“Your people have been here long enough to form an ethnicity—the Yanks.”
“I prefer Yankee.”
“One who yanks or one who has been yanked?” asked Chosen. “You’re the yanker.”
“In any case, you seem very much a product of your environment. I think you may be very well adapted,” said Ill John.
“Well, thanks.”
“That is not completely a compliment,” added Chosen.
“Well then take it back.”
“It is not an insult, just an observation,” said Ill John.
“OK then, but I’m still not going to make you any coffee.”
“We are all set,” said Chosen.
“You’re all set? You guys are getting good.”
“All set,” said Chosen, “was a hard term to understand. But it is like ‘OK,’ yes?”
“You could still want more and be OK, but if you’re all set, you’re OK because you don’t want any more.”
“OK,” said Chosen.
“We are all set with this. Bestir yourself, Orange,” said Ill John. “We must leave.”
“All right.”
It would seem we were done with our lobstering career. The Koreans were back in their hoodies, and the ride was the Suburban we’d luncheoned in a few days ago. Myself, I was much cleaner and felt much more comfortable in my own jeans. I sat in back on the wide bench and we took a short drive down to the Lucy’s.
“You so sure this is a good idea?”
“We are not ready to say whether it is good or not,” said Ill John.
“I still don’t get what I have to do with this.”
“You are the pivot point for the sampo-gift and the native we trust. We met you when you tendered the first handoff, now it should continue its course with you.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if Snorri came, and you just gave it to him?”
“Not at this stage,” said Ill John. “We gave it to you. You gave it to Mr. Lucy. Mr. Lucy should have given it to Mineola Bombardier, who was to give it to Snorri. The sampo stalled at Mr. Lucy, and that was unanticipated and perhaps important.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I said.
“Nothing. It would be better if you did not speak.”
I didn’t know what to think of that. I guess it suited me.
“You are all set?” asked Ill John.
“OK, I guess.”
Donny bust open the kitchen storm door like a seagull trying to look tough. His head bobbed forward and he held his arms out, bent up at the elbow, forming a W. I knew Donny well enough to know that this meant, “What, what!?” He telegraphed angry confusion easily.
Ill John stepped out the car and summoned all his posture and authority into his chest. Donny flapped over, squawking, “The fuck?!”
“Fetch your father,” said Ill John.
“Motherfucker!”
“Mr. Lucy should be the only mother fucker here.”
Donny was parsing this when Mr. Lucy came out. “Get inside,” he told his son.
“It’s fucking Orange and his fucking fag friends.”
Ill John withered Donny with such a dominating glare, I suspected drill-sergeantry in his past. The two Lucys tangled in the doorway as the younger retreated and the elder advanced.
Mr. Lucy was wearing a green plaid flannel shirt tucked into his faded green Dickies, which were hitched up to mid-rib with suspenders. He rooted around his pocket, found his partials and installed them into his jaw. To speak comprehensibly after a lifetime of seagum-chewing requires one to keep one’s lips in something of a moue; Mr. Lucy looked like he was expecting a kiss as he squinted at us.
“What’s Whippey doing here?” he said—or tried to say—sharply.
“He is here to felicitate.”
“Facilitate,” said Chosen.
Felatiate, I thought, but did not utter.
“Jesum Crow. Come on.”
We followed Mr. Lucy around back to his shed. The wide door sagged on its hinges and scraped the granite cobbles as he dragged it open. Briny mildew and turpentinic vapors watered my eyes a bit. He shuffled between the workbench and the little dory flipped over on sawhorses that took up most of the shed’s interior to pull on the cord for the bare bulb hanging above the bench. There was only the one lawn chair in the shed; we stood around the upturned boat that was either being reconditioned or demolished—it was midway through either one of the processes and probably had been for years.
We stood and stared, each testing the others’ mettle to stand and stare. It seemed like a fair match. As the felicitator, I felt obliged to break first. “Well?”
“Well, what the hell you boys want?”
“We discussed this last night, Mr. Lucy,” said Ill John.
