Dead Bait 2

by Steve Alten

  Aunt Meg wrote him he should stay away from the fishermen, especially after they’d gotten bad news. “When their blood is up, they need someone to punch. If you hadn’t come along, they would have started up with each other, sure enough.”

  When she came home for supper, Lorna smirked at him as she hurried upstairs to wash up. “Sorry about your eye, cousin. My mates thought you were queer.”

  Did she mean gay? He could never tell for sure with the way they talked… the few of them who could or did. He followed her up the stairs and down the hall, past all those doors with dust piling up against the thresholds. “Nobody gave me a chance. I was just trying to talk to them. And I’m not… I’m straight.”

  “They won’t ever believe that now.”

  “What did I do? I didn’t hit on him, I was just trying to—”

  “You didn’t fight him.” She closed the door in his face.

  Dinner was late.

  Grandma Amelia didn’t come down from her room. Aunt Meg loomed over the stove. Uncle Tab sat at the dinner table with a bunch of nautical maps and notes spread everywhere. The smell of the chowder on the stove turned Joe’s stomach with renewed vigor, as if the stock had begun to turn.

  They did things differently here, that was all. It was just temporary. They did the best they could, doing what they had to do to survive out here and if they were meant to live somewhere else, why, they would have been born there.

  They were the only family he had left, the only ones who would take him in.

  The aroma of the chowder on the stove grew more briny and bitter, and shortly the kitchen filled with smoke. Aunt Meg had dozed off on her feet in front of the stove, but they served it anyway. The burst eggs in the black soup tasted like licking a weak, leaking battery.

  “Soup’s off,” Uncle Tab muttered, but he dutifully slurped the last scorched dregs from his chipped china bowl. “But soon the catch’ll be in. Tomorrow, if the tides are right. Boy here ought to learn to work.”

  “How much does it pay?” Joe said in a deep voice.

  “I’ll take it out of your room and board,” Tab chuckled.

  Aunt Meg signed something too fast for Joe to catch anything, but it included several emphatic No’s.

  “If the boy’s going to stay here, he’ll have to make himself useful. He starts tomorrow.” Rapping his arthritic fist on the table like a gavel, Tab rose and left the room.

  Joe jumped as he felt something brush against his leg, teasingly like a cat. Lorna smirked at him as she got up to clear the dishes.

  He went out on the porch after dinner, and he chanced to see the women of the island going to work. A line of twelve of them, all pregnant, stooped over gravid bellies, some hobbling along with canes. Most of them were not much older than Lorna, but some were Aunt Meg’s age. He watched them pass out of sight before he followed them, lighting a cigarette and popping in his earbuds.

  They went into the little warehouse at the edge of the harbor. He’d heard Lorna call it the hatchery, but he figured it was abandoned like most of the buildings on the island. The big barn doors were chained, and the windows were boarded up, but a deadfall of discarded crab cages piled against the leeward wall nearly reached the roof and he managed to climb it and perch uneasily before a slot between white, warped shingles and peek inside.

  Beneath him, a young girl lay on a cot with her legs in stirrups, just like at the doctor’s office. Joe recognized her from the store. She was a few years older than him and watched the counter for her father.

  The doctor was there and an old woman with glazed eggs for eyes, stroking the pretty girl’s lovely burnished red hair. She wasn’t pregnant, that Joe could see, and hadn’t been with the others.

  The cot was enclosed in black rubber curtains and a big rubber pouch hung on a hook over the doctor’s head. A hose from it trailed on the floor and the doctor stuck it under the girl’s skirt.

  Joe gasped at the sight and wondered what it meant. He knew most of what men and women did to each other from ugly experience walking in on Mom with her boyfriends and he knew babies didn’t come from the stork. But if men put babies into women, it had to be better than this. The redheaded girl cried out when the doctor unplugged the pouch and something redder than blood sluiced down the hose, stiffening it as it flowed into the girl’s bottom.

  “It’s cold,” she whimpered.

  The doctor clucked and chucked her under the chin. “Well, you’ll warm it up, won’t you?” He got up off his stool and slipped out through a part in the rubber curtains. Joe crawled like a ninja along the roof, peering in at any crack that leaked light until he saw something else.

