The Lobster Kings

by Alexi Zentner

  Timmy looked over my shoulder and nodded. “One for him wouldn’t be such a bad idea, either.”

  I glanced back and saw Kenny ordering at the counter.

  I stood up and grabbed the newspaper. “I’ll see you boys tonight, but in the meantime, I’ve got to go. Kenny and I have something to talk about.”

  I stepped up to Kenny as he stood at the counter, but before I could say anything, he asked, “You hear about James Harbor?”

  “The shoot-out at the docks?” I said.

  “Yeah. No, what?” I handed him the copy of the James Harbor Tide that I was holding and showed him the “Meth Death Bloodbath” headline. He took the paper out of my hand, gave it a scan, and then put it down on the counter. “No, but I mean, Jesus. Nah, I’m talking about James Harbor dropping pots in our waters.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s what you said this morning, that the rumor is that they’re coming.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Not a rumour. They’re here. I ran into George on my way here. He found a couple James Harbor traps in our waters when he was pissing around on his boat this morning. Fucking peckerwoods.”

  “Shit. I knew it was coming, but the season hasn’t even started yet and there are already real live traps in our waters? Can’t Al Burns keep his boys in check?”

  “I think things have changed. He’s just an old man now. It’s not the same as when you were a teenager, not the same as—” He stopped and looked at my hands and then back to my eyes. “It’s different. Been long enough that there’s a new, young group of fishermen, and they’re looking to extend their range, and they aren’t listening to Al Burns,” Kenny said. “That’s my understanding.” He pulled out his wallet. “Buy you a coffee?”

  I shook my head, unsure of how to bring up what Carly had told me, that he and Sally were leaving the island. Out the window, the rain had broken momentarily, but a new wave of dark clouds seemed to be swimming over the island. It would start raining again soon, but I didn’t want to ask Kenny about his moving away in front of the boys. When Kenny picked up his drink and came over I took his arm and steered him outside.

  As soon as the door closed, I hit him with it: “When the fuck were you going to tell me?”

  He was staring over the water and up at the incoming clouds, and instead of turning to face me he gave me the corner of his eyes. “What are you talking about, Cordelia?”

  “You and Sally leaving the island.”

  That made him turn toward me. “We aren’t leaving the island.”

  “I just talked to Carly. She said Sally gave notice at the school yesterday. Principal Philips called up Carly, hired her to take over K through grade three, and there we have it. Said Sally told Principal Philips you were headed off the island.”

  I could see it in Kenny’s face as I was talking, but I somehow couldn’t stop myself from going forward: he didn’t know. He turned pale. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out for a moment. “You sure about that, Cordelia?”

  “You mean you didn’t know? Oh, Jesus, Kenny. I’m sorry. I thought—” I shook my head and then grabbed his elbow. “Come on; let’s get out of the doorway. Walk down to the docks.” He came along. “I just assumed …” I shook my head again, not sure what to say, but Kenny left it at silence, and as we headed down the slope I tried again. “I was mad at you, you know? I couldn’t figure out why you hadn’t told me. But, well, fuck.”

  “She’s leaving me,” he said.

  “Maybe.” I wanted to say something better, but all I could add was, “I’m sorry.”

  “I mean, we’ve talked about it, splitting up. Sleeping apart for most of the last year. Jesus. She’s leaving me. We’ve been having problems, you know?”

  I did know. We talked about it sometimes on the boat. Not much—Kenny didn’t bring up Sally that often with me—but it was something that came up occasionally. I would have known anyway. Sally had been heading mainland every Saturday for therapy, and on Sundays it was both of them going over for couples counseling, and there was no way to hide that kind of thing from the island.

  “But I thought things were getting better. Sally’s been acting happier lately.” Kenny stopped walking and turned to look at me and I could see that he was trembling, that despite all of the things he and Sally had gone through, he hadn’t believed that it would come to this. “You really think she’s leaving me?” he said, and I thought if I didn’t answer him quick—any answer would do—he might just start walking again and not stop when he came to the end of the dock.

