Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  FRESH CATCH

  by Michael A. Arnzen

  Jared chuckled when Twitchell’s line unspooled and the kid began flailing a limp hand at the reel as if it might burn him. Sandy, Twitchell’s reluctant tagalong gal, dropped her impotent reel to help him try to pull the surprise catch in. As Jared’s small fishing boat rocked from the transfer of weight to one side, he tried to ignore the imbalance, turning away from the pair of touristy idiots to eyeball his own bobber out on the salty green. Fish had been teasing him all day. But the weather was right and he’d brought the boat to his honey spot—so soon they would be biting, he just knew it.

  “Ho-o-lee…” Twitchell’s voice raised an octave, and since he sounded like a dying seal, Jared thought that was reason enough to glance again their way. He forced a smile. They’d paid for this trip on his boat, ostensibly to fish, but he’d done this with couples on vacation a million times, and he knew they just wanted to be coddled and assured that this sea fishing excursion was a great way to blow five hundred dollars. So he had to pretend to care; it was standard operating procedure. If he was lucky, they’d actually reel one in and he’d probably get to keep it for dinner, along with tip.

  The couple had managed to yank the catch up from the drink. The thing was bigger than anything he expected Twitchell might hook. And for just a second, it looked like Twitchell had snagged a human baby.

  Both of them heaved on the rod to try to lift it from the wobbly green surface and the bulbous shark-gray shape suddenly cut through the skin of the water like a gull in response, spraying water, sailing swiftly toward them through the air. Twitchell’s line trailed from its mouth, flaccid, caught between two tiny twisted arcs that could have been its lips. Jared fell back against the hull of the boat, worried the thing would run into him, but it splatted onto the floorboards between him and the two lovebirds, flopping and twisting wetly against the wood. Jared instinctively felt like the landed fish needed to be kicked or clubbed, and he raised a hesitant boot to do so, but with one last spasm the thing stiffened and stared idly at his foot, as if giving up the fight before he had the chance.

  Twitchell’s eyes were light bulbs as he came forward, gripping Sandy’s bare, sweaty arm. “My God, what the hell is it?”

  Together, they stared. Black eyes, filmy and gray, stared back at them, behind sclerae thin as mucus, a covering reminiscent of eyelids but weirder, speckled yellow. Its marbled eyes were forever closed, not understanding light. The lenses had no color—just a black bead in the center of gray. The thing’s head itself was something like a flat basketball. A crooked slit of black made up its mouth. A large dimple near the top of its skull vaguely resembled a collapsed newborn’s soft-spot.

  Jared marveled over its ugliness. Gray gills and seaweed-clogged fins, no larger than Jared’s palms, were wholly unfishly. Its body was shaped like a squeezed square—six rounded rectangular edges with hollow, sagging centers—and the skin was so loose it didn’t appear to house anything resembling meat or muscle. It seemed empty, hollow, like a small, wet, crepe-papered crate with a mannequin’s smashed plastic head attached.

  Not knowing what else to do with his foot, Jared cautiously toed one side, flipping it over.

  Flapped edges curling as it rolled, the thing revealed its flat bottom: all gray color tapering to the standard fish-belly bright white. Its bottom surface was flat as a stingray’s hood, but it carried a blanket of tiny tentacles. Its stomach, if that’s what you would call it, was lined with writhing suckers which still puckered the sky, searching for something to grip.

  Satisfied that it was dead or dying, Jared reached for the bottle of Jim Beam beside the catch’s head, placed it in his lap, and capped it. “Throw it back,” he said in Twitchell’s direction. “Too small. It’s just a baby.”

  Sandy guffawed, her voice deep with snot. “A baby what?” she asked, her upper lip gnarled tightly to one side.

  Twitchell just stared down at the creature; his chest muscles flexed in a rhythmic, unconscious way that mimicked the leech-like suckers on the thing’s belly as he waited for it to move.

