Hatteras Blue (10 page)

"Tiller. Can we talk?"

"Sure."

"Did you know you have grease on the back of that shirt?"

"Yeah."

"This old man. You don't know him? Who he might be? You're sure?"

"Doesn't sound like anyone I know. No, I think this is Dick's business."

She glanced toward the companionway; it was empty, but she lowered her voice just the same. "He says he doesn't know who he is. But I was watching him when he read the note. I think maybe he does."

"He says he doesn't."

"What
is
his business? The two of you are getting awfully chummy."

"He says he's a historian."

"What do you mean, he says he's a historian?"

"Nothing. He's a historian."

"Well, what is he doing here?"

"He's paying me to do research."

"That's all?"

"That's all so far, Counselor."

"Don't condescend to me, Mister Galloway."

"Sorry, Miz Hirsch. But you have a habit of forcing me to do it."

They looked at each other angrily. At last he turned away and resumed his rummaging. He pulled out a wire pennant and examined it. It was very rusty and one of the swagings was cracked. He fed it out through the porthole and it splashed outside.

"What are you doing?"

He sighed. "Normal upkeep, just normal business. Checking out my gear."

"Are you going out?"

"I have no plans to, but I like to keep ready."

"Tiller—after the trawler you blew—do you have any more work lined up?"

"Not a patch of it, darlin'. This fella's the only source of income in sight at the moment So I've got to play him close if I plan to eat next week. Do me a favor, Bernice. Don't scare him away."

"I can take a hint. Well, I'm going to drive up to Sam and Omie's for lunch. Want to come?"

"Thanks, no."

She left feeling rejected; vaguely angry, vaguely puzzled. There was something going on between the two of them. Keyes didn't look like any historian to her. But whatever he was he'd managed to rouse Tiller part way from his apathy, like a half-raised hulk. That was good.

But then what was this "Tarnhelm" business, strangers leaving laconic and mysterious warnings____

She decided it would bear watching. But for the moment she dismissed it from her mind, dismissed Keyes too. She was hot and hungry and looked forward to some fresh fried clams. All the way to Nags Head she watched the road behind her. But no black and silver car showed itself.

seven

L
ate that evening they headed south,

down the long stroke of Hatteras Island's reversed L. Near Rodanthe the roadway sagged. The sea had chewed its way through the dunes that winter and only bulldozers and sandbags had forced it back. Past Buxton it rose, winding through low forests of live oak and loblolly pine. As they purred along tiny red eyes peered back at them from the underbrush. Halfway past Frisco Keyes said, "What in hell are those things?"

"Mink," said Galloway in a monotone. "Or Russian rats, we call 'em. They say a Russian ship went aground here once—okay, slow down. Right coming up."

They moved off the road onto marl. The crushed oystershell crackled under the tires as they followed its winding course between clumps of bush. It reminded Galloway of another house, one he had not been to since his equivocal homecoming from Raleigh.

His father's house, now his stepmother's, the one he'd grown up in____

Keyes interrupted his musing.
^tf
Who is this guy Aydlett? Why does he live way out here?"

"I told you, he used to be a big name in marlin fishing, back in the fifties."

'You said you worked for him."

'Yeah, used to bait-boy on the
Princess
when I was a kid. He was kind of a father figure, I guess. I liked it better than home."

"You didn't get along at home?"

"Lyle Two didn't believe in coddling his sons. Either of us. He kept a length of rope out in the boatshed I got real familiar with."

"You said you had a stepmother."

"Anna's a good woman. She'd hide me and try to stop him. But my dad had the last word. Couple times I ran away. This is where I'd come."

"He's a fisherman, you said."

"A charter skipper. He has—he had—anyway, there's three boats; the
Queen,
the
Princess
; the
Duchess.
He built them with his own hands, him and his sons. But he's been retired for years now."

"Wait a minute. He can't be that old if he was a boy in forty-five—"

"He wasn't."

"The old woman said he was."

"She didn't say he was a boy. She said, 'that Aydlett boy.' Now listen. I want you to stay in the car."

"Why?"

"Because I told you to."

"Well, good luck. Should I cut the lights?"

"Yeah."

Three small houses loomed vaguely in the darkness ahead, surrounded by live oak and red cedar. From two came the white glow of electric light. Only the last, farthest into the soundside bush, waited with windows dark. "Which one?" said Keyes.

"That one."

"The dark one? But—"

"Clifton Aydlett doesn't need the light anymore," said Tiller evenly.

When the engine stopped the night was very quiet. There was only the creak and whirr of the night insects, the distant shiver of surf, and once in a long

while the whine of tires from the direction of the road. Marl crunched under Galloway's feet as he walked the last few steps to the house.

The old man was standing behind the screen, as if watching the night. He waited silently as Galloway mounted the porch.

"Cap'n Aydlett."

"Who's that?"

"Someone come to talk."

"Well come in, come in. Hold on, I'll light a lamp for you."

"It's all right, you don't need to."

But the wooden kitchen match was already sputtering along the screen. Galloway watched the thick work-warped fingers tremble over the wick, turning it up, shaking out the match. When it flared up he looked around.

It had once been, or still was, a storeroom. Against the walls were stacked bundles of hand-tied nets. In the roofbeams were racked bamboo poles, rods, old outriggers striped red and white. Shoved into corners of the plank floor were heaps of bronze propellers, fighting chairs, Pflueger reels, old cans of Athey and Pettit paint and varnish. It smelled of pipe tobacco and turpentine and hot kerosene from the lamp. The man who shuffled slowly among them was not large, but his shoulders bulged under his loose shirt as he lowered himself into his armchair.

