Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“It’s dark as shit out here,” said Marty.
“Nice stars, though,” said Len. He passed the joint.
Marty took a hit and said, “The other night, after you left, it started raining hard. I went up to bed. When I got under the covers Claire’s back was to me. I knew she was awake. I told her what you said about the eels, and I told her if something happened where I got caught she would have to bail me out. A few seconds passed and, without turning around, she asked, ‘How much can you make?’ ‘Maybe a couple of thousand,’ I told her. The rain dripped in. She said, ‘Do it.’”
Len laughed. “That’s what I call a working marriage.” He leaned forward and took the pint from Marty’s hand.
“Do you think Matisse ever did this?” asked Marty.
“I don’t think Matisse was ever a substitute teacher.”
“The other day they sent me to teach English in a separate school for all the truants and delinquents. They call it the Hawthorne Academy. Jesus, it’s the worst. Fights, a couple an hour. Crazy motherfucker kids. They’re being warehoused by the state until they reach the legal age and can be released into society.”
“Haunted High School,” said Len. He pointed into the sky. “Here comes the moon.”
“Nice,” said Marty.
They sat quietly for a long while, listening to the flow of the gut and the wind moving over the marshland. Len lit a cigarette and said, “I saw a guy in town this afternoon. I think I remember him from ’Nam.”
“Oh lordy, no Vietnam stories. Show some mercy.”
“I’ll just tell you the short version,” said Len.
“Never short enough. When do the eels show up?”
“Listen, I saw this guy, Vietcong. We never learned what his real name was but everybody on both sides called him
Uncle Fun
. I was shown black-and-white photos of him. We were sent into the tunnels with an express mission to execute this guy. The tunnels were mind-blowing, mazes of warrens, three, four floors, couches, kids, booby traps. He was a fucking entertainer, like a nightclub act, only he played the Vietcong tunnel systems instead of Vegas. He told jokes and sang songs. For some reason they wanted us to cancel his contract asap.”
“You’re a one-man blizzard of bullshit,” said Marty.
“Fuck you. Intel said that at the end of every performance he laughed like Woody Woodpecker.”
“What was he doing downtown this afternoon, trying out new material in the parking lot of City Liquors? You been taking your pills?”
“Shit, they’re here,” said Len. “Grab a net.”
The moon shone down on the bend in the gut and the water bubbled and glowed with the reflection of thousands of glass eels. Len and Marty scooped up dripping nets of them like shovelfuls of silver.
“Do we need to put water in the coolers to keep them alive?” asked Marty.
“Are you kidding? They’re tough as hell. They’ll keep for hours just like they are.”
“The black eyes creep me out.”
“A glass eel the size of a person would be the Holy Ghost.”
Marty drove his old Impala. Len was in the passenger seat. The nets were in the back, the coolers in the trunk. They headed north, away from the marina, past Marty’s house, and turned at the cemetery onto a road that went over a wooden bridge. It led to a narrow lane lined with oak and pine. The deer looked up, their eyes glowing in the headlights.
“You know that giant tree up at the end of the road here, where you make the turn? The one with the neon-orange pentagram on it? Star with a circle around it. What’s that all about?” asked Marty.
“That’s Wiccan, I think. Nature witches. They’ve been here for a long, long time. They mark the important crossroads.”
“Witches?”
“I’ve run into a few. You hear stories about spells and shit, but I never witnessed any of that. They just seem like sketchy hippies.”
“Me and Claire call it the Devil Tree. Which way am I going here?”
“You want to make a left. Then, in a quarter of a mile, make a right. I hope the buyer’s there again.”
“How much do you think we’ve got?”
“I’d say about eight grand. Maybe more.”
“Jeez.”
“These eels have never been successfully bred in captivity,” said Len. “When it comes to eels you can only take.”
“You trying to make me feel guilty?”
“Yeah, but fuck it, we need the cash. The parking lot of the old diner is up here on the right just past these cattails.”
Behind the burned-out shell of Jaqui’s All-Night Diner, in a parking lot long gone to weeds, Len and Marty stood before the open back doors of a large van. Inside was a lantern that gave a dim light. Behind the lantern, a teenage girl sitting on a crate aimed a shotgun at them.
