The Catch (9 page)

“Don’t be an asshole. Pass the gravy.”

Alan Budney stopped talking to his sister, reached out, and grabbed the small pot of gravy that his mother had just brought. He handed it to his brother beside him, eyeing his father at the head of the table.

“’Bout time,” the older man said in response.

Alan ignored him, returning to his conversation.

He was at home—or what had been home when he was younger—where his parents still lived, by the ocean’s edge, in Blackmore Harbor, in the heart of Maine’s Down East seacoast.

The Budney place wasn’t what Realtors envisioned when they touted “waterfront property” on their lawn signs, although, as pure real estate, it was worth a small fortune. From the outside, it was a workingman’s multi-structure estate, practically built, practically maintained, littered with the detritus of generations of mechanically oriented, machine-loving lobstermen. Budney’s great-grandfather had built the original shed, leaving more room for the equipment and the shop than for living quarters. Succeeding family members had improved upon the overall, adding, remodeling, and expanding its
components to better suit the multiple missions of home, boat dock, and maintenance yard.

The results weren’t aesthetic, but comfortable enough in a cluttered, dirty, ramshackle way. None of the Budney women had been driven to plant bushes or otherwise improve the compound’s exterior, and none of the men had ever applied their ham-handed artistry to the home’s interior.

To Alan, the setting had only been a prison—a place of rigid, unforgiving rules, demands, and expectations he’d chafed against all his life.

“Hey, hotshot,” his father called out, taking hold of the pot of gravy and spilling some of its contents across his mashed potatoes. “What’ve you been doing since you got out?”

Alan ignored him and kept talking, although his sister’s face had frozen, her eyes fixed on their father. She had been one of the kids to choose the opposite course from Alan, catering to and caving under the Old Man’s reign.

Alpheus Budney, universally called Buddy, was a bluff bully of a man, the grandson of a lobsterman, who’d known no other profession and aspired to none. Through times lean and flush—the latter of which had been the norm for several years—he had pretty much run his life, his business, his five kids and wife, and much of the village of Blackmore Harbor the same way, making him consistent if not considerate.

Over time, all of the kids had left the house except Helen, the spinster in training with whom Alan had been talking. Only Alan had left the calling as well, graduating from high school to go on to college, instead
of joining his father, buying his own boat, or marrying into another fishing clan, as had every one of his siblings.

Alan, in many ways the most similar to their father, had always been the rebel. He’d been the one who, even while helping on the boat from the day he could handle a knife, had dreamed of a life off the water. While everyone around him seemed content to assume whatever role fate had decreed—and to count themselves lucky in the process—Alan had silently raged against convention. He admitted the money was good, the lifestyle reminiscent of the old cowboys, and the overall aura of the profession attractively renegade. The lobstermen of Matinicus Isle had an outlaw reputation so cultured and burnished, in fact, that they were known as virtual gunfighters—certainly appealing to someone of Alan’s disposition.

But the appearance of the hardy, independent, sometimes rebellious lobsterman was also couched in the reality of horrendous hours, brutal weather conditions, constant danger, financial insecurity, and endless governmental nagging about when and how you could do what you’d been doing for generations. There was a true working-class ruggedness attached to the image, which, despite the current good money and high times, repelled Alan Budney. He aspired to a life of plenty, but he didn’t see the point of almost killing himself to get it.

Also, of course, there had been his father. Not just a local lobsterman, but a highliner—a fisherman of legendary prowess—and, worst of all for Alan, the “King of Blackmore Harbor.” Virtually every lobster fleet had
such a leader. Their status was unofficial, although they were often selectmen or fire department trustees or headed the Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, as did Buddy. They ran the gamut from being benign, avuncular sorts—evoking a secular priest from some Bing Crosby movie—to fleshing out the traditions of the worst petty tyrant.

There was little question where Buddy fit in.

And so Alan had gone to college, to his mother’s joy and his father’s disgust, although he’d just barely received a degree in chemistry. This he’d all but stolen through an alcohol-induced haze, aided by an undemanding curriculum and the general slackness of his teachers, one of whom he’d actually threatened in order to get a crucial passing grade.

