. It sat fat and floating on its juices. Clay took it and tasted it with the tip of his tongue. Then he sucked the oyster down.

  Byron waited.

  “Fresh enough.”

  “Salty?”

  “Not bad.”

  Byron opened one for himself. “Good for the pecker,” he mumbled, drinking it down. “Could use some horseradish.”

  “I think I can make it work,” Clay continued. “With a good season I could build a second boat. I’d like to start on that. Eventually maybe I could try to buy back the wholesale operation.”

  “Big thinkin’.”

  “It’s been done before. Look at Pappy. It’s called horizontal monopoly. I’ve studied it.”

  “Times change. The life’s gotten harder. Just go down to Tilghman and listen to the oystermen for a while. Better yet, just look at ’em.”

  “I’ve seen them. Plenty.”

  Byron gestured with his arms, opening them wide toward the open water. “Bay ain’t what she used to be.”

  “The Bay needs managing. Needs people on her who understand that.”

  “May not be enough left to manage. Or time left.”

  After a while Byron wiped the blade of his knife across his pants leg. He turned it, watching it flash the fading light, then sheathed it. It was one of the few things he had brought back from Vietnam. “Bones of the deep,” Byron muttered. “To all the bones in hell . . .” Raising his beer, he crumpled the empty can in his fist and threw it into the oyster bushel. “Could use some good dope right now.”

  Clay sat on the rail, quiet, sensing the turn in Byron’s mood. “You think about it too much, don’t you?” Clay said after a while.

  Byron hesitated. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Nope. Not at all. I don’t think about it at all.” He paused. It was not something he had been able or willing to speak about. “It’s just there, though,” he continued, “like something stuck in my gut. Attached. But I try not to notice it. In fact, I think mostly about trying to think about other things.”

  Both of them listened for a moment to the silence. The sun started to dip below the horizon, and spires of violet fire radiated up into the round of darkening space. The bateau, motionless on the still water, seemed suspended in a perfect element, suspended in silent time.

  Byron opened another oyster for Clay, then one for himself. “I think about that afternoon, for instance, when you and me went fishing. When we were kids. That time in that rickety goddamn rowboat.” He paused and reached into his jacket for his cigarettes. “And we hit into them stripers off Castle Haven.”

  Clay leaned back against the cabin and stretched his legs down the rail. He watched the water, still as death.

  “Caught a boatful. Before that diddly engine quit. They bit off all our tackle and you wouldn’t stop. Remember? You tore up your shirt and put a piece on the hook and caught that one.”

  Byron flicked a white-tipped wooden match against the gunnel and
it flared. He lit a cigarette, taking a long, deep drag, and exhaled slowly. “The sunset over the churning water turned it all red, and I thought it was blood everywhere and got scared.”

  “Well, we weren’t more than ten.”

  “God. Remember how we got blowed out in the channel and then couldn’t make any headway and then dark coming on and with no lights?”

  He leaned and spat a piece of tobacco over the side. “And how we saw this figure comin’ at us, above the mist, like Jesus on the water, from out of the dusk? I was glad to see your pappy and then this here boat under him, I’ll say that. And then I thought he was gonna kill us. But he surprised me.”

  “He was full of those.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Surprises.”

  Byron dragged on his cigarette. “You were hotter than he was.”

  “I lost track of my way. On the water.”

  “Well, what’d you just say? We weren’t more’n ten.”

  Clay smiled. “Still.”

  “How about that time before? Might’ve been that same spring. When Pappy first let you take the rowboat. And we went chicken-neckin’ in the creek.” Byron chuckled to himself. “Remember? Neither of us had shoes on, and one small bushel basket, overflowin’. Crabs everywhere. The whole bottom of the boat full of ’em tryin’ to pinch us. So we jumped over and swam to shore and had to go lookin’ for some shoes.” Byron pulled on his smoke. “He saw the boat out there floatin’ and thought we’d both drowned. Shit.”

  Clay studied his friend, there doing as he had over the past two weeks or so, trying to make him feel better about Pappy. He reached his elbows back to stretch his shoulders. From high overhead came a clamor, and he looked up and watched the contours of two migrating flocks of Canada geese converge, blending into a single focus northward.

  Byron changed subjects. “That Matty is a piece of work, ain’t he?”

  Clay didn’t respond.

  “Some guys are just born with it, I guess.” He shook his head.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know. Looks. Money. Chicks.”

  “Think so, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Clay sniffed at a stir of breeze and watched a cat’s-paw scuttle across the coppery surface. “There’s a price everyone pays for what they have.”

  “You suppose?”

  “Matty’s got a generous side. The way he took me in right off. He and Kate. I told you. But he’s kind of adrift, a little bit. Got no need to be otherwise, maybe.”

  “What’s his family got? Like a city block they own in Richmond?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Where did he go to high school again?”

  “Near Charlottesville. Woodbury-Forest. He boarded from like tenth grade. Didn’t like it, though.”

  Another pocket of rolling breeze lazily rippled the water, quiet like the rustling of a skirt. Both young men paused to listen and feel the imperceptible motion of the boat.

  “That Kate’s a looker,” Byron continued.

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s got her eye on you.”

  Clay shrugged. “It’s a friendship.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s just like that.”

  “With you, maybe.”

  “You shouldn’t be commenting on what you don’t know.”

  “I know what I see.”

  “She was just trying to offer some comfort. In her way. Just like you do in yours.” Clay watched Byron shift his position. “She’s with Matty. Our feelings for each other are different. Anyway, you know how I feel about that.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re gettin’ your mind off her, then.”

  “Right.”

  “You need to find some new dolly bird anyway.”

  “You think I wouldn’t like to?”

  “What?”

  “Find one.”