Mr. Lucy grunted. He leaned down on the boat to rest his forearms and elbows. Then he straightened and pushed some old bolts around in a dirty Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee can. He plucked out a couple of the rustiest, dropped them on the floor and kicked them under the workbench.
“Well. . . ,” he said, then thought better of finishing his statement. Instead he lined up a few tools on the bench. He considered a paint brush that had been curled into a crusty brown ringlet by dried varnish. A dead fly was added to an ashtray with butts from another decade.
“Well what?” I said.
“We heard ’bout enough outta you, Whippey,” said Mr. Lucy.
I didn’t know if the Koreans had realized that an island geezer has the ability to fart around in his shed until long after the heat death of the sun. Which is presumably when Mr. Lucy would finally get around to finishing some of his projects.
“Why don’t you explain it again, boys. I’m not sure I follow.”
“Mr. Lucy,” said Ill John, “when we last paid you for your seagum on the Polk, we included with the payment a package, which you had agreed to give to Mineola Bombardier, who had agreed to, in turn, render the package to Snorri, the Finlindian whale herder.”
“What’s that fuckin’ dinghy gonna do with it?” he muttered.
“It was a gift, as I had explained previously,” said Ill John.
Chosen elaborated: “It is an important gift because we feel that it demonstrates our insight into Finlindian culture, particularly the concept of sampo. We hoped that as cultural ambassadors we could use this gift to signify our comprehension of the subtleties and unmentionables of his culture. This would help us broker a successful trading relationship and inaugurate the herding of North Indian Atlantic whales to our peninsula, where such stock is valuable in our seaports.”
“You make it sound important,” said Mr. Lucy.
“Its perfect unimportance is what makes it crucial,” said Ill John.
Mr. Lucy side-stepped from between the bench and boat toward the shed’s dooryard where the fraying webbed lawn chair held open the door. He sat down with some difficulty. His pant legs rode well above his white socks. “I’m sorry kids, I don’t got it.”
“Yes, you do,” said Chosen, “it is right there.”
Mr. Lucy took the contradiction sitting down. Unfazed, he said, “Well I ain’t done with it.”
“How long?” asked Ill John.
“Could might be some time,” said Mr. Lucy. “Can’t really say.”
“Should we wait here while you finish?” asked Ill John. “Help elucidate matters for you?”
“Wouldabeen done if Donny hadn’tabeen in such a rut. Stole it from me.”
Mr. Lucy took out his reading glasses from the case in his shirt pocket. He picked up a thick, worn paperback and showed us where he’d bookmarked it. He appeared to have around forty pages to go. “I already knew the fish dies at the end. And the ship sinks.”
“This book,” said Ill John, “is the defining totem of your island culture. From the islands come men of tragic obsession chasing sea monsters that resist the lumber of symbology by never divagating from their own essential savage natures. The monsters remain monsters, make the men into monsters.
Men can only be true men among monsters. A German literary critical term for masculine monster lust would be apt. Men love their monsters; in the end they explode together. Only the men most full of doubt and words outlive their monsters, and it is an unbearable burden for them.”
The book was beachworn, slept upon, sneeze-inducing. Infinities of rings belied its shadow life as a coaster. Summer humidity and winter furnaces had plumped and shrunken its pages like a fisherman’s face. The browning edges of the foxed and dog-eared pages were perfect camouflage for the shed; it was as much a piece of Mr. Lucy’s world as the brass oarlocks that dangled from the shelf bracket—a piece of island umweltern whose ubiquity made it a familiar relic, its cover still iconic, the eponymous monster still, after all these years, a perfect summation of dread and desire.
Ill John was dead right. This book was both product and symbol of our island ways. Our history, our families, even our property tax assessments were affected by this book—the one book read by both Islanders and strangers—the book that told us it might just be better not to go down to the sea. It had so permeated every space of private and public thought on the island that it was hard to imagine a shelf without it. From the Christian Science Reading Room storefront window to under my very own pillow, that book has never been far from any Islander’s eyes.
