Part 2 (1/2)
”Yeah, but I saw you coming down Calhoun Creek late yesterday afternoon. You must have some idea how many fish got up the river.”
Loud voices sounded from the counter, followed by a crash of crockery. ”It's Craig off the Rose,” Lamar said, rising up to peer over the back of the booth. ”And Les off the Deliah.”
”I thought Les broke it off with Craig,” Kate said, leaning to look around him, just in time to see Joe Anahonak grab both men by the scruffs of their necks, shake them like dogs and a.s.sist them ungently out the door, to the accompaniment of general applause.
”He did,” Lamar said, settling back in his seat. ”Looks like he started up again.”
”Or not,” Kate said, leaning back to look out the window. Craig and Les picked themselves up and marched off in opposite directions, one with a rapidly swelling eye and the other checking to see that he still had all his teeth. ”I saw Les cork Craig's line yesterday about two minutes after the official opening.”
”Ah.” Lamar nodded his appreciation of the difference.
Ruthie arrived with Kate's breakfast. The eggs were perfect, the bacon crisp, the spuds done and the biscuit hot. Conversation, at their table at least, suffered a momentary lapse.
It went on nonstop around them. One table over, a burly man in a checked wool s.h.i.+rt and a gimme cap with a Gulf logo on it said, ”I didn't do squat in herring this spring. Those G.o.ddam j.a.ps are getting pickier about what they'll take every year.”
”You're lucky you caught anything to show them,” the man next to him said. His eyes were bright blue in a tanned face, lines fanning out from the corners, the result of squinting at the same horizon for thirty-five years. He was the only one at the table without a hat, which probably meant he was the only one at the table with any hair left. It was pure white and thick and combed carefully back from a broad brow. ”We had five boats and a spotter plane and we barely caught enough to pay for fuel.”
There was a grunt of agreement from the table next door. ”There hasn't been a decent run of herring since the spill.”
”It's not just the herring,” someone else said. ”It's the salmon. If it weren't for the hatcheries, we'd be up the creek our own selfs.”
”Yeah, but because of the hatcheries we've got humpies coming out our ears and no place to sell them.”
”Why don't sport fishermen have to apply for limited-entry permits?” someone else demanded. ”Tell me sport guides aren't commercial fishermen, and I'll call you a liar.”
”They ought to have to fill out fish tickets, same as us,” someone else agreed.
”And pay the raw fish tax.”
”Not to mention the enhancement tax,” the first man added, ”to restore the creek habitat they tear up every year with those friggin' speedboats.”
”It all goes back to the spill,” the first man insisted stubbornly, and there wasn't a lot of disagreement.
Watching their faces, Kate saw anger and a consistent, pervasive bitterness that would never go away. The ten-million-gallon, eight-hundred-mile-long spill of Prudhoe Bay crude was nine years old, but it might as well have been yesterday. These men had been fis.h.i.+ng Prince William Sound since they were old enough to walk the decks of their fathers' boats. They fed their families and paid their mortgages and put their kids through school with what they wrested from the jealous grasp of the Mother of Storms.
When the TransAlaska Pipeline project had first been proposed, shortly after the discovery of nine and a half billion barrels of oil and twenty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas seven thousand feet below the surface of Prudhoe Bay, these same fishermen, who individually had more hands-on experience of Prince William Sound than any twenty tanker captains, drunk or sober, had lobbied long and hard for an overland, transCanada route, as opposed to the all-Alaska route that would culminate in Valdez and require s.h.i.+pping by tanker.
Supported in their efforts by economists and environmentalists alike, they were roundly defeated by a coalition of local and state businessmen frankly drooling at the prospect of opening up to development an eight-hundred-mile corridor of Alaskan wilderness. The fishermen freely prophesied disaster, and the grounding of the RPetCo Anchorage on Bligh Reef sixteen years later was a Pyrrhic victory for their viewpoint.
There is no worse triumph, Kate thought, than the one that results only in saying, ”I told you so.”
She leaned forward, fork momentarily suspended, the better to look at the faded T-s.h.i.+rt worn by a fisherman a few tables down. Don't Shoot, it read, I'm Not Denton Harvey!
She sat back in her seat. ”Who's Denton Harvey?”
