MY FATHER CAME BACK TO THE STORE FROM Fall River late that afternoon. He’d been there all day trying to get Mr. Riley out of jail, but the judge was a hard-nose and wouldn’t set bail.
Right off the bat, Dad called a meeting of store employees to put the record straight.
He explained how Mr. Riley had been busted in a raid on Brown’s Cove, which everyone already knew from the gossip flying around town. He said Mr. Riley would have to sit in a cell for a few days until things got worked out, and that a lawyer was on the case and he’d have his day in court. In the meantime, Riley’s General Store was to go ahead with its usual business.
“Nothing has changed,” Dad told us. “This store is not involved with Mr. Riley’s arrest. Neither is anyone who works here. Smuggling is not part of our business, and that,” he went on, sending a warning look around the stockroom where we were all gathered, “is how things will continue to be as long as I am in charge.”
It was a good speech, I’ve got to say. For the first time, I understood why my father had been so careful not to voice an opinion, one way or the other, about rum-running. It was his responsibility to keep Riley’s General Store open and on the right side of the law. Our community depended on Riley’s, and he was going to see that it was well served.
I couldn’t help noticing, though, that while he was giving the eye to Bink Mosher, the butcher, and Fanny DeSousa, the cashier, and even to the new stock boy, John Appleby, he never once glanced at me. This was deceitfulness of a sort, for all the time he was talking about no one being involved, he knew I’d been there on Brown’s with Mr. Riley. He knew he himself had given me permission to be there.
It opened my eyes to watch my father walking the fringes of dishonesty that afternoon, though I could appreciate why he did. It was to protect the store and to give me cover, and certainly to spare my mother the worry of knowing where I’d been.
Something else began to bother me. My father didn’t level with me privately, either. All the rest of that day, I waited for him to take me aside and talk to me about Brown’s. I badly needed to hear his views on Mr. Riley’s arrest. Was it good or bad? I wanted to tell him about Chief McKenzie being on the beach, about the charges Mr. Riley had made against him and how everyone else had been let go afterward. Was Tino right? Had Mr. Riley been set up?
Gradually, it dawned on me: Dad was never going to speak to me. He didn’t want to know about my night on the beach. He even avoided being alone with me, as if he was afraid I’d embarrass him by bringing it up. If I’d been older, I might have understood. The less said the better was his old-fashioned way of dealing with a situation that had gotten out of hand, that was scaring him, maybe, because Mr. Riley had gone to jail.
As it was, I was hurt by his silence, which I turned on myself. I knew I was far from perfect, a disappointment to him as a person and a son. Now I believed I’d sunk so low that he couldn’t bear even my company anymore. Cast off in this new, frightening way, I stayed out of his sight as much as I could. And that was too bad, because right then was when I could have used his help.
Charlie Pope caught up with me late one afternoon as I walked home from the store. He pulled his car over to the side of the road ahead of me and waited until I came up. Then he opened the door and stepped in front of me.
“Howdy, Ruben,” he said, eyes sharp on my face.
I said hello.
“Wanted to speak to you about one small thing.”
I looked at him. Ever since Jeddy had told me what he’d tried with Marina, I’d thought he was a snake. Now, just like one, his tongue flicked out over his lips, leaving a thin film of spit.
“Y’know that body you and Jed found a few weeks back?”
I nodded.
“You might be interested to hear it’s been identified.”
“Never was lost. Turns out the Coast Guard spotted it from the air just after you left. Went in there in a seaplane and picked it up before we got there.”
That was a lie. I kept quiet.
“He was a New Bedford man, drowned off his boat while he was sport fishing,” Charlie went on. “One of those sad accidents. People don’t know the power of the sea. They get a hold of some fancy boat and think they’ve bought the keys to heaven. Go off by themselves. Don’t take precautions.”
I didn’t say anything. He went on.
“The fellow was a well-known businessman over there, owned a couple of restaurants. Made quite a bundle for himself. I hear his wife’s in a bad state. Two little kids. You can imagine how it’d be. She believes he had some papers on him from a deal he was negotiating. It wasn’t in his wallet. That turned up on the boat. Actually, one slip of paper is what they’re looking for. You didn’t by any chance see something like that when you found the body?”
“What kind of paper?” I said.
“I dunno, receipt-sized. Y’know, they’re trying to clean up his affairs, get the estate straightened out. She is, I mean. His wife. That piece of paper would be helpful.”
“Did you look in his pockets?” I asked sarcastically.
Charlie’s lips twitched. He glanced down at his feet. When he glanced back up, his eyes had turned mean.
“We looked in his pockets. Yes sir, we certainly did. What I want to know, kid, is if you looked in his pockets.”
“I didn’t,” I answered. I gazed directly at him. It was a bold-faced lie.
“And you didn’t take anything else off that body?”
“No. I didn’t even touch it. Neither of us did.”
I added this to protect Jeddy. I hoped to God he’d said the same thing.
“I find that hard to believe,” Charlie said. “Two kids and a body alone on a beach. First thing you’d do is search him.” He was really putting the squeeze on.
“Not us,” I declared. We stared at each other.
“He’d been in the water awhile,” I said. “Could be this piece of paper dissolved. Or washed away.”
“That’d be a shame,” Charlie snapped. He got back in his car and put his head out the window. “Listen up, Ruben, you better be telling the truth. This isn’t some game of hide-and-seek we’re playing.”
I didn’t turn a hair. “Who’s we?” I shot back. “You and Chief McKenzie? Or are you in this by yourself?”
He licked his lips again. “You’re a smarty. I’d watch my back if I was you,” he said, and drove off.
When I got home, I went up to my room first thing and closed the door behind me. I opened my desk drawer and searched around in the rear of it. The pipe and tobacco pouch were there, pushed into a corner. I brought them out into the light, feeling again the strangeness of having them in my possession. It was like holding a little piece of the dead man’s life, a very personal piece that only those closest to him would have been familiar with. His wife, for instance.
Now that Charlie had told me about her, I could imagine her. She must have watched the man open his pouch and fill his pipe after dinner on many nights. What was his name again? Tony something. His young children would have caught the scent of tobacco smoke traveling up the stairs to their bedrooms. They would have gone to sleep with a peaceful image of their father in their minds. Their father, the rumrunner. Would they ever know the real story of how he’d died?
I opened the pouch to sniff the leaf myself, and with its tang in my nostrils came a sudden thought. I pushed my fingers down into the tobacco and poked around. In a second, I brushed against something, and going deeper, I pulled out a slim paper scroll. It looked like a cigarette to me, a fancy one with a fine gray-green design, somewhat misshapen from being in salt water for so long. A bit odd, yes, but a man might store a cigarette he wished to smoke later in his tobacco pouch.
It was only as I stared at this object that a faint sense of recognition arrived in my head. I put the pouch aside and began trying to unroll the thing. Seawater had stiffened it and collapsed the ends. I managed at last to spread it flat on my desk, and there, in a flash, the exotic greenish design turned commonplace. Before me lay one half of a fifty-dollar bill.