Free Beauty: A Novel by Frederick Dillen Page A

legislation that governed the days and territories and catch weights for boats that went out after groundfish in New England’s Atlantic fishing areas. Groundfish were the heart of the industry. A judge supported the amendment, and if the agencies decided to enforce it as scheduled in a few weeks, most of the men here wouldn’t fish again. That did not sound good for them, and Carol sympathized, but for her own company, she wasn’t sure what it meant. Parks had told her that the blocks of fish to feed the lines in the old plant would in fact come from Asia, and presumably that supply wouldn’t be affected by what happened here.
    Today the agencies were announcing their decision, and if it had been her, Carol would have convened the meeting and made the announcement fast and let the fishermen get to the bars.
    Wherever they were from—Maine, Gloucester, New Bedford, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Long Island—the fishermen were old. The men who were standing were healthy, but even they were forty years old. The guys sitting in the chairs, from behind she could see their rolls and their bald spots and their white bristle on loose jowls. Carol wondered if all these fishermen would really have come from such distances if this was the kind of no-hope show she used to run. Parks had said, after all, that the amendment and the regulations might not get approved.
    Maybe, Carol thought, Elizabeth Island had been lucky in losing most of its fleet earlier than the harbors with bigger fleets and auction sites. She had seen it before. As industries consolidated and transformed and were killed off, the towns and companies that hung on longest sometimes got hit hardest in the end, while ravaged companies in the towns that got hit first had time to discover niches and adapt and survive.
    As soon as she thought that, Carol wondered what might be a profitable niche her company could establish.
    For her plant here to survive, it would need to find and fill some sort of niche to augment the failing margins in its principal product of fish sticks cut from those blocks of frozen fish brought in from overseas. Unless Carol could lower the price on her fish sticks, she could not compete with the bigger outfits in the business. Income from some sort of niche, and it didn’t have to be a lot of income, would give her the leeway to lower her fish stick price.
    What the plant didn’t use, what it had been built for and survived on generation after generation, was fresh fish. It was the failing of fresh fish stocks that had led to importing blocks of frozen fish from Asia and that right now was killing the fishermen in this gym. Carol thought it might be possible that fresh fish, maybe even regardless of the regulations, could provide her plant with the balance of free cash flow that would mean survival. She wondered if there would be enough fresh fish available to give her a small signature niche, and to tip her balance sheet into the black.
    She looked at the fishermen. She’d seen the factory floor of a fishing boat this morning, and she felt she could pick out the factory owners in the room by the authority in their bearing. She thought she spotted a brittle pretense in the posture of some of them, suggesting that their boats might belong to the bank in a month. It was the kind of dynamic you could notice among men anywhere.
    There was a different dynamic in this gym, though, than there would have been in a gym full of other kinds of factory workers, and it wasn’t just because there were a lot of independent owners here. There weren’t any women. Ah, Carol thought, women worked in the plants, and men went out on the boats. But that didn’t account for the discomfort she felt in her head and her stomach. She felt unsteady on her feet.
    Had she eaten something? Suddenly she could barely stand. Blume thought she was too old a zebra.
    She looked over the heads of the men in the chairs to the table of short-sleeve-dress-shirted, cheap-necktied