6
The mail boat was departing for its morning run as I parked at the Casco Bay terminal, a handful of passengers on board, most of them tourists, watching as the wharf receded, taking in the bustle of the fishing boats and the ferries. The mail boat was an integral part of life on the bay, a twice-daily link between the mainland and the folk on Little Diamond and Great Diamond and Diamond Cove, on Long Island and Cliff Island and Peaks Island, on Great Chebeague, the largest of the islands on Casco Bay, and on Dutch Island, or Sanctuary as it was sometimes called, the most remote of the ‘Calendar Islands.’ The boat was a point of connection not only between those who lived by the sea and those who lived on the sea, but also between the inhabitants of the various outposts on Casco Bay.
The sight of the mail boat always brought with it a hint of nostalgia. It seemed to belong to another time, and it was impossible not to look upon it and imagine its earlier incarnations, the importance of that link when travel between the islands and the mainland was not so easy. The mail boat brought letters and packages and freight, but it also brought, and disseminated, news. My grandfather, my mother’s father, took me on one of the mail boat’s runs shortly after my mother and I returned to Maine in the aftermath of my father’s death, as we fled north to escape the spreading stain of it. I wondered then if it might be possible for us to live on one of those islands, to leave the mainland behind forever, so that when the blood reached the limits of the coast it would drip slowly into the sea and be dispersed by the waves. Looking back, I realize that I was always running: from my father’s legacy; from the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, my wife and child; and, ultimately, from my own nature.
But now I had stopped running.
The Sailmaker was, not to put too fine a point on it, a dump. It was one of the last of the old wharf bars in Portland, the ones that were built to cater for the needs of lobstermen, dock workers, and all of those whose livelihood depended on the grittier aspects of Portland’s working harbor. It was there long before anyone thought that tourists might want to spend time on the waterfront, and when the tourists did eventually appear they gave the Sailmaker a wide berth. It was like the dog on the street that snoozes in the yard, its fur pitted with the scars of old battles, its mouth, even in repose, always baring yellowed teeth, its eyes rheumy beneath half-closed lids, every aspect of it exuding restrained menace and promising the loss of a finger, or more, if a passing stranger were foolish enough to attempt a pat on the head. Even the name on the sign that hung outside the bar was barely legible, its paintwork ignored for years. Those who needed it knew where to find it, which was true of locals and a certain type of new arrival, the type that was not concerned with fine dining, and lighthouses, and nostalgic thoughts about mail boats and islanders. That kind sniffed out the Sailmaker and found their place in it, once they’d snapped at the other dogs, and taken their bites in return.
The Sailmaker was the only business still open on its wharf; around it, shuttered windows and padlocked doors secured premises that had nothing inside left to steal. Even to enter them would be to risk plummeting through the floor and into the cold waters beneath, for these buildings, like the wharf itself, were slowly rotting into the sea. It seemed a miracle that the whole structure had not collapsed many years before, and while the Sailmaker appeared to be more stable than its neighbors, it sat on the same uncertain pilings as they did.
So it was that drinking in the Sailmaker brought with it a sense of danger on a great many levels, the prospect of drowning in the bay due to stepping through a busted board being a relatively minor concern when compared with the more immediate threat of physical violence, serious or minor, from one or more of its customers. For the most part, even the lobstermen no longer frequented the Sailmaker, and the ones who did were less interested in fishing than in drinking steadily until fluid came out of their ears. They were lobstermen in name only, for those who ended up in the Sailmaker had resigned themselves to the fact that their days of being contributory members of society, of working hard for an honest wage, were long behind them. The Sailmaker was where you ended up when there was nowhere else left to go, when the only ending in sight was a funeral attended by people who knew you only by your seat at the bar and the drink that you ordered, and who would be mourning their own lives as much as yours as you were lowered into the ground. Every coastal town used to have a bar like the Sailmaker; in a way, the lost were more likely to be remembered in such places than they were among the remnants of their own family. In that sense, the Sailmaker was, nominally as well as figuratively, an apt venue in which to end one’s days, for it was the sailmaker on board ship who would sew the dead man up in his hammock, passing a final stitch through the nose of the departed to ensure that he was dead. At the Sailmaker, no such precautions were necessary: its patrons were drinking themselves to death, so when they stopped ordering drinks it was a pretty sure sign that they’d succeeded.
