Into Woods Read online

  That afternoon there’s a 2:30 tide, and Mr. Forrest sets me up with one of his crews, the group I have been calling the Midcoast boys, these fellows who, I’ll later learn, are practically worming poster boys they’ve been on TV so much. They love nothing more than razzing a guy with a tie and a microphone. The wormers know something most reporters won’t admit: they’re getting used. But torturing a reporter for a tide can make up for it, make time fly.

  One of the crew, my guide, gets me to follow him in my own vehicle—sixty miles an hour on back roads to one Thompson Island. I watch his head turn at every sight of the water; he’s checking the size of the tide, driving off the road. We park on the main drag into Bar Harbor in front of an enormous fence that hides a gargantuan house.

  After I’ve donned my fly-fishing boots in the face of my guide’s skeptical impatience (but no warnings), he trots me past two no-trespassing signs and through the summer-dink lawn, around a summer-dink gate and past two more summer-dink property signs, then along an old lane through a quiet wood, shore pines and pin oaks, lots of poison ivy. Past the fifth and sixth no-trespassing signs we break into a little meadow that is on a point thrust into the Mount Desert Narrows. Trap Rock is in sight, and Thomas Island. Seals play out there. There’s a strong onshore breeze, the sound of waves crashing, white sprays of foam thrown up on rocks out there. It’s gorgeous.

  In the cover of some scruffy pines and under yet another no-trespassing sign, three grim guys await. My guide offers no introductions. I pull out my little notebook filled with little questions to ask, but every one of them looks and sounds like it was written at four in the morning in the worst motel in Ellsworth. We all of us stand amongst boulders and birch trees and watch the tide, which for me means picking out a particular rock and keeping track of how wet it is.

  I smile my rube’s smile. “So what are your all’s names?”

  Nothing.

  “You. Hi. Where do you live?”

  Nada.

  “How much can a good wormer expect to make on the average tide?”

  Silence.

  “Ever get into fights over territory?”

  Here we go. They all look at me. My guide says, “Old days you’d have a hell of a brawl. Now we see guys from Wiscasset or someplace, we might holler some.”

  “Tell’ em to go the fuck home,” the next guy says, real fury.

  My guide says, “Used to be you’d shoot holes in a guy’s boat.”

  Another gently says, “Tires do get slashed. But some years the worms are one place and not another and fellows travel.”

  “Where’re you from?” the go-the-fuck-home guy says. Everyone looks at me closely.

  Me, I don’t say a thing, just look out at the tide.

  “He’s from the college,” my guide says. “Farmington, up there.”

  “I thought only queers lived up that way!”

  I’m supposed to defend Farmington, I guess. But I don’t. What am I going to say? Well, yes, we have some gay citizens, of course, about ten percent, I believe, something along those lines, same as Wormville, same as anywhere. Nice folks, our queers. Get used to it!

  We stand on the rocks. We watch the tide. The breeze itself feels tense, carries drops of rain. Where’s the story? I don’t say a word. The men around me stiffen.

  Shoptalk saves the day. My guide says, “She gonna go out?”

  The gentle man says, “Somewhat, I think.” That onshore wind will keep the tide small.

  The angry fellow says, “Probably under eight feet.”

  My guide: “Shit tide.”

  The angry fellow: “tI’ll give you ten bucks you bail out the bay.”

  They all snigger and have a look at me to see if I believe that’s possible. I notice for the first time that the silent man is a young teen. He looks as if he feels sorry for me. I love him for that, gangly kid. He stands half behind the protection of his dad’s back (his dad is the gentle one), holding a bloodworm hoe (six tines nine inches long, short wooden handle), dangles it at the end of one limp arm, an empty joint-compound bucket dangled at the end of the other, the tools of the trade looking like mittens someone has pinned to his jacket.

  “You like worming?” I ask him inanely.

  “I’m just doing it so my dad don’t get pissed off when I ask for money.”

  His dad doesn’t laugh, stares the boy down.

  Around a corner on the rocky mud toward the mainland a lone figure comes a-slogging, a stately, slow march through the muck, his bucket in one hand, hoe in the other. On shore he’d look weary; on firm land he’d look gimpy and stiff; on dry land he’d be another old salt spitting stories; but on the flats there’s a grandeur about him. He pauses and looks at the mud, continues on, pauses and looks at the mud, stoops, begins to dig. His style is large, operatic: big strokes, very slowly made. He doesn’t seem to be turning up many worms. “He’s way inside,” the angry man says.

  “It’s Binky Farmer,” my guide says. “He’s seventy-seven years old, that one.”

  “Way inside,” the angry one repeats, but no one else seems to want to indict old Binky, whose only pension is a tide a day.

  “Shoot him,” the angry one says. “I mean it. Shoot him. It’s the ethics of the thing.”

  My guide says, “It’s not Binky who should be shot. It’s these schoolteachers who come along in summah, trying to strike it rich during their taxpayer vacation.”

  All the boys turn subtly. Binky’s off the spot. I’m back on. They eye me closely.

  I pull out my pen, my little notebook, write down chunks of conversation to remind everyone what I’m here for.