For Alan had a cold-bloodedness that his father could only aspire to. Buddy was brutal and uncaring and selfish and self-interested. But a mercurial passion flowed through it all, both igniting his moods and rendering them less than lethal. Alan was all business. As outwardly charming as his father could be—almost seductive when he chose—he had no pressure valve to let off steam. As Matt Mroz and his bodyguard had found out, Alan kept his rage fully intact up to the end.

“Look, you little shit,” Buddy now addressed him, still eating. “You sit at this table, you talk when you’re talked to.”

Since he wasn’t about to get any further with Helen, Alan turned to his father. “What’s up, Dad?”

“I asked you what you were doin’, now you’re out of jail.”

“Considering options.”

The older man raised his eyebrows. “Can’t decide between cleaning toilets and picking up garbage? Go for the garbage. At least it’s out in the open.”

He burst out laughing and stabbed another piece of chicken. Alan smiled, allowing the others—long used to the tensions between the two—to chuckle cautiously.

These had only worsened with Alan’s release. Part of a king’s credibility, as Buddy saw it, lay beyond his prowess on the water, and was reflected in his family. There were allowances, of course. Misfortune and error were forgiven, within reason—a stretch in the big house and a criminal record for drug dealing were harder stains to overlook. And Buddy was not of a generous nature.

“I’m sure Alan has better prospects than that,” his mother proposed from her end, adding, “Don’t you, dear?”

“A couple,” he said agreeably.

It was Sunday dinner—a Budney family tradition. The one time every week when the entire clan gathered to share a meal. Back in the day, this was when Buddy laid out the week’s marching orders. Nowadays, it had a less formal function, largely traditional, mostly as a way to assuage Buddy, whose hurt feelings, when anyone missed the event, were subtly made known within a day.

It amazed Alan that they all still practiced it, and thereby honored their father, even though most of them had homes of their own. He looked around the table, Buddy being distracted with dismembering his chicken leg, and pondered—not for the first time—how this family had taken the turn it had. They had been a part of Blackmore Harbor for so long that their fabric and the village’s had finally completely blended. Buddy had
yielded to the rhythm and habits of his community to where this weekly dinner was now as rooted—and, to Alan, meaningless as a family affair—as Saturday night Bingo at the firehouse.

Except that this time, he was here on a mission.

His father finally looked up. “Your parole officer called me today. Asked if I’d let you back on the boat. I asked him what was in it for me. That had him stumped.”

Alan doubted that. He’d told the poor bastard what to expect. He wasn’t surprised he’d called anyway—the guy was almost as big a jerk as the Old Man.

“I bet,” he said.

“Yeah. Is he really called Dudley? What a stupid name.”

“Stupid guy, too,” his son said mildly.

Buddy put his fork and knife down for emphasis as he spoke.
“He’s
stupid? You’re one to talk. He’s got a job, bucko—he’s not some loser with a college degree and a record to cancel it out. You coulda stayed on the boat and done that much, and still be profit sharing the load with Pete and me, rap sheet or no. Instead, you got nuthin’.”

“You tell him you’d take me on?” Alan asked, mostly to shut him up.

He got the response he’d anticipated. His father’s eyes grew in his head. “Take you on? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Buddy,” his wife cautioned.

He stared at her. “What do you mean, ‘Buddy’? Did you hear what he said? The man’s a drug dealer, Jane. Did you miss something these last few years? He’s a
goddamn felon. He took everything we gave him and blew it out his ass—made front page news so everyone could see that a Budney had finally hit the big time.” Buddy spread his stubby hands wide apart, as if hanging quotes around a banner headline. “‘Pharmaceutical Salesman Caught Selling Drugs.’”

He stared incredulously at the entire table. “You all read that in the paper, didn’t you?” he asked. “Or were your heads too far up your butts to realize our favorite little boy had turned into a crook and disgraced his family?”

Jane Budney stood up abruptly, pretending to be reaching for a plate of corn, and stopped his diatribe cold. “Buddy,” she said, “we get your point. Give it a rest.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, stabbing at his chicken again. “Well, that’s good.”