  Below lay a cavernous room with big tanks of water. The floor was deeper than the water level and waves rolled into channels cut in the floor, flooding the tanks through a Byzantine system of rusty pipes. The room was hot and dank, lit only by hooded crimson lamps.

  A plank was laid across the tank directly beneath Joe’s vantage point and a pregnant woman sat on a funny stool with a hole in the seat with her skirts hiked up around her waist. She strained and pushed like on the toilet. A huge man wearing hip waders and no shirt and a hooded fisherman’s hat waded in the tank below her, but nobody else seemed to be concerned with her birthing her baby into the water.

  The woman gave a piercing shriek and bent to clamp her head between her knees as she loudly expelled something from her girl-parts. The tank water was coffee-cloudy and simmering with tiny pink things like shrimp rolling around in it.

  Other pregnant women sat in similar stools over other tanks, or lay on cots beside them, sweaty and spent from their labors.

  Joe tried to move crabwise on the roof to see what was coming out of them, but the shingles gave way under his hand and he was falling through the roof. He threw his legs wide and caught a rafter, stopping his fall.

  The hooded man in the tank looked up at him and grabbed a net on a long pole to drag him down. His torso and arms were carved up with deep scars like fissures in dry mud and all over his body, weird lumps and knobby lesions pulsed among his rippling, rangy muscles.

  Joe swung his arms wildly, trying to lift himself up out of the hole in the roof. The boards trapping his knees groaned. The woman on the birthing stool howled and forced out something that splashed in the water. A turgid, translucent sac dangled out from between her legs, then ruptured like a soap bubble. Hundreds of finger-sized pink bugs spilled out.

  Joe screamed, “Let me go!”

  The man with the net swiped at Joe and banged his head, trying to drag him off-balance. The rafter beam under his left foot cracked and gave way. Joe squealed as he fell a whole foot, but something caught the waistband of his jeans and held him suspended over the tank. Around the big man’s legs, newborn pink, spiny things darted and churned the water to a foamy stew.

  “Quit fighting me, stupid boy!” Lorna’s hissing whisper slapped Joe just as he was yanked backwards and rolled over the shingles to tumble off the drooping edge of the roof. He fell into an ancient shell-mound and rolled to his feet running. Lorna, with her long legs, was right behind him. Breathless, yet he kept screaming the same thing at her until she hissed, “Shut up or they’ll come!”

  “But that… that man… that was my dad!”

  Joe rolled over and rubbed his eyes, but the dark got no lighter and whatever had awakened him did nothing to announce itself, but he felt clasped by the certainty that someone had been in the room only a moment before.

  Crooked rays of tarnished silver moonlight leaked in through the shutters. The walls of the tiny bedroom seemed to sag even closer together. The crack in the ceiling pursed like lips whispering a secret.

  A peculiar scent laced the air; salty and pungent like heated seawater, but richer, spicy, arousing. Pinned down under the stifling weight of the dusty comforter, Joe inhaled greedily. The heady aroma made him feel drunk and tweaked at the same time. His cock stood painfully erect, struggling to lift the heavy blankets into a tent. Rolling the covers ba
ck, he turned to the door just as the twin shadows of feet flitted away and something clunked on the warped floorboards just outside his door.

  Cold hands probed his bowels. He hoped, and yet he dreaded, that it was Lorna. Playing her strange games. He couldn’t figure her out, but he wanted her. Until just now, he’d been torn. Her games had seemed like naïve courting one minute and a teasing trap the next, snapping shut whenever he showed a flicker of interest. She was trying to draw him out because she was bored and he was an outsider, to make a clown of him. But he was bored too, and he had to admit she was pretty, if a bit odd-looking, with her wideset violet eyes, moonstone complexion and blue-black hair. At home, he would have noticed her, but never approached her, worried what people would say, because on the mainland, she would surely be a social outcast. She vexed him with her weird mingling of exotic beauty and deformity. Her weird, withered arm that she always turned away from him only seemed a minor distraction because she had tits like a cow, and Joe was a boy of thirteen.

