by Norman Green
After a while we came back down the hill. I stopped Nicky just inside the tree line and glassed Avery’s house. There was someone in the pasture next to Louis’s house, next to the horse. “I wonder who that is,” I said, mostly to myself.
“That’s Eddie,” Nicky said.
“Eddie? Oh, you mean Edna. How do you know?”
“She comes over during the day sometimes when you’re gone. She helps out when Mrs. Avery isn’t feeling good.”
“Wow, Nicky, you got good eyes. Let’s wait up here for just a minute, okay?”
“Okay, Poppy.”
I watched her through the glasses. She was wearing construction boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. If I had met her in the city, I might have assumed that she batted from the other side of the plate, but up here in the boonies, it’s tougher to tell. I was used to people who wore clothes for what they said, but out here, people wore them for what they did.
“We going down?” Nicky was getting restless.
“Yeah, we are,” I told him. “Just one more minute.” My paranoia was in full bloom, and I wanted to make sure she was alone. I didn’t know what difference it made, but I tend to listen to these inner voices.
Nicky tugged at me. “C’mon, Poppy.”
“All right, let’s go.” If there was anyone inside the house, they weren’t going to come out carrying a sign to let me know who they were, anyhow. We headed down the hill. Nicky, who had been showing signs of fatigue in our last half hour in the woodlot, started bouncing up and down next to me.
“Can I go? Can I run, Dad?”
“Don’t fall and hurt yourself.” He turned and grinned at me, patted me once on the hip, for luck, I guess, and tore off down the hill. The horse must have heard him coming—she raised her head to look. Edna turned then and saw us. By the time I got down there she had Nicky up on the horse’s back, and he was grinning so hard I thought his face was gonna break. I didn’t go into the pasture with them, but leaned on the outside of the board fence and watched. Edna said something to Nicky, and he nodded, patting the horse’s neck. She came over and stood next to me, inside the fence.
“Hi,” she said. “What did you do to Hoppie?”
“Well,” I said, “we had to have a conversation about nonaggression and mutual respect. Man, I gotta say, the grapevine up here is pretty muscular.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” she said. “Really, what happened?”
“I went to hear Roscoe’s band. Hop was there, and he was tanked. Just as well, I guess, it made him easier to handle. He came after me, and I had to dissuade him.”
“I hear you did some job of it.”
“Do I need to worry about him coming back for a rematch?”
“You bet your ass you do. Hop always has to get the last word in, always.” She looked at me. “If I had someone like Nicky to think about, I would get far away from here.” She looked down at the ground. “It’s none of my business, but I hope you’re not into beating your chest and showing everybody what a tough guy you are. Tangling with Hop would be a serious mistake.”
“I’m not into posing. Listen, he came after me.”
“I know. I’m not trying to tell you what to do.” She glanced over at the house.
“How’s Eleanor?” I asked her.
“Not too swingin’.” She looked over at Nicky sitting on the horse, and then she led me a few steps farther away. “How much have they told you?”
“How much have they told me about what?”
She stared at me for a minute, and it struck me how much older than her years she seemed, and then the next thought was that old male thing, you know, she’s old enough, or at least she’s big enough, and she seems interesting as hell. . . .
“About her tumor.”
That got my attention. “Tumor? Nobody said anything about a tumor. Louis said she gets pain spells.”
“That sounds like Louis,” she said, pursing her lips in disapproval. “Never admit when you’re in trouble, never ask for help.” She shook her head. “Eleanor gets pain spells because she has a tumor in her stomach. Louis has been taking her to a doctor in Machias, and Eleanor hates to go because she’s agoraphobic.”
“Afraid of sweaters?”
She glared at me. “That would be angoraphobic, you moron. Agoraphobia, she never leaves the house.”
“I kinda noticed that.”
