Spotlight: While The Getting Is Good by Matt Riordan
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Amid the gangland wars of Prohibition, one fisherman’s long-shot play to secure his family’s future brings disaster to everyone he loves.
As Prohibition nears its end, Eld—a Great Lakes fisherman and war veteran—makes a desperate grab for more. Watching lesser men hit it big while he struggles to provide becomes too much to bear. A quick stint running whiskey seems like a smart, temporary fix. Even his cautious wife, Maggie, agrees.
But one brutal run across Lake Huron upends everything. Caught in a ruthless turf war, Eld’s family is torn apart—he vanishes into Canada, while Maggie and their daughter are forced into a faith that’s more cult than refuge.
By the time they find each other again, the cost of that one gamble may have changed them forever.
Excerpt
Eld watched his son raise the binoculars to his eyes. The boy didn’t put the strap around his neck, and Eld almost said something in the way of a warning about the about the binoculars finding their way overboard. He opened his mouth but thought better of it and said nothing. The boy had arrived at the age where telling him things wasn’t so much teaching as nagging, and a flash of annoyance was getting to be a familiar look on the boy’s face. Besides, Eld had picked up those binoculars in France.
Eld never said “war.” He always said “in France.” Even to himself.
They were good binoculars, too expensive to replace, but they weren’t French. Eld had plucked them from the mud near the body of an almost dead English horse. If those binoculars went to the bottom of Lake Huron it would be one less thing Eld had from France, which was fine by him.
“Yup,” Doc said, “that’s Charlie McCallister’s boat.” The boy held the binoculars one-handed and rolled at the hips with the swell. “He’s painted the old scow, blue of all things, but that’s his, all right.”
Doc turned and moved toward Eld, each step across the yawing deck light and certain. Eld watched him and knew how the world seemed an easy place to a young man, more so for a young man like Doc. There was no point in telling him otherwise. Doc would just stare at him, and anyway that information would reveal itself soon enough. Eld smiled at his son and took back the binoculars. He put the strap around his neck before sweeping the rolling blue for Charlie’s boat. It hadn’t been half an hour since the rain quit, but the sun was sparkling down the slope of the bigger rollers, forcing Eld to squint. It was indeed Charlie’s boat, and Doc was right. He’d repainted it. Blue. If some dark November night Charlie didn’t come back on time, and his wife sounded the alarm, Eld and the rest of the fishermen in town would be out here looking for the upturned blue hull of his boat, in all that blue water. Charlie knew that.
“I don’t see any gear out,” said Doc.
Eld focused on the stern. Doc was right again. No nets were visible and no cork lines trailed from the stern. Charlie was nowhere in evidence either.
“He’s just drifting,” said Doc. “We in Canada? Close?” The boy looked at his father and cocked an eyebrow. “ ’Course, little thing like an international border, that wouldn’t stop Charlie from fishing.”
Doc had been out on deck when Eld dead reckoned their course on the chart table in the wheelhouse. Eld figured them at a couple miles over the Ontario line. He didn’t have the papers to fish here any more than Charlie did, but there was less competition than on the Michigan side. Fishing over the line was illegal, but Eld didn’t feel wrong about it. The fish didn’t know they were Canadians.
Eld put the binoculars down. “Let’s go take a look. Might be he needs help.”
Doc followed his father into the wheelhouse.
“That fool Charlie needs a tow, he’s gonna have to wait till we’re full up. We don’t have the fuel or the time to run him back twenty miles.”
“There’s been days I needed help,” said Eld, but he didn’t counter his son.
Lately Doc was given to expressing some unchristian sentiments, and when he did, Eld could hear those same words coming from Doc’s mother. He saw that thought for the poison it was and chose instead to think of Doc’s sentiments as a symptom of a youthful impatience. Anyway, they could sort out what to do when they talked to Charlie. Eld bumped the throttle arm twice with the palm of his hand and the engine clatter made further conversation impossible.
If Charlie needed help, he should be out on deck looking for it, but he wasn’t there. Eld weighed the possibility that Charlie was working alone, and that he had gone over. He’d be floating somewhere, on his back probably, in the twenty miles of open water between here and land, and there’d be almost no point in looking for him. Eld knew he would look anyway, until he had to run back for fuel. A whole tank of fuel burned and no fish to show for it would put his month in the red. That would make two out of the last three, and that would mean a conversation with Maggie. Like her son, Maggie would say Charlie was a damned fool and Eld didn’t need to make his family go hungry for every fool who got it in his head to be a fisherman. All of that was true, and reasonable, and just the same, Eld, if need be, would go looking for Charlie.
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About the Author
Matt Riordan grew up in Michigan but spent his early twenties working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. After college, Matt drifted from commercial fishing through a variety of jobs before landing in law school. He then became a litigator in New York City, where he practiced for twenty years. He now lives with his family in Australia.
