LITMIR.BIZ

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worse with forty liquid fathoms beneath you.

      Then there was that night he saw her. This was in Jack’s Bar, when he’d only begun to venture there, tired of drinking alone on the new boat, and tired of avoiding Robbie as he had in those early months out of prison. She was with an old man who had the roughened look of someone only now at rest from a life of work. Quinn found a stool down on the lee side of the cash register and looked down into his beer mug; when he looked up, he saw her, the face a hard mask of pure hatred. He would never have recognized her, but the face was what told him what he needed. She was blinking furiously, and her face reddened; she had the tough look of someone who’d been trading shots since birth.

      This was the night she said nothing, before the rants and drunken keening, before she arrived at a point where going after him gave her the same pump as the drinks would, and became her tailored act, the endless victim. But it was this night, knowing that reaction across the bar might have been the one genuine moment between them, that he felt truly awful. He was being haunted by proxy.

      Two more first-timers on board for this run, predictably. Quinn pretty much knew it when he was casting off, but these guys are even worse than he’d expected. They’d come down to the docks that morning, looking for work. He’d said, “Okay, get on.”

      The two of them, eighteen or nineteen at best, looked at each other.

      “Right now?” one of them said.

      “Get on and off we go,” Quinn said. “We can still beat the day.”

      The other one laughed. “Seriously?”

      “I thought you wanted to work.”

      “I got plans tonight.”

      Quinn leaned against the gunwale. “So when do you want to go? Because I’m ready now. I have paperwork you can sign.”

      “What are you going to pay us?”

      “The shares split six ways,” Quinn said. “One share for the boat, one for the fuel, two for me as the owner and deck boss, one each for you as stern men. That’s if we go right now. If we kill half the day while you decide, then you two split one share and I take one more for wasted time.”

      Quinn looked at them in a hard squint. “But if you have such big plans . . .”

      “We’ll go,” the first one said, reaching for his phone. “Just let me call my house and let them know.”

      “You can call home when we’re out on the water. We need to get right to work.” Quinn knew better than to let anybody talk them out of this before they cast off.

      That was at eight in the morning; now it’s near midnight and the first of two hundred traps are coming up, and these boys are already fading fast. They have no strength, no stamina, and clearly no real work ethic. Quinn is doubling their output, even one-on-two, and he’s getting second thoughts about the shares. But this is the crew he gets now, reduced to scraping for warm bodies willing to board his dubious vessel.

      One of them simply stops, and sits, and takes out cigarettes.

      “You need to get back to work,” Quinn shouts.

      “I can’t anymore,” the kid says.

      “Yes, you can,” Quinn says, yet more ominously.

      This, uncountable times. Condemned to raw beginners who’ve bought the idea that lobstering is easy money. It only looks like that when you’re back on land, getting handed cash, or when you’re in the bar, watching it slip away. These two are getting their sea trial. First time out is always shit, bumbling over the traps and missing knots. Quinn keeps an eye on them, always, the same way Chuck Joyce watched him on his first run, all the years ago.

      The connection between his father and Chuck Joyce had the usual indistinct ligature surrounding many of Dad’s acquaintances. This was with Gina pregnant and school already bottomed out. He’d kept his grades just high enough to limp through junior-year sports. But when baseball ended and the report card dropped through the mail slot, his changed life was instantly upon him. Even then, he was surprised at how events pulled him along.

      There had been the short spell in which Gina, who had first tried to ignore that she was pregnant, had kept her mouth shut and considered her options. But her mother was immediately on to something—preternaturally, it seemed, but maybe just not fooled by what was going on. It was as if her nascent maternity was wafting in the air. Decisions then were made. One of them was for Quinn to be forbidden to see Gina until he was working.

      The old man had his own ideas. Furious on all accounts, he brought Quinn down to the docks, where Chuck Joyce sat on his cedar-planked Jonesport, the Cassie Lee.

      “Need some help down here?” the old man had called to him, sounding too rehearsed.

      “I might,” Chuck had called back. “If this one’s not a pussy.”

      Quinn never figured the connection, or if there was a human Cassie Lee. But he began the work with Chuck, his apparent purgatory for cleansing all manner of sins. He was supposed to be making money to support the new baby, and that meant going out on as many runs as Chuck could muster. The Cassie Lee was a short boat, drafted for inshore work, but Chuck seemed intent on driving her far past what was logically safe for a light craft with a tight cabin. The Cassie had a narrow beam and that meant it could move fast to open water. But once the work began, she got tippy. The dance of the work on a rolling deck struck Quinn as nearly a new sport to try out for, and he took to it. He was, quickly enough, fast and efficient; the more facile parts of the work became quickly mastered skills. He learned the nuances: banding a lobster’s claws, you don’t hold it upside down, which makes the lobster nervous; nervous lobsters drop claws, and a one-claw lobster is a cull, and a cull is wasted money. Tie your buoy hitch not quite right. Missed routes change the knots, into cow hitches, clove hitches, and buntline hitches, all of which looked much the same but won’t always hold the pot on your snood, nor your snood to your trapline. A pot lost because of a bad knot shears fifty dollars off your take-home. Quinn also learned, quickly enough, that Chuck was cheating him.

      The matter of shares was always a tricky one, with many junctures of potential malfeasance. Handshake deals could be interpreted far more broadly than the U.S. Constitution. The dealings were done word-of-mouth; when you went out on a boat being told you get one share of six, but then were told back on land that it had been a one-of-eight that had been negotiated, it was your word against another’s. And he learned that when you stood there watching a wholesaler count out the money into the boat owner’s hand, that there were often side agreements between them that held back other money. There was, in all that, complex kickbacks that could serve to further devalue the stern men. Quinn at sixteen was already a regular at the bars near the waterline, and the guys from other boats sat and explained to him how he was getting royally screwed by Joyce, who apparently was notorious. Quinn, still the hothead at that young age, got increasingly furious, even though his fellow-men (laughing at full throat at his teapot redness) reminded him it was the way all the first-timers broke in. Quinn the teenager couldn’t imagine Chuck Joyce’s life, of upkeep on a boat and small margins and pushy ex-wives and maybe some bad personal habits that had become too hard to shake. Quinn just wanted his money.

      There was a two-day run to the South Channel that went very badly. All manner of rotten luck was visited upon them. Every string of traps seemed to come up with berried hens (which had to be notched and tossed back, the real time-killer), with shorts (some so small he could measure against his hand to know they had to go back), or with pistols (which, clawless, would take three or four molts to regrow the missing limbs). Then there were the traps that came up with nothing, one after another, so many empty bedrooms Joyce took up his binoculars and began to scan the horizon for poachers.

      “What in the hell is going on?” he said generally.

      The number of legal bugs in the live tank was woeful. They came into port bone-tired and frustrated. Quinn had a payment scheduled for Gina that Friday, the payments set up between his parents and hers, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He could see that

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