by Weston Ochse
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Surfer Town!” my brother laughed, as I started my truck and backed out. I assumed this was a movie reference and gave him a consolation honk. Weirdo.
***
I was still drunk and shouldn’t have been driving, but I got there quick, and I figured I could just drop Noah’s name to the Palos Verdes police if I got pulled over. But the streets were empty. The streets were ours. I parked in the lot on the cliff and trekked down to the beach carrying a door, a dead shark, and a bear trap. Like people do.
The dawn broke right when I got back to the clubhouse. It was empty, the Bay Boys back in the water lining up for their waves. In the morning sun, I saw the sand was littered with shotgun shells after all, and I smiled at the extreme level of bullshit Noah could sling. In the warmth of that sunrise, I looked to the skyline and thought I could almost believe in a god. Almost. I was never a religious man like my brother, but he did teach me all the prayers.
There were prayers of veneration, prayers of supplication, prayers of worship, prayers of consecration, prayers of intercession, and prayers of imprecation. That last one was my favorite. It was when you prayed for God to mess up your enemies. Well, more like judgment for the wicked, but it was the only one I still used, and I used that prayer so much it was pretty much the only voice in my head. And on a beach at dawn I was afraid everyone could hear that voice, so I plugged my ears just in case, forced the trap deep into the slack jaws to lock teeth upon teeth upon teeth, then I prayed that something in the ocean would fuck them up good
Shark-on-shark action, please. Amen.
I couldn’t be the only one praying like this, and I wondered if maybe this was why surfers got bit so often. Could I be the only one singing this psalm?
My brother would have been upset. He once scolded me that using a prayer of imprecation on a human foe was out of context, unjustifiable, just plain wrong. I would have told him, “Don’t worry, bro. These dudes were sharks.”
I laid my own shark and its new smile out onto my door and straddled it, walking us into the ocean, then I kicked straight towards the shoal of black fins in the distance.
***
Something was wrong. The Bay Boys were arguing, fighting for the same waves, and at least three of them had just been axed, the lip of one wave catching them in the grill and chucking them backwards, head over fins. The chaos had them paddling in all directions, and I locked eyes with Noah, who did a duck dive under a surge to lose the crowd and buttonhook back towards me.
“Are you kidding, Jake?” he said when he got close. “The hell is that?”
I answered the first question, but only in spirit.
“You like my log?
“You’ll get your ass chopped out here, Jake. Take your 747 and get the fuck out.”
“You mean my funboard?” I asked, willfully obtuse. I’d remembered a lot of lingo from the fire the night before. For example, I knew “Noah” was slang for “shark,” which was the closest surfer slang came to Cockney slang (Noah equals Noah’s Ark, which rhymes with shark). This made sense. Cockney rhyming slang originated as a way to code conversations from law enforcement, and to actually say “shark” on the water was an invitation for trouble. “Sharky” also described a lot of chop, but in California, it also described a lot of sharks. This was likely the strangest and most direct bit of jargon ever conceived, as it circled right on back to its origin, sort of like someone handing you a “piece of cake” that was really easy to bake. Or someone pretending to have no food to share then literally spilling a can of beans on the floor. Something like that. I was still a little drunk. How about riding shotgun with a shotgun? A weapon I was still expecting to see a Bay Boy wield.
“This right here?” I told him, knocking wood between my legs and ignoring the dead shark. “This is a goddamn door. Like right off a house.”
“Okay.”
He shook his head in disgust and paddled away, starting to line up again for a run. He was wearing a pink-and-black “shortie” today, a sleeveless wetsuit for the hottest days, but his fin was still there. And in the small of his back, under this fin, I noticed a second bulge. Possibly a weapon.
“Drop in on me with that fuckin’ door, and you’re dead!” he yelled out the side of his mouth. “And that’s not slang, Jake. Out here, dead means dead. You’ll never stand up on our watch.
I nodded and stroked my shark, careful to keep my hand out of its spring-loaded maw. The bear trap gave it a gleaming, wicked grin, but it didn’t look too unusual. I had a feeling a bear trap would look reasonable in any shark’s mouth.
I stayed where it was glassy, did some push-ups on my board to keep my back pain at bay, and I watched the Bay Boys continue to have trouble. Missing wave after wave, pleading for better waves that never came. They continued to mutter their crazy shit like, “That grom won’t rip switchfoot in the slot unless you cutback, waxhead,” and I closed my eyes to soak up their otherworldly chatter, imagining my door sliding along the surface of an icy moonscape. Then the waves separated Noah from the pack and brought him close again, and I put my plan into motion. But my attempt to stamp his passport was a disaster.
Noah was on his knees when he veered close to my door, and I carefully pulled my shark’s new iron jaw wide and locked the pin. I got down on my belly, paddling toward Noah. I was off his radar, and his back was turned so I could stare at the fin, lining up for the perfect bite. I slid my shark out in front of me and into the water, aiming for a hard snap on his squaretail. Then I saw his hand reach around his back and pull the gun from the long split in his shortie as he spun a leg over his board to face me. He took aim, and fired.
Thank Christ it’s a toy, I had time to realize.
