the cup of his hand. He’ll dress and go to find food, soon. But the envelope, as yet unsealed, lies on the counter, with the familiar handwriting, Quinn in that loopy, overdone hand that already speaks to him like indictment.
It’s not a letter as much as a balance sheet.
Quinn—
Balance on missed child support is 4,000
Interest is now about 7,000
That’s $11,000.
WTF?
—G
Interest! Gina’s usurious rates, set independent of any jurisdiction. She hasn’t gone to court on it, and she clearly thinks he should be thankful. But after standing at the docks last night receiving his payout, he knew that he was screwed, after the catch-up mechanical work on the boat, paying the inept crew, and buying fuel and supplies. He will pay the money out for his daughter, all of it. He just doesn’t know when.
He knows he won’t sleep more and if he can’t sleep he may has well get back out there, if he can rope a crew. That’s the hardest part, finding guys too young or too down on their fortunes to pass on the obvious misery this living tends to be. The absence of the drugs not only means he can’t mask the fatigue, neither can he mask the reality. It’s been two years like this.
He came off heroin in the most inadvisable way, his way. He was trying to be a man about it. He simply got on his boat absent the required substance, and pushed headlong out toward the horizon. Heroin had become not just the way to come home; he had for some time brought his kit out to sea, unable to concentrate without the fix. He was burning through his profits and the needle tracks were becoming obvious on his arms. So, one day, he simply fled his abuses, putting himself in the middle of two powerful-but-opposing negatives: to not go forward without his fix, and then to not succumb and turn the boat around without a hold full of bugs. But he had still loaded up the coke, on the premise of one battle at a time.
He started puking two hours out, to the consternation of his two-man crew. They were new, and understandably worried about sailing with an apparently seasick skipper. The cramps bent him over, and the shits kept him running below. Out fifty miles, the bad waters came up with the winds and he felt he could barely stand. But the work went on and on.
He tried to think only of finding some peace. That was the new preoccupation for him, as he pushed forty. He’d been in hand-to-hand combat with Peace since he was a kid. Now he was ready to taste it, to take it on as a new substance of choice, to be consumed and ridden. He’d pretty well screwed up almost everything, starting at fifteen. His last year of high school he was “the kid who had a kid,” as his father dolefully lectured him nightly about the responsibilities he had, up to now, continued to mostly evade.
Peace, he thought as he leaned over the rail, ready to puke up those last strings of bile he’d not already heaved. He clung to the side as the boat steered itself, East-Southeast into the darkening sky, toward the Great South Channel.
The older of the new guys, João, started in on it.
“I hope you’re ready to work as hard as we are,” he said. “I need the money. I don’t need a skipper who can’t pull his load.”
“I’ll pull my load,” Quinn had barked over the grind of the diesel.
“I got kids to feed,” he said. “If you can’t do the work, give me and the boy equal bigger shares.”
“Is that what this is, then?” Quinn said, more sharply. “Negotiating shares a half-day out of port? Because you don’t do that.”
“You look like shit.”
“I’m just getting prepped,” Quinn said.
“I didn’t know I was signing on to a jackpot,” João said.
“You’ll do just fine,” Quinn said over his shoulder.
Quinn had done his farewell mainline the night before the trip. He was sleeping on the boat in those days; the spent needle went off the back as they cast off, held since morning for this bit of concealed ceremony, something approximating baptismal waters. And he had been ebullient the first few hours, both riding the dregs of the last of the smack, yet too easily allowing himself the sense of celebration of being off it. The new guy had been all smiles, sensing fun. Quinn asked, “Why did you want to work on lobster boats?”
“Beats sitting at home listening to the bitch run her mouth,” the new guy said, grinning.
As Quinn came down, it all came down. After he’d wrung himself out for hours with the vomiting, they began to bait and set the pots. He was instantly without strength. It was now twelve hours since the last rush, and the cravings came in on schedule, as precise as a train into a station. Quinn was overcome with the need. João and the kid were going hard, and Quinn’s own legs were cramping in a way he’d never known. He was suffering, but João was unrelenting.
“I’m not doing all the work,” he shouted, and bitterly. “I’m starting to think maybe I was had.”
The work, once out there, was always rote, mindless and mechanical. At the open stern the traps slid off one by one, roped into a long train. The job was like working on the edge of a tall building with no rail. Skill meant marking the edges nearly subconsciously, the industrious dance made leaden by withdrawal. He snuck to the cabin and snorted some more cocaine, filling the ache with the wrong medicine.
By late afternoon, this wasn’t turning out to be a good run. Better than half the pots were coming up empty, and a lot of throw-backs, and the cold rain in sheets. Quinn was in full agony, knowing that turning now, toward land and a fix and insolvency, was pure futility. He had the kid “notching the eggers”— the law said that any fertile female, egg-laden on the underside, be knife-cut with a V to denote its status, before being thrown back. The kid was only getting the hang of it, slowing it all.
“Waste of my damned time,” João was saying from the stern.
“I didn’t guarantee the bugs would jump right into the traps,” Quinn said, “and you ought to know it.”
Soon enough, the younger one had faded completely. Stamina was earned over time. Sixteen hours in and he began to wobble, not used to the sleepless stretches the work demanded.
“Go under and crash for an hour,” Quinn said. “I’ll come and get you.”
In the middle of the night, the big lights made the deck like a tiny arena of their failing. Quinn and João kept on with the work, no longer speaking, backs to one another. Somewhere in there, Quinn began to rally, letting the work try to be the cure, letting it be the anesthetic. He kept on, pulling and sorting, getting from one moment to another. Then he turned and saw that João was gone.
He didn’t have any idea of how long it had been. He stood, looking. Past the open stern was only the wake fading into the darkness behind the trundling boat. No one was there. He went below and found the kid sleeping hard, and shook him. The kid startled, scanning as if he had no idea.
“Where’s the other guy?” Quinn said.
“Who?”
He went back up top and looked fore