“We’ll see what you have,” said a heavyset man to their right. He wore a tweed suit jacket and had a pistol tucked into the waist of his jeans. Before him on a makeshift wooden platform was a large antique balance scale, one end a fine net, the other a flat plate holding four-kilogram cylinders of lead.
“Snorri,” called the buyer, and a huge guy with a crew cut, wearing a shoulder holster, appeared from around the side of the van. “Pour these gentlemen’s eels, I have to weigh them.”
Snorri lifted the first cooler and carefully poured out the eels into the net of the scale. The weighing took awhile. Every time the scale moved it creaked. The wind blew strong and whipped the reeds that surrounded the parking lot. The girl with the shotgun yawned and checked for messages on her phone.
“That’s the last of them,” said the buyer, clapping his hands. “One more calculation, though. I subtract for the water the eels have on them. I only pay for eels, not water.” He laid three small white gull feathers on the flat plate of the scale and leaned over to read the difference. “You have a little more than nine kilograms here. I can give you eight thousand.”
“I heard it was a thousand a kilogram,” said Len.
“One hears what one wants,” said the buyer.
“I know from a reliable source that last night you were paying a grand.”
“Supply and demand,” said the buyer.
“Explain it,” said Len.
“Eight grand or I can have Snorri explain it to you in no uncertain terms.”
The girl in the van laughed.
“We’ll take the eight grand,” said Marty. “Chill out,” he said to Len. “We’re talking eight grand for an hour and a half of fishing.”
“Okay,” said Len.
Snorri stepped back, taking the gun from its holster. The buyer leaned into the van and stuffed eight stacks of banded hundreds into a yellow plastic grocery bag. He handed the bag to Marty. “Check it.”
Marty held the bag open and counted the stacks in a whisper. He reached in and felt the money. He lifted the bag and smelled it. “Thanks,” he said.
“An hour and a half,” said the buyer. “That’s very fast for what you brought in.”
“We don’t mess around,” said Len.
“Where were you?”
“Over west,” said Len, “in the woods by the bay south of Greenwich.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Have Snorri explain it to you,” said Len, and laughed on his way back to the Impala.
They got in the car. Marty backed out past the remains of the diner and onto the road. “Why’d you have to be such an asshole with the guy? I thought they were gonna shoot us in the back with every step I took.”
“They’re not gonna shoot us. Think about it, they need us. If we’re getting a bit less than a grand for a kilogram, imagine what the buyer is making per kilogram from aquafarms in Asia.”
“Too many guns for me.”
“Quit your cryin’, we’ve got four grand apiece. You can get your roof fixed and I can medicate. Harmony will reign.”
“I’m happy for the four grand,” said Marty. “In your honor, I’m gonna paint a series, maybe eight canvases, each a scene from the career of Uncle Fun.”
“Put him in a tux and make him look like a North Vietnamese Bobby Darin.”
“Hey, there’s somebody behind us.”
Len looked over his shoulder. “We’ll know soon enough if it’s a cop. When you get to the Devil Tree, keep going, don’t make the turn. Head down the road a ways and then turn back by the old glass factory. We can lose him in the dunes.”
“Could just be somebody out driving.”
“I kind of doubt it,” said Len. “We’ve got eight thousand dollars in cash here and it’s three in the morning on one of the loneliest roads in the world. When you get to the tree, hit the gas. We’ll see if he keeps up.”
“I can’t drive fast at night. I can’t see dick.”
“You gotta lose this fucker now.”
The Impala suddenly accelerated. Len whooped and called, “Faster!”
Marty was hunched up over the steering wheel, peering into the dark.
“They’re definitely on our asses,” said Len. “Turn in at the glass factory.”
“I don’t know where the turn is. You’re gonna have to warn me.”
“Okay, okay, okay … Now!”
Marty cut the wheel. The back tires skidded sideways and the car did a 180. He put it in reverse, turned around, and they were headed into the maze of sand dunes.
“Go to the right,” said Len. “That’s where it gets crazy.”
“You know your way through here?”
“Nobody knows their way through here. I used to play here as a kid and I’d get lost and turned around all the time.”
“How’s that gonna help us?”
“Make a left after this next dune. Twenty minutes of driving around in this bullshit in the dark and that guy’s gonna forget all about us and go home. Just keep dodging him for a while and then I’ll get us back to the road.”
“That plan sucks.”
“That’s its strength.”
