Float (3 page)

After a few days of frustrating calls and meetings with loan officers, Friday arrived, and Duncan made payroll in spite of them all. Not, as he would have liked, through any financial heroics but by withdrawing the money out of his personal account. He wouldn’t be able to outrun the tide too much longer, since Cora had set money out of his reach for the fertility project earlier that summer. After signing off on payroll, he spent the rest of the day staring out the window, half-expecting another message to appear in the sand.

“Mr. Leland, I’m locking up,” called Wade from the first floor.

Duncan nodded, then realized too late that Wade couldn’t hear a nod and was already heading up the metal stairs.

“Why is it so dark in here?” Wade stood at the door, grabbing at the air until he found a cord, and an overhead fixture came on with a fluorescent tinkle. Duncan stared at Wade, this bringer of light, whose eyes were too close together and favored one side of his face, like a flounder. His arms were roped with veins and purpled with tattoos. He was one of the many men at Seacrest’s who had begun his working life on the sea but got tossed ashore when the National Marine Fisheries cut his boat’s fishing quota to three days a month. Now he was Seacrest’s head of maintenance. A janitor.

“You go,” said Duncan. “I’ll close up.”

Wade stood at the door, staring at Duncan. “Want to come to supper?” he asked. “Clokie’s got a lobster stew on the burner. Bet we have a baby lying around you haven’t even met.”

Duncan smiled. “Thanks for the offer, but some other time. I told my mother I’d pick up dinner so she and Nod could work on racing tactics.”

Wade gave a wry smile. “Wish ’em luck.” Then he raised his hand in farewell and went back downstairs, the sound of his steps echoing, then disappearing altogether.

The door slammed, and the building was empty. Duncan remembered being in the factory after hours when he was young, playing among the old tanks and wooden ladders with Nod while their father arranged the orders for the next day, and then they’d sail back home together in the catboat, his father’s good-weather commuter vehicle. If it was dark, Duncan would lie flat on the bow with a red and green light to make them legal. As their father raised sails and adjusted the rudder, he tried to scare them with stories of sea monsters and ghost vessels, but they only laughed at the thought that anything could go wrong while they were all on the boat together, floating between worlds. Their mother would meet them on the dock and scold them for walking into town without telling her, but she didn’t mean it. She was only covering up the fact that she hadn’t realized they were gone.

It was getting late. “On we go,” he said as he stood up and gathered himself together. After setting the building’s alarm system, he closed the door firmly behind him, then climbed into his blue Ford pickup truck, the only vehicle left in the lot. He drove a couple of blocks to Manavilins as the sun set, bruising the sky with color. When he pulled into the parking lot and turned off the ignition, the engine coughed a couple of times before it finally died. Along with all his other unmet responsibilities, he was overdue for a tune-up, but it had waited this long; it could wait some more. It could all wait. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, offering his freckled neck to an unfeeling universe. His windows were open to the evening air, and through the thick exhaust of the restaurant’s deep fat fryer he could smell the salt-heavy Atlantic. All around him, life went on. Motorcycles ratcheted into reckless gears; fully loaded freezer trucks hit potholes that tested their suspensions. Gulls squabbled at the Dumpster. His spine tightened when a ferry scraped against a piling as it docked. It was a world awash in menace, and he didn’t want to get out of the truck. A car horn shattered his thoughts, and his eyes shot open.

“Duncan Leland.” The voice came from the gray-and-black Mini Cooper that had pulled opposite him, so that the two driver’s side windows faced each other.

Duncan shook his head, not denying he was Duncan, but to imply he didn’t know who this man was, all scrunched up in his shell.

“Beaky Harrow.” The man leaned out his window, and Duncan groaned in recognition. Beaky’s face was pinched and ageless, with a mustache like a bit of dark seaweed. His brown hair looked dyed and was gelled flat to his head. Bones must have been missing from his back because his neck did not quite appear above his jacket collar. A beige, sock-like animal sat on his shoulder and stared at Duncan. It wore a small pink harness.

Duncan leaned away. “What
is
that?”

“Meet Fingers. My ferret. I’m glad we caught you, Mr. Leland. I was hoping we could talk business. I understand you could use a little.” He punctuated each sentence with a little snort.

