The Lobster Kings (27 page)

“Eddie Glouster?”

“And one of his friends. Ozzy or something like that.”

“Oswald,” I said. “Isn’t Eddie supposed to be in jail?” Petey Dogger’s brother had busted Eddie for trying to sell meth in James Harbor only a couple of days after we’d burned Eddie’s house down. Was he out already?

“Obviously, Eddie is not in jail. But it might not be too long before he’s back again. I did some asking around, and it sounds like Eddie is trying to move up from selling dime bags. Wants to be an operator.”

I couldn’t stop myself from snickering. “Dime bags?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Cordelia.”

“Oh, Jesus, Daddy, come on.”

“But you can see why I tried to keep this quiet. Word gets out that one of the Warner boys got jumped in James Harbor, and nobody’s going to be asking if maybe he had it coming.” I started to speak but Daddy held up his hand. “I’m not saying Eddie is on the side of the angels, or that I think you all did the wrong thing running him out, even if I didn’t like the way you went about it, but it’s sort of understandable that Eddie might want to put a beating on the Warner boy. But the Warner boys are tough, and even if Eddie had a buddy, it didn’t work out too bad. Just a chipped tooth and a few bruises that could be covered up. When he got back to Loosewood Island he came straight to his father instead of spreading the news. Anyway, Mr. Warner and I talked it over and brought George in. We figured, let’s see if we can stop word of this spreading, try to keep things from getting out of control. But then there’s today, with Georgie, so yeah, I’m trying to keep things tamped down.”

“That speech of yours tonight is your idea of keeping things tamped down?” I gave him a smile to show that I was just teasing. “I’d hate to see what it was like if you were trying to start a fire.”

“Truth is, Cordelia, we actually got lucky. Eddie or his buddy could have had a knife or a gun on them last week. George could have been blinded or worse.” He paused for a moment and looked
up at the sky. There were no clouds, and I looked up, too, taking the chance to remind myself that the sky wasn’t like this everywhere, that not everybody got to see the sheer depth of stars that swam through the night. “I think there’s already a fire,” Daddy said. “All we can do is try to keep it under control. It’s kind of like a controlled burn, you might say. You heard me talking down some of the younger fellows who wanted to head to James Harbor tonight—”

“Jessie and Matty? Don’t take them too seriously, Daddy. They’re sternmen. They don’t even have boats of their own. What are they going to do, swim over to James Harbor?”

“If it was only them I wouldn’t have been worried, honey, but I already talked about it with George and Harly and Paul.” I wasn’t surprised that he’d talked to George and Harly—Timmy’s father—but I hadn’t expected that Paul Paragopolis would be part of the conversation. Paul did a swell job with the co-op, but he wasn’t a lobsterman. Wasn’t a fisherman of any kind. “Thing is, there’ve already been a couple of other things that have spilled over. You know the Tulip boys?”

He paused and glanced at me, and I realized that he wasn’t sure if I knew Frank and Dave Tulip or not. Even on an island as small as Loosewood, it was a fair enough question. There were two thousand of us, and the Tulip boys were young enough that I wasn’t friends with them, but old enough that they weren’t the children of people I was friends with. They didn’t fish, either. Their dad was out of the picture, down in Massachusetts or New Hampshire or something working as a welder. In tourist season, they worked at the hotel, like their mother did, and they spent the off-season mostly drinking and getting into the occasional fight. They weren’t long for the island, I figured. Most of the girls their age had already matched up with a boy who had better long-term prospects or had spent enough time with the Tulip boys that they knew they could do better. I didn’t know either Frank or Dave that well, but I knew them enough. I actually thought they were
okay, the kind of boys who could have turned out better in different circumstances.

“I know that they have too much time on their hands,” I said.

“Well, this afternoon, they went over to James Harbor and jumped the first lobsterman they came across. Young kid. Twenty, twenty-one. Put him in the hospital. Broke his arm and kicked out a couple of teeth.”

This actually made me stop walking again. I slipped my hand out from Daddy’s arm. He took another two or three steps and then turned to look at me. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He shifted, and his boots crunched against the crushed shells underfoot, a sound that bothered some people but always seemed familiar to me.

“You going to keep stopping every time something comes out of my mouth?”

I sighed and started walking again. “How come I haven’t heard about this, either?”

“You’re hearing it now. And not everything gets run by you, Cordelia.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. “The boy they jumped never saw them, didn’t know them, didn’t even know it was somebody from outside James Harbor. Good thing, too. That’s the sort of thing that escalates. The Tulip twins went looking for trouble and they found it, and you know how things are. If they go around bragging about it, word would make its way back to James Harbor soon enough that it was an island boy who’d put one of their boys in the hospital, no matter that Chip or Tony or whichever one it was got himself beat up last week.”

“What about Al Burns, does he—”

“Al’s old, honey. He’s old, and he tried, but there’s a new group of boys out of James Harbor. He’s not the only one, Cordelia. I’m getting old, too.” He put his hand out like he was ready to interrupt me, but I hadn’t started speaking. “I’m getting to the age when things start going wrong, old enough that the beer I just finished back at the Fish House means I’m going to have to
get up two, three times tonight to go to the head. How’s that for making me feel like an old man, having to piss all the time? And there will come a day where I’m pissing myself. Things move on. There was a time when I just would have taken care of things, but all I can do now is try to nudge it best I can.”

“Yeah, but—”

“There’s no ‘but,’ here, Cordelia. I thought we could keep a lid on things, handle this easy, but after what happened last week with the Warner boy, after this morning, after George nearly gets blinded, after the Tulip twins’ stunt this afternoon, it’s clear that things are going to come to push and shove.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The only question is whether or not it’s a couple of drunk kids doing something stupid, or if we can keep it about business, keep it about lobster traps and this being our land, our waters. We’re trying to keep a lid on things best we can.”