Not quite a toy though. Not a real gun, but a flare gun, and still pretty dangerous. It nailed my shark right in the mouth, and the bear trap snapped shut, jets of sparks roaring up through its eyes and nostril. Noah smiled like someone who’d shot hundreds of dead sharks looking to nip his board, then he tucked his yellow gun back into his wet suit and kicked away like I was nothing.
I sat with my burning shark, watching the orange fire gush from its gills. The lining of its mouth began to smoke and cook, the water in its snout popping like popcorn, and it smelled delicious. I was contemplating my own bite when I felt the bump under my feet.
It was big. Big in the way only something that slides silently under you is big. Big in the way only something that can kill you with cruel indifference is big. I looked to the Bay Boys, and saw them clustered tight. They were looking around, looking down, and it seemed like they were being herded. I’d seen something like this in videos, when the amateurs clashed with the locals, when gangs formed a sorta prayer circle in the ocean to frustrate anyone paddling for a wave. But this was different, more like the ocean was working to keep the surfers stacked up, like the water itself was functioning in concert with an unseen predator, rounding up prey into a squirming nucleus ripe for easy pickings.
I pointed my toes and felt the same huge something still gliding under my feet with no end any time soon. I was excited to be corralled with the rest. My prayer had been for the sharks, and now I was one, too.
Then the prow of the thing ascended in front of me, breaching directly behind Noah, water raining from its summit, and at first I thought it was a whale. But it was transparent, or translucent. Under the surface, I had no doubt it was invisible, but in that moment it was barely perceptible in the sunlight, which revealed armored plates like glass and prisms of color refracted in its massive head. My brain was still mapping the beast onto more familiar forms when a mountain of ocean rolled toward me then smoothed out as it dove. Noah was gone.
The air was silent, no sea breeze, and not a single Bay Boy to be found. Then two huge, lucent fins suddenly broke on either side of me, rotated high in the sky, until one crashed down dangerously close, narrowly missing a devastating slap over my door. I pulled my feet on board and closed my eyes, clutching my dead shark and its burni
ng smile for warmth.
Then I remembered my peephole. It seemed like a good compromise. I cupped my hands around it and took a look.
There was an eyeball looking back. One lone eye, emotionless but intent. It was the size of a tractor tire, insect-like, buried in a living, crystalline structure. Two pairs of segmented antennae branched from the eye, which reached out to hold my door fast. They traced the length and shape of it, then pierced the waves near my legs to brush the metal hinges. I made myself small as the antennae crawled up and tickled the shark, tentatively tapping the heat of the flare still rumbling in its mouth. They jerked, then retreated back into the water. Peering down through my tiny fish-eye lens, I saw the giant sink low enough to finally chart its edges, and I realized how mind-splitting enormous the creature really was.
The huge, segmented carapace spasmed and curled to pick up momentum for a dive, as the alien mandibles in its crown spun their hardware like watch parts. The mouth wiggled and thrummed like a factory, terrifying tendrils and bristles drumming like fingers, fanning then coming back together like the shuffle of an invisible deck of cards, and I realized it was working men through the strange machinery of its body. It was every Bay Boy being swallowed, then corralled through the maze of its body, and this helped me to diagram the rest of it and finally recognized the species, or at least its tiny descendents. I often pulled its offspring from the eyes of my dog whenever they abandoned the easy blood meals of his belly to crawl through the long forest of his fur and finally rest to drink the tears off his corneas. When I would catch one, then hold those tiny intruders up to a light, I would only have a moment to study their downturned lobster-like heads and marvel at how much they resembled a denizen of the sea. I understood now that flea collars were the castle wall and the last line of defense, as they must all dream of this prehistoric past and of one day climbing that collar to find their way home and baptize in the holy saltwater of a canine eye.
I stared through my door, the reflections of the sunlight sketching the tail end of the great insectoid form line by line, a body as big and detailed as a crop circle. I imagined these huge creatures were always in our oceans, invisible away from the sun until they fed, and I decided the surfers, too, would become transparent as they digested, only perceived as real until they were eaten, like anything else really.
The two great fins like crystal airplane wings rose high again, touching their tips in prayer, then knocked on my door one last time, upending my perch. Then they pulsed down, their wake almost flipping me over again. And through my peephole I saw the huge creature descend, saw Noah struggling in the labyrinth of his invisible prison. The fins beat once more, and it was gone.
I looked around the still water, and saw the fleet of unmanned surfboards, directionless and dancing. Tombstoning. One trembled violently, then flipped twice until it was still, and I knew it was the last of the Bay Boys, foot finally cut free to surf a glass throat forever.
Alone, I caught a wave on my door. I stood up high. It was everything they said it was.
***
I was arrested in the parking lot. The news would later report I had the smoking “gums” in my hand, the steel-toothed grin of a dead Mako flickering like a Jack-o’-lantern, which cops had to wrestle away. I couldn’t explain what happened to the Bay Boys even if I wanted to, or why I had seven of their surfboards stacked in the back of my pick-up. Someone placed a hand on my wet head to guide me in the police car, and I blacked out for a second when my forehead bumped the roof. But while I was gone, I travelled back to the moment I was surfing my first tube, when I was in the “green room,” as they called it, sometimes known as the Pope’s Bedroom, sometimes referred to as the Astronaut’s Garden, that emerald oasis inside a wave, somewhere a tourist had no business being, standing up strong while the ocean rolled around me to keep me safe until the tail of the great beast descended into the endless dark beneath my door.