“A little … ” Duncan could see what was happening. Had Beaky found out that payroll had come from his own savings that day? Certainly so. Did he know how much—or little—was still available? Of course. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.

“Shall we talk?” Beaky’s eyes were set far apart, like a crab’s, and it was hard to tell just where he was looking.

“That’s kind of you,” said Duncan. “But I don’t need to talk. I’m really not in the market for your business.” Duncan tried to say this lightly. He did not want to make an enemy of this man, just decline his favors.

Beaky raised himself from his seat and stretched his arm to create a bridge to Duncan’s window, and the ferret shimmied across it and in a moment was on his steering column. Duncan meant to scream but nothing came of it, and by the time he made a grab for the animal, it had climbed up the front of his shirt and was trying to burrow behind his neck. When he pried it from his person, he was surprised that its warm body went limp in his hand. He’d been expecting a fight, but instead it arched its head up and stared amiably and intelligently at Duncan as if they were old friends.

“Look at that,” said Beaky. “Fingers likes you.”

“Take it.” Duncan held the ferret out of the window and dropped it into Beaky’s waiting hands. Beaky kissed the ferret on its forehead before returning it to his shoulder.

“Drowning men try to fight off their saviors, Leland, but we’re trained to knock them out to get them ashore. We do whatever it takes.” He put the car in drive. “When you change your mind, call me. My number is in your shirt pocket.”

Duncan put his hand to his chest and felt a business card.

Beaky smiled as he turned out of the parking lot. Duncan watched him disappear into the night, trailing two streaks of red light. His vanity plate read WEASEL. Duncan’s financial crisis was now officially blood on the water, attracting bottom feeders and scavengers alike. He felt himself sinking slowly into the deep cold, where the light grew weak and blunt noses bumped against his ribs.

~

Duncan abandoned his truck for the relative safety of Manavilins to wait for his dinner. Rather than take a seat, he stood at the takeout counter and read the blackboard. Along with the usual strange dishes, he noted the market price of lobsters. Cheap. Too cheap. Poor economic times had brought a halt to the purchase of luxuries like lobster, so the market was glutted with them. The major cruise lines had cancelled millions of pounds of orders for the season and were serving cheap farmed shrimp from Asia instead of lobster in their surf and turf. He picked up a copy of
New England Fisherman
to take his mind off his financial woes by reading about others’ woes. Above the general noise of the restaurant, he heard a thickly accented voice rise from a booth.

“I am willing to make a contribution to nature, but nature must be willing to make a contribution to me first! Who is going to pay for me to change my nets?”

Duncan pressed his glasses hard against his face, as if that could block out the words. No matter which way he turned these days, his business problems lay in wait for him. This particular problem was Kendrie Ottejnstein, captain of a 100-ton South African vessel fishing out of Port Ellery for the herring season, and there he sat, trapped by Annuncia, whose physique was as solid as if she’d been poured in a foundry. Kendrie was a fish she’d been trying to land for a long time, and all she had to do to block his exit from his booth was pull up a chair. Aside from her job managing Seacrest’s, she was an organizer for Green Fish, a group that promoted ecologically caught seafood. She was constantly haranguing captains like Kendrie—a paying Seacrest’s client—about conforming to practices that respected the fisheries, such as proper net size to limit bycatch, the inadvertent capture of one species while trying to fish for another. By law, the bycatch—which was almost always dead, and, if not dead, dying—had to be thrown back into the sea. It couldn’t even be given to Duncan to dehydrate, which was a truly sinful waste of an already depleted resource. Duncan understood the long-term consequences of dirty fishing, but with Seacrest’s on such shaky legs at the moment, this was hardly the time to alienate clients because of it.

“It’s cheaper to pay the fines than to change my nets,” continued Kendrie. “You know how much that costs?”

“Do you know how much it costs not to?” asked Annuncia. She spoke with controlled motions of her hand, as if she were trying to keep from hitting him. “Healthy fisheries are good business, good for everyone. If the fish disappear, so do we.”

“I’ll be here,” he said, his mouth full of coleslaw.

