Shooting at Loons

pneumonia? I’m pretty sure it was something that didn’t have to be fatal if she’d gotten treatment in time; but her husband was off pulling a drunk or something, and she just lay there in that trailer parked on the backside of nowhere and died.

Mickey Mantle Davis was too wild and shiftless to make a home for any child, so he dumped Guthrie on his parents and, as far as I could see, if he contributed anything to the boy’s upbringing, it was more as an older brother might than as a real father should.

As the boy and I talked, we’d been walking past wind-sculpted live oaks, across the flat grassy stretch that lay between the cottage and a knee-high ridge of sand that rose from the water’s edge. A short path had been worn through the mini-dune and we stepped through it onto the beach. Not that there’s much of a beach here. Even at dead low tide, there’s only a few feet of clear sand and that’s usually littered with kelp, an occasional boot or stray sneaker, conch shells, plastic six-pack rings or torn fishing nets. Being on the sound side of Shackleford Banks, waves here are generally just wavelets, lazy and gentle with hardly any break at all unless there’s a storm kicking up.

East of us was a wildish stretch that fronted an empty field. To the west was Mahlon Davis’s narrow landing, then another field, this one overgrown with yucca, wax myrtle and sumac. Along Mahlon’s line, and spilling over in places on that side, were an abandoned truck, a hodgepodge of raised cockerel pens and enough trash and debris to fill several dumpsters. At least the Davises had quit piling it along Carl’s line.

Sand fleas skittered away from our feet, and the terns and sandpipers that had flown up as we approached now resumed their inspection of the water’s edge a safe distance away.

Early afternoon and the tide was still low, but coming in. There was a funky smell of wet seaweed, salt water, and clumps of drying eel grass. Otherwise, the air was so crystalline that the black-and-white diamond-patterned lighthouse stood out crisply, and the sun was so dazzling that it almost cancelled the distant light that gleamed and flashed every fifteen seconds. Out in the channel, speedboats zoomed past, trailing wakes that rocked some pelicans that were floating with a few sea gulls a hundred feet offshore. Where the shoreline curved, more gulls lifted from the carcass of a rusted-out car and flew over to see if we happened to have stale bread or were dumping any fish offal. They voiced their disappointment in raucous cries when no food appeared and settled onto several small boats that were moored in close.

For several long minutes I just breathed it all in, feeling what Julia Lee’s poodle must feel when it slips the leash and heads for the woods. A whole week ahead of me. Five full days in a place where no one who knew me would have the right to make cracks about the way I dressed or drove or drank.

Like Julia Lee’s CoCo, I don’t get too many chances to run wild these days. Not that I planned to emulate CoCo, who’s never been spayed—despite what my brothers think, I have learned a little judicious discretion. Still, if I did take a notion to run through the underbrush, it was nice to know that my nearest nosey brother was more than a hundred miles away.

“That your boat?” I asked Guthrie, pointing to a white skiff with a dark red bottom.

“Naw, that’s Mark’s,” he said, naming another neighboring teenager. “Yonder’s mine.” He gestured proudly.

Sporting a recent coat of fresh white paint, the skiff was flat-bottomed, with a flared bow, two board seats, and a black outboard motor.

“Your granddaddy build it?” I asked, remembering that Mahlon Davis had begun framing a skiff the last time I was down. Now a trawler was taking shape beyond the boat shelter beside their house.

Harkers Islanders are famous all up and down the Atlantic Coast as independent boat builders who use lore handed down from generation to generation. Most boat works are one-or two-man operations. A man needs a fishing boat, he doesn’t have to go buy it. He can build it. Houses may get thrown together, but little skiffs aren’t much challenge to men who can build anything that floats, from yachts to fishing schooners, with no plans or blueprints, just by “rack of the eye.”

“He helped me,” Guthrie said, “but I did most of the work.”

He waded out to the boat and fiddled with the propeller blades with that proprietary air men always seem to have about boats or trucks. Teetering on the verge of manhood now. Fourteen and a half. His preadolescent chubbiness was almost gone, his belly was flattening, his muscles tightening.

But when he splashed back to shore, he was still a diffident kid. “Want to see how she rides?”

Being banged around the sound in a flat-bottomed skiff was a far cry from skimming across the surface in a streamlined power cruiser. Still...

“Wouldn’t know where I could dig a few clams for supper, would you?” I asked.

“Other side of the channel, over near the banks is good.” Boyish eagerness to show off was suddenly tinged with crafty materialism. “Wouldn’t take more’n five dollars worth of gas.”

As I made a show of considering, he added, “Carl’s got two rakes. I’d help you dig ‘em.”

•      •      •

Ten minutes later, I’d changed into shorts, a windbreaker and a raggedy old pair of Sue’s sneakers and we were heading out to the channel, a five-gallon plastic bucket and two clam rakes stowed in the bow. Despite April sunshine, the air was nippy out on the water, but I left the jacket unzipped and the hood down. Wind streamed through my hair and salt spray misted my face. Guthrie sat in the stern with his hand on the tiller and the throttle wide open. If he was chilly in just a tee shirt, he didn’t show it.

A dispossessed gull followed us for a couple of minutes, then wheeled off toward Beaufort and Morehead City.

Sunday afternoon and the channel was still sprinkled with upstate boaters and recreational fishermen —“dingbatters and ditdots” in scornful island parlance. Soon most of them would be swinging in to launch ramps along the shore, pulling their boats out of the water and heading on back up to Raleigh, Asheville, Greensboro. By sunset, Highway 70 West would be bumper-to-bumper with boat trailers, RVs, and shiny pickups, all with a cooler or two of fresh fish and steamer clams.

I knew because I’d been part of that Sunday night exodus enough weekends myself. It always seemed so luxurious the few times I’d stayed over till a Monday or Tuesday.

Instead of bucking Sunday night traffic, I planned to pop a cool one, prop my feet on the porch railing and enjoy the sunset while a big pot of clam chowder simmered on the stove for my supper. Core Sound chowder can taste