The Lobster Kings (13 page)

It didn’t take long before I was trying to impress him. It’s not like I didn’t read much before Kenny, didn’t watch movies unless shit was being blown up, didn’t go to museums when I went to Montreal or Boston, but it was different after Kenny started working as my sternman. He’d mention a book he’d read and then when I said I hadn’t heard of it, a few days later he’d show up to work with the book stuffed inside a plastic bag. I’d read the book, and then later, back on the boat, as we were pulling traps, stuffing bait bags, slapping the brass measure against the backs of bugs, we’d talk about it. Same thing with a play he’d see in the city or a piece of art at a gallery. Next time I was in a big city—and I went every couple of months—I’d go where he told me. If there was a new band he heard, he burned me a CD; a magazine article he liked, he’d clip it out for me. We argued about some of the things. He made me read a novel that had won the Pulitzer, and even though I passed it on to Daddy and he thought it was brilliant, I had to tell Kenny the truth, which was that I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. He was enamoured with an indie rock group out of Columbus, Ohio, that sounded like two dogs fucking a cat in a garbage can, and after about the thirtieth time he put it in the boat’s CD player I threw the disc out into the ocean.

But what happened was that after a while I realized I wasn’t reading this stuff or going to check out paintings at galleries or online—living on the island, that was sometimes my only option—because Kenny had told me I should, but rather because I wanted to. Before long, I was bringing him my own book suggestions or telling him about some movie I’d read about that I
thought sounded good. We couldn’t agree much on music, though he finally grew to appreciate Johnny Cash.

We probably spent the most time talking about Brumfitt Kings. Kenny had been an art history major at Yale, and he wrote his senior honour’s thesis on Brumfitt’s lighter works, arguing that they deserved an equal place to his darker works. There was no reason, he wrote, that a painting showing a mother and young son picnicking on a stone beach in clear weather was inherently less important than one that showed a mother and son in peril from a bank of black clouds. Since then, he’s come around to my point of view, which is that the Brumfitt’s paintings that show the Loosewood Island from Daddy’s stories are better than either his lighter pieces or his more menacing, realistic paintings.

I didn’t fool myself that it was romantic when we were on the
Kings’ Ransom
. We flirted at times, the sort of aimless brushing against the line of two people who are attracted to each other but know that nothing can happen, because while Kenny may have been unhappily married, he
was
married. I missed the flirting in the off-season, but more than anything, what I missed was the regularity of having him with me out on the
Kings’ Ransom
, the intimacy of the two of us out on the water, the rhythm of working together. Sometimes, when things were going well on the boat, it was an odd sort of dancing. I saw him in the off-season or touched base with him on the phone, but it was different.

Still, he was the person I wanted to call to talk with about Daddy’s fainting spell, but it was too early. Waking up before dawn was a habit that was hard for me to break in the off-season, but it wasn’t something Kenny took too long to adjust to. Instead of calling, I decided to hop in the shower and see if Daddy wanted some company on the way to the doctor’s. By the time I made it down to the docks, however, the
Queen Jane
and Daddy were gone to Saint John. I was already slickered up and not interested in watching the rain through the glass doors of my living room, so I rowed out to the
Kings’ Ransom
instead. I didn’t have anything that needed to be done on board, but I decided that I could find
something. We were barely more than a week out from the spring season and I was itchy to get started. Part of it was that I just loved being on the water, and that fishing meant spending time with Kenny, but part of it was the rumours that the James Harbor boys were going to make a play at our waters again.

But even without worrying about James Harbor lobstermen horning in on my grounds, I still would have been antsy. The way we ran the lobster fishing season worked well for us—we pulled the traps out of the water during the summer tourist season, for chunks of the spring, fall, and winter—but between our schedule and the weather, there were often days on end when the seas kept me at home. I should probably have been going over paperwork, but that had never been my strong suit. It drove Rena crazy. She ran the fish shop, but the fish shop was only ever busy in the tourist season, and with her accounting degree she handled the books for Daddy’s rentals and business concerns, for the
Queen Jane
and the
Kings’ Ransom
, and did all of our personal taxes, too. All that Rena asked from me was to handle my own day-to-day records, expenses, gas, daily catches, and she figured out the rest.

I poked around for a while on the
Kings’ Ransom
, trying to keep my mind off Daddy’s doctor’s appointment and going back and forth on whether or not I should call Carly down in Portland to tell her about Daddy fainting. Every time I heard a boat’s motor I’d pop my head up, like some fucker from James Harbor was going to just sail up to the
Kings’ Ransom
and tell me that he was going to try to poach my fishing grounds. I was both keyed up and bored at the same time. I tried mucking about in the engine, and then I pulled out my fishing rod and threw a few halfhearted casts. I sat on the bow in my slickers and let the rain wash over me, slowly working the lure through the water. Trudy stuck her paws up on the bow to see what was going on, and then curled up again on the deck. I didn’t have much of a thought to catch anything, which was just as well, because after ten minutes or so I hadn’t gotten a nibble yet and was done with it. Still, even with being anxious about the season being a week off and James Harbor getting pushy, there was
something nice about being down in the harbour when nobody else was there. During the season, mornings are the busiest time of the day: lobstermen up before dawn, heading out with the throttle full-on, men readying themselves for a day at sea, a few wives walking down to see their husbands off.

