Beauty

by Frederick Dillen

  It didn’t take long for her to figure out what had happened. Mathews and his fat boys had bought a shitload of toothfish, almost certainly illegal, with money skimmed from the company. There were no records of any purchases in any books Annette had seen. But it turned out the fat boys had made their toothfish legal in separate books kept in the antechamber of the storage building. Carol and Annette ran through the books in a couple minutes. Elizabeth Island’s Best, which had bought all plant assets, owned two million dollars’ worth of laundered toothfish. That two million had not been enough to persuade Mathews to buy the plant under harbor zoning, but it would have paid plenty of greens fees if he had been able to flip the site to a developer. For Carol, two million dollars meant more than greens fees. It didn’t mean she could relax, but it did mean she wasn’t completely naked in the storm. Her company was going to make it, and she had decided on that without a clue about toothfish. With an extra two million dollars, she would not have to be holding her breath for the years it was going to take the company to prove out. She took a breath, and she relaxed, and as soon as she did those things, she toughened back up. In the neighborhood where Carol was raised, you learned that if you got something extra, you were going to need it, and you’d better pay attention.

  Easy said, “How do we do the right thing?”

  His voice had an edge that surprised Carol. She let that go and focused on managing what she could. She said to Annette, “The electricity is billing through the new plant, isn’t it?”

  Annette said, “Yes, Remy might shut it off. I’ll call him.”

  “And would you ask Parks to come over?”

  Annette took Carol’s cell and turned away, and Carol and Easy and Buddy stood facing the cold storage.

  “It doesn’t belong to Mathews anymore,” Easy said. “But I wish we could put him in prison for it.”

  It was early in the day and they all stood in shadow, but the sun was enough above the main plant to light the corrugations at the top of the storage unit. The fat boys’ industrial padlock hung on its open hasp beside the outer door. Carol could smell harbor, and the sunlight began to glare as it levered down the wall. She wouldn’t have minded helping Mathews to jail, but toothfish wasn’t the ticket; that would mean the fish was announced as officially illegal, and lost to Elizabeth Island’s Best. No, Carol thought, the company needed the value of that fish. She could have laughed about two million dollars in free money.

  Buddy said, for Carol’s benefit, “We all caught too many fish, and if we could have, we’d have caught every one. But now most of us are trying to do it right. Because this is how we live, not just how we make a living.”

  Carol wasn’t sure what that meant, but Buddy seemed to need to say it. She said, “Okay.”

  “Twenty years ago,” Easy said, “people were buying boats for us.”

  He said that with his edge again. Carol thought she was falling in love with Easy, and she didn’t understand how he could be so sharp with her. She said, “What’s that have to do with us?”

  Buddy said, “It’s the background for that meeting in the gym at the high school. You wouldn’t have known, but everybody there did, whether they admitted it or not. When the government pushed territorial fishing limits out to two hundred miles and gave the best grounds to Canada, then the government started big-time discount loaning on big boats for us, as good as telling us to go catch the last fish. So we did. We tried. And we made money. We did the fishing. We also paid the price. The fish and the money dried up, and most of the captains who didn’t sink their boats for insurance, or bring in drugs, they ate their loans and left the water. Fifteen years ago, I’d let a lumper carry a haddock off over his shoulder when we were done unloading. Today, I watch every ounce comes out of my hold, and so does Easy.”

  Easy said, but without the edge now, “The question is, who’s buying? And I don’t mean at the supermarket.”

  Carol zeroed in on getting the history they were giving her, and what it meant to them—and to her, which was what seemed to be their point.

  Buddy said, “Who’s making the real money off of us? Who goes lobbying the government to loan on the bigger boats so they can make extra money off us? I caught the fish, and I’m paying the price. I ain’t happy about it, but I’m living with it. We’re all of us, the ones left, living with it.”

  “And we’re bringing the fish stocks back,” Easy said slowly, calm, no edge, but Carol could sense him not happy. “I didn’t say it at the meeting in the gym, because we’d gotten what we needed and why fool with it, but if we could get the government to put observers on our boats and see what we see, they’d know for sure that we are bringing the stocks back. They send out research vessels to count fish, and the scientists don’t know how to fish and don’t know where to look. They’re counting in the dark, and the guy driving the boat couldn’t make it as a fisherman when fish were jumping into the ice.”

  “If we got real observers,” Buddy said, “they’d see how much we pull in. They’d see how much we have to throw back that’s over quota, that’s bycatch. These are dead fish we’re throwing back. But yeah, all right. If we have to pay for overfishing, all right, but let’s really save the fish.”

  “And so then there’s Mathews,” Easy said to Carol, and the edge was back.

  “So, what about Mathews?” Buddy said to her, looking at Easy to settle him down.

  “What about this toothfish?” Easy said to her, not completely settled but not ugly.

  Carol smiled at him, which wasn’t the point, and was the point. She tilted her head toward the storage with its two million dollars’ worth of stolen toothfish that by the time it went onto the menu would have to be worth closer to four million. She said, “Let me get this clear. The toothfish should never have been caught. That they were caught is a violation of the law and of what good fishermen are trying to do to save the ocean and make up for how they fished in the past. And this is Mathews’s fault?”

