She paused to snag a glass of white wine from a passing tray, and the tackle shop owner jumped back in. “Look, if they’re so almighty anxious to work, how come the crab houses have to hire Mexicans to pick the crabmeat?”
“Don’t you reckon that’s because Mexicans’ll work like slaves under slave-like conditions?” drawled a tall white-haired man who looked like he just stepped off a plantation veranda.
Goes to show you about stereotypes.
I edged past and out onto the terrace, which was less crowded. The air was cooler, but laced with cigarette smoke and something else.
“Uh-oh, the wind’s shifting,” someone said, as the homely smell of cooking fish drifted lightly across the grounds.
It wasn’t an unpleasant aroma, but I had to admit that it did take away something of the bucolic sophistication of Linville Pope’s cocktail party.
I hadn’t yet seen the Llewellyns, Mr. and Mrs. Docksider; but down by the water, Claire Montgomery sat on the grass like Alice in Wonderland, with her full-skirted blue dress spread out around her. From this distance, it appeared that her hand puppet was also dressed in blue and it seemed to be carrying on a lively conversation with some of the younger male guests.
Across the terrace, raucous laughter centered around the wildlife officer who’d testified in my court this afternoon. I recognized a couple of attorneys and one of the ADAs, but as I began to thread my way over, I was delayed by a man who gave a friendly smile of recognition. “Judge.”
“Good evening, Mr.—um—”
“Hudpeth,” he reminded me. “Willis Hudpeth. And this is my brother, Telford.”
The family likeness was unmistakable. Both men appeared to be late thirties or early forties. Dark brown hair and the tanned faces of outdoorsmen. Rather handsome faces now that I looked twice. (Never hurts to check.)
Telford Hudpeth’s handshake was nicely firm as his brother said, “Those bounced checks—the guy from Kinston that bought two rods and then came back the next day and gave me another rubber check for a sixty-dollar reel? Judge Knott here heard the case today and got me a little justice.”
Now I remembered. Hudpeth owned a fishing pier over on Atlantic Beach.
“I guess it’s hard to remember every case,” said Willis Hudpeth.
“No, I remember yours. I gave the defendant a suspended sentence conditional upon his working out a repayment plan with you and paying a fine. You must get a lot of that in season.”
“Not as much as you might think. Most sportsmen are pretty honest.”
I shook my head. “Practically all I’ve heard since I got down here is the controversy between recreational and commercial fishermen. I suppose you want to get rid of netters, too.”
“Well, no, ma’am, not particularly,” he answered, surprising the hell out of me.
“But I thought pier owners—”
“Look,” he said patiently. “Drive onto Atlantic Beach and the first pier you come to, Sportsman’s Pier, the first thing you see is that big sign, ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday.’ The reason it’s there’s because fishermen always grumble when they don’t catch fish. Maybe they don’t have the right rigs, maybe they don’t know the first thing about fishing, or maybe the fish just aren’t biting that day. You spend a couple of hundred to come down to the coast and you don’t catch anything but pinfish, then you can get mad at yourself or mad at the fish or mad at the pier owner. But if the pier owner says, ‘Hey, pal, it’s them netters out there that’s catching all your fish,’ who you going to blame?”
“But stop nets do stop fish,” I said, enjoying the novelty of his position enough to play devil’s advocate.
“Well, of course they do. But if they stopped all the fish, crews on the east would be richer’n Midas and those working the westernmost part of Bogue Banks would be poorer’n Job’s house cat.”
“You’re a most unusual pier owner, Mr. Hudpeth. I’m surprised you’re here this evening.”
“Because I don’t agree with Linville Pope’s solution to every problem? Know thy enemy’s what they preach in my church.”
“Is she the enemy?”
“Not Willis’s,” said Telford Hudpeth. “And not mine either particularly. No, he means she’s the one wants to know who’s thinking what. That’s why she invites people from all walks.”
“And what’s your walk?” I asked him.
“Oh, I’m one of those independent fishermen the other pier owners grumble about.”
I’d already picked up on their “hoi toide” accent, yet it wasn’t just their measured views that intrigued me. Maybe I was stumbling over stereotypes again, but Telford and Willis Hudpeth in their well-cut jackets, oxford cotton shirts, and tailored slacks seemed a far cry from a Harkers Islander like Mahlon Davis.
“So fishing really can compete with a shore job?”
He nodded. “Beats flipping hamburgers by a fair bit.”
His brother laughed. “Buys a brand new car every few years, takes his boys to Europe every summer—yeah, it’s a fair bit.”
“But how can you make money when so many others complain that sportsmen are running them off the water?”
“I treat it like a business and I fish the whole cycle,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I shrimp in the spring, long-haul in summer, sink-net in the fall, scallop in the winter.”
Willis Hudpeth nodded approvingly. “Most islanders, they’ll wait on a shrimp set and wait and wait till they get the gold mine and maybe they’ll bring in two or three hundred pounds. Set out there two or three nights, sometimes longer, and make four or five hundred dollars in just one good night.”
“So?”
“So then they won’t go back out again for maybe a week or ten days. Not till their money’s all gone again. Telford here’ll channel-net every night. Maybe only get forty or fifty pounds some nights, but he’s averaging a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars every night, five nights a week during shrimping season. His hours are just as regular as mine. Just as regular as yours maybe.”
Telford looked a little embarrassed by his brother’s bragging. “Willis works just as hard. Nobody gave him that pier. It’s how we were raised. And we’re not the only ones living on Harkers Island that have something to show at the end of the year. It’s just that Down Easters have always been sort of independent and—”
“Independent?” I snorted. “Bunch of anarchists is what I’ve heard.”
He smiled. “Well, it’s true we don’t like anybody telling us what to do—not a boss man, not the government, and sometimes not even our own good sense. That’s mainly why a lot of Islanders won’t work as regularly as they could. They say they’d as soon punch a time clock over to Cherry Point if they can’t fish when they want to and lay out when they don’t want to.”
Some people nearby vacated a set of white canvas lawn chairs and we claimed them. The ice was starting to melt in my Bloody Mary, but I was too interested in this different view of the water to go looking for a fresh drink. Besides, their words had triggered Mahlon’s.
“Where do you sell your catch?”
“Might be any one of several places,” Telford Hudpeth said. “Whoever’s giving top dollar.”
“Bynum’s?”
“That’s right,” Willis remembered. “You were the first out to Andy, weren’t you? Wonder if they’ll ever catch who did it?”
“Why would a fisherman call him the man?”
“Depends on who he is,” said Telford. “Everybody that runs a fish house gets called that at one time or another. See, a fish house can’t survive if it doesn’t have people out there fishing for it, so some of ‘em might weight the nets a little in their favor—stake a man to new nets, give him gas on credit, maybe even help him buy a boat and let him fish on shares.”