  Jared gulped from the mouth of the bottle, eyeing them. College kids, he thought. What would they do if they had actually caught something really worth fretting over, like a red-eyed shark? He shoved the bottle between his legs to cool his thighs and tossed the cap over the side, figuring he might as well finish what he’d started. “Hell if I know what it is.” He swallowed back the nausea rising up his throat from the booze, reminding him that his body was still working off last night’s binge. “But I don’t want that freak of nature on my boat.” He twisted with a squeak in his seat to watch his own tranquil bobber impotently floating out on the green. He wondered if the sea was polluted out here, and that’s why there wasn’t much competition this time of year. “Get rid of it.”

  Twitchell uttered something incoherent to Jared’s back.

  Sandy sniffled and whispered: “Are you crazy? Even Captain Jared said he doesn’t know what it is. You can’t possibly want to eat that thing. Why don’t you toss it back like he says?”

  Twitchell’s voice surfaced from a mumble: “…rare. Maybe it’s worth something. I think I saw something like that on the food network once. Could be a delicacy.”

  “It’s disgusting. Probably poisonous.”

  Jared chugged from his bottle again. He could hear the liquid in his gut smacking against the walls of his stomach like the small waves lapping the hull of his small boat. “Throw it out,” he repeated, refusing to look at them. Or it.

  The boat was awkwardly silent while Jared watched his bobber. The red side of the sphere kept tipping like a buoy, and he couldn’t be sure if his bait was being nibbled or if he’d tied too much weight to his sinker. Either way, he could feel them down there, circling the hook. It was always this way when he used hamburger meat to fish—at first they didn’t know what the gloppy red meat was—the aquatic scent of blood foreign to their salty gills—and they took a while to realize that the wormy-looking globule was a kind of food. Not the best bait for fish, but good enough for Jared. The fish in this location were desperate; they didn’t have much choice this far from shore. But that creepy creature was clearly some kind of mutant, and maybe his old honey hole had gone toxically sour.

  The boat rocked. Jared figured Twitchell was bending over to pick the thing up and throw it overboard, giving in to Sandy’s silent treatment, as well as her good looks. Jared knew the boy was whipped the second he saw the two of them together, all kissy and holding hands like teenagers. It wasn’t often Jared took folks fishing on a date, but he didn’t care what they did, so long as they paid him and maybe caught a thing or two to spread the word about his business.

  Jared heard a large splash behind him. He grinned. “About time you grew a pair, boy.” He wondered if the sound would disturb the fish he was after below. He squinted, studying his line closely.

  Nothing.

  Quiet. Water tickling wood, a sound like draining.

  A slight sniffle…followed by a shrieked sigh.

  He snapped around, boat creaking as his neck twisted.

  Sandy was alone, hands cupped over her mouth and cowering from the dark pinkish curling puddle that swished on the deck of the boat like a shadow where Twitchell should have been standing.

  Jared surfaced from the water, wet hair revealing bald spaces on his scalp. “I don’t see him anywhere,” he grumbled, holding on to the edge of the sailboat and breathing heavily. Dizziness spun up his brain from too much drink.

  Sandy wasn’t talking. She kept her hand over her mouth, as if holding her breath, afraid to inhale the seawater’s tainted air.

  “Damn this.” Jared lumbered over the side of the boat and fell back inside, huffing. He was too drunk for scuba and too tired for this malarkey. He wasn’t completely convinced that the kid wasn’t playing some kind of joke, but Twitchell had been gone for far too long. And Jared knew he might be out of business if he lost a man overboard and word got around.
A drunk captain made for bad headlines, too. But maybe he could get it out of the woman that it was all Twitchell’s fault: maybe he didn’t know how to swim, or was allergic to saltwater, or heck, even suicidal to begin with.

  He sat beside her, dripping, and caught his breath. Sandy didn’t move; just stared out at the water, as if expecting her boyfriend to return from the deep at any moment.

  “Are you ready to tell me what happened yet? Did you two get in a fight or something?”

  She just watched the sea, mute, her eyes dilated black and cheeks wet with tears. The boat bobbed uncomfortably.

  Jared groaned. Grabbed his bottle of JB. He took the last swig of the remainder to rinse the saltwater from his mouth. Moved to toss the bottle overboard, but had a better idea. He slammed it down against the metal anchor chain near the bow, where it splintered and sprayed glass beside Sandy’s feet.

  She cringed and then stared at him. “What?” was all she could say.

