by Hannah Tinti
He squeezed the trigger over and over, until all the bullets were gone and there was nothing but the sound of the ocean and the click of an empty barrel. Blood colored the water. Another spray rose high over their heads and rained down upon them with a roar. Hawley watched the spouts on the animal’s back, swelling with air. They sealed tight, like two lids over a single eye, and the whale sank beneath the waves.
Jove clutched the bailer, breathing hard. “Where’d it go?”
“I can’t tell,” said Hawley.
The men waited. The boat rocked.
A distant tone came from the cliffs overhead. A burst of air, a hiss. Hawley turned, trying to place the sound, then saw the cut of the whale’s back in the distance. He said nothing, only pointed, and the men watched as the whale dove, the long, dark slick of its back sliding along the waves and then the bend of its spine and then the scarred tail rising high in the air like a pair of beckoning hands before vanishing beneath the surface.
Hawley’s shoulder was raw, his clothes soaked to the bone. He thought of the holes in the whale’s back, the way they opened and closed together, and it was like he could feel the same opening and closing in his own chest, and then the plug, and the sinking. He dropped the gun. He sat down in the flooded boat.
“Hell of a thing,” said Jove. His face was streaked with salt water, the burns like shadows carved into skin. He picked up the bailer again and began to scoop and pour, scoop and pour, returning ocean to ocean.
“I’m finished,” Hawley said, “with all of this.”
It felt good to say it, even if it wasn’t true. Hawley peeled back his coat and checked the hole in his shoulder. The bandages he’d used were wet and covered with blood but they had not fallen apart. Not yet. He turned to the engine. He tried to get it started again. He checked the vents, switched to neutral, opened the choke, looked for a sign. Hawley wrapped his fingers around the starter and pulled. He listened for the catch. He pulled again. And the motor roared to life.
Firebird
PRINCIPAL GUNDERSON’S OFFICE SMELLED LIKE fish and watermelon. The brine wafted up from his old gray desk, as if it had been made from pieces of driftwood dragged in from the beach and the drawers filled with day-old scrod, while the candy he was eating produced a synthetic, fruity cloud that hovered in the center of the room. He rolled this candy in his mouth, from one cheek to the other. He offered the bowl of candy to Loo.
“We’re here to talk about your future,” he said.
Loo plucked one of the cellophane-wrapped squares but she did not open it. She pressed it in the palm of her hand until she felt the sugar begin to melt and soften at the edges. She tried to breathe through her mouth instead of her nose.
“What about it.”
“College.” Principal Gunderson cleared his throat. “Or maybe a trade school?”
“I haven’t graduated yet.”
Principal Gunderson set the bowl of candy back on the desk. “Your best grades are in science. But you’ve missed the last four classes, and if you don’t make up the work, you won’t graduate.”
“I’ve been sick.” Loo had no intention of returning to biology. Whenever she approached the lab door her hands would start to sweat and she would end up hiding in the library. She’d felt powerful when she broke Marshall Hicks’s finger, but kissing him had made her insides shaky and vulnerable. Avoiding embarrassment now seemed more important than getting an A.
Principal Gunderson shuffled some papers to show that he did not believe her. “Your teacher wants to fail you. But I convinced her to let you write a paper instead. On condition.”
“Of what?” Loo asked.
“Of you working. For me. At the Sawtooth. As long as you control your temper,” Principal Gunderson said, “you’ll be starting this Saturday at four.”
Loo could think of a hundred things she would rather do.
“I’ll have to ask my father.”
Gunderson released a soft bubble of air. “He already knows.”
“What?”
“It was his idea, actually.”
Loo squeezed the candy in her hand harder. She knew Hawley was mad at her for sneaking out and going to Dogtown. But she had not been expecting anything like this.
Principal Gunderson opened a drawer and took out a clean, folded apron. He slid the apron across the desk, and at once it revealed itself to be the source of the fishy odor. Even then Loo knew that nothing would ever wash out the scent of scales and guts. Its stink seemed to be woven directly into the cloth.
