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fifty-four—was a stout, balding, round-belly, thick-knuckled old Wolverine net-minder and only son of a crusty Eastport lobsterman. Arnie had made it off the boat on his hockey skills, then studied history and became a scholar. After graduation, he drove dutifully back to Eastport to be stern-man forhis ailing pop, but got “kicked off by the ole man for my own good.” After which, he picked up an MBA at Rutgers, worked a decade in institutional provisioning, then went out with his own ideas and made a ton of money running a fancy fish boutique, catering to big-money types in Bernardsville and Basking Ridge. With his Maine-boy solidity, athlete’s doggedness, and a lifetime gnosis regarding fish, Arnie (who was a quick read) figured out that what he was selling was authenticity— his (as well as Asian Arowana and Golden Osetra). The Schlumberger and Cantor-Fitzgerald bosses all adored him. He showed up personally in the van with his sleeves rolled up, meaty forearms bared, grinning and ready to give great service at a top price. He toted trays, set out canapés, made tireless trips back to the shop, saw to it that every single fishy thing was better than perfect. He reminded his rich customers of the get-your-hands-dirty (and smelly) New England work ethic that made this republic great, powerful, and indomitable and always would, and that they’d gone to Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth to make sure they never got any closer to than the length of Arnie’s sweaty arm.
    â€œI just shake my head, Frank,” Arnie said to me, when we were getting the house sold back in ’04. “My ole man’d drown each and every one of these cocksuckers like palsied puppies. But I like ’em. They’re my bread-and-butter. The moment they’re gone—and they will be, take my word forit—I’ll be right up there in Hopatcong with fish gunk on my hands, delivering lobsters to a whole new limo-full of boy geniuses.”
    Arnie knew something about the future. How much he knew might’ve been worth something to somebody paying attention to our economy back in ’08.
    What’s since then happened to Arnie appearance-wise, however, is not much short of alarming. His big face, once scuffed and divoted by a boyhood on the briny, now looks lacquered, as though he’d gone to the islands and picked up some new facial features. There’s also something strange about his hair. Arnie, like Corporal Alyss, was never a good-looking brute. And even with whatever strange resurfacings and repointings he’s gone in for, he’s no more handsome than he was, nor any younger-looking—which must’ve been the goal. He has the same snarly mouth, the same pugnacious chin, the same brick-bat forehead and too-narrow eyes and meaty ears. I’d assumed the new brown face in the Christmas photo had been a son’s young wife. But possibly she’d belonged to Arnie, who by then had made some dough and traded up from his original wife—first, for a winsome Shu-Kai, then later on for a busty Svetlana. Along the way he’d felt the need to make the old outer-Arnie keep pace with the spirited, energetic, seemingly ageless inner-essence Arnie. Whatever. His need dictated a Biden-esque transplant to replace his old Johnny-Uflattop—a follicle forest that’s now grown in but will never look natural. Likewise, the center crevice between Arnie’s thick eyebrows has been paved over—the part he formerly utilized to register stare-you-down take-it-or-leave-it’s to the high dockside price of halibut and Alaskan crab claws. Plus, the old gulley-gulley of his previously pocked neck now looks the smoothed way it did in his ’68 Wolverine team picture, when he was known as “Gumper Two” and had the habit of roaring out from between the pipes and kicking your ass if he thought you needed it.
    I just have to trust that the old Arnie’s in there