From Away Page 9

  Unable to check them, I was suddenly sure that there had to be messages. Vitally important messages. Anne must have called. Dozens of times. Weeping, probably. Begging forgiveness. Then calling again, angry at me for not calling back, for leaving her to stew in her agony. Then calling to tell me off and letting me know she was going back to Bill Zacharias, even though he was a nerdy pervert. And all that without my being able to lift a finger, without my even being aware.

  And who knew who else might have been calling? Hugh, offering me my own store. Publishers dying for my book. Barbara Steele finally agreeing to give me that interview. Ed McMahon telling me I’d won millions.

  I tried to imagine things so ridiculous that they’d turn the whole thing into a joke, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something marvelous was happening just out of sight and I was missing it.

  Then something marvelous did happen. Something so unusual that I can feel it now, while I write this. I started to relax. To feel calm. Actual peace and restfulness enveloped me. I could feel my pulse rate slow, my blood pressure drop.

  And there was no reason for it. Nothing I was doing or thinking. No happy news had come my way. It just was. I felt as though my mother’s hand was stroking my hair and she was singing one of her oddly chosen lullabies like “The Look of Love” or “What the World Needs Now.” Peaceful. Content.

  I drifted off right there in the chair and slept the whole night through.

  Four o’clock the next morning (if you can call four o’clock “morning”) I was jolted awake by the ringing of the phone at my elbow.

  “Rise and shine, sternman,” Neil said with cold-blooded enthusiasm. “We got traps to haul.”

  By 4:30, I was sitting in Monty’s, the fisherman’s diner that overhangs the harbor, eating scrambled eggs and Tabasco sauce with Neil. I’d used the pay phone to check my messages, and, of course, there weren’t any. I banished my regrets of the night before and prepared to plunge into my new life as a lobsterman.

  “And another reason this’ll never work,” Neil was saying, “is that you’re from away. The only way an off-islander can fish here is if he’s born here.”

  “Then he wouldn’t be from away.”

  “That’s my point.”

  But I told him I wasn’t going to be dissuaded. I had some money saved up, I was going to invest in his business, become his partner.

  “I’m not a law firm,” Neil said. “It’s just me and my boat. I don’t need a partner. If you want to help out, fine, but I won’t say more than that.” You never “worked for” somebody on the island; you only “helped them out.”

  “Call it whatever you want,” I said. “I’m going to make this work.”

  The door opened, bringing in a blast of freezing night air and a new customer who sat at the counter.

  “I quit,” I said to Neil.

  “You lasted longer than I expected,” he said.

  I pointed to the newcomer at the counter—the woman I’d seen from the ferry. She was wearing the same sweater, and her face looked even fresher now in the middle of this cold winter night.

  “I want to go hauling with her,” I said.

  Neil leaned over to take a look and gave me a sympathetic smile. “Kathleen Milland. Good luck to you.”

  “Where’d she come from?”

  Neil shrugged. “She’s from away.”

  “I thought your gang didn’t let off-islanders haul?”

  Neil smiled over his coffee. “Well, when we see her sailing by, we don’t mind so much.” He glanced over at her again with a hopeless but amused look in his eye. “Is there anything prettier than a beautiful, sad woman?” We were soul-mates, Neil and I.

  “You in love with her?”

  “The whole island’s in love with her.”

  “So, is she married? In a relationship? A lesbian?”

  “Well, she lives alone, and the island lesbians haven’t gotten anywhere with her either.”

  “There are island lesbians?”

  “There’s not a lot to do here in the wintertime.”

  Neil told me her story, or as much of it as was known. She’d come over on the ferry four years ago, driving a Saturn with New York plates, and put herself up at Marcy Swensen’s bed and breakfast. She got a job as a grocery clerk, then took over as butcher in Raymond’s Market when old man Orville died. The second year, she started hauling for lobsters part-time. They should have stopped her then, Neil said, but she kept to herself and didn’t make any missteps (poaching in somebody else’s territory or fouling somebody’s line, etc.), so nobody could find an excuse. Also, everybody had a crush on her, and since she never dated anyone, everybody kept holding out hope they’d be the one, so nobody wanted to offend her.

