Hatteras Blue (8 page)

In which case, it might pay to stay with the man, act like he bought his story. Keep paying out line on him, till he found out what he was after.

He waited, but Keyes said nothing. So at last he just said, "Don't threaten me, bud. It has a bad effect. Frankly, you may be wasting your time. Any ship that went down off Hatteras, at least in the last fifty years, it'd be in the records. And if it had anything worth money in it, six hundred feet isn't too much for a big firm with the right gear. There'd have been salvors out there a long time ago."

"I'm hiring you, not your opinions."

Galloway dropped it. He got up, staggering a little, and went into the head forward. Keyes looked after him, then picked up the pencil. He tapped it against his lips for a moment, then carefully and thoroughly erased all the marks on the chart.

There was the snap of a lock, the hollow lonely beat of two sets of footsteps pacing down a dock. A motor purring into life. Then silence came to stay, and the boat rocked gently in the night wind.

five

OT MUCH IN THE WAY OF ROADS OUT

JL% here," said Keyes the next morning. He was maintaining sixty, staring out through the tinted windshield at a slim shimmering of asphalt.

"Wasn't even this two-laner till fifty-eight."

"How did they live? Or was there anybody here then?"

Galloway glanced at him. This morning the blond man wore khaki Banana Republic hiking shorts and an open sports shirt. His narrow feet were strapped into Birkenstock sandals. A Rolex and a hammered nugget ring glinted gold as he swung the convertible around a northbound pickup.

"'Course there were. Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo; Kin-nekeet, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, Hatteras. Little fishing villages. They grew up around the inlets and the old Lifesaving stations. Or where the dunes were high enough so beans or corn would grow without getting salt-killed."

"But how did they get around?"

"They
didn't, not much. Mostly went places by boat, or drove along the beach at low tide. I remember doin' that when I was growing up. Had to take the ferry across at the inlet—that was before they built the bridge. You still have to take a ferry to get to Ocracoke."

Now the road rose and fell as marsh spread to their left. The dunes cut off their view of the sea But herons, stilts, and willets waded in freshwater ponds, and ducks burst into belated flight to clear the road as Keyes bore down on them.

"So tell me who we're going to see."

"Her name's Mercy Baum. She's oh, late eighties. No, she must be ninety by now. Lived on Hatteras all her life. Knows everything. Local history, that kind of thing."

"And you think she could help us."

"If she wants to. And if she's ... still able. Anyway, it's a place to start."

When the car lifted, the bridge lofting them high over Oregon Inlet, they could see for miles. Behind them stretched the island, green of yaupon and bay-berry and myrtle, tan of sand, its seaward coast gnawed by white surf. To their left the Pamlico stretched a sheet of dimpled silver to the horizon; over it, too far to see, lay the mainland. But Galloway was searching to seaward. "Looks like she broke up clear and went out with the tide," he said at last.

"Who?"

"The trawler. I can't see a thing where she used to be."

When they came down off the bridge they were in Nags Head. A few miles later the unpopulated scrub and dunes gave way suddenly to restaurants, hotels, fishing piers, and the ubiquitous cottages. Identical, boxlike, they swarmed along the shore. Above them from time to time loomed larger structures, many still being sheathed with plywood: the time-share resorts. They crawled north on the bypass, mired in moving metal. In the narrow strip between sound and ocean the summer tourists thronged the Deep Africa Mini-Golf, the Surf Slide, the Go-Kart Grand Prix, Dowdy's Amusement Park, Brew-Through, Hardee's, Tastee-

Freeze, McDonald's. A few miles past an immense hill of bare sand Galloway pointed to the left. "Turn in here."

"All right." The BMW's tires hummed on new paving as it wound upward into soundside dunes. At the crests of the road they could look down on the Albemarle, immense, shining, morning-calm.

"This is it. Park here," said Galloway at last.

"You're joking."

"Afraid not."

The building was modern and low, placed not atop but amid the sandhills, as if hidden away. An ambulance stood ready at a side door. Over the entrance stainless steel letters read
kitty hawk nursing center.

