The first few years of the co-op were kind of rough. They’d hired Mr. Taber to run the shop. He was an islander and when he fished he’d been a highliner—the kind of lobsterman who constantly outfished other men—and that seemed like qualification enough. Unfortunately, Mr. Taber was an old-school fisherman, born and raised to it, without a day of school past tenth grade, and he was taking on water from the beginning. He didn’t know shit about marketing or buying or selling or paperwork or accounting or any of the hundred things you need to know to actually be successful buying and selling lobsters. He was over his head. He immediately upped the offer price, buying for fifty cents a pound more than that shit-ass dealer we’d run out. But, of course, after buying the lobsters for fifty cents a pound more than the going rate, Mr. Taber ran smack into the problem of not being able to demand a higher rate from the wholesalers in Boston and New York who used to buy from our dealer. We lost some money there. And then he forgot to do some simple things that we’d all taken for granted, like order fuel, so the pumps ran dry and several boys had to stay tied up for a week until more fuel arrived. And then he forgot to order bait, and everybody had to take their boats to the mainland, wasting fuel and time that nobody had. That sort of thing went on for about two years, but nobody, not even Daddy, wanted to be the first to tell Mr. Taber it was time for him to go. He’d been well respected when he worked the water, and his family name meant a lot on Loosewood Island: the Tabers had been on the island almost as long as Momma’s side. They had fought on both sides of the War of 1812, which made for some mixed-up loyalties and even better dinner conversation back in the day. Fortunately, before anything had to be done about it, Mr. Taber had a heart attack and died. Then the men, at Daddy’s urging, did something that was almost unthinkable: they brought in an outsider.
Paul Paragopolis had a name we couldn’t pronounce, but he also had a business degree and some experience in the lobster trade. His family ran a wholesale business in Boston, and despite being young—he was barely twenty-four—he knew what he was doing, and he turned the co-op around in less than a year. He even got a bunch of the boys to run “lobster tours” in the summer off-season, letting tourists pay fifty bucks to pretend to be lobstermen for a couple of hours. He got the co-op in the black real quick, and soon enough the lobstermen counted on wholesale prices on gear and a year-end bonus once the co-op had covered costs and Paul’s salary. By the time he married Lucy Swift, a fifth-generation islander, a couple of years later, the boys had stopped referring to him as “the new kid.” It’s funny how some men can come to the island every summer their entire lives, move here after college, work, live, raise children here, and still, forty years out, be considered “new,” and yet Paul managed to become part of the island in only a few years simply because he helped the boys make more money. About five years ago they had a big party to celebrate the last repayments for the loan used to buy the wharf and the dealership in the first place, and when Paul got up to give a speech the boys hoisted him up, carried him down the dock, and threw him in the water. Paul came out complaining that the water was cold as shit—even in the height of summer, the water never gets much past fifty degrees, and a man can freeze to death on a sunny day—but he had a grin on his face all the same.
The thing is, even though Paul runs the co-op, nobody would mistake him for the man in charge: everybody understood that the Kings’ word is the final word. Daddy usually let us talk things out among ourselves, but the few times he settled a matter, it was settled.
I thought about calling Carly back to insist that I was happy—or at least that I wanted to be happy—that she and Stephanie were coming home, that I thought it would all work out, but I didn’t have it in me. I needed to get out of the house, to shake loose my worries about her coming home, Kenny leaving, and Daddy having to spend the night in the hospital being poked and prodded. Maybe if I’d lived on the mainland, someplace where I could have called Carly back from my mobile, I could have walked and talked, but being inside felt too close to being stuck. I headed outside instead, never mind the rain, and then stopped short at the coat hooks when I realized I’d left my slickers aboard the Kings’ Ransom earlier in the morning. It wasn’t cold enough for my winter parka, and I’d be damned if I was going to walk around the island carrying an umbrella. I dug in the closet for a minute and came up with an old oilcloth coat that I thought had belonged to my momma’s daddy. I had to roll up the sleeves a couple turns, but it fit me well enough, the voluminous hood keeping my head out of water.
