by Youers, Rio
Denis saw it first. He shouted at me to come look. By the time I’d gotten to the back of the boat everyone was standing around, and I pushed through to the front. I couldn’t believe what I saw when I looked down into the blue-black Atlantic.
I swear if I hadn’t seen it myself I wouldn’t believe it.
One of those goddamn whales had pushed into the net. We couldn’t haul the thing up because it had wedged itself in there. Chasing cod maybe. Thing is, we were scraping the bottom of the ocean floor, and I’ve never heard of whales just sitting down there getting in the way. I’ve been out here over thirty years.
So the net comes up and this whale is halfway down the cod net. Just kind of sitting there. I figure the only thing we can do is turn the net and try to push him out. Otherwise we cut the lines and we are out a net. I’m still carrying the spare, but like I said, those things are expensive. Money was on my mind. So I guess that’s why I decided to be stupid instead of just cutting those lines. Now they’re dead and I’m getting drunk in my cabin.
We got the net up to surface and even managed to turn it a bit. Then the whale decided he’d had enough. His tail came up and thrashed the side of the boat. Just once. Once was enough to angle the net down and he pushed what must be twelve tons of weight toward the bottom of the ocean. Those trawl lines can’t stand up to that. They handle a ton, ton and a half at most. This was twelve tons of whale.
The cables snapped. They came back at the ship. Same time, almost identical strikes. Of course, they were both standing there as lead lines, so it’s not a surprise. Kruthers caught the damn line across the throat. Actually took his head right off. Ray Stevens, well, I’m not sure where he took his hit. It was somewhere on the chest, cuz he just grabbed at his heart like he’d been shot and toppled into the water. The whale swam away with the net. We managed to gaff Kruthers body. His fuckin head is long gone though. We couldn’t find anything else. There’s a mile of water under us right now.
I’m very sorry to both families.
The seas were red. The trawl is gone. I wish I was with you right now, Maggie. You’ve never felt farther away than you do right now.
November 3. Days at sea:
who gives a fuck
We’re heading home.
I’m a total failure. I’m sorry everyone. I’m sorry for the dead men. I’m sorry Maggie. I’m not sorry to you, Robert Denis. You’re still an arrogant prick. And I know it was you smoking pot in the lower deck, I just can’t prove it. Lucky for you we’re leaving. I’ll drop your ass in a hundred feet of Canadian water and you can swim to shore.
As an added punishment for this damned trip, the sperm whales are sick. It was those goddamned fish. You know there are still a couple swimming around the boat? Denis gaffed one and tossed it on board for shits and giggles. The damn thing was still flopping on the deck some four hours later. FOUR HOURS. It was missing scales, and its eyes was all milky white. It is a dead fish. I swear my life on this. And after we tossed it in the water it just swam in a lazy little circle. Its air bladder must have been totally full of air, because it couldn’t straighten itself out no matter how hard it tried.
But the whales ate those dead fish, and now they are all sick. I could see them rolling on the surface all day. That’s a sure sign of a sick whale. God, this area is like a damn charnel pit. Everything is either dead or dying.
So we’re going home. Maybe if they don’t take my boat we’ll have a chance to go out one more time before it gets too cold. If they do take my boat, well, I’ll spend the winter getting drunk. Maybe take a walk in the snow and look for you, Maggie. You never know, I might be able to find you yet.
The sea was dead today. Trawling is out of the question. I love you Maggie. I’m coming home.
November 5. Days at sea: -
The Russians sent some kind of military ship to deal with us. We’ve been stopped for about two hours now. They were already aboard and looked over the rig. Thankfully the soldiers speak English, so we can understand what they want when they point their fuckin’ rifles at us. The Captain had me aboard to discuss exactly what I had seen. He wouldn’t tell me what was in the barrels. He claims he doesn’t know anything, but I know he’s lying about that.
I told him about the fish and the sick whales. He responded by turning their 12.7mm DShk guns on the damn things. Double machine guns. The noise was terrific. There was whale meat everywhere. If it hadn’t been for all the shit that’s been going on here the last week or so, I might have actually been upset about seeing that. I know you would have, Maggie. There was some-thing awful about those whales though. I swear. They were turning, just like the fish.
The soldiers are leaving now, so we might be able to get underway in a bit. I’ll come back later and finish this
November 6ish.
I can’t believe I found this. It’s some kind of fate.
The Russians didn’t want to help. They turned those fuckin’ guns on us the minute the last soldier left the ship. There were holes everywhere. We took on water so fast...
The Aurora Brite is gone to the bottom of the ocean.
Everyone is dead, as far as I can tell. I’m stuck in this stupid orange emergency boat out on the high sea. I WILL die out here. I had to smash my emergency beacon in case the Russians picked it up and swung back for another go.