  Byron grinned. “Yeah. Tell me about it.” He held up the ash of his cigarette, burning down. “Why is it that all we think about is women.”

  Clay grunted his assent.

  “Makes me kinda mad.”

  “No sense being mad at them. They’re as lost as us.”

  “I’ve seen Laura-Dez a few times,” Byron offered. “Saw her last weekend.”

  It always struck Clay funny how Byron pronounced his girlfriend’s name, which was Lourdes. Her father was a dentist who had emigrated from Cuba. But Byron had called her Laura-Dez from their first date in high school, and she had somehow taken to it.

  “She still sweet as ever?”

  “She had some great pot. Took me to the drive-in in her VW van. We watched the Culpepper Cattle Company. We laid in the back. She let me strip her right there.” He paused. “Her skin is the smoothest. Pure. But she won’t come near my scar. Won’t touch it even. She’s scared of me now. Something. Distant.”

  “Doesn’t sound too distant.”

  “We can’t talk. Like there’s nothin’ to say.”

  “She’ll come around. She probably needs you to talk.”

  Byron paused. “Well, talk is cheap.”

  “Not all talk.”

  “Maybe not all talk.”

  Another flush of breeze rippled the surface of the river. It carried off the last orange flecks of ash from Byron’s cigarette just as he flicked its stub into the water, and they both watched it sizzle and die in an instant.

  “You know, you might as well finish school anyway. You’ve got this far.”

  Clay folded his arms. “I’ve been hearing that advice enough. Like an echo.”

  “Don’t sound from your tone like you got sense enough to follow it.” Byron grabbed two more beers from the cooler. He threw one to Clay.

  “Probably not.”

  “I was watchin’ you out there. Searchin’ the creeks. I saw your face. I saw it comin’.”

  Tapping the aluminum top with his finger, Clay opened his beer and took a drink. “I don’t particularly like where I’m heading now,” he said. “I don’t want to go to the city. I don’t want to sell stocks. Or insurance.”

  “Bay’s hurt. Gettin’ sicker. You know those fellas in the statehouse don’t give a good goddamn.”

  Clay sat fingering his Adam’s apple. “Well, least it’s honest work.”

  “That’s why it don’t pay. Don’t they teach you nothin’ in college?”

  “Anyway, I’ve mostly made up my mind.”

  “Mostly, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Clay turned back to the water and studied the jagged moon hovering just under the surface. “Yeah, mostly.” Then, turning, he added, “You know, you could use a job yourself.”

  Byron seemed to ponder this for a while. “I hear Mac Longley just bought hisself a new Grady White. Like a two hundred on the back. Cuddy cabin.”

  “She’s a waxing gibbous moon,” Clay said, transfixed by the water.

  Byron gulped down the rest of his beer. “Right nice. Really. I mean the Grady White.” He waited and then went on. “Heard he’s also buyin’ one of the cottages down Town Creek.”

  Clay pulled his gaze up from the river. “Yeah? Well, crabbing must be good.” He nodded distractedly.

  “It ain’t crabs, Clayton. He ain’t waterin’ serious at all anymore.”

  “No?” Clay blinked, and his eyes seemed to focus. “Then what?”

  “He was clammin’ mostly and crabbin’ some. Got beat bad, what with that clam moratorium two years back. They shut ’em down. Remember? The bacteria. All the nitrogen from the farm runoff. So they say. And overfishin’. Then after, they cut the boat limit back from sixty to fifteen bushels. Bank nearly took him down, heard tell. Hurt Pappy too, I’m sure. Anyway, word is he’s runnin’ dope. Part of some network, I heard. Smooth operation. People can’t get enough.”

  Clay was silent. He waited for Byron to continue.

  “Started with his Bay-built. At first. Expandin’ now, I suppose.” Byron grinned. “New opportunities for the enterprisin’ waterman.”


  Rising up, Clay frowned.

  “Money’s good, I hear. Real good.” Byron paused. “Gettin’ rich gettin’ folks high. Not bad.”

  Each quietly eyed the other.

  “It’s a thought,” Byron said absently.

  “Not for you.” Clay spoke in almost a whisper. He coughed, like something was caught in his throat.

  “Just a thought, man.”

  “A bad one. It’s a wrong turn. I know that. You know it too.” Clay took a long breath. “Wrong for you. That’s for sure.”

  Byron looked away. “Figured you’d probably say that.” He tried to change tacks. “It’s just marijuana anyway. Ain’t no harm in it. Hell, I like it. You do too.”

  “Byron.”

  “Well, is there?”

  “What?”

  “Harm in it?”

  “Smoking a joint and selling dope is different.”

  “How’s that? You’re on weak ground there, pal.”

  Clay pursed his brow. “I sure can’t recall one drug dealer I care for. Or ever have. Mac Longley included.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not a right direction. That’s all. It’s trouble.”

  “Life is trouble.”

  Clay watched, uncertain of what to say, as his friend opened another beer and took a long drink.

  “Forget it.” Byron waved him off. “I’m just kickin’ it around. Tryin’ to sort shit out.” He drank again. “Really. That’s him. I ain’t sure it’s me.”

  “No. It’s not you.”

  “Yeah. Well, when you aimin’ to start on your foolishness?”

  Clay looked out, scanning the darkening streaks of colored light firing the dusk. “Soon enough,” he answered. “Spring coming, anyway.”

  “Don’t cut your anchor line, you know. You may want to go back.”

  Clay made a pretense of accepting the advice. “Good thinking.”

  “Yeah. Well, there may be a shortage of that around here lately.”

  “I can drink to that,” Clay retorted.

  “I’ll drink to anything,” Byron answered, raising his can.

  They stood there facing each other and then were quiet, together taking in the peace of dusk out on the water. And after a time Clay nodded and moved over to the center console and started up the bateau.