Cape Fear (7 page)

The club was expensive and too many of the members were excessively stuffy. And it was a long way from Harper. When it came time to pay dues for the second year, Sam and Carol talked it over and were each pleased and surprised to find how willingly the other person would give up the club.

They joined the Harper Boat Club. It was ten miles closer, on the lake shore between New Essex and Harper, at the end of a road that turned off Route 18. The club building could more accurately be called a shack. The boat basin was small and crowded. Jake Barnes’s boat yard was next door to the club. It was a cluttered, informal enterprise. He sold boats, gas, oil, gear, fishing tackle and cold beer. He was a fat, sleepy man who had inherited the business when his father died. He was a good but indolent craftsman. He had rickety ways on which he could haul anything up to forty feet out of the water. He had a good touch with marine engines and outboards and, when pressed, could do major hull repairs. His yard was an incredible clutter of timbers, corroding hardware, empty oil cans, hulls too far gone for repair, rotting lines and sagging roofs over his covered storage area.

Most members of the Harper Boat Club were ardent do-it-yourself addicts. This seemed to please Jake. He charged a nominal fee for hauling the boats out. He seemed happiest
when he could stand in dirty tee shirt and soiled duck pants drinking his own beer and watching the clientele work on their boats. The children of the members of the neighboring club adored Jake. He told them all kinds of monstrous lies of his adventures.

The
Sweet Sioux
took kindly to the change. Here she looked almost modern. After the opera the washer-woman had returned to the neighborhood saloon and was content. The marine engine no longer conked out. And Sam and Carol had a lot more fun at club affairs. The group was younger.

Sam parked the station wagon in the rear of Jake’s boat yard and checked off the things they had brought. Sandpaper, calking material and calking compound, antifouling marine hull paint, deck paint and varnish.

Jake, with a can of beer in his large dirty hand, ambled over to meet them as they came around the side of the main shed.

“Hi, Sam. Howya, Mizz Bowden. Hello, kids.”

“Did you get her out?” Nancy asked.

“Sure did. Right down there on the last cradle. She needs some work, all right. Looked her over yesterday. Want to show you something, Sam.”

They walked down to the
Sweet Sioux
. Out of the water she looked twice as big and half again as ugly.

Jake finished his beer and threw the can aside, took out a pocket knife, opened the small blade and went around to the transom. As Sam watched, he dug the blade into the rear of the keel just forward of the prop. The blade went in with alarming ease. Jake straightened up and gave Sam a significant look.

“Rotten?”

“It’s rotted some. The last two, three feet of the keel.”

“Is that dangerous?”

“I’d say if a fellow let it go too long it might give him some trouble after a while.”

“Should I do something right away?”

“Now, I wouldn’t say right away. Busy as I am this time of year, it would be some time before I could get to her. Then I’d say cut it back to about here. Cut this whole section right out. Then cut a good choice piece to fit and bolt it up right here, and then put some plate braces on both sides along here and bolt them all the way through. I checked the rest of her over and she’s still sound.”

“When should I do it, Jake?”

“I’d say after I pull her out in October is time enough. Then you’ll have the use of her all summer. Now, come around here and I’ll show you where the bad leak is. Right here. See. The planking is a little sprung and it opened up this here crack. Water run out of her real good right at that place.”

“Isn’t that a little wide to calk?”

Jake reached under the boat and picked up a thin piece of wood off the crossbar of the cradle. “I whittled this piece out and it seems to fit okay. I was going to soak it good with waterproof glue and pound it in there, but I didn’t get around to it. I guess you could handle that okay. I’ll show you where the glue pot is, Sam. Now, I want to see you kids turn out some work today. No runnin’ off like the last time, Bucky. You sand good and you’ll raise yourself a crop of muscle. You bring old Marilyn along to help you? … What’s the matter? I say something wrong?”

“Let’s go get that glue,” Sam said. On the way up to the shed he told Jake about the dog.

Jake spat accurately at an empty oil drum. “Take a special mean kind of son of a bitch to poison a dog.”

“I know.”

