Daring Nighttime Robbery
MAGGIE MADE three visits in August. That month, too, David took a number of photographs; most were still lifes through rainy windows — so obvious. There were almost daily cloudbursts, lasting only minutes, but otherwise the drought continued. He’d photographed the swans, the elevated black well-cap amongst begonias in the garden, an archipelago of moss on a particularly wide boulder atop the stone wall near the guesthouse. He’d constructed a makeshift darkroom in a small outbuilding. The whole setup — bins, trays, chemicals, paper, enlarger — cost him $1,155. A hose running from the guesthouse provided water. Yet when he appraised the first contact sheets, he recognized the familiar lack of originality, took it harder than expected, threw out the negatives, every last one, stuffed them in the garbage.
Around seven o’clock on the thirtieth, David walked to the pond. He’d allowed the swans to stay on the water, such a disgustingly humid night. He stripped off his shorts, boxer shorts, T-shirt, setting them on the ground, then waded in. The water was slightly brackish from the accumulated heat of June, July and August. He felt the slickness and slope of the hard-packed clay bottom. Up to his chest in water, he stretched out, performed a quick breaststroke, reversed direction, sidestroked back to where he stood again. And that was all, really, he wanted. To gain footing. To hold still. It was a peaceful moment. The slight beaded chill on his skin. The ineluctable strangeness of swimming with swans.
He heard a bass voice originating from the direction of the tree-lined drive leading out to Route 2. It was a car radio; he not only recalled the tide, “Duke of Earl,” but the singer, Gene Chandler, the Duke of Earl himself. The pulsing refrain, as if Chandler had an amplifier held to his heart as he implored his great love to be his Duchess, the repetition of the word “Duke” two, three, four times in a row at different points in the song, returned with such vivid immediacy that all intervening time between 1962, when the novelty song was popular, and the present was erased. David had always loved that song, “Duke of Earl.” When he’d first heard it at age nine, he’d conjectured that the Duke of Earl was an actual figure out of history, and tried to find Earl on a map of England in the big atlas his mother kept in the living room. No luck there.
People lost their way. They sometimes made a wrong turn off the two-lane into the estate. Tourists, visiting relatives of folks in Parrsboro, it might be anyone. At least a dozen times while lying in bed at night, or sitting on the screen porch, he’d heard a car radio. One night he heard a car approach, laughter, then, “Not here, Charlie, can’t you see it’s private property,” then the sound of the car leaving. That had been at 3:30 A.M., the night still young.
The car seemed almost to materialize out of the crepuscular light, crunching gravel under its hubcapped tires, headlights sweeping the main house. David stood ten or so feet from the bank. When the car stopped, he saw it was a 1956 Buick, the exact model and year his family had owned in Vancouver. No doubt he’d heard “Duke of Earl” on the car radio; his mother used to listen to the pop station. “A big stupid American car,” she’d say, “but at least I have one. Some divorcées of my acquaintance don’t.” The mind plays tricks, if it does anything it plays tricks, but this was not the ghost of his father, the ghost of his mother, arrived to Nova Scotia after driving around in the afterlife of Canada all these years. And yet what were the odds of a 1956 Dynaflow suddenly appearing? Seeing as Buick had manufactured thousands of these cars, the conundrum — the uncanny aspect of it here at the estate — was, of course, meaningful only in the context of his own childhood.
The Buick now turned around. Just someone lost, David thought. He swam a little — look, the swanherd’s hardly a graceful swimmer. The swans kept near the opposite bank. David sidestroked awhile. Then stood again, the water rimming his body, giving him the memory sensation of when he’d stood next to the leather examination couch in Dr. Steenhagen’s office, shivering in his skivvies as the doctor held a metal tape measure around his body at chest level. Ardith had brought him in for the swan bite, but Steenhagen decided to add a general checkup, too. He wrote down David’s chest measurement, listened to his heart and lungs through the stethoscope, all routine stuff.
“Things look fine,” he said to Ardith. “I assure you, this bite is nothing to worry about. No worries here at all. You might expect David to have some soreness, but no infection. It’ll heal on its own. Just put the ointment on twice a day as prescribed. Change the bandage. He’ll be just fine.”
The Buick came back. The headlights were off. David could scarcely make out the car’s full definition. Something wrong here.
The car stopped. The driver’s-side door opened but didn’t close. The engine idled. David waited, staring at the car. Five or six minutes went by. He then heard a shotgun blast — thundering echo in all directions, it seemed, the pond, the trees, the guesthouse. David saw a figure running from the main house to the car (he hadn’t seen it go to the house, a trick of light), then heard William’s voice, straining but loud and clear, cracking in midsentence: “You broke my window, you cowardly little shit!” William fired off another round; David saw the flash. He heard a branch fall through other branches and hit the ground. William had aimed high on purpose, when he could easily have hit the car. The car door slammed. The car was jammed into gear, wheels spun, the car lurched into reverse, sending up a dust cloud, the spray and hover of gravel dust slightly illuminated when the taillights came on. Then it disappeared.
David witnessed the incident as if it took place in a netherworld of shadow puppets. What snapped him back to his senses was hearing the swans’ distress. He turned and saw wings fluttering in the dark, heard wings roiling up water. David scrambled up to dry ground, threw on his shorts, hopping forward the whole time. He ran to the house, yelling, “William, it’s me — David! It’s me — David!” so as not to be shot.
When he got close to the porch, he stopped, held up his hands as if under arrest, said, “It’s me — David.”
“Jesus Holy Christ in heaven, will you please stop introducing yourself!” William said.
“I was in the pond.”
William did not respond right away, but finally said, “Hey, now’s an opportunity to knock your lights out, eh? But I guess a shotgun’s a bit extreme for that purpose.” William laughed hard, coughed a little, cleared his throat. He was wearing a bathrobe and unlaced work boots. He broke open the shotgun, held it slantwise, barrel pointing down and away from David. He stepped off the porch. “Daring nighttime robbery. The little bastard interrupted my favorite opera. Did you get a look at him?”
“No. Too far away.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to take a dip myself, sweltering in my goddamn invalid bed as I was for so long.”
“Are you all right, William?”
“I’m the one had the shotgun.”
“I didn’t even know you owned one.”
“Under my bed the whole time.”
“No kidding.”
“This shotgun was my father’s in Scotland. Once in a blue moon I go quail hunting.”
“We should call the authorities now.”
“The thing is, I know that boy. The hooligan.”
“Good, you can identify him. I’ll put in the call.”