WHAT JEDDY AND I KNEW ABOUT ONE-EYED Tom was what everyone in town knew: that as a young man he’d been a good fisherman. He’d had a boat and a crew and the kind of rugged strength it takes to pull a living from the sea.
But the sea has a way of breaking down even the best. One gusty afternoon, a wave swept Tom’s first mate overboard, and he sank and disappeared before Tom could reach him. A few years later, a storm came up and smashed Tom’s boat into the rocks, and he had no money to replace her. Then he went to work as crew for others, but a boat hook caught in his eye one day and tore his face so badly that he had to quit working.
After that, according to the story, his moods turned foul. The word went around that he brought bad luck on board a boat, and even when his face healed, no one wanted to hire him. Then his wife left him for another man, and he was forced to sell his house. And so he had retreated, alone, far out on the Point, to a shack that had once housed hens by the side of a salt pond.
From then on, he’d kept away from humanity and rarely come into town. Jeddy and I had caught sight of his gaunt figure in the distance during our treks around Coulter’s Point. Neither one of us had spoken to him, though, or dared to follow the sandy footpath that led back to his shack, as we were doing now.
Tom was nowhere in sight when we arrived. We skulked around a bit. The whole place was in a shambles, overgrown with weeds and pond brush, scattered with old tins, rusty tools, broken bottles and the like. The house was actually a pair of coops nailed together, and badly so, for one side had taken to leaning far over on the other, which was itself listing at a dangerous angle. It looked to us as if a hurricane had been through, and perhaps if you thought of what life had served up to poor Tom, you could say he’d weathered more than one.
If he was still around.
A half hour later, we were about to give up and head back toward the beach when the crunch of footsteps came from the bushes. An elderly dog staggered into the yard, followed by an old man carrying a long-handled net bristling with crabs. He halted and looked us over with one rheumy eye. The other was a whitened disk in its socket.
“Hello, Tom!” I managed to call out.
This brought a second suspicious glare. Jeddy weighed in with, “We’re here to ask you something, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Under its gray bush of beard, Tom Morrison’s chin made a chewing motion, as if he were mulling this over. Then he walked toward the house, urging his moth-eaten mutt along. He propped his net against the stoop, where the crabs rattled their claws and scrabbled together, still very much alive.
“It’s no trouble of me!” he called at us. “It’s trouble of you t’come all the way here.”
He sat down against the chicken coop door and pried off his boots. Gruff as he was, we could see he was curious about why we were there. He was throwing us half-glances and muttering to himself. After a bit, he motioned us across the yard to sit down near him on a mound of clam shells.
“This here’s Viola,” he said, in a somewhat more friendly tone. The dog thumped her tail.
She was about the most beaten-down dog I’d ever seen, and so stiff-jointed, she had to circle around four or five times before her old legs would agree to let her down on the ground. But she had a gentle face and a sweet way about her. When she’d settled, Tom reached out and stroked her with a wide, rough hand.
“Hello, Viola,” Jeddy said, leaning forward to give her a pat. She thumped her tail again. Then we got down to business.
“What we want to know,” I began, “is if a seaplane came in here a few days back. Not here, I mean, but off the beach out there. It would’ve had pontoons and made a good amount of noise, and we wondered if you saw it.”
Tom stared at me out of his good eye. I was trying my best not to look at his bad eye, which had no pupil and bulged from his head like a peeled egg. Most people would’ve put a patch over something like that out of plain good manners. Tom was way past worrying about such things, I could see.
“Why we’re asking is, we found a dead body there a couple of days ago,” Jeddy continued, probably thinking it might help to give the whole story. “And when we left to report it, somebody stole it. And there were no signs of where it went, and no one’s talking about it. We think that’s fishy.”
Tom stared at him. He still didn’t trust us and was holding back on an answer. Something else had already answered for him, though. A fancy gold watch was around his wrist. Jeddy and I both saw it. When Tom saw us looking, he raised his arm to make a proud show of the thing.
“We sure would appreciate anything you could tell us,” I said. “It was midafternoon when we were there. A bunch of seagulls was making a racket over the body.”
“Doing more than making a racket,” Tom replied, gazing fondly at the watch. “Having quite a banquet for themselves. Quite a banquet!” He glanced up, amused by his own words.
“But then, somebody must’ve come. Flown in is what we guess,” I pressed him. “We came back later, about suppertime, and nothing was there. No gulls and no body.”
“And no empty liquor crate,” Jeddy put in. “It’d been there, washed up with the body.”
Tom stared at us. “Well, I got that,” he said. “After you left. There it is. Might be of use one day.”
We looked where he was pointing. The crate was lying cocked up against an overturned skiff across the yard.
“So you saw us,” Jeddy said.
Tom grinned. “How d’ya like my new watch?” he asked, holding up his arm again.
“We like it,” I said. “It was on the dead man, right?”
“He don’t care,” Tom said. “He got no use for it now. Anyways, I left him his wedding ring.”
“We won’t tell,” Jeddy said. “We just want to know about the seaplane. Did you recognize the guys in it?”
“Naw. I don’t know ’em. Somebody’d been keeping a watch on these beaches, though. Been a big speedboat nosing up and down the coast all week, like it was looking for something. Then in comes the plane.”
“Was it the Coast Guard?” I asked.
