City Beasts Page 7

  Salvy was born to fish. He claimed he could hear fish swimming below the surface of the water. Sometimes he would prove it with a heavy lead jig shaped like a cod with a razor-sharp triple hook coming out of the mouth. He would stand on the dock with his head slightly cocked to one side and instruct Domingo to listen hard. Domingo listened as hard as he could. He heard the ripple of the harbor lap the reedy shore and sound like a small dog at a water bowl. And he heard the rumble almost like peaceful snoring, of inboard engines moving into the harbor and the slap of their wakes on the hulls of moored boats. But that was all. Salvy would shout, “There,” and toss the lead jig into the water, holding on to the line with both open hands. When he hit the bottom he would give a sharp yank or two and the line would straighten at a low angle and Salvy would reel it up on nothing but his bare thumbs—a striper or blue or flounder or sometimes a cod.

  Angela could see how this thrilled Domingo and wished it wouldn’t and hoped that soon they would be away from fishing, though she could not imagine what else her husband could do.

  Salvy still loved sliding out of the harbor under an early purple sky, past Eastern Point off the port and then seeing the twin lighthouses and the black shadow of land vanish off the stern. The first apricot rays of light dabbed the gray and forceful ocean as they motored out to sea where they could pretend to be wild and free even if New England Fishery Management was using electronics to watch their every move. Fuel cost too much and their days at sea were limited, so they were not going far, but still they were going to sea and there was no other life. His cousin Anthony had gone to college just like Beverly Boston and he had come back to fish.

  Bonagia lived up the hill at the fort facing the harbor and she always saw when Salvy had gone to sea and would gather her macaroni and go to Angela. “Ngustia, prublema, not good,” she said, and shook her head.

  “Why do you let her in?” said Mena.

  “It’s for my mother.”

  Angela did not suffer the same kind of torment that had been her mother’s life because Angela had a phone that could call Salvy at sea. After Bonagia left with her macaroni—sometimes she would leave it and instruct Angela to cook it for dinner for bona furtuna, but Angela, much as she hated throwing away food, always dumped it in the garbage the minute she left—Angela always called Salvy at sea just to make sure. Sometimes he didn’t answer but he would call later. This morning he couldn’t answer because they were hauling up the net, birds shouting, dumping fish on the morning-lit deck. Then Salvy heard Anthony shout, “Whale! Goddamn whale!”

  Salvy could only hope he was wrong. There were whales out there—big ones—humpbacks and finbacks. Getting one in your net was the worst trouble—trouble for the net and trouble with the fisheries and the government.

  But when Salvy looked on the deck at the sparkling, shivering tangle of dying fish, he saw it. It was a whale cod.

  “Whale cod” was the term the Boston market used for codfish that were more than six feet. Years ago they were not unusual, just one of the size classifications. But the market had stopped listing the category because none ever came in anymore. No one had seen a whale cod in a long time. This one had avoided everyone’s nets for thirty or forty years. She had been around in his grandfather’s day, before the good days ended with a flying steel door that hit his grandfather as the net ran out and knocked him overboard, never to be seen again.

  Unless this cod had seen him. The cod had been around before that winter when his father was chopping ice off the windward side and slipped in the rigging and instantly froze to death in the sea, his body never found, either. Maybe this fish had swum by both their bodies. She could hear the rumble of the draggers, and whenever she did she ran far and fast and so had escaped all those nets and after forty years of surviving, one day she hadn’t listened and glided right into Salvy’s net, just the same way as his grandfather after a thousand trawls one day forgot to stay out of the path of the out-running door.

  The more Salvy thought about this big fish on his deck, the more tragic it seemed. This fish was owed some respect.

  “Maybe we ought to dump it over. Look, it’s still alive,” he said to his cousin.

  They often dumped fish over, both dead and alive, if their quota was used up or the price wasn’t good. But right now they had a new cod quota and the price had been good. Anthony phoned the Gloucester auction and asked what cod prices were like. They were high.

  “What about for whale cod? We’ve got one.”

  “Come on. No such thing,” answered Manny di Santos, a veteran in the fish business for whom whale cod was just a legend from the past.

  “But suppose we do have one. Is it a good price?”

  “It would be a lot of pounds.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not using them up if it’s not good.”

  “It would be a real rarity, probably a good price. Big steaks.”

  So Anthony assured Salvy that it was a good price and they shouldn’t dump it. Salvy thought a minute in silence. “Let’s keep it alive.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t want it to die. It’s a survivor.”

  They pumped seawater into their deck tank and the two of them wrestled to get the huge slippery giant into the tank.

  By the time they came to the dock Salvy had made up his mind. The inspectors already knew. A crowd had gathered to see the whale cod. The Gloucester Times was there with a photographer and their star reporter, who had broken the story about the couple that was eaten by their dogs because they didn’t feed them.

  “I’m not bringing it to market,” said Salvy.

  “What?” said Manny di Santos.

  “I don’t think you can do that,” said the inspector.

