Stern Men (30 page)

“YOU PEOPLE LIKE PLAYING WITH DOLLS?” Angus Addams bellowed. His friends in their boats could hear him clear across the water. He held up and shook the murdered doll. One of the Courne Haven men said something that made his friends laugh.

“COME ON DOWN HERE!” Angus shouted. “COME ON DOWN AND SAY THAT!”

“What’d he say?” Barney Addams asked Don Pommeroy. “Did you hear what that guy said?”

Don Pommeroy shrugged.

Just then, a big man walked down the path to the dock and the fishermen parted to make way for him. He was tall and wide and wasn’t wearing a hat on his gleaming head of blond hair. He had some ropes, neatly coiled, over his shoulder, and was carrying a tin lunchbox. The laughter on the Courne Haven dock stopped. Angus Addams said nothing; that is, nothing that his friends could hear.

The blond man, not looking at Angus, climbed down from the dock, his lunchbox tucked under his arm, and stepped into a rowboat. He released it from its post and began to row. His stroke was beautiful to behold: a long pull followed by a quick, muscular snap. In very little time, he reached his boat and climbed aboard. By now, the men at the mouth of the harbor could see that this was Ned Wishnell, a true high-line fisherman and the current patriarch of the Wishnell dynasty. They looked at his boat with envy. It was twenty-five feet long, immaculate, white, with a clean blue stripe all around it. Ned Wishnell started it up and headed out of the harbor.

“Where the hell’s he going?” said Barney Addams.

Don Pommeroy shrugged again.

Ned Wishnell came right at them, right toward their blockade, as if it weren’t there. The Fort Niles fishermen looked at each other warily, wondering whether they were supposed to stop this man. It didn’t seem right to let him pass, but Angus Addams wasn’t with them to give instructions. They watched, paralyzed, as Ned Wishnell sailed right through, passing between Don Pommeroy and Duke Cobb without looking left or right. The Fort Niles boats bobbed in his wake. Don had to grab his rail, or he would have fallen over. The men watched as Ned Wishnell sped off, smaller and smaller as he went out to sea.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Barney apparently still expected an answer.

“I think he’s going fishing,” said Don Pommeroy.

“Hell of a note,” said Barney. He squinted out at the ocean. “Didn’t he see us?”

“Course he seen us.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“What the hell did you think he’d say?”

“I don’t know. Something like, ‘Hey, fellas! What’s going on?’ ”

“Shut up, Barney.”

“I don’t see why I should,” said Barney Addams, but he did.

Ned Wishnell’s impudence utterly dissolved any menace the Fort Niles men may have presented, so the rest of the Courne Haven fishermen, one at a time, climbed down their dock, got into their boats, and set out for a day of lobstering. Like their neighbor Ned, they passed through the Fort Niles blockade without looking to the left or right. Angus Addams screamed at them for a while, but this embarrassed the rest of the Fort Niles men, who, one at a time, turned around and headed home. Angus was the last to go. He was, as Barney reported later, “sweating bullets, cursing stars, sewing buttonholes, and everything else.” Angus was outraged at being deserted by his friends, furious that what could have been a pretty decent blockade had turned comic and useless.

This might have been the end of the fourth Fort Niles-Courne Haven lobster war, right there. If the incidents that morning had closed the quarrel, in fact, it wouldn’t even have been remembered as a lobster war; rather, just another in the long series of disputes and confrontations. As the summer went on, the pushing and cutting continued, but sporadically. For the most part, it was Angus Addams doing the cutting, and the men on both islands were used to that. Angus Addams held on to what was his like a bull terrier. For everyone else, new boundaries were set. Some territory got shifted; some new fishermen took over old areas; some old fishermen cut back on their workload; some fishermen home from the war resumed their profession. Everything settled down to a normal, tense peace.

For a few weeks.

At the end of April, Angus Addams happened to go to Rockland to sell his lobsters at the same time as Don Pommeroy. Don, a bachelor, was a known fool. He was the softer brother of Ira Pommeroy, the scowling, hard-knuckled husband of Rhonda Pommeroy, the father of Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and so on. Angus Addams didn’t think much of either of the Pommeroys, but he ended up spending a night drinking with Don at the Wayside Hotel, because it was too rough and too dark to head back home, and he was bored. Angus might have preferred to drink alone in his hotel room, but that’s not how things ended up. The men met at the wholesaler’s place, and Don said, “Let’s have a refresher, Angus,” and Angus agreed.