“Your mother was always reckless with her life. I hope you won’t be.”
Loo stared at the balding, middle-aged man sitting behind the desk. It was hard to believe that Lily and Principal Gunderson had ever breathed the same air.
When she got home Loo did her best to change her father’s mind. She tried arguing and promises and even slammed the door to her room but Hawley would not budge.
“If you’re old enough to go out partying you’re old enough to have a job,” he said. “And I still want you there on the mudflats every weekend, helping me bring in the clams.”
Loo shoved her hands into her front pockets. She wondered what Hawley would think if he knew that she had her mother’s gloves hidden there.
She felt fierce, holding this secret that her father did not know. Loo found herself savoring the details, sliding the lace over her fingers, and poring over the album that Mabel Ridge had given her late at night. The pages were pasted with clippings about Lily’s death. A short notice from a police blotter about a missing woman. A few articles about the Forest Service helping search the lake for her body. Others about her being found. A prayer card with an excerpt from the Book of Wisdom. Then Lily’s obituary from the local paper in Olympus. An accident, they all said. A terrible, tragic accident. At night Loo read the pages over and over, until the phrases floated through her mind like lyrics from a song. Young mother, morning swim, dragnet, search and rescue, loving husband and infant daughter left behind.
Hawley had become more agitated since the night Loo went missing. He paced the house, checking the locks, then got into his truck and disappeared for hours. He even smelled different, his sweat taking on a more acrid tone, the stench of it filling up the laundry basket. He drove Loo to school. He drove her home. And he cleaned his guns more furiously than ever. He seemed to sense that something had changed, but she didn’t want to tell him about Mabel Ridge yet, so she kept the book hidden from him, just like the gloves she was fingering now in her pocket.
“I get it,” Loo said. “You’re teaching me a lesson.”
“Supporting yourself isn’t a lesson. It’s reality.”
“You don’t work for anyone. You don’t have a real job.”
Hawley grabbed the stinking apron off the table and threw it at her.
“You,” he said. “You’re my job.”
—
AT THE SAWTOOTH Loo spent her time cleaning and setting the tables, answering every ding-ding of the chefs, holding plates with the side of her hand, the crook of her arm, the edge of her shoulder, filling and refilling glasses of water, washing dishes in a body-length rubber apron, hauling ice from the cellar and helping drunken captains tie their motorboats at the dock outside. She learned to wipe the corners of plates before picking them up, and to carry them by the edges; she learned to wash wineglasses with burning-hot water, not soap; she learned to never ask the chef if he could do a special order unless he had smoked a joint within the past hour; she learned to carry bouillabaisse by itself, or risk spilling it all over the customers; she learned to sidestep “accidental” butt grabs and boob brushes, ignore lustful, drunken stares and smile away propositions by men old enough to be her grandfather; and she learned to curb the hate that flushed through her veins and made her want to slam plates of food into customers’ faces, slam the waitresses into the walls, slam the hand of the sous-chef who had tweaked her nipple—a joke, a joke—over and over in the freezer door until his fingers were
cut in two.
The Sawtooth was owned by the entire Gunderson family, including Principal Gunderson, whose father had passed down the establishment to his six sons. Hawley provided the clams and mussels, but the fish and lobsters and crabs served were all caught by the Gunderson brothers—who would drag their catch in the back door still alive and take turns bashing it with a club. Then they would go home to their families. But Principal Gunderson had no family. His wife had left him for an Outward Bound instructor, and so he acted as general manager for the Sawtooth, opening the restaurant each morning and then returning after school for the night shift. On weekends he sat in a corner booth and drank coffee and did the books.
Food runners and bar-backs got tipped out by the waitstaff. At the end of the night, when the final customers were persuaded to leave, and Principal Gunderson rang through credit cards, and everyone from the back of the house and the front of the house was sitting exhausted at the bar, covered with food and the smell of food, fingernails thick with oil and grease, smoking and drinking too much to be driving, Loo waited for the waitresses to count their money and decide how much they would give her. It was supposed to be ten percent. More, if she’d helped them out especially. Usually Loo got tipped her proper share. Unless Mary Titus was working.
