Float (2 page)

Taking care not to slip on the amber blobs of jellyfish that had been stranded by the tide, Duncan feigned left and the bird bobbed right. Back and forth they went, tangoing their way slowly to the crumbling seawall where the gull could be cornered among the debris. If the harbor of Port Ellery, Maine, was anatomical, they now stood firmly in the appendix. The town, all red brick and shadows, was neatly centered in the groin between two intertwining estuaries that flowed into the harbor like crossed legs. Protected coves formed armpits, and piney islands spread across the skin of water like raised hives. Seacrest’s sat off the harbor’s irregular belly, in a small unnavigable loop prone to collecting trash. Blue rubber gloves and pieces of yellow rope were dashed twice daily against the seawall, then fell behind the dark, wet rocks. Twisted metal shrines of lobster traps had dug into the beach to become part of the natural landscape, but plastic water bottles and featherweight polystyrene coffee cups were the transient and windblown accessories. Some days the tide took it all away; other days it left it all behind.

The gull’s options narrowed, and it turned its back to the wall, preparing to hold its ground. Duncan removed his jacket and held it aside like a toreador. The air blowing in off the harbor was cool, but the warmth of the sun on his back reminded him it was still technically summer. “It’s not over yet,” he said to the bird and moved carefully toward it, attempting a graceful drop of the jacket, but that required him to get so close that the gull was able to slash the tender part of his palm with the curved tip of its beak before trundling away.

“Damn!” Duncan squeezed his hand and looked up at the factory. He was sure he saw people move away. Would no one come to help him? Worse, would someone come to help and expose him as a leader who could not even catch an injured gull? It was equally unthinkable that they should see him walk away from a bad situation. He had to hurry. He took hold of his jacket and, with what he considered to be a superb show of agility, pounced on the bird. There ensued a whir of elbows and wings, and for a moment Duncan thought he’d lost him, but finally, kneeling in the wet sand with sea water seeping through the wool blend of his trousers, he managed to wrap the jacket over the bird’s head. Darkness calmed it down while Duncan restrained its wings with the sleeves. He was breathing hard by the time he collapsed against a barnacled rock with the neat package of gull under his arm. “For a dying bird, you’ve got a lot of fight left in you,” he said. He readjusted his glasses, then dug around in his pants pocket for his cell phone.

“Josefa, I’m on Seacrest’s beach with a gull for you—bring a cage and a Band-Aid.”

Josefa arrived lugging a dog crate with both hands while trying to keep a canvas tote from slipping off her shoulders. She was somewhere well over sixty, with thinning black hair and a complexion so pale it was as if her skin had been bleached colorless by the sun. Her eyes had long ago disappeared in folds of wrinkles, and she had a chin like a fried clam. In spite of this, she had the youthful, tubular body of a preteen and wore the Disney clothing of a toddler, making her seem helpless, which she was not. But even if he wanted to help her with the crate, Duncan couldn’t stand up without losing the gull, who had worked its head out from under the fabric and was eyeing Duncan with evil intent. The bird had a noble head with a long patrician beak, and its neck feathers were ruffed up around its face from the ordeal. It was the first seagull Duncan ever saw that looked like a bald eagle.

“Blood on your shirt,” Josefa said as she put the crate down.

Duncan raised his cut hand. “I was trying to help him, and he attacked me.”

She smiled. “Good … knows how to protect himself.” She removed a pair of scissors from her bag and carefully cut the plastic loops off the gull’s head while Duncan held it still. His own head was very close to the bird’s back, and he could smell its musty linen scent.

“You’re going to cut my lapel,” said Duncan.

Josefa kept snipping. “He looks more … comfortable in that suit than you,” she said, using words with difficulty. She was easier around animals than people and had a hard time translating human talk into thought and back again. The widow of an employee who had died in a freak accident at the plant, Josefa had since patched together a meager living with life insurance, social security, and the occasional donation, all of which gave her the freedom to save seagulls full time. She patrolled the beaches every day, combing the wash and rocks for sick gulls, then monitored the streets for ones injured by cars when they dawdled too long over roadkill. She’d load them into her rusty van and bring them to her yard, where they stood staring at the fence, depressed and dirty, often dying just hours after being saved. Most people consigned her to the category of someone too strange to know, but Duncan had an exceptionally high tolerance for strange, so they had developed a loafing kind of friendship. She had, from what he could make out, half a dozen adult children and a small herd of grandchildren, but they had all moved to distant pockets of the country for year-round jobs and placid weather. She missed them. She missed her husband. So here she was, funneling her affection onto seagulls instead. “Love is an energy … has to go somewhere,” she’d once told him. “Bottle it up, nothing but trouble.”

“The bird can keep the jacket,” said Duncan. “I won’t be needing a suit again until my funeral.”

