Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  Dennis Kehoe had inherited the Kingfisher and its customers from his father, with Prentiss Phinney thrown in. Dennis had inherited his father’s looks too, but the blue eyes had lost their kindness and the wide mouth its easy smile. He avoided Richard’s outstretched hand by holding up his own, still wrapped in the oily rag.

  “You just caught us,” he said. “We was about to pull up bumpers and head home. You got two cases of rum. We thought we’d have to sell them in Boston.”

  You weren’t going to wait for me the way your father would have, Richard thought, or offer up a cup of rum to celebrate the trade.

  Phinney weighed one of Richard’s lobster crates and poured the skittering contents into the smack’s watery hold.

  “Save out a half dozen from that second crate, if you would Mister Phinney,” said Richard. “They’re for my friends here at the Coast Guard station.”

  Phinney grunted in reply and set about packing the empty crates with rockweed and then rum, two bottles at a time.

  “The bad news is that the rum’s up 15 percent this time,” said Dennis. “The good news is that lobsters are up 10 percent.” The Kingfisher’s skipper seemed to be looking at something perched on Richard’s shoulder as he talked. “Butter’s up more than 50 percent, if you can get it.”

  Richard lifted the flannel ear flaps of his hat and tied them together on top while Dennis wrapped a rubber band around a wad of bills and tucked it into the pocket of his overalls. “A lot of people are using the war to get rich,” Richard said.

  “If you mean me, you’re mistaken,” said Dennis. “I’ve joined the navy. Phinney here will be making the runs from now on.”

  “I didn’t mean you. I’d join up too if I was your age. I guess me and Phinney can keep this trade going until you get back— us old fellows, eh, Phinney?”

  “Step onto your deck, and I’ll hand these crates down to you,” Phinney said. “I’ll be back the first Friday in June.”

  “Maybe next time you won’t be in such a hurry, and we can have a drink or two the way we used to.” Richard took the crate by its rope handle as it slid toward him over the boat’s washboard.

  “Perhaps we will,” Phinney said.

  Richard knelt on the seat of his skiff, facing the bow so he could see where he was going and rowed cautiously through the harbor’s boat traffic to the public landing. His long johns and shirtsleeves were pushed up above his elbows, revealing the bulging forearms of a man who had hauled heavy traps hand over hand for twenty years. He pulled and sculled his way through a confusion of other skiffs and tied off. The sun had gone down behind the distant hills leaving the noisy harbor in shadow. But at what seemed the exact second that Richard set foot on the pier, the dredge’s dozens of mounted floodlights were switched on as the vessel took its place for the night shift. Two Portuguese quarrymen were fixing dog-toes to a granite block, while a third—a darker, older man in a leather muffin hat—smoked and watched. Richard knew the crew was from the Crotch Island quarry at Stonington; he did not recognize any of them but thought they might know him, so he nodded in their direction as he swung the heavy gunnysack over his shoulder. Then he started for town, eager to get away from the howl of the dredge and the awful pounding that made him wince.

  The bar at the Harbor Inn was just barely lit by imitation ships’ lanterns with little bulbs inside them. The place was dark, and when the door swung shut behind him, it was quiet too. The only two customers, both young men with slicked-back hair and baggy trousers, were seated at the bar watching Reggie Lombard as he exchanged their empty beer bottles for full ones, and poured their shot glasses full. Richard set his gunnysack on the floor at the end of the bar and took the stool next to it. The drinker closer to him watched him, then looked over his shoulder at the sack on the floor.

  Reggie said, “Look what the cat drug in,” and brought Richard a cold draft.

  “This is the only quiet place I’ve been all day,” Richard told him.

  “You wait,” Reggie said. “In an hour, when the day shift’s over, you won’t be able to hear your own voice in here.” He motioned to the empty tables with a folded newspaper. “Half of them will be your Portagee friends from Stonington. They make more money here than they do on Crotch Island, and they spend every penny of it, too.”

