Shooting at Loons

camps.

Had Andy Bynum angered some hot-tempered islander so thoroughly that a simple house-burning was not enough to settle the grudge?

•      •      •

The telephone rang as I finished gutting the clams and chopping them into small pieces. This time it was Carl, wanting to know if I found everything okay.

“Yeah, once Guthrie and I figured out your new water pump system.”

“Same system it’s always been,” said Carl.

I sighed. “That Guthrie’s got himself a reality problem, hasn’t he?”

Carl laughed. “He been stretching the truth on you, too?”

He was startled to hear about Andy and I had to go through all the details again.

“Say it was out at Hes Hadley’s leased bottom?”

There was a significant silence.

“What?” I asked.

It took some prodding, but eventually he repeated some gossip he’d heard from Mahlon Davis: “Said Hes warned Andy off his wife.”

“Andy?” I was astonished.

“Oh, heck, yeah. Andy Bynum liked the ladies almost as much as Mahlon does. He just wasn’t as crude about it.

He told me to be careful and not to go sticking my nose into anything that wasn’t my business, a piece of advice every man in my whole family feels free to give, then he put Sue on so I could get her to go over the recipe for Core Sound cornmeal dumplings. (“One part plain flour to four parts cornmeal.”)

“Did Andy ever make a pass at you?” I asked.

“Well, sure he did,” she drawled. “I’d have been insulted if he hadn’t, the way he used to flirt with every grown woman. Didn’t mean anything. It was just his way of being polite. Now if it’d been Mahlon Davis...”

There was no need to elaborate.

She told me there was a little piece of salt pork in the freezer if I wanted it for my chowder and rang off without giving me any advice at all. Yet, paradoxically, it was her words that left me disoriented. Nothing sends you straight back to childhood quicker than getting an unexpected insight into how things—relationships—really were when you lived in Eden, a child oblivious to the Serpent.

•      •      •

While the clams simmered on the stove’s lowest setting, I carried the shells and wastes down to dump at the water’s edge. The fresh shell of a loggerhead turtle floated in the wash. Somebody not far away was probably enjoying a hot turtle stew at the moment—hot in more than one sense, because loggerheads are a protected species.

Almost twilight, yet gulls still came shrieking over, pushing and shoving and elbowing each other aside to be first at whatever was going down.

A line of brown pelicans flew by on their way to roost, as indifferent to the gulls as the sandpipers further down the sand.

Like their human counterparts, each had their own agenda for the water. Netters, tongers, dredgers or trawlers—according to Barbara Jean, the Alliance Andy Bynum had started wasn’t so much a cooperative effort as a self-serving attempt to hang on to the particular niche each group considered a personal birthright.

Out in the channel, an expensive late-model sports boat headed for the Beaufort marina, and its running lights gleamed a rich red and green in the gathering dusk. A few moments later, its wake broke against the shore, scattering gulls and rocking the little homemade skiffs moored close in.

I turned and saw Mahlon’s new trawler. More than half-finished now, it stood outside on blocks and dwarfed the small house. There was nothing sporty about it, but its lines were clean and solid, and the empty utilitarian cabin rose starkly against the dying light of the western sky.

And there was Mahlon himself, a gaunt wiry form half-hidden by the end post of his boat shed, standing motionless in the twilight as he stared at me. When he realized I’d seen him, he stepped forward. A caulk gun was in his hand and his fingers were coated with the yellow adhesive.

“Still like to feed the birds, do you?” His thick accent turned like to loike.

“How you doing, Mahlon?” I said, with more geniality than I felt.

“Just fair. Carl coming down?”

“Not this time.”

“Ain’t seen you down for a while. Staying long?”

“Just till the weekend.”

He had to be over sixty now, and he’d lost weight since that shirt and work pants were new; but his corded forearms were still muscular and he still made me uneasy, Mahlon did. Only once had he ever acted out of the way with me and I’d never actually seen him hit his wife or deliver more than a casual swat to Guthrie’s backside, yet I knew the violence his easygoing, laid-back exterior belied. His mother, Miss Nellie Em, seemed to be the only one who could face him down.

There were tales of monumental drunks, of neighbors’ set nets deliberately torn or their boats rammed; his