“Boy, it’s cold,” I said, scuffing my hands together like a sports fan. “Tough day to go boating, huh?”
The boatman’s eyebrows and two-day beard were bright red, but not brighter than his sun-scrubbed flesh, everywhere it showed: cheeks, nose, ears and the corroded knuckles he rubbed under his chin now as he tried to work out a response.
I heard and felt the boat’s body clunking as it bobbed against the pier. My thoughts wandered to the underwaterropellers, whirring silently in the water. If I were closer to the water I’d want to reach in and touch the propeller, it was so stimulating to my kinesthetic obsessions. “Tugboat! Forgettaboat!” I ticced, and jerked my neck, to hurl the syllables sideways into the wind.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” he said carefully. I’d expected his voice to come out like Yosemite Sam’s or Popeye’s, scabrous and sputtering. Instead he was so stolid and patrimonial with his New England accent-Ya nawt from around heah, ah you?-that I was left with no doubt which of us resembled the cartoon character.
“No, actually.” I affected a bright look-Illuminate me, sir, for I am a stranger in these exotic parts! It seemed as likely he’d shove me off the dock into the water or simply turn away as continue the conversation. I straightened my suit again, fingered my own collar so I wouldn’t be tempted to finger his fluorescent hood, to crimp its Velcro edge like the rim of a piecrust.
He examined me carefully. “Urchin season runs October through March. It’s cold work. Day like today is a walk in the park.”
“Urchin?” I said, feeling as I said it that I’d ticced, that the word was itself a tic by definition, it was so innately twitchy. It would have made a good pronunciation for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince’s glyph.
“These are urchin waters out around the island. That’s the market, so that’s what’s fished.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, that’s terrific. Keep it up. You know anything about the place up the hill-Yoshii’s?”
“Probably you want to talk to Mr. Foible.” He nodded his head at the fishing dock’s small shack, from the smokestack of which piped a tiny plume of smoke. “He’s the one does dealings with them Japanese. I’m just a bayman.”
“Eatmebayman!-thanks for your help.” I smiled and tipped an imaginary cap to him, and headed for the shack. He shrugged at me and received another carton off the boat.
“How can I help you, sir?”
Foible was red too, but in a different way. His cheeks and nose and even his brow were spiderwebbed with blossoming red veins, painful to look at. His eyes too showed veins through their yellow. As Minna used to say about the St. Mary’s parish priest, Foible had a thirsty face. Right on the wooden counter where he sat in the shack was evidence of what the face was thirsty for: a cluster of empty long-neck beer bottles and a couple of gin quarts, one still with an inch or so to cover the bottom. A coil heater glowed under the countertop, and when I stepped inside, he nodded at the heater and the door to indicate I should shut the door behind me. Besides Foible and his heater and bottles the shack held a scarred wooden file cabinet and a few boxes of what I guessed might be hardware and fishing tackle beneath their layers of grease. In my two-day suit and stubble I was the freshest thing in the place by far.
ght=”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”›I could see this called for the oldest investigatory technique of them alclass="underline" I opened my wallet and took out a twenty. “I’d buy a guy a drink if he could tell me a few things about the Japanese,” I said.
“What about ’em?” His milky eyes made intimate contact with the twenty, worked their way back up to meet mine.
“I’m interested in the restaurant up the hill. Who owns it, specifically.”
“Why?”
“What if I said I wanted to buy it?” I winked and gritted through a barking tic, cut it down to a momentary “-charp!”
“Son, you’d never get that thing away from them. You better do your shopping elsewhere.”
“What if I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse?”
Foible squinted at me, suddenly suspicious. I thought of how Detective Seminole had gotten spooked by the Minna Men, our Court Street milieu. I had no idea whether such images would reverberate so far from Gotham City.
“Can I ask you something?” said Foible.
“Shoot.”
“You’re not one of them Scientologists, are you?”
“No,” I said, surprised. It wasn’t the impression I’d imagined I was making.
He winced deeply, as though recalling the trauma that had driven him to the bottle. “Good,” he said. “Dang Scientologists bought the old hotel up the island, turned it into a funhouse for movie stars. Hell, I’ll take the Japanese any day. Least they eat fish.”
“Muscongus Island?” I’d only wanted to feel the word in my mouth at last.
“What other island would I be talking about?” He squinted at me again, then held out his hand for the twenty. “Give me that, son.”
I turned it over. He laid it out on the counter and cleared his rheumy throat. “That money there says you’re out of your depth here, son. Japanese yank out a roll, the smallest thing they got’s a hundred. Hell, before they shut down the urchin market, this dock used to be littered with thousand-dollar bank bands from them Japanese paying off my baymen for a haul.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Humph.”
“Eat me.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“I said tell me about it. Explain about the Japanese to a guy who doesn’t know.”
“You know what uni is?”
“Forgive my ignorance.”
“That’s the national food of Japan, son. That’s the whole story around Musconguspoint anymore, unless you count the Scientologists camped out in that damn hotel. Japanese family’s got to eat uni least once a week just to maintain their self-respect. Like you’d want a steak, they want a plate of urchin eggs. Golden Week-that’s like Christmas in Japan-uni’s the only thing they eat. Except Japanese waters got fished out. You follow?”
“Maybe.”
“The Japanese law says you can’t dive for urchin anymore. All you can do is hand-rake. Means standing out on a rock at low tide with a rake in your hand. Try it sometime. Rake all day, won’t get an urchin worth a damn.”
If ever there was a guy who needed to tell his story walking, it was Foible. I stifled the urge to tell him so.
“Maine coast’s got the choicest urchin on the globe, son. Clustered under the island thick as grapes. Mainers never had a taste for the stuff, lobstermen thought urchins was a pain in the ass. That Japanese law made a lot of boatmen rich up here, if they knew how to rig for a diving crew. Whole economy down Rockport way. Japanese set up processing plants, they got women down there shucking urchins day and night, fly it out the next morning. Japanese dealers come in limousines, wait for the boats to come in, bid on loads, pay in cash with wads like I said before-the money would scare you silly.”
“What happened?” I gulped back tics. Foible’s story was beginning to interest me.
“In Rockport? Nothing happened. Still like that. If you mean up here, we just got a couple of boats. The folks up the hill bought me out and that’s that, no more cars with dark windows, no more Yakuza making deals on the dock-I don’t miss it for a minute. I’m an exclusive supplier, son, and a happier man you’ll never meet.”
In the little shack I was surrounded by Foible’s happiness, and I wasn’t enthralled. I didn’t mention it. “The folks up the hill,” I said. “You mean Fujisaki.” I figured he was deep enough in his story not to balk at my feeding him the name.