  “I’m not sure, but you need to talk to her,” I said. “I’m sorry, Kenny. I really am.”

  “You’re right. I know you’re right. I need to go talk to her,” he said, and then he looked at his watch. I realized that he was thinking that Sally was still at school, that he was going to have to go home and brood until the children left Loosewood Elementary and Sally could make her way back to the house; that glance at his watch was such a tender, domestic action that it was all I could do to stop from taking him in my arms and pulling him into me. “Jesus. I’ve got to go, Cordelia,” he said.

  He turned, but I grabbed his elbow again. “Kenny, you call me if you need. You know I’m here for you, okay?” He just nodded, and then he started walking up the slope and away from the dock, breaking into a half jog after a few feet.

  I watched him disappear and then looked out over the harbour again. Was I actually sorry? It was complicated, and it wasn’t my business what happened with him and Sally, but there was also a part of me that reacted to the thought that he might end up single.

  I could see George Sweeney’s boat on its mooring buoy. I couldn’t make out his features from where I stood, but I knew it was George up on deck hosing it clean. He raised a hand to me—though I doubt he could tell who was watching him—and I waved back. The swell of the water soothed me, and I stared off into nothingness for a while, letting my eyes lose focus on that middle distance past the harbour and before the horizon. Daddy wasn’t set to be back from the doctor’s until the next day, and I knew he wasn’t going to call just to set me at ease. I could feel my anxiety creeping back again. This wasn’t right, this having to worry about him instead of the other way around. He’d looked so goddamned pale lying on the floor of his kitchen that for a moment I could picture what he’d look like lying in a coffin. He was fifty-seven. If he’d been an accountant or a lawyer or something that didn’t involve the demands of lobstering, he wouldn’t be that old, and as much as I wanted to be able to show Daddy that I was ready to take over, I wasn’t ready to be without him. I might not be willing to admit it to him anymore, but I still needed him. This wasn’t the natural order of things. I was used to Daddy looking after me.

  At least there was getting rid of Eddie Glouster to distract me from waiting for Daddy to come back from the hospital. I couldn’t do anything about Daddy’s tests, but I could do something about Eddie Glouster. Daddy would be pissed if he knew that we were planning to deal with Eddie while he was in Saint John, but I didn’t have to ask for permission. If Daddy was going to be pissed, he’d be pissed, but he’d also have to see that I could take care of the island just as well as he could. And things were complicated with Eddie Glouster and Daddy.

  There was a piece of dried seaweed half off the dock and I gave it a shove with my foot, watching it flutter into the ocean.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and then turned to head back to my house to wait for the night to come.

  Eddie Glouster’s dad moved to Loosewood Island from James Harbor when Eddie was already sixteen or seventeen. Ostensibly, it was to get Eddie away from a rough crowd he’d been hewing to in James Harbor, but with his dad commuting to a job at a processing plant on the mainland, Eddie seemed cut adrift from the first. He was the sort of boy who was probably in his prime during his mid-teens, before he came to Loosewood Island, in the few years where his early growth spurt let him be a bully without worrying about the consequences. By the time he made it here, the other boys had
filled out as well, and they were solid in a way that he wasn’t, turned hard from the grind of pulling traps and working on the water.

  He was a few years younger than me, and I was at college when he lived on the island, so I didn’t see him much. The year after he graduated from high school, which was the year I came home from college, Eddie lit out to Portland, getting a job as a security guard at some mall and then signing up with the army before washing out. After that, he drifted south to Boston, where he seemed to bounce from job to job. Mr. Glouster wasn’t a bad guy, even if he was a bit of a drinker, and the boys liked him well enough, but when Eddie came to visit every few months, while Mr. Glouster would quietly hunch over a dozen beers at the Grumman Fish House, Eddie would get drunk in a loud sort of way that didn’t sit too well.

