“Not that kind of boat.”
“Shame,” says Billy, shaking his head. Matty feels like he should apologize, but he doesn’t.
Billy explains that a lot of the boats will be out already. “I earned my stripes long time ago anyway,” he says. “I can come and go as I please.” They pull into the parking lot at the wharf, next to the other trucks. There’s a man fiddling with a trap in the back of his truck. Billy, who’s first to the boat, says, “Hey, Brendan.”
Matty slides out of his side, and Hazel right after. Brendan calls out, “Hey, Billy, you hire yourself a new sternman?”
“Yuh,” says Billy. He smiles, and his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Got two for the price of one. My lucky day.” Hazel rolls her eyes at Matty. She squeezes his hand, then lets it go.I could die happy,thinks Matty after the hand squeeze.Right here, right now.
Billy’s boat is calledPauline,after his wife, Hazel’s grandmother. It’s an honor, Billy says, to be the most important woman in a fisherman’s life. To have your name on a boat.
“There’s girl fishermen too though, right?” asks Hazel.
Billy says, “Yuh. We let a few in.” Matty can’t tell if he’s joking or not.
“I would say that it’s probably also an honor to be the most important man in a fisherwoman’s life,” Hazel says. “Right?” She looks at Matty and smiles.
“Right,” says Matty.
The orange overalls Billy gives them are too big on both of them; they look like kids dressing up on Halloween. He hands them each a pair of gloves that make Matty think of the gloves Pauline wears to wash the dishes.
“This here’s my skiff,” Billy says, pointing to one of the small boats tied up at the wharf.
“We row out to thePauline,” explains Hazel. Billy swings a foul-smelling bucket into the skiff—bait—and motions for Matty and Hazel to climb in first. “Can I row, Granddad?” asks Hazel, and Billy tells her maybe on the way back, when they’re done hauling. She is so comfortable, so self-assured, that something in Matty’s heart clenches and unclenches. His breath snags in his throat. He is not worthy.
On the boat, Billy fires up the radio, uncoils some ropes, checks the engine. (Should Matty offer to help? What if he does and Billy says okay? He doesn’t know how to help!)
“I’ll give you a tour,” says Hazel. “Pot hauler.” She points to a pulley contraption on one side of the boat. “Radar antennae. Gunwale.” The rail along the edge of the boat. “That’s where we’ll restthe traps when we pull them up. Let’s see. Bathroom.” She motions to an empty bait bucket.
Matty blanches. “Bathroom?” he manages.
“Only in emergencies. You can just go over the side if you need to. Benefit of being a boy. Me, I’ll hold it all day.”
Matty is 150 percent sure he’s not going to go to the bathroom in front of Hazel or Billy.
Hazel pours coffee from a big sliver thermos into three Styrofoam cups. “We drink it black out here,” she says. “Hope you can handle it.” A joke, or a challenge? He isn’t sure.
“I can,” he says.
“Hazel,” Billy says. “Here’s a trap I need to take back for repair. Forgot to bring it with me last time. Want to show your young friend there what’s what on it? So’s he knows the drill?” The trap is metal: yellow and green. Hazel slides it between them and squats down beside it. Matty squats too.
Hazel points to the different parts of the trap. “This here is the bait bag. This is where we’re going to put the herring. See how the trap is made up of two compartments? The lobster, let’s call him Fred, comes in through this first part—it’s called the kitchen.” She walks her fingers into the trap. “Then he smells the bait in the bait bag.” Hazel’s voice goes high and she says, ‘Yum! Herring!’” Matty laughs. “He gets a little taste and it isdelicious.So then Fred is like, I wouldlovesome more of that herring. Or maybe he’s thinking, I’m super full, time to get out of here. Either way, he goes through this netting into this second part here, which is the parlor. And,there’s no going back from the parlor, because the netting is wide where he enters, see, but narrow where he’d try to go back. Fred is trapped.” She grins at Matty. “Then we pull up the trap, and we say hello to Fred.”
“That’s it,” says Billy approvingly. “Tell him about the eggs.”
“Oh! Yeah. So let’s say Fred was actually Frederica, and she was pregnant. We’d flip her over and we’d see these eggs attached toher belly. They look like a bunch of little black berries spread all over. You can’t miss them.” Matty feels slightly sick to his stomach at this part. “Then we make a notch in her tail with this thing here, it’s called a V-notch. We toss her back into the water, so she can go out there and have all of her happy little lobster babies and nobody else will bother her. It’s illegal to keep a female with eggs. Got it?”
“Got it.” Matty can’t believe that in addition to being an absolute goddess Hazel knows everything there is to know about lobstering, and she’s not scared of anything. It’s official: Hazel is perfect.
“The most important thing,” Billy says, “is to always know where the ropes are.” He points to the deck of the boat, and the neat coil of ropes. “Know where your feet are relative to the ropes.Always. You get your feet caught in the ropes and I don’t know about it and I throw a trap overboard or turn on the hauler, that’s it for you. Straight overboard.”
“People die that way all the time,” says Hazel. “Don’t they, Granddad?” Matty shivers.
“Maybe not all the time,” says Billy. “But, yuh, I’ve known my fair share. There’s hardly even enough time to cut someone free of the ropes before they drown.” He looks out to the horizon and furrows his brow, then looks at Matty like he can see all the way into the very depths of his soul. “Ready, crew?”
In Matty’s grandparents’ dining room Billy Pelletier sometimes looks out of place, his hands too big for the silverware, maybe, his voice too loud or too gruff for the room, his accent too strong. But here on the water Matty can see how he fits in. Everyone has a natural habitat—Matty’s is the cross-country course, his mother’s is the classroom, his father’s the podcast studio—and clearly this, the open water, the wheelhouse of thePauline,is Billy’s.
“Ready, captain,” says Hazel. They both look at Matty until he repeats, “Ready, captain.” Billy starts the engine.