The fishing widow looked the same as she had bleeding in Loo’s bathtub, small and childlike but her face lined with middle age, her body slick with patchouli oil and covered in beaded jewelry, a hippie skirt around her waist and a tank top with no bra and the same dark tufts of hair poking from beneath her armpits. On the day Loo started as a food runner, Mary Titus went straight to Principal Gunderson, then returned carrying a fistful of forks. She said, “You’ve got him fooled, but not me.” Then she walked over to the coffee station, where the other waitresses were gathered, and showed off the stitches in the back of her head.
“Mary says you tried to kill her,” said Agnes, the tallest of the waitresses, after Loo had refilled her breadbasket. The hair on top of her head was dyed pink and the sides were orange. A metal stud pierced her lower lip.
“It was an accident,” said Loo.
Agnes ate one of the shrimp on her surf and turf. She smelled of Vaseline and paint thinner. “That’s what my boyfriend said. Now I’m pregnant again.”
“Boy or girl?” Loo asked.
Agnes clicked the metal stud in her lip against her teeth.
“Neither,” she said.
Loo went back to folding napkins. She kept her head down and did her work while Agnes ate half the food she served and Mary Titus swooped in like a magpie, snatching any tips left behind on the tables. At the end of the night Principal Gunderson cashed everyone out and Loo left the Sawtooth with a roll of bills in her pocket. Her own money. It almost made her forget the smell of the apron, the frying oil she couldn’t get out of her hair and how bone-tired she felt at the end of her shift. It almost made her forget that the job had been her father’s idea.
When Loo got home she emptied her winnings onto her bed, a sea of fives and tens and ones, and then she counted and stacked, counted and stacked, and hid the money in a manila envelope in her underwear drawer, until the next morning at breakfast, when Hawley tossed the envelope onto her lap.
“You need to get better at hiding things. Top drawers are the first place that anyone would look.”
“You think someone’s going to rob us?”
Hawley pulled on the rubber boots he wore to go clamming. Then he took the .45 out of the breadbox and tucked it into the back of his pants. “Not today.”
Loo snatched up the envelope, and when she hid it again, she sealed the money in a plastic baggie and slipped it behind the insulation in the attic. Later, after Hawley had picked up his tools and driven off to dig some soft shells in Ipswich, she removed a twenty from the envelope for gas, put on her sneakers and jogged fifteen blocks to where she’d parked the Firebird.
Loo had not returned Mabel Ridge’s car, though the first few times she got into the Firebird it was her intention to do so. The day after the party she had traveled to Dogtown, then went right past Mabel Ridge’s house and down Route 127, a twisty road that hugged the rocky shore from Olympus all the way to Beverly, going faster and faster until her hair caught in her mouth, the danger of being caught filling her chest as she sat behind the wheel.
Now she unlocked the car with the key and turned the ignition. She needed time to think. After filling the tank, she took a left and went to the farthest point of Olympus, where the road turned from asphalt to dirt and then to sand and rocks until it simply stopped in a maze of thorns and blackberry bushes.
Loo parked and climbed out onto the beach. The waves roared and crashed against the shore and sent torrents of white spray in the air that landed with a loud clap into the tidal pools. She rolled her pants up to her thighs and scaled a sloping boulder slippery with lichen. The farther she went out, the wilder the ocean became. She could see the currents and whirlpools and the waves fighting against the undertow. She picked up a stone, flat and porous with flecks of mica that shimmered in the sunlight, hooked it with her thumb and sent it skipping along the surface, then watched as it was sucked down into the ocean.
Hiding an envelope of cash was one thing. Hiding a car was something else. If she couldn’t come up with a safe place to stash the Firebird, she’d have to return it to Mabel Ridge. But the thought of losing the freedom that flooded her body each time she slid behind the wheel made her want to run someone over with the car instead.