  My guide looks on curiously, but no way he’ll penetrate my handwriting. He offers a quote, is visibly pleased when I write it down: “We’ll all need boats before long with all these no-trespassing signs.”

  “Fucking summer dinks,” says the angry one. “Just try to keep me off this fucking point!” He swipes his rake at the air. “I been coming out here since I was seven.” He swipes the rake in my direction again, for emphasis, ready to pop my summer-dink skull, find the worm within.

  We watch the tide. It’s going nowhere at all.

  Five more wormers come into the meadow. No greetings, just nods, men who’ve known each other a long time. The new fellows take note of a stranger’s presence, remain utterly silent, drift off to watch the tide from their own lookouts around the point. The rest of us watch the bay, watch the sky, watch old Binky as he straightens up, rests; we watch the seagulls, watch the island out there, watch as Binky goes back to work.

  Suddenly, no word said, they’re all rolling up their sleeves. Suddenly, the tide is right. I can’t find my indicator rock—suddenly there are a million rocks. The new guys are off and moving through the mud. The father-and-son team hike off across the meadow to the other side of the neck, disappear. I had hoped to work near them, in the warmth of their kindness. My guide and the angry fellow step over the seaweed-covered rocks and into the mud right in front of us. Resolutely I follow, uninvited. It may not be much of a tide, it may not be deep mud, but after a short twenty minutes, I’m stuck good.

  The angry guy looks back, laughs, shouts something.

  “What?” I shout.

  “I said, You are a queer!”

  “Leave him for the tide,” my guide shouts. The two of them are laughing, hard, moving away from me.

  “What?” I shout.

  “Mud eel bite your homo dick off!” says the angry guy.

  “What?” I shout.

  My guide: “He won’t get but four cents for that worm!”

  Hor, hor, hor, hor, hor.

  I’m alone. I struggle, still sinking. I drop my notebook, reach for it, lose my pen. I thrash after the notebook, quickly exhausted, then lose my hat, lose my sunglasses. I don’t want to lose my Orvis wading boots, but after a struggle, I do lose them, abandon them there in the mud, socks too. The notebook is the one thing I manage to recover, and with it stuffed in my shirt I crawl and sl
ither and drag myself to a rock near shore, pull myself puffing up onto it, sit heavily, watch the wormers move out and away chopping at the mud, warmed to their work, no thought of me in their heads.

  “Fucking queers!” I shout. I’m reaching for an insult they might mind.

  But they can’t hear me. They’re already hundreds of yards away in the wind, which comes at my face.

  “Fucking winter dinks!”

  They don’t even turn their heads.

  I drag myself rock to rock through the mud and to shore and slog my way back up the point through the yard of the summer mansion. All the no-trespassing signs have been torn down, torn to bits by those fellows who came after, strewn in bits everywhere along the way as if by some furious wind.

  Dicky Butts’s wife drives the town school bus, part time. Health insurance? No way. Pension plan? Ha. They live in town, a quiet and genuine Maine place, a working town—no stores, no tourist facilities—just a village made of houses and trailers and shacks and sheds. Dicky’s good little house is neatly kept, painted blue, on a small piece of an old family lot. His grandmother lives nearby, and his sister too, and his mom and dad, and his aunts and uncles and cousins and many a good friend. Their propinquity is his security, his insurance, his retirement plan.

  Truey’s house is on a corner of the property down by the road, next turn up from the worm shed. It’s a small place, a ranch house, bedrooms in the basement. In the yard he’s got an old army truck rebuilt to serve as a log skidder, huge tires draped with tractor chains—winter work. There are logs everywhere. Some cut, some tree length, all of them a season old, valuably waiting. Beside the skidder is his speedway trailer—high rack of worn racing slicks—leaning into the weather. The car itself, the estimable number five, is in a homebuilt garage, and in the garage is where you’ll find Truey and Dicky, most high tides, mired in oil, changing engines, packing bearings, knocking out dents (of which in number five there are always plenty). Behind the garage in tall grass are a couple of car bodies—what’s left of wrecks Truman and Dicky have used as parts for the racer. And there’s kid stuff for the little boys—plenty of toys, a swing set, a play pool. Truey’s wife is a nurse at the hospital in Calais, fifteen miles down Route 1. Her job provides the family with health insurance and a retirement plan. Her job also gives insurance of another kind: proof against bad worming.

  Delores and Walter’s house is at the top of a long, narrow lawn, a couple of football fields up the hill from the road and the worm shed. It’s newish, set back on the hill, modern lines, tall windows, peaked ceiling, furniture-showroom furniture. It’s all very tidy, with an entire wall devoted to a wallpaper mountain scene, anything but the ocean.