“There was a fella here before your time, when my daddy was alive. Most folks say fish got no feelings. Cold blood and all. But he used to clean his fish here, and he’d take them alive out of the bait well and scale ’em and fillet ’em still wiggling. Seemed to get a kick out of it. We run him off the place finally. Lost a bait customer. Some people got a mean streak all right. It’s surely hell on those kids. That wasn’t much of a dog for fight, but she sure liked friends. Here’s the glue. Let me get that top for you. Use this here rubber mallet and don’t try to get it in too fast. Little taps, and keep it even. Don Langly’s setter bitch had another litter couple of weeks ago. She jumped the fence again. Don thinks it was a chow dog got to her this time, but those pups are sure cute. He’s trying to find homes for them for when they’re weaned.”

“Thanks, Jake. But maybe later on.”

“Sometimes it’s good to get another one right away. I’d say a little more glue. Slop it on good. You can wipe off what squeezes out.”

After the family had watched him tap the whittled wedge into place, Sam apportioned the work. They all began to work, using the sanding blocks. The sun was hot and it was tiring work. After a half hour Sam took off his shirt and hung it on a sawhorse. The slight breeze off the lake cooled the perspiration on his lean back. Bucky was unexpectedly solemn and diligent.

When Gil Burman came by and stopped, Sam used it as an excuse to call a break. Jamie and Bucky raced off with a dollar to buy two beers and three Cokes from Jake.

“You got this crew organized,” Gil said. Gil was a forty-year-old vice-president of the New Essex Bank and Trust Company. He had moved out to Harper a year ago. He was a big man, prematurely gray. His wife was a vivacious and rattle-brained redhead. Sam and Carol liked and enjoyed Gil and Betty.

“He’s a whip snapper,” Carol said.

“I lost my helpers on account of the pram race this afternoon. They’re getting organized.”

“Does the
Jungle Queen
need work?”

“Does she ever not need it? Dry rot in the dashboard this time. Damn old clunker. Why we keep her, I’ll never know. Carol, did Betty get in touch with you yet about next Friday?”

“No, not yet.”

“A big old Burman soiree, kids. Cindered steaks in the back yard. An extensive clobbering on Martinis. Drunken conversation and family battles afterward. We have to do it for a lot of sordid types, and so we need some of our friends around to improve the situation.”

Carol glanced at Sam and then said to Gil, “We’d love to come. But there may be a hitch. I might have to be out of town. I could let Betty know later in the week?”

“Right up until kickoff. It’s a big party.”

The boys came back with the Cokes and beer. Sam went off to one side to talk business with Gil. The bank acted as trustee on many of the estates represented by Dorrity, Stetch and Bowden. As they talked, Sam looked idly at his
family. Carol was getting them back to work. Nancy wore very short red shorts, old and faded, and a yellow linen halter. Her legs were long and brown and slim, beautifully shaped. She worked the sanding block with both hands, turning lithely at the waist. The smooth young muscles bunched and lengthened under the sheen and texture of her back.

After Gil left he worked again, steadily, and by one o’clock Carol announced it was time for a lunch break. They would run home and eat and come back. It was then that Nancy announced, quite demurely, that she had told Tommy Kent what they’d be doing and he had said he might stop around and help, so, if it was all right, she would stay and keep working and they could bring her back a sandwich, please.

Sam drove Carol and the boys home. Mike Turner was sitting on the front porch, waiting for Jamie. Carol made hefty sandwiches and a giant pitcher of iced tea. As she was wrapping Nancy’s sandwich, Carol said, “You itching to get back to work?”

“I’d like to get that hull painted before dark.”

“I’m going to make Bucky take a nap. He’s completely pooped. He’ll yelp at the idea, but he’ll cork off in about ten seconds. You go on ahead and I’ll bring the boys down in an hour or so.”

He took the MG and drove back to the boat yard. He walked around the shed, carrying the sandwich and a small thermos of iced tea. Nancy was sitting on her haunches, sanding the undercurve of the hull, a difficult place to get at. She smiled up at him.

“No dreamboat yet?”

“Not yet, Daddy. Nobody says that any more.”

“What’s a good expression?”

“Well … he resonates me.”

“Good Lord!”

“Please just set that stuff down, Daddy. I want to finish this one place first.”

He went over and put the sandwich and thermos on the sawhorse. As he was unbuttoning his shirt, he had his back to Nancy. He stopped, motionless, his finger tips touching the third button. Max Cady sat on a low pile of timbers twenty feet away. He had a can of beer and a cigar. He wore a yellow knit sports shirt and a pair of sharply creased slacks in a shade of cheap electric blue. He was smiling at Sam.

