The Lobster Kings (23 page)

D
espite my fling with Otto, the summer seemed to drag forever. It felt like all I did was wait: for Carly and Stephanie to move to Loosewood Island, for the fishing season to start again. Finally, the day before the season started, in mid-August, we moved Carly and Stephanie onto the island. I’d volunteered to give them my house and move into one of Daddy’s smaller rentals—it made the most sense, but it was also a peace offering—but it meant I was going to have to move in with Daddy through mid-September, when the rental house opened up. Moving me was easy, since the rental was furnished, but Stephanie and Carly were a different matter.

Daddy, Tucker, and I drove down to Portland to help them pack up and drive the rental truck, and it turned out that they had a lot more stuff than you would have expected in a one-bedroom apartment.

“I’ve heard of people with baggage,” I muttered, “but this is ridiculous.”

Carly didn’t smile. “Some people have more baggage than others, Cordelia.”

I didn’t bother responding. My baggage didn’t need to be carried down three flights of stairs.

Even with Daddy, Tucker, and I leaving Loosewood Island before dawn—which is early, in August—we weren’t back to the docks on the mainland and loading up the
Queen Jane
and the
Kings’ Ransom
until late afternoon. By the time we hit the island and were down to the last dozen or so boxes, I was beat. I skipped over a large box and then another one that had
BOOKS
written on it, and grabbed a small box marked for the bedroom. Carrying it into what used to be my bedroom, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, and I didn’t see that Trudy had spread herself out across the doorway.

I didn’t fall that hard—it was more of an awkward stumble—but I landed partially on the box and the side split open. I got up on my knees and started stuffing the contents back in, a few shirts, a bathrobe, a scarf, and then I saw the necklace. It had been tucked inside a delicate wooden box, and when I’d fallen, the lid of the box must have slid open. There were only a few pearls of the necklace showing. I reached out to touch it, but then I hesitated.

I stood up and carried the box into the bathroom, putting it down on the counter, and then reached in and touched my fingers to the pearls. They were cool. I pinched them and then gently, very gently, pulled them out of the wooden box that they had been wrapped inside, and held them in the light. The necklace pooled in my hands. There was no question to me: this was Momma’s necklace.

I looked in the mirror while I put the strand of pearls around my neck. I could feel my fingers fumbling—I thought of how nice it would be to have Momma still alive, to have her fasten it for me—and then it was on. I touched it, trying to remember exactly how Momma’s fingers looked when she touched the necklace.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t jump, despite being surprised, and I didn’t turn to look
at Carly. I could see her well enough in the reflection. “You’ve had it the whole time?”

“What are you doing in my stuff?”

For a second I thought about explaining how I’d tripped, how I hadn’t been snooping, but I was too angry to bother. “I thought it was gone. You took Momma’s necklace. You just took it?”

I could see Carly weighing it, trying to decide what to say. “I didn’t mean to. I just, you know, clearly your place was out on the boat with Daddy, and Rena and I were home with Momma, and I wanted …” She couldn’t look at me. “I wanted something for myself. It was on her dresser. She wasn’t wearing it when she …”

“Fuck you, Carly. Okay? Fuck you.” I started to walk past her but she grabbed my arm.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like, Carly? I’m taking it.” I grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand off my arm.

She looked pale, like she was going to be sick. “You can’t just take it.” She started to reach out again, but then she let her arm fall to her side. “Please,” she said. “You’ve already got Daddy. What more do you want? Let me have it. It’s mine.”

I touched it again, and the thought of giving it back to her filled me with a kind of fury. “It was never your necklace, and it was never even Momma’s.”

“Don’t tell me you believe that story of Daddy’s?” She straightened up and actually gave a rough laugh. “That
this
is the necklace Brumfitt’s wife was wearing when she was delivered from the ocean? Please don’t tell me you believe that. What, the necklace doesn’t belong to me because it belongs to the Kings?”

I pushed the rest of the way past her. “Welcome home,” I said, tossing the words over my shoulder, but I didn’t have the last say.

“If you believe that, Cordelia, then you better remember that there’s a price for being a Kings,” Carly said.

B
y the time I got back to the house I’d already taken the necklace off. There was a part of me that felt terrible, and I knew that I should take it back and give it to her, but I couldn’t. Not yet. The pearls were cool and smooth in my fingers, and they made me realize how much I missed Momma; there wasn’t that much that she had left behind. And it wasn’t as if Daddy or I knew that the necklace still existed and had decided to give it to Carly in the first place. She had just taken the necklace on her own. I thought about bringing the necklace to Daddy, but in the end I hid it in one of my drawers and then took a shower.

I cleaned up and had a bite to eat and then it was time for the co-op meeting. We always held them the night before a new season started, and we always held them at the Grumman Fish House, partly because the co-op offices weren’t big enough, and partly because the Grumman Fish House had beer. Mostly the latter.

Daddy waited until we’d all had a couple of drinks and the official business was finished before he brought it up. He came right out and said it. “So you probably all know, Carly’s back on the island.” He said it loud and in a break in the chatter, and
everybody piped down. “And you probably all know that she’s brought a girlfriend.”

Timmy gave me a grin and I could see the Warner brothers, who were only in their second season of running their own boat, roll their eyes the way they did anytime they thought the old men were talking like old men. They’d had the same reaction when their dad spent most of January thinking aloud about getting “one of those computers” so that he could send “electronic mail.” I wasn’t worried about them, or any of the younger boys. Besides, Chip and Tony owed me after what had happened with Eddie Glouster, and I figured they knew what I’d do if they raised my hackles. No, it was different when you hopped generations from ours to Daddy’s: it was people like George Sweeney and Mr. Warner and those fellows that Daddy was talking to, and I waited to see how it was going to go.

