Shooting at Loons Read online

  “So never having seen that many WASPs up close, I naturally made her stay after the class,” Lev said, bending the truth like one of his Aunt Ida’s homemade pretzels. “And here she is, a judge.”

  “And here you are, a—what are you now, Lev?”

  “A potential investor in a very nice project I am putting together,” Linville Pope said smoothly.

  “If the details can be worked out,” he agreed, looking at me with half-tilted head.

  “But not tonight,” said Linville Pope. “Not now that you have found an old...student?”

  She must know him well, I thought, to pick up on that undercurrent in his voice. Either that or she had a natural talent for sensing when to plant the hook and when to give more line, because she backed off without a hint of the frustration she must be feeling if she’d hoped to talk money with him tonight.

  Assuming it was money.

  (Assuming it was talk?)

  Instead, as Barbara Jean pressed Lev for more details of my student days in New York, Linville patted her arm gracefully. “If you two are going to monopolize my escort, I shall just go find Chet and make him an offer he cannot refuse.”

  “That won’t be hard,” laughed a sturdy brunette who was evidently an old friend of the Winberrys and who had paused on the edge of our conversation. “Come on, honey, let’s you and me go jump him while Barbara Jean’s got her back turned.”

  If Linville Pope was half as subtle and deliberate as she appeared to me, I couldn’t picture her jumping a man. Even in fun. Nevertheless, she went off with the brunette.

  As they melted through the crowd, an ex-assemblyman from Goldsboro who’d once known my mother immediately claimed my attention, and I let myself be swept away by one of those little eddies of movement that swirl through all big parties.

  Evidently I still wasn’t over my compulsion to put distance between myself and Lev Schuster.

  The airy room through which we moved projected in a wing off the main house and had opposing windows and French doors on the two long sides. The furnishings were casually eclectic and reflected their proximity to the water. Seascapes framed in bleached driftwood hung upon the pearl-gray walls, the deep turquoise carpet had probably been woven to order in Burlington, the white wicker chairs and couches were capacious turn-of-the-century originals with modern cushions of blue and sea-green canvas. Shells filled the clear glass bases of the table lamps, and a collection of old iron tools hung above the gray stone fireplace. I recognized an adze and mallet that would have been used in boat building, a saw, C-clamps, brace-and-bit, even an old froe, plus several more I couldn’t identify.

  At the opposite end, glass shelves held a stunning collection of handmade decoys, everything from a redheaded duck carved from wood to an old swan with a wooden head and painted canvas-and-wire body that should have been in a museum.

  (“What does stewed swan taste like?” I’d once asked Andy Bynum.

  “Well, I personally don’t like it as much as stewed loon,” he’d answered in all seriousness.)

  The elderly assemblyman murmured pleasantly about knowing Mother and my Aunt Zell when they worked at Seymour Johnson Air Field near the end of World War II. He professed himself unable to get over “how very like little Susan Stephenson you are.”

  Normally I’d have hung on every syllable. My mother died when I was eighteen and though she’d told me most of her secrets, I knew there were things about her Seymour Johnson days that she’d left unsaid. Yet I couldn’t concentrate on his words.

  “May I come talk to you when we can speak more freely?” I asked above the dull roar of so many conversations going at once.

  “Why certainly, my dear. Only don’t leave it too long. I’m eighty-three,” he warned.

  We exchanged cards just as Micah Smith came up with my Bloody Mary, “Lost you there for a few minutes,” he said by way of apology for the delay.

  “No problem.” I sipped my drink gratefully and made for the open French doors on the sea side of the room, only half-attuned to the waves of talk that washed over my ears as I passed.

  “—’course my daddy always said a scalloper won’t nothing but a fisherman with his brains knocked out.”

  “—so figuring seventy percent occupancy, that’s still more than sixty million dollars right here in Carteret County alone, and if you factor in the motels alone from here to Dare—”

  “Yeah, well let the so-called ‘private sector’ stay private instead of grabbing their profits and passing the real costs downwind and downstream to the public taxpayers.”

