MY MOTHER WAS AT THE DOOR WHEN I CAME in, but I was ready for her. I told her my bicycle lamp had burned out, that I’d been forced to walk a good part of the way home. Somehow, she believed me and I escaped to my room, where I lay awake, in a haze of disbelief. The Black Duck. At Tyler’s dock!
She was half phantom, known all over Narragansett Bay for her daring runs and yet rarely glimpsed by ordinary folk. Her skipper was too smart and her crew too skilled. She’d eluded the Coast Guard and the Feds for years, and made a laughingstock of local police who tried to track her movements.
Cornered against some dark beach, the Duck gunned her big engines and roared to freedom, leaving pursuers to wallow in her wake. If, by some fluke, she was caught carrying goods and ordered to halt for inspection, a dense cloud of engine smoke would erupt from her exhaust pipes and she’d speed away behind it into one of the hundreds of coastal inlets known to the crew.
They were local men from local families with a need to make ends meet during hard times, different altogether from the big-city syndicates that were beginning to bully their way into the business at that time. Many folks quietly cheered them on around their supper tables, proud that one of their own could outsmart both the government and the gangsters. At Riley’s store, I’d listened in on more than a few back-aisle conversations.
“Heard the Duck was up to Fogland last night, making a drop,” I’d hear a fisherman say, shaking his head in what should have been disapproval but sounded more like supressed glee.
“That so?” a friend would reply, and several other men would suddenly materialize and gather round to hear the story.
“Yup. The Coast Guard picked up a tip that she was bringing in a load of hot Canadian whiskey from an outside rig. They’d staked out three cutters up there waiting for her, and guess what?”
“She got away!”
“She did. Dumped her goods in the bay and got clean away. Led ’em on a wild-goose chase up the east passage.”
“Oh, Lord, I wish I’d seen it.”
“You could’a heard it if you was up there onshore. The C.G. had a spotlight on her and was firing across her stern. They ordered her to stop, but it didn’t do no good. She turned on the juice and disappeared.”
“She does nearly forty, y’know.”
“I heard she’s got a steel-plated hull.”
“Her skipper’s out of Westport, somebody said. Making money hand over fist.”
“He’s out of Harveston, I know it for a fact. And he’s not just in it for himself, they say. He gives from his profits to local families in need.”
“Is that so?”
“I heard it was.”
“Somebody you know?”
“Me? No. I don’t know who it is.”
Nobody knew who her skipper was. Or nobody would own up to knowing. And now I’d seen him. I’d watched him at work in all his swagger and bravado. My first thought, tearing home on my bike that night, was that I couldn’t wait to tell Jeddy.
Only later in my room, thinking back to the men onshore, men I knew and respected and who knew and trusted me, I began to have second thoughts. Jeddy was my friend, but there was so much at stake. Not least, there was my own father, the manager of Riley’s store. I wasn’t sure what Mr. Riley was doing on that beach, but I thought it best for my dad if no one heard his boss was there. Chief McKenzie was breathing fire to put a stop to the Duck. Jeddy might swear he’d never tell him, he might truly believe we could keep a secret between us, but he loved his dad and stood up for him, and I knew how easy it would be to make a slip.