I had the book in my hands when they opened fire. I guess in my panic I managed to hold onto it. I should count myself grateful: I now have something to do to take my mind off the fact that I am four hundred miles away from shore. The emergency boat has a built in water filter underneath me somewhere, so I’m good there, and I have a stack of protein crackers to eat. I also have a little orange hood to keep the sun off my head.
It’s the vacation I always wanted, I tell you!
Now when the Russians come back they’ll have a nice orange target to shoot at, and they can blow my fucking head off and end this sad joke of a life once and for all.
For the record, I’m sad the Aurora Brite is lost but it wasn’t my boat to lose. the bank was going to take it when we docked, full hold or not. Fish money would have helped stave them off for one more trip, maybe two, but so what? What would have happened when the season was over?
Now, when the bank asks, I can tell them to come find it. Maybe they’ll run into the Russians too. Ahh, I’m such an idiot for calling those barrels in!
Am I sad about losing my crew? I suppose I am. They didn’t deserve their fates. Even the Frenchman, who I couldn’t stand. I’m sure he has a family somewhere who misses him even now. truth is, so little of my heart wasn’t broken by you Maggie. I miss you so much that I can’t begin to add to the pain with the loss of mere men. Employees. My heart is a cup filled over with tears for you, my love.
That’s poetic. I think you would have liked that, but I think you would have slapped my arm and told me how silly I was. I bet you would have smiled though.
In my mind you are frozen as you were that Sunday we went to church, with your little blue and white dress. That’s how I choose to remember you. But there is another you, lurking in my nightmares, the you that is bald and frail and sickly; the you that vomits on yourself because you are too weak to turn your head.
If God made all things, then He made your cancer, and he took you from me, and I will curse him when I see him. I fantasize about burning churches, so when they ask me why I can tell them, “I am mad at God. I rage because he crushed my life.”
The Sea is my grave. I’m going to be with you soon, my love.
November.
Those whales surfaced today.
I’d resigned myself to a long agonizing death. I wasn’t going to write again, but the whales surfaced.
One of them is about twenty feet from my raft. God, he stinks to high Hell! I can see the oozing bullet holes along the length of his body. he becomes visible everytime the sun ducks behind a cloud. His huge white eyes blindly staring back and forth, as though he’s hunting something nearby. It’s proba
bly me. Maybe he can smell me, but he can’t see me.
He’s just like those fish. I knew it. I fucking KNEW IT HOLY CHRIST YOUWULD NOT BELEVE IT MAGGIE.
I need to calm down. just looking at that huge, rotted thing, rolling over in the water like some giant piece of shit floating in a toilet bowl ... it makes my chest flutter. I’m going to go insane watching this dead thing try to swim around. It’s just so big.
It just blew its blowhole. I puked on my raft. The smell inside is so much worse. A spout of black slime and blood and meat chunks blew from the top of the whale, out into the water. like he’d just blown his brains all over himself. It reminded me of Cancer Maggie, a little. the sick girl I hate to think about.
Thought: if these are zombie whales, and that big bastard just blew his brains out, shouldn’t he stop moving now?
Well he isn’t.
He rolls over, shows me his belly, then flops back to right side up. sometimes he swims on his side. a little while ago, he nearly sank. Only the tip of his head was visible in the water. Like he was coming straight up from the bottom of the ocean. Shit. I’d drown myself but I’m terrified to get into the water with that thing nearby. I can see him grabbing ahold of my leg and dragging me to the bottom of the ocean.
I’ll be long dead by then. the speed he swims, it could take hours to get down there. Plus the weight of the water down there, and the cold ... and the black. Glowing fish monsters and giant squid are all you find down there. And me, with my leg stuck in some damn whale.
I need to stop for a while. I’m losing it. The sea is fuck you God today. Kill me please.
November.
I’m out of food now.
November.
I brok the pensil. i bit a hole in my hand and Im writing in blood. The whales are all around. they are losing their skin. i see greasy fat and grey meat in the splits of their flesh. I have never touched a whale, but I look at that bone white fat and all i can think is that running my hands through it would be like squeezing lard through my fingers. I kno its not true. theyr meat. they arent lard covered in skin. Its a stupid thought. one that I can’t seem to shake. I’m a stupid man.
Im coming soon I think maggs. The filter is broken. I taste sea water in my stores now. cant be much longr. i think i taste whalestink in the water too, but maybe its just cuz i smell them and they smell so fuckin bad i cant help but taste them to.
If I do taste them
Can i die?
If they make me sick that would be something huh? if it happens im stepping off the raft and sinking to the bottom of the ocean. its were i belong anyway. maybe ill grab a handful of grease off that whale before i go down. have a snack.
I’ll just lay on the bottom of the ocean, bones crushed, eyes popped like rotting grapes, surrounded by the long cold death of the sea. how long? forever maybe. yes. forever.
