by Jon Keller
The boy needs a bullet, Virgil muttered as if responding to Jonah’s thoughts. Hell, he’s asking for a bullet.
They steamed offshore for an hour and a half with the moon nearly full climbing from the east and by the time they reached the Leviathan the moon had flooded the sea silver. Despite the moon Bill flicked on Julius’s overhead lights together with a set of deck lights that lit the boat’s shadowed workspace. Virgil gaffed Julius’s first buoy and the traps rose through the water and burst into the light. He slid the first trap back to Bill and the next one to Jonah.
What’re we doing? Jonah said.
Taking them up for our friend. He needs the help, Virgil said. Stuff the fucking rope in there and let’s go. Virgil kicked the pile of rope that had coiled at his feet back to Jonah and Jonah kicked it back to Bill. Bill began to untie the bowline that held the tailer warp to the mainline but Virgil said, Cut the fucking thing, Captain. For Christ’s sake.
Bill cut the rope just below the knot. What about the bugs?
Each trap had several lobsters in it.
Throw the fuckers back, Virgil said. We ain’t thieves.
Bill tossed several lobsters overboard and their shining wet carapaces flashed in the moonlight. He lifted the mass of wet rope into the trap and set the trap on the stern. Jonah put the tailer warp in his trap and stacked the trap on top of Bill’s. Another pair of traps rose and they stacked those while Virgil continued down the string.
When the last pair of traps was aboard Virgil cut the wheel toward the harbor. They stood three in a row at the bulkhead with Virgil at the wheel and not one of them spoke and no voices came over the radio. The only noise they heard was the drone of the diesel engine and the smooth spray of water splashing from the chines. Virgil shut the overhead lights off and the moon lit everything and that boat alone out on the water sliced across the sea leaving behind only a sparkling wake that soon ended.
Jonah watched the water slide by. He felt that they were such a small spot surrounded by a universe that he alone could not fathom and in that moment he looked up in hopeful search of the heavens and the consolations found there but he saw nothing beyond the moon. He shivered and stamped his cold wet feet.
The restaurant was a crowded bar with a back room that held a dozen tables. All were full except the largest which had been reserved for Jason Jackson. The waiter led them through the throng of patrons and seated them.
Jason held Turtle at his side and pulled a chair out for her. She kissed his cheek and said into his ear, At least it’s not a strip joint.
The waiter brought three bottles of wine. Jason held his glass up and the others did the same. The barroom was filled with smoke and voices and laughter.
To the restless, Jason said.
Osmond gave him a look as if weighing the words.
Julius drank down the glass of wine and held it empty in his fist. Gwen gave him a shy smile and poured him another glass. Take it slow, Cowboy, she said. It’s worth it.
I don’t do nothing slow.
I understand, she said.
Jason watched from across the table.
The waiter returned and Gwen spoke into his ear. He nodded and nodded again. Soon he brought plates of mussels and fries and a platter of roasted veal short ribs with roasted tomato espagnole and garlic confit. The ribs were the color of caramel with bits of fat still bursting from the heat of recent wood flames.
Turtle stood up and reached across the table and took a fistful of fries. She ladled a heap of ketchup onto her plate and dunked the fries one at a time and didn’t look up until they were finished. Then she took another handful.
Jason ate a dozen mussels then forked ribs onto his plate and ate them without looking up. Finally he wiped sauce and juice from his face and looked across the table at Julius. I have two questions for you.
Shoot, said Julius.
First, Jason said and placed his elbows on the table and held his fingertips together. First I’d like to know what you dream about.
At night?
Yes, at night.
Julius looked for a moment at Osmond then turned his attention back to Jason. He ran his fingers over his arrowhead and hid his grin and said, That ain’t a fuckbit of your business. You better try the next question.
Jason clapped his hands together and leaned back and laughed and slapped the table. Good God, he said. My next question is different. Tell me our biggest problem. I mean, in our venture. What is our biggest problem?