  “They’re not my friends,” said Richard, licking foam from his upper lip. “My friends are white.”

  “Portuguese are white,” Reggie said. “They wouldn’t be coming in here if they weren’t.”

  “You’d call Mexicans white if you could sell them a drink.”

  “You haven’t changed a damned bit.” Reggie resumed his seat on the stool by the cash register and disappeared behind his newspaper. Someone had written “Loose Lips Sink Ships” in lipstick in the corner of the mirror behind the bar. Richard thought of the red lip prints on Iris Weed’s coffee cup.

  “Whatcha got in the bag there, cap’?” The nearest drinker had turned toward him; the other watched their reflections, only partly interested.

  “Seaweed,” Richard said.

  “He looks like somebody that would be carrying around a bag of seaweed,” the other man sneered. He let smoke drift out of his mouth and inhaled it through his nose.

  Richard would have said something if he had not noticed the headlines on Reggie’s newspaper. A destroyer had sunk a U-boat off the coast of North Carolina. No German survivors. The long-awaited dawn of Victory in American waters.

  “You mean to tell me they finally sunk one of them submarines? How’d they do it?” Richard asked.

  “You just found out? Where’ve you been? It’s all anybody’s talking about,” said the nearest drinker.

  “I’ve been lobstering is where I’ve been.” Richard glanced over at the man then turned back to Reggie, whom he had been talking to. Reggie was looking at Richard over his newspaper.

  “They say the ship was a destroyer that sank it with gunfire then finished it off with depth charges. Off of Cape Lookout. Most of the Germans had abandoned ship and was in the water, but the depth charges killed them. It’s about time they got one. Now maybe—”

  “What’s that then, one submarine for how many merchantmen sunk in the last couple of months up and down the coast— several every day?” Richard slid his empty mug toward Reggie. “People stand on the pier at Atlantic City and watch them blow our ships to blazes; the lights of the amusement park give the U-boats a clear silhouette. It’s disgusting. What do we have, one destroyer for every twenty U-boats? And them building more every day.”

  “And we are too.” The near man had turned toward Richard. “That destroyer was the Roper, one of the new Wickes-class flush deckers, radar equipped. There’s two more just like it coming off the ways at Bath right now.”

  “How do you know so much? You guys in the navy?”

  “Coast Guard. This is Ed Murphy. I’m Dave. Dave Jones.”

  Murphy nodded at Richard’s reflection.

  “I’m Richard Snell.” He and Jones reached across two stools to shake hands.

  “Snell?” said Murphy. “That’s a goddamned German name isn’t it?

  “It’s an American name.” Richard’s voice went flat. “My people arrived in this country two hundred years ago. They were farming on land they bought from the Mohawks a hundred years before your people gave up digging potatoes and came over here, Mister Murphy. My grandfather moved back east, to Maine, and he fought in the Civil War with the Deer Isle regiment. Don’t go calling me a German.”

  “Snell? That means slow, doesn’t it?” asked Murphy.

  “That’s schnell, and it means fast, or quick, for your information.”

  “Snell rhymes with smell. Dick Smell.” Murphy laughed.

  “Goddamn you.” Richard set his cap on the bar and stood up.

  “Cut the shit, Murph,” said Jones. He held up his hand to Richard. “Sit down, cap’. Don’t pay any attention to him. He gets nasty when he drinks. Let me buy this next one, bartender; we’ll dri
nk to the crew of the Roper.”

  One of the lobsters in the gunny sack flapped his tail in a last desperate attempt to escape. Richard stirred the sack with his foot to quiet the critter but only disturbed the others.

  “Would those be lobsters in that bag, cap’? How many you got?” asked Murphy.

  “They would be,” said Richard. “There’s six of them.”

  “Would they be for sale?”

  “They might be.”

  “What else you got in there? I mean that sack looks pretty hefty for just six lobsters. I thought I heard something clink when you kicked it just now. If you’re looking for customers, you found them.”