“So anyway, the doctor said she’s got a tumor, and if they operate on it now and get it before it gets any further along, she might have a good chance of survival. The problem is, Medicare won’t cover the operation. Louis told me the doctor said Medicare would jerk him around for another year, and by the time they’re finally convinced she needs to get it taken out, it’ll be too late.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. The problem is, even with the surgeon kicking in his fee, it’s going to cost about forty grand, and Louis doesn’t have it. Might as well be forty million.”
“No shit. What about that piece of property up in Eastport that Sam Calder wants to buy?”
“He doesn’t want to buy it anymore. He must have heard that Louis is over a barrel, and now he only wants to buy a right-of-way to cross it. He’s offering twenty-five thousand. Either way, whether he sells that or not, Louis is worried that he’s probably going to lose his house.”
“Damn.” No wonder Louis and Eleanor were willing to put Nicky and me up, let us invade their home until the van got fixed. They were going to need every cent they could lay their hands on.
Edna was looking down, kicking the ground with a booted foot. “Anyhow, can we get off that? Can we talk about something else?” She glanced at the glasses hanging around my neck. “Your son tells me you were up in the woods looking for birds. Are you a bird-watcher?”
“Yeah, I guess. I been to therapy for it, but I think I’m a hopeless case.”
“How did you get into that?”
“I don’t really remember.” That was a lie. The first birds I really paid any attention to were the ratty little dark brown ones that used to hang around the yard in prison. They were starlings, though I didn’t know that at the time. It seemed to me then that they didn’t give a fuck what the rules were, they went where they wanted to go and did what they wanted to do, they weren’t interested in what anybody thought. I was wrong about most of that—birds generally lead lives as regimented as any convict’s—but by the time I found that out it was too late, I was hooked.
She turned around, leaning on the inside of the fence. She called out to Nicky. “You all right, honey? You want to get down yet?”
Nicky shook his head, still grinning. I guess there was no place in the world he would rather be. She turned back to me. “So that’s what you’re doing up in Maine? Looking at birds?”
“Nah, not really. I look at birds no matter where I go.” Think, Manny, why are you up here? You’ve got to come up with something halfway believable. . . . “Nicky’s mother died a couple years ago. We’ve been living in Brooklyn since then. Can you imagine a kid like him, cooped up indoors all day long? I want to find something better for him.”
She shook her head. “There’s no jobs up here, Manny. You won’t be able to work.”
“I’m a software designer. I could probably work from just about anywhere, you know, with some limitations. I guess I’m up here trying to figure out what the right thing is.”
“You’d give up New York City, for him?”
“Whoo. What a thought.” Oh, but I would, man, yeah, now that you mention it, I would give up everything for Nicky. That wasn’t a decision I came to, it was something I woke up to just then, maybe because Eddie asked me about it, I don’t know. What a strange idea, anyway, what an odd sensation that was, that I would sacrifice my life, give up myself for another person, even if he was related to me. I felt it washing over me, almost like a spell of dizziness, and for that moment I was close to losing it, which went against every instinct I had. If you have a weak spot, you never
dare to show it in public, do you? I swallowed it, tucked it away so that I could look at it again when I was all alone. “Maybe I can sneak back for a visit once in a while.”
She smiled at me then, and we watched Nicky sitting on the horse, caressing its neck, talking to it softly. Change the subject, I thought. “So you checked on Eleanor this morning?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking that I should take Nicky out for a ride or something. You know, try and give Eleanor some peace and quiet. Nicky makes a lot of noise when he’s been cooped up inside for too long.”
“Good idea,” she said. “If you thought you and Nicky would like a boat ride, you could call up Hobart, the guy you got the Subaru from. He has a lobster boat, and he takes it out most Sunday afternoons. I’d bet he knows more about the bay than just about anybody. See if he’d take you guys out. It might be fun.”
“Thanks, Eddie. Maybe I’ll do that.”
Hobart recognized my voice. “How’s the Subaru working out?” he asked.
