Nicky handed me the glasses and I looked through them. "Too big for a shag, I think. Too big for a hawk, even. Big hook on the beak. You got eagles up here?"
"Plenty. Probably fifty bald eagles within a ten-mile radius of right here. Sometimes you'll see a whole row of 'em, scaling."
"Scaling?"
"Yeah, just hanging there in the wind, you know, still, over the water."
It was an eagle, an immature first-year bird without the distinctive white head it would get if it survived into adulthood. It was big, though, as big as it would get. It got nervous when we approached, arched its wings, and hopped off to another rock farther away. Hobart jerked his head at the wooded island looming on the far side of the island the bird was on. "Nest over there in the spruce trees," he said, spinning the wheel and turning us into the current. "You wanna go see it?"
"Nah. Leave 'em alone."
"Awright."
I checked my cell phone's voice mail again, still nothing. "How long you lived up here, Hobart?"
"My family moved here when I was ten years old."
"No kidding. Man, if this place is quiet now, it must have been desolate back then."
Hobart shook his head. "You're wrong about that," he said. "There was still a bunch of sardine canneries in business then." We had made it up into the channel between Lubec and the big island to the north, and the bay opened up in front of us. The sky was overcast, giving the surface of the water a fog-colored sheen. The wind raked at us, it never stopped, it was like the currents of the bay, ceaseless, unpredictable, cold. Hobart pointed at the town of Eastport, farther west along the southern shore of the bay. From the water it looked like a row of two-and three-story buildings maybe three blocks long, built on a ledge by the shore, with a couple of wharfs in the water and some houses in the trees on the low hill behind the town. Picturesque as hell, but dead quiet. "Used to be fish canneries cheek by jowl, right along the waterfront, over theyah. Every little cove had a factory building. I seen this whole bay full of herring, one giant school seven or eight miles across, and everything that eats herring was in here after 'em. Cod, pollack, big bluefin tuna, dolphins, seals, sharks, whales
"
"Whales? Serious? What kind?"
"Finback," he said. "And minke. And you know something? The old-timahs were complaining then that there was nothing left. They used to tell stories about halibut as big as this boat. Cow halibut, they used to call 'em. Lobstahs, four foot long, dredged up in a net."
"You believe them?"
"Yeah," he said.
"So what happened?"
"In the old days, fishermen went out in sailboats, wooden, fifty or sixty feet long. Didn't have no refrigeration, just salt. They went fishing in the places where they'd been lucky befowah, or where their fathers had been lucky, that's all they knew. That's all the technology they had. By the end of it, twenty yeahs ago, we had factory ships from all over the world just offshore, processing and freezing right on board, and a thousand fishing boats keeping them busy. Didn't need to guess where the fish was, neither." He rapped on his sonar screen with his knuckles. "If there was fish there, you could see 'em, and you could go catch 'em."
"Too bad. All gone now?"
He shrugged. "Fella like you, never seen it back when, you'd still think the bay was perfect. I seen a tuna just last week, he had to be a good five or six feet long, he had a bunch of herring drove up into the cove just around from where we were tied up this morning, and he was right up in the shallows eating 'em, in about a foot of water. Bet he went six hundred pounds easy."
"No kidding."
"And we still get some of the rest, pollack, a whale now and then, seals and dolphins. Ten-thousand-dollar fine for shooting a seal."
"Why would you want to shoot a seal?"
"You might be tempted if you seined him up along with your fish and he was about to tear a hole in your net and cost you twenty-five grand in damage and lost catch." He glanced over at me. "You really cayah about any of this?"
"I'm interested."
"Awright. That's Lubec, to your left, and Eastport, up ahead there. On the right, that's Campobello Island. Everything on that side is Canada. FDR had a summah house over theyah, you can drive across that bridge from Lubec and go see it if you want. This channel we're in is called Friar's Road." He spun his wheel to the left and we headed over toward the Canadian side. "Right in the water at the foot of that bluff there, that's Friar's Rock." From a distance, it did look like a thirty-foot statue of a monk in a robe, a finger of rock rising out of the water at the foot of a cliff.
"Up across there, on the fah side of the bay, you got Deer Island and Indian Island, and the channel down between them is Indian Road. Eastport is built on the end of Moose Island, they got a causeway out to it, but you know that. Them small islands around the side of Moose Island are the Dog Islands. Now you got four hundred feet of water out here in the middle, you got the St. Croix flowing down between Moose and Deer Islands, you got the current coming down the Indian Road, and you got the tide sweeping in and out of Friar's Road, here. Twenty-three feet of tide, normally, but sometimes you'll get a lot more. I don't know what causes it, the moon or the planets or what, but sometimes you'll get what we got now, low tide five or six feet lower than normal, and high tide five or six feet higher than normal. Figure twice the normal volume of water in and out of here, twice a day. Now, you see that mahkah over there on Deer Island?" He pointed at it, a large white triangle over on the far shore.
"Yeah."
"'Nother one on this side, just opposite, but we can't see it from here. Well, that stretch between the mahkahs is called the Old Sow. Usually it looks like a big boiling pot. You'll get big boils of water come up there five foot high out of the water, up out of nowhere from the currents all swirling around. Looks pretty rugged out there now, don't it? But we're on the ebb tide now, and what you see now is nothing. On a flood tide, from about an hour after the tide starts until about an hour before she turns, you'll see whirlpools right out there in the middle, out there in those tidal streaks in the center. In forty years, the biggest one I seen was twenty-five feet across and maybe twenty feet deep, and the tide wasn't near as bad that day as it's been for the last few days. You can hear 'em growl, all the way over on the shore. These last few tides have been worse than anything I can remember. I wouldn't want to guess how big they'll be on the next few flood tides. You get out there on a flood tide, son, you might learn more about Passamaquoddy Bay than you wanted to know."