Transportation but that don’t count. The market’s flooded is the matter with your plans. We got them Canadians coming into their season when we wind up so that’s direct competition for you.
For us, Julius.
See, continued Julius, they’re tubing those bugs up there. They got eight million pounds on hold right now just hoping the price’ll come about. One guy alone’s got four million in tubes. Even the fishermen are tubing bugs on their own up there. They’re filling traps with PVC tubes and sinking them in the harbors while they hope the price changes. The problem with what you’re doing is market. There just ain’t a market. Ten years ago we caught forty million pounds and now we catch over seventy-five. Next year it’ll be over ninety. That’s a lot of product. We can’t expect the market to support that.
Jason leaned back and sipped his wine as he listened to Julius. When Julius was finished the table was quiet. Jason grunted and picked the meat from a mussel and tossed it into his mouth then scraped the abductor muscle from the shell with his thumbnail and ate that as well. So why did you buy a new boat, Julius?
Because fishing’s my business is why. Pounds and shit ain’t. I’ll get by.
I see, Jason said. He glanced at Osmond then tore a piece of the baguette off and ran it through the espagnole.
Julius felt Gwen’s hand grip his thigh. She moved close. He smelled her skin and breath. His spine tingled as he watched her lips move. She whispered, What’s tubing lobsters?
It’s live storage. They shove them end to end in plastic pipes and cycle cold water through the pipes. It’s like the lobsters are hibernating or something. They don’t feed or nothing. Just sit in them pipes but in there they don’t get grassed up with seaweed, so you don’t have to scrub each one.
Gwen nodded and sipped her wine.
Jason drank down his glass of wine. He returned to Julius. What’s happening now, Julius, and you may be aware of this, is that the Italians are expanding. You have two or three players that run the show. They each operate under multiple names, and they’re not just around here anymore. They’re in Canada. St. John, and Shediac. They’re flying overseas directly from up there. Anything goes wrong, they start throwing cash at it until it’s fixed or it’s buried.
Julius listened. Gwen’s hand drifted down to his knee then she let go and ripped a piece of baguette off and forked caramelized veal and garlic confit onto it and ate.
Osmond ate little and listened to Jason and Julius. He had his arm around the back of Renee’s chair and his fingers traced the edges of her dress. Julius paid no attention to him.
There’s a lot of pounds might not get rid of their product this year, Jason said. Those lobsters will be growing moss like swamp-fighters until June. They’ll be nearly worthless.
So what’s the point? Julius said.
Jason hefted his sleeves up over his hairy forearms and leaned onto his elbows. Here’s the point. The Italians are heading for a nosedive is what. They got too big too quick. They have money to get themselves out of trouble, but they’re fucking slobs. What we need to do is provide quality, pure and simple. The douchebag Canadians aren’t much better. Those tubed bugs have a shelf life of what, Osmond? Two or three days once they’re pulled from the water. A good pounded lobster will go weeks. And they aren’t grading before they tube them. Global warming’s changing things. The water’s warming up so they’re catching a few shedders these days and they aren’t used to that. They’re trying to tube goddamned softshells. They just shove the weak in wit
h the top product because they think they’re being smart and making some cash. The Japs savvy that. They hate the Canadians because the Canadians are cheap bastards.
Even the Chinese are getting on board. A few major things are happening for us in China. One, there’s some serious money now and they want live seafood and they want to know it came from clean water and they want to know it’s sustainably caught. The Japs are the same—Americans are the only ones who don’t want clean fucking water. Nobody else wants a lobster that’s been fed antibiotic feed, and that’s what a lot of pounds are turning to these days. But you guys don’t need that because you have the water. You know what that antibiotic feed’s got in it? Oxytetracycline. The same shit they feed you if you get the clap, and these rough bastards are feeding it to lobsters.