Everyone knew better than to thank her. She wasn’t much happier than Buddy with Alan, since, unlike her husband, she’d pinned a lot of hope on her son’s ascension to college—and was heartsick by how he’d turned out. But she had her pride, and a sense of propriety, and this house was her realm—even if the rest of the Budney estate might be deemed Buddy’s.

Buddy had learned the hard way to respect that, if little else.

The rest of the meal was spent in anesthetized conversational recovery. Alan gave up on Helen, who’d fallen to staring at her untouched plate, and the rest of them uttered only occasional one-liners about sports, the upcoming weather, or requests to pass along some item of food. Buddy stayed silent.

There’d been a time when Alan would have been
enraged by such an attack, and certainly would have stormed from the house in midmeal, much to his father’s satisfaction. But not now. This time, he actually smiled, joining the aimless chitchat, knowing that what his father had just complained about didn’t approach what he’d done since leaving prison—and which would pale in comparison to what he had planned.

They cleared the table as a family once the meal was over—all but Buddy, who silently left for the den to watch TV. Afterward, leaving his mother and sister in the kitchen to wash up, Alan quietly approached his brother, Pete, and suggested they take a walk.

Pete looked at him suspiciously, always uneasy around the youngest brother who forever had the biggest plans. “A walk? Where?”

“Jeez, Pete.” Alan laughed at him. “You afraid I’ll set you up for a mugging?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time” was the response.

But he accompanied Alan outside to the cluttered porch, and from there into the cooler night air and the equally junk-festooned yard.

“Where we going?” Pete asked.

Alan pointed ahead with his chin, indicating the dock at the bottom of the slight incline. Buddy’s holdings covered a couple of acres and consisted of a medley of sheds, garages, a few boat slips, and a dock fully equipped with two oversized block-and-tackle rigs and the usual stacks of lobster traps so typical of the Maine coast. The patriarch’s three-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar lobster boat floated just barely within sight, illuminated by a single bulb at the top of a pole at dock’s end.

Given the sheer magnitude of all this accumulation—
not to mention two trucks, a flatbed, multiple boats and cars, and several ATVs and motorcycles—it was blatantly obvious that the place was owned by somebody with a serious positive cash flow. The King was not shy about advertising his success.

They stepped onto the dock, the soles of their shoes resounding quietly on the oil-stained wooden planking, and slowly proceeded toward the big boat—the one piece of equipment most responsible for the family’s upkeep.

It was a beautiful night—clear and calm and warm. The black sky’s sharp, pulsing stars grew in strength the farther they walked beyond the house’s wash of electric light. As if imitating what arched overhead, different, harsher pinholes of light dotted the shore, identifying the other houses and businesses that lined the small bay.

It was very quiet, the lapping of water against the dock’s piers barely audible over the occasional rev of a distant car hot-rodding away from the town’s most popular bar, or the gentle slapping of lines against the metal masts of the smaller sailboats, moored somewhere ahead of them, embraced by the inky gloom.

The air smelled of salt, oil, gas, and the lingering scent of old fish and stagnant tidal mud. Despite Alan’s dislike of the fishing life, and his resentment of the years he’d spent crewing for his draconian father, he did feel at one with this environment, which forever had hold of his core, however he might struggle against it. In fact, as if speaking to the issue, Alan was dressed in slacks and an open-neck business shirt—a citified outfit rarely seen in these parts.

“How you been?” he asked his brother as they strolled farther into the night’s embrace.

“How d’you think?” Pete answered. “You worked with him.”

Alan nodded. So he had. Pete was the second youngest, older than Alan by only eleven months. Not the brightest kid around, but one of the hardest workers by far—an attribute that Alan had repeatedly warned him their father would exploit. Not that Pete was in denial; he was aware of the Old Man’s game, despite the latter’s assertions that the boat would be Pete’s in the long run. In fact, Pete had come to Alan first, complaining about how Buddy planned to see him in his grave before the title was ever transferred. But where Alan had always been the rebel of the family—partially protected by his mother and by his success in high school—Pete tended to sulk, nursing his resentments with booze and drugs.