Beauty

by Frederick Dillen

  She said, “The other boats will want to work with us?”

  He said, “You’re looking at a big part of the fleet right here, the offshore fleet. But you bet.”

  Easy was looking at her as if he had a question. His clothes were wet from the rain. Baxter would think it was funny to say that people like Easy didn’t know to come in out of the rain.

  She said, “You have a question, Easy.”

  “I do.”

  Carol thought she knew what the question was, and if she was right, it was a serious question but a question in her strike zone. He wanted to know whether she was on the up-and-up.

  She said, “If the zoning changes, Mathews—or whoever’s buying for him—gets to buy the plant from Baxter Blume and gets it at the cheap industrial-harbor price even with the harbor zoning gone. Parks tells me it’s a signed contract.”

  Carol looked to both Easy and Buddy, but she kept a particular eye on Easy. She was absolutely on the up-and-up, and she didn’t want Easy to think otherwise.

  She went on. “Under that contract, Baxter Blume only owns the old plant long enough to sell it at the cheap price, and Mathews gets to develop Marblehead, whatever that is, on harbor land he got for next to nothing. If the zoning does not change, and Mathews decides he doesn’t want the plant as an actual fish plant, which is the only way he could use harbor-zoned land, then Baxter Blume still owns the plant, but they cannot then sell at the Marblehead development price, because the zoning prevents Marblehead development. Okay?”

  Easy and Buddy both nodded. They got it.

  Carol went on anyhow, to nail it down for them. “Mathews has first crack, and our hope is that the zoning doesn’t change, that it stays harbor, and Mathews decides not to buy. Then the plant is worth what it’s worth right now and no more than that. I’ll give Baxter Blume a fair offer for the plant on that current value. I don’t know whether Baxter Blume will let me buy the plant, but I’m pretty sure they will. If they do, I need you guys to bring me the fresh fish that I think could make the plant profitable.”

  She thought Easy must have understood as soon as she’d begun to explain herself.

  “Sounds good to me,” Buddy said.

  Easy said, “Me, too.”

  Buddy said, “We’ll see you there at Town Hall tonight,” and he pulled open the door and climbed into his flatbed.

  Easy was already walking off to his own truck, and Carol wanted to kiss him.

  Walls of Names

  Carol had gotten to her apartment after dark last night and left before dawn this morning. Now in the daylight of early evening, she registered things more clearly: a galley kitchen, a small living-and-dining room, and a half bathroom; upstairs was a full bath and the little bedroom under the pitch of the roof, on which she could hear rain starting up again.

  Out the low back window beside the bed, she got her first view of an enclosed, overgrown little graveyard. Narrow houses backed onto it all the way around, other windows looking onto a hundred plain gravestones, some leaning, some broken over and covered with briar. Slender branches of saplings grew to the height of her window, and their unfurling buds danced a green haze in the rain. All these years as an undertaker, and this was her first actual graveyard posting.

  By the time she left for the meeting at Town Hall, daylight was nearly gone, and the rain had stopped once more. She went in a direction away from the high school, between narrow houses that had once been white and were flush against one another and tight on the street. They had small windows in warping clapboard, and off the curb was a gallery of rusted American cars.

  She was on her way to fight for her company, and in her head Baxter was asking if this was the company she wanted.

  Baxter wouldn’t want it. Baxter wouldn’t go anywhere near Town Hall tonight. His voice in her head told her, “Don’t go to this meeting, Carol. If anybody asks where you were, tell them you had an episode. You pick up a company in twenty-four hours? In an industry you know nothing about? With people you just met?”

  He laughed as if it were genuinely funny. He was right. But she was going to do it anyway. Screw you, Baxter, Carol thought.

  A tiny gray dog yapped and threw itself against a window beside her, and Carol smelled seaweed and iodine decay in the evening’s near-dark, as if the ocean were breathing over Elizabeth Island.

