Hatteras Blue (21 page)

His life... |y

A shift of wind brought music to him for a moment. Someone's radio, he thought He was considering another beer when he heard the distant thunder of tuned pipes. A few minutes later tires grated on gravel behind him in the lot He got up. A long black hulk crouched there, rumbling, its Cyclopean eye glowing and vibrating. He lifted his hand, staring into the glare. After a moment a thin silhouette detached itself, hesitated for a moment, then swung to earth. The eye went out. The figure limped toward him in the darkness.

"Jack?"

"Tiller, that you? Hey, good to see you." They shook hands.

"Feeling all right? Sure you're up to going to sea?"

"Sure, man. Makin' money, aren't we?" The boy laughed "Ribs are sore, but doc said guys my age either die or recover fast. I figured if I could make it here on this hog I could handle some time at sea."

Well, that's great. Say, whose cycle is that?"

"Sharon's brother's."

"How are you and Sharon getting along?"

"Okay." Caffey shrugged. "She got to play nurse a little. I think she liked it"

"Did you?"

"I guess so."

Galloway grinned in the dark and cuffed him. "Look, I got some things to do. Why don't you go aboard and bunk down forward."

"Sure. Just let me grab my bedroll."

"And let me have your keys, would you. I got an errand—"

"No problem," said Caffey agreeably. "But be careful. He said he'd kill me if he found a scratch."

The Harley was enormous, the kind of cycle Galloway had dreamed about when he was Caffey's age. Its engine sounded like the Reos on the boat—when they ran, he thought. With luck it might get him back by dawn. He wheeled it carefully out of the lot, trying to remember who Sharon was. Then he had it, a slight pale girl. She reminded him of ... Christ, he thought then, I screwed her mother in high school The realization left him feeling incredibly old.

He had not driven much in the months since leaving Raleigh, and of course not at all for four years before that He put the machine on the twin lanes of 70 east, toward the Outer Banks, and kept it in third for a mile or two to get used to it As he increased speed the marshland and then a low forest began to flash past, the stars keeping him company above the strip of road, and he settled himself in the deep saddle to think.

It took almost four hours to get to Hatteras Island, though it was less than fifty miles from him in a straight line. He had to wait twice for ferries, once from the mainland to Ocracoke, then again to Hatteras itself. At last the familiar beam flicked overhead, wiping out the stars, and he slowed. He gassed at the Red Drum in Buxton and headed north on an all but deserted road. Behind him Hatteras Light dropped away. Empty marsh and dune, Park Service land, opened darkly before his humming tires.

The lonely roar of surf followed him for miles north along the shore. From the speeding machine he looked out on the sound, shimmering silver beneath a newly risen moon. To his right, between occasional gaps in the dunes, came the answering glimmer of the breaking sea. Past tiny villages, a few score scattered homes, lifted on pilings to let hurricane surf roll beneath. Past the rising bones of the new condominiums, with his brother's name on the signs. Past the shuttered windows and flaking shingles of the old lifesaving station. He thought for a moment of his ancestor, pulling a boat out and back through January surf thirty feet high, a sea not a man in the crew expected to live through. When he was a child he'd thought him a hero. Now, he was not sure. He might have been a fool

The wind tore at his ears. It was all in the way you looked at things .,. and the way the world looked at you. The island of his childhood had still been the Hatteras of legend: a sparsely peopled community knit close by isolation, kinship, and a fierce yet silent pride. His shame and regret made sense to him because he had been one of them. But was it reasonable, was it fitting anymore? So much had changed When he was hand-holding high his stepmother had told him the names of everyone they met. Now barren dune and heron-haunted marsh had become sudden towns, thousands of anonymous and interchangeable people with anonymous and interchangeable accents; they knew no one and no one of them knew another. Why should he care or grieve over his private guilt? The name Galloway meant nothing now. The old ways of trawlers and surfmen were gone. Real estate, building, peeling dollars from tourists like leaves from artichokes—that was the future. Those who realize that, like my brother, he thought, will survive. And those who don't will be destroyed, or destroy themselves. like my father.

