"Do you think they should build it?"
"I don't know." She thought about it while she flipped eggs. "Hahd to watch yo-ah children leave, go off to the city. You only get to see them once or twice a year
. But you know if they build the terminal, it'll be up on that ridge spoiling the view and stinking up the breeze for the next hundred years. Think of all the people who would go by and curse whoever put it there. I can't imagine that would do your karma much good."
"So why not sell it to Sam junior? He says he doesn't want to see any development."
"What Sam junior doesn't want is development that he doesn't have his fingers into," she said. "This isn't about development anyhow, not with him. He wants to get control of the Calder family trust away from his father, so he'll do anything he can to put some stones in the road. As soon as Sam senior is cold in the ground, Sam junior will start building something up theyah to make himself moah money. Might not be an oil terminal, but it would probably stink just as bad."
* * *
Eleanor poured two more cups of coffee when Louis and Sam junior came tramping through the kitchen door. "Oh, I can't stay," Sam said, but he took the cup anyhow. He shook his head. "My father is going to be apoplectic."
"You work for your father?" I was surprised, given that they seemed to be at cross-purposes.
"I work with him," Sam said. I could see Louis suppressing a grin. "It's a family business. We were going to call it a co-op, but it's more like an unco-op. He hates it when I'm late."
"He don't like it much when yo-ah on time," Louis said.
"Louis," Eleanor said with a warning tone in her voice.
"Yeah, yeah," Louis said. Nicky giggled.
"Listen," I said, to nobody in particular. "Is there a car-rental outfit up here someplace? If I'm going to be here for a few days, I'd kind of like to be mobile."
"Nope," Sam said. "Not if you're talking about something like Hertz rent-a-car. If you ride up to Lubec with me, though, I can fix you up. I'm sure the guy who takes care of our vehicles has something you can use, if I ask him."
"I would appreciate that. You don't use Gevier?"
"No. Nothing wrong with him, it's just that he's too far south. Lubec is north of here, Gevier's place is south. He's a good mechanic, though. You don't need to worry about your car." He took a slug of coffee and handed the cup back to Eleanor. "Thanks, Eleanor, I really have to go."
"You sure you won't stay for breakfast, Sam? I'm cooking for Louis anyhow, I'd be happy
"
He grinned at her. "You love to cause trouble, don't you?"
"Well, I don't get out much," she said. "I have to take advantage of whatever oppahtunities come my way."
"I'll give my father your regards."
* * *
Nicky stayed behind. He wanted to come along at first, but I was no match for Louis's horse, and his cats and his chickens. I tried to remember what I had been like at Nicky's age, but I couldn't. I couldn't have been like Nicky, though. He was more adept socially at five than I was at twenty-eight. Maybe something had happened to set me back, I don't know. No profit in sweating about it now.
Sam junior was a deliberate driver. He kept near the speed limit, came to a full stop at intersections, waited for oncoming traffic to clear. He did talk to me almost the whole trip, too. I was beginning to understand what Eleanor had meant when she called him "windy." And in a funny way, he talked almost as though I weren't there, not in any real sense. It was like he didn't need me, he just needed a pair of ears, so I didn't pay much attention to what he was saying, I just made appropriate noises once in a while.
The trip took about thirty-five minutes. We passed a small airport, then some houses, and then the outskirts of a town, where the dwellings ran a little closer to one another, together with a post office, liquor store, grocery, VFW hall. Just when I thought we were just about to reach the downtown, the center of the place, the Atlantic Ocean cut it off, as though it had slashed the bigger half off of some larger, livelier, and more prosperous town, leaving the smaller, quieter section standing. What passed for a downtown was really only one long block butted up against the waterfront. There was a large island a hundred yards or so offshore, and the water ran hard enough in the rock-lined channel between to make you think twice, look down at your feet and make sure they stayed safely back on the sidewalk. You fell in, you'd be halfway to England before you could even yell for help. Calder's office was in a stately old Victorian a block off the town's main drag. Sam junior parked his pickup out front.
