Chapter 29: Listening Station

"Deal," I said.

Margie spat on her palm and held it out.

I spat on mine and shook it.

A man from away in a sport coat turned around at the rail and looked at us with real horror.

I paid her that night at her kitchen table.

I didn't have a dollar.

Jet did.

He took a shiny new coin out of the pocket of Margie's ex's jeans and laid it in front of her with great ceremony.

Margie squinted at it.

"Where'd you get this?"

"The dish at the store," Jet said. "By the register. Take a penny, leave a penny."

"That's not a penny. And you didn't leave one."

"I'll leave one tomorrow."

"You stole the dollar I'm selling her my shed for."

"It was shiny," Jet said.

Margie put her face down on the table and laughed until Minnow came downstairs to see who was dying.

The bait shed took two weeks.

I thought I'd be doing it alone.

I wasn't, not for one day.

The two gray-bearded brothers came the first morning with a truck full of lumber.

They built a long bench under the window without asking what it was for.

The loud lobsterman rewired the whole place, swearing, and wouldn't let me pay him.

"You hauled my brother's traps for two years," he said. "Call it even."

The store owner brought the fire-truck jar.

There was eleven thousand dollars in it.

"The town voted," she said. "Last night. We're getting the truck from the county surplus lot for three. The rest is yours."

"I can't take this."

"Then don't take it. Spend it. On those things you drop in the water."

So I did.

Five new hydrophones, one for every side of the island.

A real recording rig.

A solar panel on the roof, and a dehumidifier, because the shed still smelled of herring and always would.

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