  About two years ago, Mr. Glouster got sick enough that he went in for some tests, and by the time they figured out whatever kind of cancer had been eating him, he was already dead. I don’t think Mr. Glouster was in the ground more than a week before Eddie showed up on the island with a wife and a baby in tow and moved into his dad’s house. I didn’t stop by, but a few of the ladies who brought pies and cookies said that Eddie didn’t waste any time in bundling his dad’s stuff into garbage bags, including the decoys that his dad had carved with such excruciating care and proudly loaned out to the library for display every year.

  I’d see Eddie’s wife occasionally, out pushing a baby stroller around the paths on the island. Nelly was a small thing, and the jacket she wore was so big on her that she looked like she was playing dress-up. It must have been Mr. Glouster’s old winter jacket. Nelly kept the hood up, and kept wearing the coat through the winter and spring and well into that summer. It was that fall when Tucker got tangled up in the ropes and fucked up his knee, and Daddy took Eddie Glouster on as a temporary sternman.

  It raised a few eyebrows around the docks and there was some talk at the Grumman Fish House over beers. Mr. Glouster might have moved to Loosewood Island as a way of getting the high-school-aged Eddie away from James Harbor, but as an adult, with Mr. Glouster dead, there was nothing to stop Eddie from bringing James Harbor to Loosewood Island. Eddie and Nelly regularly had visitors at their place, off-islanders showing up on the ferry and disappearing into the Glousters’ house. Late nights the lights would still be on, music loud enough that their neighbours—despite their distance—said it was a nuisance, and in the mornings, a deathly stillness, empty bottles spread over the lawn. And aside from that and from generally being disliked, Eddie just didn’t seem like a lobsterman. He was big, but despite his penchant for drinking and talking loud, he seemed soft.

  Still, he was Daddy’s hire, and we were used to Daddy taking on young men who needed some taming. Daddy kept quiet about it the first few days, but by the end of the week he had that familiar little smirk of his that he got when he knew that he’d been right. Eddie might have been soft and not used to the work of lobstering, but he was willing to try and, according to Daddy, despite not being born and raised on Loosewood Island, Eddie was a quick learner. After two weeks, Daddy was even talking about keeping Eddie on once Tucker was done rehabbing his knee.

  I’d never spent much time with Eddie, or at least as little time as you could spend with somebody close to your own age on an island as small as ours, but maybe a month into Daddy’s experiment Kenny got food poisoning and Daddy broke a crown and had to go to the dentist, so I ended up with Eddie on the Kings’ Ransom for the day. He showed up fifteen minutes late, and while he didn’t seem drunk or high, or at least he wasn’t fucked up enough that it was obvious to me, he looked like he hadn’t slept, and he reeked of beer and cigarettes. When we were motoring out to the first set of traps, instead of getting his gear together, he leaned over the rail smoking and staring at the water.

  I eased up the throttle and brought us alongside my buoys, but Eddie kept dragging on his cigarette. “Eddie.” My voice had a snap to it, but he took his time pushing himself off the rail.

  “Late night last night,” he said. “Had some friends over from the mainland.” He gave me a half-assed salute and a smile that I’m pretty sure was supposed to be flirty. He was a big man, probably six-foot-two, but gone to seed and pushing two-fifty, two-sixty pounds, the sort of guy who loved playing high school football because he could toss around kids who weighed a hundred pounds less than him. Rounding his late twenties and headed to a burnt-out thirty, he had the start of a gut. His hair, already thinning, hung in a sharp part and fell to his cheekbones, but out on the Kings’ Ransom, with the early morning sun skipping off the water and burnishing his skin, I could see how some women would find him attractive. I wasn’t one of those women, though.

  Even though I didn’t like him, I hadn’t expected any problems: Daddy had vouched for him. I still can’t figure out if he was one of those guys who couldn’t deal with taking orders from a woman, or if he was just generally an asshole but had managed to keep it hidden from Daddy, but the day didn’t start well and it went downhill quickly. The first few sets of traps were fine, but once we started moving, I didn’t have the same rhythm with him as I did with Kenny: I had to step back quickly to avoid getting a trap swung into me. I didn’t like the way he stuffed the bait bags—there was too much spillage—and three or four times I noticed that he’d put a lobster in with the keepers without banding its claws. Plus, Eddie was just slower than Kenny. By nine in the morning I’d already barked at him a half dozen times. Each time I corrected something he did, he’d look at me with his eyes half lidded and then take his time before getting back to work.