Second, up until the last few years China hasn’t had the infrastructure to handle live product, but they’re on the way and as a consequence they hate the word frozen even more than ever. The word frozen to them means trash. It means the past and they want to forget the past. Now they have refrigeration and they have a decent transportation network. The Agricultural Trade Office in Beijing has gotten on board. Third is that the Australians used to have a corner on that market with their crappy-ass spiny lobsters, but their catch limits have put a dent in the trade. We can step in if we do it fast and we’ll show them the best fucking product they ever saw. We’ll sell the best fucking bugs and that’s that. That’s your market. Small, quiet, and perfect. Look at the fish I buy in Hawaii. I could buy fucking skipjack or marlin from anywhere in the world but I buy it from Turtle’s exchange in Honolulu, and I pay extra for it. That market is tiny but they handle as much cash as markets twice, three times their size. That means they sell expensive fish.
The best fish in the world, Turtle said. She had smears of ketchup on her chin and nose and she held a fry in her fingers. You think you got water? We got water. Your fries are better than your junk-ass shellfish.
Julius glared at her and pinched his arrowhead between his fingers.
Turtle wagged the fry at Julius and ate it and said, What’re you looking at, you fucking goon?
Julius looked away.
Enough, Jason said.
Turtle laughed. She grasped Jason’s head in both of her hands and turned his face toward her and wiped a crumb from his beard. He shook her off and said, You have ketchup on your face.
Then he turned to Julius. The Italians sell a lot for a little. We’ll do the opposite. The Australians and New Zealanders savvy that. They get near twenty bucks a pound for their product. The Irish do too. We’re just too damned American here. We want a lot for a little. You fishermen think your nut size depends on your haul size. Well it doesn’t, Julius. You got to be smart. I’ve been up and down the coast and you guys get the best-quality lobsters in the world, plain and simple. You have good water and good fishing bottom up there but you got no sense. That’s the point.
The waiter returned. He listened to Gwen. Shortly afterward he brought a black steel pan that held a bone-in monkfish tail the size of Gwen’s thigh. The fish had been roasted hot in brown butter and thyme and surrounded by sunchokes and golden beets and whole cloves of garlic. Gwen reached out and skimmed a crispy piece of fish off and slid it through the nut-dark sauce. She closed her eyes and murmured as she swallowed. She looked to Julius with a smile and said, I wish I had taste buds all the way down to my belly.
• • •
Later that night in the hotel they sat in two armchairs facing the window with the city lights glittering beyond and Gwen said, Jason told me that you found a body in your lobster pound. Your grandfather’s partner?
Julius ran a finger over the arrowhead of hair. He took a few seconds to respond. We found his skull. Just bones was all there was left of him.
How’d he get in there?
Julius squinted. No one knows.
Why would someone kill him?
Julius grinned. He was a asshole.
Gwen yawned and pulled two glasses and a bottle of wine and a corkscrew from her handbag. She opened the bottle. The glasses were wrapped in cloth and she unwrapped them and wiped them down. Is it true that the mafia is involved in the lobster industry up there?
Yeah, that’s true. One of the pounds near us owed them mafia guys money for some bait or feed or something and he didn’t pay on time. They went and watched him load a truck with a hundred crates to sell and then they just backed their truck up to it and loaded the crates onto their truck. Ten thousand pounds of lobsters all crated up and they just drove off and the guy never said a single word. Just went into his kitchen and shot himself in the chin. Now one of them Italian seafood companies owns that pound and five or six other pounds too. These big operations want the pounds so they can control the price through the winter. In the summer the lobsters come from boat landings but in winter most of them up our way are pounded.
Gwen poured the wine and handed a glass to Julius. He put the glass on the table beside him. But the mafia didn’t do anything to your grandfather’s partner, though?
No.
Jason said that your father is in prison.
Julius darted a glance at her and without meaning to she looked away. She sipped her wine. He took a hard candy from his pocket and unwrapped it and held the candy in his fingers. Sounds like Jason said a lot of things.
We eat dinner together a lot. I’m his de facto private chef, and he’s like my de facto uncle or something.