  She zigzagged around the peeling rear levels of a Unitarian parish hall that had rooflines of gulls weeping, and the houses on the street swelled to two- and three-family buildings in pastel vinyl siding with racer tricycles on the porches. She walked past the bays of the Elizabeth Island Fire Department and past the back of the library toward what could only be Town Hall, three stories of blackened brick with elaborate turrets that disappeared into night and mist. People streamed up the granite steps to the grim entry.

  Carol climbed halfway up the steps to watch the parade. She put her hands behind her and leaned out of the way against the iron railing. Easy and Buddy Taormina might have already gone in, but she saw men like them from the afternoon meeting in the high school gym. In the gym, she’d heard the microphone language of American bureaucracy. Here on the steps of a New England town hall, the men and their wives spoke Italian and Portuguese.

  She walked in with the last of the stragglers, all of whom followed the rest of the crowd up a bright stairwell.

  Carol stopped to peer into the oak and linoleum dim of the long hallway that handled everyday town business. Departments were painted on the pebbled glass windows of wooden doorways. Taxes, Clerk, Permits, and then it was too dark to read more. Carol wished it was daytime and she had an everyday reason to go into the hallway, even if only to pay off her parking tickets. She wished she knew the girls in the clerk’s office. She wished she lived in a town, in this town. By the time she turned and started up the stairs, she was alone.

  And the stairwell was bright and wide enough that she was startled by the height opening above her.

  More surprising, the walls of the stairwell, from the first step, were covered with lists of names.

  Painted in small gold letters, the names, men’s names, came in tight yearly bunches, chronologically. The most recent years were at the lowest step, with only a couple of names each year and not every year. Earlier and earlier years climbed the rest of the two full floors up the stairwell. Back fifteen and twenty years, there were consistently five or ten names. Back fifty years, as Carol went up the stairs, every year had twenty or thirty names. They couldn’t be war dead, not every year. By the second-floor landing, every year, year after year, from the nineteen twenties back up into the mid–eighteen hundreds, the names numbered a hundred, even as many as three hundred, a year. The lists at the bottom of the stairs, the most recent years, had been full of Portuguese and Italian names. Carol saw Taormina more than once. Up higher and earlier, into the late eighteen hundreds, it was a big proportion of Italian names. Highest up the walls were the earliest years, and the names were Carpenters and Wheelwrights, Parsonses.

  They had to be the names of fishermen from this harbor who had died at sea. Carol was amazed there could be so many. She was more amazed that the ones left could find the courage to keep going out year after year. She wondered what became of the wives and children.

  Then, for the second time in a day, she looked into a large room and over the heads of a crowd on folding chairs. There was a balcony around three sides of the room, and above the balcony, the ceiling was as high as the gym had been but with the remains of ornate molding from which fluorescent lights hung. The windows along the sides of the room were wide and tall and elegant. The walls and balcony and ceiling were white, with some of the molding still gilt.

  At the far end of the room, the town council sat at their line of brown, mismatched tables, and one of the councillors announced the sorts of procedural formalities that drive the public away so the persistent can have what they want. But
the public was certainly here, and this time it included women. Would Mathews and the fat boys be here? No. They’d keep a good distance between themselves and their zoning bonanza.

  Up behind the council was a stage and a large mural of Pilgrims and Indians, of an abundance of fish and the fishing industry rampant, of a town hall like this one surrounded by steeples on its hill above the harbor.

  Someone behind Carol said, “Is it you? Of course it is you.”

  Carol turned around to a short woman, round with fat, who stood legs apart and hands on hips. The woman was older than Carol, and she looked at Carol and then down at herself, smiling at what a pair they made for, short and tall, fat and skinny. Her hair had gone to white, but she had black eyebrows. She wore black pants and a black smock, and she looked tough enough to mother a town like Elizabeth. Carol towered over the woman and yet, for the strangest instant, wanted to climb into her arms and be cradled.

  The woman said, “Ezekiel Parsons wants everybody to call you Beauty, but I call people by real names. You are Carol, which Ignacio told me, along with the fact you have big hands. Big hands are useful hands. You are very welcome here, Carol.”

