The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (27 page)

Matty was thinking it through. “Have you told Kate?” he asked.

Clay shook his head. “I'd like to soon. If that's all right.”

“When?” Matty asked.

“We have a month's rent with what we brought down. I should have enough for a security deposit by next week or so. I need to bring my car down from Maryland. I'd say another week.”

“You really think living on the boat is bothering him? I mean, there is the couch.”

“I'm worried it will,” he said. “He wouldn't take the couch. I'm sure it's best.”

“You should tell Kate soon.”

“I will. If you don't mind. I'll tell her.”

Matty nodded. “Sure. If you've made up your mind.”

“I have.”

Matty stood up. “Okay, then. I'm sure we can find you a place nearby.” He stared across the street and out at the water. “Bay seems calm enough tonight.”

“Tides'll start to swell soon,” Clay responded. “With the moon.”

“What time do you have to get out of here in the morning?” Matty asked.

Clay rose. “About five.”

Matty patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, we better be hitting it.”

They walked inside together.

Matty ducked into the kitchen and turned out the lights. He shut the front door without locking it. “Sleep well,” Matty said, turning out the light in the hall.

“You too,” Clay answered.

“Five is uncivilized,” Matty muttered under his breath. “A waterman's hours. But I'll be up.”

The following dawn was true to the beauty of high summer in tidewater Virginia. The shores along Mobjack Bay ran with the green and gold-flecked marsh grass, rising off the
mudflats, bright in the morning sun. Stands of magnolia trees lined the road in the distance. Steam rose off the river as Clay and Byron worked their pots. Flocks of red-winged blackbirds wheeled over the creeks and lowlands, flashing color upon a landscape of brightness.

They were catching crabs now, constantly refining their lay, repositioning some of the traps. Clay had told Byron about the tickets. He had cleaned the bilge with a long-handled scrub mop till you could see the paint. At least with the two of them out together, he figured, there would be a witness to any future problem.

Byron worked the controls while Clay pulled the first pot of their easternmost lay. Emptying the crabs into the basin, he caught the tentacle of a sea nettle across his face. He cursed his own carelessness, wiping his cheek with his sleeve. The poison lick just missed his eye. He paused for a moment, wincing at the sting. His eye watered, glazing over his vision. He sat there, with the pot hanging from the haul wheel for several minutes, squinting through the wash in his eye.

“Sharp as a whore's curse. Best flush it with the vinegar. Ease the sting,” Byron offered.

Clay left the pot to Byron and went into the cabin. He found the vinegar bottle in the first aid drawer. He rolled up some toilet paper and used it to swab the vinegar across his cheek. He winced from the pain. When he came out, his vision was still blurry. Still, even through his watery eye, he could not miss the looming white blade of the bow of another workboat, larger than his, bearing down upon them once again. And again, it swung around at the last instant, like a speed skater twisting sideways to stop, reversing its propeller, throwing waves and spray their way. The wake shook the bateau, caused Clay to lose his balance, and jerked the crab pot loose from the haul wheel, sending it falling into the chop between them.

He walked over and stood next to Byron. Backing and churning
the water with his propeller, the waterman abreast of them was the same large man, this time covered with a slick green apron, which billowed around his girth like a sail. His face was swollen and red, half hidden by a curly brown beard. The high-pitched whine of his voice was incongruent with his large figure.

“You boys is from up north, ain't you,” he wheezed. He didn't wait for a reply. “Well, your pots are pushing me. I been workin' this bank and creek a good while. Crabs ain't that plentiful. I'm sayin' to you to move your pots out of this river and north Mobjack altogether. Askin' once and askin' nice. You don't want trouble, you move out. Find a different river. You steer clear. Way clear.” The man stopped speaking. He spit in their direction over the gunnel of his workboat.

Byron started to speak, but Clay took his arm, and he stopped.

“What's your name?” Clay asked.

“Fuck difference it make to you. You're leavin here.”

“Big river,” Clay mumbled. “Room enough.”

