for Louis L’Amour: A Kayak Western

The yacht had come in on the night tide, and he was crossing the main channel to meet it at the dock — for the water, and the few small things a man buys when a boat is in — when the shot came across the flat of the morning and changed the day.

It was a hard, flat sound, and it crossed the open salt the way a stone skips, once and gone. The water gave him no bearing on it. But he had felt it behind him, off the left shoulder, the way you feel a thing more than hear it, and a kayak will not turn the way a man turns his head. He dug hard on the left and brought the bow around in a slow half-circle, losing way, the hull sullen under him, and by the time the world had come around to where the feeling had been, he had already lost the first part of it.

The mayor was the part he caught. The man was sagging in his boat, folding sideways out of true the way a sack settles, his paddle gone slack with one blade trailing in the water, and then he was over the side and into the channel and the boat was empty and rocking.

He brought the bow around further. That cost him more. When the channel mouth swung into his line he caught the second part of it — a paddle, working. Whoever it was worked hard and well, the blade flashing on both sides in a clean unhurried rhythm that ate water, and the boat under it was a thing he did not know. Orange and green, an odd pairing, the colors of two different boats married into one. A man in a low hat, his back to the morning, already a good way off and turning in toward the channels.

He marked it the way you mark a thing you mean to find again. The colors. The hat. The reach of that stroke. Then he let it go, because there was a woman at the mayor’s boat already, and she was calling out.

She had her boat alongside the mayor’s and a hand on the empty hull, and she did not know what to do with any of it. Mayor Phil, she kept saying. A good’un. What’s the world coming to.

“You saw it,” he said. It was not quite a question.

She nodded. The shot, and then the paddle going off into the green, and then nothing.

“Do you know him?”

She looked at him, and then out at the empty channel mouth, as if the man might still be sitting there to be named. “No,” she said. “No.” And then, lower, as if it troubled her more than the rest: “And I ought to, oughtn’t I.”

He had thought the same thing, and had no answer for her, and there was no time to look for one. Fisher Joe was coming.

Joe had seen the boats clustered wrong and was already putting his back into it, and a body in the water is a thing that needs a good man and a good boat and time, and Joe was the best of them. The sheriff caught his eye across the fifty yards of it and held it, and tipped his head once toward the mayor and once toward the green country, and Joe lifted his chin, and that was the whole of it. The body was Joe’s. The green country was his.

He turned his bow toward the channels. He had not filled his water, and he thought of it, and let the thought go.

He began to paddle.

He turned his back on the body and put the green country in front of him, and the water between was full of boats.

The yacht was in, and the main drag had its morning traffic on it — farmers down to trade, a barge under tow, two old men drifting and talking, a woman with her children and a load of greens. None of them knew yet what had happened behind them. They paddled easy, the way people paddle when the day is ordinary, and that was how he found his man: among all that ease, one boat was bending its back. Far up the channel, small with distance, a single paddler was driving hard, eating water, while everything around him ambled. A man in a hurry on a morning when no one else was. The blades caught the light on the upstroke, one orange, one yellow, left, right, left.

Eight hundred yards, the sheriff made it. Maybe more. The man had taken seven or eight minutes while the mayor died — a lung shot, by the pink spreading on the water, and a lung-shot man does not argue the matter — and seven minutes is a long lead on the water. It sat on him like a weight. A man could look at that distance and call it lost.

He did not call it lost, and while he bent his back into the first of it he made himself think, because thinking was the half of the job that caught men.

It made no sense. That was the trouble at the bottom of it. Everybody loved the mayor. Phil had been the mayor since before half the farms were dug, a hands-off man, a friend to everybody, a man who gave no one cause. You did not shoot a man like that. And you did not shoot him here — in the main drag, in the morning, with the whole water watching. A local with a grievance, if such a thing could even be imagined, did his business quiet, or he did it as a duel, faced up and witnessed and agreed. This was no duel. This was a shot from a boat and a man folding over, and a paddle already going for the green.

