Fishermen's Court

by Andrew Wolfendon

  “Facts about what, Jeannie? What could be so—”

  “I did some unforgivable things, Finn. After you left.”

  “What kinds of things?” I honestly can’t imagine what would be worse than screwing Cliff the fisherman on the same sofa I watched Breaking Bad on.

  “Things that... well, they’re the reason I stopped drinking.”

  “Those things can remain your business, Jeannie. Forever.”

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” she says, as if I haven’t spoken. “And I was pissed at you and thinking good riddance to bad ass-clowns. I never in a million years thought we would have another... opportunity with each other. Or that I’d want one. That doesn’t make what I did right; it just explains my frame of mind.”

  “You don’t need to explain anything.”

  “Yes, I do. I did things in order to hurt you and get back at you. I let my guard down and got involved with the wrong people.”

  “We both had reasons to try to hurt each other back then,” I say. “But whatever you did after I left, it was only emotional acting-out. It didn’t actually hurt me, because I was gone. I don’t ever need to know about it, whatever it was. It has no power to affect me now.”

  “Yes, it does, Finn. There are... circumstances I have created that are... ongoing. And you will be hurt. Unless you leave the island on the first ferry run and stay away for good.”

  “What if I decide not to do that?”

  “You need to.”

  “What if I decide I want to move back to Musqasset, start painting again, build a new life here, meet your daughter...?”

  “Christ, Finn!” She jumps up off the sawhorse. “What is wrong with you? You need to go. Now. I have to get ready for work, and if you stay any longer I am going to say things that will…”—her voice loses its edge—“ruin a memory I want to hold onto. Please, Finn, go. ...Please.”

  She looks wrung out, flattened by a bus. I have no words for her. And yet I don’t seem capable of locomotion.

  My phone rings, breaking my paralysis. It’s Miles. I text him, Call u in a few.

  Jeannie leans over me, places her hands on my face, and gives me a lingering and delicious kiss. It is deeply infused with “goodbye,” though. When she stands up, I can feel the connection between us sever like a snapped cord. She walks off into the house and into her private future.

  . . . . .

  “Are you ready?” says Miles on the phone as I step out onto the road.

  “For what?”

  “What we talked about yesterday! To flush out Mr. Edgar Goslin.”

  “Are we really going to do that?” My brain—not to mention other select portions of my anatomy—is locked into a Jeannie groove right now. I have trouble switching tracks to Goslin. I force my feet to commence the painful trek away from Jeannie’s house.

  “We’d better be,” replies phone-Miles. “I’ve recruited some helpers.” He explains that a pair of young men who work at the new marina have agreed to serve as our “muscle” in the utterly insane event Goslin does agree to meet us in person.

  “But we don’t even have a plan,” I point out.

  “I’ve been working on that,” he responds. “Here’s the deal. If—and I know that’s a giant if—we can get Goslin to agree to meet, we’ll insist the meeting take place at the gazebo on the west side of the village. It’s private enough to hold a discreet conversation, public enough that no funny business can go down there. My two guys have already staked a claim to it, and I planted a webcam and a recorder there. I’ve also thrown together some cash, which we can flash at Goslin to, you know, lubricate the gears of conversation.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we just... see what we can get him to say.” That’s our plan? I’m glad my health insurance is paid up.

  Miles proposes that he make the initial call and conduct the actual powwow with Goslin. He’s decided the situation is too sensitive to use a stand-in—he’s probably right—and so he will do the meeting himself, wearing oversized sunglasses and Billy Staves’ hooded rain suit with the the super-high collar. Our two beefy young conscripts will conspicuously stand guard nearby. In theory, there should be no real danger of violence. But in theory, bumblebees can’t fly. We don’t know how Goslin will play this, or whether he will bring his own goon squad along. We’re messing with things we are eminently unqualified to deal with. As usual.

  “I’ll meet you at Harbor House in fifteen,” says Miles, “and we can phone Goslin from your room.”

  I hit End Call and step up my pace. The weird clash of emotions I’m feeling—post-coital bliss, raw heartache, and mortal terror—is one I’ve never quite experienced before. I still feel oddly vital, though, in a way I haven’t in years. And I’ll still take this jacked-up emotional goulash over the low-grade depression that was devouring my soul in Wentworth.

  I’m feeling so enlivened, in fact, I barely break stride when I spot a dead crab lying on its back in the middle of the road. Someone’s dropped catch? Nope, it’s been cut cleanly in half. I see another demi-crustacean about twenty-five feet ahead. And another one after that. Intended for my eyes, no doubt. So my buddies did stake me out at Jeannie’s after all, and they knew I’d be heading back toward the village on this road. Can’t say I’m exactly shocked.

  I march on, less fearful than I probably have any right to be.

  As I’m about to pass a trailhead on my right, I see a dead mackerel nailed to the wooden trail sign, festering merrily in the morning air. This routine is starting to feel a little childish, guys. I stop and take a look down the bush-lined trail. I see three or four more rotting fish nailed to trees, ten feet or so apart. Do my stalkers actually think they’re going to lure me into the woods by planting a trail of dead fish like breadcrumbs? How stupid do I look?

