from the ceiling. Grabbing a poker, Ned beat on the pipe.
‘Shut it off, goddamnit!’ The deafening sound restored some kind of order to the assembly.
Ned advanced through the rows of men ranged on chairs before him, brandishing the poker. ‘You, Osborne, bring your ass to anchor.’ Art Osborne duly did as he was told.
‘God in heaven,’ snapped Ned. ‘What do you think the sports’d say if they saw us now? I tell you what they’d say, they’d say they got the battle won, and they’d be right, you sorry sonsabitches.’
Conrad caught sight of Rollo standing with his brothers against the wall in the corner, looking completely puzzled. His father wasn’t naturally given to profanities.
‘We got to get us organized,’ Ned went on. ‘Else we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of beating the bill, that’s sure enough.’
The bill in question was a proposed amendment to the state fisheries law sponsored by the growing lobby of sportsfishermen. Like the bill narrowly defeated before the war, it called for a total ban on all fishing by means of nets, traps and trawl lines within the tidal waters of New York State, ascribing natural fluctuations in all fish populations to wholesale pillaging by the commercial fishermen. When it came to it, though, everyone knew the real reason the rod-and-line men were calling for action. They wanted to board the train at Penn Station in New York at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning in the knowledge that no one else had tampered with their precious waters off Montauk since the previous weekend.
Conrad had witnessed the ‘Fisherman’s Special’ pull into Montauk Station only once, but it wasn’t a sight you were ever likely to forget – hundreds of grown men, many of whom had been on their feet for the past four hours, grappling with their gear and with each other to get off that train, leaping from the carriages, scrabbling through windows, anything to beat their friends-turned-rivals to the favored spots on the boats lined up along the Union News Dock on Fort Pond Bay, a short but sapping sprint away.
To the fishermen of the South Fork, the building crusade against them was an affront of such profound impertinence it made the blood beat in their ears. These were men whose families had fished the waters off the East End for as long as anyone could remember, for twelve generations in the case of the older Amagansett clans. They were the representatives of a tradition reaching back hundreds of years, and many still spoke with the same Kentish and West Country inflections of their seventeenth-century English ancestors who had first settled the village.
Ned Kemp understood that these romantic notions counted for nothing in Albany. The sportsfishermen were wealthy, they could afford the best lawyers, and they were accustomed to getting their own way. It was the reason Ned had called the meeting at Oyster Hall, to urge the fishermen to meet like with like, to act with level-headed pragmatism. But the discussion had clearly become mired in a collective venting of the spleen.
‘I know I ain’t a tub of wisdom,’ said Noah Poole, too old now to do anything but grub for piss clams in summer. ‘The way I sees it though, God Almighty put the fish in the water and the birds and animals in the woods for the people, and when you make any fool laws that stops the people from using ’em, then God Almighty makes ’em scarce.’
‘You’re right …’ said Jack Holden. Noah accepted the compliment by smoothing the few lonely wisps of hair on his head. ‘ … You ain’t no tub of wisdom,’ continued Jack.
This triggered a chorus of sniggers from the other young men he was seated with.
‘You boys got nothin’ better to contribute,’ said Ned, ‘you might as well clear off.’
‘What’s to say? This crap them sports is trying to put over on us, it burns me up,’ said Jack. ‘Sometimes the fish don’t run so good. There’s good and bad seasons for fish just like crops to a farm.’
‘Yeah.’
‘The bass and blues is down right now. Come next year they’ll be running like a damn army. That’s just the way things is.’
‘Always has been.’
Ned looked down at the younger men, deep furrows in his lean dark face, his white hair clipped so short it sat like a dusting of frost on his square skull. ‘We know that,’ he said. ‘Now we got to show it. Prove it.’
‘How’n the hell we gonna do that?’ came a voice from across the hall.
‘First off, I say we co-operate with that young fellow who’s around right now.’
‘You mean that screwball who keeps wantin’ to scrape scales off of my fish?’
There was a smattering of laughter from around the hall. The source of their amusement was a young fisheries biologist with the New York State Conservation Department. Sheepish, bespectacled and with a nose like a cobbler’s awl, the poor fellow had become something of a whipping boy for the local fishermen who openly referred to his biological survey as the ‘diabolical survey’ whenever he dared show his face.
‘I been talking to him,’ said Ned. ‘He’s a log of stuff to learn about fishing, but what he don’t know about bass ain’t worth knowing.’ He ignored the incredulous puffs from his audience. ‘It’s all in the spawning, he says, the Hudson and Chesapeake. The conditions ain’t right for the cows in the estuaries, ain’t no point in us and the sports even arguing, not one of us is going to see a fish off the East End.’
‘Fact is, the sports is takin’ more bass than us anyhows.’
‘Goddamn pinhookers.’
‘Yeah, what we take don’t amount to nothin’.’
‘He knows that, he’s with us on it. Like I say, the problem don’t lie here, it’s in the estuaries, the pollution from the factories.’
‘Factories owned by them politicians and their friends.’
‘Yeah, what good’s a sorry scamp like that going to do against them lot?’
‘If anything can drive you crazy or into evil, it’s politics.’
‘That’s the truth.’
‘I say him being here don’t spell nothin’ good.’
‘No, not by a damned sight.’
And so the discussion continued, despite Ned’s best efforts, whirling, reeling, spinning in circles, until Conrad’s head was swimming with words he no longer heard. The hall suddenly felt very small and congested, the atmosphere heavy, stifling. He steadied himself against the rear wall with a hand. He needed air.
The door swung shut behind him as he stepped outside into the night. A cloud of bugs buzzed around the tin lamp above the door, and for a moment it seemed to Conrad that they too were embroiled in some feverish, futile debate.
He drew a few long, deep breaths, but they did nothing to clear his head. He picked his way cautiously down the steps and towards the truck, each stride an act of concentration. Halfway across the lot he heard the door of the hall swing open then bang shut again. He didn’t turn till he heard the footsteps crunching behind him on the carpet of crushed shells, a pace and purpose to the tread.
Three men were advancing towards him, shoulder to shoulder, backlit by the
