by Norman Green
“Whales? Serious? What kind?”
“Finback,” he said. “And minke. And you know something? The oldtimahs were complaining then that there was nothing left. They used to tell stories about halibut as big as this boat. Cow halibut, they used to call ’em. Lobstahs, four foot long, dredged up in a net.”
“You believe them?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“So what happened?”
“In the old days, fishermen went out in sailboats, wooden, fifty or sixty feet long. Didn’t have no refrigeration, just salt. They went fishing in the places where they’d been lucky befowah, or where their fathers had been lucky, that’s all they knew. That’s all the technology they had. By the end of it, twenty yeahs ago, we had factory ships from all over the world just offshore, processing and freezing right on board, and a thousand fishing boats keeping them busy. Didn’t need to guess where the fish was, neither.” He rapped on his sonar screen with his knuckles. “If there was fish there, you could see ’em, and you could go catch ’em.”
“Too bad. All gone now?”
He shrugged. “Fella like you, never seen it back when, you’d still think the bay was perfect. I seen a tuna just last week, he had to be a good five or six feet long, he had a bunch of herring drove up into the cove just around from where we were tied up this morning, and he was right up in the shallows eating ’em, in about a foot of water. Bet he went six hundred pounds easy.”
“No kidding.”
“And we still get some of the rest, pollack, a whale now and then, seals and dolphins. Ten-thousand-dollar fine for shooting a seal.”
“Why would you want to shoot a seal?”
“You might be tempted if you seined him up along with your fish and he was about to tear a hole in your net and cost you twenty-five grand in damage and lost catch.” He glanced over at me. “You really cayah about any of this?”
“I’m interested.”
“Awright. That’s Lubec, to your left, and Eastport, up ahead there. On the right, that’s Campobello Island. Everything on that side is Canada. FDR had a summah house over theyah, you can drive across that bridge from Lubec and go see it if you want. This channel we’re in is called Friar’s Road.” He spun his wheel to the left and we headed over toward the Canadian side. “Right in the water at the foot of that bluff there, that’s Friar’s Rock.” From a distance, it did look like a thirty-foot statue of a monk in a robe, a finger of rock rising out of the water at the foot of a cliff.
“Up across there, on the fah side of the bay, you got Deer Island and Indian Island, and the channel down between them is Indian Road. Eastport is built on the end of Moose Island, they got a causeway out to it, but you know that. Them small islands around the side of Moose Island are the Dog Islands. Now you got four hundred feet of water out here in the middle, you got the St. Croix flowing down between Moose and Deer Islands, you got the current coming down the Indian Road, and you got the tide sweeping in and out of Friar’s Road, here. Twenty-three feet of tide, normally, but sometimes you’ll get a lot more. I don’t know what causes it, the moon or the planets or what, but sometimes you’ll get what we got now, low tide five or six feet lower than normal, and high tide five or six feet higher than normal. Figure twice the normal volume of water in and out of here, twice a day. Now, you see that mahkah over there on Deer Island?” He pointed at it, a large white triangle over on the far shore.
“Yeah.”
“’Nother one on this side, just opposite, but we can’t see it from here. Well, that stretch between the mahkahs is called the Old Sow. Usually it looks like a big boiling pot. You’ll get big boils of water come up there five foot high out of the water, up out of nowhere from the currents all swirling around. Looks pretty rugged out there now, don’t it? But we’re on the ebb tide now, and what you see now is nothing. On a flood tide, from about an hour after the tide starts until about an hour before she turns, you’ll see whirlpools right out there in the middle, out there in those tidal streaks in the center. In forty years, the biggest one I seen was twenty-five feet across and maybe twenty feet deep, and the tide wasn’t near as bad that day as it’s been for the last few days. You can hear ’em growl, all the way over on the shore. These last few tides have been worse than anything I can remember. I wouldn’t want to guess how big they’ll be on the next few flood tides. You get out there on a flood tide, son, you might learn more about Passamaquoddy Bay than you wanted to know.”
“Not now, though.”
“Nah. Ebb tide, just what you see, just a little churning around.” What he called “a little churning around” looked bad enough to me. Gulls, sitting in the water, went ripping past us, carried along by the current. You went overboard here, they’d have a bitch of a time catching up to you. Provided you didn’t get eaten by something in the meantime.
On the way back, just outside Bailey’s Folly, I saw a strange bird, like a gull only ten times bigger, although it’s hard to gauge size against a backdrop of empty ocean and sky. It had impossibly long, slender wings, and it flew like it was tired, wingbeats like the strides of a marathon runner. I didn’t get a good look, and I didn’t get my glasses on it until it was too far away, but it might have been an albatross. You don’t see them often in the North Atlantic, and I had never seen one before. I have heard that there have been a few windblown vagrants. What happens, an albatross needs wind to fly, so occasionally one will ride up on a storm from the Southern Hemisphere. Once he’s up here, he can’t get back, he can’t get back across the doldrums on his own. You wonder if a bird can miss his mate and all the places he knew, you wonder if he knows he can never go home again.