  Carol put her hands in her pockets.

  Through the doors, one of the council was calling for quiet as past business was read, and Carol nodded to the woman that they should whisper. The woman held one large hand toward whatever was the business in there and dismissed it.

  Carol, before she could stop herself, said, “You have big hands, too.”

  “Thank you. They are hands that have done work always. My name is Anna Rose Taormina. My Elizabeth Island Wives of the Sea have prayed for years to keep our harbor, and then this year we gave up. We lost faith, Carol, and I am ashamed of that, but now you are here, and together we will succeed.”

  Carol remembered Easy introducing Buddy. His name was Buddy Taormina. She said, “Are you Buddy’s mother?”

  “Yes. It is not your fault, but why Ignacio must be made into Buddy, I can never know. Call me Anna Rose. You’ll see it on one of Ignacio’s boats that was my husband’s for many years. Twenty years ago, I organized the Wives of the Sea, and now I can talk to both senators. They know to return my telephone call. The senators in Washington, not the crooks in Boston. But you don’t need the senators for this. My women are here tonight, and Ignacio and Ezekiel brought all the men from the waterfront who are still sober enough after the meeting with the fisheries commission.”

  “It was a good day for the fishermen.”

  “If we can land fresh catch again in Elizabeth and sell direct to a processor, it is a better day. Do you know anything about what we do? No matter. It is not hard as long as the fish are with us. And just the same, we don’t ever again stop praying.” She took hold of Carol’s arm and led Carol into the meeting.

  Our Dead

  Town council meetings were not a usual part of Easy’s life, and this was the first time he’d paid attention to the podium. It was old, square, dinged but solid, dangling a cord, looking like something that’d been stolen off the boat. It was to the side of the town councillors, in front of the stage and under the mural. Easy watched Carol set herself there behind the podium and hold the top of it with both hands. She looked over the crowd. She didn’t look nervous exactly. It was a full house, and Easy didn’t think anybody hated her yet, so that was good. Somewhere in town, of course, Mathews and his fat pals were hating her; Carol had apparently kicked them all out in her first five minutes. Easy looked at Carol and thought of that and started to laugh out loud until Buddy gave him an elbow.

  Carol was bending her knees a bit, feet apart, back-and-forthing a bit foot to foot. That had to be good, getting ready for action. Easy worried about her. He wanted her to get what she wanted. He didn’t care so much about what her fresh fish angle meant for him; he’d be fine with or without. He didn’t even much care if he was fine, and hadn’t cared much about anything since Mississippi and Angie and the baby. He’d kept going because that was who he was, fishing and a couple friends. He was surprised by how much he liked Carol, who was tough and smart and smiled some and didn’t seem to mind him.

  He and Buddy and Dave Parks and Buddy’s mother, Anna Rose, had spread the word and gotten a lot of the town here, but Easy wondered if the town cared. The fish and the real waterfront work in the harbor had been dying for twenty years anyhow. Unless you had skills like Easy and Buddy, it’d all been as good as dead for most of the last ten. If the town got a hotel on the old plant site, if they got condominiums for rich people, that would buy educations for everybody’s kids, and restaurants and tourists. The value of everybody’s houses goes through the roof. Easy cared about the harbor, but he figured most of the people who had showed up tonight were just pretending for a few minutes, and then they’d be ready to get on with it.

  Carol stepped away from the podium. She stepped out in front of the town council table and faced the town.

  She looked around at everybody, meeting their eyes. She knew what she was doing. It was a roomful of fish-town working people, brand new to her, and she seemed at home. Mostly at home.

  He wished she didn’t look like she was smelling something. All Easy could smell was low tide that the evening air was breathing into town. Nothing new in that—Easy loved the smell—but now she was checking out around her like she might have to shout Fire. Everybody was noticing now. Hold on, Carol, Easy thought, it’s going to be all right. He wished he could run up, whisper, “This is what you do for a living, Carol. This is what you were made for,” as if he knew.

