Spotted Cats (14 page)

‘Want to talk?’

‘Yes. Can I call you back?’

‘Sure.’

‘Five minutes.’

I hung up and waited at my kitchen table, watching the lights wink and flicker over the ocean outside my apartment. It was nearly fifteen minutes later when the phone rang.

‘Joey,’ I answered.

‘It’s me. Look, Dad, I got a real problem here.’

‘So I understand.’

‘You talked to Mom?’

‘Yes. She told me her side.’

‘Yeah, well that’s why I didn’t get right back to you. I had to take out the trash. She’s really on my case.’

‘Anything wrong with taking out the trash?’

He hesitated. ‘That’s not the point. It’s like I’ve got to ask her permission before I take a leak, practically. She’s bitching at me all the time. I never do this, I never do that, I spend too much time with Debbie, there’s no way I’m doing my homework, the house is a mess, the lawn needs mowing, I should do my own laundry, she has to do all the vacuuming. She was never like this when Billy was here. I’m going nuts.’

‘So’s she.’

‘You’re not kidding.’

‘Is she right?’

‘What do you mean? Oh. Well, in a way, I guess. But I try, Dad. I mean, sometimes I do things. She never even notices. She only notices when I don’t. It’s like heads you win, tails I lose. Know what I mean?’

I found myself nodding. I sure did know. ‘Since Billy went off to school,’ I said, ‘it’s just the two of you. That’s hard for her. She’s sad because you’ll be gone in a year or so, too.’

‘She’s got a funny way of showing it.’

‘You’ve got to try to get along.’

‘Shit. I am trying. She’s not. I can’t take it.’

‘Try harder. It’s a big house. You live there, too. She’s not your slave, you know. You can make things easy, or you can make things hard. Do things before she has to remind you. She’ll notice.’

‘Yeah, I guess,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Look, Dad.’

‘What, son?’

‘Well, I had this idea.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I mean, you guys have like joint custody, right?’

‘Sure.’

‘I mean, I could live with you, right?’

‘Is that what you want?’ I said carefully.

‘It’d be great, Pop. Don’t you think?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to think it through.’ I hesitated. ‘Have you?’

‘Sure I have. That’s why I called you.’

‘You can solve your issue with your mother by running away from it, huh?’

He was quiet for a minute. ‘You’re saying no, right?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, you’ve got to think it all the way through. I’m saying that you can’t run away from your problems. I’m saying you’ve got to think about your mother.’

‘I think Mom would be thrilled,’ he said.

‘You better think again, then.’

I heard him sigh. ‘I guess I hear you.’

‘What do you hear?’

‘It’s a dumb idea.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want you,’ I said, though even as I said it I wondered if I was telling the truth.

‘Sure. It’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’

‘I am worried about it. Your happiness—and your mother’s—is important to me.’

‘It’ll work out,’ he said. ‘Look. I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, OK?’

‘Sure, son. Talk to your mother.’

‘Yeah. I’ll do that.’

And we hung up.

And now I was staring out at the sunrise, awake while the rest of the world still slept, and for some reason that conversation with Joey, with his litany of complaints about Gloria, and hers about him, reminded me of what I have been told more than once and in more than one way by more than one female person: I don’t know very much about women. Correct that. I don’t know much about intimate and complicated human relationships. Which probably accounts for the fact that I can’t seem to sustain many of them, and those that I do manage to hang on to seem to cause me more unhappiness than joy. And which in turn probably accounts for the fact that I live alone and can’t imagine living any other way, however lonely and empty it sometimes feels first thing in the morning.

I love my sons beyond all reason. But I couldn’t imagine one of them living with me.

I downed the dregs of my coffee and went back inside. I picked up my Winston ten-weight fly rod and saltwater reel, the plastic box of bluefish poppers, and the spool of twenty-pound wire leader from the table where I had assembled them the previous night. Then I elevatored six floors down to the parking garage under my apartment building. I climbed into my car and pointed it north to Gloucester.

Dan and Charlie were waiting for me at the marina. Dan was in the cabin of
Cap’n Hook,
his twenty-two-foot Grady-White, fussing with the controls. Charlie was wrestling aboard a big cooler which, I knew, contained more beer and Pepsi-Cola and ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel than the three of us could consume in a week. We would be well fortified should
Cap’n Hook
’s engines betray us ten miles out to sea.

