Angus got a big kick out of these games until the day he pulled up one of his own traps and found in it a child’s doll, with a rusty pair of scissors stuck in its chest. That was an alarming, violent message to pull from the sea. Angus Addams’s sternman shrieked like a girl when he saw it. The doll horrified even Angus. Its blond hair was wet and slathered across its face, which was cracked china. The doll’s stiff lips formed a shocked O. A crab had found its way into the trap and was clinging to the doll’s dress.
“What the fuck is this?” Angus shouted. He pulled the stabbed doll from his trap and yanked out the scissors. “What the fuck is this, some kind of fucking threat?”
He brought the doll back to Fort Niles and showed it around, thrusting it into people’s faces in a manner that was pretty damned unsettling. The people on Fort Niles were generally dismissive of Angus Addams’s rages, but this time they paid attention. There was something about the savagery of the stabbed doll that angered everyone. A doll? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Garbage and nails were one thing, but a murdered doll? If someone on Courne Haven had a problem with Angus, why couldn’t that person say it to his face? And whose doll was it? It probably belonged to some fisherman’s poor daughter. What kind of a man would stab his little girl’s doll, just to make a point? And what exactly was the point?
Those people over on Courne Haven were animals.
The next morning, many of the Fort Niles lobstermen gathered at the dock much earlier than usual. It was more than an hour before sunrise, still dark. There were stars in the sky, and the moon was low and dim. The men set off toward Courne Haven in a small fleet. Their engines threw up a huge, stinking cloud of diesel fumes. They didn’t have a particular intent, but they motored with determination over to Courne Haven and stopped their boats right outside the harbor. There were twelve of them, the fishermen of Fort Niles, a small blockade. Nobody spoke. A few of the men smoked cigarettes.
After about a half hour, they could see activity on the Courne Haven dock. The Courne Haven men coming down to begin their day of fishing looked out to the sea and saw the line of boats. They gathered in a small group on the dock and kept looking at the boats. Some of the men were drinking from thermoses of coffee, and wisps of steam rose among them. The group grew larger as more men came down to start their day of fishing and found the huddle on the dock.
Some of the men pointed. Some of them smoked cigarettes, too. After about fifteen minutes, it was clear they didn’t know what to do about the blockade. No one made a move toward his boat. They all shuffled around, talking to each other. Across the water, the Fort Niles men in their boats could hear the watery distillations of Courne Haven conversation. Sometimes a cough or a laugh would carry clearly. The laughter was killing Angus Addams.
“Fucking pussies,” he said, but only a few in the blockade could hear him, because he muttered it under his breath.
“What’s that?” said the man in the boat beside him, Angus’s cousin Barney.
“What’s so funny?” asked Angus. “I’ll show them funny.”
“I don’t think they’re laughing at us,” said Barney. “I think they’re just laughing.”
“I’ll show them funny.”
Angus Addams went to his helm and gunned his motor, powering his boat forward, right into the Courne Haven harbor. He sped among the boats, smacking up a mean wake in his path, then slowed down near the dock. It was low tide, and his boat was far, far below the gathered Courne Haven fishermen. They moved to the edge of the dock to look down at Angus Addams. None of the other Fort Niles fishermen had followed him; they hung back at the mouth of the harbor. No one knew what to do.
“YOU PEOPLE LIKE PLAYING WITH DOLLS?” Angus Addams bellowed. His friends in their boats could hear him clear across the water. He held up and shook the murdered doll. One of the Courne Haven men said something that made his friends laugh.
“COME ON DOWN HERE!” Angus shouted. “COME ON DOWN AND SAY THAT!”
“What’d he say?” Barney Addams asked Don Pommeroy. “Did you hear what that guy said?”
Don Pommeroy shrugged.
Just then, a big man walked down the path to the dock and the fishermen parted to make way for him. He was tall and wide and wasn’t wearing a hat on his gleaming head of blond hair. He had some ropes, neatly coiled, over his shoulder, and was carrying a tin lunchbox. The laughter on the Courne Haven dock stopped. Angus Addams said nothing; that is, nothing that his friends could hear.
The blond man, not looking at Angus, climbed down from the dock, his lunchbox tucked under his arm, and stepped into a rowboat. He released it from its post and began to row. His stroke was beautiful to behold: a long pull followed by a quick, muscular snap. In very little time, he reached his boat and climbed aboard. By now, the men at the mouth of the harbor could see that this was Ned Wishnell, a true high-line fisherman and the current patriarch of the Wishnell dynasty. They looked at his boat with envy. It was twenty-five feet long, immaculate, white, with a clean blue stripe all around it. Ned Wishnell started it up and headed out of the harbor.
“Where the hell’s he going?” said Barney Addams.
Don Pommeroy shrugged again.
Ned Wishnell came right at them, right toward their blockade, as if it weren’t there. The Fort Niles fishermen looked at each other warily, wondering whether they were supposed to stop this man. It didn’t seem right to let him pass, but Angus Addams wasn’t with them to give instructions. They watched, paralyzed, as Ned Wishnell sailed right through, passing between Don Pommeroy and Duke Cobb without looking left or right. The Fort Niles boats bobbed in his wake. Don had to grab his rail, or he would have fallen over. The men watched as Ned Wishnell sped off, smaller and smaller as he went out to sea.
“Where the hell’s he going?” Barney apparently still expected an answer.
“I think he’s going fishing,” said Don Pommeroy.
“Hell of a note,” said Barney. He squinted out at the ocean. “Didn’t he see us?”
“Course he seen us.”
“Why didn’t he say anything?”
“What the hell did you think he’d say?”
“I don’t know. Something like, ‘Hey, fellas! What’s going on?’ ”
“Shut up, Barney.”
“I don’t see why I should,” said Barney Addams, but he did.
Ned Wishnell’s impudence utterly dissolved any menace the Fort Niles men may have presented, so the rest of the Courne Haven fishermen, one at a time, climbed down their dock, got into their boats, and set out for a day of lobstering. Like their neighbor Ned, they passed through the Fort Niles blockade without looking to the left or right. Angus Addams screamed at them for a while, but this embarrassed the rest of the Fort Niles men, who, one at a time, turned around and headed home. Angus was the last to go. He was, as Barney reported later, “sweating bullets, cursing stars, sewing buttonholes, and everything else.” Angus was outraged at being deserted by his friends, furious that what could have been a pretty decent blockade had turned comic and useless.