“Don’t wait up,” I yelled out. He blew me a kiss, covered his mouth with the back of his hand as if he couldn’t contain the emotion.
I put her in gear and headed out to the trawl I was hauling. There was a handful of us that fished all year, moving our traps offshore when the water was colder and inshore when spring came, following the lobsters looking for warmer water.
I motored out, cutting across the channel and heading north, the tops of my buoys barely visible in the distance.
Ten minutes later, I pulled up alongside the first buoy and squinted, thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me. On top of my traps were buoys I didn’t recognize. I throttled over, gaffed the line, and pulled it to the rail.
The buoy was purple. A single thick stripe around the center.
In the summer, new buoys always appeared in the water, but they were recreational licenses, with one or two traps in the shallows off the coves where someone might catch a handful of lobsters if they were lucky. But summer folks were usually smart enough to stay far clear of the territories of working lobstermen. Those who weren’t smart enough lost their gear, cut loose to tumble on the bottom. Although, there were other methods as well.
The Frazier brothers had a chainsaw stashed on their boat for when they found a trap too close to their own. It was a sport for them, slicing the traps in half and throwing them back in the water.
Hank Bitts, nicknamed Bitty even though he was the size of a linebacker, was the most reasonable in the group, with his miniature beanbag lobsters he stocked up on at the dollar store. He’d give them out to kids at the lobster festival, but they had another purpose on the water. He’d stuff a couple of them in a trap he found too close to his own, but not before he mutilated them, leaving holes where the eyes should have been or cutting off a claw, or disemboweling it, as if to warn whomever found it in the trap that next time, it might be him that got mangled.
I’d never destroyed gear before. The way I saw it, you’d spin your wheels and start a war if you weren’t careful. People got shot, boats got sunk, sometimes nobody knew who started it, or over what, but by that time, it was its own thing and it didn’t matter.
But these were Finn’s.
He’d warned me, after all. As much as told me he was going to mess with my territory. I knew all the colors that fished out of this harbor and these weren’t ones I’d ever seen.
And I was going to cut them. That much I knew.
The tightness in my chest was back, not exactly pain, but a heaviness that made it hard to breathe. A heat spread up my neck, a ringing in my ears now. I blinked, swallowed, resisting the urge to slice my knife through the line, smash the buoy on the deck until it came apart in chunks. I had hours of work to do, and traps tumbling on the bottom into my own was not what I needed.
I let the buoy go, watched it drop back in the water, wobble, and right itself.
There were trawls to haul, and nothing was getting done sitting here, stewing in my own juices. I put the warp in the hauler and pulled up my first trap.
An hour passed before I took a water break. Then it was back to work: gaff the buoy; put the warp in the hauler; notch and throw back the punched and undersized lobsters, crabs, and whatnot; band the claws; bait the bags; and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
I’d been doing it so long, the movements were second nature, but the days were never the same. If it wasn’t the weather, it was the tide, or something acting up on the boat. Out here, there wasn’t time to think about anything but what you were doing, or you’d pay the price.
I’d had my share of days when I was lost in my thoughts and the wind would shift and a wave would crash over the bow, knocking the traps over the rail. Or the warp line would snake around my ankle, and I’d catch it right before I threw the trap over. My adrenaline spiking, the image of my body pitching over the rail and plunging into the cold water snapping me back to what I should have been concentrating on.
Now, I heard the hum of an engine off my bow and looked up to see a boat heading toward me, maybe fifty yards away.
I watched it before it slowed, almost to a stop, then turned right, changing its course to pass me. It was the Go Deep, the Miller brothers’ boat that ran out of Owl Head, nowhere near their territory. Finn ran with their crew back in high school. I knew he was still tight with one of the Millers. I grabbed the mike off the radio clip.
“Miller, Kelly here. You off my starboard?”
The VHF hummed, crackled. Then nothing.
I turned over the engine, threw her into gear, and throttled after the boat, the diesel engine growling. I was ten feet off Go Deep’s stern when the boat stopped. I pulled up, threw out a fender, and stood by the rail.
Keith Miller came out of the wheelhouse, a puzzled look on his face. He walked back to where I was standing.
“Didn’t hear me on the radio?” I yelled over to him.
“Don’t have it on. What’s up?”
Keith was the oldest of the Miller boys. He’d done some time in the state penitentiary years ago after his girlfriend fell off the back of his motorcycle and died. At the time, the girl’s father was a district counselor, and he’d lobbied hard for Keith to be charged with manslaughter, even though Keith had been sober and going the speed limit when she fell off the bike. Keith never even got a lawyer, just pleaded guilty and walked into jail, let go early for good behavior. He was a quiet guy, kept to himself. I’d never had a problem with Keith. It was his little brother, Wayne, I was looking for.
“Don’t see you over here much,” I pointed out.
“Going over to the island to pick up some gear. You need something?” He said it in a way that meant I better need something. And it better be important.
“I thought you were your brother,” I explained. “There are traps over there that don’t belong. On top of mine.”
He looked over to where I pointed, then looked back at me.
“You stop me for that?” he asked.
“I stopped you to tell you I’m cutting them,” I told him, the heat rising up my neck. “Tell your brother Wayne and his moron buddy you heard it straight from me.”
He stepped back when I said this, pushed his sunglasses up until they sat on top of his head. I saw his gaze flicker to the scar above my eye and rest there for a minute before he looked away. He knew I was talking about Finn.
The week after Finn and his cronies jumped me, Wayne had sported a black eye and a fat lip. I remember landing a punch or two before everything went black, but I knew I hadn’t done that kind of damage to Wayne. It got back to me that Keith had done it. When he found out the numbers; four to one, meaning four of them to one of me, he’d beat the shit out of his little brother. For being that kind of guy.