I picked Nicky up. I told myself it was so that he could see better, but maybe it was so that I could see better, I don’t know. He put his arm across my shoulders and stared out across the water. He still had that look of wonder on his face. A minute later, he turned and looked at me. “You like boats, Dad?”
“Yeah, I like boats.”
“Me, too,” he said.
I went out that evening after dinner because I was feeling a little squeezed. I told everyone that I wanted to see the screech owl again, and I suppose I did, but the real reason was that I was having some trouble breathing. I had been used to a certain level of solitude most of my life. Funny, when you think of living in the city, you think of the inescapable pressure of so many people crowded together. The fact is, you can walk down any street in New York at rush hour and be totally alone. There was something perversely comforting about that, being surrounded by millions of people and knowing that none of them can touch you, none of them have any connection to you at all. And yet, here I was, up in the middle of nowhere, living in this great big house with only three other people, and I could feel the web of invisible nerve endings that held the four of us together. I could actually feel Eleanor’s sorrow over the thing growing in her stomach and how it was upsetting the fragile balance of the life she and Louis worked so hard to live, I could feel Louis’s worry about her and his sense of helplessness and fear, I could feel Nicky’s heart, not small and hard like mine, but growing and opening up in this place. It was more input than I knew what to do with, I felt like a drowning man inhaling water. It wasn’t that they were asking anything from me, either. Eleanor was feeling better, she’d gotten up and was surfing the Web on my laptop, Nicky was watching television, and Louis was sitting at his kitchen table, drinking Jim Beam out of a coffee cup and playing solitaire. Eleanor had gone pale and haggard when she saw him break out the bottle, but she hadn’t said a word. None of my business. I sat watching Eleanor, thinking about what Eddie Gevier had told me, wondering if Eleanor was going to die for the lack of a lousy forty grand. And then I began to wonder if I, too, might be carrying the seeds of my own death, lying quiet inside me somewhere, waiting for their time. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me, some reason why I couldn’t handle caring about someone other than myself. I found, shortly after that, that I needed to get outdoor
s. I needed to be by myself for a little while, until I could catch my breath.
I stopped at the Subaru for my glasses and some bug spray, then settled into a comfortable spot on the far side of the yard. I was as quiet as I could manage, not that it mattered much. Even if I lay completely still the owl would hear the sound of me breathing. An owl can hear a mouse walking across hard ground from thirty yards away, and he can pinpoint the mouse’s exact location from those faint noises. If I really did want to see the owl again, I had to pay attention. He might hear me, but I would never hear him. Owls are engineered to kill in complete silence. Their feathers are different from the feathers of other birds, there are no hard edges on them anywhere, and when they fly, they are as quiet as death. I just hoped he wouldn’t be interested in me, that he would go about his business and not mind my attention. As it got progressively darker, the bugs came out. The repellent kept them off my face and hands, but mosquitoes and the odd blackfly would land on my shirt and jeans and wander around looking for a weak spot. A mosquito pierced one of my socks and bit me on the ankle. You learn as you go along, I guess—next time I’d use bug spray down there, too. They say only the females bite you. I couldn’t spare her any attention, though, I just hoped none of her sisters were as smart as she was.
I got distracted anyway. A pair of bats began working the airspace over the Subaru and Louis’s Jeep. I guess they were eating the bugs attracted by the dim lights of the house. I watched them until it got too dark to see them anymore. It was a clear night with no moon, and even with the blue light of Louis’s television in the background, it was darker than any night I could remember experiencing before. The stars came out, hard and cold, they seemed much closer to me that night in Maine than they ever had before. To tell you the truth, I had never paid them any attention. Even when I’d gone up on the Jersey Palisades they’d just been the background to what I was looking for, just wallpaper. For most of human history people lived this close to them, though, thought they might mean something, looked up there for portents, clues that might help them decipher their own course. I could easily have gone my entire life without really noticing the night sky at all, let alone wondering if it had anything to tell me. We’re so smart now, we know at least something about everything, but still, nobody can tell you which of those pieces of information are important.
I wasn’t thinking about Louis and Eleanor, but some inner voice got through. If she was your mother . . .
She’s not my mother, I thought. I don’t have a mother.
Yeah, so? You got the money, you cheap fuck.
Hey, man, people just don’t go around interfering with other people’s lives like that. Besides, if it was me that was fucked up, nobody’s lining up to help out my ass. That’s not the way the world works. I’ll kick in a couple Gs for the cause.
Okay?
The voice was silent, but I could feel the cold weight of disappointment laying on my chest.
6
I still hadn’t heard from Bookman, and I was trying to come up with another way to find out where the Russians were staying when he called me the next morning. “Talk to Chris Johnson,” he said. “He’s an Indian, lives up on the Passamaquoddy Reservation near Grand Lake Stream.”
“You think he can find these guys?”
“He knows everything that goes on up there, and if he doesn’t, he’ll know how to find out. You’re gonna have to hire him. Be better for you if you didn’t mention my name.”
“He don’t like you?”
“Hahd to believe, isn’t it? We may have worked at cross-purposes in the past, but it’s authority he doesn’t like, not me personally. Nice enough young fella, for all of that. He’s a guide, takes rich people from Noo Yawk fishing and hunting. Gets a hundred a day, they tell me.”