“Fine,” I told him. “Listen, I’m trying to get my son out of Louis and Eleanor’s house for the afternoon. I was told, if I wanted to see Passamaquoddy Bay, you’re the guy to talk to.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I was gonna go out and dub around, I guess. You wanna come along, I could probably use the company.” He told me how to find the boat, and we agreed to meet there. Before we left, I checked the voice-mail box on my phone, but there were no messages.
He kept his boat tied up at a long-legged pier that perched high above the water of a round inlet called Bailey’s Folly. The place was outside of Passamaquoddy Bay, south of Lubec, and out through the narrow mouth of the inlet you could see the cold water of the southern reaches of the Bay of Fundy. There were a couple of houses on one side of the place, and a dog somewhere barked as Nicky and I made our way over to the pier. There was a long walkway on one side of the pier that tilted down to a square wooden platform that floated in the water next to the pier, and as the tides came in and out, the platform, with Hobart’s boat tied to it, rose and fell with the water level. There were piles of wire-mesh lobster traps stacked on the platform, bits of dried seaweed and barnacles stuck to them.
The boat itself was fiberglass, green on the outside, white on the inside, maybe twenty-three, twenty-four feet long, with a sort of half shelter built around the steering wheel and the throttle. I guess it would keep you a little drier in the rain, as long as the wind wasn’t blowing too hard, which it generally was. The thing looked exactly like a million other lobster boats up and down the coast. Nicky and I climbed down onto the platform, over behind a pile of lobster traps, and sat down. With my binoculars, I could see out through the mouth of the inlet, out to where a bunch of seagulls sat in the mad, churning, swirling rush of water, riding the insane currents, eating something that floated near the surface. Nicky got down on his hands and knees next to the water, reached down, and put his hand in. “Cold,” he said. After that, he came over and sat down beside me, and I gave him the binoculars to play with.
“Turn that little wheel on top,” I told him. “Turn it back and forth until you can see something.” I showed him how it worked. I don’t know if he got it or not, but he seemed happy enough to sit there and mess with it.
About fifteen minutes after I sat down, I heard footsteps coming down the walkway. Had to be him—there were no other boats there. I stood up.
“There you are,” he said. “Come ahead.”
“This is my son, Nicky. Nicky, that’s Captain Hobart.”
Nicky’s mouth went wide. “Captain?”
Hobart chuckled. It was the first real sign of emotion I’d seen in him. “Hello, son,” he said. “You ready to go for a ride in my boat?”
Nicky’s mouth went wider still. “Is that your boat?”
“Yep. C’mon aboard.” I handed Nicky over to him, then climbed aboard and sat down on the doghouse that covered the engine back by the stern. Hobart climbed out onto the dock and untied a rope at the front of the boat. After that, he got back and started up his engine. He pointed back at me. “Cast us off, there,” he said. “Let go that line.”
There was a rope holding the stern of the boat to the dock. I started looking for the end, where it was tied to the boat. “T’other end,” Hobart said. “She’s wound around that cleat on the dock there.” I got it loose. Hobart put the thing in gear with a thunk, pushed his throttle forward. He spun the wheel and the boat chugged away from the dock. He looped a piece of rope around one of the spokes on the wheel. Autopilot, I guess. “Nicky,” Hobart said, “we got to get you to put a life vest on. Okay?”
Nicky, enthralled, nodded his head slowly. Hobart fished around in a wooden locker, came up with a child-sized life vest. It had a ring on the back, with a piece of rope tied to it. Hobart glanced over the side. I guessed that he was satisfied we weren’t about to run into anything, and he knelt down and fastened the vest around Nicky. “This piece of line, here,” he said, “is a safety line. We want to make sure we don’t lose you, okay?” He looked up at me. “Some kids don’t like the line, makes ’em feel like a dog in the backyard, but you gotta have it. He went over the side, even with a vest on, it’d be hell getting him back. You’d be asking a lot of him, just to try to keep his face out of that cold water.”
“You don’t mind, do you, Nicky?” I asked him. He looked up at me, no idea what we were talking about. “You all right?”
