The Lobster Kings (26 page)

George looked peeved to be interrupted. “Does it matter now, Matty? Does it matter if we had fifty traps or only forty traps loaded up? What difference does ten traps make?”

“You’d know if you were the one wrestling the traps instead of just spinning a wheel all day.” Matty got a good laugh from us at this, and even George grinned. It looked weird to see his familiar smile below the layers of bandages, the top half of his face belonging to the Invisible Man and the bottom half—scabs aside—belonging to the man I’d known all my life. “But I’ll tell you what, George, since you got shot in the face and all, if you want it to be fifty traps instead of forty, then fifty traps it is,” Matt said. “Hell, let’s make it sixty.”

“Ah, you’re a good sternman, Matt, and I’ll tell you, with these bandages over my eyes, you even seem like a handsome man.” Everyone laughed, and George seemed pleased. “Point is,” George continued, “we was piled up with traps and steaming out to drop them. Figured I’d be out and then back in again quick enough to get the last of the traps wet before lunch. I’d even promised Matt that I’d buy him a sub at the Sandwich Shoppe.”

“I’m holding you to that, George,” Matt called.

“But as I come up to my grounds …” He trailed off and touched the bandages near his temple. Early season and he’d be setting his traps off near Seal Coat Cove—his boat and the bobbing buoys making a pretty view for tourists taking the Brumfitt walk—and then east of there, grounds that, like his fishing knowledge, had been passed down for generations. The law, of course, didn’t officially recognize territory like that, but for the
lobstermen, for all of us on Loosewood Island, our grounds might as well have been mapped to the inch. Sometimes one or another of us set traps too near somebody else’s fishing ground, but it was like cutting in to dance with another man’s wife: okay as long as you don’t do it too often, too close, or too long, and as long as you understand there’s going to be a time when the man cuts back in.

“So I come up to my grounds,” he said, starting himself up again, “and I’m there, and it’s one of the most pleasing sights in the world. The cliff back behind the cove, the rock beach, the Whale’s Tail Rocks catching waves, the sun hitting the water all right, and the first fifty of my traps already in the water, the orange and the blue stripes just about saying my name.” He scratched at his bandage again and was quiet. I could hear the way that the entire bar waited for him. I wondered if they were thinking what I was thinking, which was that George was lucky that wasn’t the last time he ever saw Loosewood Island. George cleared his throat and took a sip from his beer. “And there were some other buoys out there with colours I didn’t recognize. Yellow with a triple ring of sky-blue and a band of green.”

“James fucking Harbor.” Tony Warner, across the room.

“James fucking Harbor,” George agreed. “And I figured we’d given them warning enough, so I gaffed it and cut the rope.”

“You all might remember,” Daddy said, “me standing here in this very spot and saying let’s not get in a cutting war? That sound familiar? It should, Georgie, because I said it last night.”

“Let’s let bygones be bygones, Woody,” George said, commanding his audience, “because the thing is, I cut the rope, and it felt good. So we moved on to the next buoy and then I cut that one off, too, and that felt so good that we moved on to the third one. And we did this for a while, but the problem is, Matty and I were so busy orphaning their traps that we didn’t happen to notice the boat creeping up our ass. Seems like they’d been just around the corner, so to speak, and they’d not taken kindly to watching me cut their traps.”

George took a breath and started to speak again and then
bit at his thumb. “Lucky, you know. Lucky they weren’t closer. Lucky I’d just sent Matty belowdecks. I turned and barely saw anything. Didn’t make out much other than that it was a boat I didn’t recognize and that there was a fellow pointing a shotgun at me. He was thirty metres, forty metres. Using bird shot, too, thank god. Doctor who cleaned me out was a hunter, said it looked like six-shot. Probably his dad’s old hunting shotgun, the sort of thing you take out for squirrels or rabbit. Might even have been meaning to put it over my head, but at that distance, using cheap-shit shells, the kind of open choke a gun like that would have, it’s just like spraying a hose.”