Well it’s none of Jason’s goddamned business where my father is, Julius said. He put the candy in his mouth and crunched it once with his molars before sucking the shards.
Tell that to Jason.
I will, Julius said.
She reached over and squeezed his thigh and smiled softly then took her hand back and wrapped it together with her other hand around the wineglass. Do you ever see him? Your father?
No.
Do you hear from him? Like in the movies when you see them lined up to make phone calls?
Again Julius spun his head toward her but this time the move was measured and a blackness sparked in his eye like the flashing of a crow wing.
She bit the inside of her cheek. She looked out the window for a full minute then said, So what do you dream?
He didn’t answer. She leaned close to him and whispered into his ear and he felt the heat of her breath.
What do you dream about, Julius?
He pursed his lips as if chewing. What do you dream about? he asked her.
Me? I dream about all sorts of things. I dream about when I was a little girl and my mother would take me apple picking up north and then we’d make cider in the barn at the orchard. I dream that a lot. The cider streams down my chin and all over me and I drink gallons of it. And I dream about the two autumns I spent working in the vineyards in California. Maybe I dream about fruit. I never thought of that before. Fruit. But sometimes I dream about other things, mostly food though. Isn’t that strange? I love food but maybe I was starved when I was little.
I dream about water, said Julius.
Saltwater?
That’s what water is. Saltwater.
What’s the water doing? You dream about working on a lobster boat?
No. Never. Just water.
Are you in it?
No.
I don’t understand, she said.
Just fucking water.
Are you seeing it from above?
Oh, he said as if he hadn’t understood the question. He slouched in the chair so that the back of his head rested on the chair back. He thought for a moment and said, I guess it’s like I’m in it. It’s like when I fall asleep I’m surrounded by water instead of air until I wake up. That’s all. No people or boats in it. Just water all around.
Can you hear anything? Like bubbles?
No, he said. His voice was harsh. I don’t dream I’m a fucking whale.
She forced a short laugh as if the noise would pry the room open.
Julius turn
ed his head. The back of his skull stayed pressed to the chair. It’s not funny, Gwen.
She remembered Turtle calling Julius a goon and laughing as if he were a little boy. She tensed the muscles in her back and stomach and sipped her wine. She told herself that Turtle was right but it didn’t feel right. She said, I’m sorry. Your dream sounds beautiful. I’d trade you my fruit for your water.
Sure, he said. Whenever.
Maybe you dream you’re in the womb again. Maybe you’re scared of this world and want to return to that safe place.
I ain’t scared of nothing. He paused then said, What the fuck is a womb?
Don’t worry about it, she said.
I don’t worry about a thing.
She finished her glass of wine and went to the bathroom and faced the mirror. It occurred to her to go out the door and take a cab to her apartment and lock the door. Her heart raced. Behind Julius’s eyes she’d seen a light that scared her and part of what scared her was that she simply could not figure him out. He was tough then an instant later fragile and lost but there was something more. Something that frightened her deep down and the fact that she couldn’t place it made her distrust her instincts.
She swallowed. She mouthed the words you can do this into the mirror. She took three deep breaths. She ran two fingers across her lips. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and she lifted the thin straps of her dress over her shoulders and let the dress slide to the floor. She stepped over the black cloth. She looked again to the mirror. Her heart had slowed and she reached behind her back and unclasped her bra and let it slide. She bent and pulled her underwear over her thighs and knees and ankles and kicked free. She took three more breaths and opened the door.
A blade of city light cut Julius in half. She crossed the carpeted floor. She pulled him to his feet and was relieved to see that his knees shook. She kissed his neck and the skin was hot and dry. She unbuttoned his shirt and spread the silk over his shoulders and ran her fingers over his chest. A tattoo of a black lobster with red eyes covered his breast and she pushed the red eyes like buttons. She kneeled down and held his kneecaps in her palms. She looked up at him and said, Are you nervous?