By ten, about the time I turned to head back in, the rain had stopped. I stowed my rod, stripped off my slicker and hung it in the cabin, and then climbed into my rowboat. Trudy set up shop on the stern bench. She looked pitiful and soaked and smelled like what she was: a wet dog. I checked the knot on my mooring buoy, making sure the
Kings’ Ransom
was set in case something blew in, and started pulling on the paddles. Most of the men had five-horsepowers or nine-point-nines on their skiffs, but I’d bought this rowboat from Daddy when I was fifteen for two hundred and fifty bucks. I’d used it for the rest of high school, dropping my first set of double traps in the shallow water I could reach with oars, and eventually expanding to ten traps, which was a lot to work from a crappy old rowboat. More than fifteen years later, I was still using that rowboat for lobstering, even if just to get me back and forth to the
Kings’ Ransom
. It wouldn’t have hurt me much to drop three grand on a new nine-point-nine, but I liked the way rowing out and back from the
Kings’ Ransom
framed my day.

I backed in to the dock and heard Kenny’s voice.

“Where’s the
Queen Jane
?” he asked. “Woody told me he wasn’t going to be out on the water, for pleasure or otherwise, until the season started. Though your daddy’s been known to lie about what he is or isn’t doing with the
Queen Jane
.” He grabbed the rail of the boat and held it steady while I tied off the stern, and then reached down and grabbed the bow painter and cleated it off. Trudy jumped out and rubbed herself against his leg while she wagged her tail. Kenny stumbled a little and then scratched at her chest. “You’re a big, smelly darling,” he said. He looked up and winked at me. “Just like your mommy.”

“Working on that raise, Kenny?”

He grinned at me and stuck his hand out to pull me up and onto the dock. I would have bristled if any other of the boys had done it, but from Kenny it was somehow charming, just more proof that despite how hard he worked and the decade he’d lived on Loosewood Island, he still didn’t have what it meant to be an islander quite figured out. He was wearing a pair of paint-spattered jeans and a button-down that had seen better days, and he was carrying his portable easel and paint kit. Kenny was a good painter. There was some sort of emotional openness in what he painted; a way in which what was on his canvases took hold of you. Carly’s girlfriend, Stephanie, an artist herself, said that Kenny had a nice command of light. That’s what she said: a command of light. I didn’t have anything more intelligent to say. Kenny’s paintings were good enough to sell, and they did, not just on the island but in galleries in Halifax, Bar Harbor, and even New York.

“Well,” I said, “Daddy wouldn’t start setting traps without telling me. Besides, if he started setting traps today, he’d be out of his mind. Even if the season was open it isn’t worth any bother for at least another week. What do you think he’s doing, putting out the traps unbaited just so they can soak up some water? No, we’ll start fishing next week when the season opens, but it will be a few days past that when we are actually pulling anything up.” I’d wanted to call Kenny earlier in the morning, but right then I could feel my mouth staying closed. I don’t know why I didn’t want to tell Kenny that Daddy had gone to the doctor’s.

“All I can tell you, Cordelia,” Kenny said, “is that if Woody started setting traps on Christmas Eve, nobody on the island would be unwrapping presents the next day.”

“We’ve got the seasons all set. You’ve been on-island long enough to know that, Kenny. Nobody, not even Daddy, is going to fish outside the dates.”

“James Harbor would,” Kenny said. He stared at me and then nodded. “Yeah, me, too. The rumour’s going around. Everybody seems to think it’s a done deal, that the James Harbor boys are coming for us.”

“Well, it won’t change when we start our fishing. If the James Harbor boys are making a play for our waters, we’ll deal with it when the season starts.”

“You know, the season starts when your father says it starts. Woody
is
the island, Cordelia. He wanted to change the dates, they’d be changed. Maybe it takes somebody who wasn’t born here to point that out to you.”

He was right, and it annoyed me to hear him say it, so I tacked back to him. “Where you off to? Painting?”

“You feel like modeling?”

“I’ll get naked if you do, Kenny.”

He grinned and then shook his head. “Promises, promises. Maybe someday.”

That was what he always liked to say. Maybe someday. It let the flirting stay casual, but I don’t think Kenny understood that I wasn’t sure I was joking. If he wasn’t married, I might have wanted someday to be today.

“I’m going to set up at the end of the dock for a spell. Take advantage of the lull in the rain.” He glanced up at the village and then said, “You going up to the fish shop?” I could tell that he was itching to get on with things. “Be sure to say hey to Rena and the twins for me,” Kenny said.

“Paint me something beautiful,” I said, hoping he might make another joke about me modeling for him, but he just nodded back and headed out to the end of the dock to set up his easel.

I
thought about heading up to the fish shop, like Kenny had asked, but Trudy had a mind of her own and had turned toward the house. Instead of calling her back, I followed behind her and then fixed myself a cup of tea and set myself in front of the phone. There was a brief message on it from Daddy: the doctor wanted him to spend the night in the hospital for some tests, and I wasn’t to worry. Not for the first time, I wished that he carried a cell phone with him when he was off-island.

I deleted the message and put the phone back down in front of me, trying to gather my energy. I knew I should have called Carly the night before, but I hadn’t been up for it. Calling her now, while she was at work, meant that she couldn’t be mad at me for not calling her. It also meant that I could just leave her a message. I hoped that by the time she was done teaching and called me back this afternoon I’d have some sort of better news for her.

It only rang once before Stephanie answered the phone.

Stephanie and Carly had been together for a few years now, ever since Carly had set up shop teaching second grade in Portland after college. Daddy seemed to keep himself surprisingly oblivious
to the idea that Carly and Stephanie might be lovers. Carly had always been after boys in high school, and despite her dating a few different women in college, it had seemed to me just to be another way of acting out her women’s studies classes and showing that she wasn’t “under the yoke of patriarchy.” It took me a while to realize that she and Stephanie were serious.

“How’s the lobster business?” Stephanie asked.

“Keeping me in cashmere,” I said, our usual exchange.