I looked into the diner through the front window and saw about whom you’d expect: the old boys, most of whom were down to lobstering part-time now, just something to keep their hands in the game, nursing the same cups of coffee they’d had in front of them since they finished up their lunches. I skipped past the Bronson Gallery, Island Ice Cream, and the Sandwich Shoppe, all closed for the season, past the Brumfitt Kings Museum, which was open only Wednesday and Saturday or by appointment until summer, past an empty storefront, and popped into the Coffee Catch, thinking I’d get something before heading over to see Rena. In the back, Timmy Green, Chip and Tony Warner, and Petey Dogger, all lobstermen closer to my age, were sitting and drinking from oversized mugs, looking as if they’d been there for a while. Timmy Green—who was actually not green, but black, and a third-generation islander—raised his hand at me and got up from the table.
“You hear about the shoot-out at the docks in James Harbor, Cordelia?” He handed me a copy of the James Harbor Tide so I could see the picture of a lobster boat and read the caption: “Meth Death Bloodbath.” He waited for me to look back up at him again and then said, “Petey told me his brother says that there’s some sort of a turf war going on.” Petey Dogger was like most of us who’d been on the island for any length of time: part of a family of international mongrels. His sister was a dental hygienist in Lubec, Maine, his brother a cop in Yarmouth, on the tip of Nova Scotia, and Petey had stayed on Loosewood Island, which some years was part of the USA and some years Canada, and most years was just tangled up in the bureaucracy of two countries who disagreed about where exactly the border ran. The border dispute’s been going on as long as Loosewood Island’s had people on it: before the U.S. and Canada were the U.S. and Canada, it was France and Britain fighting over possession of the island. Today, despite the USA’s official position that they don’t recognize dual citizenship, both countries claim us as citizens. We’re supposed to file taxes in both the USA and Canada. Of course, in the confusion, there are more than a handful of islanders who haven’t bothered to pay either country. Loosewood Island is a kind of borderland, a no-man’s-land.
“Sure it wasn’t one of Brumfitt’s monsters come to life, going after the James Harbor boys for being such pricks?”
Timmy smiled at me and it made me blush hot for a minute, thinking about the way he used to smile at me. We’d had a thing for a year or two, when I’d first come back to the island after college, but despite being good together in bed and even on the water, we couldn’t hack it in the same house. When the season wasn’t going on we’d get to picking on each other so fierce. One time I hit him in the head with a coffee mug. He hadn’t been hurt, but we took it as a sign that we’d be better off if we weren’t an item any longer. He moved on quick enough, marrying a Japanese tourist who’d rented a house on the island for a summer and never left—Etsuko does translation work—and Timmy and I had become close friends again since the wedding. Still, every once and a while he looked at me with that sharp smile and I’d think of the last time we had sex: he’d grinned at me and said, “For old times’ sake, huh?”
For a while, I’d been in love with him. Or, if not in love with him, in lust with him. His boat, the Green Machine, wasn’t anything special as far as lobster boats go, but Timmy knew how to keep his boat tight and clean, and that was as good a description of Timmy himself as anything. He wasn’t tall, but he was solid in the way that you can’t get from lifting weights, that you can only get
from spending your life working; when he’d reach out and hook me around the waist and kiss me on the neck, just under my ear, it made my legs feel like they weren’t used to the buck and bounce of a boat. Maybe Timmy and I weren’t cut out to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but we loved each other in that weird sort of way that broken couples can be great together when the music stops, and I was genuinely happy for him. Plus, Etsuko and I, in some roundabout manner that I wouldn’t have expected, had become friends. They’d already asked me to be the godmother for the baby they were expecting in the fall.