Loo covered her face with her hands. Made a mask like her father had taught her, blocked out the world and listened. Over and over the waves hit with a boom and then receded, sucking and pulling at the shore. It sounded like trees caught in a storm. Like an animal being slowly ripped apart. Loo spread her fingers, expecting her vision to focus. A direction to become clear. But instead she saw a splash. Something tossing in the water, thirty or forty feet from shore.
At first Loo thought it was a bit of wreckage. Then a head rose to the surface. Through the tunnel of her fingers Loo recognized the face, the one she knew only from the bathroom and the newspaper clippings she pored over each night. So many times she’d imagined Lily’s death, and now here it was before her. Black hair spread in the water. Eyes as green as the sea. A hand rose from the depths and waved at her.
Loo dropped the mask but the figure in the water remained. A tumbling in the eddy. The tide yanked the body under, and with a roar of foam, spit a tangle of legs and arms into the shallows. Only now it was no longer her mother.
It was Marshall Hicks.
“Are you all right?” Loo called down to him.
Marshall coughed and choked and sputtered, clothes plastered to skin, salt leaking from his nose, shoes digging ruts as he clawed away from the water. The boy shook his head in response before collapsing onto a mountain of kelp. He pressed his face into the rubbery leaves.
Loo scanned the horizon, then climbed down to where the boy was struggling. “Did you fall off a boat?” she asked, though Marshall was not wearing the right clothes for fishing. He was dressed as if he were going to church. His shirt buttoned to the collar. His leather shoes tied tight. A tie caught around his neck like a piece of rope. He turned and looked up at her. He touched her foot.
He said, “Your knees are dirty.”
Her knees were dirty, but it was only sand, stuck to her skin from kneeling on the wet beach. Marshall’s eyes traveled above the two dark circles to the pale skin of her thighs. For a moment he looked like he was still underwater, still being tossed in the roar of foam and salt water. Then Loo’s hands came down and brushed her knees, and the sand sprinkled across his face like sugar.
As she helped him over the beach, she remembered the beery taste of his lips, the sensation of him pressed against her in the dark of Dogtown. She had not spoken to him since the party in the woods. But she had seen him across the cafeteria, and once in the stairwell, and a few times when she’d peered through the window of the
biology lab, wondering how this boy had managed to make her afraid again. Now she settled him into the Firebird, wondering if he remembered their kiss, too, but the only thing that Marshall seemed concerned about was his mother’s petition. He’d been sitting on the jetty, drawing in his notebook, when a rogue wave came and washed the clipboard into the sea.
“You went in after it?”
“The water didn’t look that deep, but when I got in I couldn’t get out.” There was a piece of brown seaweed caught around Marshall’s belt. His button-down shirt was so soaked it had become translucent, the color of his skin pressing through where the cloth touched his elbows.
Loo wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. It was the first time she had driven with a passenger in the Firebird, and it changed things: the adventure suddenly magnified, the feel of the clutch, the grip of the wheels.
Loo glanced at the boy’s wing tips. “You didn’t even take off your shoes.”
“It was the only copy,” Marshall said. “All the names we’ve collected so far. I was supposed to be out knocking on doors.” He looked down at his pants. “I’m getting your seat all wet.” There was something pinched about Marshall’s face. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary, and there were lines fanning out between his eyebrows, as if he’d spent the past two months getting ten years older.
“Don’t take me home,” he said.
“All right,” said Loo, but she didn’t know where else to take him. So she brought him to her house instead.
—
LOO BOILED WATER for coffee and gave Marshall a towel and some of her father’s clothes. They were ill-fitting, and when he stepped out of the bathroom, clutching his bundle of soggy belongings, he looked like a kid, the sleeves too long, his clavicle bare. On his feet were a pair of Loo’s own socks. They were orange and blue; she could see a hole in one of the toes.