“How do I find him?”
“He don’t have no phone, I don’t think. Take a ride on up there, stop in the tackle store and ask. They’re the ones that do his bookings, so they should know where he is.”
“Thanks, Bookman.”
“Just you remember what I said: no dead Rooskies in my county.”
“I’ll dump ’em up in Aroostook.”
Bookman exploded. “Goddammit, Manny! I already got one dead man on my hands. I don’t want any more problems than I already have. You better not be more trouble than you’re worth.”
“Don’t worry, Bookman, I ain’t a violent person. Who’s the dead guy?”
“That stupid kid we picked up with the OxyContins. Last night he aspirated his own vomit and choked to death.”
“Jesus.”
“He was a good kid, once upon a time. Now he’s dead, and whoever the bastard is, bringing that shit over, he can keep right on doing it.”
“I don’t know, man. There’s not a lot of people up here. Somebody’s bound to know who your guy is. Maybe this will piss them off enough to give you a name.”
“I keep telling myself that. Remember what I said about them goddam Russians.” He hung up.
I asked Eleanor if she would watch Nicky for me. “I’m embarrassed, how much he’s with you and how little he’s with me.”
She patted my hand and smiled. “I don’t think you realize how lucky you are, Manny.”
“Well, I didn’t want to just assume . . .”
She shook her head. “Your son is a joy.”
Then I went and asked Nicky if he minded staying with her. I guess I was trying to treat him like an adult. I didn’t know how you were supposed to treat kids. He took it seriously, too. “You’re coming back, right?”
“Course I’m coming back.”
He nodded gravely. “Can I come with you next time?”
“This is not a trip for fun. I have to go take care of some things. Anytime I go somewhere for fun, I’ll take you with me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“In the meantime, you promise to mind Mrs. Avery?”
“Yep.”
“You’ll do what she tells you to do?”
“Yep.”
He followed me up the stairs, stayed close to me while I grabbed a few things out of one of my duffel bags, and he followed me back downstairs again. God, I felt rotten. Every time I left him with someone I felt worse than the last time. He gave me a hug before I left, and that made it even harder. I had to get out of there before I started blubbering. Jesus. What I needed was to find a safe place to be with my kid, where he would have a chance to grow up and be normal—I realized it as I drove the Subaru down Louis’s driveway. It was Mohammed’s fault, it was that fucking guy from Brooklyn. I promised myself, if I ever got loose of him and his business, I would never go back.
There was a store in Grand Lake Stream that sold, among other things, bait and tackle. I myself have never been fishing. You can buy a fish in a store if you want one, or order it cooked already in a restaurant, am I right? The guy had lots of gear for sale in the place, though, rods and reels and flies and special clothes, all sorts of crap. Sometimes I think accessorizing is the real point of any sport. There was no point to my fascination with birds, either, it was never gonna make me any money, and every time I hear about a new gizmo, a new scope or better binoculars or another book, you know I gotta have it.
I picked out a bucket hat, one of those stupid-looking things that fishermen wear, got a brim going all the way around to keep the sun off you, and I took it up to the register. The guy behind the counter was the only other person in the place, and he was watching some celebrity news show on a small television. “Find everything you were looking for?”
“Actually I’m looking for a guy, name of Chris Johnson. I was told he’s the best guide around here.”
“He’s very good,” the guy told me, “but you’re out of luck. He’s up the Alleagash, taking some naychah photographahs to see the river.”
“Damn. I got lousy timing.”
“I can fix you up with another guide, if you want.”
“Chris came highly recommended.” It wasn’t fish or deer I w
as after. I would have to talk to Bookman. I couldn’t just take some guy at random.
“Well,” the guy said. “He’s been gone ’bout ten days, I imagine he’ll be back fairly soon. Why don’t you go ask his mother? She would prolly know bettah than me.”
“You know her phone number?”
“She don’t have a phone, but she lives right up the road.” I paid for my hat, wrote down the directions to Chris Johnson’s mother’s house.
She had some serious pine trees around her house. Who knew those things got so freaking huge? Some of the branches seemed so large and so high, if one broke off in a storm it would crush her house like an egg crate. The house itself was very small, and under the corners you could see the cement blocks that held it up off the ground. It was green, with a reddish brown roof, more what you would call a cabin than a house. It had a deck at one end, gas grill in the corner. There was a carpet of pale brown pine needles everywhere, on the roof, the yard, and the deck. I parked the Subaru out front and knocked on the door.
The lady who answered was a short, broad, roundish woman, brown skin and eyes, black hair pulled back from her face in a bun. She looked vaguely Oriental to me. “Hi,” she said. “If you’re selling something, I’m too broke to even pay attention.”
She had a soft voice, and her accent was different from the ones I had been hearing. “I’m no salesman. I’m looking for Chris Johnson.”
“He isn’t here,” she said. “Come on inside and I’ll take down your information so he can get back to you.” She stood holding the door open. The central room was the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The walls were knotty pine, and the floor was linoleum with an oval rag rug. It felt like a comfortable place. I took the seat she offered me at her kitchen table. “Are you trying to arrange a fishing trip?”