  “All the Mathewses,” Buddy said, and now Buddy began to get angry.

  Easy, holding back, but angry just the same, added, “Maybe it was American fishermen, maybe not.”

  Their anger had taken on personal intensity, and because she was the one in front of the anger, Carol was starting to get angry back. When she realized that, she looked down at Easy’s boots and remembered those boots beside her that first night when she was on her hands and knees after Remy had told her she was out. She also remembered how she’d come to feel about Easy since then.

  Besides which, she was a businesswoman and she could deal with a little heat.

  “Whatever the last fish is worth,” Easy said, “the Mathewses are going to find someone to go get it for them at a cost they can make money off of. After that, they start another business. Strip-mine the last of the shore and then develop it for second homes. When that’s done, go into asbestos.”

  Carol, all common sense and business, love aside, said, “Mathews broke the law, apparently, but you’re starting to make me feel like if I run a fish business, at the end of the day I’m wading through my own sewage just like Mathews.” Which came out sounding harder than she meant, but they were coming at her.

  Buddy said, as full-on angry now as if Carol were Mathews’s right hand, “He was here, watching our days get cut, watching the fleet lose its boats and our kids take jobs in cubicles off the island. Meanwhile, he’s buying fish nobody is allowed to catch. It’s a fish outside our waters, but we’ve got plenty of illegal fish inside our waters, and we forfeit our boats if we catch them.”

  Easy looked almost as if he could take a swing. He said, “We’re going to give this fish for charity or we’re going to kill Mathews with it,” and he looked hard at Carol. Still hard, he said, “We are not going to keep it.”

  Carol said, “We are going to keep it. I’m going to keep it.” She knew what she was saying, and not just about the fish. She
was telling Easy, the man she still had not kissed nearly enough, that she had other priorities. She’d be heartbroken in an hour or however long it took, but she’d say it again.

  And she wasn’t just thinking about her own invested savings. Every year of her life was in this company, the two million belonged to the company, and the company needed it. It was a fact that at least once a week she imagined herself among the legions of men and women she had fired. She hadn’t gone in, and brought everybody else in, on a whim. If the business took too much longer than they’d hoped to get traction, at that point, two million dollars could mean everything. Carol believed Easy would understand eventually. It shouldn’t have to be heartbreak between Easy and her company, Easy or her company.

  Buddy said, “You’re going to keep it?”

  Annette had come back among them and heard most of it.

  As Dave Parks jogged to them, he called, “Two million. No shit. But okay, who do we give it to? Start with the Coast Guard?”

  “She’s keeping it,” Easy said. He said it and aimed it at her. “Dirty fish and dirty money and let the jerks go free.”

  At that, Carol damn near told him to hell.

  “You’re going to keep it?” Parks said.

  Easy turned his back on the conversation. He looked away between the buildings at a slice of air over the harbor, and Carol felt the beginning of heartbreak, coming quicker than she’d have thought.

  Buddy said, “We report the fish, and we say it was Mathews. Even if he’s got the records to protect him, we make him look like who he is. And we look like who we are.”

  Easy didn’t turn around.

  Parks said, “Carol, Buddy may be right. It’s a lot of money, but this is more sensitive than you know. The word will get out, and we’ll be sleazebags. We don’t want our new brand to say sleazebag. A lot of people in this town and down the coast, throughout the business, have been hurt by the restrictions. If we can say we’re turning over illegal catch, if we can say we’ve got a real enough business that we can take the high road, it’s going to make a difference. We’re starting out and we’re the little guy, but especially with what you just added in, we have the reserves to wait to be sleazebags until we’re the big guy. Look at your investors. They don’t want money from wiping out a species. I don’t want it, and I’m not even a fisherman. Let’s advertise it, Carol. Let’s brand it. We’re the company of the new fisherman, farming the ocean honestly and sustainably.”

  Carol concentrated on Parks. She heard him. She was doing what she had to do. She was doing her job. She said, “Fair enough, Dave.” Then she turned to Annette.

  Annette said, “We don’t know if we’ll make it, and we took money from people who can’t afford to lose money. If the fish could swim, I would put them back in the water. Everybody we know is in this company, and some of them don’t have jobs. They’re our responsibility now. How we feel and how we look doesn’t matter if we fail. Excuse me, Dave.”

  Buddy looked over the roof of the plant at a cloud of screaming gulls.

  Carol said, “Thank you, Annette. For a moment, I’d almost managed to forget about the town money.”

  Parks said, “No need to excuse, Annette. We’re having a meeting. We all say our piece, and Carol makes a decision.”

  Carol knew where Parks, Buddy, and Easy were coming from, and she believed that what Annette said might have the best chance of changing their minds. She did not believe Baxter would have to go through Annette’s logic; Baxter, she was sure, would see that two million and pick it up before anyone else could blink.

  She said to Parks, “Can we place it? Can what’s left of our marketing department sell what we’ve got here? Our Chilean sea bass?”

