The Line Tender

by Kate Allen

  I slid the glasses onto the top of my head. Fred often chose albums with interesting artwork, but this one was different. My eyes moved immediately from a flaming pink flower in the bottom left to a strange storm brewing in the top right. There were three African people on the cover: a woman with a serene face and two other people hugging in the bottom center. Then I realized they were looking out at a storm with fierce lightning in the distance. The artwork was colorful and surreal, and it left me feeling uneasy.

  “Check out the back,” Fred said.

  I flipped over the cover and saw a pair of hands, one black and the other white. The hands were linked, but some of the fingers looked dislocated and each ring finger stretched like taffy, connecting into the line of a woman’s chin.

  “What does this mean?” I asked, looking up. “What is this?”

  “It’s jazz fusion.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s jazz meets rock and roll.”

  “Is that gonna work?” I asked.

  “Some people think it does.”

  I could tell by the way we’d traveled over three different MBTA lines to buy this album that Fred was one of those people.

  “Where’d you hear about it?”

  “A guy from the high school jazz band,” he said. “I’ll play it for you when we get home.”

  I shrugged. “I’m crabby. I need food.”

  “Okay, I’m almost ready to check out.”

  At the register, I looked at the rack of postcards. There were mostly black-and-white portraits of bands and a few famous paintings. Fred and Fiona looked at them too, while we waited in line.

  “Miles,” Fred shouted. He pulled out a close-up of Miles Davis, wearing some crazy glasses. They were like bug eyes, except they were a little square. They seemed too big for the man’s face.

  “I saw those,” Fiona said. She headed for the rack of sunglasses and came back with a pair that almost matched the ones in the postcard photo. The frames were black and the lenses were tinted yellow. She unfolded the plastic arms and pushed them onto Fred’s face.

  We both looked at him, giggling. It was like he was wearing a diving mask. Fred laughed, but when it was his turn in line, he put the glasses on top of the postcard and the album. The guy behind the counter rang him up. Fiona returned our sunglasses to the rack.

  Fred dropped the album and postcard into his backpack and put his glasses on his face.

  “Pizza, then art store?” he asked, looking at me sincerely. I didn’t know what to think of the glasses. They didn’t seem like Fred.

  I nodded.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  That night, I sat on the rug in my room with my pencils and new black pens scattered on the floor. I flipped my sketch pad back to the drawings I’d made the night we saw the shark hanging from the winch. The shark was a bunched-up blob in the straps. I tried to imagine what it would look like stretched out, moving through the ocean, but when I drew more sharks on the page, I couldn’t get them right. I erased the lines again and again.

  I blew the dust into the air and heard strange sounds coming from outside. At first, I thought it was some kind of an animal. We had a lot of raccoons in town. I put my sketch pad on the rug and crawled to the window. At first, I searched for pairs of glowing eyes on the street, but like a magnet, I looked straight into Fred’s room. The light was on and his window was open.

  I heard a breathy trumpet sound that went flat and faded away. I made a mental note to tell him later that I’d thought he was a wounded rodent. There was a trumpet shriek, followed by a few notes strung together nicely. And then it went back to sounding like fourth-grade band practice.

  I heard a number of sounds layered behind him—drums, a keyboard playing cosmic notes, and something low, like a saxophone. It sounded like they were all playing from different sheet music. Fred was that kid who always got picked to play the solos in the school band concerts. He could play any song that the band teacher gave him and it sounded good. But this was odd.

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning over the trumpet.

  In a way, he was playing along with the album, echoing the trumpet sounds he’d heard. Except, he’d play the same notes over and over, like he was trying to learn a different language. Everything sounded like mistakes.

  I was ready to give up for the night. I clicked my pencil case shut and the music stopped. While I was putting the supplies back on my desk, a farty bass line came from Fred’s room. He’d put on a new song and I liked it a little better, though I’d never heard it before either.

  I peeked out the window again. Fred’s trumpet lay on the bed. I leaned back a bit until I could see him. He was wearing his sunglasses, playing air bass, totally on another planet. I covered my mouth with my hand, so I wouldn’t laugh or yell anything out the window.

  The layers of instruments started to pile up. First bass, then drums, then guitar (maybe), and keyboards (maybe). It was hard to even name some of the instruments because the sounds they made were so unusual. Fred was still plucking imaginary strings to the looping rhythm. His hair flopped around and he danced like a robot that had been left out in the rain. Fred unrestrained was a good sight. He looked sort of disheveled and less uptight. And those sunglasses were growing on me. I had the urge to run over and kiss him, but I quickly stuffed it back in like a tampon flying out of my backpack.

  He slowed down and fumbled in his pocket. Puff. Fred’s face was red and he had a sweaty hairline. As he held his breath, he squinted in my direction, like maybe he had seen me. I hit the ground so fast, I got rug burn on my chin.