So it was not a local. It was a man who did not care that the water was watching, because the man was not staying — a man who would be over the sea and gone before the body cooled. An outsider. And there had been one, hadn’t there. That stranger who came through, who had mouthed off in the saloon by the dock late one night — the sheriff had not been there, but he had heard of it, the way he heard of most things. A hard man passing through, with something in him. He had a face for it now, or near enough.

And if it was that man, then the man was running for the coast, for whatever had brought him to it. He would take the Longjohn — the first of the sea-arms, opening to the right a half-mile up — out to the open water where the channels stopped closing behind you and a man simply could not be found.

The sheriff leaned his boat toward the right of the channel, the way you lean toward a door you expect a man to walk through, and he ate into the eight hundred yards a little at a time, and he watched the orange and the yellow flash among the morning boats.

There was traffic to get through first, and the traffic did not know to get out of his way.

A man towing a barge wanted to talk to him — lifted his paddle and called something across the water — but the sheriff went by with a lift of the hand that was not quite an apology, and the barge man said something to that and the sheriff did not catch it. Two kayaks on the barge’s lines, both of them bending hard, the barge heavy and low behind with a load of timber, the whole rig driving inland on the making tide. A man did not haul a load like that against the water; he rode it up while it was still rising and was where he meant to be before it turned. There was maybe two hours of rising left in it. The barge men knew that as well as he did, by the way they were spending it.

He went by a farmer and a clutch of children gathered around a small new kayak the color of a tomato — one of the little ones getting his first boat, by the look of it, the neighbors come out to see him into it, the day a child in this country started to become a man. They were laughing. None of them looked at the green country, or at the hard-driving boat far up against it, or at the sheriff going through them with murder at his back.

He passed the health woman, out in her good boat with her bag, on her rounds of the farms where the women were carrying, because this was her day for it. She raised a hand. He raised one back, because you did, and did not slow.

And he kept, in the back of his head, a running account of the water. It was with him now, the tide, carrying him up the green the same as it carried the man he wanted and the barges and everyone else. But it was slowing — he could feel it slowing — and in two hours it would stand still a little while and then come back the other way, hard and fast and against him, and the country up there would start to drain and show its teeth. Whatever this was going to be, it would be a different thing after the turn.

Then the orange and yellow were gone.

One moment the blades were flashing against the green, small and steady, and the next there was nothing there at all, and the sheriff felt it go through him like a missed step on a stair. Gone. He drove three hard strokes before his head caught up to his gut — boats do not vanish, the man went behind something — and even as he thought it the something came clear: a barge, low and wide and crowded with sheep, working slow across the head of the Longjohn arm, and the orange-and-green hull had simply gone behind the wool of it.

It had ridden the cross-set over the head of the Longjohn, left to right, taking what the arm-current would give it — but its way was seaward, against the making tide, and the two on the tow lines were grinding into the flood with their heads down and nothing to spare. Heavy work. It would be heavy all the way to the dock. The sheriff was going the other way, up the green and with the water, and the two boats closed fast.

He did not slow for them. There was no need. He came up on them and they came down on him, and for the space of a few seconds there was clear water and clear air between, fifty, sixty yards of it, and a man’s voice would carry that and no more.

“Orange and yellow,” he called across it. “Hard paddle. Did you see him.”

The paddlers did not lift their heads. But the boy riding among the sheep to keep them off the rails came up on his knees in the wool, and his voice came back thin across the closing water.

“Up the Cut — hour back — going like the devil—”

“You know the boat? The man?”

“No—” the boy called back. “Never seen him. Nor the boat—”

And that was worth something, because a boy who rode a crossing all day knew every hull that used it, and if this one was strange to him it was strange to everybody.

“His load. What’s he carrying — on the deck—”

The boy came higher on his knees, glad of the asking, a boy’s eye for gear running over what he’d seen go by.