  “Not in here,” said Reggie. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

  Richard lifted the gunnysack over his shoulder and led the way out the side door, thinking that the son of a bitch would pay in dollars for his smart-ass remarks. Behind an old flatbed truck that rested on cinder blocks, its tires gone, Richard set the sack down in the gravel and untied it. He drew out one bottle, pulled a strand of rockweed from its neck, and pointed to the label.

  “This is Demerara, from Guyana. You won’t find rum this good in any barroom. There’s four bottles, at ten dollars each.” He slipped the bottle back into the sack. “The lobsters are sixty cents.”

  “How big are they?” asked Murphy. “Show us one.”

  Richard fished around for a fair-sized lobster and held it in front of Murphy’s face, so close the critter could smell his hair oil. The lobster waved its war claw and climbed in the air on its skinny legs.

  “We don’t have that kind of money,” Jones said. He bent down and picked up the sack. “But since we’re in the service, you can call it your contribution to the war effort. Here, just drop that one in with the others, Dick Smell.”

  Murphy was laughing when Richard drove the lobster—legs and claws first—into his face with all the force he could muster. The Coast Guardsman fell backward, his throaty cry muffled by crunching shell and squishing flesh. Richard drew back the lobster for a second blow again, but Jones caught him with a fist to the temple, and he collapsed to his knees. He saw Murphy on the gravel next to him, covering his own face with bloody hands. Richard felt another blow to the same side of his head, then another on his cheekbone, then nothing more.

  Amos opened the fish shack door with his foot and turned the trap sideways to get it through. He had taken off his shirt and unbuttoned his long johns in the warm shack, but out on the wharf, where he added the trap to the top row, he shivered all over like a wet dog, rolled down his sleeves, and buttoned up his shirt. It was cold for mid-May and unusually clear. From the way his boat was riding on her mooring the wind appeared to be westerly, but Amos knew it was northwest by the cold forest smell of it; light northwesterly winds like this one often got baffled by the mountain and the high cliffs around the cove, coming across as westerly by the time they got to his mooring. Still, he thought, it was christly cold and bright, more like late October.

  He counted thirty-nine traps in the tiered stack of those with their warps cut to fifteen fathoms. One more fifteen, he thought, then he could start on the tens for inshore fishing. Since the boy had started to go lobstering with him, he had taken better care of his gear. He tucked his hands into his armpits and allowed himself some satisfaction in the sight of the freshly painted buoys and their warps tarred and coiled inside each trap. The new oak laths and bows with which he had replaced the weaker ones gave the old, weathered traps a sturdier look. Amos decided that he’d build the last fifteen brand new, from the bottom up, and set it out first for good luck.

  The two windows over the workbench in the fish shack looked out over the wharf and the cove, facing south to collect the light and warmth of the sun. Amos laid out pieces for a new trap frame on the bench. He lifted one of the heavy oak runners and sniffed it.

  “This batch is pretty green,” he said out loud.

  Uncle Walter did not answer. He was standing at the bench, resting his bulk on a tilted stool. He did not like to sit because he overflowed the stool and his ass hurt him. The sunlight made his hair look extra red and his body look hazy. Walter’s attention was fixed on something out the window.

  A boat was approaching from the south; Amos had not heard it because it was downwind. It was Richard Snell in the Lucille, and he was cutting back the throttle as he came into the cove. He had not been out lobstering, and he had no business down in Head Harbor, so he must be coming from Rockland with the rum. Amos had expected him yesterday and had watched for him, but today he did not feel like talking to Richard, or rather listening to him talk about his new Chevrolet engine and his hotshot friends in Stonington.

  Amos opened the damper on the stove so Richard would not see smoke and tie up to the wharf.

  Christ, you’ll roast us to death, Walter said.

  Amos reached through Walter for his old spyglass and perched on the stool in the shadow under the drying buoys, where the Lucille’s skipper could not see him watching.