He nodded his head again.
“You want to sit down on the back or you want to stand there?”
He closed his mouth, finally, and swallowed. He looked around, then back at me. “Here,” he said, pointing at his spot on the deck. I think he was blown away. I think the boat, the water, the noise of the engine, the smell of the bay, had all overloaded his inputs. I think he was doing that thing that only little kids can do, when they’re wide open, taking it all in.
Hobart shoved the throttle forward a little more, and the boat picked up speed, but not much. It was a workboat, and its only speeds were slow and slower. “I appreciate this,” I told him. “I’ve never been out in a boat like this before.”
“Well, there it is,” he said, a small waggle of his hand encompassing the whole scope of the water and islands around us. “There’s the bay. It’s a hungry place. Every living thing you see out here is looking for something to eat. Dolphins, over in the channel.”
“Where?”
“Ahead, and to your left, headed up into the channel between Lubec and Campobello Island, into the bay.” He pointed at some fuzzy neon green shit on a small sonar screen in front of him. “That there’s probably a school of herring. That’s what the dolphins are chasing, like as not.”
I looked up where he pointed, and a minute later they broke through the water’s surface, sleek rounded shapes topped by smallish dorsal fins. “I see ’em. How about that?”
“Poppy.”
I looked down, and Nicky was peering through the glasses. “What?” He pointed unsteadily, trying to hold the glasses to his face with one hand and point with the other. “There’s a bird,” he said. “Over there.”
I looked where he was pointing, but all I saw was a small rocky islet sticking out of the water. It had a small patch of green on the top, looked like a toupee several sizes too small. I guess that was what was left showing when the tide was in. “I don’t see a bird.”
“Ten points for me,” he said. “He’s sitting up on that rock.”
I squinted. “Oh, yeah. Good job, Nicky. I can’t tell what he is, he’s too far away.”
“We can go see, if you want,” Hobart said. “Shags like to stand up theyah and dry their wings out so that they can fly again.”
Nicky handed me the glasses and I looked through them. “Too big for a shag, I think. Too big for a hawk, even. Big hook on the beak. You got eagles up here?”
“Plenty. Probably fifty bald eagles within a ten-mile radius of right here. Sometimes you’ll see a whole row of
’em, scaling.”
“Scaling?”
“Yeah, just hanging there in the wind, you know, still, over the water.”
It was an eagle, an immature first-year bird without the distinctive white head it would get if it survived into adulthood. It was big, though, as big as it would get. It got nervous when we approached, arched its wings, and hopped off to another rock farther away. Hobart jerked his head at the wooded island looming on the far side of the island the bird was on. “Nest over there in the spruce trees,” he said, spinning the wheel and turning us into the current. “You wanna go see it?”
“Nah. Leave ’em alone.”
“Awright.”
I checked my cell phone’s voice mail again, still nothing. “How long you lived up here, Hobart?”
“My family moved here when I was ten years old.”
“No kidding. Man, if this place is quiet now, it must have been desolate back then.”
Hobart shook his head. “You’re wrong about that,” he said. “There was still a bunch of sardine canneries in business then.” We had made it up into the channel between Lubec and the big island to the north, and the bay opened up in front of us. The sky was overcast, giving the surface of the water a fog-colored sheen. The wind raked at us, it never stopped, it was like the currents of the bay, ceaseless, unpredictable, cold. Hobart pointed at the town of Eastport, farther west along the southern shore of the bay. From the water it looked like a row of two-and three-story buildings maybe three blocks long, built on a ledge by the shore, with a couple of wharfs in the water and some houses in the trees on the low hill behind the town. Picturesque as hell, but dead quiet. “Used to be fish canneries cheek by jowl, right along the waterfront, over theyah. Every little cove had a factory building. I seen this whole bay full of herring, one giant school seven or eight miles across, and everything that eats herring was in here after ’em. Cod, pollack, big bluefin tuna, dolphins, seals, sharks, whales . . .”