I saw George’s wife, Mackie, reach out and take one of George’s hands in hers. She looked like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to be angry or to start crying. I knew how she felt.

“George,” Daddy said. “Anything else?”

From across the room, Mr. Warner called out. “Who was it, Georgie?”

“I didn’t see shit. Don’t know if I’d even recognize him if I saw him again. All I can tell you is what I told you: buoys were yellow with a triple ring of sky-blue and a band of green, and I didn’t recognize the boat.” He hung his head down.

“Okay, there, George,” Daddy said. “So you’ve heard it from him, heard it from George. Looks like we’ve gotten into it, then.” Daddy was casual when he said it, but he was deliberate in his casualness. He wanted to make it clear that we were done just
talking
about the peckerwoods from James Harbor.

“Now, we all know what the law says about this,” Daddy said. I felt Rena touch my elbow.

“Fuck the law,” somebody yelled from the back, and there was a swell of support, but Daddy kept talking.

“The law says that the waters are open to those that get there first, and the law frowns upon cutting traps and letting George take a load of bird shot in the face. The law says that whomever it was that fired a gun at George ought to go to jail. The law says that you don’t get to take the law into your own hands.” Daddy
took a few steps away from the bar, into the centre of the room. He was holding a beer, the label peeled cleanly off, which was one of his habits, and the bottle hung loosely from his hand. The room was as quiet as a bar full of fishermen gets, and Daddy took a moment to look around the room, giving every man the feeling that they’d been seen. “But,” Daddy said, giving that single word some space, “there’s the law and then there’s our laws. You all know me, and you all know that I’ve been fishing Loosewood Island since I could walk, and that before me it was my daddy, and my daddy’s daddy, and back all the way to Brumfitt Kings. You know me, right? You know that I’ll do what needs to be done to take care of Loosewood Island.”

I couldn’t help but think of that day nearly half my lifetime ago, when we motored into James Harbor and Daddy brought his hammer into Al Burns’s office. “Daddy,” I said, because as I looked around the room, it was clear to me that I was the only one who was thinking of the consequences, of what happened after Daddy smashed Al Burns’s hand, of the months Daddy spent in the loony bin.

He glanced over at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I can look behind me at the generations of my family, and I can look next to me at Cordelia and see what’s coming. We do well by the island, but there isn’t space enough for the James Harbor boys to come along. Does anybody doubt that?”

It was an odd pause, and for a moment nobody seemed sure if it was a question or not, and then there was a half swell of “No” and grunts before Daddy nodded and then took a sip of his beer.

In the small murmur of voices, I leaned in toward him. “Daddy? Are you sure—”

“Don’t question me, Cordelia,” he said. “I’m still in charge of this family.” His voice was quiet enough that nobody else could have heard him, but there was no brooking it. He let go of my shoulder, banged his beer down on the bar, and raised his voice again. “There isn’t much to it, then, is there? We cut them out, we run them out, we fight them out. See a trap that isn’t
Loosewood Island and you cut it. See a boat that isn’t Loosewood Island and you get on the horn and call us up and everybody drops what they’re doing and hauls ass over so that we can run them out. Nobody confronts a boat on his own. Nobody plays a hero, because if we have to, we’ll fight them out, fist or gun, and we’ll do it together,” Daddy said, raising his beer up. “To Loosewood Island.”

And there was no hesitation there, no pause at all, just a room full of fishermen and their families, a wave of sound, a thrust of arms.

I
walked back to the house with Daddy. It took a while to get clear of the Fish House. The boys wanted to talk with Daddy, were running hot on the idea of forcing James Harbor out of our waters.

