Headed for the Blue Fin loading dock, he guided the Lady Bee at a speed hardly raising a wake. Resting against a swivel stool he had installed years ago, he kept a hand on the ’68 Buick steering wheel, took in the air, and gazed within as he maintained a course he had followed into Portsmouth Harbor several thousand times— in childhood, adolescence, young manhood, maturity. His cough erupted then like a bark from an old dog, broke from his lungs as if from the depths of the sea. It’s happening, he thought. He was turning the corner.
Still the air remained calm, and he couldn’t help thinking yet again how satisfying it would be to putt unto an October horizon forever. All he had ever worked for would be gone from him before long, and he wondered once more if it had been his impulse to possess her that had cost him that prize of life in the first place. A country song he’d heard at the diner—she’ll never be yours if you can’t let her go—came to mind, and he knew he was guilty to a degree. His being possessive was what she had charged, while he believed, still, that her disloyalty with that eel who was her boss lay at the core of their marriage being such a failure.
Well, what does it matter now, and why keep fighting it? Nothing can likely be made right with her anyway, and what a dream it would be to sail on forever and have the old disappointments and resentments disappear in his wake.
The Lady Bee pulled along a dozen gulls like kites on strings. They squawked, flapped, dove like fighter planes as Warren eased a quarter turn to starboard to make a cross-tide approach to the wharf. He coughed some more. Passing a channel marker, he glanced beside the Lady Bee’s windshield; the hull slapped water and, as usual, delivered a spray of mist to his face, and the balmy air kept suggesting a peacefulness at odds with the tangled lines in his heart. Helen at the diner. Divorced with two children. She was long gone now, who knew where, but something in her smile, in her refilling of his coffee mug, had told him he’d have had a chance with her. Wasn’t she the kind of woman a fisherman was meant to marry?
The hull plowed on, and the breeze was countering by less than a knot. The swollen harbor yet again resembled a glassy infield tarpaulin, and back to the south, Warren thought, in Baltimore, New York, wherever it was, vendors and groundskeepers were gearing up for an afternoon game. Early fans would be loitering about a greasy ballpark’s shaded ramparts and balconies, avoiding their seats for a while, and both wanting and not wanting the players to trickle forth and engage in infield and hitting practice on a precious green lawn. There would be the intoxication of youth, soil, grass, while the game—a lesson he knew too well—could only conclude and disperse the loitering fans back to the hard streets and jobs they had escaped, never having touched foot or finger to the youthful turf or its sandy border and manicured infield. Leaning out from the protection of the windshield, Warren all at once thought he detected a sound, a stadium’s roar rising over the harbor—a chill raced down his spine—and he wondered why a sound of the kind might be visiting at a time like this. Could there be a supreme power after all, and was he being given a sign?
Baseball had been big in Warren’s life, though long ago, and he sensed a circling back as if in a dream. The ball field had been his boyhood preoccupation until his father died, when he had put away his bats, cleats, first baseman’s glove, and never unbagged them again. And though he listened to their games, he had declined giving his heart to the Red Sox in the intervening years; he had been too serious as a player to be a fan and hadn’t been to Fenway Park more than half a dozen times in three decades, always alone and always feeling haunted. He had been only once with Beatrice, when they were a young couple and the guests of her first employer, State Representative Virgil Pound, and his wife, Abby. Warren had hardly had a clue about illicit love or political power at the time, and he wondered still again, barking another cough, how things might have gone had he had but a notion of the skulduggery of which Virgil was capable. Being so attentive. His constant smile. The mere thought of him, after all these years, had Warren tightening his jaw yet again. If he could go back in time, he’d pound that politician into lobster bait, he thought. He and Beatrice would have a life without him. Like night and day. Sailing with the breeze. Senator Pound swallowed by the shimmering sea.
