“That’s because you’re not a chicken. After the oil is pressed out, the leftover meal is used for feed and fertilizer.”
“That’s what Barbara What’s-her-name’s factory processes?”
“Right. But the whole controversy’s turning into a class thing—traditional livelihoods up against privileged leisure.
“See, what you have to keep in mind is that this place didn’t start booming and become the Crystal Coast till the late seventies, early eighties,” I said. “Down Easters lived so isolated and insular that they just assumed God gave them Core Sound back when He first laid down the waters and He meant it for their personal use till the last trumpet sounds. Then down come these upstate sportsmen who can afford to drop three or four hundred for a weekend of fishing. They’re after the same fish a working man’s trying to catch to feed his family and maybe make a mortgage and boat payments. So you start with that resentment between natives and visitors.”
“But if menhaden aren’t edible,” Lev said, keeping his eye on the shifting target, “then why—?”
“According to Barbara Jean, menhaden fishing’s gotten a bad rap both from the sportsmen and from some of the rich retirees along the coast who don’t want to look out from their decks and see big old rusty boats sitting out there off their beach. The stock is healthy, they’re not overfished, and they’re easy to catch because they run in tight schools close to the shoreline. And that’s where the trouble seems to be. About seventy-five percent of the catch is within a quarter mile of the shore. So here comes Barbara Jean’s clunky old Washington Neville. Or Beaufort Fisheries’ Gregory Poole. The big boat sends out two little purse boats to surround the school of fish with a long net that they can draw up tight at the bottom like a purse. Then the mother boat sucks the fish up with a big hose. People on shore are close enough to see exactly what’s happening and they think ‘O, my Gawd! Look at that ugly greedy ship taking all those fish!’ And the sportsman who’s out there casting in the surf and not getting any good bites thinks ‘They’ve just scooped up all the game fish.’ ”
“And haven’t they?” asked Lev, pouring himself a fresh glass of beer.
“Local watermen joke that anybody who can catch a menhaden on a hook is welcome to try and no, the bycatch of game fish is incredibly small—something like three-tenths of one percent because there’s nothing in that school except menhaden.”
“But if a net broke—”
“I’m told there hasn’t been a spill worth talking about since 1983 and that was up in Virginia.”
“But why—?”
“I know, I know. Why poor Linville?”
“Well?”
“Because she’s been a very vocal supporter for limits on how close in the menhaden boats can come. She’s even gone up to Raleigh to lobby some of the legislators and they say she’s very persuasive. When people like Barbara Jean or Andy Bynum start yelling in these hearings, she just hangs cool and manages to sound calm and objective and beautifully reasonable. If the boats do get pushed out of the sound and two or three miles offshore, it’ll hurt the industry enough that it may not survive. But Andy thought, and Barbara Jean does, too, that menhaden’s just the stalking horse, a foot in the door.”
“For what?”
“Well, from listening to everybody mouth off about everybody else, there probably is too much equipment in the water down here. Especially since the estuaries are getting so much polluted runoff that nursery stocks can’t replenish what’s being taken out. If they could get rid of all the commercial fishers, then it’d really be a sportsman’s paradise. You heard Linville this evening—right now, tourism’s worth half a billion to this area and growing, menhaden’s only worth about four million and dropping. But from what she said to Barbara Jean, I think it’s more than just gentrifying Carteret County. She wants that particular piece of property where the Neville Fishery sits, doesn’t she? Is that part of the investment deal she’s trying to get you to buy into?”
Lev looked thoughtful. “As you say, she’s very persuasive. I did think things were a little further along.”
“Like claiming title to property she doesn’t have?”
“Oh no. She’s too sharp for that.” He gave me a quizzical look. “You still haven’t learned to play chess yet, have you?”
“I remember the moves,” I lied.
“Well, Linville Pope has the makings of a natural chess player—always looking eight moves ahead. She sees the ramifications, knows that what happens on this move makes what happens later absolutely inevitable. I’m going to have to watch her closer than I realized. Interesting lady.”
That I would never take chess seriously was one of the things that had rasped him. He loved the game’s complexity and admired deviousness in his opponents.
I personally think that bridge and poker call for just as much deviousness. Of course, they also call for more than two players. Was that a fundamental difference?
“So how interesting would you say she is?” I asked, pushing my plate aside. “Would she kill?”
“Not for any reason you’ve laid out here. The woman’s bright, beautiful and seems to work hard and smart. Maybe she’s a little too cute about the way she acquires property, but what she’s offering your friend sounds like a good deal to me. I’ve looked that factory over from the outside and even if the fishing continues, it’s probably going to need a lot of capital repairs. I bet her whole operation wouldn’t bring a half-million, if that, on today’s market.”
How casually he tossed off half a million dollars. I was suddenly remembering the tons of pasta we ate because his fellowship money always ran out before the month did.
“Do you still have that book—A Hundred Ways With Pasta?”
“Is that another dig about my current living standards?”
“Not to mention current moral standards if you don’t see anything wrong with coercing someone to sell.”
He went into his Daniel Webster mode. “You don’t think your friend might have exaggerated?”
“Barbara Jean can go off half-cocked,” I conceded. “But not without something to light her fuse. She certainly didn’t dream up that thing about a boat ramp and storage next door to her ancestral home.”
“But accusing Linville of murdering a fisherman sounds like wishful thinking to me.”
First it was poor Linville and then it was Linville the bright and beautiful. “Just how long have you known this woman anyhow?” I asked nastily.
“Long enough to know she wouldn’t do something that vicious or stupid.”
“Coffee?” chirped our waitress.
I nodded; Lev said, “Cappuccino?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Espresso, then.”
“I’m sorry sir, we just have regular and decaf.”
“Decaf then,” he said ungraciously; and when she’d brought it, he grumbled, “If this town hopes to keep tourists coming back, it’s going to have to get serious about its coffee.”
“If the whole world turns into Manhattan, how will you know when you’re on vacation?” I asked sweetly.
In a familiar gesture of exasperation, he ran his hand through his hair and wiry tufts stood up angrily. Some things even a fifty-dollar haircut can’t change.
He saw my amusement, started to bristle and then suddenly smiled. “Why the hell are we talking about Linville Pope and Barbara Jean What’s-her-name and fishmeal factories when we should be talking about us? You know, I pictured a thousand times running into you again. I never expected to find you sitting on the bench in a little town on the Intracoastal Waterway.”
I was willing to play and smiled back at him over my coffee cup. “How did you imagine it?”
“That we were both back in New York on a visit and we bumped into each other over the cheese counter at Zabar’s or standing in line for Cats or—”