The offices of Calder's Blueberries were decorated in tasteful shades of powder blue and gray. A woman sat behind a desk, talking on a telephone. She looked blankly at me, waved to Calder. Just then a door in the back burst open and a short old guy came fuming out. He looked like he'd been pickled in his own malevolence. He had a small pot stomach, and when he stood with his hands on his hips he thrust it forward belligerently, along with his chin. "You couldn't leave it alone, could you. You had to go out there."
"I don't want to have this debate again," Sam junior said.
"Goddammit, Sam! I'm trying to do something to build this company back up again, and this community, and instead of helping me out, you stab me in the back." He turned on his heel, took two steps back toward his office, turned back again. "What a piece of shit you turned out to be." He turned again, stomped back where he'd come from, slammed the door behind him.
Calder looked at me. "My father," he said, looking bleak. "My father. Come on, let's go get you that car."
* * *
"Roscoe, you seen Hobart?" Roscoe, Sam junior had told me, was a French Canadian guy who worked at Hobart's garage. Roscoe was exploring the mysteries of a Holly four-barrel that he had sitting on a workbench. He was a dark-haired guy, five eight or so, and solid, looked like he was ready to fight you. He looked up from what he was doing, a wide grin on his face. He reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt because you couldn't be sure if he was smiling, grimacing, or just showing you his teeth. "Over da smokehouse, maybe," he said. "De old man call over here. Look for you, aye?"
"He got me already," Sam said sorrowfully.
"Someday," Roscoe said. "Someday you ask him if his pee-pee reach his asshole, aye?"
"You think I ought to tell him to go fuck himself?"
"He wait for dat, I tink." Roscoe shook his head slowly, still grinning, or showing his teeth, or whatever it was he did. His accent was much different than the down east accent. "Dat old man too mean to die," he said, "too old to fight, too ugly to fuck. I tink you maybe stuck wit him. Check over da smokehouse, I tink Hobart over dere."
The smokehouse was across the street on a wooden pier that stuck out into the vicious currents of what was called Passamaquoddy Bay. The back of it was a long red barn-looking thing with vents in the roof, and the front was small, no bigger than one room, white clapboards, and cedar shingles on the roof. We stopped on the sidewalk to let a single car pass by. Whoever it was driving waved to Sam, and he waved back.
"Hobart own the smokehouse, too?"
"Yep. Maine multitasking. Most men up here have to wear a lot of different hats to make one living. There's not enough business to be just one thing."
The door to the white building was unlocked, but there was nobody inside. We went back out and around to the smokehouse. There was a row of low, door-sized openings that ran along the length of the place, and there were piles of sawdust on the floor inside, smoldering. Rows of wooden poles bridged the upper part of the place, and what I found out later were herring fillets hung from the poles. They averaged about eight inches in length and were a dark, dark brown, almost black color. Calder stuck his head into one of the openings. "Hobart!" he yelled. "You in there?"
A tall guy with unruly white hair stepped out of the far end of the smokehouse. He was taller than me, maybe six three or so, broader through the shoulders than I am, and sinewy, made you think of a lifetime of hard work and exposure. He wore suspenders to keep his pants up, probably because his bony ass didn't have enough shape to give a belt any purchase. He had an air about himmaybe it was the sparse white beard, the kind old guys grow when they're bored with shaving, or maybe it was the wrinkled shirt, the unkempt hair, or just the look on his face, but I would have bet you then and there that this guy was beyond caring, that everybody who'd loved him was gone. He was just playing out the hand.
"Right heah," he said. "No need yellin'."
"Hobart." Sam turned in his direction and started telling him how my van was broken down, how I was staying out at the Averys' and needed a car for a few days. Hobart walked up, stuck his hand out, and I shook it. It felt like I had a handful of what I'd spent the morning wrestling out of Louis Avery's pasture, rough, no inner warmth of its own, covered with hard bark. He didn't squeeze in that adolescent way that some guys do, but I got the feeling he was taking my measure somehow, and more out of habit than interest.
"How's my old friend Louis?" It struck me as an odd question to ask, in a place so small. How could you avoid running over the guy every other day?
