The Lobster Kings (15 page)

M
y house wasn’t something I’d have been able to afford on my own. Daddy let me live in this house free and clear, and he hadn’t been subtle about the fact that there was room in the house for a husband and children both; he reminded me all the time that early thirties wasn’t too old to get started. He’d set up the same sort of deal for Rena and Tucker, too. Other side of the harbour, but waterfront, same as mine. He’d even bought bunk beds to put in each of the twins’ rooms, thinking ahead to when the kids would want to have sleepovers. Rena and I both offered to pay rent, but he said not to mind it. He had two other houses that he rented out to summer folk as well as the fish shop, the warehouse where the lobster pounds sat, two buildings on Main Street that held six different businesses that operated year-round—which was more impressive when you figured that Loosewood Island only had about three dozen businesses open during the off-season—and his own house, the house I’d grown up in. He didn’t have loans on any of them, and that’s the way he liked it. He was old-fashioned about being in debt and always said if you dealt in cash you didn’t have to keep buying whatever it was that you bought. He was no dub—a fisherman who couldn’t
cut it—and that was part of things, but part of it, too, was that he seemed to understand that things were changing on Loosewood Island before anybody else did, and he bought before the tourists hijacked the island. There were lots of things about Loosewood Island that he seemed to understand better than anybody else, and sometimes I wondered if there was more to those stories he told me about Brumfitt than he let on. Either way, it worked out well for the Kings.

Maybe somewhere else, men would have been jealous of him. Even without him flaunting his money—his house had beautiful views, but was as old and beaten down as any other lobsterman’s—every one of the boys in the harbour knew he had the money to buy something bigger and newer than the
Queen Jane
, that he had enough put away to weather the downs of the markets, the crash in lobster sales after the terrorist attacks in New York, that he could even weather the weather itself. But this was Loosewood Island, and more often than not I thought of our name as a description. Kenny was right about Daddy. He was the king of the harbour just as his father had been the king of the harbour, and his grandfather before, and there would come a day, probably, when I’d take over. We made decisions as a group—to shorten the season, to fish less traps, to stop letting cruise ships dock in the harbour—but anytime we made a decision, big or small, there was always the moment when every man would look to Daddy to see if he agreed.

Daddy was the reason we had the lobster co-op. Loosewood Island only has one wharf, though a few of the more ritzy cottages that are in sheltered coves have put in deepwater docks for their yachts so that they don’t have to bother with the harbour. The lobstermen own the wharf. And I don’t mean that like some silly gang slogan. I mean it in a purely literal sense. When Daddy said we should start a co-op, the lobstermen went together to buy out the old, crooked mainlander dealer who was nickeling and diming us to death. We could have forced him out—it’s amazing how quickly somebody recognizes a deal when their truck burns
up and their boat mysteriously sinks—but we offered him a fair price. When he took the money and left for Florida, we started the Loosewood Island Lobster Co-op. This would have been twenty years ago or so, before I started lobstering, before Scotty died.

The first few years of the co-op were kind of rough. They’d hired Mr. Taber to run the shop. He was an islander and when he fished he’d been a highliner—the kind of lobsterman who constantly outfished other men—and that seemed like qualification enough. Unfortunately, Mr. Taber was an old-school fisherman, born and raised to it, without a day of school past tenth grade, and he was taking on water from the beginning. He didn’t know shit about marketing or buying or selling or paperwork or accounting or any of the hundred things you need to know to actually be successful buying and selling lobsters. He was over his head. He immediately upped the offer price, buying for fifty cents a pound more than that shit-ass dealer we’d run out. But, of course, after buying the lobsters for fifty cents a pound more than the going rate, Mr. Taber ran smack into the problem of not being able to demand a higher rate from the wholesalers in Boston and New York who used to buy from our dealer. We lost some money there. And then he forgot to do some simple things that we’d all taken for granted, like order fuel, so the pumps ran dry and several boys had to stay tied up for a week until more fuel arrived. And then he forgot to order bait, and everybody had to take their boats to the mainland, wasting fuel and time that nobody had. That sort of thing went on for about two years, but nobody, not even Daddy, wanted to be the first to tell Mr. Taber it was time for him to go. He’d been well respected when he worked the water, and his family name meant a lot on Loosewood Island: the Tabers had been on the island almost as long as Momma’s side. They had fought on both sides of the War of 1812, which made for some mixed-up loyalties and even better dinner conversation back in the day. Fortunately, before anything had to be done about it, Mr. Taber had a heart attack and died. Then the men, at Daddy’s
urging, did something that was almost unthinkable: they brought in an outsider.

