“Yep.”
“Guess you won’t be without a sternman after all.”
“Nope,” I said, and that was that for the rest of the ride. The Johnny Cash tape kicked in—the same tape and the same tape deck in the truck for more than a decade—and we made it most of the way through a song by the time we negotiated the winding roads and what passed for rush hour on the island; every lobsterman was heading to the docks, same as us.
Stephanie and Kenny and the dogs cut a straight line down to the docks and were waiting for us by the time we pulled up. They started taking the traps off the truck before Daddy and I were out of the cab. Tucker came over, pulling on his work gloves, and between all of us we made quick work of it, stacking Daddy’s traps near the edge of the dock so that he could tie off the Queen Jane and load directly up. By the time we were done, Mr. Warner was backing his truck past Daddy’s, and Tucker and Kenny went over to start unloading his truck as well. Stephanie started to head after them, but I grabbed her arm.
“Aren’t I supposed to help?” she said to me, yanking her arm.
“Not without gloves,” I said.
“I don’t need them,” she said, shaking her head, making her ponytail bob back and forth. I was annoyed by her stubbornness, but I understood it. Lots of girls on the island helped their fathers when it was needed. There were enough of us who ran traps part-time as teenagers—five or six traps to make some spending money—that it’s not like women never took to the water. Still, I had been the first woman on the island to try to make a full go of it as a lobsterwoman. I’d been just as stubborn as Stephanie. That was the only way to make it. The boys weren’t circling me like wolves, but I wasn’t set on showing any weakness, and I didn’t let them treat me any differently than any of the other boys. But stubbornness and foolishness were two separate things.
“Look around you,” I said. “Take a good look at everybody out here. How many people do you see wearing work gloves?”
She looked over the dock. There were already four trucks aside from Daddy’s. The traps were taking shape in neat stacks along the edges of the dock. Petey Doggy turned into the lot and sat with his arm out the window, his truck running, waiting for Daddy or somebody else to pull out and give him a space to drop his traps. Stephanie shook her head. “I don’t know, maybe half of them?”
“Okay, now look closer. Tell me, how many lobstermen aren’t wearing gloves?”
“I don’t know everybody yet, Cordelia,” she said. “I can’t tell who’s a lobsterman and who isn’t. We just moved here yesterday.”
“I’ll make it simple for you. Most of the lobstermen wear gloves. You start out without gloves now, this early in the season, and what will happen is that about halfway through the morning you’ll start getting blisters and cuts and nicks and scrapes, and about the time you decide you’re ready to throw on a pair of gloves it will be too late. And then tonight, when you’re washing your hands before dinner, the hot water will sting like a motherfucker, and Carly will have to lance out whatever blisters don’t pop. You don’t wear gloves today, you won’t even be able to unclench your hands tomorrow morning, let alone last a day at sea with Daddy.”
She shook my hand off her shoulder and glared at me. “If you can do it, I can do it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Stephanie.” I stepped over to Daddy’s truck, opened the passenger door, and popped open the glove compartment. I pulled out a pair of work gloves. “I’m trying to help you. Just wear the fucking gloves.”
She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and then laughed. “You know, I’ve never seen anybody actually keep gloves in the glove compartment before.” In that moment, with the way she smiled at me, I saw how easy it must have been for Carly to fall in love with her.
She reached out for the gloves, but I gave her a grin instead. “These ones are mine. You can get your own pair when we go back to the house. There’s a pile of them on the workbench.” I nodded over to the busy part of the dock and toward where Tucker and Kenny walked back to us. “We’ll make another couple of runs for Daddy’s traps, then when we’re all done with his we’ll do mine and then Tucker’s.” Something caught Kenny’s eye, and he gave Tucker a tap on the shoulder. The two of them stopped walking and turned to look over the water, where tendrils of mist floated eagerly, Kenny pointing to something out where the boats were moored.