  Oh, there was the usual harassment any new man gets: pots cut loose, buoys defaced, you know the kind of crap the lobster gangs get up to. But she never retaliated, just took it in stride, so the perpetrators ended up feeling sorry for her and defending her from any new pranks. Before you knew it, highliners were giving her tips on the best places to haul and she was at it full-time, fishing with seven hundred traps.

  “She’s a damn fine fisherman,” Neil said, the highest praise he could offer anyone. He said he knew she could bring in twice as many lobsters as she did, but she was smart enough not to push it.

  As I heard all this, I was liking her more and more. I asked if she had a sternman.

  “Weren’t you going to be my partner?” Neil asked, amused.

  “Come on.”

  “Well, she used to use Jimmy Norvag, but he got drunk and fell overboard, so he says. Now she hauls on her own.”

  “Talk to her. Put in a word for me.”

  Neil laughed. “Jesus, you haven’t changed a bit. When are you going to stop all this flitting around and settle down?”

  “Right now. With her. Go talk.”

  So Neil slid off his chair and strolled over to her, and I sipped some of the worst coffee I’d ever tasted while he engaged her in a long, drawn-out discussion, which was pretty much the only kind you could have on the island, where it was considered bad form to get to your point in less than ten minutes.

  Now and then they’d look over at me, and I’d have to decide what kind of expression to put on—smiling and friendly? serious and professional? brooding and sexually magnetic? I tried them all and probably came across as a manic depressive with multiple personalities.

  Neil ambled back over to me, just as he had left—he’d mastered the island trait of making his body language a bland cipher, so you never knew if he was crossing to you with news that you’d won the lottery or with a death sentence from the chemo ward. He sat down and sipped his coffee. “It ain’t any better when it’s cold, is it?”

  “So, what did she say?”

  He shook his head with that why-are-these-tourists-always-in-such-a-hurry expression. “She’ll give you a shot.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Now.”

  I felt suddenly ridiculous. “Jesus, now?”

  Immediately, I started looking for a way out. “But you were counting on me today.”

  Neil laughed, snorting back his coffee. “I think I’ll get by.”

  “What’d you tell her about me?”

  “Enough to get you on her boat.”

  This was starting to feel like a stupider idea by the minute. “What’s enough to get me on her boat?”

  “Just that you’ve been hauling for years and you used to have your own boat off Matinicus, but you’re a drunk and you lost everything and now you’ve joined AA and you’re trying to start over.”

  I stared at him in numb disbelief. He came up with that story while strolling over to the counter? No wonder he walked so slow. “Why did you tell her that?”

  He shrugged. “She goes to the AA meetings in the Union Church, and you know how they all stick together; it’s like a cult.”

  “You could have just told her I needed a job.”

  He slid his coffee ba
ck with his elbow and leaned into me with a wise smile. “She wasn’t going to hire you because she needs a sternman, because nobody really needs a sternman. The only reason you bring one on is because you think he might have some good stories to pass the time. I gave you a good story. Now, it’s up to you.”

  I stood up and crossed over to her, ready to set her straight, to tell the truth, to make a devastatingly bad first impression. I hesitated, hands in my back pockets, unsure how to start.

  “Hey. I’m Sam Kehoe.” She didn’t look up. Close to her, looking at her in profile, she seemed even more beautiful than she had from the boat. She was a little older than I’d thought, past thirty, I guessed, and the wind and sun had left their mark on her face. But they were all marks of experience, and they’d been drawn on with loving grace, like the pen strokes of elegant handwriting, and I wanted to kiss the salt out of them and blend them smooth with my tongue.

  “Let’s go,” she said, tossing change onto the counter and heading out the door.

  I hurried back to Neil, paying him for my breakfast. “What’ll she do if she finds out I’m a fake?”