  “The people of this state have an obligation—a duty, dammit!—to bring a vision of what this area is to be.”

  “—but I don’t see why the whole of Taylors Creek’s got to be a no-wake zone. Why shouldn’t water-skiers have the right to ski where they want? One of my customers—”

  “Oh, they’ll say a menhaden’s the soybean of the ocean, but try asking for the same subsidies those crybaby farmers get and see if—”

  “—one thing to stick up for your constituents but for Basnight to bring the legislature into it when—”

  “Yeah, but if Marine Fisheries would just use the power they already have—”

  I stepped back to let two chamber of commerce types pass (green blazers, plaid pants) and landed myself between a passionate young social scientist and the owner of a tackle shop.

  “Commercial fishing’s had its day,” the tackle man was saying. “Carteret County gets a hundred times more money from tourism than—”

  “Only because upstate pollution’s killing the estuaries and the recreation industry’s driving traditional watermen off the water,” the sociologist interrupted. “If you’re an uneducated black or white blue-collar worker, your only slice of the tourism pie’s going to be cleaning motel rooms or clerking at the local Seven-Eleven for minimum wages. We’ve got to have better-paying blue-collar jobs if we’re ever—”

  She paused to snag a glass of white wine from a passing tray, and the tackle shop owner jumped back in. “Look, if they’re so almighty anxious to work, how come the crab houses have to hire Mexicans to pick the crabmeat?”

  “Don’t you reckon that’s because Mexicans’ll work like slaves under slave-like conditions?” drawled a tall white-haired man who looked like he just stepped off a plantation veranda.

  Goes to show you about stereotypes.

  I edged past and out onto the terrace, which was less crowded. The air was cooler, but laced with cigarette smoke and something else.

  “Uh-oh, the wind’s shifting,” someone said, as the homely smell of cooking fish drifted lightly across the grounds.

  It wasn’t an unpleasant aroma, but I had to admit that it did take away something of the bucolic sophistication of Linville Pope’s cocktail party.

  I hadn’t yet seen the Llewellyns, Mr. and Mrs. Docksider; but down by the water, Claire Montgomery sat on the grass like Alice in Wonderland, with her full-skirted blue dress spread out around her. From this distance, it appeared that her hand puppet was also dressed in blue and it seemed to be carrying on a lively conversation with some of the younger male guests.

  Across the terrace, raucous laughter centered around the wildlife officer who’d testified in my court this afternoon. I recognized a couple of attorneys and one of the ADAs, but as I began to thread my way over, I was delayed by a man who gave a friendly smile of recognition. “Judge.”

  “Good evening, Mr.—um—”

  “Hudpeth,” he reminded me. “Willis Hudpeth. And this is my brother, Telford.”

  The family likeness was unmistakable. Both men appeared to be late thirties or early forties. Dark brown hair and the tanned faces of outdoorsmen. Rather handsome faces now that I looked twice. (Never hurts to check.)

  Telford Hudpeth’s handshake was nicely firm as his brother said, “Those bounced checks—the guy from Kinston that bought two rods and then came back the next day and gave me another rubber check for a sixty-dollar reel? Judge Kno
tt here heard the case today and got me a little justice.”

  Now I remembered. Hudpeth owned a fishing pier over on Atlantic Beach.

  “I guess it’s hard to remember every case,” said Willis Hudpeth.

  “No, I remember yours. I gave the defendant a suspended sentence conditional upon his working out a repayment plan with you and paying a fine. You must get a lot of that in season.”

  “Not as much as you might think. Most sportsmen are pretty honest.”

  I shook my head. “Practically all I’ve heard since I got down here is the controversy between recreational and commercial fishermen. I suppose you want to get rid of netters, too.”

  “Well, no, ma’am, not particularly,” he answered, surprising the hell out of me.