“Shit, Woody,” George said, “I’ve known Carly since she was born, and it doesn’t matter if she’s dating a man or a woman, long as she’s happy.”

“As long as it’s not some bastard out of James Harbor,” Mr. Warner said, and at that everybody laughed a little harder.

Daddy shook his head. He had a small smile, but that came off his face as he raised his hand and spoke. “James. Fucking. Harbor.” The room came to complete quiet. “That’s what we need to talk about.”

“I say we just cut ’em out,” somebody called.

There were a few choruses in agreement, but Daddy held his hand up again. “No. You know as well as I do how that works,” he said. “We cut a few of their traps, they cut a few of ours. The James Harbor fellows who are fishing out here are running a different season than we are, and they’re running big rigs, at the limit or close to it, seven, eight hundred traps. They lose five or ten traps, it’s going to seem a lot less personal than if we lose five or ten. We go to war, we go to war, but let’s not hasten things.”

We were smaller than they were, and had many fewer traps. We didn’t want to get into a trap-cutting war with the James
Harbor gangs if we didn’t have to, but I wasn’t sure I agreed with Daddy that it was something we could avoid this time.

Daddy finished his beer and made the rounds. By eight o’clock he was ready to take off, and I walked with him. It felt odd to be walking back home with him, to know that Carly and Stephanie were setting up house in what I still thought of as my house, but it gave me a chance to talk to Daddy without all of the other boys around.

“You seriously think we can avoid a cutting war?” I asked him as soon as we were outside the door of the Grumman Fish House.

I thought I caught him taking a glance at me, but it was hard to tell, and besides, I was sort of knocked over by what he said: “I went to see that cunt, Al Burns.”

“What?” I stopped walking, and Daddy took a few more steps before he stopped, too, and turned to wait for me. “When? By yourself?”

“Yes, Cordelia. By myself. I’m not going to whack him with a hammer every time I see him. And it was in the spring, when we first started having problems. We talked civilized, and Al promised to reel his boys in, keep them out of our waters before any warps got cut. They might have a lot more traps than us, but nobody wants to get into that kind of business.”

He fidgeted, and I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to start walking again. “All right,” I said. “I can live with you going to see Al Burns.”

“I wasn’t looking for your approval on that, oh daughter of mine.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sensing a ‘but’ that you haven’t said yet.”

Daddy sighed. “You’re too smart sometimes. Anybody ever tell you that?”

“You have.”

“But,” he said, “the problem is Al. He didn’t look too good, and I got the impression that he wasn’t going to be able to hold those younger boys together. They’ve got a wild crew up there, and there’s been a bunch of boys who’ve gone into lobstering in
the last couple of years, but not that many retiring. They’re pushing out of their boundaries. Everybody’s fishing the maximum, and they’re right on top of each other. Seems like some of them might be doing more than just running lobster traps, too.”

“Meth,” I said.

“Yep,” Daddy said.

“Good money in it. A lot more dangerous than pot, though, so I don’t know why you wouldn’t just stick to that. A day running a load of pot over the border can make you the same as three months of hard fishing.” Daddy gave me a hard look, holding it long enough that I realized he actually thought I might be running drugs. “Oh, for god’s sake, Daddy, don’t be daft,” I said. “If I needed money, I’d come to you.”

He kept the hard look for another second and then reached out and ruffled my hair. “Sorry, kiddo. You’ll never not be my daughter.” He turned, and we started walking again. “Yeah, the money’s good in drugs, but it’s not good news for us. James Harbor’s pushing their limits for fishing, and it’s an easy choice for them: try to take some of our waters or go after Northport.”

He had a point to that, I thought. Northport had been hit hard by meth and coke and nobody wanted to go messing there. Northport was bigger than Loosewood Island and James Harbor put together, and despite once being a good town—unlike James Harbor, which had always been run-down—Northport had fallen hard and fast. When I was a girl, it was a treat to go there. But now? There were pockets of Northport that I wouldn’t go to anymore, even in the middle of the day. Lobstering was down, but gunplay was up. The one serious drug problem we’d had on Loosewood Island so far—Eddie Glouster—had been solved by a little arson, but I didn’t think that it was going to be that easy to run off other drug dealers if they set up shop in our waters. Just running pot from north to south had enough money in it that people were willing to kill over it, and I figured if the Northport boys were running coke and meth, there was even more at stake than with pot. It was simple. Pot’s bulkier than either meth or
coke, so a boy running a boat full of cocaine or meth over the border could make a lot more money than pot. In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

We passed a tourist couple who were in their late sixties. They were clearly Brumfitt tourists, and Daddy nodded in greeting as we walked by. “Lubec doesn’t make a lot of sense. They’ve got more area because they’ve got more boats working, ten for every one of ours. No drug scene, or at least not as bad as what Northport has, but if James Harbor tried to step in there, they’d be outnumbered.” He sighed and we turned off the path toward the house. “Sadly, we’re the easy choice. What would you do? Pick a fight with Northport, which is already bursting at the seams and has some serious muscle invested in moving drugs, go at Lubec and know you’re outnumbered, or see what might happen with us?” He held out his hand and started ticking it off: “Limited traps, big area of water, good lobster stock, and barely thirty boats running off an island with a population of less than two thousand.”