She looked up at the brick building, which had
Seacrest’s Ocean Products of Maine
newly repainted in glossy white on its side. “Old dehyde looks smart enough. Things that bad … on the inside?”

He twisted his upper torso around to admire the building. “It had better look good for all the money I poured into it. I’m in over my head in debt, and the banks have thrown up a headwind to any more credit until I pay off the renovation loan. They want their principal back. Now. I didn’t even know they could do that.”

“You didn’t read the loans?” Josefa carefully eased the plastic off the gull, and it jerked its bruised head back in response.

“Loan agreements are as easy to decipher as the small print on a plane ticket. I guess I knew they had the right—I just never thought they’d do it. I don’t know how I’m going to stay afloat. I don’t even have enough money to make payroll on Friday.”

“There’s always Beaky,” she said, struggling with the catch on the crate.

Duncan shook his head as if he were getting rid of water in his ears. “I’m over-extended as it is. I’d never get out from under a debt like that.” In the local lending world, Beaky Harrow was known as a hagfish, an eel-like creature who burrowed into the flesh of dead and dying fish caught on lines.

Josefa shrugged. “Here … slide your friend in.” She held the door of the crate open, and, with some bending of neck and compression of wing, Duncan managed to get the bird safely inside as he released his jacket. Josefa reached in and stroked the traumatized bird, murmuring gull-like noises. To Duncan’s ears she sounded as if she were gasping for air, but the bird relaxed under her touch. He held out his jacket and inspected it for gull poop. Satisfied, he shook it out and put it back on, only a little worse for wear.

“You think someone did this on purpose?” he asked, picking up the six-pack holder.

Six-pack holders were part of the plastic armada that floated in the sea, but they looked like slow-moving snacks to the gulls, who bit at them and ended up getting caught by their own prey. Those were accidents, although his plant manager, Annuncia, would call them flagrant murder by irresponsible trashing. What was not so accidental was the lunchtime game that downtown workers played by holding the plastic six-pack rings out of their office windows to let gulls snatch them out of their hands. Humans were so cruel, the way they knew how to play on natural greed. Didn’t the birds ever learn? Didn’t they ever notice the fate of every other seagull that succumbed to the temptation? He’d seen gulls compete over a single holder, fighting over the very thing that would choke them to death.

Josefa secured the crate. “Don’t matter how it starts,” she said, removing a box of Band-Aids from her canvas bag. “It’s the same bad end.”

Duncan tucked the plastic in his pocket before settling himself back down against the rock, in no hurry to return to the office. Josefa retrieved a paper cup from her bag and walked down to the tide line. She splashed some water on her hands, wiping them clean on her pink-hooded Ariel the Mermaid sweatshirt before filling the cup. When she returned, she stood for a moment and scanned the beach.

“Speaking of bad ends … I found a knee. On Colrain Beach.”

“Is this the beginning of a joke?” Duncan held his hand out and braced himself as Josefa poured salt water over his wound. “Ouch.”

“Called the police. Weren’t laughing like it were a joke. They guess it’s Marsilio flotsam.”

“Poor bastard,” said Duncan. Marsilio was Slocum’s brother-in-law, who went down in his lobster boat in the storm.

Josefa snorted as she dried his hand with the hem of her sweatshirt. After she applied the bandage, she took a bottle of Gritty’s Beer out of her bag and handed it to him. “For being brave.”

“I wasn’t brave,” he said, twisting the top with a spritz. “I’m just saving my voice for Friday when my employees rise up against me.”

She sat down with a grunt and opened a beer of her own. They both watched the foam rise from the top and spill onto the sand. “Dunc, the future’s never what we think ... no use getting yourself wrapped around the propeller about it.”

True that. Josefa’s future could not have been predicted by anyone. Her husband, George, had been on Seacrest’s loading dock directing gurry from a truck into the chute when he got dive-bombed by a gull. The new system had just been installed, and waste was no longer exposed as it went from truck to holding tank—hence, no vapors of rotting bones and entrails in the air. This made the EPA and the citizens of Port Ellery happy, but a frustrated gull, used to feeding on spillage, went into battle fury. George stepped back to wave him off and fell ten feet to the ground, onto his head, which did not in itself kill him. If every worker who fell on his head died, Duncan would have no employees left at all. But the truck driver panicked when he saw what happened, put his vehicle in the wrong gear to get out of the way, and crushed George against the factory wall. It was an extraordinary act of grace that Josefa continued to save seagulls, but she said the gull was just being a gull—it was the human who had the gift of conscious choice who’d fucked it up.

