“Sure I could.” She’d always had great balance with the oars, it was one of the many skills from her childhood that had absolutely no bearing on her present life.
On Legacy, Russell started the engine. The key was in the ignition already—they all were, same as they were in all of the pickup trucks parked at the wharf, and you’d no sooner touch another fisherman’s truck or boat without permission than you’d dump a tankful of keepers back into the ocean. He busied himself with his electronics and his compass, switching on the GPS, consulting the radar.
The water was dark and inscrutable as always but the surface was smooth like glass: no chop. That was good. Eliza wasn’t ready for chop, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Russell, in the same way that she wasn’t about to admit that part of her was nervous to be out on the water, scared to make a mistake. This wasn’t a friendly afternoon sail on A Family Affair with Rob doing most of the work.
Russell uncovered the bait box and Eliza said, “Holy cow, I forgot how much this bait stinks,” and made a big show of gagging in case that caused Russell to change his mind, bring her safely back to shore, and let her get on with her day.
“You get used to the smell,” said Russell. “You probably remember that.”
He put the baskets in place and filled them with circulating salt water. She figured Gavin Tracey did some of this stuff usually—she might get fired for incompetence, she was just standing there like a total landlubber. But she didn’t know Russell’s boat the way she knew her father’s and didn’t really remember what to do and she didn’t want to make a mistake and cause Russell extra work. For all the joking, she knew that the good fishermen took their work seriously and wanted everything done the way they wanted it done, no exceptions.
Once a guy had borrowed her dad’s skiff and tied it back up with a different knot than the one he’d found it tied up with and, man, hadn’t her dad gone apeshit on that guy, didn’t talk to him for half the year at least.
“I guess,” she said, about the bait, but she wasn’t sure. The herring were bigger and creepier than she recalled. They reminded her in an unsettling way of Evie’s pet goldfish. And they really did smell deadly. Also, it was discomfiting to have so many wide dead eyes staring at you, like they were keeping a ghastly secret that they might, at any minute, decide to share with you.
Once the engine was warmed up, Russell opened the boat to cruising speed and said, “I’m not going to put you through a real offshore trip today. Don’t think you could handle it.”
He didn’t look at her when he said that, but she could see a smile playing at his lips.
“Bullshit. Nice try. You don’t go offshore this time of year anyway.” Nobody did. The best time for offshore fishing was October through December. Everybody knew that.
“Fair enough,” he said. They passed the channel marker and not too far away Eliza could see Grindstone lighthouse, automated now but still functional, thirty-nine feet high, flashing every eight seconds, as steady and reliable as anything in Eliza’s life had ever been.
“We’ll do my traps first, then we’ll head over to Charlie’s.” He was yelling more than he was talking, to be heard over the noise of the motor, and she just nodded because it was easier than trying to yell back.
Russell’s buoys were red and white and bright yellow, same as they’d been when he first got his license, before they’d graduated from high school. Eliza had painted many of those buoys with him, in his father’s shop, over that long winter during their senior year, dozens and dozens of them, the dark coming on so early in the beginning of January that they needed their headlights to drive home from school.
It was really odd now to think about the fact that she had had time to sit around painting lobster buoys while she was finishing up high school, while she was getting accepted to Brown, of all places. Her children would never, not in a million years, have time to paint lobster buoys, not when they had tennis and swimming and sundry after-school activities and pounds of homework every night.
She remembered how relaxing it had been, though, how simple and satisfying, almost therapeutic, just the two of them, crowded near the electric heater in the otherwise unheated shop, scraping and painting, scraping and painting, electric heat coming from their bodies too. She felt warm, thinking about it, about their bodies, eager and young, attached to each other more often than not, and for a minute she had to keep herself from standing too close to Russell. Another life, she reminded herself. A lifetime ago.
“Shedders are starting to come on,” said Russell. “Heard it on the VHF day before yesterday. You want to keep an eye out for them when you’re banding.”
