Chapter Twenty

Behind the wheel of the Mary B, Hank was more relaxed than he’d been in a week. There was only water in all directions, and he could breathe again. All the anxiety that had been building up inside of him over the past few days washed away. He was out on the water, where he belonged, where nothing could touch him, nothing could hurt him.

From the working deck he could hear the purr of the motors and the grind of the winches as the dredges were lowered into the sea. He could feel the boat’s motors strain as they worked to pull the rapidly filling nets through the water. He slowed the boat to a crawl, letting the dredges hit bottom, to allow them to scoop up any scallops in the area.

Douglas came onto the bridge.

“Things under control?” Hank asked, glancing at his brother before bringing his attention back to the controls in front of him.

“Seem to be. They lowered the dredge again. The last haul brought up an octopus. Ugly thing.”

“They got it back overboard safely?”

“There was some talk about keeping it for dinner, but that was vetoed.”

“Good.” Hank didn’t mind keeping the lobsters or some of the other fish that got caught in his dredge net, but the octopus and starfish he preferred to return to the sea.

Douglas shut the door to the bridge with a firm click. “Now,” he said. “Tell me about the false bottoms in the storage deck.”

Hank sighed. He knew this moment would come. Anyone on the crew was going to be involved in the rum running one way or another. It could not be kept secret.

“They are for my side business.”

“So you are running rum.”

There was no point in denying it anymore. “Yes.”

“I knew it!” Douglas flashed him a triumphant grin. “This makes having to be out at sea worth it!” He leaned against the control panel and peppered Hank with questions. “How long have you been doing it? Do you make a lot of money at it? Is the Katinka outfitted the same way? What do I have to do to get started? Just head out to rum row? Is it like going to the market? Tell me everything!”

Hank sighed and sank into his captain’s chair.

“I don’t want you involved in it.”

“Why?” Douglas crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at his brother.

“It’s too dangerous.” Hank turned to look at the bright expanse of ocean in front of him. He hadn’t minded the dangers when it was just him, but to have his family and Alice threatened? That he didn’t go for. And if Douglas got involved, who would Jiggy threaten then? Marty? Where would it end?

“You think you’re the only one who can handle danger? Just because you were in France? I’m not a baby anymore!”

No, you’re a petulant, spoiled brat. He slammed his palm on the control panel. “Don’t talk about France.”

“Why not? You never do. Maybe you should!”

“You don’t want to hear about it.”

Douglas came and stood by him, putting a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I do. And I think, more importantly, you need to talk about it.”

He shrugged off his brother’s hand and got up, walking to the other side of the bridge before turning to glare at him. “What do you want to hear about? The rat-infested trenches? The body parts strewn about after a bombing? The look in the enemy’s eyes when he realizes the bullet from your gun is going to kill him? Which of those things do you want to hear about?”

“Whatever you want to tell me,” Douglas said, though his face had paled, and his bravado was gone. “You’ve been trying to kill yourself, one way or another, ever since you got home from the war. I want my brother back again.”

“The brother you remember died in the trenches of France. I’m who you’ve got, and you have to live with it.”

“But you didn’t die.” Douglas looked so young and earnest Hank had to look away. He couldn’t stand the sadness on his brother’s face. “You came back. You were one of the lucky ones.”

“Lucky?” The word exploded out of him. “No. The lucky ones were the ones who took a direct hit and never knew what hit them. I watched my friends get blown to pieces. I was not one of the lucky ones.”

“Hank…Henry…” Douglas faltered, as if unsure how to proceed. “Don’t let the bombs kill you now. For your friends’ sake you need to let yourself live.”

“Don’t lecture me. You weren’t there. You don’t know.”

“I realize that,” Douglas admitted humbly. “I can’t know. But I want to help.”

“You can’t.” Hank turned back to his controls, looking out at the bright expanse of the sea.

“Let me take some of the danger.”

“You don’t understand.” It was time to explain. “I want to stop. I told my buyer I was done, but he threatened me.” He cleared his throat. “More specifically, he threatened Mother, and you, and Alice.”

Douglas crossed his arms and frowned. “What kind of threats?”

“Death. To be blunt about it.”

“And you think this guy can follow through?”

“I think he ordered Nagy killed.”

There was silence while Douglas absorbed that information. Hank waited him out. Waited for him to panic or insist he didn’t care and wanted to get involved in this stupid business anyway. Instead Douglas straightened up, put his hands on the control panel and said, “So what are we going to do about it?”

“We?”

“Of course, ‘we.’ You’re not in the trenches anymore, brother. You don’t have to go it alone.”

A weight lifted off his heart. Maybe things would be okay.

Smitty came up to take his turn at the wheel.

“Got a good load. Feel like going down to help them sort?”

“Yeah, actually.” Right now, he wanted the mind-numbing job of sorting the scallops from the other sea creatures that got caught in the dredge. He left Smitty in charge of the bridge, and he and Douglas went down to the working deck, where the crew was ankle deep in scallops, throwing back starfish and other incidental creatures caught in the netting. Ahab was struggling with a bass that was as long as his arm.