  “Why not? Fishermen dump fish and don’t bring them to market all the time.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  The fishermen at the dock were getting noticeably angry. “Got to stop this foolishness, Salvy,” said Flynn, one of the leaders in the Fishermen’s Association. “We are in the business of bringing fish to market. Not adopting pets.”

  But Salvy wouldn’t turn it in. He took it to Smith Cove and built a net pen and dumped the well-fashioned netting in the cove in front of his house, moored to the dock. Mayor Beverly Boston watched. She was pleased.

  * * *

  Later Salvy constructed a pen from knotted monofilament held up by Styrofoam buoys. Domingo, with his skilled little fingers, helped him. Tommy Laughlin, an old-time Newfie, showed Salvy how to make it based on the cod traps they used up in Newfoundland. But this was much bigger, almost like a fish apartment, with several large net rooms like his grandfather had talked about building to trap giant bluefin tuna in Sicily. Salvy lowered herring into one of the net rooms to feed the cod. The cod thought she had journeyed her whole life to find this safe place full of food.

  “It’s magnificent,” Salvy declared.

  “That it is, boy,” said Tommy in his Newfie lilt. “But don’t keep her here long or you will have the whole world hating you.”

  “Why would they hate me?”

  “Because you are going against all the rules. We hunt down animals and we kill them so people can eat them. Don’t try to turn us into game wardens running zoos.”

  Several other fishermen stopped by to deliver similar messages, though sometimes not as politely. One even used an old Sicilian gesture that was meant as a threat. That was his grandfather’s language, not his, and Salvy wasn’t afraid. But he could see how angry they all were.

  Not everyone was angry. The mayor braved the little gravel path between their houses in her black suede Garolinis with the rhinestones along the back to tell him what a great idea she thought it was and how happy she was to see “a fisherman who understood the future.” A shudder went through Salvy’s sinewy body, but he smiled politely and said nothing. He was starting to understand
why the other fishermen were angry.

  The party boat, the cruise ship from Provincetown, the Harbor Adventures Club—all the shoddy attempts at tourism that he and his fellow fishermen had opposed—were interested in his whale cod. There had been a dozen more bad ideas like these that the fishermen and the community had been able to stop. Now everyone in Smith Cove, including the mayor, hated the party boat because it went by their homes with loud music and bright lights, stopped at Smith Cove to point out the home of “the fisherman Salvy Tatoli” and to say that there in the dark water Salvy kept a live six-foot codfish. Some said it was an eight-foot codfish. None of them had actually seen it. They turned their spotlights on the water as though the light could penetrate the murky greenish gray and light the codfish. The passengers strained to look over the side. The cod could see these bright moons above and knew to avoid them.

  Salvy didn’t need lights. He would stand on the dock and he could hear the whale cod swimming. He had always opposed tourism and now he was becoming a tourist attraction. He thought of taking the fish over to the display auction, where buyers would see the now famous animal and bid good prices for it. Fisheries warned him that he had to report to them before taking it to market. As Anthony pointed out, it would not be a bad thing to use up his cod quota at a high price without spending a lot of fuel on a big trawl.

  But he could not kill it. He could not explain why, but this fish had to live, it deserved to live.

  Finally the Harbor Adventures Club went too far. This was a group that took tourists on scuba diving tours of the harbor. The fishermen had tried to stop them, saying it was a menace to navigation and violated the city zoning ordinance that declared that the harbor could only be used for “marine industrial activity.” But after a seven-hour City Council debate, it passed by one vote. Many City Council issues these days were decided by one vote. Three on the council believed in the future of fishing and three didn’t. That left one who kept switching and two who could never decide, so these were the three everybody worked on.

  When Harbor Adventures started bringing divers to Smith Cove to look through his mesh, Salvy made his mistake. He petitioned the City Council to stop Harbor Adventures. As soon as he did that the Fishermen’s Association and their allies in town, all the people Salvy always supported, petitioned the City Council to ban the keeping of penned-up fish in Gloucester Harbor. This, after all, was not a marine industrial activity, either. Now everything was in the hands of the City Council, which was not what anyone wanted.

  Paolo Fagacchi, a fisherman and close friend of Salvy’s father, ran into Salvy at the Big Shop, a chain supermarket they had both opposed, where they now did their shopping. Paolo said sadly, “Salvy, why have you turned against us?”

  “It’s not true.”

  Paolo stared at him with eyes the color of sliced black olives buried deep in valleys of crinkling brown flesh furrowed and grizzled from years of staring at the sea and said, “Isn’t it, Salvy? Hmh? Then take your catch to market.”

  Salvy almost did just that the same evening—but he couldn’t.

  Bonagia stopped by and spilled the macaroni on the table. She sucked in a gasp of air and put her fingers on her mouth, her wide eyes showing shock. She whispered, “You must kill the big fish. It is a curse. Kill it as soon as you can. Mala furtuna. It’s a malanova, a curse. Kill it.”

  * * *

  The City Council met every other Tuesday evening and argued late into the night. Salvy’s petition was held off and the one against him was scheduled first since if it passed, the issue of the Harbor Adventures divers would no longer be relevant.