The Sailmaker was owned by a man named Jimmy Jewel, although I had never heard him called anything other than ‘Mr. Jewel’ to his face. Jimmy Jewel owned a lot of places like the Sailmaker and the wharf upon which it stood: apartment buildings that barely came up to code; ruined structures on waterfronts and side streets in towns all the way from Kittery to Calais; and vacant lots that were used for nothing but storing filthy pools of stagnating rainwater, lots that were not for sale and bore no indication of ownership beyond a series of ‘No Trespassing’ signs, some of them reasonably official in appearance, others just scrawled boards with increasingly varied and creative spellings of the word ‘Trespassing.’
What these buildings and lots had in common was the possibility that they might, at some future date, be valuable to a developer. The wharf on which the Sailmaker sat was one of a number tipped to become part of the new Maine State Pier redevelopment, a $160 million effort to revitalize the commercial waterfront involving a new hotel, soaring offices, and a cruise ship terminal which had since been dropped and now looked to be an increasingly distant prospect. The port was struggling. The International Marine Terminal that had once been filled with cargo containers waiting to be taken out on ships and barges, or transported inland by truck and train, was quieter than it had ever been. The number of fishing boats bringing their catches to the fish exchange on the Portland Fish Pier had fallen from 350 to 70 in the space of fifteen years, and the livelihoods of the fishermen were being threatened further by a reduction in their number of permitted fishing days. The high-speed Cat service between Portland and Nova Scotia was ending, taking with it much needed jobs and income for the port. Some were suggesting that the survival of the waterfront depended on increasing the number of bars and restaurants permitted on the wharfs, but the danger was that the port would then become little more than a theme park, with a handful of lobstermen left to eke out a meager living and provide some local color for the tourists, leaving Portland just a shadow of the great deep-water harbor that had defined the city’s identity for three centuries.
And in the middle of all this uncertainty squatted Jimmy Jewel, sizing up the angles, his finger damp and raised to the wind. It wouldn’t be true to say that Jimmy didn’t care about Portland, or its piers, or its history. He just cared about money more.
But decaying buildings, although a significant part of his portfolio, did not represent the sum total of Jimmy’s business interests. He had a slice of interstate and cross-border trucking, and he knew more about the smuggling of narcotics than almost anyone on the northeastern seaboard. Jimmy’s main deal was pot, but he’d suffered a couple of serious hits in recent years, and now he was rumored to be taking a step back from the drug business in favor of more legitimate enterprises, or those enterprises that gave the appearance of legitimacy, which was not the same thing. Old habits died hard, and when it came to criminality Jimmy kept his hand in as much for the money as for the pleasure he got in breaking the law.
I didn’t have to call ahead to make an appointment with him. The heart of Jimmy’s empire was the Sailmaker. He had a small office in back, but it was used mainly for storage. Instead, Jimmy could always be found at the bar, reading newspapers, answering occasional calls on an ancient phone, and drinking endless cups of coffee. He was there when I entered that morning. There was nobody else with him, apart from a bartender in a stained white t-shirt who was hauling in crates of beer from the storeroom. The bartender’s name was Earle Hanley, the same Earle Hanley who had tended bar at the Blue Moon on the night that Sally Cleaver was beaten to death by her boyfriend, for the owner of the Sailmaker and the Blue Moon were one and the same: Jimmy Jewel.
Earle looked up as I came in. If he liked what he saw, he made a manly effort to disguise the fact. His face creased, wrinkling like a ball of paper that had just been squeezed hard, and, even in repose, Earle’s face already resembled the last walnut in the bowl a week after Thanksgiving. He doubled as one of the guys who occasionally doled out beatings to recalcitrants who crossed Jimmy and incurred his displeasure. He appeared to have been constructed from a series of balls of encrusted lipids, the topmost fringed with greasy black hair. Even his thighs were circular. I could almost hear the fats sluicing around in his body as he moved.