The late morning sunlight glinted off the dunes outside the window, glinted again off salt-white hair. It was cut short and pinned up with a brown barrette. Tiny hands lay softly together on a colorful afghan. Outside in the corridor came from time to time the hiss of wheelchairs on tile, the chatter of nurses.

"Mrs. Baum, you have a visitor."

Galloway smiled thanks at the attendant, then bent.

"Mercy?"

The bright blue eyes turned instandy toward him, and the old woman smiled.

"Mrs. Baum, it's Tiller. You remember me?"

The smile clouded. "Tiller—? Can't say I do. Things ain't as clear as they used to be. Still, whoever you are, I'm glad to have you to visit."

"I wondered if we could talk a little—about the old days?"

"The old days. There's right many come to ask me about them lately. Well—sure."

The attendant bent over her for a moment, wiped her cheek with a tissue, whispered loudly in her ear; she shook her head. The attendant left. Galloway drew a chair to hers; Keyes found a nearby sofa. "I appreciate it, Mrs. Baum. We'll talk a little, and then I'll ask a question or two, maybe."

The woman sat for a moment, looking out again; her eyes went distant. Then she began, not rapidly but unhesitating, as if reciting a poem memorized years before.

"I remember a lot about it. About the dirt roads and all such as that. About the last one left who does. My father and my mother have been dead for years, and my sisters and brothers too. And all my other kinfolks are dead. I've got children—four, two boys and two girls.

"You'll want to know when I was born. Well, that was in eighteen and ninety-eight. Our closest doctor was at Manns Harbor. Had to go by water to get him, wa'n't no bridges, you see. Sometimes you died 'fore he got there. But Doctor Gardner was with my mother when I was born.

"Most all my people were Service. My father and grandfather were in the Coast Guard—it was the Life-saving Service, years ago. My father was a surfman. His father died when he was thirteen years old. He died in that storm of eighty-nine trying to save them people in the
Henry P. Simmons.
So my father couldn't go to school. He had to go out and work to take care of his mother. He had it pretty hard.

"All my people come from around here. My mother's people were Claffords. Seems I heard her say they originally come from somewhere in the mainland. Little Washington, or somewhere that way. Now my father's father, he came from Manteo. There's Stories still on Roanoke Island. And my father's mother, she was a Etheridge. There were four of them, Etheridge girls. My grandmother Casey, and Lizbeth, and Clara, and Kelly Lea. I didn't know them, that was before I was born.

"My mother died having my sister when I wasn't quite three. She's buried in Avon. All my people are in the Methodist cemetery there.

"My daddy was a hard-workin' man. And he raised a big family. I had four sisters, and I had one, two—three brothers. So there was eight of we children to raise up. And I'm telling you he had a hard time of it. But since he was in the Service we always had something to eat and a house to stay in.

"I was a little barefooted girl We didn't have to wear shoes, no, even to school. We had a little one-room schoolhouse in Avon. The teacher she would stand in the door and ring, ring this hand bell, when we children would be playing, for us to come in. And we had to stay in at recess a lot, we'd misbehave and done something we shouldn't. Whisperin' in school, or laughing."

Keyes was eyeing Galloway. Galloway ignored him. "What kind of games did you play?"

"Oh, you'd hardly believe the silly things we did in them days. We had ball games. We had a game we called fifty-oh. And ring around the roses. And a game we called sheepie."

"I remember playing sheepie. But how do you play fifty-oh?"

"Oh, some'd go off and hide, and we try to find them. And if you found them and could make the home before they did we'd win the game. Hide and seek was what it was. Oh, and we played cat. That was like baseball sort of, but we made our own ball out of string, didn't have no factory made.

"And on Sunday afternoons we'd go to this big hill out near Kinnekeet. It wasn't as big as Jockey's Ridge, but it didn't lack much. We'd run up and down it and play until we were so tired we couldn't hardly get back. You wouldn't believe it to go down there. I hear there's all kind of cottages and such there now."

"Tell us some more about your father," said Galloway. 'You said he was in the Service."