  Parks said, “Mathews would have fed it out a little at a time, and he would have had buyers lined up. We don’t have those buyers lined up, and we don’t have the logistics in place to slip out bits and pieces. If we try to sell in bulk, or if we put the word out to sell piecemeal, by the second day of trying to move this volume of illegal catch, some agency is going to be here suspending further sales until everything checks out. If Mathews did his fake books well enough, which he wouldn’t have had to do if he knew his buyers, maybe we can hope to sell it all, but who knows how long that will take? In the best version, it’ll get ugly and we’ll get covered in mud, not to mention legal costs.”

  The cloud of gulls was moving away, following something, and Buddy watched them. Easy didn’t move.

  Annette said, “Buddy, your mother and her Wives of the Sea could sell those fish in an hour. And they would love to do it. And they’re as much fishing people as you and Easy. After it’s all sold, if anybody asks, we can say, truthfully, that we came by the fish honestly and that along with the fish we found books justifying the plant’s original purchase of them.”

  Carol thought about the local fishermen’s club and the diner, both named for Christ’s fisherman, and it went back further than that. It went back to people nourishing themselves and their communities since the beginning of time. Buddy and Easy were standing up for oceans that had once seemed eternal, and for a way of life that had seemed equally eternal—and they were standing up against their own practical well-being. The new company Buddy and Easy had just invested in was nothing close to a sure thing, and the Patagonian toothfish could absolutely determine whether or not they lost everything. It was hard not to admire their integrity, and Carol did admire it.

  She said to Annette, “Call Anna Rose and tell her and the Wives of the Sea to sell it all, and get immediate payment. If she has to give up on price to get payment, do it.”

  Annette still had the phone, and turned away to dial.

  Carol said to Parks, “We start the first line in three days? Is that right?”

  She knew it was right. She asked to find out if he was still on the team.

  He said, “Everything’s on schedule. And I wanted to tell you that what’s left of marketing, which is a kid who used to work at the Chamber, is excited about cheese breading, a pizza-fish thing. Really, he’s got some schools interested. He’s thinking about prisons. He may be an asset, this kid.”

  She said, “I love the pizza-fish idea, Dave. I’ll go to the schools with him, if you’ll do the prisons. Annette, keep me posted on Anna Rose.”

  Then she turned and walked away from everyone. She walked away from Easy.

  If she needed the two million dollars and didn’t have it, if the company went under, she’d have to go back to shutting places and firing people, and she didn’t even know if she could get hired for that again. Who would she be then? Not a CEO and not an undertaker. She tried to imagine Easy, standing behind her, but she could only see Dominic whom she’d loved from her hair to her toes and lost before anything. Since then she’d learned that she could live without love. Yet now, here was Easy, and it was as if she hadn’t learned anything at all.

  She kept walking. She had to keep walking.

  Behind her, Parks sang just loud enough for her to hear, “There she goes.”

  Under her breath, Carol said, “Screw you, Parks.” She walked away by herself and held her stomach. She’d chosen her company. She’d never have another chance.

  Named Beauty

  Easy turned around. She was walking away. He looked at Buddy, and Buddy looked back like he was thinking what a jerk Easy had been. Easy felt like he had said what had to be said, which he would say again in a heartbeat, and which, if you got down to it, he had not nearly said in the way he would have said to Mathews. With Mathews, it would have gotten beyond language. With Carol, he had only turned up the volume.

  Easy told himself to come up for air. He liked that Carol was good at what she did. Maybe he even liked that she did what she had to do when it wasn’t what he wanted. He was pretty sure he liked her, almost loved her, regardless of what she figured out about toothfish. He had started to think she felt the
same way. He wondered if he wanted her to love him so much that she’d forget about her company.

  Easy saw Carol MacLean walking away from him, and he called, “Beauty,” and it came out a whisper. He called, “Carol.”

  She heard him. She walked away faster. She had business; she always had business—he admired that, but he believed what she was doing right now was leaving him, and god-damned Parks kept humming.

  He said, “Jesus, Dave.”

  Parks said, “Jesus yourself, Easy. What’s the matter with you? That’s your girl.”

  Easy yelled, “Beauty!” and ran after her. He ran scared.

  He’d run after Angie after she died. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. He couldn’t stop himself now either. He didn’t want to stop. He should have started running after Carol the night he first saw her.

  He ran so fast, he went past her and had to stop and then had to jog to stay beside her, because she could walk that fast. That was one more sweet thing about her. He could tell her that. He knew she had noticed him, but she was acting like she hadn’t. He laughed because she wasn’t going to laugh, and laughing was what Angie had taught him of love. He said, “I hope you weren’t listening to Parks.”

  He didn’t expect she’d look at him, and he was sure she wouldn’t say anything, but he kept along next to her so she’d understand that he was going to keep it up.

  Since he could only keep it up for so long before they got into the plant, he stepped in front of her and spread his arms so she had to stop and look at him. It had been a long time since he’d wished he was handsome, but he wished it now, not that he thought it would have made a difference.

  He said, “Parks was singing that at me. You were leaving, and I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t getting it. He’s guessed that I like you, and he was telling me that, “There she goes,” and if I liked you, I’d better run after you.”