  City Council meetings and their public hearings were televised live and Salvy stayed home to watch. He would periodically go to the kitchen to get a beer from the refrigerator but also to look out the kitchen window because he noticed something strange. The mayor was home. She didn’t go to the council meetings. Like him, she watched them on television. She sat in a comfortable stuffed leather chair and kicked off her satinized beige leather Stuart Weitzmans. She had by her side an enormous deep glass containing what seemed to be a martini. She also kept grabbing a nearby cellphone.

  Angela caught her husband looking out the window and simply shook her head disapprovingly. She was used to it.

  On television the chairwoman, Elaine Petrocino, an old East Gloucester friend of the mayor’s, was asking for public comment. She would allow three minutes. Then she looked down at her desk, maybe her cellphone, and said two minutes. Salvy was almost certain he had seen Beverly texting.

  Flynn from the Fishermen’s Association walked up to the microphone wearing his brown sport jacket and possibly the widest tie ever made with a picture of a swordfish leaping on it. Despite his rough appearance he had an Irish eloquence when he spoke that always caught people by surprise.

  “Thank you, Madame President and council members,” he began. “For nearly four hundred years, four hundred years, men from this town have been going to sea, chasing and capturing and bringing to market the fish that has fed America . . .” He went on about the men of Gloucester harvesting the sea. Everyone knew the speech. He ended, “So that Gloucester remains a fishing port forever where men harvest the riches of the North Atlantic and not a kind of African plain where tourists take safaris to see the animals or some kind of a northern Bronx Zoo.” This last point was powerful, because one thing everyone could always agree on in Gloucester was that they did not want to be New York—a city of shallowness and vanity, where people spent their money foolishly and rooted for the New York Yankees.

  It was only a matter of time until someone brought up the fishermen’s monument on the boulevard and the five thousand Gloucestermen lost at sea, not failing to point out that two of them were Salvy’s father and grandfather. Salvy went into the kitchen for another beer. Meanwhile, Beverly, on her second martini, was becoming more Gloucester than most people would have ever suspected. When a councilman proposed rereading the measure calling for marine industrial activity only in the harbor she sent Elaine the message “Shut this asshole up!” and since the chairwoman pointed out in a reply that she had to let him speak, Beverly replied, “Give the son of a bitch a rebuttal!”

  But even at the meeting the tone was getting tougher. One fisherman warned that if the council approved this, he would go to the state attorney general. An animal-rights activist called Salvy “a perverted torturer of helpless fish.”

  Before Beverly finished her second martini she managed to write and send a statement for Frank Gianchialli to read. Frank was the councilman that kept switching positions, and Beverly often helped him. He began Beverly’s speech, “Salvy Tatoli is a permeate in his . . .”

  “Excuse me,” said the chairwoman. “He is a what?”

  Frank looked down at his text in confused silence, but in the meantime, Beverly, who had quick though not always accurate fingers, had texted the chairwoman, “I made a fucking typo. Let it go!!”

  Frank continued. “Even by the high standards of courage of his profession, Salvy is a fisherman of rare bravery. He has the courage to recognize what we all know but are afraid to say. Commercial fishing is over. Gloucester has to do something else.”

  Salvy reached for his remote and muttered “Shit” as he clicked off the television.

  The knock on the door came sooner than he thought. Fishermen do not like to stay up late. It was five fishermen, all Sicilians. They had been drinking and their brown eyes were all large, droopy, and red like hounds’. They were all older men of his father’s generation and were led by Paolo, who greeted him in the old Sicilian dialect. “Salvy,” said Paolo. “Don’t go against your own.”

  “I’m not going against anyone.”

  “I hope not. I say I hope not because we work in a very dangerous profession. Accidents happen all the time. That’s why we have to stick together.” And then all five weather-beaten red-eyed men left.

 
“Can you believe that?” Salvy said to his wife.

  “They’re an older generation. Born over there,” Angela calmly explained. “But in a way they’re right. You can’t go against your people. You have to put up with them because they are all we have.” She flashed an angry gesture out the window. “You think Beverly Boston is your friend?”

  “So now those guys are my friends?”

  “They’re your people,” Angela answered with such angry black eyes that he couldn’t speak.

  And then there was a smack at the front door, something between a slap and a kiss. Angela and Salvy looked at each other, motionless, and then ran to the front door. There on the stoop was a thoroughly dead ten-inch flounder. It was one of those winter flounder from Georges Bank. They had a good quota right now, but the price still wasn’t high enough because oil had become so expensive and Georges Bank was a long way to go. Salvy even knew whose fish it was because he was the only one fishing Georges Bank for winter flounder at the time. He was one of the five who had just visited.

  Salvy and Angela may have been new country, but they knew what it meant when a Sicilian left a dead fish on your doorstep. Salvy went down into the basement and returned with a double-barreled shotgun. He slipped a cartridge into each barrel and went outside and climbed aboard his boat. He waited for someone to try to disturb his fish or his boat. A raven settled his big wings into the mayor’s tree and stared at Salvy with a hard topaz eye and let out a squawk that echoed across the smooth harbor water. Salvy raised his shotgun to show the bird and the raven did not squawk again, just stared.