  “But I thought pier owners—”

  “Look,” he said patiently. “Drive onto Atlantic Beach and the first pier you come to, Sportsman’s Pier, the first thing you see is that big sign, ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday.’ The reason it’s there’s because fishermen always grumble when they don’t catch fish. Maybe they don’t have the right rigs, maybe they don’t know the first thing about fishing, or maybe the fish just aren’t biting that day. You spend a couple of hundred to come down to the coast and you don’t catch anything but pinfish, then you can get mad at yourself or mad at the fish or mad at the pier owner. But if the pier owner says, ‘Hey, pal, it’s them netters out there that’s catching all your fish,’ who you going to blame?”

  “But stop nets do stop fish,” I said, enjoying the novelty of his position enough to play devil’s advocate.

  “Well, of course they do. But if they stopped all the fish, crews on the east would be richer’n Midas and those working the westernmost part of Bogue Banks would be poorer’n Job’s house cat.”

  “You’re a most unusual pier owner, Mr. Hudpeth. I’m surprised you’re here this evening.”

  “Because I don’t agree with Linville Pope’s solution to every problem? Know thy enemy’s what they preach in my church.”

  “Is she the enemy?”

  “Not Willis’s,” said Telford Hudpeth. “And not mine either particularly. No, he means she’s the one wants to know who’s thinking what. That’s why she invites people from all walks.”

  “And what’s your walk?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I’m one of those independent fishermen the other pier owners grumble about.”

  I’d already picked up on their “hoi toide” accent, yet it wasn’t just their measured views that intrigued me. Maybe I was stumbling over stereotypes again, but Telford and Willis Hudpeth in their well-cut jackets, oxford cotton shirts, and tailored slacks seemed a far cry from a Harkers Islander like Mahlon Davis.

  “So fishing really can compete with a shore job?”

  He nodded. “Beats flipping hamburgers by a fair bit.”

  His brother laughed. “Buys a brand new car every few years, takes his boys to Europe every summer—yeah, it’s a fair bit.”

  “But how can you make money when so many others complain that sportsmen are running them off the water?”

  “I treat it like a business and I fish the whole cycle,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I shrimp in the spring, long-haul in summer, sink-net in the fall, scallop in the winter.”

  Willis Hudpeth nodded approvingly. “Most islanders, they’ll wait on a shrimp set and wait and wait till they get the gold mine and maybe they’ll bring in two or three hundred pounds. Set out there two or three nights, sometimes longer, and make four or five hundred dollars in just one good night.”

  “So?”

  “So then they won’t go back out again for maybe a week or ten days. Not till their money’s all gone again. Telford here’ll channel-net every night. Maybe only get forty or fifty pounds some nights, but he’s averaging a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars every night, five nights a week during shrimping season. His hours are just as regular as mine. Just as regular as yours maybe.”

  Telford looked a little embarrassed by his brother’s bragging. “Willis works just as hard. Nobody gave him that pier. It’s how we were raised. And we’re not the only ones living on Harkers Island that have something to show at the end of the year. It’s just that Down Easters have always been sort of independent and—”

  “Independent?” I snorted. “Bunch of anarchists is what I’ve heard.”

  He smiled. “Well, it’s true we don’t like anybody telling us what to do—not a boss man, not the government, and sometimes not even our own good sense. That’s mainly why a lot of Islanders won’t work as regularly as they could. They say they’d as soon punch a time clock over to Cherry Point if they can’t fish when they want to and lay out when they don’t want to.”

  Some people nearby vacated a set of white canvas lawn chairs and we claimed them. The ice was starting to melt in my Bloody Mary, but I was too interested in this different view of the water to go looking for a fresh drink. Besides, their words had triggered Mahlon’s.

  “Where do you sell your catch?”

  “Might be any one of several places,” Telford Hudpeth said. “Whoever’s giving top dollar.”

  “Bynum’s?”

  “That’s right,” Willis remembered. “You were the first out to Andy, weren’t you? Wonder if they’ll ever catch who did it?”

  “Why would a fisherman call him the man?”