  Richard tied up onto the far side of Amos’s boat, which— on a whim—he had named the Tuna. He did not step out onto his deck and hail the cove or even look around as he usually did. At first Amos could only make out Richard’s shape and his red flannel cap in the wheelhouse, but as he stepped over the washboard onto the Tuna, the breeze swung both boats toward shore and put Richard—full bodied and face first—into Amos’s view. The lobsterman held four bottles of rum pressed against his chest and carried two by their necks in his free hand—only six quarts instead of the eight Amos had ordered. But it was Richard’s face, not the number of bottles, that made Amos gasp. One whole side was swollen like a ripe pumpkin and was the pale purple color of a sheep’s intestines. His right eye was lost in a little black hole, and his lower lip was puffed out like that of some Africans Amos had seen in National Geographic. There was a row of black stitching over his eyebrow, and another followed the border of his nose from bridge to nostril. Richard ducked quickly into the cabin of the Tuna.

  He looks like a goddamned jack-o-lantern, said Walter.

  “Jesus what do you suppose happened to him? He must have mixed it up with somebody and gotten the raw end of it. He’s only wearing one mitten; I wonder what that’s covering up,” whispered Amos.

  Richard came up out of the Tunas cabin and plucked the envelope from its clothespin on the bulkhead next to the wheel. He stuffed it into his jacket pocket with his left hand without bothering to open it and count the money. And, Amos soon saw, he did not leave any change, and he did not come back aboard with two more bottles. Richard took money for eight quarts but left six, and he roared off at full throttle, rocking the Tuna with his wake as if to remind Amos how tippy and unseaworthy his little boat was.

  Amos lowered the spyglass.

  “Now isn’t that a goddamned Snell for you. Poachers and crooks, all of them. His uncle still has those two wrenches he borrowed, what, twelve years ago? Richard’ll say that prices went up again, so six costs the same as eight. He’ll say he gave me a deal. Tonight we’ll drink a toast to the guy who fixed his face that way, by Jesus.”

  Richard ran a broomstick through the spokes of his wheel to keep it steady and unwrapped the linen bandage on his right hand. Of the dozens of cuts on his fingers and palm, only the one just below his thumb had been deep enough to take stitches. The swelling had gone down, but the hand still throbbed when he moved it, and the cuts from which he had picked pieces of broken shell still stung. He wished he had seen that Murphy’s face before he had blacked out; he hoped it was mashed up like deviled ham. In fact, Richard hoped he had put at least one of his eyes out with a spiny leg. The son of a bitch wouldn’t be eating lobster for a while, at least not one of those they stole. Richard smiled and winced when his face moved.

  He bent over the washboard, scooped up a bucket of salt water, and stood soaking his hand, watching Barter Island recede over his stern. It had been six years since Richard and his mother moved off the island and b
ought a house in Stonington on Deer Isle. When the bridge over Eggemoggin Reach was built, connecting Deer Isle to the mainland, Lucille said she wanted to move up there, where she could get to a doctor when she needed one and to the hospital if she had another fall. He bought her a little house near her friend Claire, on Hill Street, and lived with her there—except during the lobstering season, when he stayed overnight often at their old house on Barter Island.

  It was not until after they had settled in Stonington that he realized how isolated and backward life on Barter Island had been. No movies. No electricity except for a few who had generators. No running water. No telephones. In Stonington he could take Lucille for Sunday drives—to Bucksport or to Southwest Harbor to watch the sailboats. When he was not at home, she had a phone to call her sister or the doctor if anything went wrong or if she wanted to gossip with her friends. Tonight he would wait until it was dark so nobody would see his face when he went into Stonington Harbor; he would call her from the town landing and say he had engine work to do and would be late. Maybe by morning the swelling would be down, and it wouldn’t scare her so much. He touched his fat lip with his pinky.

  When Richard came around Merchant’s Island and drew within sight of Stonington and the quarry, he saw Cecil Barter’s store boat coming toward him and cursed his luck. Cecil was loaded with groceries from the mainland, and Richard had no doubt that he would want his rum.