The Lobster Kings (35 page)

They’d wrapped Daddy up in a blanket like a baby. Even when I’d lip-hooked him when I was a kid, even when he’d had the flu, even in the days leading up to his trip to the loony bin when I was a teenager, he’d never looked like this—like a man who would die someday, and I was afraid that day was today. In the yellow of the dock lights and the cover of rain, his face was pale enough that until he opened his eyes and looked at me, I was sure that he already was dead. His face sagged toward starboard, his left arm slipped loose from the blanket and flopping limply at his side. It wasn’t until the men tried to get him belowdecks that he showed some fire, his right arm shooting from the blanket and grabbing
at a handle, the words, “No, no, no,” coming out like a moan. They settled him on the deck of the cabin, near my feet. His head was resting on a life preserver, and Carly sat on the deck, her legs turned sideways and behind her, her hand grabbing the wrist of his limp arm and folding it onto his chest.

I turned to the men who were standing on the deck, looking at Daddy as if there were still something else to do. “Get the hell off my boat,” I yelled. I didn’t even see their faces, but they scrambled off the boat, taking the rail in stride, leaving me and my sisters with Kenny, Stephanie, and Tucker. “You all coming?” I said, and when they nodded, I called for George, standing on the dock, to let me loose.

Kenny stood by my side, his back braced against the console. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. I knew that the lights from the dock would disappear in the rain. There was only darkness behind us, darkness ahead of us. The boat caught a wave and slammed hard against the water.

“Watch it,” Rena shouted.

“Fast or smooth,” I said back, trying to keep my tone calm despite having to yell for her to hear me above the storm and the motor. “I can only do one in this kind of weather.”

The lights of the
Kings’ Ransom
came bouncing back against the rain, and I killed the spots, just leaving the running lights on, in the one-in-a-million chance that there was somebody else out on the seas with us. The rain hammered the glass of the windshield, burrowed around the edges of the cabin, misted and came after us like it was alive, like it was a cloud of mosquitoes. I glanced back and saw Tucker huddled out on the deck of the boat, unable to fit in the cabin, bent over and trying to disappear inside his slickers. Mackie was warm and dry right now, in Rena’s house, getting Fatty and Guppy into bed, but I knew that Tucker wouldn’t have done well staying behind. It was better to be here than to be sitting uselessly at home, waiting for some word. He was Rena’s husband, he’d been Daddy’s sternman, and I knew he cared for him like a father.

The wheel shook in my hands. I wasn’t steering the boat, I was wrestling it. The
Kings’ Ransom
beat its way across the ocean, crashing through and on the waves, bouncing and smashing. The waves were tall, the kind of sea that I would never have wanted to be out in, but it was manageable, I thought. I could feel us moving. Her engine might have been old, but the overhaul had put some extra horsepower in the
Kings’ Ransom
. This, I thought, was what it must feel like for a mortal to try to control Poseidon’s chariot, the hippocamps revolting at the feel of someone other than their master at the helm. And it did feel like we were galloping, like I had my own team of sea horses pulling the
Kings’ Ransom
. Despite Daddy lying pale at my feet, occasionally flickering open his eyes, despite the wind and the rain and the lighting dropping from the sky, I felt a sudden surge of hope: whatever magic there was in the ocean for the Kings, it was at our backs, urging us forward and on, taking us to the land. I was sure that this wasn’t how Daddy was going to die: we were going to get him to the hospital, and whatever it was that had kicked him down, a stroke, a heart attack, we’d beat it. We’d get him rested up, get him back on the water soon enough. Come the spring, Daddy would be out on the
Queen Jane
, bringing home a highliner’s catch of lobster, suffering no incursions upon our waters by James Harbor boys. Come the spring, he’d be standing on the dock in the sun, browning up his skin in the first warmth that followed the winter.

Fifteen more minutes to Blacks Harbour. That’s all I needed. Fifteen more minutes and we’d be hitting shore, pulling up to the docks. I couldn’t wait for the sight of those cherried lights flashing in the parking lot. Fifteen minutes. Like Daddy always said, both the history and the future of the Kings family could be found in Brumfitt’s paintings if I only looked in the right place. Surely if I looked hard enough I’d find those fifteen minutes hidden somewhere among the rocks and the waves, the seals and the selkies, fifteen minutes hidden among the dragons and the birds and the fish and the lobsters and the boats upon the water.

Rena was sitting next to Daddy’s head. I could see her lips
moving, see Daddy opening his eyes here and there to look at her. She was stroking his hair and making sure the blanket stayed wrapped around him. Water misted on the fabric, and I hoped it wasn’t soaking through. I didn’t know if it mattered much if we kept him warm, but I couldn’t see any upside to getting him frozen. From the floor, Carly staggered to her feet and pushed past Stephanie and then me, and barely made it out of the cabin before vomiting on the deck. Tucker pulled himself out of his shell and grabbed her by the shoulders, tried to aim her toward the rail, but the ride was too rough for him to do more than steady her. She stumbled forward, and Tucker fell over, hitting hard on his side before struggling back to his feet against the bucking of the ship. Kenny was looking like he was thinking of joining Carly in being sick out on the deck, but Stephanie was standing strong. She’d gotten her sea legs. To me, she looked like she belonged here out on the water, more than my baby sister did; there’d be some teasing coming Carly’s way after all of this played out.

Even using the instruments, there was a part of me that was driving by feel. Despite wanting to do nothing more than drop to my knees and cradle Daddy’s head in my hands, I tried to keep my eyes forward, at the ocean in front of me. The lightning came in strobes, the waves here and then disappearing. It seemed like the thunder never stopped rolling around us, like we were a part of the storm. Then light filled everything, burning out my eyes, and the thunder was like a gunshot. The darkness came back in spots, eating through the white of the lightning. It took me a moment to realize, through the ringing in my ears, that there was a missing sound: the motor was quiet.