“Not around my pots. Or my creeks. I move 'em around. You're in my way.” His voice was unnatural. “Be on back to where you come from, boys. 'Cause you ain't gonna poach round here.”

Byron was tensed up and Clay continued to squeeze his arm. The big man stared at them, then looked around in the water. The pot buoy that had been knocked loose was floating around near the man's stern. “You been warned there, misters.” He threw his boat into reverse, running over the buoy line as he backed away from the
Miss Sarah
. He seemed to squint at them as he continued backing, then threw his engine into forward, turning out and away with a heavy throttle.

They saw the buoy pop up, free from its line, cut and gouged from the boat's propeller. Its pot was lost. And each recognized the boat before reading the name on the stern as it turned away from them: the
Vena Lee
.

• • •

They didn't move any of their pots that day. Byron took some time to calm down while Clay talked to him about being smart and thoughtful. Clay got him working again, and they finished with their pots but left them where they were. Clay said they should think carefully and talk things over before deciding what to do. But belying his calm was his own anger at being bullied. And he knew Byron was on a short fuse, just looking for an excuse, for a reason to blow.

The insult was not directed just against them. It disrespected the land as well, the river. No one had rights to the river. No one, at any rate, had rights greater than any other man's. No one owned her any more than Clay did. This was basic. He and Byron would not easily retreat from this place on the water that they had found and staked out and harvested with success. He didn't plan to allow the
Vena Lee
to cheat their time.

The river was flat as they brought the
Miss Sarah
around the point and into Davis Creek, and Clay worked to calm his mind. Cat's-paws played across the surface. He would think before he acted. He would crab carefully. And be watchful. He would unload their bushels and then drive over to Pepper Creek.

They sold their catch to Calvin. After the bateau was tied and cleaned, they found Calvin rocking on the wharf deck and spoke for a while. Byron interjected a question about the
Vena Lee
.

“What you askin' for?” Calvin asked in return.

“We had a few words on the river,” Clay answered. “Not real friendly.”

Calvin tilted his head. “I told you before that Amos's been strange of late. Particular strange. Funny. He's closer to here than anywhere. But won't come in here to sell. I dunno. I'd say, keep your distance.”

Clay listened. Byron said nothing but turned and walked into the bar.

Three times that afternoon, Clay drove himself across the spit to
Pepper Creek, looking to find and speak to Amos Pickett. There were only a few boats there, tied up against the bulkhead, but the
Vena Lee
never came in. He didn't know what to make of this. He would keep at it, though.

That evening, after dinner, in front of Matty, Clay told Kate of his decision, that he needed to move out. She started to argue but saw that Clay and Matty had already talked it over, and that Clay had made up his mind, so she stopped and turned sullen. Soon after, she went up to her room and shut the door.

On the river the next morning, again before first light, the air was still, and the silence broken only by the echoed bleating of distant engines moving out across Mobjack Bay, the green and red channel lights still blinking in the receding darkness.

As they rounded the eastern point of Davis Creek and pushed out past the black spar, Clay strained his eyes through the gray film of dawn and was relieved after a few minutes to see his first line of pot buoys floating in the layer of morning mist that steamed off the river.

They worked their first line in an easterly direction, toward the mouth of Mobjack Bay and New Point Comfort, the stone lighthouse rising up from the swirl, as if heralding the great, steaming Bay beyond. The traps were full of crabs, and both he and Byron, sweating in the heat, soaked their shirts through. Halfway through the line, with the sun massive in its rise above the horizon, Clay saw a small grouping of black-and-red buoys pressing against the southeastern end of his lay, though huddled in deeper water. They looked as though they had been placed to crowd him. They seemed oddly set. Deepwater crabbing was not typical for this time of year.

“See those black and reds over there?” he said to Byron, motioning toward the lighthouse.

Byron had just finished shaking some jimmies out of the lower basket of a trap. He refastened the lid and looked, squinting into the glare of the sun, shielding his brow with his palm.

“I don't get it,” Clay added.

“Fucker's pinching us,” Byron answered.