'Yes, at Kinnekeet Station, with Otinus and Lyle and them other Galloways they give the gold medals to. Most times he had to walk the night. If it was a stormy night he'd patrol twice a night. He'd walk up and down the beach—that ocean had to be watched for ships, y'know. Then when one of them got in trouble, he pulled an oar. I remember how I used to worry when there was a shipwreck on the beach. Because then the rule was you had to go, you didn't have to come back.

"I remember seein' 'em come ashore. Ships from different countries. Some men got lost, some got saved. I've seen women and little children too torn to pieces, washed ashore on the beach drowned."

Keyes glanced at Galloway again. "Sounds like a rough life," he muttered.

"Oh, you wouldn't hardly believe how people lived them days. Nobody got nowhere much—I think I did go to Norfolk once or twice when I was growin' up. That was when we saw the Wright brothers. My daddy took me through Kitty Hawk on the way up. And they flew over our cart It looked different from planes they have now. And we were scared. Wouldn't you have been?"

"Well, I guess so," said Galloway.

"No, we had no easy time of it. But still, them were happy days. We didn't have a lot, but what we had we enjoyed. If I got a rag doll at Christmas, and a stocking full of nuts and an orange, I was happy. Now little children gets everything and in no time it's tore up. And the grown-ups are the same way. Money, money, money—they'll sell their souls to get the dollar."

"Your husband was in the Service too, wasn't he?" said Galloway. "How did you meet him?"

"Oh, I met Leford in 1914. He was from Buxton, but he lived down in Hatteras Village." A thousand wrinkles deepened on her cheeks. "I met him at the dance at Wahab's Hotel. We moved down there and lived there and then in Rodanthe for right many years. My oldest son was born in Rodanthe, and my daughter was born in Raleigh when I was visiting my sister out there.

"And, yes, he went into the Coast Guard there in the first war, and we were stationed here and there—Poyn-ers Hill, and Kitty Hawk, and in Norfolk for two year even. But I didn't go there, the children was small. And he got transferred back to the Banks in 1937. And finally settled down in Avon, where I was born. I buried him close to twenty year ago."

"Mercy, this is interesting. Hearing about the old days. Let's talk about a little later now. About the war."

"The first one or—"

"The second war. Do you remember that?"

"Lord yes. That was when things changed so much, you know. You could go down to the base, if you had family in the service, and buy just what you wanted. Didn't have to order it, and wait and wait for the mail. I remember Leford bought me a gold watch once." Her hand twisted a plastic bracelet. "I never saw a ship actually get torpedoed; but we could hear it, boom boom boooom. Everything was blacked out. They had the shutters on the Light. I could sit out on my porch in the dark and see the blaze out to sea. I asked my husband one night, 'What'll we do if the Germans come to land on Hatteras?' And Leford said, 'We'll kill 'em, Mercy. That's what that shotgun's for.'"

Keyes was leaning forward; Galloway shot him a warning glance. He said, "That's something I wanted to ask you about, Mercy. You know the men who used to patrol the beach then, during the war?"

'You mean from the station. Yes I do. It was Leford and William Tolson, Dunbar Hooper, Jamie O'Neal and those. And that Aydlett boy."

"That's right. Mercy, one night they caught some people coming ashore. In a rubber raft. What happened to them? Did you ever hear?"

"Oh yes. They come ashore that night in the spring of forty-five. But Leford swore me never ever to—"

The nervously moving hands stopped.

"He swore you what?" said Keyes, leaning forward, despite Galloway's warning gesture. "Did he tell you?
What happened?"

The old woman was silent for a moment more. Then she said, 'You boys got to forgive me. My mind's not so clear as it was. And sometimes I take to talkin' nonsense. I'm not bodily sick, but I broke my hip a couple of year ago and something happened that it got twisted. I don't think I've got enough time for it to ever heal."

Tiller said, 'Yes, Mrs. Baum, but let's go back to what you were telling us about. Did Leford tell you what happened that night? Did he ever mention anything they'd taken, anything they had with them—"