“That’s good,” said Eliza. “I will.” Lobsters that had shed their old shells, moving out of their cramped living quarters, were shedders; they gained weight and length when they shed, so their appearance made for more keepers in the batch. But they were fragile, with their soft jelly bodies, and you had to take care with them. “You want me to double-band them if I see them?”
“Yep,” said Russell.
Russell had brought a Thermos of coffee for each of them, and he handed one to Eliza. If she didn’t look at or smell the herring, if she concentrated on the blue-black water and the stunning sky, if she ignored the fact that her hand was shaking with cold and it was hard to keep the coffee from splashing out, she could almost pretend she was on a scenic cruise.
Soon enough they’d arrived at the buoys and Russell pulled up alongside the first one and cut the motor.
“Ready?”
“Ready.” Russell reached over the starboard side with his gaff and his hook, grabbed the pot warp, then pulled the line from the water to run it through the hauling block and into the hydraulic hauler. The line coiled itself on the deck below the hauler. The line strained, and they both looked respectfully into the inscrutable dark water until the trap broke the surface. Eliza was at first so mesmerized by the waiting that she forgot she was there to do a job until Russell said, “Grab it, Liza,” mildly aggravated, and Eliza broke the trap.
“Nothing,” he said. Sometimes you had to pry a crab off the trap’s walls, but this trap was empty.
The second trap in the string had four keepers, and the third had two lobsters that looked promising until Eliza flipped them over and saw that the undersides of both were berried with eggs. “Check ’em,” said Russell. In Maine you had to V-notch an egg-carrying female to mark her as a breeder; once she was V-notched you couldn’t trap her even if you caught her at a time when she had no eggs. These were notched already.
Russell’s jawline tightened. “Let’s rebait.”
She grabbed a bait bag, saying nothing.
“Watch yourself,” said Russell, and Eliza obeyed, making sure her feet were clear of the line.
“Ready to go again?” Russell asked, and he started the motor to go out to the next set of buoys.
“Yep,” she said. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Same motion, over and over and over: pull the traps over the rail, check, empty. Measure the lobsters, toss back the small ones, mark the ones with eggs and toss those back, toss back the big ones, band the ones that were left. Take care with the shedders.
Rebait, lower it back down, same thing again and again. Sometimes they would pass another boat, or another boat them: the man or woman on the other boat would lift a hand, and Russell would lift one in return.
The day wore on. Eliza realized too late that she’d forgotten sunscreen. In the predawn darkness, dark enough that they had needed the lights on the bow, she hadn’t thought about it. She was going to fry. Russell found her an extra cap, and she put it on. The cap said MAINE in big black letters and below it were the words EST 1820. Total tourist wear; she didn’t know why Russell had it on his boat, but she was glad he did.
Time passed. Another trap over the gunwale. She was getting tired. As it turned out, barre class and gentle three-mile runs by the water in Barton were ineffectual training for honest manual labor. She�
��d been stronger the summer she was fifteen, hauling with Charlie on the Joanie B. She’d been sinewy, with visible muscles in her forearms and a fisherman’s tan that started three inches below her shoulder. Not that that was a good look, necessarily, but when you were fishing six days a week you didn’t think too much about how you looked.
She emptied the trap, prying a crab off the side and tossing it over. She rebaited. Her back hurt. And she had to go to the bathroom. She should have gone easier on the coffee. How many traps did Russell have, anyway? She knew most of the fishermen fished in a three- or four-day rotation, but it felt to her like they were checking every single trap he’d ever owned.
She wouldn’t admit it, though, no sir. She wouldn’t cry uncle, whatever happened. She tried to channel the medical school Eliza, who’d once stayed up for thirty-six hours and then had nailed her pharmacology exam, highest grade in the class.
“One more string and we’ll head over to Charlie’s,” said Russell finally, and Eliza tried not to let the relief show on her scorched face.
