Monterey Bay (15 page)

He stood and retrieved a tarp, which he unfurled with a snap. Sitting next to him now, the tarp beneath them, she watched him watch the net. As always, the prospect of a capture had him completely focused, and she, too, felt certain something extraordinary was within seconds of happening. This time, however, his attention proved a poor predictor of action. For a long stretch, there was nothing: just the minutes ticking slowly by, the morning starting to deepen and shift into noon, the only sound that of the occasional car rattling up or down the distant road, that of the seals flopping their beefy shapes into the mounds of shattered clamshells that lined the lower edges of the slope.

“What did you bring for lunch?” she asked.

“Hungry?”

“No. Just curious.”

“Fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs.”

“And which shall we eat first?”

His eyes were widening now, his mouth curling, a portion of his good humor starting to resurface.

“Can it be true? Has Margot Fiske attempted a joke?”

“No good? You should have invited someone funnier.”

He wrenched his gaze from the net and let it fall on her face. “Funny or not, you're the only person on earth I would've wanted to come along.”

She looked down and pretended to examine the blisters on her palms, which had begun to surround themselves with little hoods of clear fluid. He was a charming man, and he likely would have said the same thing no matter who was sitting there beside him. To Steinbeck, to Wormy, maybe even to Arthur. She didn't care, though. She had goals in mind, and none of them would be achieved by convincing herself she wasn't special.

“What did you mean about the lab?” she asked. “About wanting to escape it?”

He tucked both legs beneath him and then reconsidered, stretching them out to their full length, the heels of his boots digging into the mud.

“I don't know,” he replied. “It just feels different in there all of a sudden. I wish I could explain it better.”

“Money's no longer a problem. That's probably a relief.”

“Oh, money's never really a problem.” His focus was on the net again, but a shred of it had been left behind with her. “Yet it's always a problem. I'm sure you understand.”

She nodded vigorously to conceal her confusion.

“And with the trip coming up, I suppose we can use every penny we can get our hands on, even though I can't shake the feeling we're doomed no matter what.”

“What trip? And why is it doomed?”

He gave her a perplexed glance. “I could have sworn we already discussed this at length. Just yesterday, in fact.”

“No. I would have remembered.”

“Hmmm.” He frowned. “Must be mistaking you for one of the girls at the Lone Star. Anyhow, we're leaving for Mexico in March. A couple of months in the Sea of Cortez, gathering material for the new book. John's lawyer is finalizing the lease for the boat as we speak and Wormy is preparing the cargo manifest, which is mostly beer, which I'm sure comes as less than a shock.”

She prodded at a blister to make it burn. “Sounds like a productive journey.”

“That's the idea, but things have gotten so complicated. John is worse than I've ever seen him, the poor fellow. He just can't seem to concentrate and I don't blame him. The Hollywood contingent is driving him mad. Carol is up north, screaming
divorce every time he blinks. As for Wormy, well, she has obligations of her own, which never comes as a surprise to anyone but me. To be honest, it makes me wonder what we're trying to prove, taking off to sea when everything on land is falling to pieces.”

When he stopped talking, she paused to weigh his words. With only a few luminous exceptions, he had never unburdened himself like this before; he had never dropped the scrim of his friendly optimism. For several seconds, she had no idea what to say. Then, as she looked in the direction of the bay, a useful memory surfaced: the departure from the Philippines, the decisive enormity of the cargo ship, the sea putting a measurable distance between her and happiness, but also between her and defeat.

“Some people think the ocean means freedom. A new start.”

“I'll bet fish think the same thing about land. And oh, how wrong they are!”

“I'm not sure fish care one way or another.”

“And that, I'm afraid, is where we part ways.”

At this, he shimmied his rear end deeply into the tarp, as if trying to reestablish contact with the mud beneath.

“Should I tell another joke?” she asked.

Still brooding, he looked up at her. “You know why I'm out there every day, don't you? On the very borderline of the metaphysical?”

“Breaking through with the limpets? Staring the life out of hermit crabs?”

“I had a dream about you last night,” he continued, ignoring her incitement. “Or, more accurately, about your father. He was a Nazi. And you were a Jew.”

“How silly.”

“Is it? I feel like Anders has more than a bit of latent sadism trying to push its way through.”

“I would assume most fathers do.”

“Not mine. Most of his people were ministers.”

“God brings no guarantees.”

“You're quite right. But in this instance, the book matched its cover.” His smile was sad but thankful. “His mind wasn't especially keen, I'll grant you that, but his soul was good. He encouraged me to read and exercise. To sleep out in the snow, to harden myself a little. When I dropped out of school with the intention of walking through the southern states by day and sleeping in graveyards by night, he didn't question it. He saw me off with encouragement and pocket change, and then, in the lab's early days, he even worked alongside me for a spell. It was wonderful.”

Another flurry of confessions. How to best receive them? she wondered frantically. How to keep them coming?

“And where is he now?” she asked.

“Dead.”

“Oh.”

She expected him to sneer at the grief and shove it aside, as she usually did. Instead, he put a hand over his heart, as if palpating the ache.

“Almost four years now, but it's still pretty fresh. Same year as the fire in the lab—the one that destroyed practically everything I owned—and, even now, it's like two halves of the same terrible thing. It's like the two events are related. Not in terms of one causing the other, but in terms of being linked in some primal,
toto
manner. I'm sure you know what I mean.”