It was the kind of night that is rare on Loosewood Island, with the heat staying past the setting of the sun. I was wearing a smocked peasant dress that I’d ordered just before Kenny left the island and that arrived just after he’d fled, and I thought that it was as good a night as any to wear it. It was cut lower on the top than I usually wore and fit off the shoulder, but I looked good in it, the hemline high enough that my calves were out in the open. I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, less than Rena and less than Carly, but I have a good sense of what clothes flatter me. I’d even worn a pair of wedges so that my legs had a little extra shape, and I’d spent a few minutes with my hair, leaving it down instead of pulling it back in a ponytail. Rena hadn’t said anything when she saw me, just shook her head. Other than my week with Otto, I hadn’t put any serious effort into my looks since Kenny had disappeared, and Rena didn’t ask. But Kenny said something. He put
his arm around my waist and pulled me to him at the bar and said, “Glad to be back with the prettiest captain on the island.”

He’d showered—which wasn’t a given for the boys at the bar—and was wearing wrinkled khakis and a T-shirt with a band name on it. He was wearing some sort of cologne, or maybe it was his shampoo. It was barely enough for me to get a whiff of it when he leaned in and past me toward the bar to order a beer, and even then I couldn’t concentrate on it because as he was leaning in, he said, “That’s a pretty dress, Cordelia.” The din of the Grumman Fish House, with all of the boys and everybody else packed in to hear George’s story, was enough that he had to press his mouth up against my ear to say it, and when he spoke, I felt the words as a warm air that travelled down my body. But it was only a moment, because once the beer was in his hand, he turned back to his conversation with Petey.

Still, walking home with Daddy, I was glad I’d worn the dress. I wasn’t quite as thrilled with my shoe choice, and I’d taken them off, holding them by the straps in one hand, my other arm through Daddy’s arm. The air was warm. The slight dampness of the night settled on my skin. It wasn’t particularly late, but the island had gone mostly dark. We kept to one of the trails, and the crushed shells held a slight glow from the moon. With my bare feet on the crushed shells and the darkness of the night, even with the familiarity of the island, we walked slowly together.

“Everything all right between you and Carly?” he asked. “You two didn’t seem too warm toward each other tonight.”

“Getting used to living in the same place again,” I said, deciding that I didn’t want to bring up Momma’s necklace. I changed the subject. “Is George going to be okay, Daddy?”

“Well, I wouldn’t trust it if it was just coming from George’s mouth, but Mackie said so. Eyes tested fine, but the skin around them is nasty. The bandages are just for a couple of days. He’s lucky. A few pellets in the eye and there isn’t much you can do. It’s just a ball full of jelly.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing with James Harbor, Daddy,” I said.

“Me, too, darling.” He reached across and patted my hand where it rested in the crook of his arm. I thought for a moment about telling him how reassuring it was to hold his arm like this, how solid he was beside me, how lucky I was, but I didn’t want to get sidetracked.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to get the boys riled up like this instead of going to the cops? Somebody’s liable to get hurt.”

“Cordelia, I’m sorry I snapped at you back there when I was talking. There will be a time when you’re in charge of things, but it isn’t now.” He sighed. “But to answer your question, yes. Somebody is probably going to get hurt, but I’m hoping that what I did will stop somebody from getting killed. You hear about one of the Warner boys getting roughed up last week?” His entire life he’d known Mr. Warner, had watched Chip and Tony growing up, and he could still never seem to remember who was who.

“Seems like the sort of thing I should have heard about, but no, Daddy, I didn’t.”

He nodded. “That’s because I worked hard to keep it quiet. And, obviously, he wasn’t hurt too bad, or it wouldn’t have stayed a secret, but one of the Warner boys was in James Harbor, on a date, taking a girl to the movies, and he got jumped by a pair of James Harbor boys and took a beating.”

“He’s lucky all he got was a beating. Go out with a James Harbor girl and you’re likely to get syphilis.”

“Laugh it up, Cordelia, but want to take any guesses as to who it was who jumped him?”

“Well, if it was Chip, knowing him, he was probably taking out a girl who already had a boyfriend.”

“Eddie Glouster.”

The name made me stop walking. Daddy stopped, too, and then looked down at my bare feet. “I’ll never understand why you girls insist on wearing shoes like that. What’s wrong with a comfortable pair of boots?” He pulled his arm lightly, giving me a tug.