Motherfucking Sharks

by Brian Allen Carr

  Slowly, Crick watches as the sharks’ forms pale away. Over the course of his two-day captivity, he sees their skins go transparent so the veins of them are visible, their cartilaginous skeletal systems apparent, and then they can be seen through like wax paper and then they lessen further until they’re no more.

  Once gone entirely, Crick pulls the cage key from his waistband and unlocks his entrapment, and he weeps his way from skeleton to skeleton, picking up skulls and holding them to his face.

  But, a skeleton is gone.

  On the ground, beside the cage, he finds the bones of his boy’s arms, scattered haphazardly, the fingers of both hands jumbled together, but that is all.

  The absence of the skeleton births a quest.

  Let us now envision Crick as the wanderer he becomes.

  Initially, he is not as our first encounter with him. He is not a streaked stranger inked with indigenous-mannered images. He does not travel with a one-eyed mule. He does not haul harpoons from town to town and profess the coming onslaught of motherfucking sharks. He is less the ancient mariner and more Rapunzel’s fallen prince. He bears no warning of things to come, he merely asks the questions as he progresses, “Have you seen an armless boy?”

  An armless boy? An armless boy?

  Crick crashes his way from town to town eating slop from trash cans and prickly pears foraged from cactus paddles.

  An armless boy? An armless boy?

  His history plagues him.

  An armless boy? An armless boy?

  “You look familiar,” some say.

  Armless boy?

  “Didn’t you make off with my piano?”

  Armless?

  “Tell us again about the orphans?”

  Boy?

  The nature of his twisted experience is made further unbelievable by the fact that his wake is burdened with falsities espoused.

  “Sure, sure,” most people say, “motherfucking sharks. Armless boy.” They shake their heads. “Get to the point,” they tell him, “what are you trying to take me for?”

  Still, there are whispers. “A carnival. A freak show. A circus act. Some strangers.”

  Crick gathers shards of stories and crumples them together in his mind. “There was a boy. The boy was armless.” And Crick follows any line offered him from place to place through miserable weather and over lands shunned by God.

  In some towns, his reputation is so badgered he catches beatings for returning. He sees jail time. In the cells he hears more. From convicts whose pathways chance avenues of ill repute where, as Crick sees it, armless boys may be forced to tarry.

  Crick slips down these outlets, himself becoming a wanderer of the underbelly, where he takes odd employments and keeps company with tattoo artists who convince him the drawings now on his skin would render his image unrecognizable from the Crick of the past, and he allows his face and arms to be inked to their now remarkable appearance.

  His journeys bring him to dilapidated towns. Broken villages littered with skeletons. Reminders of his family’s falling.

  But it is not all bad. There are moments of glory as he traipses the earth, as he pauses and sees in distances before him citrus orchards toasting in the bake of sunlight, the perfume of them bright and tangy, soporific and clean. Or further south in his wanderings, into the mountains of Mexico, where ramshackle houses made from cinder blocks and blankets sit in the shadow of Cola de Caballo—Horse Tail Falls—and the sound of the rushing waters fills his ears like white noise as the residents speak their music-shaped language in response to his continuing query, “A boy with no arms?”

  And Crick has never found him.

  Now there is Crick in the cage with a fragment of skull in his grip, but who the skull belongs to is unknown, and all the armless boys who Crick found in his journeys were the sons of other men. Sad boys with vacant faces straining in dust-flavored dwellings.

  That mission, to find his child, was abandoned. Instead, Crick decided to spread word of the terrors of the motherfucking sharks, but so often his labors found him in situations similar to this.

  Crick sits on the hard bed in his cell. He stares at the skull. He wonders if he’ll ever see his boy again.

  The thunder starts.

  V

  Kinky Pete rushed in bleeding, and Mom watched him absently as he fidgeted a wet washrag from a bucket and began to dab his face.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “Nothing worth mentioning,” he told her.

  Mom thought: Nothing with men ever is.