  Neil smiled again. “Probably throw you overboard like she did Jimmy Norvag.”

  Now, I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t know my way around a lobster boat. I worked three summers as sternman on Neil’s father’s boat when I was a teenager. (The sternman does all the shit jobs—loading the bait, banding the lobsters, hauling the crates off the winches.) I knew the job and could do it efficiently and with good humor.

  What I didn’t know was the lingo. I could never remember what a following sea was or what the difference between a reef and a shoal was. I couldn’t make head nor tails of the high-tech navigational equipment—GPS, Loran-C, and God knew what-all satellite tracking systems—that beeped and blipped on flickering green screens in the wheelhouse. Of course, Neil had tried to teach it all to me, and I tried to learn it, but as soon as he launched into the jargon, my eyes would just glaze over and my mind would wander, just like it did those long winter evenings when Mom tried to tutor me in algebra.

  I could do the job I was supposed to just fine, but I could never have engaged in the tiniest bit of small talk that would have convinced her I was a former lobsterman.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to. She didn’t talk. I don’t mean to say that she was shy or a woman of few words. I mean, she really did not talk. There wasn’t a word exchanged between us that wasn’t absolutely necessary for the running of the boat.

  At first, this was a great relief to me. Through the hours of early morning I scooped bait and unloaded traps in a state of constant anxiety that at least distracted me from the unpleasantness of the job; when would she start chatting and ask one of the million simple questions that would unveil me as a fraud? But she didn’t chat, she didn’t ask questions, she didn’t even gab on the radio like every other fisherman I’ve ever known. All she did was work.

  She worked with thoroughgoing intensity, like a surgeon doing an organ transplant. Her eyes were forever regarding the sea around her or checking the GPS or reading her charts; whatever she looked at seemed to claim her attention to the exclusion of all else. I worried for a while that there might be a specific reason for this. That maybe the weather was worse than it looked or that we were going through a particularly dangerous patch of ocean. The more time passed, the more I sensed that there was nothing unusual about her behavior today. This was simply the way she lived. Everything she did, she did totally and with a purpose.

  And what’s more, despite the rain slicker and wool sweater and clunky rubber boots, she was beautiful while she did it. I’ll maintain till the day I die that there is nothing more attractive than watching someone do something really well.

  She kept her boat spotless. She measured each lobster with scrupulous care and threw back any that were even slightly below or above legal standard. She instructed me to do the same, not with words but by example and a curt nod of her head. She was a lobstering machine.

  Now, as I said, I appreciated all this. I admire good workmanship as much as the next person and lament its disappearance from the American scene and all that, but still, after three or four hours, this professionalism was starting to grate on me. For one thing, there was nothing to take my mind off what I was now realizing to my disappointment was a singularly unpleasant job. Handling stinking bait fish and strapping rubber bands onto the claws of angry crustaceans while trying to stave off seasickness was feeling less and less like a route to fulfillment.

  My disappointment with the job was only matched by my disappointment with myself. Why couldn’t I find simple fulfillment in doing a job well, like Kathleen did? Dear God, this wasn’t going to turn out to be another one of my fifteen-minute whims, was it? I think you can answer that one for yourself, but to get my mind off it, I started focusing more and more on Kathleen and getting her to talk.

  I dragged a trap off the winch, unhooked the bungee cord to open the cage, and pulled out a pissed-off crab. I held it out to her as it snapped and swore at us in crab.

  “You want to keep this?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?” I asked, perversely putting on a heavy Down Easter accent. “Crab sandwiches. Good eatin’.”

  She looked at me as if I was just slightly nuts. “I’m not fishing for crab.”

  And that was that for the next hour.

  The sea grew rougher as the day went on. The surface turned darker and angrier; white caps popped up all around us. The boat started bobbing and leaping in a nauseating, corkscrew motion that made it harder and harder to hook the lines and pull the traps up.