Kenny was wearing jeans and his boots and a T-shirt, and he looked good. He’d lost some weight while he was gone—he kept hitching up his jeans—but he still had the broad V’d-up shoulders from working on the boat, and I could see the lines of the muscles in his arms when he pointed. He brushed back his hair from his forehead, and I bit my lip and smiled. When I looked back at Stephanie I saw that she was watching me, not Tucker and Kenny.
“Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Does he know?” she said.
I felt sick for a second. I’d been careful about Kenny, trying never to let anyone—including Kenny—know how I felt about him. Stephanie was on the island less than twenty-four hours, and she already had things figured out. “Know what?” I said, and as I said it I could tell that Stephanie knew I was bluffing. Still, she seemed to understand and she nodded.
“Okay,” she said. She looked down at her hands and then clapped me on the shoulder. “And thanks.”
We were back and forth from the dock to the house, stacking up Daddy’s traps in a solid tower of wire and rope. When there were enough, he loaded up the Queen Jane and he and Stephanie motored out to drop the traps. Tucker hopped off to go get a coffee. Kenny and I got into Daddy’s truck to drive back to the house to start loading my traps.
The sky was aching with blue. We didn’t say anything on the short drive to Daddy’s house, but when I parked and Kenny reached for his door handle, I stopped him.
“Kenny,” I said, “if you and Sally are done, then why’d you come back?”
“Heck, Cordelia. I fell in love.” He sighed, and I could feel my head start to pound. I couldn’t look over at him, and I was glad we were still sitting in the truck; if I had been standing, my legs might have given out. He kept speaking. “I fell in love with Loosewood Island and with working on the sea, first with your daddy and then with you, and I fell in love with the light and water and the rocks and the birds and the boats and the way everything comes together here when I paint.” He popped open the door of the truck and slid off his seat, but then stopped and turned to look at me, his arm resting loosely on the open frame of the window. “I think you either take to living on the island or you don’t,” he said. “Sally’s from Lubec, and she couldn’t hack it. I’m not sure I helped that much. Maybe I was too wrapped up in myself, maybe I could have done more when …” He trailed off and shook his head. I knew he was talking about when she lost the babies. “But if you take to the island, I’m not sure it’s something you can just leave. Ask Carly about it. She came back, too,” he said, and then he knocked the door closed and headed over to the stack of traps.
I felt the thump and the light bounce of Kenny dropping the first trap into the back of the truck. I don’t know how long I was sitting there or how long I would have sat there if Kenny hadn’t appeared at the passenger-side window again, leaning into the truck.
“You planning on getting off your ass, Cordelia? I know you’re the boss and all, but some help might be in order.”
I got out of the truck and headed over to the stack of traps, but then I stopped and stared at him. “Why, Kenny?”
“Why what?” He had his hands on a trap, about to pick it up, but he let go and straightened up, staring at me, and I could see he didn’t know what I meant.
I didn’t know what I meant, either, so I said, “Why do you work as my sternman?”
“I like it,” he said. “I like being out on the ocean.”
“You don’t need the money, do you?” I said, and it was another unexpected shift, another wave rocking the boat.
“No, Cordelia,” he said
, “not really.” And then he grinned at me, and whatever that invisible line had been that we’d never crossed in our conversation, it was as if somebody had simply come along and wiped it away. I felt like some sort of dam had broken, but instead of water it was relief washing over me.
“I’ve got family money, but I like being out on the boat,” he said. “I like hauling the traps, the rhythm of it, working with the lobsters, and even the smelly-as-shit bait. And I liked being out on the water with Woody, and now with you.” He started moving again, making me realize we’d just been standing there in Daddy’s yard, and he grabbed one of the lobster traps and threw it up into the bed of the truck. “Besides,” he said, pulling at one of his work gloves, “it’s not like I can spend all of my time painting. And it keeps me in shape despite my natural inclination towards sloth.” He patted his stomach. “As much as chicks dig the potbelly, if I’m going to be dating again …” He raised his arms and gave a theatrical spin.
“I’m sure you can hold your own, Kenny.”