I tried to figure out how to say what I wanted to, which was that he may have talked it over with George and Harly and Paul Paragopolis, but why didn’t he think to talk it over with me? I had the words ready to come out, but then he stopped walking. He was breathing heavily and he pulled his hand out of his pocket and put it on his stomach.

“Daddy?”

“I’m okay, Cordelia.” He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. “Little out of breath.”

“Your chest?”

“I’m not having a heart attack. Just a lot going on right now, and I don’t care to share everything all the time. The doctor’s got me on so many pills that I can’t hardly keep track of them.”

“You said it was just fibre pills.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “I say a lot of things, Cordelia. I’m fine, and you and your sisters don’t need to know all of my business.”

“Are you taking your medicine like you’re supposed to?”

“You hear me? I’m just fine, Cordelia. I’ve survived losing a
son and a wife and raising you three girls the rest of the way. I know what I’m doing.”

He turned back toward the house and waited a beat for me to catch up with him and put my hand in the crook of his arm again.

“I sure hope so,” I said.

“And I hope that
you
know what you’re doing, Cordelia.”

“What do you mean?”

We turned the corner around the outside of the old Community Boat House, and I could see the lights up on the hill, the silhouette of Daddy’s house—of my house for the next couple of weeks.

“I mean with Kenny. I hope you know what you’re doing with him. You’ve got a good thing going with him as your sternman, and I know that he’s at loose ends now that Sally’s gone, but I don’t want to see you get your heart broken. You might want to give him time to settle down.”

“How …”

“You think I only worry about what’s going on with you when you’re out on the
Kings’ Ransom
? Just because you’re past thirty doesn’t mean I’m not always going to be watching over you.” His voice was warm, even if his words brought me to task, and he didn’t say anything else.

We walked in silence the last few minutes to the house, parted quietly, and went to sleep, but I wanted to ask him if he would have loved me as much if I didn’t work the water. I wanted to fall into his arms, and to tell him that I had no idea what I was doing with Kenny, but that it was too late.

B
y the week after Labour Day, things had settled into a pattern. Carly and I hadn’t hashed out what to do about the necklace—which was still tucked away in the back of my underwear drawer—but things between us had simmered down. She no longer looked like she wanted to claw my eyes out when she saw me, and I was kind of hoping we just wouldn’t talk about it. As for Stephanie, she seemed to have gotten the hang of being Daddy’s sternman. She’d had a few rough days, Carly said, coming home too tired to get undressed on her own. A couple of gaffes, too, forgetting to rebait traps so that they went back into the water empty, not banding some of the lobsters’ claws so that they tore each other apart in the holding tank, simple things that I take for granted after a lifetime on the water and five years of working with a sternman like Kenny. She even accidently threw one trap—baited and weighted—into the water without a buoy on it, and watched it sink beneath the water without a trace, like Scotty had done two decades ago. But despite the difficulty of her first days, she’d gotten to the point where she seemed to have a handle on things. All things considered, I was happy for her. I was honestly a bit surprised that I didn’t feel jealous that she was on
the
Queen Jane
, but maybe it was because it was Carly’s girlfriend instead of Carly herself. And if Stephanie wasn’t a natural, she was a quick learner. Daddy, who never believed in building somebody up just for the sake of building them up, said that Stephanie was ready to start earning a share, that she was contributing more than she was slowing him down. He also said that she was solid enough that I could take her on for a couple of days while he went to Saint John to see the doctor. Stephanie could be an extra crewman to help manage both my and his lines.

The day after Labour Day—or Labor Day for islanders who were feeling American that week—Daddy told me that I’d be waiting
another
two weeks before I could take over the rental house as my own, since the New York City couple renting it had decided to stay on a little longer. “Didn’t figure you’d mind much, Cordelia,” he said. “They’re a nice couple of fellows and I’ll put the extra rent money into whatever new furniture you want, to make the place the way you’d like it.”

Out on the
Kings’ Ransom
, Kenny and I had more or less fallen into our old routines in the way we moved in rhythm, keeping the talk going, all the while pulling traps, baiting, measuring, banding, dropping, motoring, and working the waters. The difference was that with Sally out of the picture, at least to me, when we flirted there wasn’t the same sense of there being a line we couldn’t cross.

So it was into that second week in September that Daddy said that he was taking off with George for a couple of days. Daddy was due for a checkup with the doctor he’d seen in the spring after his fainting spell, and George had a follow-up for his face scheduled the next day. He still had some raw marks on the skin, but even with things looking good, Mackie insisted that George keep the appointment. I don’t think George fought too hard. He and Daddy seemed to be taking it as an opportunity for a break. They planned, as George put it, “on drinking a lot of beer. A real bachelor’s holiday.”

George’s sternman, Matty, was going to get put on Tucker’s
boat with Colin O’Connor, and Stephanie would be going out with Kenny and me until George and Daddy got back. I knew better than to try and weasel out of it, but I made a face when he said I was inheriting Stephanie in the meantime.

“She’s gotten to the point where she knows what she’s doing,” he said. We were eating dinner, a simple pasta that Daddy had made, and I didn’t say anything, just raised an eyebrow suspiciously. He laughed and speared his fork into the pasta. It was just vegetables sautéed in garlic and olive oil, sprinkled liberally with pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes. We’d been making him eat less meat and saturated fats, and recently he’d discovered sun-dried tomatoes. “Well, she knows what she’s doing enough that she’s mostly not in the way anymore,” Daddy said. “Besides, I’ll only be gone for two days this time. Come on. Are you telling me that you don’t want me to see what the doctor has to say?”