Charlie’s buoys were red and black and bright blue, and when Russell cut the motor near the first one she felt the strangest sense of disorientation, like she was walking on her hands, underwater, in a dream. She started to sway a little bit, confused. Russell had to come up and catch her by the elbow so she didn’t tip over.
“You okay?” he asked.
She shook her head. No. Yes. No. “Sure,” she said. “Just got a little dizzy.” Then it wasn’t her dad’s buoys making her dizzy, it was Russell’s proximity, his touch, the long-familiar weight of his fingers on her arm, all of it as unexpected and potentially devastating as the shock of an electric eel, because of the accompanying memories it brought up. Russell’s was the same body it had always been, long, lean, muscle piled on muscle layered over bone. Unselfconsciously strong. Different from Rob’s body. Russell had dark hair and dark eyes; Rob was fair with light eyes; it was almost like she’d sought out Russell’s opposite in every possible way.
Another life, she told herself again.
Russell made her sit down in the captain’s chair for a minute and drink some water from a bottle he pulled from his cooler. She squinted out at Charlie’s buoys bobbing in the water until she felt better and then together they hauled Charlie’s traps just the way they’d hauled Russell’s.
Eliza hesitated after they’d emptied the first trap.
“Whatcha doing?” asked Russell while she stood there dumbly, balancing the trap on the gunwale. “You waiting for a personal invitation to put some bait in that trap?”
“I thought we might pull them,” she muttered.
“Pull them? In July? You think Charlie would want us to pull his traps in July?”
“No, but.” The unspoken question was this: Is he ever going to get out here to haul these traps himself?
“Season’s just getting started. The best fishing’s still ahead of us. Rebait.”
She did what Russell said and he started the motor and moved the Legacy to another string.
“Geezum, these are full to bursting,” Russell said at the next string. “Unbelievable. I should leave my traps out that long, see what happens.” The lobsters were crawling all over each other, filling up most of the traps, and there was always a crab or two or a pregnant female or a lobster that was too big or too small, but you couldn’t argue with the fact that this was one hell of a catch. “Well,” said Russell. “Charlie Sargent did always know where to set his traps. I’ll give him that, the old bastard.”
Eliza nodded and swallowed hard and different parts of her wanted to scream, Touch me again, on the arm, anywhere! And then after thinking about it, Don’t get too close!
Did any part of Russell’s memory fire up with that touch on her arm? She couldn’t tell.
After they emptied each trap and measured each bunch, Russell put Charlie’s keepers into his backup holding tank to keep them separate from his own. Eliza knew he’d keep them separate when they got to the co-op to turn in the catch, too, and she knew he’d give Charlie what his lobsters had fetched and maybe even some on top of that, and he wouldn’t subtract for bait even though he was using double what he’d normally use by baiting double the number of traps for the day, because that’s how Russell was.
After that she let the motion and the physical work and the monotony take over her whole body. And although she was ravenous she wasn’t going to say anything until Russell did because it had occurred to her maybe an hour before that she hadn’t brought any food for herself. Rookie mistake. She’d starve before she’d admit to it!
She thought about the ladies of Barton, who were always trying to lose the last six pounds of baby weight or vacation weight or holiday weight. She would give them this, the Lobsterman’s Diet, hours of manual labor on an empty stomach under a punishing July sun.
Finally, finally, Russell cut the engine, reached again inside the cooler, and handed her a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Eliza was so hungry she almost ate the paper along with the sandwich.
“I don’t normally feed my sternman,” Russell said. “But I made an exception for you.”
“Take it out of my pay,” she said, unwrapping the sandwich.
“Ham and cheese,” he said. “Just for you, Liza.”
“Like hell it is,” she said, trying not to let her heart jump at the way he said her name. Lobstermen didn’t allow pig of any kind on their boats; it was a long-held superstition. She peered inside the bread. Turkey.