***
I knock on my door sometimes, and it drives everybody nuts. I knock on the plastic when my brother comes to visit, too, but he always plays along. He mocks the new streaks of gray in my hair, which I thought at first were the result of locking eyes with an ancient aquatic mystery, but it was just citric acid from a power drink a surfer had chucked in my face at the bonfire that had prematurely frosted my tips. He doesn’t believe my story, but, of course, he forgives me.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Will you remember me in a year?”
“Yes.”
“Will you remember me in a month?”
“Yes.”
“Will you remember me in a week?”
“Yes.”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” he croaked.
"See, you forgot me already," I said. And it would be okay when he did.
One night, I dreamed of plucking an engorged flea from the dusty lunar crater of my navel and flicking it through the bars of my cell, where it bounced across the concrete floor like a marble. In the morning, when we filed out for breakfast, I stepped over the comet streak of blood it had suckled from the scar tissue of an umbilical cord I’d always assumed long dead.
I do push-ups in prison, to get ready for the ocean again someday, to hopefully drink from that eye. Sit-ups are more difficult though. The knob of bone in the middle of my spine continues to grow, and it’s painful to roll it against the concrete floor. It aches even when I sleep on my stomach, as it longs for water, a surface that yields, a flexible world that allows a body to grow unhindered in any direction. My back hurts, but this pain is wonderful, too, and the guards get mad when I slice holes in all my shirts. I explain that, in every sense of the word, I am sick.
Catfish Gods
Weston Ochse
Trey sat on the community dock staring out across the green August water of Chicamaugua Reservoir. His tanned legs swung in tune to the waves. His fingers gripped the rough gray wood as thoughts of mortality tripped through his thirteen-year-old mind.
His grandfather had died six months ago and there were times when the heat and the bickering of his family and the memory of the loss became so much that he needed to be alone. Times like that he’d sit and remember every word the old man had spoken. Remember every action. Every smile.
All grandfathers are special, but Trey felt his was even more so. It was as if the man's mere presence could calm the world. It was as if he was a God and when Gods die, one never forgets.
The dock was where Trey went when he needed to remember and think. Other than his bed, it was the one place he spent most of his time. His first fight, his first bass, the first time he slid his trembling fingers along the curve of a breast as he massaged oil into the soft skin of an older high school girl—all had taken place on the dock. Called the Community Dock, it had been abandoned by the city years before he moved in. Although the access was grown over with tall weeds, a path had been pounded into the red Tennessee clay by a faithful herd of children who now called it their own. The dock was a sacred place where parents never tread.
There was one month a year when nobody could swim in the lake and this was the month. It made the interminably hot days long and filled with a hundred attempts to ease the constant boredom. The only good thing was that the mosquitoes had all been killed when the TVA men lowered the water level by several feet, leaving the eggs to dry and die along the muddy beaches of the Tennessee lake. The side effect, of course, was that long weeds grew up from the lake bottom as the sun, for the first time since winter, finally managed to plumb the depths, arousing the lake's deadly kudzu cousin. The weeds were as thick as a wrist and halted fishing, boating, and now swimming since they found Billy Picket drowned last year. They said the weed had wrapped around him a dozen times as if the leafy arms had reached out and snagged him, but that was just something the grownups said to scare the kids away.
At least he was pretty sure it was.
So even with the lull in swimming, and the death of
his grandfather, and the possibility of cthulhu weeds searching for sustenance, Trey's thirteen-year-old mind identified his freedom and the golden sunset against the green water as a rare time he would remember when he was old and the lessons of school and the minutiae of life were long forgotten.
***
The next day dawned ugly as the light of the summer sun was dulled by the dishwater sky. The waves of the slate gray lake seemed to reach up as if they could liberate the light.
Trey struggled out of bed and plodded into the kitchen. The coldness of the sky did nothing to alleviate the humidity, sweat immediately forming as a second skin. He poured himself a tall orange juice and held the glass against his face.
As he drank, he walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and eyed the driveway. Only the old Ford was left. His parents had driven to Jacob Mountain for a Sunday gathering—part business, part fun, they’d said. He’d been invited, but had pretended to be sick and promised to stay in bed until they returned. At thirteen, his parents had lengthened his leash and today was the first day they had ever let him free.
Trey smiled. He and Greg had planned it well. Today was their fishing day and they were going to try the loading dock across the inlet at the old TNT plant which was rumored to be the deepest place in the entire lake -- with the exception of the dam itself, of course. Every week, tarp shrouded barges could be seen being loaded with the Army's secret stuff. If all the tales were even half true, then there were fish down there as large as automobiles.
Trey had dressed and was getting the gear together in the garage when Greg swung around the corner of the driveway toting his favorite rod and an oversized tackle box.
"What's up, Trey? You ready for a little fishing? Ready to catch the big one?"