  She thought: Look at him with his cut. Damn sad. I’ve seen him shoot men dead and now he bleeds like a child. I’ve seen so many silly men. This one. His blood caught in the rag from the water bucket. Was it preordained that I’d be so inundated by puny men? In the pattern of the stars is it organized that my acquaintances with the opposite sex would be bungled? I find them foolish and haphazard, and yet physically I crave them. Perhaps that is the evilest side of my coin. I wish I was as those other women who find breasts and hips mesmerizing, but I can’t sway myself in that direction. In my memory my father is feeble, but my mother was absent, and perhaps that’s the saddest act of all—to run like a coward from a duty you’ve gestated. Father was a drunk, but he was there: in the morning light of the kitchen with a sundae bowl of bourbon to ‘warm up his bones,’ and he never did foul by me sexually, though I’m certain most who smelled his breath figured him a daughter toucher, but in my mind the tragedy of his self-driven destruction was the great undoer of my opinion of him. How can a creature’s prime motivation be to poison itself? All he did was drink and hope to drink again. Even when he got ill off it, and had to hide from the sun, deep in whatever shade he could find with his head wrapped in wet cloth, he would beg me to fetch him whisky to alleviate his malaise and the excruciating moroseness of it, and that always further puzzled me: it was like trying to heal a burn with more fire. And that’s what he was: a wound that wanted to be wounded. Here, this Kinky Pete, this face bleeding into a wet rag, here I find it paltry and clumsy, but I get it. Whatever secret situation caused the abrasion matters not. What matters is he’s aiming to quell the ache with a sane method. I’d say “Daddy, just wait it out. Sit in the dark. I’ll bring you cool water,” and he’d laugh and say, “Why wait for what’s coming anyhow?” And perhaps there was some logic in that. There never passed a day I didn’t see him drinking. Eight in the morning or eight at night: is there much difference?

  “He’s an odd one.”

  Mom looked up, confused.

  “But he can’t hurt no one where we got him,” said Pete, and Mom knew he meant the stranger. Pete took the blood-colored rag from his cheek, lowered his face to hers and asked, “Think it needs stitches?”

  She surveyed the gash and could see clotted fat hanging limp and yellow at the edges. “Probably,” she said, and Pete nodded.

  “Figures,” he said, and he turned and tossed the bloody rag back into the water bucket, stomped to the front door, threw it open and then banged it shut as he disappeared into the street.

  Was there much difference? I don’t drink, so maybe I don’t know. I have drank, but not like that. I have tasted wine and I have felt it change me, but not like that. He would go from sick to swell in a swallow and a half, and he’d sing those foolish songs with a smile on his face, made up things that he pretended were real, the lyrics all rhyming and he’d pause for me to finish the couplets—

  The first thing in gumbo is?

  Roux

  Which is basically a Cajun?

  Stew

  And the opposite of false is?

  True

  And the opposite of old is?

  New

  And he could go on that way for hours with his sundae bowl that he always drank from, and when I asked him why he’d say, “Because I love ice cream.”

  Fine. Ice cream. The thing that killed him. His smell changing and his skin turning yellow. A real man. Like all the men. Like the one to
day. Drawn on like a coloring book. Playing with toys. A real man. Shouting make believe stories on the street corner certain that everyone wanted to listen. Because he is a man.

  Then the thunder starts.

  Mom goes to the door and opens it. She steps onto the porch. In the distance she can see the white lightning coughing fits behind the jagged-peaked mountains, the sillhouettes of them more dramatic in the dark of the oncoming storm.

  She thinks: Storm.

  She thinks: Just like children.

  She thinks: Ice cream.

  Mom goes to the cupboard where Kinky Pete keeps the bourbon and plucks a bottle from the shelf. She goes to her room. At the foot of her bed, a trunk. Inside the trunk, her father’s sundae bowl.

  She thinks: All the same.

  She thinks: Nothing but children.

  She thinks: I’ll take it to him.

  Mom makes her way back on to the porch, down the few steps and into the single, proper street of the town.

  She thinks: When I first came here there was one house made from mold-freckled timber.

  She thinks: It’s not where I want it, but it’s getting there.

  Mom had come to the town after her father died with an aunt who she met only once before her father’s funeral. She was a baldheaded woman who wore a black bandana on her skull and smoked cigarettes and played harmonica. They had driven there by donkey-dragged wagon, and when they reached the house the aunt halted the donkey, said, “There you go,” and looked out at nothing.