I remembered the day it made me understand the very nature of family and community here. Not only has every Islander lost family to the water and its monsters, but we all know Islanders whose lust for monsters exceeds their means, or who have met their monsters, done nothing about it, and live now in moiled shame. That wasn’t my revelation though. Kids already know all about monsters. It was when a friend was telling me his cousin had regretted wearing denim cut-offs when he was a beach extra in the film of the book. I too had a cousin in that scene. In fact, as years past, I came to learn that everyone had a cousin in the film that could be spotted if one paused on a particular frame in the beach scene. How many cousins could one have, I began to wonder. I had cousins to spare, some of them who really were the children of my parents’ siblings. Cousins are one thing all Islanders have in common. Even only children can have cousins. Cousins aren’t limited by blood or intermarriage. Many of us knew each other perfectly well as cousins but were at an utter loss to explain our familial relationship. And all of them were in the beach scene, screaming, frothing up the water, losing their floats, shouting for their children.
Ill John and Chosen began to converse in short, quiet Korean. Maybe even argue.
“He can finish? Maybe quickly?” Chosen asked me in English.
“I didn’t know he read books,” I said.
“It would be best if he finished reading the book,” said Ill John.
“He knows how it ends; the whole world knows how it ends,” I said.
“Ho!” shouted Mr. Lucy. He held up his right index finger and licked it with deliberation. Then he turned a page. “You boys are disturbing my afternoon.”
The Koreans whispered to each other. “Let us attend him,” said Ill John.
“Wait, you mean?” I asked.
“It is important to finish reading books.”
I was getting the vapors from the turpentine fumes. I wondered what could be more boring than watching Mr. Lucy read.
“You got to be kidding.”
Ill John frowned. “Perhaps we have overestimated you, Orange.”
I thought maybe I could get Chosen’s AK from the Suburban and make Mr. Lucy read faster with it, which was a stupid idea. It wasn’t even worth blurting out the ending, since everyone knew. I looked around at the eddies of rusty jetsam that covered nearly every surface of the shed. This would be my fate. I would be stuck here decomposing in this shed until an archeologist’s trowel tinked on my bones. I’d be written up in a dissertation on early twenty-first century Northeastern Islander suicide-by-boredom rituals; Mr. Lucy’s shed and Mineola’s sauna hut would be reconstructed as worship chambers where Islanders practiced the dark art of killing time. Mr. Lucy would be the high priest; I’d just be a novice who obviously couldn’t go the distance. It wasn’t fair.
“Tighten up, Orange. I have your back, OK?” said Chosen.
I moaned; Mr. Lucy told us to shut up, with more spray than say. The Koreans had surely endured horrific stress-position de-sensitization training in the army I presumed they had served in. Sitting still, or leaning anyway, was nothing to them. Mr. Lucy, he had a book for Christ’s sake. What did I have going for me? Politeness? Patience? Strength-of-character? It was subtle theater, each of us trying to outbore the other through shades of inaction, and I supposed I was a mere spear-carrier in the production. I locked my knees and pretended I was getting paid. That which doesn’t kill me only makes me older.
Mr. Lucy turned a page slowly. I watched rejectionist wasps that refused to believe in glass bonk against the pane. The sill below was mulched with the chitin of prior generations of fellow apostates. Outside more wasps labored to caulk every crevice of the window’s warping frame with a mud of their own making. Maybe they were charged with the immurement of the indoor wasps. Maybe the founders of the shed wasp line had transgressed the rules of waspdom so shamefully that they and their descendants were doomed to eternal captivity. Were they an edifying example to the free-range wasps?
The summer my father sold me to Mr. Lucy—or got me a wage-paying, character-building job, as he liked to phrase it—we got stranded when the oil pump blew on the old Wendy’s Mom. Donny and I were still too young and full of complaint to be committed to any kind of productive makework, and the real work had to be suspended while we waited for a tow back. I was in a sulk simply because I was on the boat in the first place, but when I realized that we would make no profit at all on this outing and that the one zillionth share that I was entitled to would not be forthcoming, I caught a bad case of the mopes. Donny contracted it quickly, and the combined power of our whines induced Mr. Lucy to try and distract us with big fish stories and tales of the heroic skippers of yore. This bored us further, and we suspected it of being educational, which quickened our truculence.