  Wait, don’t answer that.

  I have no intention of walking into a trap, but I do jog down the trail a few yards to see how far ahead they’ve marked the path. Through the foliage, I spot another fish-nailed-to-a-tree just beyond a fork in the trail, and another after that. I guess they want me to follow their trail toward the abandoned orchard in the middle of the island. Right, guys. That’ll happen.

  I turn around to head back to the main road when I hear the rustle of branches and the scuffle of shoes on dead leaves. Two men grab my arms from behind. A third one yanks a band of stretchy material over my head, forming an instant blindfold.

  A fist slams into my side. I collapse to my knees.

  One of the attackers ties a rag around my mouth to gag me as another one tries to pull my hands together behind my back. I thrash and kick in resistance.

  A paralyzing kick from a shoe-heel is delivered to the side of my head, and I instantly see stars (yes, I’ve just discovered, that really happens). I give up the fight. They tie my hands.

  The men carry me along, face down, my shoes dragging in the dirt. They trot me across the road and into the brush on the other side. They’re moving in a half-run as if they want to get this thing handled quickly, whatever this thing is going to be.

  The blindfold is working; I can’t see a thing. The men drag me for fifty yards or more over rocky, brambly terrain. Then they lift me and toss me, not at all gently, into what feels and sounds like the bed of a pickup truck. I yelp in pain as my face meets the molded metal, but my cry goes nowhere, thanks to the gag.

  A motor starts and the truck drives off.

  The truck bounces along a rough road and makes a series of sharp turns that have me slipping and sliding in every direction. I can feel the grit of loose sand in the truck bed.

  After a couple of minutes, the truck stops.

&nbs
p; The men yank me from the bed and drop me roughly on the ground. The surface I land on feels and smells like a dirty carpet. The guys position me on my back, my tied-up hands behind me, and pull my legs out straight. They bind my legs together with a series of bungee cords—thighs, knees, ankles.

  Next, they roll me up inside the dusty, filthy-smelling carpet and wrap some more bungees around the roll. I feel myself being lifted and carried along by the men. These guys must have planned this out like Ocean’s Eleven; not a word has been spoken by any of them.

  They toss me, rolled up in the rug, onto another hard surface. It is instantly evident, from the rocking of the “floor” and the sound of surf, that I’m in a small metal boat. I hear an outboard motor kick over. That’s when I realize how screwed I am. How many benign reasons can there be for hauling a person out to sea in a rolled-up carpet?

  Try as I might, I can’t conjure up a list.

  The boat starts off. The waves feel fence-high as we maneuver over them. We must be in the bay, though, because the water would be even rougher if we were in the open Atlantic.

  It’s hard to keep track of time, I’ve noticed, when you’re rolled up in a carpet on your way to your own execution, but I estimate eight or ten minutes pass as the boat chugs and dips over the rolling waves, which grow steadily steeper as we go.

  Finally, one of the men can no longer keep his mouth shut. He says to one of his cronies, in a voice meant for me to hear, “Should we toss him out here?”

  Another voice—slightly familiar?—snarls a “No,” then adds a moment later, “Let’s lower him into the water gently.”

  They both start laughing as if this is the grandest joke e’er told. The engine winds down.

  I am edging toward panic. For the second time in just over a week, I am facing the near certainty that I’m about to die. And I still do not want to die.

  Still do not, still do not, still do not.

  The motor cuts out and I hear a hollow thump that makes my heart leap with hope—the small boat has bumped up against what sounds like a larger boat. So maybe they’re not going to dump me into the Gulf of Maine with weights attached. Maybe I’ve been granted a stay of execution. Probably not for pizza and DVDs, though.

  The men stumble and bump about as they attempt to tie the smaller boat to the bigger one in the high-rolling surf. I hear footsteps climb a step or two up a metal boat ladder, then voices from the higher deck engaged in a debate. From what I can pick up through the muffling of the carpet, they’re trying to figure out how to maneuver me up into the larger boat. The rough water is making their job difficult. Good. Fuck them—in case I haven’t said that for a while. I hear the word “winch” being bandied about. Two of the men clamber back into the smaller boat and secure a couple of ropes around my carpet roll.

  I feel myself being slowly lifted out of the boat via electric motor, my body sagging between the two rope-holds.

  The men release me from the winch boom, dropping me onto the deck of the bigger vessel. They undo the ropes and the outer bungee cords, and unroll the rug I’m in, leaving me still blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back, my mouth gagged, and my legs bound together. The deck is pitching from the waves, but these guys seem to have seasoned sea legs.

  The men haul me roughly across the deck. One of them digs my cell phone and wallet out of my pockets. Another one throws open a heavy-sounding hatch in the floor.

  A horrific—nay, apocalyptically bad—stench is unleashed from below. Rotting fish, several days old. A muscular guy (Chokehold?) grabs me around the torso, hoists me in his arms, and carries me down a steep, short set of stairs, grunting and panting. He releases me with a shove and I splash-land in a shallow pool of liquid, amongst a clutch of slippery objects I immediately identify as dead fish.

  The man clangs back up the metal steps, escaping from the smell as fast as he can. I hear the clink of a string-operated light switch, and he shuts the hatch behind him.