Sam walked over to him. It seemed to take a long time to walk twenty feet. Cady’s smile didn’t change.

“What are you doing here?” Sam kept his voice low.

“Well, I’m having a beer, Lieutenant, and I’m smoking this here cigar.”

“I don’t want you hanging around here.”

Cady looked quietly amused. “So the man sells me a beer and I’m thinking about maybe renting a boat. I haven’t fished since I was a kid. Fishing any good in the lake?”

“What do you want?”

“That’s your boat, hey?” He gestured with the cigar, winked with obscene significance and said, “Nice lines, Lieutenant.”

Sam looked back and saw Nancy sitting on her heels, the short red shorts pulled to strained tightness around the young hips.

“God damn it, Cady, I—”

“A man has a nice family and a boat like that and a job
where he can take off when he feels like it, it must be nice. Go out into the lake and mess around. When you’re locked up you think of things like that. You know. Like dreaming.”

“What are you after? What do you want?”

The small deep-set brown eyes changed, but the smile still exposed the cheap white teeth. “We started pretty near even back there in forty-three, Lieutenant. You had a fancy education and a commission and little gold bars, but we both had a wife and a kid. Did you know that?”

“I remember hearing you were married.”

“I got married when I was twenty. The boy was four when you got me sent up. I saw him when he was a couple weeks old. Mary dumped me after I got life. She never even visited. They make it easy to do when you’re in for life. I signed the law papers. And I never got another letter. But my brother wrote me how she got married again. Married a plumber there in Charleston, West Virginia. Had a whole litter of kids. My brother sent me clippings when the kid got killed. My kid. That was in fifty-one. He was twelve, and he fell off his motor scooter under a delivery truck.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Are you, Lieutenant? You must be a nice guy. You must be a real nice guy. I looked Mary up when I got back to Charleston. She damn near dropped dead when she recognized me. The kids were in school and the plumber was out plumbing. That was last September. You know, she’d got fat, but she’s still a pretty woman. All the Pratt women are pretty. Hill people, from around Eskdale. I had to bust open the screen door to get to talk to her. Then she ran and got one of those fireplace things and tried to hit me over the
head with it. I took it away from her and bent it double and threw it in the fireplace. Then she came out quiet and got in the car. She always had a mean temper.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I want you to get the picture, like I told you last week. I drove her over to Huntington—that’s only about fifty miles—and that night I got in a booth with her while she called up the plumber. By then she was doing just what I told her, and I had her say she was taking a little vacation from him and the kids. I hung up while he was still yelling. I made her write me a love note and date it, asking me to take her away for a while. I made her write it full of dirty words. I stayed with her about three days in a hotel in Huntington. By then I got tired of her sniveling all the time and blubbering about her kids and her plumber. All the fight was gone, but she was marked up from that first day when she was still trying to get away. Are you getting the picture, Lieutenant?”

“I think so.”

“When I had enough of her, I told her that if she ever tried to yell cop, I’d mail a photostat of the note to the plumber. And I’d come around and see if I could throw a couple of the plumber’s kids under some delivery trucks. She was impressed. I had to put damn near a whole fifth of liquor into her before she passed out. Then I drove her over the Big Sandy into Kentucky, and when I found one of those rough little road-houses near Grayson, I lifted her out and put her in an old heap parked there. About a mile back up the road I threw her shoes and her dress in a field. I give her a good chance to work her way home.”

“This is supposed to scare me.”

“No, Lieutenant. This is just part of the picture. I had a lot of time to think. You know. I’d remember how it was when we got married. I’d gone back to Charleston on leave. I was twenty and it was 1939 and I had two years in. I wasn’t fixing to get married, but she’d come into town with her folks on Saturday night. She was just turned seventeen and I could tell looking at them they were hill folk. My people came from around Brounland before they moved down into Charleston. I followed them around town, never taking my eyes off Betty. After lockup at night I’d remember how it was on that Saturday night, and how the wedding was, and how she came down to Louisiana when we had the maneuvers before I got shipped. She wanted to be near me. She was religious. Came from a big clan of Bible shouters. But it didn’t stop her taking a big interest in climbing into the hay.”