“Sure?”
Teddy nodded. “Just finding my sea legs.”
They stood in silence for a bit, the sea undulating all around them, pockets of it as dark and silken as velvet.
“You know it used to be a POW camp?” Teddy said.
Chuck said, “The island?”
Teddy nodded. “Back in the Civil War. They built a fort there, barracks.”
“What do they use the fort for now?”
Teddy shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. There’s quite a few of them out here on the different islands. Most of them were target practice for artillery shells during the war. Not too many left standing.”
“But the institution?”
“From what I could tell, they use the old troop quarters.”
Chuck said, “Be like going back to basic, huh?”
“Don’t wish that on us.” Teddy turned on the rail. “So what’s your story there, Chuck?”
Chuck smiled. He was a bit stockier and a bit shorter than Teddy, maybe five ten or so, and he had a head of tight, curly black hair and olive skin and slim, delicate hands that seemed incongruous with the rest of him, as if he’d borrowed them until his real ones came back from the shop. His left cheek bore a small scythe of a scar, and he tapped it with his index finger.
“I always start with the scar,” he said. “People usually ask sooner or later.”
“Okay.”
“Wasn’t from the war,” Chuck said. “My girlfriend says I should just say it was, be done with it, but…” He shrugged. “It was from
“From playing war.”
“From playing it, yeah.”
“You transferred from Oregon?”
“Seattle. Came in last week.”
Teddy waited, but Chuck didn’t offer any further explanation.
Teddy said, “How long you been with the marshals?”
“Four years.”
“So you know how small it is.”
“Sure. You want to know how come I transferred.” Chuck nodded, as if deciding something for himself. “If I said I was tired of rain?”
Teddy turned his palms up above the rail. “If you said so…”
“But it’s small, like you said. Everyone knows everyone in the service. So eventually, there’ll be—what do they call it?—scuttlebutt.”
“That’s word for it.”
“You caught Breck, right?”
Teddy nodded.
“How’d you know where he’d go? Fifty guys chasing him, they all went to Cleveland. You went to Maine.”
“He’d summered there once with his family when he was a kid. That thing he did with his victims? It’s what you do to horses. I talked to an aunt. She told me the only time he was ever happy was at a horse farm near this rental cottage in Maine. So I went up there.”
“Shot him five times,” Chuck said and looked down the bow at the foam.
“Would have shot him five more,” Teddy said. “Five’s what it took.”
Chuck nodded and spit over the rail. “My girlfriend’s Japanese. Well, born here, but you know…Grew up in a camp. There’s still a lot of tension out there—Portland, Seattle, Tacoma. No one likes me being with her.”
“So they transferred you.”
Chuck nodded, spit again, watched it fall into the churning foam.
“They say it’s going to be big,” he said.
Teddy lifted his elbows off the rail and straightened. His face was damp, his lips salty. Somewhat surprising that the sea had managed to find him when he couldn’t recall the spray hitting his face.
He patted the pockets of his overcoat, looking for his Chesterfields. “Who’s ‘they’? What’s ‘it’?”
“They. The papers,” Chuck said. “The storm. Big one, they say. Huge.” He waved his arm at the pale sky, as pale as the foam churning against the bow. But there, along its southern edge, a thin line of purple cotton swabs grew like ink blots.
Teddy sniffed the air. “You remember the war, don’t you, Chuck?”
Chuck smiled in such a way that Teddy suspected they were already tuning in to each other’s rhythms, learning how to fuck with each other.
“A bit,” Chuck said. “I seem to remember rubble. Lots of rubble. People denigrate rubble, but I say it has its place. I say it has its own aesthetic beauty. I say it’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
“You talk like a dime novel. Has anyone else told you that?”
“It’s come up.” Chuck giving the sea another of his small smiles, leaning over the bow, stretching his back.
Teddy patted his trouser pockets, searched the inside pockets of his suit jacket. “You remember how often the deployments were dependent on weather reports.”
Chuck rubbed the stubble on his chin with the heel of his hand. “Oh, I do, yes.”
“Do you remember how often those weather reports proved correct?”
Chuck furrowed his brow, wanting Teddy to know he was giving this due and proper consideration. Then he smacked his lips and said, “About thirty percent of the time, I’d venture.”
“At best.”
Chuck nodded. “At best.”
“And so now, back in the world as we are…”
“Oh, back we are,” Chuck said. “Ensconced, one could even say.”
Teddy suppressed a laugh, liking this guy a lot now. Ensconced. Jesus.
“Ensconced,” Teddy agreed. “Why would you put any more credence in the weather reports now than you did then?”
“Well,” Chuck said as the sagging tip of a small triangle peeked above the horizon line, “I’m not sure my credence can be measured in terms of less or more. Do you want a cigarette?”
Teddy stopped in the middle of a second round of pocket pats, found Chuck watching him, his wry grin etched into his cheeks just below the scar.
“I had them when I boarded,” Teddy said.
Chuck looked back over his shoulder. “Government employees. Rob you blind.” Chuck shook a cigarette free of his pack of Luckies, handed one to Teddy, and lit it for him with his brass Zippo, the stench of the kerosene climbing over the salt air and finding the back of Teddy’s throat. Chuck snapped the lighter closed, then flicked it back open with a snap of his wrist and lit his own.
Teddy exhaled, and the triangle tip of the island disappeared for a moment in the plume of smoke.
“Overseas,” Chuck said, “When a weather report dictated if you went to the drop zone with your parachute pack or set off for the beachhead, well, there was much more at stake, wasn’t there?”
“True.”
“But back home, where’s the harm in a little arbitrary faith? That’s all I’m saying, boss.”
It began to reveal itself to them as more than a triangle tip, the lower sections gradually filling in until the sea stretched out flat again on the other side of it and they could see colors filling in as if by brush stroke—a muted green where the vegetation grew unchecked, a tan strip of shoreline, the dull ochre of cliff face on the northern edge. And at the top, as they churned closer, they began to make out the flat rectangular edges of buildings themselves.
“It’s a pity,” Chuck said.