There were some men from Courne Haven at the Wayside that night. Fred Burden the fiddler was there with his brother-in-law, Carl Cobb. Because it was a night of windy, icy rain, and because the Courne Haven men and the Fort Niles men were the only ones at the bar, they found themselves in conversation. It wasn’t unfriendly conversation. In fact, it began when Fred Burden ordered a drink sent down to Angus Addams.

“That’s to keep your strength up,” Fred called over, “after a long day of cutting away our traps.”

It was a hostile opening line, so Angus Addams called back, “You’d better send me the whole bottle, then. I cut away a hell of a lot more than one drink’s worth today.”

This was hostile, too, but it didn’t lead to fighting. It led to laughing all around. The men had all had enough drinks to be jovial but not enough to start fighting. Fred Burden and Carl Cobb moved down the bar to sit next to their neighbors from Fort Niles. Of course they knew one another. They clapped each other on the back, ordered up some more beers and whiskeys, talked about their new boats and the new wholesaler and the newest trap design. They talked about the new fishing limitations the state was imposing, and what idiots the new wardens were. They had absolutely everything in common, so there was a lot to talk about.

Carl Cobb had been stationed in Germany during the Korean War, and he took out his wallet and showed off some German money. Everyone looked at Angus Addams’s stump, where he’d lost his finger in the winch, and made him tell the story about kicking his finger overboard and searing the wound with his cigar. Fred Burden told the other men that the summer tourists on Courne Haven had decided the island was too rowdy and had pooled their money to hire a policeman for the months of July and August. The policeman was a red-headed teenager from Bangor, and he’d been beaten up three times in his first week on the island. The summer people had even got the kid a police car, which the stupid kid had flipped over in a high-speed chase across the island, trying to catch a guy with no license plate on his car.

“A high-speed chase!” Fred Burden said. “On an island four miles long! For Christ’s sake, how far was the guy gonna go? Damn kid could’ve killed somebody.”

As it was, Fred Burden went on, the dazed young policeman was dragged out of his wrecked car and beaten up again, this time by a neighbor, furious at finding a police car overturned in his garden. After three weeks, the young policeman went home to Bangor. The police car was still on the island. One of the Wishnells bought it and fixed it up for his kid to drive around. The summer tourists were enraged, but Henry Burden and everyone else told them that if they didn’t like it on Courne Haven, they should go back to Boston, where they could have all the policemen they wanted.

Don Pommeroy said that was one good thing about Fort Niles—no summer tourists. The Ellis family owned damn near the whole island, and they wanted it all to themselves.

“That’s one good thing about Courne Haven, though,” Fred Burden said. “No Ellis family.”

Everyone laughed. That was a good point.

Angus Addams told about the old days on Fort Niles, when the granite industry was still thriving. They’d had a policeman back then, and he was the perfect cop for an island. He was an Addams, first of all, so he knew everybody, and he knew how things operated. He left the islanders alone and mostly made sure the Italians didn’t cause too much trouble. Roy Addams was his name; he’d been hired by the Ellis family to keep order. The Ellises didn’t care what old Roy did as long as nobody was getting murdered or robbed. He had a squad car—a big Packard sedan, with wooden panels—but he never drove it. Roy had his own theory of policing. He’d sit in his house, listening to the radio, and if anything happened on the island, everyone would know where to find him. Once he heard about a crime, he’d go have a talk with the perpetrator. That was a good island policeman, Angus said. Fred and his brother-in-law agreed.

“There wasn’t even a jail,” Angus said. “You got in trouble, you had to sit in old Roy’s living room for a while.”

“That sounds about right,” Fred said. “That’s how it should be with police on an island.”

“If there’s going to be any police at all, that is,” said Angus.

“That’s right. If.”

Angus then told the joke about the polar bear kid who wants to know if there’s any koala blood in his family, and Fred Burden said that reminded him of the one about the three Eskimos in the bakery. And Don Pommeroy told the one about the Japanese guy and the iceberg, but he screwed it up, so Angus Addams had to tell it right. Carl Cobb said he’d heard it a different way, and he gave his whole version, and it was practically the same. That was a waste of time. Don contributed the joke about the Catholic lady and the talking frog, but he wrecked it pretty bad, too.