“I see that.” Clay squinted into the sun as well. Without turning, he pointed at the pot on the rail. “Wrap it. We'll move this last bunch back to the western edge and a little south. Off the sloping channel bank.”

“Clay.” Byron set the wire cage down. “We got full pots right here. He's doin' the crowdin'.”

Clay wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Damn it, Byron, I know. But he lives here. Maybe he did plan to pot here. Let's give him some slack.”

Byron unfastened the plastic top to the bait cylinder and threw the alewives into it. He closed the top and dropped the cage onto the deck. “Yeah. Well, I'm thinking this boy wants more than slack.”

They worked through the first lay, and after harvesting the crabs from the most easterly traps, they rebaited and stacked them in the bateau. Gunning the inboard engine, Clay ran back to the westerly edge of his lay and, working with a sense of the depth and the bank off the channel, dropped the traps down onto the river bottom, where he believed the crabs were running. Continuing southwest, they bisected the top of Mobjack Bay and found their second string off the northwest shoal guarding the East River. These pots were full and filled the barrels with sooks and several baskets with jimmies. Clay then turned the bateau back and headed east, toward the third lay off the island. As they approached their buoys, they saw another grouping of black and reds farther out, just south of their string, bobbing close together and crowding their own crab pots. Their placement seemed, again, strange to Clay.

“We movin' these too?” Byron asked.

Clay cursed. He brought the boat adjacent to their first buoy so that Byron could hook it and bring the line into the pulley.

“I don't see any possible good in having a quarrel. This just ain't home waters for us. Empty the pot and bring it in. We'll move this group around the point.”

Byron grabbed the pot as it came up streaming with sand, water, and eelgrass. He threw it down disgustedly. “This is weak. We should stand our ground.”

“Byron, what are we going to do? We're alone down here, man. These people don't know us. This guy's a local. I figure we give him space. This'll blow over. We're catching crabs now. I'll find us another good shelf.”

Byron shook his head. The pot was full of scrabbling crabs. He picked it up and began to angrily shake the crabs into the cull basin.

Clay grabbed a large bait fish. “It ain't worth it, Buck. Let's not let this guy bust with what we're doing. We're catching crabs.” He shoved the menhaden into the bait cylinder of the pot as Byron stacked it against the gunnel, coiling the buoy warp on top of it.

“You call it, man. Whatever. But I ain't sure this guy's gonna quit.”

“He'll quit. He's got no reason not to.” Clay stepped behind the tiller, increased the throttle, and moved forward to another buoy, then slowed the bateau down. “We'll just stay clear of him. Mind our own business and catch crabs. Survive this season. We'll figure something out in the fall. Be back on home water next spring.”

In the heat and glare, the two of them raised all of the pots in the third lay and moved them around the point and up toward Horn Harbor, looking for a breakwater to soften the strong Bay tide, where the slope and depth of the bottom might work. The water was deeper than Clay wanted, but the pots needed to be back in the river. They had to get their crabs to the wharf to sell, and he
didn't want Byron to get any worse. He chose a lay in twenty-two feet at the bottom of a bank. They laid out the pots in a triangular configuration receding southeast. Working quickly, they finished in another hour. Still, it was almost three o'clock when they got back to the wharf and weighed and sold their crabs. It was a good catch, nearly a thousand pounds clear weight, including eight barrels of jimmies. They earned $180. After bait and fuel, they'd keep $150 or so.

They tied up the
Miss Sarah
. Tired and thirsty, they headed for the bar. In the middle of the parking lot, though, blocking their way as they were heading for the restaurant, was a mud-splattered pickup truck. The driver was Amos Pickett. His face was flushed. An unlit cigar was in his mouth. As they approached, he addressed them in his high rasp.

“You boys don't listen, I reckon.” He took his right hand off the steering wheel and pulled the cigar out of his mouth, and then he once again spit in their direction.

Clay stopped Byron from speaking by putting his hand on his shoulder. “We saw your pots, mister,” Clay said. “We got no intent to crowd your operation. We moved our lay north, around the point.” Clay held his hands out, palms up. “We don't want a problem. Why don't we all start over?”