  “There I go what?” asked Mom.

  The aunt took one long drag on her cigarette, and Mom could hear the paper and tobacco burning to ash, turning to smoke. The aunt lunged the smoke, her face going tight as she breathed deep the air. She exhaled. She pointed at the house. “Get on up there,” she said, “knock on that door,” her words stained gray with the escaping smoke, “tell ’em what’s brought you here.”

  Mom thought a moment. “You brought me here,” she said.

  Her aunt shook her head, “I mean your pa,” she said, “dead as they come,” she smoked again, “buried in the dirt.” She nodded. “Tell ’em that and they’ll take you in.”

  Mom looked at the sad little house. It looked like a good rain would wash it away. “And you?” she asked her aunt without looking at her, because she was old enough to figure the answer.

  “Well,” said the aunt, “I’ll be back from time to time to check.”

  Mom looked at her. The aunt smiled guiltily. Some people are so worthless, they don’t bother hiding their lies.

  The aunt helped Mom pull her trunk from the wagon, but she did not help her drag it to the house. “Go and knock,” she said, “they’ll help you carry it in.”

  Mom nodded, walked toward the door. The aunt drove on before she’d even gotten there to knock.

  Mom thinks: That house was empty.

  She thinks: Was probably always empty.

  She thinks: And she probably thought I’d die in it.

  She remembered knocking and knocking again. She knocked and knocked again. It was summer and the sun shone so bright the light of the world seemed false, and the shadows of all things were darker than midnight, and young Mom sat sweating on that porch of that busted house trying to shade her face with her hand, and she waited until the sun sank away from noon and into evening, and she watched it half itself with the horizon and watched it slip away like an orange ghost, the sky’s blue hue fading into nighttime’s navy. She knocked again, then sat on the trunk with her knees pulled to her chin, terrified of the noises and the stars and the moon, and annoyed at the mosquitos who sank their poisonous suckers in her. She swatted herself pink. She itched herself awake, watching the moon trace the sky.

  In the morning, the dew made her dress sticky.

  She knocked on the door again. She knocked again.

  She was tired and angry from being tired, and she decided she would no longer follow the etiquette taught to her. She turned the doorknob and went inside. It was as she feared. The house was entirely empty.

  Mom thinks: I was only a child.

  She thinks: But that childhood didn’t last long.

  “Wake up,” Mom says.

  She stands in front of Crick’s cell, holds the bourbon bottle in one hand and the sundae bowl in the other.

  Crick pulls his eyes open. His slumber breaks oddly. He shakes his head. “Storms always do it,” he says, “I love to sleep through the rain.”

  Mom nods. “It’s coming,” she says, “you said it would,” she pours the sundae bowl full of bourbon and walks to the bars. “Thirsty?” she says.

  Crick nods. He stands and goes to her. He takes the sundae bowl from her and contemplates it. “I’d rather it be ice cream,” he says and sips at it gingerly.

  Mom smiles. She sets the bottle on the ground. In doing so, she sees the shattered skull bits. “What happened here?” she asks.

  Crick sips his bourbon. “Ask that Kinky Pete,” he says, and Mom nods because now she knows.

  She looks about. She sees Crick’s satchel. “You know,” she says, “I can juggle too.” She takes the skulls from the bag. “But I can only do three,” she says. She takes a skull in each hand and lets the third rest on her right wrist. Crick watches her nervously.

  Mom jerks her right arm toward the ceiling and the skull lifts from her wrist into the air. It begins to drop and she launches the skull from her left hand, catches the falling skull and tosses up the third. Her form is sloppy, but Crick watches her work the skulls from hand to hand, Mom’s face pinched with concentration. She catches them and holds them a moment against her. “Tada,” she says.

  “Bravo,” says Crick.

  “I could never do four though,” she says.

  “Neither can I,” he says, “I just do two with each hand.”

  Mom thinks a moment on this. “Is that how it’s done?” she asks.

  “It is,” he says.

  “Forgive me if I don’t try,” she says.

  Crick smiles. “I’d actually rather you didn’t.”

  Mom looks then at the skulls. “That’s right,” she says, “your family.”