“This will make a good dinner tonight, Captain, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. Cook it up.”

The scallops were scooped into buckets and brought into the shelling room, where Junior and Curly got to work opening them and discarding the shells. The shells were dumped back into the sea; the scallops were rinsed and bagged. Fifty pounds of scallops to a bag. Then the bags were put on ice in the storage area.

“Everything happens so quickly,” Douglas commented as he watched the activity.

“It does, and your extra pair of hands would make it go even faster,” Hank pointed out. “Go help Junior and Curly. A little scallop shelling will do you good.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.” Douglas gave him a friendly salute.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad having Douglas on board.

****

Hours later, back up on the bridge with Douglas, he poured them both a dram of his hidden whiskey.

“Guess I’ll have to give up my secret stash.” With a sigh he returned the bottle to its hiding place.

“Why did you get involved in the first place?” his brother asked him.

“I liked the thrill of it. The danger. It made me feel alive.”

Douglas clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Maybe there’s another way to feel alive.”

Hank shifted to remove his brother’s hand from his shoulder. “There is no other way. Even this isn’t working anymore.”

Another pause, long enough that Hank finally turned to face his brother.

“Being with Marty makes me feel alive,” Douglas said, a faraway, wistful look in his eyes.

“That’s nice for you,” Hank responded shortly and stared back out at the sea.

“I had the impression the same thing happened when you were with Alice.”

His shoulders tensed. Yes, he felt alive when he was with Alice, but it didn’t matter. She deserved better than him, and besides, she wasn’t speaking to him anymore.

“No.” He boosted the power to the engine as he felt the boat slow with the increasingly full dredges. Soon they’d be winching them back up again and dumping their contents on the working deck. “Listen, I’m happy for you that you and Marty get along so well. I wish you many years of happiness. I’ll play the doting uncle when I’m on shore. But that’s not the life I want for myself. It’s not the life I get to have.”

“Why not?” Douglas asked bluntly. “You deserve happiness as much as anyone else. If not Alice, then maybe someone else. Let yourself be happy.”

“I do not deserve happiness,” Hank spit out the words. “You did not see what I did during the war. You did not do what I did. You don’t know. Just leave me alone.”

Douglas moved to the other side of the bridge and sat down but didn’t leave.

The thoughts Hank was always trying to push out of his mind refused to leave as well. He stared into the open space. He could breathe when he concentrated on the open space. But in his mind the walls of the trenches were closing in.

He could see clearly the face of McGuire sitting next to him in the mud as shelling went on all around them and dirt and pebbles rained down on them. They were joking. Gallows humor, he supposed. They were being deliberately crude, something about he’d rather be buried in a woman than in a damn hole in the ground.

It was the last thing McGuire said before the shell landed damn near on top of him. When Hank looked again, there was nothing left of his friend and the walls were collapsing around him. He was afraid he’d never see open sky again.

He looked out at it now and breathed deeply.

It was over.

It had been over a long time, Douglas was right.

Why couldn’t he put it behind him?

Would it help if he had someone to share his life with? But who would want to share his terrors with him? Or would the terrors go away? It was impossible to know. He’d felt safe when Alice had been in his arms. He’d kissed her, and she’d kissed him back. And then they’d fought. It was almost like he’d held the chance for a real future, a happy future, in his hands and he had thrown it away.

Douglas would probably say that’s what he’d been doing ever since he got back from the war.

Maybe it was true.

Maybe it was time to try to live again.

It had been almost ten years.

He looked back over at his brother, sitting, waiting, as he always was. Waiting for him to finally come home from the war. It was time to move forward.

“How are we going to get me out of this deal with Jiggy without getting you or Mother or Alice shot?”

Douglas didn’t seem to mind the shift in conversation. “I’ve been thinking about that. The most obvious thing seems to be to turn him in and have him arrested.”

“On what grounds? I don’t have proof he set up Tomas’s murder.”

“On smuggling.”

Hank finished the rest of his drink and put the glass down.

“I’d have to implicate myself.”

Douglas nodded. “Probably true.”

“I could go to jail.”

Douglas, annoyingly calm, nodded again. “Possibly. Or you could cut a deal. What do they say? Turn state’s evidence?”

“I can’t take that chance. I don’t want to go to jail. I couldn’t survive it.” It would be worse than being in the trenches. No open space. He might as well just shoot himself now.

“We could fake your drowning and you could start over somewhere new.”

Clearly his brother spent too much of his free time reading pulp fiction.

“I suppose it would get Jiggy off my case, but I’m not sure I want to go to that length.”

“There’s got to be a way.” Douglas tapped his chin in contemplation. After a few minutes of silence, he shrugged and said, “Well, we have almost two weeks to think of it.”

Right. Everyone was safe for at least two weeks, because Jiggy wouldn’t expect him back before then anyway. That gave them time to come up with a plan.

The put-putting of a motor made Hank look up. He cocked his head to get a better idea where the noise was coming from.

“Sounds like a boat.” Douglas was also listening to the foreign sound.

“It does.” It did not sound like a fishing boat, and no one would come that close to another working boat anyway. Then with a sinking feeling he realized what it must be. “Pirates.”