  9. Moon Snail

  At low tide the next day, Fred asked if we could go to Folly Cove. We’d been there more times than I could count. It was his favorite spot to collect specimens for the creepy aquarium that he kept in the garage. The aquarium looked more like a swamp than one of those pristine tanks at the dentist’s office, but it made a nice temporary home for some of the field guide critters until I could get around to drawing them.

  Fred grabbed a bucket and sandwiches from his house. I packed the sketch pad and met Fred out front with my bike. He was wearing his Miles Davis glasses.

  “Hold on, you’ve got something in your hair,” he said, scooting his bike a little closer. He zeroed in on my scalp and pinched a group of hairs at the root, sliding mysterious debris to the end and setting off a ripple of chills from my shoulders to my face. I looked into his palm.

  “Just a leaf,” he said. There was still junk falling out of the trees from the storm. I didn’t care if it was a caterpillar or a bramble or lice. I just wanted him to do it again. But he pushed off with his foot and steadied his bike.

  We pedaled down Smith Street and the ocean came into view. The water was gray-blue under the clearing sky. I led the way as we coasted by the parking meters along the edge of the beach. We had to swerve around branches from the storm.

  We passed the gazebo at the end of our street where the American Legion band played every Saturday night of the summer and we crossed Beach Street. I watched the divers standing in the parking lot across from Back Beach. In the summer, there were always divers hanging around half dressed by the side of the road. It was a good spot for beginners because the cove was protected and it wasn’t very deep.

  Seven divers stood between the road and the shore. One man was zipping up a woman. They looked like carpenter ants in their black suits. I wondered if they were afraid to dive so close to the spot where a great white had been towed into the harbor.

  We rode down Route 127 to Folly Cove, passing a mile of granite curbing and houses built with granite blocks. We coasted by the entrance to Halibut Point State Park where, some nights, Fred’s sisters swam in the quarries. Skinny-dipped, as Fred had once told me. I looked behind me even though I knew Fred was still there. I could hear his bucket thumping.


  We ditched our bikes and started the trek to the big rocks at the edge of the tide, egg-shaped hunks of granite banging together underfoot. Offshore, an unfinished break wall was home to kelp beds and invertebrates. Divers loved that place too.

  At mid-tide it was a difficult walk. The small rocks became big rocks. The brown boulders covered in slippery seaweed looked like hairy trolls, and the medium stones shifted below us.

  “Did you hear me practicing my trumpet last night?” he asked.

  I held my breath. He’d seen me in the window. “I heard something,” I said, stepping carefully onto the rocks. “But it didn’t sound like music.”

  “Thanks,” he said. I could hear that he was a little hurt.

  “No, it just sounds different,” I said. I skimmed his arm with my palm, like an apology. “Were you trying to play along?”

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “Do you listen to songs with words anymore?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  We wobbled to a point where the large rocks held a tide pool. I sat on a hunk of granite and put the sketch pad on my lap, opening to a drawing of the great white shark, with its pointy teeth and charcoal-black throat. I wondered what had happened to the shark, but I was pretty sure it was gone for good. If my mom had been there, I knew the shark wouldn’t have gone to waste. I turned to a clean page.

  “What are we looking for today?” I asked.

  “Nothing in particular,” he said, flipping his glasses onto his head. “Wait, check it out.” Fred picked up a sea star, an amputee.

  “How can they grow a new leg?” I said. “Why can’t humans do that?”

  “They’ve just figured it out,” Fred said. “Your dad told me a story once about oyster fishermen. The fishermen were pissed at the sea stars for eating their oysters, so they cut off the sea stars’ arms and threw them back into the ocean. Only, it doubled the number of sea stars and destroyed the oysters.”

  “Bad karma,” I said, doodling a group of sea stars in the corner of my paper, attacking a single oyster. “Mind if I break into the sandwiches?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, searching the pool.

  I grabbed a paper bag from the bucket and looked inside. There were two turkeys on wheat, a couple of apples at the bottom, and two granola bars. I took a sandwich out of the wax paper bag and got down to business. Both Fred and I liked our sandwiches dry—no mustard, no mayo.

  Fred found a moon snail with a shell the size of a baseball. We had a moon snail page in the field guide already, but this specimen was freakishly large. The bucket contained about a gallon of seawater, and Fred set the moon snail at the bottom while he grabbed his tools. While chomping on an apple, I looked down at the snail and drew a large circle around and around until I made the circuit five times with my pen. In the middle of my circle, I made a tight spiral pattern that spread into a wide band to join the circle’s edge. The core of the moon snail’s spiral was blue while most of the shell was orange. Who picked these colors? It was a strange choice because they were opposites—but it worked.

  Fred sat down beside me on the rock, holding a measuring tape from his mom’s sewing kit. He pulled the moon snail out of the bucket. I drew Fred’s hand holding the specimen, his thumb curving around the side and his fingertips peeking around the other side of the shell. I’d been working on hands all year long. I was getting pretty good. I carried his wrist down the page for a little bit. It looked small under his chunky watch.

  I wished I’d brought colored pencils. He leaned over my drawing while I made notes about the shell colors in the margin. I could feel his cheek near my shoulder.