Paul Paragopolis had a name we couldn’t pronounce, but he also had a business degree and some experience in the lobster trade. His family ran a wholesale business in Boston, and despite being young—he was barely twenty-four—he knew what he was doing, and he turned the co-op around in less than a year. He even got a bunch of the boys to run “lobster tours” in the summer off-season, letting tourists pay fifty bucks to pretend to be lobstermen for a couple of hours. He got the co-op in the black real quick, and soon enough the lobstermen counted on wholesale prices on gear and a year-end bonus once the co-op had covered costs and Paul’s salary. By the time he married Lucy Swift, a fifth-generation islander, a couple of years later, the boys had stopped referring to him as “the new kid.” It’s funny how some men can come to the island every summer their entire lives, move here after college, work, live, raise children here, and still, forty years out, be considered “new,” and yet Paul managed to become part of the island in only a few years simply because he helped the boys make more money. About five years ago they had a big party to celebrate the last repayments for the loan used to buy the wharf and the dealership in the first place, and when Paul got up to give a speech the boys hoisted him up, carried him down the dock, and threw him in the water. Paul came out complaining that the water was cold as shit—even in the height of summer, the water never gets much past fifty degrees, and a man can freeze to death on a sunny day—but he had a grin on his face all the same.

The thing is, even though Paul runs the co-op, nobody would mistake him for the man in charge: everybody understood that the Kings’ word is the final word. Daddy usually let us talk things out among ourselves, but the few times he settled a matter, it was settled.

I
thought about calling Carly back to insist that I
was
happy—or at least that I
wanted
to be happy—that she and Stephanie were coming home, that I thought it would all work out, but I didn’t have it in me. I needed to get out of the house, to shake loose my worries about her coming home, Kenny leaving, and Daddy having to spend the night in the hospital being poked and prodded. Maybe if I’d lived on the mainland, someplace where I could have called Carly back from my mobile, I could have walked and talked, but being inside felt too close to being stuck. I headed outside instead, never mind the rain, and then stopped short at the coat hooks when I realized I’d left my slickers aboard the
Kings’ Ransom
earlier in the morning. It wasn’t cold enough for my winter parka, and I’d be damned if I was going to walk around the island carrying an umbrella. I dug in the closet for a minute and came up with an old oilcloth coat that I thought had belonged to my momma’s daddy. I had to roll up the sleeves a couple turns, but it fit me well enough, the voluminous hood keeping my head out of water.

I looked into the diner through the front window and saw about whom you’d expect: the old boys, most of whom were
down to lobstering part-time now, just something to keep their hands in the game, nursing the same cups of coffee they’d had in front of them since they finished up their lunches. I skipped past the Bronson Gallery, Island Ice Cream, and the Sandwich Shoppe, all closed for the season, past the Brumfitt Kings Museum, which was open only Wednesday and Saturday or by appointment until summer, past an empty storefront, and popped into the Coffee Catch, thinking I’d get something before heading over to see Rena. In the back, Timmy Green, Chip and Tony Warner, and Petey Dogger, all lobstermen closer to my age, were sitting and drinking from oversized mugs, looking as if they’d been there for a while. Timmy Green—who was actually not green, but black, and a third-generation islander—raised his hand at me and got up from the table.

