Oysterman
Politics | Fable 5
“Buying or lost?” the man said. Gravel in the voice, thirty years of shouting over diesel.
“Neither. You’re Graham?”
“Depends who’s asking.”
“Daniel Reyes. I watched the video, the one the conservation group cut about the salmon farm.” He let it sit. “Three generations, you said. You said you did not intend to watch this bay die feeding a balance sheet in Oslo.”
Graham straightened. Up close he was bigger than the video made him, forearms like dock line, a white scar through one eyebrow. “They filmed a lot of us.”
“They did. You’re the one I flew up for.” Daniel nodded at the totes. “You interested in politics, Graham?”
Graham looked at him a long moment, then out at the water, where the salmon company’s survey buoys sat orange against the gray. “Interested,” he said. “That’s one word for it.”
“So you’ve thought about it.”
“Thought about it the way you think about swimming out past the ledge.”
“Let me buy you a beer.”
“You’ll buy me two.”
The Anchor smelled like fryer oil and salt-swollen wood. Deb had Graham’s lager down before he reached the stool and looked a question at Daniel, who pointed at the same tap.
They talked weather first, the way you’re supposed to, then diesel prices, then the lease renewals. Daniel kept opening small doors and Graham kept stepping through them, and somewhere in the second beer Daniel asked what happened to the Democrats up here. Graham set his glass down.
“Same thing that happened everywhere. They stopped showing up, and when they came they sounded like the bank.” He turned on the stool. “You want to know what I think, mister from away? I think forty billionaires bought both parties and kept the receipt. I think a senator’s vote runs cheaper than what I pay a sternman for a winter. Private equity is buying the wharves, the trailer parks, and now a conglomerate out of Oslo wants my bay for a feedlot, and the people whose job it was to stand in the doorway spent thirty years holding it open.” He kept it at working volume. It carried anyway; clear things do. “Folks out here want the water clean, the work to pay, and a house in their own town. That used to be a whole party.”
The bar had gone quiet around the edges. Daniel had a sentence ready with the word message in it and swallowed it. He’d given this speech before, Daniel thought. To the wheelhouse radio. To the gulls. He’d been running for years and nobody had told him.
At a table by the window, four women had turned at the raised voice. Three went back to their wine. The fourth, green jacket, fifties, held on Graham a half second longer, and Daniel watched recognition cross her face, watched her look away fast, before their eyes could meet, and set her shoulder against the room. Fixers keep files. Some of this man’s file was sitting twenty feet away drinking pinot grigio.
Graham caught none of it. He was looking at the taps like they were a horizon.
“Here’s my situation,” Daniel said. “Filing deadline is five weeks out. The party has nobody for the Senate seat. I have eleven names in my bag, and every one of them loses to Susan Collins by nine points, politely.” He set his card on the bar, face down. “I think you should run.”
Graham turned his glass a quarter turn. Then another. “You know what you’re asking. People here know me. All of me. There’s things in my wake.”
“I read the file. I flew up anyway.”
“I’ve got a boat. A crew. A lease that comes up in March.” The glass went around again. “I need to sit with it.”
“Take the week,” Daniel said.
Graham finished the beer and set the empty down soft, the way you set a full cage on a rail. “Don’t book your flight home yet.”