He laughed, and even though we’d flirted before, had always brushed up against that edge, this was both different and familiar, with the way he looked at me and held his gaze for an extra second, and I couldn’t tell how much of what he was saying was real and how much of it was a game. I think Kenny could feel it, too, because he didn’t say anything else. We lapsed into the comfortable silence of work. We stacked the traps three high in the bed of the truck and then started lashing them down for the short ride to the docks.
Then we heard the bang.
The sound was elongated and softened by distance, drifting up to us from the water, but we knew exactly what it was: a gunshot.
Daddy climbed up on his chair and raised his hands. Almost all of the lobstermen and fishermen had descended on the Fish House to talk about the shooting. Even the ones who didn’t drink, like Tucker, were there, nursing club sodas and Diet Cokes. I’m not sure I’d ever seen the Grumman Fish House more crowded. There were more than a handful of wives, too, and Carly and Rena and some other people who weren’t lobstermen proper, but it only took a few seconds for the hush to spread out across the room, for the men to understand that we’d gotten to the point when we were going to decide what to do.
“Well,” Daddy said, “what say you, George? You want to tell us how you decided to get shot in the face?” He got down from the chair and stood next to me. “Better to have you tell us the story than to go by rumours.”
George’s face was wrapped in gauze. Above the nose he had bandages swaddling his head, climbing up over his eyes and forehead so that there was just a tuft of hair peeking out, and below his nose there were scabs, like acne on a teenage girl. It could have been worse. Two hours in the emergency room getting worked over with a pair of tweezers, and the doctor said all George would end up with was a few scars that would fade with time. George didn’t even need a single stitch. A week with the bandages and he’d be as good as new.
“Wasn’t much to it, I guess,” George said. “I’d already dropped my first boat of sets, and was out there with another run of fifty traps.”
“Forty,” his sternman, Matt Frieze, piped in. “Wasn’t only forty traps that load, George.”
George looked peeved to be interrupted. “Does it matter now, Matty? Does it matter if we had fifty traps or only forty traps loaded up? What difference does ten traps make?”
“You’d know if you were the one wrestling the traps instead of just spinning a wheel all day.” Matty got a good laugh from us at this, and even George grinned. It looked weird to see his familiar smile below the layers of bandages, the top half of his face belonging to the Invisible Man and the bottom half—scabs aside—belonging to the man I’d known all my life. “But I’ll tell you what, George, since you got shot in the face and all, if you want it to be fifty traps instead of forty, then fifty traps it is,” Matt said. “Hell, let’s make it sixty.”
“Ah, you’re a good sternman, Matt, and I’ll tell you, with these bandages over my eyes, you even seem like a handsome man.” Everyone laughed, and George seemed pleased. “Point is,” George continued, “we was piled up with traps and steaming out to drop them. Figured I’d be out and then back in again quick enough to get the last of the traps wet before lunch. I’d even promised Matt that I’d buy him a sub at the Sandwich Shoppe.”
“I’m holding you to that, George,” Matt called.
“But as I come up to my grounds …” He trailed off and touched the bandages near his temple. Early season and he’d be setting his traps off near Seal Coat Cove—his boat and the bobbing buoys making a pretty view for tourists taking the Brumfitt walk—and then east of there, grounds that, like his fishing knowledge, had been passed down for generations. The law, of course, didn’t officially recognize territory like that, but for the lobstermen, for all of us on Loosewood Island, our grounds might as well have been mapped to the inch. Sometimes one or another of us set traps too near somebody else’s fishing ground, but it was like cutting in to dance with another man’s wife: okay as long as you don’t do it too often, too close, or too long, and as long as you understand there’s going to be a time when the man cuts back in.
“So I come up to my grounds,” he said, starting himself up again, “and I’m there, and it’s one of the most pleasing sights in the world. The cliff back behind the cove, the rock beach, the Whale’s Tail Rocks catching waves, the sun hitting the water all right, and the first fifty of my traps already in the water, the orange and the blue stripes just about saying my name.” He scratched at his bandage again and was quiet. I could hear the way that the entire bar waited for him. I wondered if they were thinking what I was thinking, which was that George was lucky that wasn’t the last time he ever saw Loosewood Island. George cleared his throat and took a sip from his beer. “And there were some other buoys out there with colours I didn’t recognize. Yellow with a triple ring of sky-blue and a band of green.”
