surrounded with seagulls greedy for the bait. Angus sped up to the boat. Stan Thomas stopped his work and looked over at his friend.
“Something wrong, Angus?” Stan asked.
Angus Addams threw the severed buoys onto Stan’s deck without saying a word. He threw the buoys down with a triumphant gesture, as if they were the severed heads of his worldly enemies. Stan looked at the buoys impassively.
“Something wrong, Angus?” he repeated.
“You push me again,” Angus said, “the next thing I’ll cut is your goddamn throat.”
That was Angus’s standard threat. Stan Thomas had heard it a dozen times, sometimes directed to a malefactor and sometimes in the gleeful retelling of a story over beers and cribbage. But Angus had never before directed it at Stan. The two men, the two best friends, looked at each other. Their boats bobbed below them.
“You owe me for twelve traps,” Stan Thomas said. “Those were brand-new. I could tell you to sit down and make me twelve brand-new traps, but you can give me twelve of your old ones, and we’ll forget about it.”
“You can jump up my ass.”
“You haven’t set any traps there all spring,” Stan said.
“Don’t you fucking think you have any play with me because we have a goddamn history, Stan.”
Angus Addams was purple around his neck, but Stan Thomas stared him down without showing any anger. “If you were anyone else,” Stan said, “I’d punch you in the teeth right now for the way you’re talking to me.”
“Don’t give me no special goddamn treatment.”
“That’s right. You didn’t give me any.”
“That’s right. And I won’t ever give you none, neither, so keep your goddamn traps the hell away from my ass.”
And he pulled his boat away, giving Stan Thomas the finger as he sped off. Stan and Angus did not speak to each other for nearly eight months. And that encounter was between good friends, between two men who ate dinner together several nights a week, between two neighbors, between a teacher and his protégé. That was an encounter between two men who did not believe that the other was working day and night to destroy him, which was what the men of Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island happen to believe of each other. Correctly, for the most part.
It’s a dicey business. And it was that sort of pushing and cutting that brought about the fourth lobster war, back in the late 1950s. Who started it? Hard to say. Hostility was in the air. There were men back from Korea who wanted to take up fishing again and found that their territory had been eaten away. There were, in the spring of 1957, several young men who had just come of age and had bought their own boats. They were trying to find a place for themselves. The fishing had been good the year before, so everyone had enough money to buy more traps and bigger boats with bigger engines, and the fishermen were pressing against one another.
There was some cutting on both sides; there was some pushing. Curses were shouted over the bows of some boats. And, over the course of several months, the rancor grew more intense. Angus Addams got tired of cutting away Courne Haven traps in his territory, so he started messing with the enemy in more imaginative ways. He took all his household garbage aboard, and when he found alien traps in his way, he’d pull them up and stuff them with garbage. Once, he stuffed an old pillow into someone’s trap so that no lobsters could get in, and he wasted one entire afternoon driving nails through a trap; it ended up looking like a spiked instrument of torture. Angus had another trick; he’d stuff someone’s straying trap with rocks and throw it back into the sea. It was a lot of work, that trick. He had to load the rocks on his own boat, with sacks and a wheelbarrow, which took a lot of time. But Angus considered it time well spent. He liked to think of the Courne Haven bastard straining and struggling to pull up a trap, only to find it full of rubble.
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.