“Oh shit,” said Marty, “I’m past empty.”
“You’re kidding,”said Len, and leaned over to look at the dashboard. “Oh man.”
“I forgot to gas up.”
“That’s just fuckin’ dandy.”
“It’s running on fumes, should I try to make it back to the road?”
“No, go deeper in. We’ll hide somewhere with the lights out. Make as many crazy turns as you can.”
“I don’t like it.”
“When the car craps out, shut up. We’re gonna run silent, run deep.”
The Impala died in a cul-de-sac bounded by three enormous sand dunes.
“Kill the lights,” said Len. “Crack a window so we can hear better and then turn everything off.”
“That guy’s probably home having a beer right now, cursing us ’cause we gave him the slip.”
Len unzipped his jacket and reached down the front of his shirt. He cocked back his chin and pulled out a large scabbard and knife on a leather strap around his neck. Taking the strap off, he removed the knife, ten inches with a hunting blade and grip guard, and stowed it up his jacket sleeve, hilt first.
“What’s that for?”
“Whatever,” said Len. Then he whispered, “I remember, once we had Uncle Fun surrounded and he managed to give us the slip …”
“Run silent,” said Marty.
They sat quietly in the dark. Off to the east an owl called.
Len and Marty stood ten yards in front of the Impala. Three guys in black hoodies and ski masks surrounded them. The one in front of them held a .22 pistol with a homemade silencer on it. Marty shivered and clutched the yellow grocery bag. The moon was gone from the sky. Dark clouds raced and it smelled like rain.
“What you two have to learn is that if you harvest glass down here, you need to pay us 15 percent of your take,” said the guy with the gun.
“Are you ladies pro-eel or something?” asked Len. “I mean the outfits. You look like eels. It’s the first thing I thought when I saw you.”
“Nobody’s pro-eel, asshole. We’re pro-cash. We poach the poachers. Like the food chain.”
“That silencer have a wipe?” asked Len.
“What difference does it make? I could shoot you with a cannon out here and nobody’d know.”
“Listen, I was born down here,” said Len. “I have as much right to these eels as you do.”
“Wait, man, listen,” said Marty. “It’s just like a tax. Everything has a tax on it. So we pay for eight grand—twelve hundred or something. Let it go and let’s get out of here.”
“I’m not paying anything,” snapped Len. “He can suck my glass eel.”
“That’s it for you,” said the guy in the mask, and raised the gun.
Len ducked as the shot sounded, the gruff sudden cough of an old man. When he sprang up, he had the knife in his hand. In one swift motion he slashed the blade across the wrist of the masked man’s gun hand. The sharp metal bit in deep and severed the tendon. The gun dropped. The guy screamed. Marty, pissing his pants, turned and ran.
Len took a backhanded swipe and the blade tore open the throat beneath the ski mask. Blood poured and the scream turned to a gurgle. Len pivoted to follow Marty and was hit in the left side of the head with a baseball bat. He staggered sideways a few steps before his feet went out from under him. The masked guy with the bat took off after Marty while his remaining partner stood over Len and drew a .22 pistol with a silencer from the pocket of his hoodie. Len’s jaw was busted and jutting to the side. He blinked and grunted. The cough of the gun sounded twice.
Marty worked like crazy to climb the dune but he got nowhere. Finally, he turned and lay back against the slope. He held the bag of money out toward the two masked men that stood only a few yards below him. One kept a flashlight trained on the painter. The other carried the pistol.
“I just wanted to fix my fuckin’ roof. Take the money.”
“We’re gonna throw your bodies in an eel pond,” said the guy with the flashlight. “In August, when the old ones head to the Sargasso to spawn, you’ll go with them.” He laughed high-pitched and insane.
Marty quit weeping. “Uncle Fun?” he asked. “Is it you?”
“This loser’s lost his mind,” said the gunman to his partner. “I’ll give you Uncle Fun,” he said to Marty, and pulled the trigger three times.
BY
B
ARRY
N. M
ALZBERG
& B
ILL
P
RONZINI
L
isten to me. Please listen. Everything I’m about to tell you is the gospel truth.
I can’t live with this terrible secret any longer. It’s been thirty-five years, but I’ve never stopped thinking about what I did. Not for a single day. It’s all there, every detail burned into the walls of my mind. It could’ve happened yesterday, that’s how clear it is.