Angus Addams went off to the bathroom, and when he came back, Don Pommeroy and Fred Burden were arguing. They were really going at it. Someone had said something. Someone had started something. It sure hadn’t taken long. Angus Addams went over to figure out what the fight was about.

“There’s no way,” Fred Burden was saying, his face red and his lips spitting when he talked. “No way you could! He’d
kill
you!”

“I’m just saying I could,” Don Pommeroy said, slowly and with dignity. “I’m not saying it would be easy. I’m just saying I could do it.”

“What’s he talking about?” Angus asked Carl.

“Don bet Fred Burden a hundred bucks he could beat up a five-foot monkey in a fight,” Carl said.

“What?”

“You’d get creamed!” Fred was shouting now. “You’d get
creamed
by a five-foot monkey!”

“I’m a good fighter,” Don said.

Angus rolled his eyes and sat down. He felt sorry for Fred Burden. Fred Burden was from Courne Haven, but he didn’t deserve to get into a stupid conversation like this with a known fool like Don Pommeroy.

“Have you ever
seen
a goddamn monkey?” Fred demanded. “The way a monkey is built? A five-foot monkey would have a six-foot arm span. You know how strong a monkey is? You couldn’t beat up a
two
-foot monkey. You’d get
demolished!
”

“But he wouldn’t know how to fight,” Don said. “That’s where my advantage is. I know how to fight.”

“Now that’s stupid. We’re assuming he’d know how to fight.”

“No we ain’t.”

“Then what are we talking about? How can we talk about fighting a five-foot monkey if the monkey can’t even fight?”

“I’m just saying I could beat one if he
could
fight.” Don was speaking very calmly. He was the prince of logic. “If a five-foot monkey could fight, I could beat him.”

“What about the teeth?” Carl Cobb asked, genuinely interested now.

“Shut up, Carl,” said his brother-in-law Fred.

“That’s a good question,” Don said, and nodded sagely. “The monkey wouldn’t be allowed to use his teeth.”

“Then he wouldn’t be
fighting!
” Fred shouted. “That’s how a monkey
would
fight! By biting!”

“No biting allowed,” Don said, and his verdict was final.

“He would be boxing? Is that it?” Fred Burden demanded. “You’re saying you could beat a five-foot monkey in a boxing match?”

“Exactly,” said Don.

“But a monkey wouldn’t
know
how to box,” Carl Cobb observed, frowning.

Don nodded with composed satisfaction. “Exactly,” he said, “why I would win.”

This left Fred Burden with no choice but to punch Don out, so he did. Angus Addams said later he’d have done it himself if Don had said another goddamn word about boxing a five-foot monkey, but Fred was the first who couldn’t take it any more, so he laid one across Don’s ear. Carl Cobb looked so surprised that it really annoyed Angus, so Angus punched Carl. Then Fred punched Angus. Carl punched Angus, too, but not hard. Don came up off the floor and threw himself, bent over and howling, right into Fred’s gut, sending Fred tumbling backward into some empty barstools, which clattered and wavered and fell.

The two men—Fred and Don—set to rolling on the floor of the bar. They had somehow got laid up against each other head to foot and foot to head, which was not an effective posture for fighting. They looked like a large clumsy starfish—all arms and legs. Fred Burden was on top, and he dug his boot tip into the floor and spun himself and Don in a circle, trying to get a grip.

Carl and Angus had stopped fighting. They hadn’t had that strong an interest in it, anyway. Each had got in a punch, and that took care of that. Now they stood beside each other, backs to the bar, watching their friends on the floor.

“Get ’em, Fred!” Carl hooted, and shot a sheepish look at Angus.

Angus shrugged. He didn’t particularly care if Don Pommeroy got beat up. He deserved it, the idiot. A five-foot monkey. For Christ’s sake.

Fred Burden set his teeth into Don’s shin and clamped. Don howled at the injustice, “No biting! No biting!” He was outraged, it seemed, because he’d made that rule perfectly clear with regard to the monkey fight. Angus Addams, standing at the bar, watched the awkward scramble on the floor for a while and then sighed, turned around, and asked the bartender if he could settle the tab. The bartender, a small, slight man with an anxious expression, was holding a baseball bat that was half his height.