  “How do you do that?” he asked.

  I looked at him. “Do what?”

  “Draw things that look three-D.”

  I shrugged. “I’m an art person. You are a science person.”

  “You don’t think you are a science person?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like equations,” I said. I thought for a minute. “But if you could tell science like a story, I’d pay attention. I liked your story about the sea stars and the oysters.”

  “I can tell a story about the moon snail.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  He grabbed the moon snail out of the bucket.

  “Okay. Look at the shell. It’s an example of the golden ratio—an equiangular spiral, based on the proportion of one to one-point-six-one-eight—”

  “First of all, you should skip eighth grade and go to MIT. Second of all, you sound like a robot. What does that mean?”

  “It means the spiral on the shell is made in perfect proportion. Don’t you ever see a living thing and wonder how it was made?”

  “Sometimes.” I thought about the shark’s endless rows of teeth. “But that’s still not a story,” I said.

  He thought for a minute. “Okay. I got one. You know when you are looking for shells on the beach and you find one with a perfect hole in it?”

  I nodded. I knew exactly what he was talking about. “I used to string them on yarn and make necklaces.”

  “Right. Do you know how that hole got there?”

  I shook my head.

  “It was the moon snail.”

  I squinted at Fred.

  “It has this tool like a drill that’s kind of like a tongue, but not a tongue. And it has teeth all over it. The snail drills the hole and excretes an enzyme to soften the shell and then it eats the clam.”

  I hated to admit it, but I had wondered on several occasions how that hole got there. It was like a mystery solved. I smiled at Fred. “That’s a story. You win.”

  He smiled back. “I have lots of them.”

  “No more numbers though.”

  “Just wait. You’ll come around,” he said.

  That’s the thing about Fred. I always believed every word he said. Not only was he smart about academic stuff. He was smart about me. If he predicted that I would like numbers someday, I would be open to the idea. That donkey.

  “Aren’t you eating anything?” I asked, moving on to the granola bar.

  Fred dropped the snail in the pool. It made a noise like a tub of Vaseline falling into the toilet. I was staring at him for a long time, but he wouldn’t look my way. He was too busy frisking a pile of seaweed. Finally, he stood up and caught my gaze.

  I smiled at him. “I feel pretty blah about the shark.”

  “Blah?”

  “Disappointed. ’Cause it’s gone,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, which was fair because I had never taken much of an interest in biology before. “Me too. We can still work on the field guide. I’ll come over tonight. We can look through your mom’s old books for shark facts.”

  I thought about how those weighty biology texts that I had used to press flowers or smooth bent photographs had served other purposes for her. I was curious.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He pulled his sunglasses down from his head and they settled on his face.

  “What? They look cool,” he said.

  I looked skeptical.

  The only thing cool was Fred’s confidence that he looked cool.

  10. Meatballs

  Later in the afternoon, we headed home. Fred veered off to his side of the street, his bucket of snails sloshing.

  “We’re working on the field guide later, right?” he asked.

  “Yup,” I said. “Come over after dinner.”

  Dad’s old Volvo was parked in the driveway. I saw the grocery bags in the trunk and I ditched my bike under the pine tree. I grabbed one of the paper bags and looked inside, heading for the house. Dad opened the screen door on his way back to the car.

  “Hi,” he said. “How was your day?”

  “Better now,” I said.

 
When the bags were gathered on the kitchen floor, I started pulling groceries onto the kitchen table—half a watermelon, a coffee cake, milk, and ground beef.

  “Lucy,” he said, putting a pizza in the freezer. “I’m sorry I let the refrigerator get so bare.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  He thought for a minute. “Sometimes I can’t get it all done,” he said. “It’s been a busy summer for the dive team. But I’m making meatballs for dinner.”

  I gave him a hug and just stayed there like I was hanging on to a buoy.

  “I was going to make something from there,” he said, pointing to the Silver Palate cookbook on the table. “But that’s too much work tonight.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. When I let go of Dad, I brought the watermelon over to the counter and unwrapped the plastic, dripping pink juice into the sink. I sliced the watermelon half into quarters and cut the fruit into thick wedges. I wrapped one in a paper towel and brought it upstairs, sucking away the juice. I couldn’t stand hanging around downstairs while Dad cooked the onions for the meatballs. I was so hungry for real food that it made me dizzy.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  At dinner, Dad told me that he knew what happened to the shark. He ran into Officer Parrelli at the IGA.

  “First thing in the morning, Parrelli got a call from a man in Pigeon Cove, complaining about a horrible fish odor coming from his neighbor’s yard,” Dad said. “But when the Rockport PD went to investigate, it was just trash from a lobster bake. The storm had stirred up the neighbor’s garbage and dumped it all over the side yard next to the caller’s house.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  “Then there was a call from a woman who’d seen her neighbor pull into his driveway sometime in the night with a trailer and something under a tarp, but it turned out to be a Jet-Ski.”

  I rolled my eyes and wondered how many ridiculous phone calls the Rockport Police Department must receive in an average week.