Beauty

by Frederick Dillen

  “All right,” Carol said. “Thank you. Keep the electricity in mind, and keep looking everywhere else. Dave, I need you to be thinking big picture in terms of industry demand for what components we have and where that demand is and also what we may need for ourselves. And right, we need figures, as complete as we can get, for the old plant. If you guys can help one another, great. You decide which of the office staff we should keep on. We may want to keep everybody, or not. If I can help you in anything, tell me. The disposal stuff I’m good at. Some of it I’ll handle entirely, but I’m also at your mercy on the details. Getting up the new company, we already have a template at the old plant, but we’ll need to rethink that as well. No question, we’ll have to find ways to boost the margins, and I think we’ll be looking for specialty niches. You guys, please, say anything. This is a team, and I’ve got skills, but I don’t know much about your business in general or this company in particular.”

  Annette said, “But Baxter Blume has everything about us, don’t they?”

  Dave shook his head.

  Annette said, “No?”

  Carol said, “They bought very quickly and even more cheaply, and due diligence all but went out the window. I mean, I know a little bit about the industry and its trajectory, a little bit about a shop like yours using blocks of shredded and frozen fish from Asia to feed your lines. Aside from that, no. As far as the detailed news inside this company, no. I hope you won’t think of me as a dope.”

  “On that note,” Dave said, and he was happy to see Carol laugh. Annette laughed, too, when she was sure it was okay.

  “Actually,” Dave said, “there are a couple of things you might want to do today, or today and tonight, while Annette and I dig for evidence, criminal and otherwise, around here. First, there’s a conference going on today in the high school gymnasium. Fishermen from up and down the coast, government officials, oceanographic experts, environmental types, industry representatives, some civic reps. There’s a common understanding that the fish stocks in the Atlantic are mostly gone, and that the fishing industry is responsible. Knowledgeable fishermen on the harbor here contend that the stocks are coming back, but this conference is probably going to confirm a draconian amendment to fishing regulations about how much fish and what kind can be taken when and where. The amendment would put a lot of fishermen out of business, the ones that aren’t out already. Not a good thing for our new enterprise, but not necessarily the end of the world. It could be the amendment won’t happen, but in any case, you’re right—the fish we need for our fish sticks is coming in frozen blocks mostly from Asia. I’m thinking you might want to look in on all this. You’d get a flash cross section of the business and what’s happening in it.”

  “And the second thing? Tonight?”

  “Every four years, the town council meets, in front of a lot of the town, to decide whether or not to keep the waterfront zoned for the fishing industry only. That zoning is a matter of town pride, but the harbor is dying. At every one of these meetings, going back awhile, there’s been more and more agitation to break the zoning restriction and cash in on commercial development of the waterfront property. It’s rare that these would happen on the same day, but the zoning meeting is set in stone, and the thing at the gym is short notice and urgent. Consider yourself lucky, Carol.”

  She grinned. “I’m there for both events.”

  And while Carol was at the high school, Dave was going to look for Mathews’s secret files.

  Dave could hardly believe the old plant was waking from the dead. He stood back up and said in his sports announcer voice, “Yes. The team is coming out to play the second half.”

  High School for Fishermen

  Carol walked over to the high school from her apartment. She walked fast. She was eager. No more waiting for somebody to hand over a company. Carol was in motion, on her own, grabbing a company of her own.

  The high school was fifties modern, and around the edges of the parking lot were the fishermen’s pickups and flatbeds, most of them hard-used. The rest of the parking lot was kids’ cars. Carol had never been back to her own high school, but over the years she’d gone to other high schools for meetings with workers and townspeople as factories were shut. No matter how tough the times, the kids had cars.

  For Carol, cars had meant the alley she knew as a kid. She’d made her friends there. They were older, though less older as new kids came in and the bigger kids left for real jobs or the draft. By the time Dominic came, Carol had her job getting parts for the alley. She used that money to buy her own parts for the bent-frame, free-if-you-haul-it-away Mustang that her dad paid the towing for. Dominic was taller than she was, which few of them were because she got her height early and a lot of it. He was also only three years older, though that could seem plenty in those days. What was important was that Dominic knew about car engines and how to work on them. And because she didn’t realize how good he was at first, she did a crazy thing. She took his hand and said she’d introduce him to the parts guys at the store. He laughed and made her pull him all the way, leaning back but not letting go of her hand. When they reached the store, she told the guys to please help him out since he might want to get parts on his own.

  Carol kept her hands in her pockets all the way back to the alley. Then Dominic grabbed her hand out of her pocket when she’d relaxed. He pulled her to where his hood was leaning on a boarded door down the alley. She hadn’t seen that he’d cut it and had a scoop ready. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed. She had suggested a standard barrel because he didn’t look cool enough. Then she looked at the cut for the scoop, and it was very clean, and when she looked at him, he shrugged.

  Except he was still holding her hand, which he also thought was funny, and she did, too, after half-pretending to be mad. So he was like a brother at first, and she didn’t have a brother. Then they were best friends, and later everything else besides.

  High school for her as a kid, if anybody there had noticed, was the wrong clothes with the wrong face and the wrong body. She didn’t care. Her life was in the alley.