  Jared’s face was bright red and slimy with seawater. He flung a finger at her. “You better start talking to me now, little lady, or you’re going overboard with your boyfriend.” He stood, dizzily, pointing his thick finger at the girl’s face like the barrel of a gun. He had difficulty keeping his balance, waiting for speech to surface from her silent treatment, but he felt more in control than he had since leaving shore.

  “That thing,” she said, looking down at the puddle between Jared’s legs. “The thing just…sprang.”

  “What thing? You mean that stupid ugly fish?”

  “That thing.” She faced him boldly now, confronting him with the word till he put his finger down. “Twitchy bent down over it, and a second later it was just…just on his face, smothering him.”

  Jared rolled his eyes. “Oh, give me a friggin’ break!”

  “It wasn’t dying—it was waiting to attack! It suffocated Twitch and he tripped and fell overboard with it…” Her eyes trailed back to the water, reflecting its green. “It killed him, Captain Jared.”

  Jared almost laughed at the stupid way she kept calling him Captain, but he sat beside her now, trying to calm. She wasn’t making sense, but at least she was speaking. “Are you sure your boyfriend ain’t pulling no dumb joke on us? He saw how scared you were of that thing. Maybe he’s just pranking us…” Jared knew his voice betrayed his gut sense that she was right.

  “No,” she said, the muscles over her eyes tightening. “It ambushed him. It did it on purpose.”

  Jared smirked, disbelieving, and inhaled sea air like it might clear his head. He tugged on a rope to realign the sails. “Well if that boy is messin’ with our minds, he’s gonna learn the hard way. And if he’s not…well, it’s just better if we head back for shore now.” The boat gained a modicum of speed and tipped gently to one side as the sail caught air. It felt good to be on the move.

  Jared’s reel sang. He’d forgotten about his line. He turned and noticed that his bobber wasn’t trailing behind, but was anchored in the same spot. Or perhaps he’d caught something moving in the opposite direction. “Hold this here,” he said to Sandy, motioning at the flimsy mast and releasing his grip. “I gotta reel that puppy in.”

  Sandy didn’t move. “You can’t be serious. How can you continue to fish with what just happened? Twitchell’s out there, down there, somewhere. You gotta find him.”

  “No can do, missy. Unless I just hooked me your boyfriend, he’s a goner.” He pulled on the line and slowly turned the handle on his reel. There wasn’t much slack, not enough to tell if he had caught something or not, and he couldn’t tell if he was the one doing the reeling.

  Sandy grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him back. “I don’t care how drunk you are, Captain Jared, you have to do something about my Twitchy!”

  Jared laughed.

  She slapped him from behind, slamming the full breadth of her palm against his stubbled face. It stung—he could feel the spikes of her fingers trailing up toward his eyes in his reddening cheeks, like a developing afterimage. His mouth was filling with spit—a gut reaction that told him he was ready to fight.

  “Why you…” He was up and tackling her, but she dove out of his swinging arms, settling into the wooden slat that functioned as a seat on the opposite side of the boat. Jared’s chin hit the pink puddle in the center of the floor. His teeth caught some tongue.

  “Leave me alone!” Sandy shouted, and then nervously cast glances around the boat, as if looking for help. She screamed and the emptiness that surrounded them swallowed her voice.

  “Shut up, lady,” Jared said coolly, getting his legs under him, but stumbling from the dizziness of the alcohol. “Just shut up. I’ll get your boyfriend for you. Okay?” He wiped the pink sticky goo from his chin. Sniffed his fingers. It smelled like freshwater: green like forests and mold. An odd smell for the ocean. He frowned, and then he noticed that Sandy was still crying out, her voice crackling. He called louder: “Okay?”

  Sandy quieted, and nodded.

  And then something like driftwood smacked against the bow with a hollow thud.

  Jared knew it was Twitchell before he even saw him. Same Hawaiian Palm swimming trunks bubbling with air pockets and sloshing with the briny water. Same crew neck T-shirt with bait stains. Same hair. All doing the dead man’s float, right out of the Red Cross handbook.

  Sandy refused to look. Instead, she sat beside Jared’s pole, and toyed with the reel, watching the bobber bob.