Donny and I, along with every other kid on the island, had been telling shark jokes to each other all summer. We had a good routine going with the landshark. We had ganged up on his father and were drowning his stories with an improvised call and response version of the sketch. On each iteration we traded roles so that we could take turns announcing ourselves at an imaginary door: “Candygram,” “mailman,” and “plumber” gave way to more familiar island figures like Mr. Loomis, a hated teacher, Denise and Sylvie—the sisters already on our pubescent minds—and then more strangely, realer monsters like King Kong and Godzilla. This disgusted Mr. Lucy, who grumbled we didn’t know how to tell stories or even listen, just to shout out stupid phrases. We succeeded in bothering Mr. Lucy sufficiently well enough to transfer the burden of the sulk onto his shoulders, leaving us in good moods, blithering around the boat like over-caffeinated goats.
It was Donny who began screaming, “Shark, shark!” Even I thought it was in poor taste, given how thoroughly we had beaten the landshark joke into the ground. But he persisted, and sure enough, even Mr. Lucy saw the fin. It was huge and oddly floppy. In fact, as it slapped slowly back and forth, it didn’t seem to be taking its role as supreme monster of the sea seriously. We were motorless and dragging a sea anchor, which functions as a sort of cross between an anvil and a kite, so we could neither escape nor give chase. Eventually the wind and waves brought us and the lollygagging fish closer. It was indeed huge and frightening, just as the shark should be. Its head was vast and gray and more like a sea boulder with eyes than a predator’s snout. In fact, given its lackadaisical lolling, it seemed more like a hazard to navigation than to life and limb.
Donny and I were frantic. Every single shark encounter we’d ever heard of ended in dismemberment at the very least. Any second, it would bite the boat in half and gulp us down like oysters. Donny begged his dad to get the rifle. He ar
med us instead with a boathook and a gaff, which we brandished like harpoons. The shark was barely moving, neither predator nor prey. We wondered if it were wounded or sick, like the parasite-addled dolphins that insisted on killing themselves on our shores now and then. Man-eating sharks were canny though, capable of making ambush plans and certainly capable of playing dead.
By the time we arrived at poking-distance our fear had mostly dissipated. The fish was still oblivious or laying in wait. As the tide of my excitement ebbed, I noticed something profoundly disturbing. No matter my perspective, no matter how hard I looked, the fish had no body. It had a head half the size of the Wendy’s hull and then just nothing. It had been bit off at the neck—pinched off, maybe, since I couldn’t see any gore and its skin seemed as if it had been clamped together to seal the wound. Donny and I had convinced ourselves that we were witnessing the best, most topical monster of our lives, yet we were looking at something much more frightening, otherworldly even. Universal laws were broken right in front of us. Somehow, as if surviving as just a head weren’t preposterous enough, it had managed to move its fins up near its jaws, so it was still able to propel itself. An anti-cherub from the pelagic underworld biding its time until it chose to pull us down to fish hell.
Donny was holding his dad’s hand shamelessly. I suppose the only thing that kept me from exploding into chunks of chum was that I just could not fully convince myself that I was seeing what was clearly right off our starboard bow.
“Sunfish. Moonfish, maybe,” said Mr. Lucy.
Sunfish? Moonfish? Sunfish were the first fish I learned how to throw back. Sunfish nibble toddlers’ toes and flit around under docks. Sunfish were insignificant freshwater fish that some summer kids called crappies, for God’s sake. Of all fish on the planet, this was the least like a sunfish I could imagine. A fish from the moon seemed as reasonable an explanation as anything else.
“What happened to it?” asked Donny.
“Nothing. That’s just the way they are.”
“Its body. . . ?” I said.
“Yer lookin’ at it.”
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