Shooting At Loons Part 10

"What?" said Chet.

"Blackmail?" I said. "That's a pretty strong term."

She gave an impatient flip of her hand. "Not blackmail. What's the term? Coercion? That's what she's trying to do, coerce me."

"But how?" Chet and I asked together.

"Jill," she said, and her anger abruptly dissolved into tears that spilled down her cheeks.

"Honey?"

"Oh Chet, she's bought Gib Epson's place!" she wailed. "She says she's already got the permits and that I have till the first of June to decide, then she's going to start building a launch ramp and boat storage for a hundred boats. There'll be cars in and out, day and night, all year long!"

Chet hit the wheel with his fist. "But Epson swore he'd never sell."

"She made him a fat offer and let him think it was a conservancy group that wanted it. He probably thinks he was doing us a favor." She reached into Chet's pocket for his handkerchief and blotted her eyes in pensive silence.

We were moving a little faster around the point than when we'd come. The wind ruffled our hair and felt cool enough to make me wish for a sweater now that the sun was dropping down behind the trees.

"How does your daughter come into it?" I asked.

"My mother was from Harkers Island," Barbara Jean explained, "and she inherited the home place over there. The original part of the house dates from the 1890s. She really loved it and she always wanted to go live there, but Daddy had the factory over here and what with one thing or another, they never got to restore the house the way she wanted. She used to take Jill over and tell her all the old family stories and Jill was wild about it, too, so when Mother died, she willed it to Jill and she and her husband have put every nickel they have into fixing it up. They've just finished."

More tears pooled in her eyes and she dashed them away angrily. "And now that b.i.t.c.h-!"

"I take it that the b.i.t.c.h's new property abuts yours?"

"Even curves around one side," Chet said grimly.

"But surely your zoning laws-?"

Chet shook his head. "Harkers Island is like the rest of Down East. They're so adamantly opposed to any kind of growth or government interference that they won't allow any zoning of any kind."

"That's crazy," I said. "Zoning's the only way a community can control growth and have a say in what's built."

"Well, why don't you just run on over and tell them that if you get a few minutes off from court?" Chet said with asperity. "You think people haven't tried? Every time the county planners try to hold a hearing on the subject and explain how zoning would protect them, they're lucky to get away with their lives."

"Down Easters don't think they need zoning," Barbara Jean said as Chet throttled back on the motor and headed in toward their landing. "My cousin over in Marshallburg said that if somebody ever tried to build something the rest of them didn't want, they'd just burn it down. They would, too."

"Maybe we'll sic your cousin on to Linville's boat storage," Chet said.

"Hey!" I objected. "I'm an officer of the court and I didn't hear a thing you just said, okay?"

Chet nosed us in next to the dock and secured a line to the piling. I scrambled out and Chet reached out a hand to Barbara Jean, who hadn't moved. "Honey?"

She took his hand and stood up slowly. "All of a sudden, I remember something Andy said."

"Andy Bynum?"

"Remember how he was rooting around in the courthouse all this month? And last week at the Alliance meeting-you remember when you came to pick me up and I was standing out front with Andy and Jay Hadley and her son?"

Chet nodded.

"You must have heard him. Andy said he'd found something that was going to fix Linville Pope's little red wagon once and for all and-oh my G.o.d!"

She clutched Chet's arm hard. "What if Andy really did find something illegal? What if he threatened to tell if she didn't back off? She's got a boat, she's got a gun and she's got the conscience of a sand shark-maybe she's the one who shot him out there in the sound."

7.

Launch out into the deep,

Oh, let the sh.o.r.eline go;

Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine,

Out where the full ticks go.

But many, alas! only stand on the sh.o.r.e

And gaze on the ocean so wide;

They never have ventured its depths to explore,

Or to launch on the fathomless tide.

-A. B. Simpson and B. B. McKinney "Now let me get this straight," said Lev. "This Andy Bynum was a fisherman, right?"

"A fisherman, the owner of a fish house and the president of the Independent Fishers Alliance," I said, nibbling at a shrimp from my Mate's Plate (coleslaw, hushpuppies and three seafood choices from a list of eight; the Captain's Plate lets you choose four; the Admiral's, five).

"And your friend Barbara Ann-"

"Barbara Jean."

"Whatever. Her husband's a judge and she owns a fishmeal plant, right?"

"Right."

"So how do fis.h.i.+ng interests conflict with Pope Properties?"

We were sitting in a candlelit booth at the Long Haul, one block off Front Street, but for a moment it was like being back in that old fourth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, sharing Chinese takeout while Lev helped me clarify the facts of a case for next day's cla.s.s.

He lifted his empty beer bottle when the waitress pa.s.sed and she nodded. "Another for you, ma'am?"

My gla.s.s of house "blush" was still half full, so I shook my head and went back to explaining a situation I didn't fully comprehend myself even though I'd asked a lot of questions and listened to a lot of polemics the short time I'd been down.

"The way I understand it, there are four major interests pulling at the coastal waters here in North Carolina: environmentalists; commercial fis.h.i.+ng-that's workers on and off the water; recreational fis.h.i.+ng-motels, piers, marinas, boat sales, tackle shops, and all the other tourist-support businesses; and finally the developers who seem to want managed growth as long as it's everybody else who's being managed."

"So what else is new?" Lev asked sardonically.

"Trouble is, it doesn't stay that simple. Depending on what's being discussed, alliances seem to switch back and forth with the tides. Environmentalists will ally with either or both groups of fishermen against the developers. Fishermen ally with them because they've seen what pollution does to the estuaries and they've already lost too many sh.e.l.lfish beds. Now the conservationist wing-"

"Aren't they the same as environmentalists?"