“James fucking Harbor.” Tony Warner, across the room.
“James fucking Harbor,” George agreed. “And I figured we’d given them warning enough, so I gaffed it and cut the rope.”
“You all might remember,” Daddy said, “me standing here in this very spot and saying let’s not get in a cutting war? That sound familiar? It should, Georgie, because I said it last night.”
“Let’s let bygones be bygones, Woody,” George said, commanding his audience, “because the thing is, I cut the rope, and it felt good. So we moved on to the next buoy and then I cut that one off, too, and that felt so good that we moved on to the third one. And we did this for a while, but the problem is, Matty and I were so busy orphaning their traps that we didn’t happen to notice the boat creeping up our ass. Seems like they’d been just around the corner, so to speak, and they’d not taken kindly to watching me cut their traps.”
George took a breath and started to speak again and then bit at his thumb. “Lucky, you know. Lucky they weren’t closer. Lucky I’d just sent Matty belowdecks. I turned and barely saw anything. Didn’t make out much other than that it was a boat I didn’t recognize and that there was a fellow pointing a shotgun at me. He was thirty metres, forty metres. Using bird shot, too, thank god. Doctor who cleaned me out was a hunter, said it looked like six-shot. Probably his dad’s old hunting shotgun, the sort of thing you take out for squirrels or rabbit. Might even have been meaning to put it over my head, but at that distance, using cheap-shit shells, the kind of open choke a gun like that would have, it’s just like spraying a hose.”
I saw George’s wife, Mackie, reach out and take one of George’s hands in hers. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to be angry or to start crying. I knew how she felt.
“George,” Daddy said. “Anything else?”
From across the room, Mr. Warner called out. “Who was it, Georgie?”
“I didn’t see shit. Don’t know if I’d even recognize him if I saw him again. All I can tell you is what I told you: buoys were yellow with a tripl
e ring of sky-blue and a band of green, and I didn’t recognize the boat.” He hung his head down.
“Okay, there, George,” Daddy said. “So you’ve heard it from him, heard it from George. Looks like we’ve gotten into it, then.” Daddy was casual when he said it, but he was deliberate in his casualness. He wanted to make it clear that we were done just talking about the peckerwoods from James Harbor.
“Now, we all know what the law says about this,” Daddy said. I felt Rena touch my elbow.
“Fuck the law,” somebody yelled from the back, and there was a swell of support, but Daddy kept talking.
“The law says that the waters are open to those that get there first, and the law frowns upon cutting traps and letting George take a load of bird shot in the face. The law says that whomever it was that fired a gun at George ought to go to jail. The law says that you don’t get to take the law into your own hands.” Daddy took a few steps away from the bar, into the centre of the room. He was holding a beer, the label peeled cleanly off, which was one of his habits, and the bottle hung loosely from his hand. The room was as quiet as a bar full of fishermen gets, and Daddy took a moment to look around the room, giving every man the feeling that they’d been seen. “But,” Daddy said, giving that single word some space, “there’s the law and then there’s our laws. You all know me, and you all know that I’ve been fishing Loosewood Island since I could walk, and that before me it was my daddy, and my daddy’s daddy, and back all the way to Brumfitt Kings. You know me, right? You know that I’ll do what needs to be done to take care of Loosewood Island.”
I couldn’t help but think of that day nearly half my lifetime ago, when we motored into James Harbor and Daddy brought his hammer into Al Burns’s office. “Daddy,” I said, because as I looked around the room, it was clear to me that I was the only one who was thinking of the consequences, of what happened after Daddy smashed Al Burns’s hand, of the months Daddy spent in the loony bin.
The Lobster Kings Page 18