Nasty Morning
in Barrington on Sea
The freighter was small, no more
than a football field in length, painted dark red which hid the rust stains
fairly well if you didn’t have binoculars.
It appeared to have dropped anchor where as far as he knew ships of that
size never had done so before. Staring
hard through the high power binoculars, he could see the crew lowering a boat
on the port side, the side nearest him; though from that anchorage it was still
a long pull to shore. Barrington on Sea
was not equipped with docking facilities for ships of any size beyond the
pleasure boats and the few fishing boats, mostly shell fishers, which plied the
local waters. At this time of year, the
harbors were full of moored and docked yachts and sailboats and speedboats, a
few trawlers, some as large as forty feet, and the tiny quahog skiffs that went
out each morning, winter and summer alike.
Freighters could be seen moving up and down the bay, heading to or from
Providence terminals to offload vehicles and heating oil and some to pick up the only major exports of the USA
nowadays, scrap iron and garbage, recycled, of course.
He watched as
the skiff was pulled by its ten straining oarsmen toward the shore from which
he was gazing and wondering what in heaven’s name they were heading this way
for. There were several private docks
some with their owners’ powerboats tied up, some empty. The large houses that were set back from the
water were surrounded by trees and shrubbery along the street side to protect
the occupants from the few idle motorists who might make their way along what
was essentially a private road. Toward
the water their lawns, rolling and green, sloped downward like parks set off on
the sides of the property lines by rows of bushes maintained by Mexicans or
Hondurans or whatever Hispanics were least expensive in this decade.
What on
earth, he wondered aloud this time, was a boatload of scruffy men – they appeared
pretty rudely clothed and mostly unshaven through his powerful lenses – be
doing in this neighborhood of suburban delights? He was soon enough to find out though
satisfaction was not be had by what he learned.
The skiff was
pulled ashore by the small party of men who leaped from their oars into the
waist deep water and manhandled the large boat, more a whaleboat than a skiff,
he could now see, onto the sand and tying the craft securely to the side of the
longer of the two nearest docks, they all of them splashed through the water
and up onto the lawn of the Stanley Myersons’ house, increasing their pace as
they slogged through the reeds first and then onto the shelf and finally onto
the lawn where they began to fan out and
run toward the long stone patio that comprised the front of the large house.
He trained
his binoculars on the front lawn sweeping them to the right side of the house
where a back door led to a garage connected to a breezeway. The men on the lawn had slowed to a walk now
and he could see they were holding weapons, pistols most of them while one or
two held short double barreled shotguns.
A woman appeared in the window that faced onto the now occupied patio or
deck. She was shouting something in a
high pitched scream, something about the police. He was transfixed by the impossibility of
this scene. A man appeared at the door
to the patio, opened it and pointed a gun of some sort at the occupiers who
shot him, blowing him back into his comfortable well appliance kitchen. The woman was screaming now. A high pitched and even at his distance from
the actual events very annoying sound that ended with a similar” bang bang”
from another shotgun.
The raiders
entered the house breaking glass, he could hear, and firing their shotguns as
they went. The woman at the window
stopped screaming and disappeared from his view. He noticed someone else at the window
upstairs. She was holding a cell phone
to her head. A mistake he thought to
himself and seconds later she too was blown back into the doubtless comfortable
bedroom. Just visible in the circle of
his binoculars he noticed a woman sitting on a lawn chair by the side of the
garage closest to him. She appeared not
to have noticed anything amiss for she kept on reading her magazine or
newspaper. One of the men was walking
slowly up to her holding a pistol in his right hand. She did not look up as he drew near. He said something to her evidently
establishing that she was not only elderly but hard of hearing as well,
possibly deaf, for she did not look up even when he stood by the side of her
chair, the sort of cheap lawn chair you can buy in a big box store, the kind
with webbing that doesn’t last. He
remembered he had given away all those type of chairs when he had moved to
Barrington on Sea from his previous home in Pawtucket, a mill city very far
down on its luck, a gritty decaying place distinguished nowadays by its prior
history as the birthplace, so the city claimed, of the American industrial
revolution, and the first place to have a factory or “works” clock high on a
tower, the result of the first strike by women workers in the long, bloody, and
largely forgotten history of the labor movement in America.
The elderly
woman in the chair was now apparently talking with the intruder who had bent
over her to be able to speak directly into her ear. He watched fascinated as she leaned her ear
toward the man, young, dark skinned like herself he noted, and pointed toward
something in the front of the house, something he could not see.
She was smiling;
laughing even and the intruder shared her joke, said a further few words, and
walked toward the front of the house now completely taken over by the band of
raiders. He heard one or two more gun
shots, cracks rather than booms suggesting pistols being fired not shotguns,
and then silence, only the resumption of bird calls from the trees and brush
where he was standing. Then the
intruders, all of them, appeared again on the back lawn. Two of them were
carrying a trunk or chest: the others held various smaller articles in their
free hands, and the whole group joined by the elderly lady from the lawn chair
walked without haste back the way they had come, toward the waiting boat. They put their acquisitions into the stern of
the boat and one by one they climbed in.
The dark skinned man, they were, he would see, mostly all dark skinned
except for one or two who appeared to be white men whose skin had been browned
by sun and salt, assisted the lady from the lawn chair into the stern as well
where she sat comfortably it seemed on the stern sheets while the men still on
shore pushed the craft into the deeper water before climbing in and taking up
their oars. Together they pulled the
boat, a larger craft than he had at first thought, out into the still calm
water of the inlet heading toward the freighter which had begun to emit engine
noises, loud clanking sounds as the anchor was drawn up. In less than five minutes they were along
side. The davits had been lowered, the
crew in the boat secured the lines to the fore and aft of the boat, and he watched
while boat and occupants were slowly hoisted up to the boat deck level. By this time the freighter was underway, the
rhythmic beat of her engines driving the ship back out toward the bay.
Behind him he
could hear the faint sound of sirens, police or ambulance or perhaps both he
hoped, and the occasional slamming of a door.
He watched, waiting to see if perhaps a Coast Guard vessel or a police
boat would appear to intercept the freighter slowly making its way back out to
the channel that would bring her down toward Newport and the open ocean, but
none appeared.
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