  And then I saw him sort through a trap and drop a lobster into the keeper bin without measuring its carapace. Even from where I was standing I could tell it was too small. A cardinal sin. I stomped over, pulled the bug, and slapped my brass measure against the shell.

  “What the fuck, Eddie?” He dropped the rebaited trap into the water and then turned to look at me. I held up the lobster. “You didn’t measure this one.” I pinned it down and put the measure on it. “It’s not big enough. If it’s not a keeper, it’s not a keeper.” I picked the lobster back up, walked to the rail, and dropped it over the side.

  He pulled his pack of smokes out from the pocket of his overalls, flipped the lid, and then tapped it against his hand until one stood at attention. He touched the pack to his mouth and pulled it away, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “Jesus. What’s your problem? You’ve been on my ass all day. Can you hear yourself?” He made his voice higher, mimicking me: “If it’s not a keeper, it’s not a keeper.” He tucked the pack of cigarettes away again, cupped his hand against the wind, and sparked his lighter. “It’s just a lobster. You need to relax.”

  “And you need to do your fucking job, Eddie.”

  He leaned back against the rail. “Don’t get your panties in a knot.”

  “You want to swim back to shore?”

  He took a drag on his cigarette, staring at me, and I saw the way his eyes flicked down my body and back up. He pushed himself off the rail, stood at his full height, and stepped toward me until he was closer than I was comfortable with. I didn’t step back, but I wanted to. For the first time, I was scared on my own boat.

  “You threatening me?”

  Behind me, I heard Trudy getting to her feet, and then felt her pressing up against my leg. There was the low rumble of her growling, and I remembered what Daddy had always said about dogs: Stare them in the eye until they look away. Be the boss or be the bitch.

  I looked straight at Eddie. “I’m telling you that I’m the captain, and you’ll listen to me on my boat, and you better think real carefully about what you do and say next.”

  He put the cigarette back in his mouth and sucked at it, still staring at me. I thought he was going to blow smoke into my face, but at the last second he turned his head to the side and then stepped past me.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I grabbed his arm. “What did you say?” />
  He knocked my hand off his arm, and then, before I realized it, he’d shoved me.

  Maybe he didn’t mean to push me that hard, but we were on a boat and there was gear everywhere. I stumbled backward, caught my heel on something, and fell. As I went down, I felt my arm scrape against the bolt of an exposed hose clamp. I could tell it wasn’t a deep cut, but it was long, running from my elbow almost to my wrist, and it started to bleed right away.

  Eddie hadn’t moved. The scowl that he’d had on his face was gone. Instead, he looked surprised. Almost scared. Maybe if he’d still been looming over me, maybe if he still looked like he wanted to punch me, I would have stayed down, but instead I got to my feet and pulled out my work knife.

  Eddie took a step back. He held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  I kept the knife up for another second, but even though I was angry, I wasn’t stupid, and while I wasn’t sure that Eddie was actually sorry, he did look like he regretted what he’d done. I put the knife away and went to move past him.

  “Your arm,” he said. He reached out to where I was bleeding, but I pulled back.

  “Go take a seat at the stern.”

  He stared at me, but then he looked down at the deck, headed aft, and turned his back to me, staring out over the water.

  I didn’t bother telling him he was fired. I didn’t say a word to him. I just ran the motor until we were in the harbour, and then I watched him climb out onto the dock and walk away.

  Of course, that afternoon, when Daddy got back from the dentist, I had to tell him that I’d fired his sternman. And then I had to tell him why.

  Daddy didn’t say much about it. He sat there and rubbed at the temporary crown on his canine. But the next day, I saw Eddie and Nelly out walking with their baby, and Eddie had a black eye and a cut under it that looked like it had taken a half dozen stitches.