Timmy lowered his voice, though the coffee shop was empty other than him and the other boys, all of whom seemed caught up in their own discussion arguing the merits of engine power versus gas efficiency and noise. My motor on the Kings’ Ransom was old as dirt, but I’d had it overhauled two years ago. I’d ended up having to have half of the motor rebuilt, and I wasn’t interested in something new, so I tuned them out. “Nah,” Timmy said, “none of Brumfitt’s monsters. Just meth. But I don’t know. From what Petey’s brother”—the cop—“says, meth is going to be a bigger problem for the island than anything that Brumfitt ever came up with. There’s a whole mess of men and women there who are cooking it up, running it over the border, trying to turn it into a real business. It was bad enough when it was just those morons taking it recreationally.” He shrugged. “I guess it gives you energy. No big deal to pull traps all day and all night if you’re tweaking, and I guess I didn’t think about it that much when it was just James Harbor. I mean, how much worse can that shithole be, even with a meth problem? But Petey’s brother says that it’s spreading. Says it’s a real cancer, and wanted to be sure to give us the heads-up, particularly if James Harbor boys are trying to move into our waters.”
Loosewood Island couldn’t pass for a puritanical paradise by any measure. We didn’t have more than a couple of real bars in the off-season, but that was a function of the island’s size, not any comment on temperance. During the U.S. Prohibition, the island firmly declared itself to be under Canadian control. We all drank, some of us to excess. Pot smoking wasn’t much of a problem, either, and by that I mean nobody seemed to have any problem if you smoked pot. There were a dozen or so older residents—die-hard hippies who moved here in the late seventies and made their living as potters, and a few third- and fourth-generation fishermen—who liked lighting up a joint on a regular basis, and there was some of it with the teens and with the other people in their thirties and their forties. But weed was about where it ended on the island.
I’m not trying to make it sound like islanders were somehow above temptation. We sure as hell had enough drunks, and when people moved off-island or fished on ocean crews with mainland outfits, we had our fair share of people who turned into cokeheads, meth addicts, heroin, opium, crack addicts, whatever else was out there. But on the island, things were different. The simple explanation was that we more or less kept the island clean of any sort of serious drugs. Sure, there were tourists who’d bring in their own stashes, but we tried to keep it on the mainland. When there was somebody who didn’t understand that there were unspoken rules about what we were willing to tolerate, we made things very clear. Every year or two there’d be somebody, sometimes a prodigal son but usually an outsider—always a man—who’d move to the island and come trailing bad ideas in his wake. Coke or heroin or pot or whatever it was, it didn’t take too long before the word got around, and then Daddy and few of the lobstermen would visit and persuade that man that he wasn’t welcome on Loosewood Island. Usually words were enough, sometimes a beating, and every once in a while a boat would be sunk, a truck smashed. Sooner or later, whomever it was would get on the ferry and not come back.
Was it hypocritical? Yeah. No question. Chip and Tony had worked as mules to get the money to buy their own boat, running pot south from Canada. They could make eight, nine, ten thousand dollars running two hundred pounds of weed over the border, and a few quick nights of risk put them in business as lobstermen, which was all they wanted. Petey had never done it—his brother was a cop and had him scared shitless about what jail would be like—nor had Timmy, but they both had friends on the mainland who supplemented their fishing incomes with a run now and then. I’d never done it, but then again, I’d never needed to with the money that Daddy had. But even if I had, or Petey or Timmy had, we would have said the same thing that Chip and Tony said: it’s just pot, and it wasn’t something we brought home. As long as we kept the island clean—and that was a line that was etched in the rock—what was the big fucking deal?
Maybe meth was going to be a different matter. According to Petey’s brother there was a wave coming, a wave that wouldn’t pass Loosewood Island by. “Is Petey’s brother worried that the James Harbor boys are going to start dealing here?”
“Seriously?”
“What?”
He looked over his shoulder to the table where Chip, Tony, and Petey were still sitting. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Give me a second,” he said. He touched my arm and then walked back to the table with the other boys. He leaned low to speak, and after a minute, he nodded me over.
“Something that needs telling?” I said. I sat down at the table and put the James Harbor Tide in front of the Warner boys, tapping on the picture. “We got more of a problem with James Harbor than just fishing?”
Tony was the one who did almost all of the talking, so I was looking at him, and when it was Chip who answered instead, I knew there was going to be trouble.
