“You can’t even look me in the eye,” Quinn said. “Make good on the share you agreed to, and I’ll quit after that.”
“Sorry,” Joyce said, more quietly.
Quinn got in close to him, trying to make Joyce look at him.
“I get my money,” Quinn said, nearly growling.
Joyce, who was past the age of fifty back then, laughed. “Or what?”
When Quinn grabbed Joyce’s suspender to try to make his point, it felt instant that he was being slammed to the deck. Joyce had him by the throat and cracked Quinn’s head down hard enough that he was out, for how long he didn’t know. When he came around, he first thought he was on the ice, laid out in a hockey game. But the sky was gray, the wind hard upon him, and Joyce sullen at the wheelhouse. They didn’t speak another word, three hours in. Joyce held back any money at all, on account of being assaulted. Mutiny was serious business, he intoned. Quinn’s father made the payment to Gina’s family and told Quinn it was time for him to move out. That Monday, he was on a new boat, a harder man now.
Quinn looks up from his memories and sees two soft boys on his own deck, struggling to do anything right. He could threaten them, or scream, but he can see it will do no good. Even baiting, an easy job, somehow seemed difficult for them as they sat with buckets of salted herring and filled the pouches. The trouble seemed less any physical shortcoming, but rather a wholesale inability to concentrate on anything for more than three seconds. He’d been told once that a lobster’s brain was the size of a grasshopper’s and not really a brain at all; these guys seemed worse than that.
Now, as the trapline winches up and it’s a time for some strength, these two boys have none at all. Quinn knows now about Joyce’s accumulated strength, something seeded over years and gained without conscious thought. If Quinn is going to come home with any profit, he’ll need to be the one doing the bulk of the work. He looks at them sitting tired on the gunwale, and he says, “I might have to cut back your shares.”
The taller one looks at him, but he’s clearly spent.
“Whatever,” he says.
The other one says nothing at all.
7.
WHEN HE’D GOTTEN OUT OF COLLEGE AND WAS HIRED at the local paper, Robbie drew what was known in that business as the “lobster shift,” the 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. yawner, sitting in a dark newsroom with the police scanners, listening for anything at all out of the static crackle. He always found himself nervous about what might happen in those dark hours, but in the silence he learned the true measure of his boring town. The occasional closing-time fight at a local bar, or a car driven off the curve on Middle Highway and into the woods, or the full-lunged domestic disturbance in the depths of the hours.
He did his hitch in the wee hours, and in time was granted his request to shift to the sports department, where he spent his first year taking phone-ins from coaches, to fill the agate columns of minor schools playing minor sports, still thinking then of how he’d soon enough make it to the Fenway Park press box, writing for some big metro newspaper. He has the occasional pang of nostalgia for all his thwarted ambitions. He’s not ashamed that he once aspired, even as he does no more.
Again, he cools it barside, awaiting his brother and another round of medicinal drinking. He spotted Quinn’s boat coming in by the breakwater as he sat at the window desk in the sports department, the third-floor long view like a widow’s walk. There’s a game later he’ll need to cover, but he sits now, happy for the respite.
And there’s Jean, the woman from the other night. She looks over and he gives her a nod, and surprisingly she’s on her feet, approaching.
“Happy happy hour,” she says. “You seem to spend a lot of time in bars.”
“But you’re here enough to notice. I’m waiting for my brother, again. He just got in.”
“From where?”
“Out there,” Robbie says. “He’s a lobsterman.”
“I hear they’re trouble.”
“At least three-quarters of them. But about that murder thing, it was a guy falling off his boat. The guy’s own fault.”
“I know, I already asked around on that.”
“Yeah,” Robbie says. “Most people in this town know the story.”
She isn’t backing off, to his surprise.
“Care to join us?” she says. “I’m with some friends.”
“If you stay here instead, I’ll buy the drinks.”
Jean slides onto the stool. “Fair enough,” she says.
She orders a glass of wine from Peg, who notes that their selection is rather limited, “red or white, but I think we’re out of white.” But when the glass is put in front of her, Jean doesn’t touch it anyway.
“How’s the sports writing?” she says.
“Same as always. And you? Did I ask you what you do?”
“You didn’t. Medical records. They transferred me up to manage the office up here.”
“Do you like it?”
“I like the pay, is what I like.”
The door kicks open and it’s Quinn, who comes shuffling over, bringing in the usual ocean gloom, and stands by Robbie at the bar.
“Jean, my brother, Quinn,” he says.
“You remembered my name,” she says.
“And how close are you two?” Quinn says, shaking her extended hand.
“This is our second date,” Jean says, to Quinn’s puzzlement.
“Kidding,” Jean says. “Just saying hello.”
“We’ll do a real date sometime,” Robbie says.
“Is that a declaration or an invitation?” Jean says. She digs her card out of her bag, hands it to him, and says, “Use the cell phone number.” And she’s off to her friends.
“And how did it go?” Robbie says, but already knowing.
“Not good,” Quinn says. “So bad, in fact, that you’re buying the beer today.”
Quinn is looking off at something, and now Robbie can see what it is. Freddy Santoro, who sits in the corner booth, chainsmoking as he has since they were all in high school. It’s a surprise to see him: he’s waiting to go on trial on a trafficking rap far more serious than anything Quinn ever got himself into. Santoro looks over, raising his head as if he’s about to say something, but Quinn looks away. He nods to Peg for a draft and waits for people to show up.
Robbie is aware of the outlines of Santoro’s story, more from dock gossip than from The Record, where Santoro’s troubles were reported briefly and without undue excitement. It involved a massive amount of hash oil packaged in plastic shampoo bottles, more than a hundred pounds, at a thousand dollars a pound of street value, in watertight boxes under the false bottom of the deck. The boat was not Santoro’s but didn’t seem to be anyone else’s. Santoro was the only person on the boat, a cabin cruiser that had been leased in Florida using a false front company. The boat had been boarded a few miles from the harbor, where he was sometimes employed running a shuttle skiff for day sailors to get to their boats. And Santoro wasn’t talking; always a nervous type, he’d spent a lot of nervous months in which the feds had tried to turn him. Whereas Quinn’s indiscretion was incidental to the lobstering, the amount of product and the matter of the boat made Santoro’s fishing (the stated purpose) mere camouflage to the true commerce. There had to have been some big hitters in the shadows of this deal, and even Freddie Santoro