Guthrie threw out his anchor and was over the side a half step ahead of me. “Andy must’ve fell on his rake,” he said as we nearly tripped on the long-handled tool ourselves. Together we rolled him over and off the prongs. A half-dozen small crabs fell from his bloodied shirt to scuttle back into the chilly water. A gush of pink flowered in the sand where gouts of blood had been trapped by the weight of his body. Any idea I had of resuscitation disappeared as soon as I saw sand and grass in his open, unblinking eyes. I felt the stiffness of rigor in his arms and legs, saw the ashy paleness of his skin, and knew that the salty water had helped to leach away most of his life’s blood.
“We can put him in his skiff and tow it back to shore,” said Guthrie.
“No,” I said. All that blood on Andy Bynum’s waterlogged cotton shirt had not been caused by the blunt prongs of any clam rake. “We better not disturb things any further. You go call the police. Tell them Andy Bynum’s been shot.”
He didn’t blink an eye. Fish aren’t the only creatures brought home bloody on the boats; and at fourteen-going-on-fifteen, he’s probably seen his share of violent death.
“Tide’s coming in,” was all he said. “Reckon you can hold him here?”
“If I have to,” I answered.
I’ve seen my share of violent deaths, too.
2
Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
See! he is sinking; O hasten today—
And out with the Lifeboat! away, then, away!
—Edward S. Ufford
For several minutes after Guthrie roared back toward Harkers Island, I continued to stand indecisively on the edge of the sandbar until my feet were nearly numb from the chilly water washing over them.
I’d heard so many horror stories about goof-ups messing over a crime scene that I really hated to touch Andy Bynum’s skiff. Reason said he’d probably been shot from another boat while he was standing on the sandbar digging for clams. Reason said that even if the killer had waded right up to the body, the incoming tide now covered every footprint. But reason could say till my feet fell off and I’d still feel skittish about getting into that skiff.
A creosoted piling stuck up like a sawed-off telephone pole near the corner of Heston Hadley’s boundary. Barnacles and mussels had cemented themselves all the way up to high-water mark. Once upon a time the piling’d probably had a flat top; now it had been gouged by storms and surging tides. Nevertheless, I scrambled up to sit with my legs dangling. My bottom protested as I eased myself down. It felt like sitting on a handful of uneven pencil nubs. The water was only a few inches below my wet sneakers and beginning to wash higher with each passing moment.
A variety of sea birds swooped past—every time I come down to the coast, I swear that I’m going to bring along a book next time and learn the names of the different gulls and terns. Channel traffic had dwindled off, and although it dried my shorts and still warmed my legs and thighs, the sun was starting its long slide down the sky.
A perfect lazy April Sunday on the water.
Except for Andy Bynum’s body.
The wavelets that lapped my piling, that were lifting the beached skiff from the sandbar, that emptied the bucket’s clams and oysters and banged it against the skiff with steady rhythm—those same wavelets were breaking against Andy’s body and I couldn’t not look.
When we’d first turned him over on his back, his face was out of the water. Now his white hair fanned out around his head like mermaid’s hair algae and only his mouth and chin were still clear. If help didn’t come soon, he’d be totally awash and the prospect horrified me. I’ve always had a fear of drowning. In my worst nightmares, I’m sinking down, down through fathoms of dark water, my lungs bursting with the need for air; and even though I knew Andy Bynum would never breathe again, it was all I could do not to go kneel beside him and lift his white head clear.
Except for those open blue eyes, his face was peaceful and serene, a face as weathered as this piling I was perched on. I hoped death had been instantaneous for him. That he’d been dead before he inhaled a single drop.
A good man. Someone liked and respected by his neighbors.
“So far as you know,” reminded the cautious preacher who lurked at the edges of my mind. “There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good and sinneth not.”
“True,” nodded the pragmatist that kept him company.
Okay. So what did I actually know of Andy Bynum?
Not much, now that I considered.
Probably in his early sixties. His wife had died eight or ten years ago and he’d lived alone since then in a sturdy, unpretentious brick house across the road from Carl and Sue’s cottage. Two sons who were both older than me. I’d never heard of any friction between father and sons; and the last time Carl had mentioned Andy to me, he said Andy’d turned his two big boats over to the sons and was cutting back on his hours at the fish house his own father had started back in the thirties.
What else?
Well, he’d liked an occasional beer. Had never said no when Carl offered him one. “Just don’t disfurnish yourself,” he’d say, making sure Carl wasn’t handing over the last one in his cooler.
And he liked to make people laugh with tales of his younger, roguish days. Even though it’d been years since he’d aimed a gun at a loon or turtle, Andy had once hunted both endangered species with enthusiasm.
“But I shot my last loon twenty years ago,” he told us. “There’d been a piece in the paper about how they was dying out and I’d been feeling right bad about it even though we all knew them Canadians was the ones really hurting the loon population. They used the eggs for glue or something. Didn’t even give the babies time to hatch out. Anyhow, it was March and me and some fellows was over on Shackleford freezing our own tailfeathers off and I had this fancy new Winchester I give a man in Portsmouth three hundred dollars for. Raiford and me, we was ‘way down the dune ready to fire when we heard two gunshots, then nothing. It’d commenced to rain a little and Raiford walked up on the sandbank and looked over to see what was happening, and there was the game warden writing everybody out a ticket. Raiford sort of slithered back down the sandbank and commenced scooping us out a hole and we buried both guns ‘fore you could say ‘magistrate’s court’ three times.
“Then we got back in my skiff and was sitting there all innocent like when the game warden come around that hummock of grass. ‘Y’all part of this loon hunt?’ he yells out to us. ‘Loon hunt?’ says Raiford. ‘Ain’t that against the law?’
“‘Bout then, that drizzle started getting serious and game wardens always did make Raiford nervous, so he started the motor and we come on back to the island and waited till it slacked off and the game warden was gone. And don’t you know we couldn’t remember exactly where we’d buried them two guns. Took us three days ‘fore we scratched ‘em out again.”
Like many a reformed rogue, Andy had become a staunch upholder of the law, even game laws. Nevertheless, the last time I was down, he ruefully admitted it was still hard for him to refuse an invitation to pull up a chair when the table held a dish of stewed loon.
As water ballooned his shirt, I saw a moon snail emerge from beneath the collar. It must have been trapped when we turned the body. As soon as it pulled itself free, it dropped down into the green undulating grasses that intertwined with his hair. Small dark shapes scuttled across Andy’s chest.
The crabs were back.
Without a watch, there was no way to know how long Guthrie had been gone. Ten minutes? Twenty?
As my eyes strained for shore, they were suddenly caught by a speedboat that was heading straight out toward me from a point further down the island. One person, a slender figure in a blue shirt, stood at the wheel and held a fast course that implied intimate familiarity with this particular stretch of the sound. Guthrie had already cut his engine by the time he was this far beyond the channel, but this boater was either suicidal or else knew to the precise second how long to keep the propeller down.