"I don't think so. Not exactly. At least not the way they define it down here. Conservationists want to save the water, too, but their main interest seems to be endangered species, especially turtles. They give the trawlers grief because nets have to use excluder devices to let the turtles escape. Or the size of the net mesh has to be big enough to let certain species through, stuff like that. And they irk sportsmen because they're always pus.h.i.+ng size and catch limits and they'd like to keep all recreational vehicles off the beach during nesting season. Come to think of it, the fishermen hate the turtle excluders, but they line up beside the conservationists to keep surf fishers from making such deep wheel ruts on the sand that baby turtles can't get back to the sea in time."

Lev laughed. "Do they really care, or is it t.i.t for tat?"

"Well, if sportsmen would support getting rid of the TEDs, the fishermen probably wouldn't be stressing themselves overmuch on baby turkles."

"Turkles?"

"That's what Islanders say when they talk about turkle stew," I said, thinking of the loggerhead sh.e.l.l I'd seen rolling in the surf by Mahlon's landing the night before.

"Wait a minute. You just said they're an endangered species."

"They are. Just like loons. But they're also a traditional island delicacy, which is why they both keep getting their heads blown off."

He rolled his eyes in amus.e.m.e.nt. "Go on."

"It gets worse. I swear to G.o.d every interest group down here's shooting at loons of one sort or the other-each one thinks that what they're doing doesn't really hurt anything and it's the other guys that are messing it up for everybody else. Fish processors ally with developers against environmentalists because they don't want anybody looking too closely at their waste disposal procedures. But then the developers turn around and talk environment whenever they can because they know if our coastline starts looking like New Jersey's, the Crystal Coast is a cooked goose. No more golden eggs."

"I still don't see why poor Linville's supposed to have it in for a fisherman," he complained.

"I'm getting to that. Have another hushpuppy and listen," I said testily, wondering what was this poor Linville c.r.a.p? "She's allied herself with the sports fishers against the menhaden boats."

He finished boning his grilled mackerel and said, "What the h.e.l.l is a menhaden anyhow? I've never seen it on a menu."

"That's because you're not a chicken. After the oil is pressed out, the leftover meal is used for feed and fertilizer."

"That's what Barbara What's-her-name's factory processes?"

"Right. But the whole controversy's turning into a cla.s.s thing-traditional livelihoods up against privileged leisure.

"See, what you have to keep in mind is that this place didn't start booming and become the Crystal Coast till the late seventies, early eighties," I said. "Down Easters lived so isolated and insular that they just a.s.sumed G.o.d gave them Core Sound back when He first laid down the waters and He meant it for their personal use till the last trumpet sounds. Then down come these upstate sportsmen who can afford to drop three or four hundred for a weekend of fis.h.i.+ng. They're after the same fish a working man's trying to catch to feed his family and maybe make a mortgage and boat payments. So you start with that resentment between natives and visitors."

"But if menhaden aren't edible," Lev said, keeping his eye on the s.h.i.+fting target, "then why-?"

"According to Barbara Jean, menhaden fis.h.i.+ng's gotten a bad rap both from the sportsmen and from some of the rich retirees along the coast who don't want to look out from their decks and see big old rusty boats sitting out there off their beach. The stock is healthy, they're not overfished, and they're easy to catch because they run in tight schools close to the sh.o.r.eline. And that's where the trouble seems to be. About seventy-five percent of the catch is within a quarter mile of the sh.o.r.e. So here comes Barbara Jean's clunky old Was.h.i.+ngton Neville. Or Beaufort Fisheries' Gregory Poole. The big boat sends out two little purse boats to surround the school of fish with a long net that they can draw up tight at the bottom like a purse. Then the mother boat sucks the fish up with a big hose. People on sh.o.r.e are close enough to see exactly what's happening and they think 'O, my Gawd! Look at that ugly greedy s.h.i.+p taking all those fis.h.!.+' And the sportsman who's out there casting in the surf and not getting any good bites thinks 'They've just scooped up all the game fish.' "

"And haven't they?" asked Lev, pouring himself a fresh gla.s.s of beer.

"Local watermen joke that anybody who can catch a menhaden on a hook is welcome to try and no, the bycatch of game fish is incredibly small-something like three-tenths of one percent because there's nothing in that school except menhaden."

"But if a net broke-"

"I'm told there hasn't been a spill worth talking about since 1983 and that was up in Virginia."

"But why-?"

"I know, I know. Why poor Linville?"

"Well?"

"Because she's been a very vocal supporter for limits on how close in the menhaden boats can come. She's even gone up to Raleigh to lobby some of the legislators and they say she's very persuasive. When people like Barbara Jean or Andy Bynum start yelling in these hearings, she just hangs cool and manages to sound calm and objective and beautifully reasonable. If the boats do get pushed out of the sound and two or three miles offsh.o.r.e, it'll hurt the industry enough that it may not survive. But Andy thought, and Barbara Jean does, too, that menhaden's just the stalking horse, a foot in the door."

"For what?"

"Well, from listening to everybody mouth off about everybody else, there probably is too much equipment in the water down here. Especially since the estuaries are getting so much polluted runoff that nursery stocks can't replenish what's being taken out. If they could get rid of all the commercial fishers, then it'd really be a sportsman's paradise. You heard Linville this evening-right now, tourism's worth half a billion to this area and growing, menhaden's only worth about four million and dropping. But from what she said to Barbara Jean, I think it's more than just gentrifying Carteret County. She wants that particular piece of property where the Neville Fishery sits, doesn't she? Is that part of the investment deal she's trying to get you to buy into?"