  She stood alone there in front of Elizabeth Island in her dark suit, and her quiet (a sexy thing, quiet) was enough to keep him sitting along with everybody else, waiting for her to speak.

  She looked over everybody’s heads.

  She said, “I smell the ocean.”

  She said it loud, or it sounded loud because it was so quiet in the room. She sure didn’t have to be loud to be heard. Also, nobody besides her would be surprised to smell the ocean in Elizabeth, but nobody said that. It stayed quiet but for Carol, now that she was going.

  She said, “I didn’t see anyone climb the stairs with reverence, but those names on the walls of the stairwell up to this room, those must be the names of men from Elizabeth Island who died at sea. Isn’t that right?”

  That was one way to start. The whole room nodded, Easy, too, and all of a sudden, he wanted the rest of the room to go away so he could listen by himself.

  Carol said, “Anna Rose. Do you have family on that wall?”

  Buddy’s mother stood up and said, “Yes, I do,” and sat back down.

  Carol said, “Easy, I saw Parsonses on the wall. Is that you?”

  Easy couldn’t help it. He wanted to tell her, right out loud, how pretty she was. Instead, he stood up and said, ashamed but all in, “No, that’s not me, Ms. MacLean. That’s my family on the wall, but Easy Parsons is right here, alive still, and that’s what I’m hoping to stay.”

  Everyone laughed, and he sat down, afraid to look and see if she hated him.

  She was quiet, and he peeked. She didn’t look pissed. She looked ready to go again. Maybe he’d been useful, which was all, until now, he’d wanted since he left Mississippi.

  She said, “I’d be curious to know how many of you do have family or connections of one kind or another on that wall, how many of you knew the people behind the most recent sets of names. Would you forgive me if I asked you to stand up?”

  Easy got himself up quick, but so did the rest of the room. A working fish-town in its bones, all of them stood. Easy knew them all, except Carol, and Carol belonged here even though she was pretty. Everybody else—him, too, obviously—was a long way from pretty. The men were lumps or withering or broken in half, from jobs that ate your body. Most of them also didn’t care so much about shaving. The drinkers, men and women both, it was in their faces. The druggers, a few had c
ome, the old ones, which you never expected at first but you weren’t going to mistake them; they’d have come because they knew they had a connection in the crowd. The women didn’t look a hell of a lot different, though there were Asian and South American women who had showed up mostly without their men. All the women’s hair, long and short, looked ratty, only some on purpose. There was muscle on some of the women and fat on some, though not so much of the fat. Working women, and they’d popped out kids. A couple of the women had been pretty as girls, he knew from firsthand viewing, and he would never tell them they’d changed even if in high school they’d told him it was a good thing he could do this or that because otherwise he was a ­mirror-breaker. What was best about this ugly crowd, though, was they dressed great. Biggest clothing store in town was work clothes, and that store was on hard times with everybody else. The men’s shirts in the room here were torn or lost their color or both and the jeans and the khakis bagged in the knees and the ass. A few—the sharks that sold summer real estate and whatnot—they wore cheap, well-pressed, nice clothes, but if somebody like Easy knew they were cheap clothes, believe it. The women—how was it they all wore secondhand? Who got the new dresses? Easy looked at everybody, and he liked them, even the assholes, of which there were plenty, himself too now and then. He wasn’t going to make out that he liked himself. He wasn’t brought up to say that, and he’d felt different too many times. But he didn’t mind saying he was proud to be one of these people. He’d stand up for the people out on the wall and for the people still breathing in here both.

  Carol said, “I can feel the floor beneath my feet move as if it is floating out of sight of land, and I smell the ocean as if it waits outside the doors of this room with the dead of your harbor, your dead, the men of Elizabeth Island who died doing what it is that the people of Elizabeth Island do. The ocean scares me more than most of you could imagine, but if I lived here, I would not want that harbor to go to condominiums for rich folks from someplace else. I would not want it to go to a hotel for tourists. And I don’t hate rich folks or tourists. I wish I were a rich tourist myself.”