Hawk and Anna sat a while longer on the bench enjoying the warmth where their bodies touched. Anna counted back on mental fingers. Many months and sixteen hundred miles had gone by since she’d last lain with a man. Remembering put the heat of the Mexican desert and a lover’s touch into her bones.
Hawk put his arm around her shoulders. His touch was light but firm. Anna relaxed against him, enjoying simple contact. At forty was there such a thing as casual sex? Somehow, she doubted it; too many memories.
An absurd desire to say the words “I love you” came over her. Not because she meant them, merely because she remembered how good it had felt when she had.
Suddenly she was sorry she’d imbibed so heavily. Her mind was wandering from lust. Anna schooled it. The body had its own life. Hungers of the spirit could be dealt with in the morning.
“I’m sleeping on the Belle tonight,” she said. “Can I offer you a nightcap?”
“Only if the night comes with it.”
“It does.”
They walked together, not touching, to the boat. Anna latched the cabin door behind them. Beyond the pilot’s area and down a step, a small door led into the bow. Anna secured it open with a metal hook made for the purpose, then lit two candles. The Belle Isle’s cabin lights would run off battery power but this was not an occasion for stark electric reality.
Hawk sat on the blue-vinyl-covered bench and watched without speaking as Anna cranked open the hatch, letting in the soft night air, the light of the stars. He watched while she put two cassettes in her well-used player and punched play on one side and pause/play on the other. As Cher’s voice sang, “It’s in his kiss,” he smiled.
“Be gentle with me,” he said and Anna laughed.
“Your first time?”
“Might as well be.”
“Orphans in the storm.” She sat beside him and he took her face in his hands, smoothed her hair back with callused fingers.
If anything was new to Anna it was the sadness. As they made love, sweetly, gently, she felt Hawk’s tears falling on her neck and breast. She found herself crying too, without knowing why. In sympathy, she realized, but whether for Hawk or herself she couldn’t tell.
The “Mermaids” tape ended. “Wolf Eyes” filled the Belle with music of the north. Anna felt herself drifting to sleep until a thought jarred her. “Damn,” she whispered.
“Vasectomy,” Hawk said as if he’d read her mind. He pulled her closer, kissed her hair. “Sleep, Anna.”
She slept without dreaming till sometime after moonrise. The silvery beam, powerful as a spotlight at the forty-eighth parallel, pouring down through the hatch woke her. Finally the harbor was utterly still. Hawk had rolled away from her on the triangular-shaped sleeping platform and lay curled up as neat and independent as a cat. Anna slipped from under the sleeping bag that covered them both.
She needed to escape the narrow confines of the hull, to get out where she could breathe. I have grown addicted to solitude, she thought as she dragged on Levi’s and a sweatshirt, too many nights alone. Something fell from the pouch pocket of the shirt and rattled to the floor. She scooped it up along with her socks. Not looking at Hawk lest the pressure of her gaze awaken him, she crept to the stern.
The scrubbed deck caught the moonlight, held it like milk in a glass. Anna’s shadow was black, its edges clearly delineated. She looked across the water to the piers lined with fishing boats. Every crack in the concrete was ink-black, every bolt visible. The boats, though colorless, kept no secrets from the night. The moon picked out their names: Marie III, Gladdest Night, Fisherman’s Home, I.O.U., The Office. The only one with lights still burning was the Spirogyra.
Anna sat down on the engine cover to pull on her socks. What had fallen from her pocket was still balled inside them. It was Tattinger’s diving knife, the one he’d handed her when he’d taken the photographs of the porthole in the Kamloops‘ captain’s cabin. Anna had brought it to Rock to return it.
As she turned it over she felt letters scratched into the plastic handle. Dive knives were all pretty similar. It wasn’t unusual for divers to mark their equipment. Anna ran her thumb over the initials. The letters were not J.T., not R.M. for Resource Management. Not S.C.R. for Submerged Cultural Resources. Tilting the knife in the moonlight, she read the marking: “d’A.” Some computer code, she thought, and: Tattinger is such a dink.
She didn’t realize she’d whispered the last half of the thought until Hawk said: “Casting spells by the light of the moon?”
He stood in the doorway, his dark hair falling over his forehead. The silvery light blessed him as the setting sun had done on Amygdaloid. Instead of bronze, his body shone like living granite.
“You’re a beautiful man,” Anna said.
He looked shy. “What’ve you got there?”
“Nothing. Jim’s dive knife. He gave it to me on the Kamloops dive and I forgot to give it back.” Because she could think of nothing else to do, she handed the clasp knife to Hawk.
He turned it in his well-made hands. “It’s a dive knife all right.” He sat down beside her, nude, perfect. “Would you take it wrong if I didn’t spend the night?”
“No,” Anna said and meant it. “We don’t know each other that well.”
He sat a moment longer. Finally he said: “You’re wearing my pants.”
Clad only in a long sweatshirt, Anna stayed on deck while he dressed, then watched him as he walked down the dock, leaving as he had come: noiselessly, privately, in the wee hours like a young girl’s fantasy. There would be no morning stares, no sly remarks, no gossip. He was a good man. Watching him go, Anna wished he were someone she loved.
Waking alone, the sensible light of day a square of gold overhead, Anna took a moment to decide whether Hawk Bradshaw’s night visit had really occurred. When she decided it had, she was unsure how she felt about it. She chose not to worry. She’d ask Christina how she should feel, and if that failed, she’d bring out the big guns: she’d ask Molly.
Physically she felt terrific; relaxed and energized. She pulled on trousers-her own this time-and a red tee-shirt with “Frijole Fire” silkscreened across the front and a line drawing of El Capitan in West Texas. Her hair, incarcerated in two braids, reminiscent of a hundred drawings of Minnehaha, was in need of a shampoo. Anna fired up the Belle’s twin engines and motored slowly over to Mott.
Docking, she saw the Loon, the boat Jim Tattinger used, and was reminded of her last Rock Harbor chore: returning his knife.
Having secured the Bertram, she climbed back aboard. The knife was gone. In the finite space of cabin and bow, she knew she was not mistaken. The knife was gone. Hawk had taken it.
Anna sat down on the bench in the bow and stared at the small space of linoleum between her feet, the place where the knife had fallen from her pocket the night before. The last she’d seen it, Hawk had it in his hand.
Had he pocketed it by accident? Force of habit? Doubtful, Anna thought. By the time she’d divested herself of his Levi’s and he’d put them on, he would have had to put the knife down somewhere. His taking it had been deliberate. Was his leaving so abruptly merely a way to steal an eleven- or twelve-dollar knife, a knife no different from half a dozen or so he and Holly must own between them? A kleptomaniac? Unlikely-a rash of petty thefts in such a closed society wouldn’t go unnoticed and anything noticed would never go unremarked upon. Hawk disliked Jim. Could the theft have been spite?
“No!” Anna stood abruptly, knocking her head on the low ceiling. All the disparate facts had tumbled into line with this sudden thought: It wasn’t Jim’s knife.
Time had come for a trip to the mainland. Talk with Christina and the lesbian community in Houghton. Pay a visit to Mother Castle in Duluth.