Like Lyle III? No way, he answered himself over the roar of the machine. This boy's going for the score.

But he was still thinking of the old days when he turned off the main highway. He cut the ignition and rolled onward, downward, in silence and darkness. The track was so narrow brush hissed against his legs. The old man had liked it out here, despite the mosquitoes. Refused to leave the placid sound, the sandy hopeless

garden, the rickety pier his grandfather had built____

Galloway pulled the cycle over when the marl ended. When he kicked down the stand he paused for a long time. The smells of the night pulled him backward through three decades. It had been years since he had stood on this silent sandy path, with the yaupon pressing close and fragrant under the moonlight But he had been here many times since. In dream, immured by stone and steel, surrounded by the sleep-stink of hived males. Back then he had been a different man. The house was just as he remembered it. Big, and old, and dark The turn-of-the-century ornamentation at its eaves fretted the sky. He could just make out the carved dolphins. He hesitated for a long moment at the edge of the lawn. But no light showed. He glanced at his watch. It was well after midnight

At last he moved forward The wooden steps creaked as they always had, familiar as childhood, yet strange as dreams. The screen door opened silently to his touch, unlocked, unlatched as of old. On the porch a rusting refrigerator glowed faintly. The house smelled familiar and yet different Was Anna still here? He didn't even know if she was still alive. Hell, this house could belong to someone else by now. She'd never written him in prison, never answered the letter he wrote her when his lawyer, dropping by for the last time to tell him his appeal had been rejected, had told him that his father was dead.

He moved into the entrance hallway, into darkness like the bottom of the sea. Felt his way around a corner and eased open a door.

The old man's office was just as he remembered it. Dustier, perhaps, but the big chart of the Atlantic still hung on the wall and the brass chronometer, tarnished now, beside the plaques from ships Lyle Galloway II had served on and commanded. Its unhurried hollow tick made him shiver. He pulled the flashlight from his pocket and crossed to the filing cabinet A forty-year career, seaman to solid-stripe admiral, in four dusty drawers ... he found the proper folder a third of the way down. He flipped it open and shuffled rapidly through yellowing papers. Then stopped.

CONFUDENTIAL At Sea, 11 May 1945

From: Commanding Officer, USCGS Hiram G. RUSSELL

To: Commander, U.S. Atlantic Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations

Subject: Destruction of German Submarine— Report of.

The following is a report of particulars of action undertaken on 9 May 1945 "between USCGS RUSSELL and USS ARNOLD and a German submarine. The action resulted in the loss of ARNOLD and the destruction of one German U-boat, type and manning unknown____

Galloway read it quickly but with care, then stopped He reread the last page. He flipped it closed. Keyes had lied.

There was no mention in the report of a German chief machinist. There had been no survivors at all. His father had depth-charged them all in the water. Galloway saw now why the report had never been released. And understood, now, a little of his father's grimness, the iron rigidity with which he had met any deviation by his younger son from what he saw as the right. And that was not the only puzzling thing...

He was just beginning to think about it when the lights came on in the room. He turned, dazzled, still holding the report

"Lyle?" said the woman with the gun.

"Hello, mom," he said slowly.

"No. Not that Not anymore."

She was old now, he saw. Five years had done that to her. Once she'd had broad shoulders, she could lift him when he was nearly full grown. Now she had shrunken, gone gray.

"Anna," he said

"What are you doing here? Have you broken in?" Her eyes went to the desk. "What are you here for?"

"Dad's old action report On that submarine he sank."

"Why do you want that?"

"I'm curious."

'You're mixed up in something criminal again. They told me you were paroled. They should have kept you in Raleigh."

"Now, Anna, hold it We haven't seen each other since dad died."

"Your father didn't die, Lyle. He loved life—as long as he could live it with honor. You killed him."

