“Way back used to be my gear shed,” said Palmer. “But I fixed it up for Bertie about twenty years ago as her art place. Should’ve done it long before, but I didn’t and Bertie never complained, not once and...” He seemed to run out of energy.
“You miss fishing for lobster?” asked Devine after a few moments of quiet.
Palmer wiped at his mouth. “I was a stern man.” He smiled weakly. “Doesn’t refer to my personality, that’s just the part of the boat I worked. Stern man does the grunt work, but we shared the duties, more or less. Me and the captain on a thirty-foot Beal boat built in 1969. Damn fine vessel. Could handle any weather, any seas, really. Every morning, crack of dawn, we’d row out to the boat with our thermoses of coffee and our lunch pails. Get out of the harbor and onto the open seas. Big rolling swells out there. Make you puke if you had motion sickness. I never did. Even in a fog when you couldn’t see the horizon, and the smell of fish guts and diesel fuel was coming at you from all compass points.”
“I really don’t know anything about fishing for lobster, but I do like eating them.”
Palmer’s mouth eased into a broad grin that reached his eyes and held there. “When I was a kid I had my rec license, five lobster traps. As proud of them as I was of anything I ever owned. Then I got my student license and moved up to ten traps. Then I got to working for others. Eight-hundred-trap license with commercial fishermen.”
“That’s a lot of lobsters.”
“Oh yeah, money was good back then. We did a rotation of the traps every day. Collect the lobsters, rebait with herring, you put ’em in mesh bags and either tie it off or stick it on a metal shaft in the trap. Get to about two hundred or so traps a day. Each buoy marks two traps attached together by a rope called a trailer. I’d pull one and the captain the other. Now, them traps alone weigh about fifty pounds. Then you add in the ballast, which is about a half dozen cement bricks plus the weight of the lobster, and the water you’re pulling it through, it’s a backbreaker all right. Builds you up, though. I was strong, real strong. Leastways, I used to be,” he added, his voice diminishing with each word spoken.
“I bet. How do you know which trap is yours?”
“Buoys have distinctive colors, and every trap has to have a tag that matches your license, which you got to display on your buoys. And you gotta replace the tags every year. You pick your colors, can’t be same as anybody else’s, of course. Have to carry a buoy with those colors in plain sight on the deck, too. So’s we pulled the traps up and collected the lobsters from them. Then I put them in a sectioned-off box.”
“Why is that?”
“Bugs are vicious. Attack and eat each other give ’em half a chance.”
“Bugs?”
“What we call the lobsters. Now once we’re done with the rotation we head on back. That’s cleaning time for the stern man. Back at the mooring in the harbor we unload the lobster from the drained holding tank and put them into crates that float right behind the boat. When we get a big enough load, we take ’em to sell. That’s about it, son. Doesn’t sound like something you’d spend most of your life doing, but I did. And I don’t have no regrets.”
His face screwed up and he looked away from Devine. “They say right now the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than just about any other body of ocean water on earth. That ain’t good for folks do what I did. Already pretty much wiped out the cod and shrimp populations around here. Lobster and oysters don’t like warm water either. They’ll keep trekking north till they run out of planet, I guess. Canadians will be smiling for a while, I suppose, till the bugs abandon them, too.” He smiled and paired it with a bittersweet expression. “We been catching and eating those crustaceans for centuries. Guess they got the last laugh on old mankind.”
“But there’re still lobsters out there,” said Devine. “I see boats coming and going.”
“Oh, yeah, just not what it was. That’s why a lot of restaurants don’t have it on the menu no more — can’t get it. And when they do, who wants to pay eighty bucks for a dang lobster? And Lord, they got regulations you got to jump through. We got different fishing zones in Maine. In our zone we got large tides, mor’n fifteen feet and strong bottom currents, so the ropes we use with the traps move. They said endangered whales were getting stuck in the vertical lines and such, so you got to use different gear and change how you lay it so a passing whale can snap it. If they do, there goes your gear. And the ropes get snagged on rock and such down there. Lose the rope, the traps, the whole shebang with that as well. Now, some lobstermen won’t fish in certain areas because of that. They go to muddy or sandy bottom so their ropes don’t get snagged. But the thing is lobster like the hard bottom, so you’re not going to trap as many. Catch-22, that is.”
“I can see that,” said Devine. “We had some Catch-22s in the military as well. And lots of early mornings, too.”
“Best time of the day to be out there, though. You wake up before the sun, see a new day unfold right in front of you on the water. Ain’t none of us guaranteed another hour of living, don’t care who you are or how much you got. Might as well get up early and enjoy what time you got left, I say.”
He looked out the SUV’s window, and it wasn’t hard for Devine to deduce that the older man was thinking about his wife and the car that had killed her and then driven off.
“Yes, sir, you’re right about that,” said Devine, now thinking about how close the previous night had come to being his last night on earth. “And I appreciate you helping me find out who hurt Jenny,” he added, trying to draw the old man back to the task at hand.
But Palmer didn’t respond to this. He just kept staring out the window.
They reached the spot and he helped ease Palmer from his seat. Devine walked slowly because Palmer was not moving steadily or swiftly over the distance, even with the sturdy walking stick he had brought along.
“Knees and hips,” he said in response to Devine’s look. “Need to get ’em all replaced, but I ain’t got the money for that. Even with Medicare, which pays a big chunk of it. I ain’t got no supplemental, see? The deductible and copayments were just too much for my Social Security, which is all I got. Might be able to get one hip and maybe a knee done, but then who’s going to help me with the rehab? Local hospital shut down a decade ago, and the closest place is forty miles from here. And nobody comes to the home no more, not out here.”
“Then where do people go for their health issues?”
“Doc Guillaume does all she can. She tried to help me with the insurance stuff and all. A while back she helped me get a surgery I needed done. She comes by to check on me, and Bertie when she was alive. Did the same for others. Very kind woman. Knew her mom and dad and her uncle. Hell, knew their parents, too. The Bings started the funeral business a long time ago.”
“How about your granddaughter? Could she help?”
“Annie’s got her own life and a business to run. She doesn’t need to be cooking my meals and changing my damn diaper.”
They slowly walked to the edge and both men looked out at the ocean.
“Prettier than any gal I ever seen, ’cept Bertie,” said Palmer.
Devine looked down to the rocks where Jenny’s body had fallen.
Or been placed.
Devine noticed that Palmer never once looked down. He kept his gaze on the horizon.
Maybe this is his safe space, like every ceiling I look at.
“So you came to this spot and looked down and there she was?”
“Yes, that’s right,” replied Palmer, still not looking down, which was odd because most people, with the words Devine had used, would look down.