“But you don’t have anything to steal,” Douglas protested.

“They don’t know that.” He looked out the surrounding windows until he spotted the boat, a sharp looking runabout with a small cabin on the deck. And then he spotted Jiggy.

“What the hell?”

Douglas stood up to look as well.

“Who is that?”

“Jiggy Malone.”

“Then I guess we don’t have two weeks, do we,” Douglas said with maddening calmness.

“No. I guess we don’t.”

Damn. What was Jiggy doing here? There was only one way to find out, and that was to go down and confront him. Hank cut the motor and let the boat drift. Time to find out what was going on. He got his pistol from its hiding place.

“There are rifles in the crew quarters. Go see that the men are armed.”

“Will do,” Douglas answered.

By the time he got to the working deck, Jiggy had already climbed a rope from his boat to theirs and was standing on the deck.

“What are you doing here?” Hank asked, making sure that Jiggy could see the pistol in his hand.

“I need to protect what’s mine.”

“Nothing of yours on the Mary B,” he answered.

“We’ll just see about that. Get rid of the gun,” he said, showing that he had his own, which he now pointed at Douglas, who was still standing beside Hank. “Or I shoot him.”

Hank didn’t hesitate, he dropped the gun to the floor.

“What’s all this about, Jiggy?” Hank asked, arms folded, shoulders tense. His only hope was that some of the men would remember the rifles and take Jiggy by surprise.

“I’ve come to get what’s mine.”

“As I said before, I have nothing of yours on board.”

“I don’t believe you, Chapman.” He kept his gun trained on Douglas and ordered the men he’d brought with him to search. “Keep your crew where I can see them.”

Hank shrugged. “There’s not much place to hide here. A couple of my men are sleeping in the crew quarters.”

“Wake them up.”

“I will not. They’ve earned their rest, and there is nothing they can do for you except get in the way.”

Jiggy didn’t seem inclined to argue with that.

“Let’s see what you’ve got in the hold.”

“Scallops.” Hank said, while his mind raced. What was Jiggy trying to prove? Why hadn’t he waited for him to come in?

“Stay where I can see you,” Jiggy ordered, and since he was holding a gun, Hank and Douglas preceded him down the steps to the fish hold.

Jiggy’s men wasted no time. They started with the holds that didn’t have any fish in them yet, dumping the ice indiscriminately to the floor until they found the secret compartments. But, as Hank had tried to tell them, each compartment was empty. Finally, they dumped the bagged scallops on the floor as well and shoveled out the ice in that hold.

“You must have other hiding places. We’ll find the stuff. I know it’s here,” Jiggy said, turning on Hank. “I know you wouldn’t risk not making the pickup.”

Hank leaned against the door frame, arms crossed. “It’s not that big a boat. There is no other hiding place. There’s nothing to find. Now, would you mind putting my cargo back?”

“Screw you,” Jiggy said and pushed past him. “Do it yourself. We’ll search the galley and the crew’s quarters.”

“I wouldn’t recommend you wake sleeping fishermen,” Hank called after him.

Jiggy made a rude gesture, but other than that didn’t answer him.

Hank straightened up and addressed the crew members who had followed him to the hold. “Better get that cleaned up, or the fish will spoil. Leave the false bottoms out. We won’t be needing them.”

To Douglas, whom Jiggy seemed to have forgotten, he said, “Better see if you can get to those rifles.”

In the galley, Jiggy and his men were wreaking havoc.

“Enough,” Hank demanded. “There’s nothing there.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

Hank sighed. “You’re wrecking the place. You found my hiding place. It was empty. Why can’t you accept that?”

“Because I don’t trust you,” Jiggy said.

Hank let out a snort. “Nothing like the pot calling the kettle black.”

Jiggy stopped rooting around in a barrel of coffee beans.

“Okay. So if the stuff isn’t here, it’s because you haven’t picked it up yet. That’s troublesome, because you told me you always pick up the order on the first night out. Planning on skipping out?”

“My routine varies,” Hank answered, though honestly, he almost always made the run the first night. Much easier to pack it away before the holds were full of fish. “Why couldn’t you have just waited until I got in to port?” This was the sticking point.

“Because when you got into port you were going to sell to Salerno.”

Hank didn’t even have to fake his surprise.

“I was?”

“Don’t play dumb with me. I have my sources.”

“Your sources fed you faulty information.”

“We’ll see about that. Let’s go.” Jiggy headed back out onto the working deck and Hank followed him.

“Go where?”

Once again Jiggy had his gun in his hand and pointing at Hank.

“To rum row.”

Where was Douglas with those rifles?

“I can’t go there with your skiff tied to mine like a barnacle.”

“That is no skiff.”

“I don’t care if it’s the bloody Mauretania,” Hank countered. “I can’t sail with it dragging behind.”

Just then the distinct roaring of a boat moving at high speed became clear to them.

“Weren’t going to sell to Salerno, huh?” Jiggy sneered.

“No.”

“Then why is he coming this way?”

And here he had thought things couldn’t get worse.