  When she was at high school gyms for meetings to bury factories, she was invisible to the kids just by virtue of being an adult. Around Baxter Blume, she was mostly invisible because she was gone so much, besides which, she was a colleague nobody had to compete with, doing a job nobody else wanted. Long before Remy’s call, she’d become a parochial throwback who was never going to get near the front of the line. Susannah wouldn’t know where to find a suit like the ones Carol wore. Susannah was going to participate in the equity funds sooner or later regardless of having to babysit the company Carol had wanted. Had Susannah ever had to compete with Carol? What had there been to compete with? The Beast? She had been sent to six weeks of a summer sales management course at not-really Harvard, of which she was very proud at the time but which she knew would be a joke to people with real colleges. Now she was out at Baxter Blume, and out as an undertaker, and those were good things. As she walked through today’s parking lot toward the gym doors, the Beast was nowhere near.

  Carol was not coming to the town gym to bury anybody; she was coming to get a reading on her industry.

  She was not coming here to see Easy Parsons, but as soon as Parks had mentioned the meeting, she had understood she might.

  The signage sent her in a side door and down a hall of trophy cases. The listed participants in the meeting were acronyms: state and federal ocean regulatory and research agencies, environmental interest groups, fishermen’s civic and industry groups. She could hear a cheap sound system working against a basketball court’s height of girders and banners. This was like no meeting she would ever have held; there would be discussion here, it seemed. When Carol had showed up to run a meeting, there had been no discussion. Still, she’d had to face gymnasiums full of people hoping she’d change her mind, as if she’d had a mind to change. She’d listened and answered to be respectful, bu
t her answers were never long. This meeting had nothing directly to do with her, and she was glad it didn’t. Despite whatever discussions, it was essentially a bad-news meeting, and instinctively her stomach fisted tight. Since she had no intimate investment in the bad news, she felt as if she were stopping to look at these people’s blood in a wreck beside the road. Although they had some hope of a good outcome, Parks had said. Would they all really be here if there was no hope? She didn’t know.

  She stepped through the double doors to a wall of the backs of workingmen who stood in flannel shirts and fiberfill vests, men she had put out of work by the thousands, men with whom her father had belonged and with whom she should have belonged.

  For a shamefully long time, Carol didn’t think of her father when she was shutting down plants and factories. But once she did, she imagined him every time among the men she faced—and despite the women at Elizabeth’s Fish this morning, it was usually mostly men. She had looked at the faces she fired to give them what humanity she could. She had come to look doubly hard because she never knew which face was going to turn out to be her father, and she wanted him to know she loved him and was sorry and didn’t expect his forgiveness and hoped to have it anyhow. That was a lot to put in a look, ridiculous if you thought about it, certainly nothing you talked about. Just the same, it was real, and it was hard work to stand straight and tough enough to keep anyone from imagining the weakness of second thoughts. Her father wouldn’t have wanted to see weakness either. His proudest moment would have been hearing about her six weeks studying new sales management techniques in a summer classroom on the Harvard campus. He had died the year before, but when she was on the campus, she had told him, out loud, where she was, and she had imagined he could hear.

  She edged through the men as if she didn’t notice she was taller than many of them. When she was inside, she could see that the bleachers were crowded with more men, and still more men sat in the folding chairs set out across the floor. Two hundred fishermen? Three hundred? These men, just like the men she’d had to face year after year, whatever their trade, looked achingly out of place. They’d been boys in gyms like this and they weren’t boys now. Beyond the rows of chairs was the U of tables for the managers and scientists and advocates and whoever was the senior bringer of bad news.

  She took a flyer off a bleacher bench. Apparently conservationists had offered an amendment to radically tighten federal legislation that governed the days and territories and catch weights for boats that went out after groundfish in New England’s Atlantic fishing areas. Groundfish were the heart of the industry. A judge supported the amendment, and if the agencies decided to enforce it as scheduled in a few weeks, most of the men here wouldn’t fish again. That did not sound good for them, and Carol sympathized, but for her own company, she wasn’t sure what it meant. Parks had told her that the blocks of fish to feed the lines in the old plant would in fact come from Asia, and presumably that supply wouldn’t be affected by what happened here.

  Today the agencies were announcing their decision, and if it had been her, Carol would have convened the meeting and made the announcement fast and let the fishermen get to the bars.

  Wherever they were from—Maine, Gloucester, New Bedford, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Long Island—the fishermen were old. The men who were standing were healthy, but even they were forty years old. The guys sitting in the chairs, from behind she could see their rolls and their bald spots and their white bristle on loose jowls. Carol wondered if all these fisher­men would really have come from such distances if this was the kind of no-hope show she used to run. Parks had said, after all, that the amendment and the regulations might not get approved.

  Maybe, Carol thought, Elizabeth Island had been lucky in losing most of its fleet earlier than the harbors with bigger fleets and auction sites. She had seen it before. As industries consolidated and transformed and were killed off, the towns and companies that hung on longest sometimes got hit hardest in the end, while ravaged companies in the towns that got hit first had time to discover niches and adapt and survive.

  As soon as she thought that, Carol wondered what might be a profitable niche her company could establish.