  It’s me and the dead fish. Together in the dark.

  Chapter 31

  The boat dips with the storm-driven waves, and the rotten-fish soup goes sloshing across the floor. It collects against the other side of the chamber, pooling in the canted angle between the wall and floor. My body topples and rolls with the fish, and I go plunging under the putrid liquid, face down.

  My mind races toward panic. I’m going to drown in this stuff! My lungs itch to inhale.

  No, I tell myself. Hold your breath; the boat will shift back in a few seconds. Those seconds stretch out into a thousand distinct microseconds, and then I feel the liquid shifting back the other way and spreading out thin again. My face finds the air. I haul in a breath as I try to gain control of my tumbling body. Oh my God! That smell! I don’t have time to dwell on it, though, because the awful broth splashes up against the other side and repeats its puddling effect. Again, I go underwater. Again, panic tries to rise.

  The boat shifts back again, the inner tide flows the other way, and I manage to gulp in another breath. As I slide across the floor again, in pitch blackness, my mind grabbles to define the physical space I’m in. The chamber is maybe seven or eight feet wide. The surface feels slick. Plastic-coated?

  I mustn’t allow myself to be submerged again. Keep your ass down and your face up, I command myself. That’s my new life-purpose: ass down, face up.

  The next time the hellish soup hits the wall, I’m ready for impact. I pull in a breath and allow the liquid to buoy me this time, instead of going under. Okay, I get how to do this now. The secret is to ride the liquid, rather than fight it. I’m sure there’s a spiritual lesson in there somewhere, but I’m not exactly in the headspace to receive it.

  Staying afloat is the key. I’m finding it devilishly hard to control my body position, what with my limbs bound and the floor tipping from side to side like the tilty room in a York Beach funhouse, but I must keep my face aimed skyward and remember to float.

  The rancid air envelops me like a second layer of liquid. It feels thick and overpowering and almost viscous. It makes breathing seem like a last-resort option.

  My mind wants to run away from this situation and never come back, but I must stay grounded. I’m not dead yet. I’m alive. In this minute. And if I play my cards right, I can be alive in the next one.

  A minute. I can shoot for that. One minute. Then maybe another one after that.

  I need to be fully present and mindful.

  I journey back to my old Zen practice. Clear the mind of judgments, I tell myself. Accept what is. Suffering is not caused by the conditions we find ourselves in but by the way we judge and label those conditions; by our resistance to reality. Suffering is resistance. Yes.

  So stop resisting.

  Nonjudgmentally speaking, then, my conditions are as follows: My hands are tied and my legs are bound. I cannot see. I am engulfed in an extremely powerful—not “bad,” necessarily—odor of putrefaction. I am sliding back and forth amongst a pile of rotting fish in several inches of liquid. The fish are wet and slimy. My gag reflex is firing and my stomach is lurching.

  Those are the facts that comprise my present reality. My reality is neither good nor bad. It just is. Om Aranam Arada. Accept what is, do not resist it.

  I slosh across the floor again, my head slamming hard against the wall. Damn!

  Breathe! Breathe! Breathe! Breath is the key.

  My lungs are telling me they can’t breathe because the odor in here is so pressing, but in fact they can. The chamber is not airtight. I am not going to suffocate. I force myself to take a full mouth inhale, through the wet bandana-gag, and allow my body to move like driftwood in the shifting liquid. Don’t fight it, go with the flow.

  I feel my h
eart rate slowly come under control, even as my body tosses back and forth in the dark. The danger of losing my mind begins to subside.

  Acceptance, not resistance, Grasshopper.

  Okay, okay. I accept.

  I accept. What is, is.

  Good. Fine. Better.

  Now what? What variable can I control here?

  The constant shifting of the floor and slopping of the fishy liquid is out of my hands. But maybe I can find some way to anchor my body. Yes. That would be a good start.

  Anchor. Body.

  If I can make my way to the metal steps, I should be able to brace myself against them somehow. Or at least grab onto them. My wrists are tied together behind my back, but my hands can still grasp.

  Get to the metal steps, then. Right. Okay, so how? As the liquid flows across the middle of the chamber, thinning out, I flip onto my side and try to inchworm my way toward where I think the steps are. No traction on the slick floor. And the flow of the liquid is too strong to overcome. Is it my imagination or is this soup getting deeper? I hold my breath and let the liquid lift me again as it pools in the wall/floor angle. I think of another idea.

  I ride the liquid—I swear it’s deeper than it was when I landed in here—till it pools again on the other side. This time I hold my breath and deliberately go underwater. My legs are tied together, but I find I can flip them as a unit, like a dolphin’s tail. I paddle furiously toward where I think the stairs are. When the water shifts the other way, my body slams full-force into the stair unit, cracking my elbow on the metal. Damn, that hurts, but I manage to grab the side of the metal structure with my bound hands. I cling to it with an iron grip. Pumping my feet against the floor to create friction, I push myself to a sitting position, still gripping the stair unit behind me.

  Hallelujah! I’m stable and anchored against the flow. For the moment. The fishy water goes sloshing past me. Yes! I’m a dock-post now, not driftwood.