”Huh?” She pointed, and Lamar leaned out to look, only to turn back to her with a wide grin. ”The superintendent of Whitfield Seafoods.”
”Oh?” Whitfield was one of the major fish buyers and processors in Prince William Sound, but until now she hadn't known the name of its superintendent, and she would do her best to forget it at the first opportunity. She made it a point of honor to tune out fis.h.i.+ng politics, which seemed to be dictated from Seattle and Tokyo and acquiesced to by a weak-kneed state legislature in Juneau. So long as the check for her deckhand share cleared the bank, she went home happy. ”What's with the T-s.h.i.+rt?”
”He put the price of reds in the toilet the first week of July last yearsomething like fifty cents a pound, I think it wasand of course all the rest of the processors followed his lead.”
”Ah.”
”Yes. I sent him a thank-you card.”
Kate was amused. ”What'd it say?”
Lamar's grin widened around a mouthful of toast. He swallowed and quoted, ” 'Thanks to you, Denton, I didn't have to duck once this summer. Keep up the good work!' ”
Kate laughed. ”Denton Harvey superintendent at Whitfield again this year?”
Lamar beamed. ”He sure is. Gotta love the guy.”
Kate didn't, but she sympathized. The fish hawk was not the most welcome sight to rise up over a fisherman's horizon, and over the years more than one fisherman had been moved to express his displeasure, sometimes at the business end of a .30-06. ”Listen, Lamar, you ever hear of a guy name of Calvin Meany?”
”Cal Meany?” Lamar's coffee cup halted, suspended in midair. ”What do you want with that a.s.shole?”
”Just curious. He delivered to the Freya yesterday. I've never met him before.”
”Lucky you,” Lamar said, and paused when their cheerleader came around with the coffeepot. He stirred four packets of creamer into his coffee with more vigor than was necessary.
Kate used six. ”So you know him,” she said, sipping cautiously at the still-dark brew. She didn't gag at the resulting taste, but only because she was a strong woman.
”Yeah, I know him.” Lamar fortified himself with a long swallow. ”He lives in Anchorage. He's got the setnet site east of the beach from Amartuq Creek, right next to the Flanagans'.”
”What?” Kate was confused. ”No, he's not a setnetter, he's a drifter, he delivered off theah, that's right, a no-namer, all he's got is an AK number on the bow.”
”No, he owns the setnet site, too, and G.o.d only knows what else.”
”Wait a minute. I thought you couldn't own two permits, I thought it was against the law.”
Lamar set down his mug, and leaned forward, eager and earnest. Lamar loved his job, almost as much as he did explaining its labyrinthine ramifications to the unenlightened, maybe even more than he did catching a perpetrator and soon-to-be felon in the act. ”You can't own more than one drift permit, Kate. But you can own a drift permit and a setnet permit and a seine permit and fish them at different times of the year. Of course,” he added, ”that's just here, in Prince William. You can't own a drift permit in Prince William Sound, another in Cook Inlet and a third in Bristol Bay. Or you can,” he amended, ”but you can't fish them all the same year, Prince William in June, Bristol Bay in July, Cook Inlet in August, you can't do that.”
”You can't follow the fish,” Kate said, nodding.
”Exactly.”
”So who's fis.h.i.+ng Meany's setnet site while he's drifting?”
”His brother. And,” Lamar added, ”before you ask, they've got a formal lease agreement. I checked.”
”So, they're within the letter of the law.” If not its spirit, she thought, and thought again of the boy, and of the boy's sullen fury, and of the expression on Auntie Joy's face. In the normal course of events Auntie Joy and Calvin Meany would have had nothing to do with each other, personally or professionally. Auntie Joy lived in the Park, Meany lived in Anchorage. Auntie Joy fished a mile up the creek, Meany drifted. Auntie Joy fished subsistence, Meany commercially. They were forty years apart in age, a world apart in culture. How had Meany managed to come into contact with Auntie Joy and offend her to the point of speechlessness?
As if he'd been reading her thoughts, Lamar said, ”Are Joyce and Viola up at fish camp this year, Kate?”
Evidently he had been too busy to see the four aunties the day before. With perfect truth Kate said, ”I haven't been up the creek yet this year, Lamar.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. ”There's still an injunction against subsistence fis.h.i.+ng there.”