Goodbye maggie. I wont write again. I hope I see you soon. If not, please know I love you. I hope I see you.
Good You
Camille Smiled
JOHN EVERSON
Camille smiled. I thought so, anyway.
And then she sighed.
It was faint, light as baby’s breath. But I swear I heard it.
I stroked a wisp of black hair from the marble smooth slope of her forehead.
“Wake up, honey,” I whispered. “Talk to me, baby.”
It had been days since I’d last heard her voice, and the house felt deadly still without the sparkling tinkle of her laughter. As if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting. I didn’t know if I could stand another day of it.
Hour after hour I’d waited by her bedside, pacing, praying, bending to listen for her heart at her breast, holding a mirror to her lips to see if she breathed. I straightened the hand-woven necklace that voodoo queen Madame Trevail had sold me, down in her tiny shop hidden near the French Quarter. I centered its tiny pouch of leaves and clippings and extracts of God only knew what until it rested like a teabag in the small of her neck. Then I reconsidered and moved it out of that pale hollow, thinking that its miniscule weight might choke her tiny throat as it rested in that most delicate of settings.
“Wake up,” I begged again, and stared at her tiny frame, so still and frail there on the bed. She wore her finest dress, a yellow chiffon summery thing that my wife Annabel had picked. “It brings out her eyes,” she’d said.
If only I could see those eyes now. It seemed like forever since they’d gazed up at me, so wide and blue, turning my scolds to dust. She had one of those faces, one of those looks, that melted any offense. She was going to bring a lot of men to their knees someday, I knew.
“Jack, come to bed,” a voice spoke behind me.
I turned and Anna was there in the doorframe, her eyes red and swollen, her fist stifling a yawn.
“She sighed,” I explained.
“She didn’t.” Anna’s voice sounded brittle as spun glass.
“She did, I heard her. She’ll wake soon, I know it.”
Anna cried, a low stifled moan, and I went to her. This was a pain we shared, a fear we couldn’t live with. I couldn’t bear to see her suffer, though I felt the same empty pit in my soul. I pulled her close, cushioning her head to my shoulder.
“Believe, Anna,” I whispered through the tangled web of her raven hair, so like her daughter’s.
She pushed away.
“Believe?” she hissed, shoving again at my shoulders. I retreated toward the bed but she kept coming.
Believe in what?” she yelled. “Our daughter is not going to wake up again, why can’t you understand that?”
She stomped to the bed and grabbed Camille’s dress with both hands. The sound of ripping fabric filled the room and Anna turned to me with the shredded lemon chiffon still gripped in her hands.
“Look at her,” she cried, pointing at my eight-year-old daughter’s undeveloped chest. The porcelain white skin was hideously broken by accusing blushes of purple and midnight blue. Black, oozing stitches held my daughter’s chest together from the ruin that the fender of an ’87 Ford had made of it. My daughter would never grow up to wow the boys with her bosom. She would never have one.
“Cammy is dead, Jack,” Anna wailed. “When are you going to accept it? When are you going to take her back to the cemetery, where she belongs?”
Her voice had risen to a dangerous boiling-tea pitch.
“I can’t stand to see her anymore,” she cried, laying her face on the ugly dark crosshatching of Camille’s chest. “I can’t stand to see you like this anymore.”
“Anna,” I began. She shrugged off my hand and rushed from the room.
I turned back to Camille, and tried to draw the shreds of her dress back to a seemly covering.
Wake up, baby,” I said for the thousandth time. I thought I saw her eyelids crease, just slightly, and I leaned forward, anxious.
Her eyes opened.
Maybe it was the press of Anna’s touch, or her tears or the violence of her actions. Maybe the voodoo sachet I’d hocked my second car to obtain had just taken its time. But for the first time in days, my baby’s beautiful crystal blue eyes stared up out of that tiny angel face and into mine. Only they seemed dulled, lacking that ocean-deep warmth I remembered.
“Cammy?” I said, bending to hug her.
She clubbed me in the side of the head with her fist.
“Huh?” I gulped and fell to the floor, more out of surprise than hurt.
Camille sat up in her bed, and looked down at me on the floor. Her expression remained blank.
“Honey?” I said, rubbing my ear. I could feel the heat of swelling as a flood of blood rushed through my earlobe. It felt like a bee sting.
Camille lifted a foot over the edge of the mattress, and then stood, walking slowly and stiffly past me to her dresser. She stood there staring at the mirror and didn’t move. I thought she was looking at her face, but then as I eased off the floor, I saw that her finger was tracing the long jagged paths stitched into her chest.
Her skin shone with the glossy smear of something liquid, something leaking, where her finger had passed.
“It will all be okay now,” I said. She leaned towards the mirror, and then turned. A split second later I realized that it might not all be okay.