  But she was his cousin; it didn’t just feel wrong the way stealing or drinking or smoking felt wrong, which was just the fear of getting caught. She was the strangest girl he’d ever met, but she was family. It felt unnatural, the way it felt when he caught himself staring at his mom when she passed out naked on the couch. And yet, the musky mist of her in the air still worked its magic on his brain and body, flatly showing him how very natural it was.

  The fear of getting caught was no slouch in adding its voice to the argument, but Joe went to the door with no more hesitation. If this was another game, he’d play to win.

  He eased the door open, careful not to let it bang into the bed, but this only drew the groan of the hinges out into a low bleat like a novelty cow-in-a-can. He jerked the door open, stepped around it, and peered out into the hall.

  At the far end, a lantern cast a quavering orange glow from a niche beside Lorna’s door, which stood open. The dark beyond the threshold was a curtain of soot, but he could nearly see the trail of scent she left behind and follow it.

  Stepping out, he tried to remember which floorboards creaked and which of the several locked rooms lining the hall were occupied, but his feet wanted to carry him sprinting to the end. He took a step, planted it gently, was rewarded with a tiny squeak as if he’d crushed a mouse.

  What did she want? What did he want, for that matter? He’d made out with a few girls from school and summer camp, had got as far as a quick furtive handful of bush twice, but this wasn’t seven drunken minutes in a closet.

  Should he whisper her name, or just go in? The prospect of going back to bed never had a chance. Fantasies raced through his mind and tied his cock in knots. If this were a game, he was not a player, but a piece.

  A stirring in the dark continent of her bedroom and she appeared. In the somber light of the lantern, she looked like a woman, mature and ripe, though her eyes were hooded, her expression grave. She looked at the floor before him and parted her lips to run her tongue over them, slowly, savoring a taste on the air and sucked in a hungry breath that tapered off in a shudder of nervous delight. She might have been sleepwalking until just then and he figured he must look the same to her.

  She gave no coy smiles, made no sound, no gesture to beckon him closer or send him away. He might not be there at all or he might be wrapped all around her, a maddening taste in the air of something that used them both. With her slender hands, she caressed her full breasts and the modest mound of her belly, the cello-shaped swells of her hips and down her thighs. At the limit of their reach, she began to gather up the folds of her flannel nightgown. Lorna’s face contorted as if she were lowering herself into a scalding hot bath, but still her hands worked an inch at a time to unveil her feet, her long, coltish calves, her knees, her thighs—

  Joe quivered. He dare not move. If he took a step, it would resound like a shotgun blast and wake the whole house, at least the ones who could hear. His heart pounded like a fist on every door in the hall. She wanted him, didn’t she? She was in some kind of ecstasy, possessed to taunt him, but not enough to just steal into his bed. It was wrong; it was still incest, north of the Mason-Dixon line. He was getting sick of telling himself that.

  Bereft of any script to follow, Joe just watched as she held the nightgown up around her waist. The unknown territory below was steeped in shadow, but her pale skin cast a soft light of its own, highlighting the sparse spray of hair on her pubic mound, little thicker than a teenager’s moustache. With her other hand, she stroked the gleaming flesh of her inner thighs and roamed hungrily around the cleft of her sex like it was too hot to touch. Her legs spread wider and her hips slowly gyrated, offering him a better view of herself. Lorna let out a rasping sigh of torment and forced her hands to creep over her burning sex and splay her nether lips wide open.

  The shiny visceral pink of it promised him everything a man dreamed of, death and resurrection and revelation. It stared at him, dared him, and denied him. Her agile fingers kneaded the layers of pouting lips and darted in and out of her fundamental hole, slathering her juices up and down the canal of her vagina, then trapping the pearl in the prow of her slit with her fingers and rolling it between them, her pouting lips clamped shut on a howl of ecstasy.

  Joe’s cock popped out at full mast through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Without a thought, he took hold of it and slid his hand up and down the shaft, squeezing it until the head burned purple and a droplet of semen oozed out his urethra.