The lack of sleep, or the long ride on the Harley, made him feel suddenly weak. He gripped the edge of the desk. His stepmother had changed. Once they had been close. Now she was an old, bitter woman. With his father's carbine in her hands.

He took a deep breath. "I didn't come back to take anything. I've never asked for anything of his. It's all yours. I'm sorry it happened the way it did, all of it"

"liar," she said. Her lips were inflexible. "Criminal Drug dealer. Murderer." The little rifle trembled in her hand "I should shoot you now for being in here."

He made a careful judgment, very careful, and moved toward her. She stepped back. "Stop," she said. "Stop rigfrt there!"

"Mom—"

She pulled the trigger. As he had hoped, but not known, she had not understood how to load a cartridge from the magazine. He took it away from her gently, smelling her familiar scent, and went down the hallway to the front room. It was the same. She had kept it ail the same, even to his own mother's picture over the old DuMont television that had not worked since the day Kennedy went to Dallas. * ..

"We forgot you, Lyle," she Was saying behind him. "And Otie and I, we don't need you. Or want you. Get out, Tiller. There are other places to live. You can only hurt us. Get out of here and never come back."

He looked back as he opened the door. The light was behind her now. He could see her hands doubled into fists; could see withered breasts under the cotton nightgown, could see how old she had grown. But he could not see her face, her expression, alone in the house, alone with the dead. He closed the door gently, hearing the same rattle it had always made as it set, and went toward the machine.

He did not quite make it In the moonlight, in the bushes, he came across the old rowboat, his grandfather's, in which he and Otie and Mezey Aydlett had played sur&nan long ago. Galloway fell to his knees beside it, burying his face in the loblolly needles, sobbing helplessly into the night-cold sand of Hatteras.

thirteen

I
T WAS JUST AFTER DAWN ON WEDNESDAY when Galloway, squinting into the new sun, steadied
Victory's
wheel in mid-channel and advanced the throttle.

It had taken a full day of dawn-to-midnight work to locate and load the gear they needed and to jury-repair for sea. Now, shading his eyes against the glare, he examined the strange short chop of the outgoing tide as it met the Atlantic outside the low whalebacks of Shackleford Banks. Underway at last, he thought. His feelings about it were mixed. He kept wanting to look over his shoulder. At last he did, looking not directly at the others but at the torpedo shape the old PT towed a hundred feet astern.

"It's holding, Tiller," said Jack Caffey. The boy motioned to the bridle-rigged line that led from
Victory's
stern to the bright orange thing she towed. "Those aft cleats are solid. I don't know what went wrong with that forward one. The deck must have gone dry rot." "Keep an eye on it. I'm going to crank her up." The diesels hammered louder, and smoke swirled away in the fresh wind. Keyes came up from below. "The tune-up helped," he said, stepping up beside Galloway. "Though you really need to pull them, get 'em rebuilt" "I can do that when we get back"

"Hell, you can buy yourself a new boat then."

Galloway ignored that. Instead he said, "Those exhausts sound better too."

"I patched them with Mar-Tex. Clamped sheet metal on the worst places. They'll stand up, I think."

"Thanks."

"Nice weather today. This is a funny sea here. One day storm, the next mild and bright as the Caribbean."

"It's had that rep for right many years." Galloway looked out over the sunny blue expanse, dimpled with whitecaps, then upward to a cloudless sky before he lowered his eyes to the chart. He walked his fingers from tan to deep blue. "We can cut the cape close in weather like this. At fifteen knots—no, won't be able to do that with this thing astern. Say ten. That'll be nine, ten hours back out to the wreck."

"That'll put us there around three or four. We can dive then—maybe twice before we lose the light."

'Teah," Galloway agreed absently. He turned again to look back at the vehicle.

Twenty feet long, the little submersible had cockpits for two divers and a trunk aft for extra tanks and equipment. Batteries powered a single centerline screw; planes and rudder controlled attitude and direction. The stick was in the forward cockpit. Half-submerged for towing, it slipped through the water on the end of its line like an orange porpoise.