Here was Eliza Sargent Barnes, eating bread (white bread!) and lunch meat. She was inadequately sunscreened, and she smelled like herring, but despite all of that (or because of it) she was about as content as she remembered being in a long time. She wasn’t thinking about her dad’s tumor, or how the family would manage without her if she stayed up here longer, or about Rob and Cabot Lodge, or about whether Judith had served Zoe a cocktail yet. Or about Phineas Tarbox. The sun was high in the sky and it was glancing off the water and there wasn’t a hint of fog around: it was that rare perfect day, the kind of day they made postcards out of, the kind of day tourists who had never worked on the water imagined every day was like when they said things like, “I think when I retire I’ll buy myself a nice little lobster boat.”
While they ate, Russell said, “Charlie might have to hire you to take his boat out when things pick up, until his arm is better.”
She appreciated the fact that Russell was pretending Charlie’s main problem was in his arm.
“Right,” she said. “I’m sure I’d be his first call.”
“You’re doing okay, Eliza, you’re doing okay after all. Don’t sell yourself short.” She smiled and took another bite of her sandwich. If Russell had pulled a vat of Kool-Aid and a bag of Doritos and a box of ultra-hydrogenated packaged donuts out of the cooler she would have been happy to eat those too. Russell said, “I figure another hour or so and we’ll be done, you okay with that?”
Russell had been consulting his equipment, checking the weather, listening in on the VHF all along. Occasionally he chimed in, ribbing one of the guys, making a comment about the catch or the weather.
“Sure,” said Eliza. She wasn’t sure if she could make it another hour but she also wasn’t sure she wanted to stop. “An hour sounds good.”
After lunch they hauled another of her dad’s strings and then a few more after that, and when it was time to start up and head back to the harbor Russell moved the gear and nothing happened; the boat didn’t move.
Russell said, “Shit,” under his breath.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Why aren’t we moving?”
She could see a muscle tightening in Russell’s neck, and there was a certain look on his face. She knew that look—her dad took on the same look every so often: when his aftercooler got clogged up and he had to run the boat dirty; if the heat exchanger went; if he had to come up with a few grand to take the Joanie B to the machine shop and pay a mechanic t
o take the engine apart. Boat repairs could ruin your season.
“Russell? What’s going on?”
Russell moved the bait box that sat over the hatch. He opened the hatch, then climbed down. She peered into the hatch and saw that he was pouring from an oil can into the reverse gear.
“Is the reverse gear broken?”
Russell climbed out of the hatch. The neck muscle twitched again, and Russell sighed. “Not broken,” he said. “Just wore out.”
Eliza eyed the oil can. “How often do you put oil in it?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Every day?”
“Eliza. It’s not your problem. Don’t worry about it.” Now the gear responded, the motor started, and they were off.
Over the noise of the motor, Eliza shouted, “It’s not safe to run your boat with a broken reverse gear, Russell.” She felt bossy saying that, but it was true.
“I know that, Eliza. It’s not broken. It’s wore out.”
She thought, worn, chastised herself for thinking that, and said, “But it might break soon.”
“Might.”
“So…”
“I just don’t happen to have fifteen grand to get it fixed right now, okay, Eliza? I’ll probably have to wait until the end of the season.” If he said anything after that, the wind and the motor took the words.
Fifteen grand? Eliza was taken aback. A lot of money. She said, “Maybe I—” Then she stopped: could she offer Russell fifteen grand to fix his reverse gear? Of course not. Would he take it? No question, he wouldn’t. So she stopped, and she let the ocean spray swallow the words she hadn’t said, and she waited.
Russell throttled down as they got close to the harbor and turned back to her and said, “Guy came to me a couple of days ago, said he had just bought ten traps and was looking for advice on where to set ’em.”
“Yeah?” said Eliza. “Who was that?” She retrieved a dropped herring from the deck and tossed it into the bait box. A few seagulls circled, waiting for action. Off in the distance she could see another boat approaching.
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