  It’s well known, according to Walter, well known around the flats Downeast, that Delores runs the Walter Lock Jr. Bait Company. He means he’s damn proud of her business acumen, and not afraid to say so. Delores is tanned and short and built delicately around the ankles and knees, bigger and sturdier on top. She wears large, round eyeglasses, gives an occasional smile, looks closely at you as you speak, her bullshit detector set on stun. Walter says she’s tough—she’s the one to sell something—sell a car, sell a house, sell the worms (“If these senators up in Washington was just women,” he says again, has said it five or six times since I’ve known him). There’s a sign in her handsome handwriting in the worm shed: “No more short counts. There will be no warning.” I know it’s her handwriting, because she’s written me at the university, inviting me to come on back down, see the business end of things. It’s her sense that I didn’t quite get what I needed from the men, she wrote, in so many words, quite a few words. And today she’s gone out of her way to answer all my questions, even suggesting questions to ask. She knows I want some color for my write-up (she calls it), so she has told me that she and Walter tried a couple of winters in Florida, picking oranges (piecework, like worms), but lately it’s been back to year-round Maine. As for Truey, Truey may seem like a tough guy, but Truey is her little love bunny.

  While Walter and Truey are out on the flats, she’s on the phone and watching the fax—getting orders from distributors and retailers all over, filling them. She shows me how everything works. Charts and graphs and order sheets. The volume of her sales gets translated into limits: if she’s got orders for 10,000 bloodworms and 5,000 sandworms on a given day, that’s as many as she’ll buy from her diggers. A 500-worm limit means a digger can make no more than $50.00 that day, no matter how prolific the mud. Some families, the ones Delores likes, can get around the limits by bringing spouses and sons and daughters into the picture.

  In the worming shed—the windowless cinderblock basement of a truck garage (the garage now converted to an apartment—the days when they could afford to run their own trucks are over)—she washes the counting trays, packs the worms. She hasn’t stopped moving since I arrived. The worms go in the usual cardboard flats for the distributors, 125 sands or 250 bloods in a bed of seaweed. Also, increasingly, Delores makes a special fisherman’s ten-pack for bait shops to sell, her own invention. A little maiden-hair seaweed, ten carefully counted worms to a small, clear, plastic bag, a twist tie, then into a partitioned shipping box, cardboard lined with styrofoam:

  LIVE SEA WORMS. RUSH!

  A lot of work, something she didn’t have to do in the past.

  It’s impossible to talk to her when she’s counting; she doesn’t hear or see, waits till the little bag she’s working on is completely and neatly packed. She doesn’t move quickly, even though it’s familiar work; rather, she’s elegant with it, as if she were cooking a fancy French dish. Between ten-packs she gives a small shrug, a smile, talks a snippet of politics, a bit of worm theory, tells a quick story, offers a confession: “Back when we were paying two and three cents a worm I’d kill ’em when they stung me. Now we’re paying ten, I just pack the biters in like the rest.” She likes her diggers loyal, she says, doesn’t appreciate someone who’s over limit trying to sell to other dealers, though she’ll buy spare worms from almost anybody if she’s got the orders.

  Delores has two years of college, University of Southern Maine, thirty-some years back, cannot remember what major, did not get the degree. At this, I just shrug. For that, she likes me more. And I like her. She knows exactly who I am. She keeps me at her side, introduces me to everyone as a scientist. I don’t correct her, and in some weird way my actual physical stance changes. The look on my face feels scientific. Even my questions change. I’m a new man. Give me a lab coat. I peer at the worms a whole new way, as if through some delicate instrument. For the first time among wormers I don’t feel like an idiot. That’s Delores.

  In the hours after the tide the wormers come in, quietly, tiredly, make their counts. There’s no banter, no conversation, no braggadocio. The diggers just come in. There’s Jordon LeMieux, whom Walter has called an ace blood digger. There’s Spooky Nick, another ace, and Clarissa Larssen—the best woman wormer in Maine, in Walter’s estimation. Squeak Snodgras comes in and counts his worms wordlessly, hands in his count slip, wordlessly leaves. There’s a cool-looking teen boy, a hottie—Nike Air sneakers, t-shirt that says Slam Dunk, inner-city haircut—standing by his long-haired and tattooed dad, and in the counting room at prom time the boy is attentive, engaged, watches carefully as Pop counts his allowance worm by worm into the tray. Another father stands beside his daughter, an athletic and serious young woman of sixteen—very, very pretty—with mud to her eyelashes. They count. No one talks, not even all the young guys—a dozen of them in their twenties (their muddy pants low on their hips, showing the cracks of their fannies: wormer’s cleavage). No chatter. No high fives. Nothing but the counting, the exchanging of slips, this scientist watching. There are two guys with ponytails like mine (that is, scraggly), a bunch with tattoos, several apparent bodybuilders, a thin fellow with Jesus Loves You on his sweatshirt. The wormers straggle in for a couple of hours, dumping their worms, counting them fast under fluorescent light, filling out their slips, collec
ting their cash or watching Delores put their counts in her book for a paycheck at the end of the week.

  In a couple of months some of the boys will have to start blueberry picking up on the highlands; a few weeks past that some will go off logging. Some have skills like welding for whoever comes needing it; some will clean houses or leave town with construction crews or take temporary work at a mill. In December there’s firewood chopping, even knickknack carving, and many an individual scheme. Then the new year: time to start thinking about the mud. Some guys will have to get out there in January—break the ice, dig the worms. Some will luxuriate till February. Some—the diggers with luck, or skills that match this year’s needs, or spouses who work good jobs—some won’t have to go out till March.