Charlie looked up and nodded when I climbed aboard. He was already sweating from his exertions. It was going to be a hot one. I said good morning to Dan, who lifted his hand to me without turning around. He was wearing a long-billed fisherman’s cap, a faded T-shirt celebrating Woodstock, stained chinos, and boat shoes without socks. His seagoing uniform.

‘Shall I get the lines?’ I said.

‘We been waitin’ on you,’ he answered in the exaggerated Downeast lobsterman’s drawl he unconsciously tended to adopt when he was aboard his boat.

‘I’m not late.’

‘Ain’t early, neither.’

The twin diesels began to burble. I climbed out, untied the lines, coiled them and passed them in to Charlie, then stepped back into the boat. Dan eased us away from the dock. I unfastened the bumpers and stowed them. Then I ducked into the cabin.

Dan waved at a big thermos. ‘Java,’ he said. It was a command, the captain’s prerogative. I poured three mugs full, placed one in the spill-proof holder beside Dan where he stood at the wheel, and took two back to where Charlie was rigging fly rod.

He accepted the mug I handed him and nodded. I grunted. I uncased my rod, screwed on the anodized saltwater reel, threaded the line through the guides, and knotted a foot and a half of wire to the end of the leader. I tied on a red and white popper, hooked it into the keeper ring, and set the rod aside. Then I sprawled into a deck chair with my coffee.

Charlie and I stared at the water as Dan weaved among the boats and buoys of Gloucester Harbour. I took off the thin windbreaker I had worn. Charlie rubbed sun block on to his face and the backs of his hands.

When we cleared the harbour, Dan turned left and we began to follow the shoreline northward. He throttled up and the growl of the engines became a whine. The bow lifted, then settled, and we skimmed across the sea. After ten or fifteen minutes he swung to the starboard. We were heading east, towards the sun, out into the ocean. I lounged back in my chair and closed my eyes, not to sleep but to savour the wash of salt air on my face and the clean smells of the open sea. They soon rinsed from my soul those lingering fragments of doubt and regret.

Joey and Gloria would work things out. She was right. The only thing I could contribute was a little superficial philosophy. It was their problem. It had to be.

The same with Lily Robbins and Alan Sauerman and officers Maroney and Kinney. The hell with them. And the hell with the bastards who had cut me with a knife in the nighttime. For that matter, the hell with Jeff Newton and his Mayan jaguars.

I was going fishing.

Abruptly the pitch of the engines changed. I opened my eyes. Dan was pointing. I looked. A pod of whales. There must have been a dozen or fifteen of them off the port bow, not close, but still huge and majestic, lolling and wallowing on the steely grey surface of the morning sea, surrounded by wheeling gulls. Dan eased us towards them. I saw one of the great mammals spout, a tall fountain of spray that caught the angled sunbeams and scattered them in a million particles of light over the sea. One of the huge beasts slapped his tail against the water like a giant beaver and sounded. A camera with a long lens on it had materialized in Charlie’s hands. He was at the side, snapping pictures as if he’d never seen whales before.

Some years they were there, so commonplace that one soon ignored them. Then they would disappear for a year or two, following the erratic migration of the organisms that nourished them. And when they returned, we celebrated it until, once again, they became part of the scenery.

We watched them for a while. I was glad they were back. After a few minutes, Dan gunned the engines and we jumped away, leaving the pod to its piece of ocean. Charlie and I returned to our seats.

I wouldn’t ask Charlie about Lily or Alan Sauerman or Lily’s old boyfriend, Martin Lodi, nor would he volunteer anything on those subjects. Not out there, not while fishing. We conducted no business while fishing. That was one angling ethic that Charlie and I had never needed to discuss. It was too transparently obvious. Ten minutes later Dan slowed to trolling speed and we let out jointed lures from the boat rods, one just subsurface, one maybe ten feet down, and one on lead-core line to travel deep. Prospecting, Dan called it. We were looking for a school of blues to cast flies to.