  Lorna’s moans grew louder and higher. Her hand massaged the folds of her sex in a panic. Her hips jerked and bucked as if she were fucking him, urging him to redouble his stroking. Another second of this, and he would explode. He stalked down the hall with his cock in his hands like a dagger, stepping lightly but almost running headlong into her arms.

  When he came close enough to touch her, it was like he’d broken a bubble, awakened her from sleepwalking. Her eyes went wide and she shrieked, “No, it’s wrong, to touch!” and jumped back and slammed her door.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Joe shouted at the door. “What kind of game is this, anyway?”

  Only then did he remember that some of the sleepers all around him could still hear and he turned and tiptoed back to his room.

  Sitting in the middle of the doorway where he must have stepped over it before, was a small, queer porcelain bowl on a saucer, like for soup, except it was empty, and instead of a spoon, there was a glass eyedropper. He knelt and picked them up, and almost dropped them. They glowed with her heat and reeked of her crazy-making scent. She’d rubbed her juice all over them and put on a show for him and approved when he put on a show for her, but then he’d broken the rules. The bowl was shaped sort of like a miniature bedpan, with a contoured mouth that curled over to prevent anything from spilling out.

  He realised, with a twitch of shock, that he was meant to jack off into it. He looked at her door again as if he could see through it and into her. He noticed a door down the hall hung ajar and the too-white face of his grandmother watching him.

  “Go ahead, boy,” she said, “do your duty,” and closed the door.

  “But, we’re family. It’s not right.”

  They were on the boat, waiting for Uncle Tab to bring the nets down in the truck. Aunt Meg was waiting for the doctor to come see Aunt Amelia. The sun was still an hour away from rising, and most of the other boats had already gone out.

  “It’s not for my pleasure, stupid.” Her stormy eyes overflowed. “I want a baby. If I don’t, I’ll have to wet-nurse next season, and most of the boys on the island are so inbred, they can’t even make—” She stopped, furious with herself and with him, then hauled off and hit him.

  “Is he bothering you, Lorna?”

  A huge hand like a catcher’s mitt fell on his shoulder. Joe threw his elbow into the big boy’s gut. He turned and blindly swung his fists out and upward.

  The boy was a head taller than him. The punch aimed at his jaw connected with his Adam’s app
le. The boy folded and dropped to his knees, clutching his throat. A sickly wheezing came from his mouth, like a broken machine. His face turned purple, then blue.

  “How was that? Who’s queer now, bitch?” Joe screamed.

  “Get off him, he’s choking!” Lorna jumped on Joe’s back. Joe shoved the bigger boy off the boat. Still choking, the boy fell over the gunwale into the water.

  A big fishing boat came barging up the harbor lane out of the hatchery’s landing. Its wake sent the boat heaving and rolling under their feet. “Angus, get him, help him!”

  Joe leaned over the gunwale and reached down for Angus’s arm, which stuck out of the narrow channel between the rocking boat and the dock. The boat rose up on a swell and closed the gap like the blades of scissors on Angus’s arm.

  Joe was holding the hand when the boat crushed Angus’s upper arm bone like a stale breadstick. The strong, callused fingers clasped his so hard that the nails broke the skin of his palm and then it was like he was holding an empty glove.

  Together, they pulled Angus out of the water. He vomited and started breathing, but his arm was crushed, and flopped backwards on his body when he tried to kick Joe. “Jonah!” he gasped, again and again. The other workers jumped down from their boats and came running.

  “Go,” Lorna said. “They’ll kill you!”

  Joe ran down the dock and up the hill just as the rest of the village converged on the Myrick boat. Uncle Tab’s truck pulled up. He waved at Joe as the boy ran past, up the hill and off the road across the overgrown yard of the empty Kinchloe place and into one of the winding canyons that carved the island.

  He hid in a treehouse. He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he woke up in a cold sweat, still seeing the hooded man in the hatchery, staring up at him from a boiling pot filled with unborn children. His grim lantern jaw and button nose should have comforted him, for his father was alive and he was here. But when Joe looked into his wide staring eyes, like burnt-out headlights, he realized that he was utterly alone.