“Nope. Nobody I ever saw. Tough guys.” He paused and sucked in his breath before uttering his next remark. You could see it was distasteful to him, something he didn’t want to dwell on.
“They got machine guns,” he said. “When they come off the plane there’s two of ’em, and they wade ashore holding the guns over their heads. One takes and shoots the dead man. Rat-a-tat-tat. Shoots him dead again. Then they laugh. They drag him out through the waves back to the airplane, and take off.”
“Where’d they go?” Jed said.
Tom shrugged. “I stayed hid. I was glad I took time to cover my tracks.”
“They never saw you watching?”
Tom shook his head grimly. “They’re shooting dead men, so I see they’re not particular to what gets shot. Me and Viola, we stayed hid.”
School being in session until 2:00 P.M., it seemed best to keep a low profile until that hour. After our talk with Tom, Jeddy and I stuck around in the yard and played with Viola, who still could fetch a stick, though it took her a while to get it back to you. Meanwhile, the old man disappeared inside his shack to heat up a pot of water to cook the blue crabs he’d caught. That was how he ate, never mind what time it was. Schedules the rest of us followed, like breakfast, lunch and dinner, night and day, had lost their pull on him. He was living free of all rules, even the most basic.
I was watching him like a hawk, I’ve got to say. I’d been under a heavy regime of right and wrong, good ways and bad ways, ever since I could remember, and to see one-eyed Tom out from under, cracking blue crabs at ten o’clock in the morning and falling asleep without even getting up from the table, was a sort of revelation to me.
About noon, with Tom snoring in his chair, Jeddy and I went back to the beach and lay around out of the wind in the dunes. Unless you’re a seagull, there’s nothing comfortable about an open beach on the Rhode Island coast in May. Keeping our heads down, we ate our school lunches. Afterward, for sport, we crawled around looking for terns’ eggs in the dune grass. It was too early in the season for turtles to be laying.
“Well, that’s the end of it, I guess,” Jeddy said as we rested after these activities. We were back on the subject of the dead man. “The guy was in deep with some bad characters and got shot. My dad is right, it was rumrunners and we probably don’t want to know any more about it.”
“Makes you wonder, though,” I said. “Why were they looking for a guy that was already dead? Then they shoot him again, like they can’t stand his guts.”
“Maybe it wasn’t them who shot him in the first place,” Jeddy said. “Maybe it was somebody else and they needed to prove to themselves that the guy was dead. He was probably double-crossing everybody.”
“He was a high roller, that’s for sure. He must’ve been hauling in the dough to afford a watch like that. That pipe and tobacco pouch, they’re both quality, too.”
There was a pause in the conversation while we looked over the dunes at a fishing rig that was chugging along offshore. It passed the beach and went on up the coast.
“Well, you know what Marina thinks,” Jeddy said.
“What?”
“She thinks Charlie Pope’s gone in with a big bootleg gang. He’s been acting like he’s some kind of hotshot.”
“She doesn’t like Charlie. She put him in his place, too. Marina knows how to do that.”
“She doesn’t like Charlie for a good reason,” Jeddy said. “Don’t tell anybody, but he tried some funny stuff on her.”
“She was walking home from the bus after school one day, and he pulls up in his car and says for her to get in, Dad wants to talk to her. So she gets in, and he starts driving to Harveston. When she asks him what’s going on, he says ‘nothing,’ he just wanted to get to know her better.”
“That’s crazy. He’s ten years older than her.”
“I know. So she says to take her home. He says he will, but he has an important errand up the road, and will she just sit tight until it’s done? Police business, he says. So, she says all right, and when they get to Harveston, he goes into some place by the train station, and comes out ten minutes later with a couple of guys in suits who shake his hand and drive off in a fancy car.
“When he got back in the car, Marina asked who they were. He told her not to worry about it, they’re old friends. He was showing her how important he was, I guess. Then, on the way home, he starts up with her again and pulls into a field off the main road.”
“That scum. What’s gotten into him?” I was getting furious listening to this. “What’d Marina do?”
“She got out and started walking.”
“He didn’t touch her, did he?”
“He tried, but she got out too fast. She went back to the main road and walked, and he was driving along beside her, begging her to get in, that he wouldn’t do anything, but she didn’t trust him and kept walking. Then Emma Pierce came along in the Harveston taxi, and Marina flagged her down and got away. She came home okay.”
“She didn’t want to. She would’ve kept it a secret like she does everything. But I saw her getting out of Emma’s taxi up the road from the Commons. She was afraid I’d tell Dad about seeing her, and that he’d ask her about it. I had to swear not to say anything. Dad would go through the roof if he knew what Charlie did.”
“I wish she’d tell him. Charlie’d get fired!”
“That’s what I said, but Marina said, ‘Don’t tell,’ because Dad is funny about stuff like that and he might blame her.”
“Blame her! He wouldn’t.” All this was giving me a new view of what it meant to be a girl with a pretty face.
“He might. He gets mad if he sees anybody looking at her the wrong way. Last summer, when Elton White came over and sat on the porch without even asking, Dad said it was Marina’s fault, that she was leading him on.”
“Marina wouldn’t do that!”
“I know. He wouldn’t listen to her, though. He told her he’d have his eye on her from then on.”
At this point, we were interrupted by the sound of a motor out on the water, and we peered up over the dune again. A high-powered rig was coming in to the beach. We flattened out and watched.