The first one hit fifteen minutes later. Charlie and I were sitting facing the stern, watching the rods fixed in their holders, monitoring the little vibrations at the tips that told us the plugs were still wobbling, that they hadn’t snagged seaweed. Abruptly one dipped and the reel began to screech. ‘Take it,’ I told Charlie. He grabbed the rod and held it high, while line peeled out. I reeled in the other two lines. Dan threw the engines into neutral.

The bluefish fought doggedly, as they all do. They are strong. They don’t leap like tarpon, nor do they cut screaming high-speed runs across the sea like bonefish. But they come to the boat reluctantly, and when they do arrive they thrash and snap with those wicked teeth, and if you aren’t careful they’ll whip a big plug with three sets of treble hooks into your face.

Charlie managed to get his fish alongside. Dan came back and reached down with a long-handled gaff. He impaled the blue through its lower lip and swung it aboard.

Charlie kneeled beside the fish and gingerly removed the plug from its mouth. ‘A keeper?’ he asked Dan.

Dan shook his head. ‘Nope. Too big. Ten-pounder, anyway. I don’t trust the PCB level of bluefish that big. Toss him back. Let’s see if you guys can’t snag a few five-pounders on your fly rods.’

Charlie dropped his fish overboard. Dan stood at the stern, shading his eyes. After a minute he said, ‘There.’

He pointed. I looked. I saw it, a patch of smooth water like an oil slick surrounded by the natural chop of the sea, and above it the gulls had begun to materialize, seemingly from nowhere. Bluefish sign. They were chasing baitfish towards the surface. I knew that not far beneath that deceptive island of flat ocean a school of blues was chopping and slashing at menhaden or baby eels, and the water was churning with gore and bits of fish meat and guts, and the blues were swirling and snapping frantically, impelled by their primeval appetites.

Dan claims he can smell them. Melons, he says. I’ve never been able to detect the smell. Probably because I smoke.

Dan eased us over until
Cap’n Hook
sat, her engines idling, on the edge of the slick. I climbed out on to the bow, rod in hand, and stood, legs wide and knees flexed against the rolling of the boat. Charlie was already casting from the stern. Up close, I could see the subsurface flashes of frenzied bluefish. Awkward in my eagerness, I stripped line off my reel and began to cast. In a moment Charlie had one on. Then my rod was nearly wrenched from my grip. My fly rod bent double and the single-action reel screamed as line was ripped off it. I could only hold my rod high and let the fish run against its resistance. I was into a bluefish, and all leftover thoughts of comatose friends and stolen jaguars and invaders of my sleep, both criminal and female, evaporated. I was on the sea with a bluefish on the end of my line and the world was a fine place.

At one-thirty that afternoon Charlie and I parked side by side in the gravel lot outside Gert’s, my favourite North Shore restaurant. Gert’s has thus far miraculously escaped printed evaluation by
Boston
magazine and the
Globe
and other nosy media. It remains a popular secret among local folks and a few others who have, like me, been taken there only after uttering a vow of silence. Those of us who know Gert’s want to keep it the way we know it—unpretentious, straightforward, and as honest as the only sign outside, which promises, simply, ‘Good Food’.

The first time I took Charlie to Gert’s, I told him, ‘Pretend this is a trout brook I’m showing you, a place that no one else fishes. It’s that kind of secret.’

And Charlie had nodded. That analogy he could understand.

We got out of our cars and went inside. The noontime crowd had thinned out. The usual mix of locals lingered, some men in suits and some in work shirts and jeans, women in suits, others in T-shirts and shorts. The tables were covered with red and white checked oilcloths. The flatware came wrapped in an oversized linen napkin. The music over the speakers was Rossini.

Our hostess, a local college girl, I guessed, led us to a table by the window overlooking the parking lot where twin Dumpsters overflowed at the far corner. Gert’s lacks the ambiance of the Gloucester restaurants on stilts over the harbour, one of the secrets of the place’s continued anonymity. I suppose the
Globe
restaurant critics frown on a view that features Dumpsters.

Charlie and I ordered ale and giant bowls of Gert’s fish chowder. We talked about the fishing while we waited the short time it took for our lunches to arrive, complaining with grins about the fish-fighting aches in our arms and the tooth scratches on our hands and the sunburn on our necks.

Only after the big chowder bowls were cleared away and we were sipping coffee did Charlie remove the computer printouts from his pocket. He held the paper against his chest and arched his eyebrows at me.