They drank in silence, gazing out on the water, which was calm, for water. Its surface undulated in pink and teal as it slurped under the docks of the industrial marina next door. But no matter how calm the water seemed, he knew. A storm could rise out of nowhere, especially as they moved into the fall. He slapped at a mosquito on his neck. The days were getting shorter. Complete dark was still a couple of hours away, but the sun was already hugging the horizon, creating a hazy, watery light. In a month’s time, the end of the day would seem to take place underwater, but for now the sun’s luster stirred up murky sediments in his brain. He’d always considered himself content, but ever since that day at the fertility clinic, everything—even an injured gull—had become an opportunity for questioning life.

“Why do you try to save the birds?” Duncan asked. “Why bother when your success rate is so low?”

She twirled her bottle close to her ear and listened to the suds inside. “ ’Cause there’s always the one, the one who gets better and flies away.”

“How many of those in your lifetime?” he asked.

“Dozen?” she said, without taking her eyes off the harbor. “Last success was Fathom, attacked by a dog and lost half a foot. He adjusted. Learned to fly and land. Time for him to go, I made a big thing of it, rowing out to the lighthouse … tossing him in the air. But I found him a week later with fishing line around his neck. I helped him again ... no use.” She tightened her sweatshirt around her and took a sip. “I like to think of the ones I’ve saved, up there. I like to think they think of me.”

“I’d like to think there was someone up there who thought of me, too,” said Duncan.

They watched a few day boats straggling in from the sea, chugging loudly and expelling clouds of diesel, heading for the fish auction. Seagulls followed them in, screaming in a dozen loud languages, demanding that the crew start cleaning fish and toss them the guts, as they had for hundreds of years. But the fish were already cleaned and in the hold, and the guts were in barrels ready to be delivered by truck to his plant. In the name of improving the environment, the gulls had lost another food source. It was funny how heavily regulated fish waste was, which got snapped up so eagerly in the wild, and yet any boob could throw away plastic, which never disappeared.

“Why didn’t something eat the knee, do you think?” asked Duncan.

Josefa shrugged. “All bone. Reminds me. I’ve got bodies for the chute.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Duncan. “I’m going to get in trouble one of these days.”

“Stop being a worrywart, Dunc. You’re within the law.”

It was true; a few gulls were allowed into the fertilizer mix because the regulators understood that a certain number of seabirds would end up in fish waste. The seaweed was riddled with gull body parts. Some days it seemed as if the birds molted wings as easily as feathers. He was allowed up to three percent “other” organic material in the dark powder, as long as it did not contain heavy metals or toxins. Josefa could not possibly dig enough graves for all her failed rescues, so she sometimes threw them down the waste chute into the grinder, the first step toward dehydration. When George was still alive, he used to bring the bodies to work with him in an insulated container, and Duncan still thought twice before opening a beer cooler at a picnic.

“That’s how I want to be buried,” said Duncan. “No commending to the sea, no ashes scattered in a daisy meadow, but here at the factory. Wrap me up in a sheet and drop me down the chute. In time, some gardener will spray me on a prize-winning pumpkin, and I’ll have made the world a better place.”

“Amen to that,” said Josefa, and she shook her beer bottle to make sure it was empty before putting it in her bag.

“Speaking of amen,” said Duncan. “I didn’t come here to save a seagull. I came down to erase a strange message someone wrote in the sand. It gave me the willies.”

Josefa looked over to where he was pointing with his bandaged hand. “You really trawl for things to fret about. What does it say?”

“It said
God Help Us
,” said Duncan. “But I’ve changed it to
Go Kelp!
What do you think of that as the name for the new fertilizer?”

“As a slogan, I like the first one better.” And then she stood up and wiped the sand off her pink sweatpants. “Come on, let’s take care of the bodies … before Annuncia and Wade shut down the works for the day.”

Duncan pulled himself upright and steadied himself against the seawall. His hand hurt, and the air on the wet seat of his trousers chilled him to his core. His knee ached, too, but that was probably sympathetic pain for the lobsterman awash in fragments. He thought of his father, lost at sea, his body never recovered from a sailing accident. Cora often worried on Duncan’s behalf about this lack of closure over his father’s death, but he didn’t mind. It was better to have him gone altogether than to have to bury a single knee.

“Duncan,” said Josefa. “Wake up and help.”

He took the crate from her and felt the gull slide to one side, throwing him off balance for a moment. Josefa adjusted her rescue bag over her shoulder, and as they headed up to the parking lot they passed dark wreaths of sea grass left by the tide.

“It’s like stepping on graves,” Duncan said.

“Not particularly,” said Josefa. She gave him a sideways glance. “Might want to think about moving out of your mom’s house and getting back with your wife. Your brain is beginning to take on water.”

“Cora doesn’t want me back until … ” And then, as if a spigot was abruptly shut off, the leveling silence returned to his head, draining him of thought. Until
what?
As his skull emptied of thought, he felt a sharp pang of worry, way off in the distance, and wondered if this was the first sign of the family madness.