  “Depends on who he is,” said Telford. “Everybody that runs a fish house gets called that at one time or another. See, a fish house can’t survive if it doesn’t have people out there fishing for it, so some of ‘em might weight the nets a little in their favor—stake a man to new nets, give him gas on credit, maybe even help him buy a boat and let him fish on shares.”

  Willis Hudpeth agreed. “‘I’ll just take ten percent till you work out the boat,’ he’ll say.”

  “Only you’ve got to sell your ninety percent to him at his price,” said Telford Hudpeth.

  “And his price is lower than what other fish houses might be paying?”

  “Some people owe the man all their lives,” Telford answered soberly. “I don’t want to live like that myself.”

  Micah Smith paused with a tray of hot crab puffs and we all three took a couple. “May I get you another one of those, Judge?” he asked, pointing to my glass.

  I shook my head. “But I sure could use a big glass of ice water.”

  “Coming right up. Gentlemen?”

  Both indicated that they would nurse the drinks they had.

  I bit into the luscious morsel of creamy crabmeat and delicate crust.

  “One thing my brother didn’t mention,” said Telford as he downed his crab puff in one mouthful, “is if the man’s a flat-out cheat and his scales are off. In his favor, of course. Because half the time you don’t know what you’ve made till he pulls up on Saturday morning with your money. He tells you what your catch weighed out to. What you get depends on the price the wholesaler pays him and some weeks there’s such a glut of fish you don’t even make your gas money back if you’re working for the man.”

  “Was Andy Bynum dishonest?”

  Willis looked uncertain, but Telford shook his head. “Never did wrong by me that I know of, but I didn’t have to sell my fish to him, see? A lot of people did.” He paused and added cryptically, “And a lot of people always think it’s the man’s fault when things don’t shake out the way they think it ought to.”

  “You must be a member of the Alliance.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I don’t know how much seiners have in common with tongers, but all watermen are under pressure, no matter what Willis says. That’s where we’re going to really miss Andy. He could near ‘bout talk a hermit crab right out of its conch shell.”

  Micah Smith returned with a large goblet of water and Telford passed it over to me with a troubled look in his clear blue eyes. “You asked me if Andy was dishonest. Not with money, maybe, and not by cheating with his scales, but I have to say that if he knew he might help the Alliance
by twisting something around, I believe he’d do it, don’t you, Will?”

  Willis Telford’s answer was lost beneath the sudden blast of a shotgun. I jumped up, heard a woman cry, “Pull!” then another crack of the gun and a clay pigeon exploded in midair over the water.

  Unnoticed by the three of us, most of the party had drifted out to the landing.

  “Trapshooting?” I’ve hunted quail and rabbits with my brothers, but I’d never done any fancy shooting.

  “Part of the entertainment,” said Telford Hudpeth. “She’s got a bunch of guns and most people like to shoot, but this is usually where we cut out. Besides, we wait any longer, I’m going to miss the tide.” He held out his hand. “Been a pleasure, ma’am. You’re staying down the island in that little yellow house next to Mahlon Davis, right?”

  I nodded, unsurprised that he should know. Fishermen and farmers have a lot in common.

  “Maybe I’ll drop you off some fresh shrimp,” he said.

  I walked with them as far as the landing so that I could watch the trapshooters who stood on the dock and shot out over the marshes beyond.

  There were a couple of men and two women, each with shotguns that our hostess seemed to have provided. One of the women was Barbara Jean and she called, “Come on, Deborah, let’s see how good your eye is.”

  I made weak protests. Truth is, it looked like fun and she only had to urge me twice to take her place.

  Even a twenty-gauge can give a nice little kick, but I was used to a sixteen so it didn’t bother me. This was a simple contest. Several yards downshore and out of the line of fire, one of the men operated a small mechanical trap thrower, and the four of us fired in rotation till we missed.

  I know it’s not politically correct to enjoy shooting, and given the option I’d certainly vote for much stricter gun control; but we all know it’s not a constitutional issue no matter what the NRA says. Why else would so many men use gun images to describe sex?