  I was reaching out to grab one of the wire crates, all green and dripping with slime, when the deck gave a sudden lurch, and I felt myself toppling over the side. I grabbed hold of the rail, felt my feet fly out from under me, and landed on my ass, seawater and bait juice soaking my pants.

  Kathleen looked down at me, puzzled; apparently, I didn’t cut a very seaman-like figure. Just as she reached down with a ragged work glove and pulled me up, the boat obliged by bucking the other way, and I fell into her, stumbling like a drunken man and pushing her against the wheelhouse. I could feel the swell of her breasts through our layers of clothing and had just time enough to think what a ridiculous way this was to cop a feel before the boat threw me back against the bait barrel.

  I shifted on my feet, trying to keep my balance, doing a little dance I knew I was going to be doing for the rest of the day. Kathleen stood on her two feet, moving with the boat and not against it, a true seafarer.

  “Been awhile since you were out?” she asked.

  This was a huge speech coming from her, so I hardly minded that it meant she was getting suspicious.

  “Yeah, it has,” I said. In the dozen or so words I’d exchanged with her over the course of the day, I’d been careful not to say anything that wasn’t perfectly true. If I hadn’t corrected the lies Neil had told her, I’d made a point of not adding to them myself.

  She went to grab the trap I’d left swinging on the snatch block, and I tried to think of something to say to keep this lengthy conversation going. “Why’d you call her the Portland Queen?”

  She looked back at me with patient annoyance, as if I were some dumb foreigner who just didn’t understand the ways of her country. “What was that?”

  “Your boat. Why’d you name her the Portland Queen?”

  She went back to work, methodically extracting two lobsters from the nylon mesh in the trap. “I didn’t. That’s what the guy I bought it from called it.”

  I tried to stroll over to her and bumped back against the rail. “Really? Most fishermen like to name their boats. You know, after their mother or their dog or something. It’s kind of sentimental, you know.”

  She stood on the deck, lobster in one hand, the mean, scissor-like tool used to clip rubber bands on its claws in the other, and looked like she was trying to figure out what to do with me. To her credit, she
made an effort at small talk. “What’d you call your boat?”

  Well, I stepped right into that one, didn’t I? It’s not that I wasn’t quick enough to come up with a fake name (the Betty Lou sprang to mind), but rather that I couldn’t decide whether to take the plunge and start lying or tell her the whole stupid truth.

  So, I hesitated for one guilty second. Then, the sea saved me by lifting the boat with a mad punch and slamming it back down. I fell one way and then the other, and then I kept falling. Right off the side of the boat until I hit water.

  Hit it hard, like it was covered with a sheet of glass that I had to break through before I even got to the freezing, sinking, drowning part. I don’t suppose there are too many good ways to die (maybe sleeping or doing something else in bed), but drowning must be one of the very worst. It hurts in so many ways; the sharp needles of the cold, the exploding panic in the lungs, the red fog that fills your brain as every cell of your body fights for the little bit of oxygen left to go around. There was no time for watching my life flash in front of me; I was too busy dying for that kind of shit.

  I broke the surface for a moment, just time enough to suck in a frothy mouthful of sea water that filled my aching lungs. Squinting my burning eyes, I saw the white bow of the boat in front of me. I allowed myself a moment of hope before a swell threw me into the side of it, cracking my head against the fiberglass hull.

  I never passed out, though I almost wanted to, so I was aware of a hand grabbing the neck of my sweater and pulling me up. I grasped the side of the boat, swung my leg up, and caught the rail. Kathleen grabbed my ass with her other hand, and together we hauled me onto the trap skids. I rolled over and dropped onto the deck, gulping air and spitting up water like a landed fish.

  Opening my streaming eyes, I saw a little black patent leather shoe about six inches from my face.

  I looked up, following the frilly white socks and the flowered dress to a bright pair of blue eyes and head of short-cropped blond hair. A little girl about your age, smiling with a missing tooth in front, giggling and reaching for Kathleen’s hand. Kathleen stood next to her, looking at me and acting like the little girl wasn’t even there.