  For her plant here to survive, it would need to find and fill some sort of niche to augment the failing margins in its principal product of fish sticks cut from those blocks of frozen fish brought in from overseas. Unless Carol could lower the price on her fish sticks, she could not compete with the bigger outfits in the business. Income from some sort of niche, and it didn’t have to be a lot of income, would give her the leeway to lower her fish stick price.

  What the plant didn’t use, what it had been built for and survived on generation after generation, was fresh fish. It was the failing of fresh fish stocks that had led to importing blocks of frozen fish from Asia and that right now was killing the fishermen in this gym. Carol thought it might be possible that fresh fish, maybe even regardless of the regulations, could provide her plant with the balance of free cash flow that would mean survival. She wondered if there would be enough fresh fish available to give her a small signature niche, and to tip her balance sheet into the black.

  She looked at the fishermen. She’d seen the factory floor of a fishing boat this morning, and she felt she could pick out the factory owners in the room by the authority in their bearing. She thought she spotted a brittle pretense in the posture of some of them, suggesting that their boats might belong to the bank in a month. It was the kind of dynamic you could notice among men anywhere.

  There was a different dynamic in this gym, though, than there would have been in a gym full of other kinds of factory workers, and it wasn’t just because there were a lot of independent owners here. There weren’t any women. Ah, Carol thought, women worked in the plants, and men went out on the boats. But that didn’t account for the discomfort she felt in her head and her stomach. She felt unsteady on her feet.

  Had she eaten something? Suddenly she could barely stand. Blume thought she was too old a zebra.

  She looked over the heads of the men in the chairs to the table of short-sleeve-dress-shirted, cheap-necktied deputy commissioners and assistants to directors and low-level scientists and the few wrinkled guys who were just fishermen representing fishermen. She was too unsteady to tell who was speaking, but somebody’s voice came through the gym with the dooming command of all bureaucrats pretending to move things along.

  She looked away from that and up at the far wall to calm her stomach. A great wooden plaque told which school basketball players had scored the most points ever. The best, with more than two thousand points, had graduated in 1962. But the second best, also with more than two thousand, had graduated only the year before. Elizabeth Island must have had a team. Carol was glad for them. As an awkward kid who spent most of her time in her alley with older guys and her bent Mustang, she’d never gone to her high school’s games. But as an undertaker, when she was in a town for the only reason she was ever in a town, she always hoped that some team was winning.

  A new voice came, and it was familiar. It was Easy, just like Carol had hoped. She could tell he was at home with himself and that he had real news whether or not his peer fishermen had enough political or economic weight to warrant him saying it. Carol was more interested just in looking at him. He wore old khakis and a flannel shirt over a long-sleeve undershirt, and the sleeves of both shirts were rolled up to his elbows. She looked at the hair on his strong forearms and wondered, like a teenager, if he was handsome.

  She quieted everything in her stomach and listened to his slow, assured persuasion. You knew he was one of the guys who made a living, and he seemed to think he could keep doing it. He explained that his vessel was rigged so he could go to species or location the minute they opened. Other people could do the same. Derby fishing, he called it. Carol had come thinking the fishermen couldn’t make it work, and it turned out she was wrong, which was interesting. And yet, what was
strangest to Carol was that as she watched Easy, she felt an alarm deep inside herself. She hadn’t felt that—though there had been other men—since she was a teenager with Dominic.

  She looked away to the men standing just to the right and behind her, and they were standing the same way Easy was standing. That was why she was losing her balance: they all stood as if the gym were rocking, as if the gym were a boat on water, and she was on it with them.

  Carol was seasick, and as seasick as she felt, or because she felt so seasick, she was full of wonder that these men made their lives on the empty ocean, out of sight of land. She leaned toward the bleachers so she could hold on to the end of a bench.

  To keep the seasickness away, she closed her eyes and imagined herself nowhere near the ocean. She thought about the alley and Dominic. He had a great car. He let her work on it with him, and he helped with the beat-up Mustang she’d bought, but only when she needed muscle or extra hands—she didn’t ever want to think she was not the one who did what she did. His dad was dead. He only had his mother like Carol only had her father. You were a different person if one of your parents was dead, and Carol thought it made Dominic kinder, not that he didn’t kick ass in his car. Then they found out it was a law that if you were the only son of a widow, you didn’t get drafted, although that hardly mattered at first. What mattered was, to begin with, they got to be friends so fast. It was as one-two-three as sunup, no question. But friends were one thing. The other guys in the alley were friends, even if never like her with Dominic. The crazy-as-science-fiction part was that she knew ahead of time that he loved her, when anybody else would have thought it was still only cool-Dominic and just-Carol, car pals. She never planned, or even honestly understood, what she hoped. Simply one day she knew past all that, which shouldn’t seem brave but was as brave as she’d ever been. Since he didn’t know yet. If she had told anybody, they would have laughed, but she knew, and she waited until he knew, too. He never acted like he was surprised, which for her was as kind as anything possible. He was going to have to kiss her. She could have said so, because that was obvious as having to have a Hurst shifter. All she did was smile, and he made like do-I-have-to, and pretty quick he did.