“Rifle—” it came across the water, and the sheriff had known that and it landed in him anyway. “Pack up front — vest on him, bottle, the comms — rope and a hook on the back—”

The gap was opening now, the barge sliding down past him toward the salt, the words stretching thin.

“—rods and a bucket, like anybody—”

Like anybody. A man fleeing a murder with his fishing rods aboard.

“—and a sail—”

That one came near lost, frayed out across the widening water, and the sheriff turned his head a half-inch to keep it.

“A sail,” the boy called once more, fainter, and then, because it had been sitting in him and the sheriff was the law and here was the law asking after that very boat: “—is he the one? Is he the man that killed the mayor—”

The sheriff did not turn his head. He let the question fall into the water behind him, where the boy could make of it what he liked, and the sheep barge went on down toward the dock with everything it knew. He dug for the green, and put the pieces together as he went, the way you put a man together from his gear when you cannot see his face.

A rifle, the boy had said, and he had known the rifle. A man who had shot the mayor through the lungs from a boat, and kept the rifle on his deck after, was a man who had not finished being dangerous. That much needed no thinking.

The pack needed a little. A man who threw a pack on the front of his boat before he did murder was not a man who had lost his temper of a morning. He had thought about the day after. He had packed for it. That was a colder thing than the rifle, and the sheriff did not like it.

The comms he liked least of all, for a while, until he reasoned it the rest of the way. The man had a device, which meant the man could hear what the water was saying — could hear the net come up its one minute in every half hour and tell him where the law had got to. But a device was only any use to a man who could read it, and reading it, like writing it, meant slowing, meant your hands off the paddle and your eyes off the water and a hundred yards bleeding away while you did. The boy on the sheep barge had known the news because the boy was riding the wool with his hands free. The two on the tow lines had known nothing, because the two on the tow lines were paddling for their lives against the tide. And the man up the green was paddling for his life harder than any of them.

So the man was running dark. Whatever the net said, the man was not hearing it, not while he drove like that, and he would not hear it until he stopped — and he was not stopping.

The rope and the rods and the bucket said nothing, or said too much — said a man with the ordinary kit of an ordinary day, which did not sit beside the rifle at all.

And the sail.

He had a sail himself, furled on his own back deck, and he could use it, which was more than some could say — but he was honest with himself about the size of that more. There were men out on the open water, the long-haul men, the ones who went where the land dropped under the horizon, who could find two knots in a sail he would never find, who read a gust before it touched them and were leaning for it while he was still being shoved. If the man up the green was one of those — a man off the open sea, a stranger — then a sail could end this.

But not now. Not on this heading. A kayak sail was a downwind rag and nothing else; it gave you the wind that was already at your back and laughed at the wind in your teeth, and the little wind there was now, and the bigger wind the afternoon might bring, were neither of them at anyone’s back on the line they were running. So the sail slept on the man’s deck, dead weight, for the moment. He filed it where he filed the rest of the afternoon’s maybes: the wind could swing, the country could bend their heading, noon was two hours off and the onshore came up hard some days and stayed home others, and if it ever got behind that man and that man could fly his rag, there would be no more chase. Until then it was a thing on a deck. He stopped feeding it.

He crossed the head of the Longjohn, and then it was time, and he did the thing he had decided to do.

He let the paddle rest across the cockpit and took up the device, and the boat slowed at once under his idle hands, the lead he had bought with his shoulders beginning quietly to bleed back the other way. He did not watch it go. He thumbed the words out small and fast against the minute the net gave him:

Sheriff following an armed man north up the main channel, into the green. Boat orange and green. Blades orange and yellow. Black hat. He has killed and he is armed — keep your people off the water and behind walls until he is past. Do not approach him. Report sightings to the net, not to me — time, place, heading. Emergency. Code—

and he set the code, the one that opened the net up, that let any boat with a device speak to every other, the protocol they kept folded away against the day a thing like this came. It was a small act and it changed the water. The net was a public square now, for as long as he held it open, and every soul on it who was not paddling could warn every other.