Sometimes Danny goes with him, stands ankle-deep in the warm mud of the tidal ponds and digs with the long-handled clam rake. It’s slow work, pulling that rake out of the bottom, digging through the mud in the tongs with your fingers to find the shellfish, and then dumping them into the bucket floating in the inner tube that Pasco ties to his belt with a frayed length of old laundry line. Pasco works steady like a machine—stripped down to the waist, his Mediterranean skin tanned a deep brown, sixty-something years old and his muscles still hard and ropy, his pectorals just starting to sag. The man runs all of southern New England, but he’s happy as hell standing under the sun in the mud, working like an old paisan.
Yeah, but how many guys has this old paisan had clipped, Danny wonders sometimes, watching him work so peaceful and content. Or done himself? Local lore has it that Pasco personally did Joey Bon ham, Remy LaChance, the McMahon brothers from Boston. Late-night whiskey talk with Peter and Paul whispered that Pasco was no gunman but did his work with a wire or a knife, so close he could smell the sweat.
Some days Pasco and Danny would go to Almacs, buy some chicken thighs, then drive over to Narrow River, where Pasco would tie a long piece of string onto the chicken, toss it out into the water, and then pull it back real slow. What would happen was a blue crab would fasten its claws onto the meat and not let go until Pasco pulled it right into the net that Danny held for him.
“Lesson for you,” Pasco said once as they watched the crab thrash in the bucket, trying to get out. Then he tied another piece of chicken and repeated the process until they had a bucketful of crabs to boil that night.
Lesson: Don’t hold on to something’s going to pull you into a trap. If you’re going to let go, let go early.
Better yet, don’t take the bait at all.
Three
Danny and Liam hop into Pat’s Camry and drive five minutes over to Mashanuck Point.
“So what are we meeting about?” Pat asks his brother.
“The Morettis are taxing the Spindrift,” Liam says, reminding him.
“It’s their territory,” Pat says.
“Not the Drift,” Liam answers. “It’s grandfathered.”
This is true, Danny thinks as he looks out the window. The rest of the places on the shore kick to the Italians, but the Spindrift has been Irish since his father’s time. He knows the place well, used to get drunk there when he worked the boats, sometimes went in to listen to the local blues bands they’d book on weekends in the summer.
The owner, Tim Carroll, is a friend.
They drive past cornfields, and Danny’s always amazed that this land hasn’t been developed. The same family has owned it for three hundred years and they’re stubborn, those Swamp Yankees, would rather grow sweet corn than sell the land and retire rich. But Danny’s grateful for it. It’s nice there, farms right up to the ocean.
“So, what?” Pat asks Liam. “Tim came to you?”
It’s a violation of protocol. If Tim has a beef, he should go to John, or at least Pat. Not the younger brother, not Liam.
“He didn’t come to me,” Liam says, a little defensive. “I was having a beer, we got talking . . .”
There’s so many little peninsulas and tidal marshes along the shore, Danny thinks, you got to drive inland, then along the coast, then back toward the sea to get to any particular place. Quicker if they drained the marshes and built some roads, but that’s Connecticut, not Rhode Island.
Rhode Island likes things difficult, hard to find.
The other unofficial state motto—“If you were supposed to know, you’d know.”
So it takes a few minutes to drive to the Spindrift, when they could have just walked up the beach. But they go by road, past the cornfields and then the little grocery store, the hot dog stand, the laundromat, the ice cream stand. As they make the curve that takes them back along the ocean, there’s a trailer park on their left, and then the bar.
They park out in front.
You walk through the door, you know this ain’t no money machine. It’s an old clapboard joint, pounded by salt air and winter winds for sixty-some-odd years, and it’s a wonder it’s still standing. One good blow, Danny thinks, could knock it down, and hurricane season is coming up.
Tim Carroll is standing behind the bar, jerking a brew for a tourist.
Skinny Tim Carroll, Danny thinks, a pound wouldn’t stick to him with glue. Tim’s, what, thirty-three now, and he already looks like the responsibility of running the place since his old man died is aging him. He wipes his hands on his apron and comes out from behind the bar. “Peter and Paul are already here,” he says, jerking his chin out toward the deck. “Chris Palumbo’s with them.”