More tears pooled in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily. “And now that bitch—!”
“I take it that the bitch’s new property abuts yours?”
“Even curves around one side,” Chet said grimly.
“But surely your zoning laws—?”
Chet shook his head. “Harkers Island is like the rest of Down East. They’re so adamantly opposed to any kind of growth or government interference that they won’t allow any zoning of any kind.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Zoning’s the only way a community can control growth and have a say in what’s built.”
“Well, why don’t you just run on over and tell them that if you get a few minutes off from court?” Chet said with asperity. “You think people haven’t tried? Every time the county planners try to hold a hearing on the subject and explain how zoning would protect them, they’re lucky to get away with their lives.”
“Down Easters don’t think they need zoning,” Barbara Jean said as Chet throttled back on the motor and headed in toward their landing. “My cousin over in Marshallburg said that if somebody ever tried to build something the rest of them didn’t want, they’d just burn it down. They would, too.”
“Maybe we’ll sic your cousin on to Linville’s boat storage,” Chet said.
“Hey!” I objected. “I’m an officer of the court and I didn’t hear a thing you just said, okay?”
Chet nosed us in next to the dock and secured a line to the piling. I scrambled out and Chet reached out a hand to Barbara Jean, who hadn’t moved. “Honey?”
She took his hand and stood up slowly. “All of a sudden, I remember something Andy said.”
“Andy Bynum?”
“Remember how he was rooting around in the courthouse all this month? And last week at the Alliance meeting—you remember when you came to pick me up and I was standing out front with Andy and Jay Hadley and her son?”
Chet nodded.
“You must have heard him. Andy said he’d found something that was going to fix Linville Pope’s little red wagon once and for all and—oh my God!”
She clutched Chet’s arm hard. “What if Andy really did find something illegal? What if he threatened to tell if she didn’t back off? She’s got a boat, she’s got a gun and she’s got the conscience of a sand shark—maybe she’s the one who shot him out there in the sound.”
7
Launch out into the deep,
Oh, let the shoreline go;
Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine,
Out where the full ticks go.
But many, alas! only stand on the shore
And gaze on the ocean so wide;
They never have ventured its depths to explore,
Or to launch on the fathomless tide.
—A. B. Simpson and B. B. McKinney
“Now let me get this straight,” said Lev. “This Andy Bynum was a fisherman, right?”
“A fisherman, the owner of a fish house and the president of the Independent Fishers Alliance,” I said, nibbling at a shrimp from my Mate’s Plate (coleslaw, hushpuppies and three seafood choices from a list of eight; the Captain’s Plate lets you choose four; the Admiral’s, five).
“And your friend Barbara Ann—”
“Barbara Jean.”
“Whatever. Her husband’s a judge and she owns a fishmeal plant, right?”
“Right.”
“So how do fishing interests conflict with Pope Properties?”
We were sitting in a candlelit booth at the Long Haul, one block off Front Street, but for a moment it was like being back in that old fourth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, sharing Chinese takeout while Lev helped me clarify the facts of a case for next day’s class.
He lifted his empty beer bottle when the waitress passed and she nodded. “Another for you, ma’am?”
My glass of house “blush” was still half full, so I shook my head and went back to explaining a situation I didn’t fully comprehend myself even though I’d asked a lot of questions and listened to a lot of polemics the short time I’d been down.
“The way I understand it, there are four major interests pulling at the coastal waters here in North Carolina: environmentalists; commercial fishing—that’s workers on and off the water; recreational fishing—motels, piers, marinas, boat sales, tackle shops, and all the other tourist-support businesses; and finally the developers who seem to want managed growth as long as it’s everybody else who’s being managed.”
“So what else is new?” Lev asked sardonically.
“Trouble is, it doesn’t stay that simple. Depending on what’s being discussed, alliances seem to switch back and forth with the tides. Environmentalists will ally with either or both groups of fishermen against the developers. Fishermen ally with them because they’ve seen what pollution does to the estuaries and they’ve already lost too many shellfish beds. Now the conservationist wing—”
“Aren’t they the same as environmentalists?”
“I don’t think so. Not exactly. At least not the way they define it down here. Conservationists want to save the water, too, but their main interest seems to be endangered species, especially turtles. They give the trawlers grief because nets have to use excluder devices to let the turtles escape. Or the size of the net mesh has to be big enough to let certain species through, stuff like that. And they irk sportsmen because they’re always pushing size and catch limits and they’d like to keep all recreational vehicles off the beach during nesting season. Come to think of it, the fishermen hate the turtle excluders, but they line up beside the conservationists to keep surf fishers from making such deep wheel ruts on the sand that baby turtles can’t get back to the sea in time.”
Lev laughed. “Do they really care, or is it tit for tat?”
“Well, if sportsmen would support getting rid of the TEDs, the fishermen probably wouldn’t be stressing themselves overmuch on baby turkles.”
“Turkles?”
“That’s what Islanders say when they talk about turkle stew,” I said, thinking of the loggerhead shell I’d seen rolling in the surf by Mahlon’s landing the night before.
“Wait a minute. You just said they’re an endangered species.”
“They are. Just like loons. But they’re also a traditional island delicacy, which is why they both keep getting their heads blown off.”
He rolled his eyes in amusement. “Go on.”
“It gets worse. I swear to God every interest group down here’s shooting at loons of one sort or the other—each one thinks that what they’re doing doesn’t really hurt anything and it’s the other guys that are messing it up for everybody else. Fish processors ally with developers against environmentalists because they don’t want anybody looking too closely at their waste disposal procedures. But then the developers turn around and talk environment whenever they can because they know if our coastline starts looking like New Jersey’s, the Crystal Coast is a cooked goose. No more golden eggs.”
“I still don’t see why poor Linville’s supposed to have it in for a fisherman,” he complained.
“I’m getting to that. Have another hushpuppy and listen,” I said testily, wondering what was this poor Linville crap? “She’s allied herself with the sports fishers against the menhaden boats.”
He finished boning his grilled mackerel and said, “What the hell is a menhaden anyhow? I’ve never seen it on a menu.”