“Depends,” Chip said, “on whether you think of Eddie Glouster as a James Harbor problem or a Loosewood Island problem.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Eddie’s not working for Daddy anymore. You know that. Hasn’t been on the Queen Jane in more than a year.”
“But he’s still on the island, Cordelia,” Chip said.
“So?”
“So,” Tony said, reaching out to take the newspaper, “how do you think he’s making money if he’s not fishing?”
I could feel my shoulders slump. “He’s dealing.”
Chip reached in front of Tony, to stop his brother from speaking. “We’re not blaming Woody for giving Eddie a chance. Woody likes those sort of reclamation projects. Hell, he let me and Tony work for him when you were at college and our dad kicked us off the boat. I’m just not sure that Eddie really wanted to be saved,” Chip said. “So, yeah. He’s dealing. It’s Jenny.”
Jenny. Chip and Tony’s little sister. I guess she wasn’t that young—fifteen and supposedly she’d been sleeping her way through the half dozen boys who were her age—and Chip said she’d been scoring meth from Eddie Glouster.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the play?”
“Our dad’s going to talk to Woody,” Tony said. “I’m assuming they’ll run him out.”
I thought of Daddy spending the night at the hospital. The way those cotton gowns can make anybody look old and sick. Fluorescent lights and pulse monitors and blood draws, the doctors trying to figure out why he’d fainted. I thought of Daddy and Mr. Warner and probably George, three men who were older than they wanted to believe, facing up against Eddie Glouster. And I thought of the way Daddy looked passed out on his kitchen floor.
I didn’t like it.
“No,” I said. “We’ll take care of it.”
Petey Dogger leaned forward, his voice eager. “We will?”
I looked around the table at Chip, Tony, Timmy, and Petey. I realized they were all eager, not just Petey. Timmy was my age, and Petey and Chip and Tony were younger than me, but none of us were kids anymore, and they felt like I did, that we could handle things just as well as the old guard. “Can’t let Daddy and all of those old farts have all of the fun, can we? It’s our island, too, and it’s something we can take care of, so we will,” I said. They all nodded, and I wondered if any of them knew that Daddy was in Saint John getting tested, that my desire to take care of the Eddie Glouster problem was as much ab
out keeping Daddy out of it as it was about it being time for us to start taking care of the island on our own.
“When?” Tony asked.
“Tonight,” I said, thinking we needed to take care of it before Daddy got back from Saint John. I reached out and took the newspaper back. “At least it’s just Eddie we’re dealing with, not all of James Harbor.”
Petey shook his head. “Not sure that’s going to last. My brother said it’s a real shitshow in James Harbor. It’s not like the old days, when we were just fighting over lobsters. Half those boys are users and need the money to keep tweaking. Things are going to get messy, and it might not be enough just to carry a hammer.”
I knew he wanted me to say something about Daddy smashing Al Burns’s hand, but instead I said, “You trying to say I should have a gun on board?”
“You don’t already?” Timmy looked at me with his half-bit smile. “This isn’t exactly the pirate coast, but with James Harbor pushing into our waters, I figured Woody’s the kind of daddy who wouldn’t give you much choice about being armed.”
In fact, Daddy would have been pissed if he’d known I stopped carrying my shotgun on board the Kings’ Ransom. He’d given me his father’s Remington Wingmaster when I’d started running my own boat. He stuck with the company that had worked out just fine for him and his own father, and bought himself a new, nickel-plated Remington Marine Magnum shotgun for the Queen Jane. He had at least two pistols on board as well, and I’d occasionally find one of my buoys with a bullet hole in it, Daddy having gotten it into his mind to take target practice on the high seas. I kept my Wingmaster loaded with double-aught, but I hadn’t bothered carrying it on the Kings’ Ransom for a few years. It was a pain in the ass to keep it registered in both Canada and the U.S., though I bet Daddy didn’t bother with registration in either country. More importantly, I’d never needed a gun. “Way I hear it, you’re telling me I should make sure I got it handy,” I said.
The Lobster Kings Page 11