It was early to be checking out—not even ten o’clock—and Warren’s catch was meaningless. Less than a dozen, and all small. Still, and but for his coughing, he proceeded into the old routine without complaint. He hadn’t told a soul of the biopsy and what was happening—as if he had anyone besides Beatrice in mind. There was Marian to tell, though Beatrice had so attached their only child that Warren remained uncertain even today if Senator Pound had not cast the deciding vote there, too, no matter the crazed blood test of two decades ago.
Easing back the throttle, letting the Lady Bee obey her onward motion, Warren saw, alas, that underneath it all he was inclined toward accepting his fate; so much of his life had been given to tasting the salt of rejection. Whatever you do now, go with dignity, he told himself. Don’t even think of what’s happened because it’s history and may never be undone. Rise above resentment and go as a gentleman. Cuckold will be one perception, but some people, if you let them, will understand. What choice do you have than to hope that a handful of fellow fishermen and a few strangers will understand and validate your life?
Letting the engine bubble as he tied alongside, Warren turned off the motor and set about counting and checking the bands on his meager catch. Nine chix. His numbers were coming up short in all ways, and not one of the little baseball gloves out of the deep would make a pound. Not earnings enough to cover bait and gas, though that was an old lament and he had bigger fish to fry. What did he care if he made gas money? And why that roar of the crowd at a time like this? Did his unmedicated condition have him hallucinating? A siren call urging a manly way out? Should he go down to the sea with his boat and gear and take his memories with him? Should he let some bubbles, and oblivion, be his only reply? Did he have a choice?
Hefting the crate onto the dock, Warren extended his feet and climbed out, his breath filling his own ears. Using both hands he lugged his catch into the weighing station to receive credit on the books and a chit to place with others—money in the bank—in that certain location in his wallet. To think that modest lifting and climbing of this kind would exhaust him. If his capacity to breathe was going so quickly, how could his diagnosis come up anything but hopeless—and would the doc grant him not a measure of months or weeks, but merely of days?
There was water on the cement floor, and, in the big tanks, dark lobster shapes crawled the backs of others. The room remained empty until DiMambro Jr., minding things for his father during the off-hour, came out to check and weigh his catch. “Mr. Hudon, how goes it?”
Warren couldn’t help grinning at the strapping young man who had been a schoolboy ballplayer himself, famous for lacing line drives over the fence at Leary Field. “Gone better,” he said.
“Well, think of the days when there’s nothing at all.”
“Seen my share of those,” Warren said. The remarks had been repeated down through the years, while no one would address the obvious—that he was checking out early and had to have left traps unattended. Questionable work—like failing health—was something any fisherman would notice and never mention to the guilty party. Among fishermen, your business was your business. Still, they all knew what was up, and Warren knew they knew. You kept such things to yourself.
Loners all, Warren thought, returning to his boat. If you weren’t a loner in the beginning, fishing would have its way with you in time. If your wife didn’t hook up by shortwave, who but yourself would you ever have a chance to get to know?
Cranking up the old straight six, Warren untied and pushed off, motoring once more through the warm autumn air. How many times had he headed home like this—thinking of Beatrice? His life as a fisherman had been marked by smells, and in the early days when he returned home from boat, bait, and fish, there had been aromas about her he had found hard not to lick after like a dog. Perfume, cologne, hair rinses—they were as fresh as petals opening on shore— and from the beginning he had loved the idea of her as his wife, had relished the smell of her. The odors of fishing were usually foul, while her smell, like her smile in those early years, had been irresistible to him, even magical. To think he had loved her as madly as any woman might wish to be loved, and that she had turned away and taken up with someone else. To think that on a hundred occasions, passing on the stairs or in the kitchen, thoughts had stolen into his mind of taking up a butcher knife and plunging it into her chest. They were the surprises of life he had never been able to sort out. Dear Beatrice. He might forgive all she had done if she would let him, but then it came to him again, a vision over the water, how helpless he was against both loving and despising her. Would she even care that his life was ending? Why in the world would she?