  “That’s right,” says Crick.

  Mom places the skulls back in the satchel. “And do people believe that?” she asks, “when you tell them?”

  “Not usually,” Crick says.

  “And the sharks?”

  “The motherfucking sharks,” says Crick.

  “Yes,” says Mom, “the motherfucking sharks.” She laughs. “Do people believe about them?”

  “Rarely,” says Crick.

  “But you tell it anyway?”

  Crick nods. He sips his drink. “You ever seen a boy with no arms?” he asks.

  Mom looks at him oddly. “Is this a kind of riddle?” she asks.

  Crick laughs. “Maybe,” he says. “But if it is, I’m living it.”

  They are silent a moment. Thunder can be heard. But, another noise as well. Hollering. Shouting of some sort. The door flings open.

  Scraw walks in with his hands on his head. Kinky Pete walks behind him. His pistol is drawn and his left hand holds a rag against his busted face.

  “God damn it,” hollers Kinky Pete. He looks at Mom. He looks at Crick. He holsters his pistol and opens Crick’s cell with a key. “Well,” he says, shoving Scraw in with Crick. “You were right,” he says to Crick.

  Crick laughs.

  Mom looks at all the men. “Right about what?” she asks.

  Pete just looks at her. He grits his teeth. He dabs his wound. “That stew,” he yells, “it was not mule.

  VI

  Kinky Pete walked the street repulsed at his anger because his anger made him throw the skull, birthed his need for stitches. There’s not a person alive who’s not phenomenal at hurting themselves. But Kinky Pete was better than most. He cussed himself as he dragged down the street to see Bark.

  “You’re a foolish piece of shit wrapped in the disguise of human flesh,” he said, “throwin
g tantrums like a baby.”

  At Bark and Scraw’s, Pete banged the door, the deep thud of his fist against the broad portal humming low in the night. “Bark,” he hollered, “I’m cut and need sewing on.”

  The door did not open, but Scraw answered from inside, “Bark’s sleeping.” That was the extent of Scraw’s offering on the matter. Night’s silence came on again.

  “Well,” said Pete, “wake him up.”

  Silence.

  Pete again banged the door, but no answer came.

  “Scraw,” he screamed, “I’m bleeding. Wake Bark. Tell him I need stitched up.”

  Silence.

  Pete’s patience fizzled out quick. He knelt to lift the door, but it was locked. “Scraw,” he yelled, “Scraw, open up.”

  Scraw hollered back, “I can’t.”

  Pete walked to the side of the building. Yellow light glowed from a window, and Pete perched on his tip toes to peek inside. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He went back to the the door, and banged it again.

  He screamed, “Scraw,” and banged the door. He screamed, “Scraw,” again. “I looked in your window,” he said. “I saw the damn mule.”

  Then the thunder starts.

  Scraw says in a limp tone, “I can’t believe what I’ve done.”

  Pete puzzles at this, “Open up,” he says, “what are you talking about?”

  Pete listens as Scraw keys the lock open from inside. He steps back from the door as it raises to reveal Scraw who stands aside the still-living Murm, petting the mule’s mane. “I couln’t kill it,” Scraw says.

  Pete nods. “Fine,” he says, “where’s Bark?”

  Scraw leans his shoulder against the mule. “Bark wanted me to kill the mule, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  “Fine,” says Pete, “but where is he?”

  “He was pushing me,” says Scraw, “or,” Scraw scratches his head, “I sure like this mule.”

  “Dammit, Scraw, don’t make me ask again.”

  Scraw looks at nothing. “I don’t know,” he says, “because I’m not sure how it works. My only memory of my mother is her telling me how the sunshine became the flowers, and she said ‘every time you pick a flower, it’s like holding a ray of sun,’ because she said that sun was how flowers made their food. I dropped bowls of Bark to the prisoner and to the poor families, but I don’t know if that means they’re part Bark or if Bark’s part them, and what I didn’t drop off is in the pot on the stove.” Scraw points to a large steel pot that is streaked with brown stew down its sides. “And the bone part of Bark is out back in the bone pile.” Scraw looks at Pete. “Do you want me to bring that part back in here?”