Fire and the death of a parent. Yes. She knew.

“But there are plenty of good people left,” he continued. “That's what I try to remind myself every day, especially when things seem dark. John, Wormy, Joe, Ritchie, Tal, George, Xenia: they understand and that's what matters. Even if the boat sinks, I'm still out there doing good work, and that's something even a failure can be proud of.”

She watched him shut his eyes and then reopen them.

“I'll come with you,” she said.

“Where?”

“On the trip to Mexico.”

“What?” He laughed. “No!”

“Why not?”

“Oh Christ.” He leaned across her and peered mournfully inside the picnic basket. “And to think I forgot to pack the beer.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

“Tell me what I'm up against.”

At this, the net gave a twitch, but not one big enough to warrant attention.

“You're not up against anything, that's the point.” If he was annoyed with her now, he was doing a decent job hiding it, his eyes fixed on the net's false alarms. “You've made yourself completely essential and I'm not sure if I like it or not.”

“Of course you like it.”

He looked insulted. But then his mouth broke open, the day's first genuine smile lighting up his face.

“I need to pee.”

“You're in the presence of a lady. You said so yourself.”

“I know. I always use the word
pee
around ladies because it's so much more elegant than
piss
. Everyone knows that only horses piss.”

“I'll wait here and pretend I'm not listening.”

He groaned and scratched his beard. “If John doesn't write a book about you, he's a goddamned idiot.”

He stood, climbed the slick dunes, and half disappeared behind them. She heard the intimate, expected sounds—the unzipping of a fly, the splashdown of an elevated stream—and then there was a tremor of the net that made her jump. She sprinted to the water's edge. In the net, only a few steps from
shore, was a bat ray nearly four feet long and equally as wide, thrashing and brown and cat-eyed.

“Ed!”

For the first time ever, she had called him by his given name, and the sound of it was like a gunshot. The commotion in the net mirrored the commotion at her back—the tucking, the zipping, the scrambling—and before she knew it, he was at her side, lunging for the captive, bringing it out of the water and into his arms, not in the competent way he handled most things, but with an almost vengeful, disorganized force. He looked desperately around him at the mud and the weeds, and then at her.

“The knife in the picnic basket,” he grunted. “Get it.”

She bent down and snatched up the implement. In her hand, it felt insubstantial and weightless, unlikely to survive a passage through a stick of butter, much less through living flesh. So she tossed it into the mud and withdrew her father's penknife from the satchel. She flicked it open.

“From gills to gills, right below the jaw,” Ricketts said, unaware of the blade's substitution. “And then stand back.”

“I'll ruin it.”

“No, you won't. Manuel just needs the wings.”

As if in response, the animal sucked Ricketts's hand into its throat, its tooth plates grinding down, its mouth curled permanently upward as if smiling. Ricketts yelped and tore his fingers free. She stepped forward and paused for a second, waiting for
the right opportunity, and when it arrived, there was no hesitation. It was just like the flatworms and the microscope slide: total precision, total inevitability. The flapping of the wings made it more difficult than expected, as did the puppylike softness of the ray's skin, as did the puppylike roundness of its skull. She proceeded, however, cutting right where he had instructed, right below the jaw as if she were making a second mouth. There was a gush from the arteries, her fingers suddenly hot and wet and red. Stunned, she stepped away and let him manage the death throes on his own, the ray flapping against his chest like a big, featherless bird.

When it was all over, she wiped the blade against the eelgrass and washed her hands in the water. He lowered the ray into a patch of mud that had turned mauve with blood.

“When I die,” he said quietly, watching the animal make its final twitch, “I'm nearly certain they'll all be waiting for me. Everything I've ever killed, waiting for me in one big room.”

That's crazy
, she wanted to say.

“That's beautiful,” she said.

He picked up the dead ray as if it were a sleeping child, wrapped it in the tarp, and then placed it inside the canoe.

“Normally I use a rock,” he said, still looking at the animal. “Just a quick smack to the head. But I couldn't find one.”

She retrieved her paddle and the picnic basket. His eyes shot over in her direction.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Packing up and going home.”

“No, you're not.”

He caught her by the wrist, shook the paddle from her grip, and dragged her down.

And this time, it wasn't slow and it wasn't careful. Also, there was the mud: a surface far less reliable than his rope mattress and far more eager to involve itself in the intricacies of the movements under way. She could feel it on every inch of her skin, even the parts that were still covered with clothing: how the mud's temporary wetness both facilitated and impeded the force with which they slammed into each other, and she knew he wasn't claiming her, not for good. But the land was. For a moment, there was fear and trepidation, but then an opening unlike anything she had ever experienced. He could talk all he wanted about where things lived and why, but the fact of the matter was that wanting something meant nothing unless you actually took it. People, places, things: all of it so fragile, so easy, so obtainable. So infinitely up for grabs.

Later that evening, she took a bath fully clothed.

Her father was a room away, sitting at the kitchen table, as usual. He had seen her come home. He had seen how she was a chalky gray from head to toe, the mud dried into a flaking shroud. He didn't mention it, though, nor did he disturb her.
Hours passed, maybe even days. He remained in his part of the house and she in hers, and by the time she drained the tub, undressed, and toweled off, the kitchen was empty and his bedroom door was closed.

She sat at the kitchen table and pretended it was Ricketts's desk. On the canoe trip back to the Buick, they had spoken only once.