“No, Kendrie, not you.” With this she tapped him on the forehead, and he gave her a serious look of warning. She pushed her chair back with a purposefully grating sound. “You may be clever, Kendrie, but you’re not very smart.”

Duncan hid behind a pillar so Kendrie wouldn’t see him and cancel their contract on the spot. The week before, the captain of a factory trawler left Seacrest’s for a waste processor in Portland to get away from Annuncia’s public attacks. She accused him of scraping the bottom of the ocean floor clean with his trawl, the marine equivalent of clear-cutting rain forests.

“Duncan!” Slocum called from the kitchen. “Put a piece of lemon in your mouth!”

Duncan picked up a wedge from a bowl and stared at it. Manavilins was owned by his buddy Slocum Statler, whose bread and butter was the fry plates, but he dreamed of making a name for himself in gastro-aquatic wonders, as he called them, and flew a pirate’s flag in the kitchen. He kept up with the latest food trends, with a special interest in molecular gastronomy, while closely adhering to a New England fish shack menu. Often this meant a liberal hand in substituting one ingredient for another. He was known to stuff shrimp with breadcrumbs made from almond cookies, and he kept a tank of live eels in the courtyard for making pie. The calamari calzone wasn’t half bad, if you could get past the disturbing menu notes:
Squid are generally recognized to be smarter than dogs. Endangered status: Zero. Because of warming waters, squid have surpassed humans in total biomass on the planet.

“It’s a test,” Slocum said, wiping his hands on his apron as he approached the takeout counter from the kitchen. He had an ancient-mariner gleam in his eyes and a full, squared-off beard and walrus mustache, probably in violation of the health code. It made him look like an Old Testament prophet, which made people trust him more than they should. He was wider than Duncan but just as tall, and it was this height that had bound them together in elementary school. They saw life from the same perspective, above the fray and into the future, full of hope. When Duncan left Port Ellery for St. Mark’s Prep in New Hampshire, he thought he’d never return. After graduating from Columbia University with a degree in chemistry, he got a job managing a perfume lab for Revlon and thought his life would be spent in New York City, touched with glamour and excitement. But his father, who worried that living among strangers for so long would prevent Duncan from seeing himself through the eyes of others—a powerful tool, his father believed, for making sound, ethical decisions—had often tried to lure him back to Port Ellery. He finally succeeded with his death. Through all this time, Slocum had kept his dreams, no matter how daft, as Duncan slipped blindly into family expectations. He couldn’t even remember what it was he once wanted to do with his life.

“A test of what?” asked Duncan.

“Lemon juice makes introverts salivate more than extroverts. This is for Clover’s kid’s science project. Open.” He squeezed the lemon on Duncan’s tongue. “Now don’t swallow for a minute.”

Clover was Slocum’s sometimes girlfriend, who wore tight pleather jeans low on her hips, with a huge belt buckle centered on her pelvis. They’d met when she rode through town with her motorcycle gang years ago and have continued happily in this way for years, her coming and going whenever. Right now, she was in New Mexico while her preteen son, Harley, was staying with Slocum above the restaurant. Harley’s father and Clover had never married, but when he died in a bar fight, she’d had his penis ring refitted for her finger, and Slocum often cited that as proof of her capacity for love. He also praised her mothering skills because she often left Harley at Slocum’s for months at a time while she was on the road, to give him some stability.

“Time to get with the program, Kendrie,” Annuncia said to the red-faced South African. “You might call yourself a captain, but you don’t know dick about fishing.” With that, she stood up slowly and walked away.

“Time’s up,” said Slocum, brandishing a flashlight. “Tip your noggin and let’s get a look.” Duncan opened his mouth for inspection, and while his head was bent back, he read the hand-lettered sign tacked over the counter:
No trans fats used in cooking
.
What the sign didn’t say was that Manavilins used lard for frying, and Slocum often claimed he’d use whale blubber if he could get his hands on any. He believed that fat was the secret to the success of the species. Humans were not just the fattest primates, they also had ten times as many fat cells as would be expected in any animal of its size, which, to Slocum, pointed to one obvious conclusion: Humans were descended from aquatic apes. And, he believed, they needed to maintain those fat deposits for when—perhaps not so far in the future—the rising tides of global warming forced Homo sapiens back to the sea.