“Why do you know about my dad’s—oh, never mind.” Small-town life. Not that Barton wasn’t small, it was, but next to Little Harbor it was a bustling, full-blown metropolis. “You don’t need a sternman,” she said. “You have a sternman. You have Gavin Tracey.” Gavin Tracey had been hauling with Russell all summer.
Russell coughed and said, “My sternman’s useless.” Zoe had told Eliza a few months ago that when a healthy person coughed or cleared his throat before speaking he or she was probably lying. It was a signpost. This was one of the fascinating and sometimes useful pieces of information Zoe had picked up from obsessively watching Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel.
“That’s the first I ever heard of a Tracey being useless,” Eliza said. The Traceys were hardworking and loyal; most of them came out of the womb holding a V-notch.
Not literally, of course.
On the phone she heard a familiar sound that she knew was Russell sucking air in through the gap between his front teeth. He’d never gotten the space fixed. Children in Little Harbor did not get their teeth fixed or their palates expanded or their eyes checked or their reading deficits tutored as a matter of course the way they did in Barton. She herself had a slightly crooked eyetooth and still, in the odd moment, alone in front of a mirror, considered (and then always quickly abandoned the idea of) adult braces.
“All right. He’s not useless, but he needs the day off tomorrow and the lobsters are really friggin’ crawling. I can’t keep up. I’m stuck.”
“You’re stuck? There’s nobody else in the whole town you can ask to haul with you, Russell?” By this point Eliza was arguing more for show than anything else. A big chunk of her wanted to know if she still had it in her.
“Okay, okay, Eliza. Are you going to make me say it?”
“I think I am.”
“I want to haul Charlie’s traps while we’re out there. Someone should. Some of the guys offered but he wouldn’t let anyone.”
Eliza knew it was killing Charlie to leave his traps untended, so she let Russell continue. Technically, they needed permission from Marine Patrol to haul someone’s traps.
“I thought if you came with me he’d be okay with it. Anyway, we won’t tell him until it’s all done, until we give him the money, and he’s not going to get mad at you.”
“Okay,” Eliza said, a little frisson of excitement bubbling up despite herself. “Fine. I’ll haul with you. What time are you going to pick me up, around seven thirty?”
“Yuh.”
“Really?” He was taking it easy on her. Nice.
“Hell no, Eliza, of course not. Day’s practically over by seven thirty. Why don’t you go ahead and set your alarm for four. Unless you need to do your hair first.”
“Go to hell, Russell.” Do her hair.
“Pick you up at four thirty.”
“Fine.”
Now they were, improbably but also inevitably, on the way to Russell’s boat, a forty-seven-foot fiberglass beauty named Legacy. Eliza was wearing the clothes Russell had brought her: a pair of boots that were slightly too big, overalls that fit dismayingly well. She actually looked the part. White cotton gloves, because that’s what the full-timers wore. It was the part-timers who wore the blue rubber gloves; the full-timers always had the tanks of hot water to warm their hands in when it was really cold. You got a real ribbing on the VHF if you wore the blue gloves. “You washing dishes over there?” she remembered her dad saying to someone more than once. “You just get your nails done and don’t want to mess them up?”
Lobsterman humor was a very specific kind of humor.
The sun was rising spectacularly, pinks and oranges that later would turn to a clear and cloudless blue. That was the best part of summer hauling: the sunrises. In the fall it was the way the mist hung over the harbor, and in the winter, well, it was when the day was done.
Russell’s skiff had an outboard motor; Charlie still rowed his with oars, he was as old school as it got. Lots of the fishermen’s houses in Little Harbor had an old-fashioned skiff in the front yard, given over as a plaything when it got too old to serve its original purpose. Kids would fool around in them, practicing hauling traps, pretending to be their daddies.
“Think you could still row a skiff if you had to, Eliza?” Russell asked, pulling the rope on his outboard.
“Sure I could.” She’d always had great balance with the oars, it was one of the many skills from her childhood that had absolutely no bearing on her present life.
On Legacy, Russell started the engine. The key was in the ignition already—they all were, same as they were in all of the pickup trucks parked at the wharf, and you’d no sooner touch another fisherman’s truck or boat without permission than you’d dump a tankful of keepers back into the ocean. He busied himself with his electronics and his compass, switching on the GPS, consulting the radar.
The water was dark and inscrutable as always but the surface was smooth like glass: no chop. That was good. Eliza wasn’t ready for chop, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Russell, in the same way that she wasn’t about to admit that part of her was nervous to be out on the water, scared to make a mistake. This wasn’t a friendly afternoon sail on A Family Affair with Rob doing most of the work.
Russell uncovered the bait box and Eliza said, “Holy cow, I forgot how much this bait stinks,” and made a big show of gagging in case that caused Russell to change his mind, bring her safely back to shore, and let her get on with her day.
“You get used to the smell,” said Russell. “You probably remember that.”
He put the baskets in place and filled them with circulating salt water. She figured Gavin Tracey did some of this stuff usually—she might get fired for incompetence, she was just standing there like a total landlubber. But she didn’t know Russell’s boat the way she knew her father’s and didn’t really remember what to do and she didn’t want to make a mistake and cause Russell extra work. For all the joking, she knew that the good fishermen took their work seriously and wanted everything done the way they wanted it done, no exceptions.
Once a guy had borrowed her dad’s skiff and tied it back up with a different knot than the one he’d found it tied up with and, man, hadn’t her dad gone apeshit on that guy, didn’t talk to him for half the year at least.
“I guess,” she said, about the bait, but she wasn’t sure. The herring were bigger and creepier than she recalled. They reminded her in an unsettling way of Evie’s pet goldfish. And they really did smell deadly. Also, it was discomfiting to have so many wide dead eyes staring at you, like they were keeping a ghastly secret that they might, at any minute, decide to share with you.
Once the engine was warmed up, Russell opened the boat to cruising speed and said, “I’m not going to put you through a real offshore trip today. Don’t think you could handle it.”
He didn’t look at her when he said that, but she could see a smile playing at his lips.