"You'll have to trim it yourself. Sit down, sit down there at that table. You know, I believe I know your voice, but can't say I get the name right off. It was—?"

"It's Tiller Galloway, Mr. Aydlett."

"Tiller, sure, I knew right off—" He paused then, stopped sightless in the dimness to which he had retreated. In the silence Tiller could hear the crash of sea beyond the dunes. "Galloway, you say?"

"Yes sir."

"Lyle Galloway's younger boy, the strong one, that used to fish with me?"

"That's right."

The old man said in a low voice, "I'll thank you to leave now. I don't believe I want to speak with you, sir."

Galloway was thinking, has it been five years? Six? It was hard to believe this old man, gaunt and trembling, had once been able to lift a fifty-horse Johnson with one arm.

"Please listen to me, Cap'n. You're one of the people I think of as my friends."

"I know Mezey wasn't the best of boys, he went off the tracks when he was young. But you finished the job proper. Many's the night I have cursed your name, Lyle Galloway."

"I paid for it. Four years in Raleigh. It's over."

"It's not over for me. Or for your dad."

Galloway looked at the blank milky eyes. The chimney began to smoke and he turned the wick down. His own hands were trembling too, he saw. "Sir, I don't forget his—suicide. Ever."

'You were the cause of it. He loved you. When you got booted out of the service there in Vee-etnam it almost killed him."

"I know."

The old man sat and trembled. It was not from emotion, Galloway saw now. It was Parkinson's; his leg jiggled incessantly, rocking the armchair; his hands shook where they lay on the armrests.

"And my boy," said Aydlett at last, almost in a whisper.

Galloway closed his eyes.

He remembered fishing with the Aydletts. He remembered the aching hours of boredom as they trolled for swordfish and white marlin, dolphin, tuna, wahoo; and then the sudden disciplined panic of the hit. The day-long battle they'd fought with a huge black marlin late one July through thunderstorms and line squalls, the lightning all around them like white-hot lizards running down a vine; they'd ended it at dusk with the fading fish on deck, a massive beast that weighed out a heartbreaking ten pounds short of the IGFA all-tackle record. The brief season of the sailfish and the savage butchery of shark fishing. How Meshach Aydlett had saved his life once when he'd slipped in a patch of bloody chum and fallen overboard into a boil of makos.

Years later Galloway had killed him.

It had happened on that last run, not that far from the cape. Somewhere out there Mezey Aydlett's bones lay in the cold silt. He'd been one of the last. The Panamanian mate was dead by then, along with most of the crew. That was the Baptist's way of cutting costs.

Not that he did it himself. Juan Nunez preferred to let the inexorable laws of economics and psychology do his work. He distributed the profits from a voyage by shares. Ostensibly that made each man a partner. What it really did was make each the enemy of all the others, since the fewer were left at the end of a voyage the more each share was worth. And of course the Baptist's cut as supplier benefited too.

The result was a hell-ship, an anarchic nightmare where each man guarded his back and even those who were satisfied—as captain and owner, Galloway would have netted over half a million dollars—had to defend themselves against men crazed with greed and uninhibited by conscience.

He stopped himself from thinking. If only he could never think again, never recall the past... never recall his friend's face when the bullet hit him____

Now, in the honey glow of the kerosene lamp, he took a shuddering breath. "Sir, I don't ask you to forget it. It's true he done wrong, like I did, but he was as good a man as me. It was just him or me there at the end. You've got to believe that.

"But I've finished with that, the smuggling, the drugs. I've paid for it. Fm out on parole now and I'm working up to Harry's as a salvage diver."

The old man sat silent in the yellow light.

"I'm not asking you to forget Mezey. I know you can't. But I want you to forgive me."

"Forgive you? Why?"

"Because I'm sorry."

The old man looked at him with his motionless eyes for a long time. At last he said, "No."

Galloway sat numb, unable to move.

"I 'magine you're right about Meshach. He was not a bad boy. But he got with bad company up in Virginia Beach. It was that white stuff that killed him. That dope is pure evil... What was it really brought you here, Tiller? It wasn't to ask me that, was it?"

"Well, yes sir, that was mainly it."

"Then who's that outside?"

Galloway jerked up his head. For a moment he stared at the blank black interiors of the windows. The old man chuckled sadly then. "I could hear him," he said. "Closed the car door, then took a leak over by my motor shop. Friend of yours?"

"Sort of," said Galloway.

"He ought not be wandering around like that. Them no-see-ums will be eatin' him alive. Plus we got them cottonmouths. He scares one of them he's likely to regret it. Go ahead, get him in here."

Galloway went to the door. Keyes was standing outside by the little porch, his shirt glowing like a ghost in the starlight.

"Go ahead, tell me about it," said Aydlett when they were both settled opposite him. "I assume it's some kind of scrape. You was always in them as a kid."

Galloway took a breath. Despite what the old man had said he seemed willing still to talk. Or maybe he was just curious. Whichever it was, this was not going to be easy. "Well, I was up to Nags Head this morning," he began. "I was talking to Mercy Mae Baum."

"Is she still alive?"

"She's getting some feeble, but she's still alive."

"And what were you talking about with Mercy Mae? I remember her well. And I remember Leford. He was a good man with an oar."

"It has to do with Leford. And the other men that Mercy told us were with you on the beach patrol in April of forty-five."

The old man did not move.

"It has to do with the bodies they found up to Kin-nekeet," Tiller said.