"Not now, though."
"Nah. Ebb tide, just what you see, just a little churning around." What he called "a little churning around" looked bad enough to me. Gulls, sitting in the water, went ripping past us, carried along by the current. You went overboard here, they'd have a bitch of a time catching up to you. Provided you didn't get eaten by something in the meantime.
On the way back, just outside Bailey's Folly, I saw a strange bird, like a gull only ten times bigger, although it's hard to gauge size against a backdrop of empty ocean and sky. It had impossibly long, slender wings, and it flew like it was tired, wingbeats like the strides of a marathon runner. I didn't get a good look, and I didn't get my glasses on it until it was too far away, but it might have been an albatross. You don't see them often in the North Atlantic, and I had never seen one before. I have heard that there have been a few windblown vagrants. What happens, an albatross needs wind to fly, so occasionally one will ride up on a storm from the Southern Hemisphere. Once he's up here, he can't get back, he can't get back across the doldrums on his own. You wonder if a bird can miss his mate and all the places he knew, you wonder if he knows he can never go home again.
I picked Nicky up. I told myself it was so that he could see better, but maybe it was so that I could see better, I don't know. He put his arm across my shoulders and stared out across the water. He still had that look of wonder on his face. A minute later, he turned and looked at me. "You like boats, Dad?"
"Yeah, I like boats."
"Me, too," he said.
* * *
I went out that evening after dinner because I was feeling a little squeezed. I told everyone that I wanted to see the screech owl again, and I suppose I did, but the real reason was that I was having some trouble breathing. I had been used to a certain level of solitude most of my life. Funny, when you think of living in the city, you think of the inescapable pressure of so many people crowded together. The fact is, you can walk down any street in New York at rush hour and be totally alone. There was something perversely comforting about that, being surrounded by millions of people and knowing that none of them can touch you, none of them have any connection to you at all. And yet, here I was, up in the middle of nowhere, living in this great big house with only three other people, and I could feel the web of invisible nerve endings that held the four of us together. I could actually feel Eleanor's sorrow over the thing growing in her stomach and how it was upsetting the fragile balance of the life she and Louis worked so hard to live, I could feel Louis's worry about her and his sense of helplessness and fear, I could feel Nicky's heart, not small and hard like mine, but growing and opening up in this place. It was more input than I knew what to do with, I felt like a drowning man inhaling water. It wasn't that they were asking anything from me, either. Eleanor was feeling better, she'd gotten up and was surfing the Web on my laptop, Nicky was watching television, and Louis was sitting at his kitchen table, drinking Jim Beam out of a coffee cup and playing solitaire. Eleanor had gone pale and haggard when she saw him break out the bottle, but she hadn't said a word. None of my business. I sat watching Eleanor, thinking about what Eddie Gevier had told me, wondering if Eleanor was going to die for the lack of a lousy forty grand. And then I began to wonder if I, too, might be carrying the seeds of my own death, lying quiet inside me somewhere, waiting for their time. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me, some reason why I couldn't handle caring about someone other than myself. I found, shortly after that, that I needed to get outdoors. I needed to be by myself for a little while, until I could catch my breath.
I stopped at the Subaru for my glasses and some bug spray, then settled into a comfortable spot on the far side of the yard. I was as quiet as I could manage, not that it mattered much. Even if I lay completely still the owl would hear the sound of me breathing. An owl can hear a mouse walking across hard ground from thirty yards away, and he can pinpoint the mouse's exact location from those faint noises. If I really did want to see the owl again, I had to pay attention. He might hear me, but I would never hear him. Owls are engineered to kill in complete silence. Their feathers are different from the feathers of other birds, there are no hard edges on them anywhere, and when they fly, they are as quiet as death. I just hoped he wouldn't be interested in me, that he would go about his business and not mind my attention. As it got progressively darker, the bugs came out. The repellent kept them off my face and hands, but mosquitoes and the odd blackfly would land on my shirt and jeans and wander around looking for a weak spot. A mosquito pierced one of my socks and bit me on the ankle. You learn as you go along, I guessnext time I'd use bug spray down there, too. They say only the females bite you. I couldn't spare her any attention, though, I just hoped none of her sisters were as smart as she was.
I got distracted anyway. A pair of bats began working the airspace over the Subaru and Louis's Jeep. I guess they were eating the bugs attracted by the dim lights of the house. I watched them until it got too dark to see them anymore. It was a clear night with no moon, and even with the blue light of Louis's television in the background, it was darker than any night I could remember experiencing before. The stars came out, hard and cold, they seemed much closer to me that night in Maine than they ever had before. To tell you the truth, I had never paid them any attention. Even when I'd gone up on the Jersey Palisades they'd just been the background to what I was looking for, just wallpaper. For most of human history people lived this close to them, though, thought they might mean something, looked up there for portents, clues that might help them decipher their own course. I could easily have gone my entire life without really noticing the night sky at all, let alone wondering if it had anything to tell me. We're so smart now, we know at least something about everything, but still, nobody can tell you which of those pieces of information are important.
I wasn't thinking about Louis and Eleanor, but some inner voice got through. If she was your mother
She's not my mother, I thought. I don't have a mother.
Yeah, so? You got the money, you cheap fuck.
Hey, man, people just don't go around interfering with other people's lives like that. Besides, if it was me that was fucked up, nobody's lining up to help out my ass. That's not the way the world works. I'll kick in a couple Gs for the cause.
Okay?
The voice was silent, but I could feel the cold weight of disappointment laying on my chest.