  Jared scooped an arm over the edge of the bow, and scooped Twitchell up. He was light—much too light and flexible—flimsy as fabric as he pulled him inside. His trunks and T-shirt slipped free and floated away when Twitchell came up over the edge, Jared falling back into his boat with the too-light body in his arms. Or what was left of it.

  On his lap and draped across his chest at strange angles: simply skin. A loose runny bag of hair and saltwater and bones; a few haphazard clumps of things mushy rolling inside. A lot of it was fatty tissue feeling something like sex, slick and slimy between his fingers. As the saltwater drained from its pink holes, the contents inside settled to the legs and feet of the sack of hairy flesh like a handful of coins in the bottom of a long stocking. Twitchell had been gutted, as if his insides had been sucked clean out. And it all felt horribly dry…much too powdery considering he had been underwater for at least half an hour…

  “It’s Twitchell, isn’t it?” Sandy said, still watching Jared’s bobber, refusing to turn around. Something had bit, but she didn’t make any motion toward reeling it in. She just watched it and didn’t watch it at the same time.

  “No,” Jared said, scraping the strange skin from his lap onto the sailboat’s floor, landing with a dull thump that reminded him of the duffel bag from his Navy days. He stared at it, dumbfounded. “No, this ain’t Twitchell. Not at all.”

  Jared wished he’d brought more booze. Sandy might not have been there at all—she had turned once, hazarding a minute-long look at Twitchell’s skinned flesh, and then silently turned back to stare at the ocean as if nothing odd had happened. She hadn’t uttered a sound. Just sat and watched the water.

  He knew shock when he saw it and gave up trying to reason with her. He’d positioned the sail to catch the optimal amount of wind, but the boat was slow heading toward shore, barely visible on the horizon. They’d drifted much too far out—he’d been drinking all day, and didn’t really pay much attention to his nautics because this was supposed to be just another boring fishing tour, nothing more. But now a kid was puddled on the floor of his sailboat, pink and ugly as a fresh caught shark with its belly slit.

  The sky was getting gray, and the color reminded him of the thing that had landed on the boat. Rain soon, Jared thought, before finally grabbing Twitchell’s dripping body and tossing it overboard. The skin smelled much like the stuff on the floor of the boat—green and moldy. He sniffed his fingers, watching as it floated away, a bubbling yellow cloud on the water like one of those emergency lifeboats with a serious flat.

 
He watched it drift away.

  “Ya know,” Jared said, staring at the skin in the water. “I’d heard about something like this, but I always thought it was just a buncha bullshit. One of those dumb fish stories people tell, stuff they usually just get from the internet.” He dug into his breast pocket, found a crumpled damp cigarette. He always only brought one with him, for some solitude and mental regrouping after work. He stroked it straight and popped it between his lips.

  “This is all your fault, you drunken jerk,” Sandy finally said, ignoring him.

  He chuckled in reply. “No way of explaining it, ’cept to just ask: What would a freshwater fish do if you put it in seawater?” He lit his smoke with a waterproof match. “Do ya know?”

  She shook her head no with her back to him. He wasn’t sure if it was a direct reply or not.

  “Well…it’d die, that’s what it would do.” He inhaled smoke. Blew. “Unless it could find some freshwater to breathe into its gills. Fact is, there really are a few still pockets of it on the ocean floor. Freshwater eddies. Very few. But they’re out there. And I think that’s what your boy hooked into when he reeled that ugly thing onto my boat.”

  She cocked an ear his way.

  Smoke drifted out of his nostrils. “Yup. That’d explain that ugly thing’s eyes, all black and glazed like they was. Freshwater usually gathers in underwater caves and whirlpools and what not. Places where the sun don’t shine. I’d heard about freshwater fish in the ocean, but I never thought I’d actually see one in real life…”

  After a lingering silence, Sandy laughed. Loudly. Then she twisted around, eyes bloodshot and manic. “A freshwater fish? In the middle of the ocean? Right! And it’s a fish that can fly through the air…like that thing did…and attack people, too!” Her lips were far too wide for a smile. “That wasn’t some dumb trout, mister. That thing was an animal. A predator of some sort. And if you weren’t so damned drunk you’da seen that, clear as day.” Her face dared him to argue.