“You hear about the shoot-out at the docks in James Harbor, Cordelia?” He handed me a copy of the
James Harbor Tide
so I could see the picture of a lobster boat and read the caption: “Meth Death Bloodbath.” He waited for me to look back up at him again and then said, “Petey told me his brother says that there’s some sort of a turf war going on.” Petey Dogger was like most of us who’d been on the island for any length of time: part of a family of international mongrels. His sister was a dental hygienist in Lubec, Maine, his brother a cop in Yarmouth, on the tip of Nova Scotia, and Petey had stayed on Loosewood Island, which some years was part of the USA and some years Canada, and most years was just tangled up in the bureaucracy of two countries who disagreed about where exactly the border ran. The border dispute’s been going on as long as Loosewood Island’s had people on it: before the U.S. and Canada
were
the U.S. and Canada, it was France and Britain fighting over possession of the island. Today, despite the USA’s official position that they don’t recognize dual citizenship, both countries claim us as citizens. We’re supposed to file taxes in both the USA and Canada. Of course, in the confusion, there are more than a handful of islanders who haven’t bothered to pay either country. Loosewood Island is a kind of borderland, a no-man’s-land.

“Sure it wasn’t one of Brumfitt’s monsters come to life, going after the James Harbor boys for being such pricks?”

Timmy smiled at me and it made me blush hot for a minute, thinking about the way he used to smile at me. We’d had a thing for a year or two, when I’d first come back to the island after college, but despite being good together in bed and even on the water, we couldn’t hack it in the same house. When the season wasn’t going on we’d get to picking on each other so fierce. One time I hit him in the head with a coffee mug. He hadn’t been hurt, but we took it as a sign that we’d be better off if we weren’t an item any longer. He moved on quick enough, marrying a Japanese tourist who’d rented a house on the island for a summer and never left—Etsuko does translation work—and Timmy and I had become close friends again since the wedding. Still, every once and a while he looked at me with that sharp smile and I’d think of the last time we had sex: he’d grinned at me and said, “For old times’ sake, huh?”

For a while, I’d been in love with him. Or, if not in love with him, in lust with him. His boat, the
Green Machine
, wasn’t anything special as far as lobster boats go, but Timmy knew how to keep his boat tight and clean, and that was as good a description of Timmy himself as anything. He wasn’t tall, but he was solid in the way that you can’t get from lifting weights, that you can only get from spending your life working; when he’d reach out and hook me around the waist and kiss me on the neck, just under my ear, it made my legs feel like they weren’t used to the buck and bounce of a boat. Maybe Timmy and I weren’t cut out to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but we loved each other in that weird sort of way that broken couples can be great together when the music stops, and I was genuinely happy for him. Plus, Etsuko and I, in some roundabout manner that I wouldn’t have expected, had become friends. They’d already asked me to be the godmother for the baby they were expecting in the fall.

Timmy lowered his voice, though the coffee shop was empty other than him and the other boys, all of whom seemed caught
up in their own discussion arguing the merits of engine power versus gas efficiency and noise. My motor on the
Kings’ Ransom
was old as dirt, but I’d had it overhauled two years ago. I’d ended up having to have half of the motor rebuilt, and I wasn’t interested in something new, so I tuned them out. “Nah,” Timmy said, “none of Brumfitt’s monsters. Just meth. But I don’t know. From what Petey’s brother”—the cop—“says, meth is going to be a bigger problem for the island than anything that Brumfitt ever came up with. There’s a whole mess of men and women there who are cooking it up, running it over the border, trying to turn it into a real business. It was bad enough when it was just those morons taking it recreationally.” He shrugged. “I guess it gives you energy. No big deal to pull traps all day and all night if you’re tweaking, and I guess I didn’t think about it that much when it was just James Harbor. I mean, how much worse can that shithole be, even with a meth problem? But Petey’s brother says that it’s spreading. Says it’s a real cancer, and wanted to be sure to give us the heads-up, particularly if James Harbor boys are trying to move into our waters.”