"Seems fine to me. You want me to say hello for you?"
Hobart chuckled. "Long as you can do it when Eleanor ain't around. She thinks I'm a bad influence."
"That so?"
"Ayuh," Hobart said. "Tell the Frenchman to give you the Brat."
* * *
It was a Subaru Brat, sort of a miniature pickup truck, fiercely rusted and seriously cramped for a guy my size. I wondered if Hobart had chosen it out of some sadistic impulse, but Roscoe told me the thing was the most dependable piece of shit they had. It started with a roar and ran raggedly, stood there on the lot in front of Hobart's garage and quivered like a dog who'd been in cold water too long. Roscoe told me, while we waited for it to warm up, that his band was going to be playing at the VFW that night, and that I was invited. Sam Calder made his way back over to his office to resume the cockfight with his old man. You assume, when you're on the outside looking in, that families tend to be, you know, love, caring, mutual support, all that shit. Maybe not exactly the Brady Bunch, but everybody on the same side, at least. Right then I got an image of Sam and his father: two cats with their tails tied together, thrown over a tree branch. No matter what their motivations, they would only continue to slash at each other, each unable to help either himself or the other guy. How do you get into something like that? Was I, even now, taking the steps that would lead to Nicky and me being thrown across that same branch?
Jesus.
Roscoe seemed genuinely pleased when I told him I'd probably see him at the VFW.
All the other drivers waved at me on the way back to the Averys'. I mean, all of them. They did it in the minimalist way Mainers have, nothing very demonstrative, just a quick flash of one open hand. Hobart's vehicle, it seemed, had given me entrance into some private club, and even though they were probably waving to the Subaru and not to me, I found myself waving back, Hey, how are you, hello, whoever you are. It got me in the habit of looking at whoever was riding inside the cars, not just at the outside of the vehicles. These were people out here, individuals, not just cars in my way, slowing me down.
I took a wrong turn somewhere on my way back to Louis's house. I knew right away that I was on the wrong road, because the stream was missing. I didn't turn around, though, I followed the road as it twisted and turned past what I assumed were abandoned farms. There weren't any farmhouses, just a decaying wooden shed here and there, and fields of tall yellow grass banded by rock walls. It was impressive, in a sort of melancholy way, because of the sheer volume of backbreaking labor it must have taken to build those walls. Some poor bastard busted his ass for what had to be decades to hump the rocks out of his fields, and now the fields were empty and untended. In some places the woods had taken over, the stone walls ran through stands of trees, and not skinny ones, either, these were mature, thick at the bottom. I didn't know how long it took to grow a tree that big. A hundred years? More? And the poor son of a bitch that cleared the fields to begin with, built those walls, wrestled his living from that hard ground, he was long gone, dead, forgotten, nameless, while the fucking rocks endured. Didn't seem fair.
A truck came around the curve in front of me, a pale green GMC pickup truck with oversized tires, looked like a '74 or '75, two teenagers in it. The kid driving it was going way too fast and using most of the road, so both he and I were very busy for a couple of seconds. It was a good thing the Subaru was on the small sidethere was room for it in the ditch. The GMC's horn bleated at me, and I jerked the Subaru back on the road, none the worse for wear, it appeared. I looked in the rearview mirror just in time to see the pickup round the corner behind me and vanish from sight.
Stupid kids.
It was hard to stay mad at them for too long, though, because I wasn't that far removed from being a stupid kid myself.
A few miles farther on, I slowed down, began looking for a place to turn around. That's when I saw the guy. He was huge, bigger than me, bigger than Rosario even. He had straight black hair, sloping shoulders, sleepy eyes. It was hard to tell his age, I would have guessed early twenties. He was carrying a bicycle under one meaty arm. The front wheel of the bike was badly bent, some of the spokes were broken off, and the rubber tire hung loose from the metal rim. I pulled over to the side of the road, intending to ask directions, and the guy looked down at the ground, not at me. I rolled the window down. "Hey, buddy. How you doing?"