The lightning strike had fried the instrument panel. The running lights had gone black. I tried firing up the motor, but there was nothing. For a few seconds the
Kings’ Ransom
kept moving, and I had the fantasy that I’d been right, that I’d been driving Poseidon’s chariot, that there was some magic of Brumfitt’s in the ocean pushing us forward, but I was wrong. It was just our momentum, and with the motor cut out, it disappeared quickly
and we started to get batted sideways. The pitch and roll sent Rena off her ass, made Daddy slide on the floor. Kenny was rooting in one of the lockers, pulling out my toolbox. In between the lightning that still carried across the sky, there was some sort of dancing orange light that spilled off the roof of the cabin. Not light, I realized. Flames.

“Fire!” I yelled, and I grabbed the fire extinguisher I kept clamped under the console, knocking hard past Carly, who was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and coming back under the protection of the cabin.

Tucker had already seen it, and he’d grabbed a bucket and was leaning over the rail to fill it. With the motor dead, we’d turned completely broadside to the waves. His side of the boat was tilted up out of the water, the starboard side pushed down so that I had to lean at a hard angle. The fire on the roof from the lighting strike was small still, but it had a ferocity that made me think that, rain or not, it wouldn’t go out on its own. I pulled the pin from the fire extinguisher and set my feet, and that’s when the wave washed over us.

It happens all the time in rough weather. The best analogy I can think of is two people dancing. One partner is the boat, the other is the waves, and together they keep the beat, but sometimes the boat misses the beat, holds it too long, or the wave is dancing with too much energy and comes in high and fast. When a boat is rolled up high on one side, like the
Kings’ Ransom
was, just as an outsized wave comes, the water will break over the deck, sweeping across just as the boat rolls back the other way. It’s not the sort of thing that will normally sink a boat, not a wall of water thirteen stories high like they’d have you believe from the movies. You don’t need a rogue wave. The amount of water that swept across the deck didn’t seem like that much—it was only calf-high—but the force it brought with it, combined with having the
Kings’ Ransom
rolling back to port, was like being hit with a sledgehammer.

My feet swept out from me and I smashed into the deck. I felt something hard strike me in the mouth—the fire extinguisher,
I realized, torn from my hands—and a tooth turned jagged and sliced into my lip. The water came through Kenny’s jacket, soaking me, and flung me spinning across the deck. I hit knees then elbows into the side, a sharp flare of pain from my wrist, my head banging against something hard and unforgiving. As I struggled to sit up I had to stop to throw up. I don’t think I lost consciousness, but when I wiped the puke from my mouth and the water out of my eyes I saw both Carly and Rena getting on their knees, straightening Daddy out, and pulling him away from the wall. Stephanie was on her ass, pulling herself to her feet on the captain’s chair. Kenny seemed to have kept his balance, and was trying to get the motor to start. On top of the cabin, the flames had died, but there was still a smouldering, greasy smoke that needed to be killed completely. The wave had either caught the fire or Tucker had gotten there with his bucket.

Tucker.

Tucker was gone.

I
t’s not a painting that people talk about. Like every famous painter, Brumfitt has a half dozen or so works that are considered iconic, pieces that people who aren’t into art will still recognize. But even for people who love Brumfitt’s work, it’s not a painting that garners much attention. It’s from the middle part of his life, and it looks, uncharacteristically for Brumfitt, as if it were rushed. I’d go so far as to say that he never bothered finishing it, and technically, it’s unimpressive. Even somebody who is a hack like me could paint it. There’s not much to the scene: a calm sea with an empty fishing boat floating on the water. There is nothing magical about it, and yet, I’d argue that for most fishermen it would rank as one of Brumfitt’s most terrifying paintings. He doesn’t need any monsters to make the painting terrifying; it’s enough to have a calm sea, an empty boat, and a single word on the back of the canvas, the title of the painting:
Gone
.

I
started trying to pull myself up. At first I couldn’t even hold on to the rail. I was dizzy, and my left hand didn’t seem to be working. Even once I got a grip, it took me three tries to get to my feet. When I finally did stand up, I wasn’t sure if it was the pitch and the yaw of the boat or getting my head and my face smashed that made me stumble my way to the cabin wall. I was coughing on vomit and blood, and when I tried to wipe the water that was streaming over my left eye, it came back sticky red. My left wrist felt like it had been crushed in a vise, and I wondered if it was broken. With my good hand, I grabbed the life ring from the wall.

“Man overboard!” I yelled. The words came out of my mouth jumbled by blood, and Rena and Carly didn’t look up from where they were tending to Daddy. Stephanie looked at me, but even with the ring in my hand, she didn’t seem to comprehend. It was Kenny who stared at me, saw what I was holding, and started hollering.

I threw the ring over the port side, flinging it as far as I could into the darkness, praying that, if I had it anywhere near Tucker, I wouldn’t have the kind of asshole luck to nail him in the head
and knock him out. Kenny dropped a handful of life preservers at my feet, and ran back to the cabin. There were a couple more below, I knew. At least four of those old-fashioned squares that really just served as cushions, maybe a dozen lobster buoys that could be split into two or three groups and would serve to help keep Tucker afloat. Stephanie had my handheld spotlight and was playing it across the water, sweeping it back and forth. I picked up one of the life preservers that Kenny had dropped at my feet and was about to pitch it into the water when Rena grabbed my left wrist.