Judging by the clothes on the corpse, he looked like he’d been down here quite a while. Tattered remnants of a plaid work shirt and protective yellow rubber coveralls - something all lobstermen wore when working - were covered with thick strands of green slime and were rotting away. The man was sitting with his legs out in front of him, his toes pointing upward. Jagged black shreds of rubber boots still clung to his feet and lower legs. His arms were extended and swaying from side to side like thick fronds of kelp moved by the deep-sea currents. The man’s hands were extended, his fingers hooked. Long yellowed fingernails looking like chipped old porcelain stuck out from the ends of the withered, bone-white hands.
Jeff couldn’t help but think the man looked like he had been waiting patiently for him . . . or
someone
. . . to come along and find him in the darkness seven fathoms below the surface.
Tiny pinpricks of light squiggled across Jeff’s vision. He realized he was still breathing too fast for safety and consciously slowed his breathing. He willed his racing pulse to slow down while he considered who this might be . . . what might have happened . . . and how long he’d been underwater. To the best of his knowledge, no one had gone missing at sea recently. This man might have been swept overboard during the recent storm and not been reported missing yet, but the condition of his clothes and skin seemed to eliminate that as a possibility. The only people who’d been lost at sea so far this summer season had been a couple of lobstermen out of Vinalhaven, whose bodies had washed up on the Nephews, an island due east of the Cove. Jeff didn’t know of anyone else who’d gone missing.
As he drew nearer, Jeff noticed something peculiar. There was something wrapped around the man’s waist. It was difficult to tell what, lost as it was in the dark folds of slime and the man’s rotting clothes, but it looked like the heavy links of a chain. Following it outward, Jeff found one end of the chain tied to a cement block. Barnacles encrusted the corroded iron and cement block, further evidence that whoever this was, he had been down here for a long, long time.
It finally dawned on him that what was bothering him was something about the man’s eyes.
They shouldn’t still be there in his head.
No matter how long or short a time someone had been underwater, the eyes were the first to go. Fish and crabs and other ocean scavengers went after the softest, juiciest parts first. After a few days or weeks, the eyeballs would be gone, leaving nothing but empty sockets.
But this man’s eyes were still intact, even though he had clearly been underwater long enough for barnacles to attach to the chain and the cement block holding him down.
After swimming around the corpse, taking a last good look at it, Jeff tilted his head back, gave a few powerful kicks, and started back to the surface. He made sure he rose slowly, keeping pace with the bubbles of his exhaled breath. When he broke the surface, he swept his mask back and tore the regulator from his mouth. Biz’s boat was less than fifty feet away from where Jeff’s diving marker bobbed up and down in the steep swells. He raised a hand and waved while shouting until Biz saw him and started up his engine. Jeff clung to his diving marker until Biz pulled up alongside him and cut the engine.
‘Toss me a rope,’ Jeff said, gasping so hard it hurt his throat. He took in a mouthful of seawater and spit it out. ‘I gotta go back down.’
Biz regarded him quizzically for a moment or two, but he didn’t say a word before darting to the cabin and returning with a coil of rope.
‘You find a ghost trap?’ Biz asked, as he leaned over the side rails and handed the rope to Jeff.
‘Worse ’n that,’ Jeff said. He took in another mouthful of water and couldn’t help but swallow some.
Biz’s frown deepened.
‘There’s someone down there,’ Jeff said.
At first, Biz reacted like he wasn’t sure what Jeff meant. Then his eyes widened and he said, ‘You mean you found a person?’
Jeff nodded grimly.
‘I wanna mark him so’s we can come back out ’n’ find ’im easily. We gotta report this to the state.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Biz said. He didn’t look at all pleased to be involved in anything like this, but Jeff ignored him as he fumbled to get the regulator back into his mouth and pulled his mask down. After adjusting everything, he tied one end of the rope to his diving marker and uncoiled the rope. With one last look at Biz, he did a quick surface dive. As he dropped back down into the depths, his heart felt like a cold, tight fist in his chest.
‘I’ll betcha I know
exactly
who it is.’
Like most nights, Jeff was drinking with his buddies down at the Local. He had a glass of beer - his fifth so far tonight - raised halfway to his mouth when Jim ‘Pappy’ Sullivan spoke up. He hadn’t even realized Pappy was listening as he told three of his drinking buddies - Ralph, Johnny, and Flip - about what he’d found this morning. Lowering the glass to the bar, Jeff nudged his Red Sox baseball cap back on his head and turned on his barstool to look directly at Pappy.
‘You do, do yah?’
‘Ay-yuh. Sure as shit.’
A wide smile of satisfaction spread across the old man’s face. Pappy relished being the center of attention, even though he had a reputation for being full of shit as often as not. Now that he had Jeff and everyone else’s attention, he seemed to wait for a cue to continue. When the wait got too long to bear, Jeff said, ‘So . . . you wanna tell me?’
Pappy grinned from ear to ear, exposing the row of missing teeth on his bottom jaw.
‘I’ll bet my left nut-sack you found Old Man Crowther.’
‘I don’t want your fuckin’ left nut-sack,’ Jeff said, smirking, ‘but what makes you so goddamned sure it’s Old Man Crowther?’
‘How long’s he been missing?’ Pappy said.
‘Damned if I know,’ Jeff said. ‘I don’t even know who the fuck he is.’
An unlit cigarette was stuck behind Pappy’s right ear, held in place by a snarl of wiry grey hair. He’d probably bummed it from the barmaid, Shantelle. He reached up and took it, rolling it between his grease-stained fingers as he nodded toward the barroom’s back door.
‘Step on outside with me whilst I have a smoke,’ he said, sliding off his barstool, ‘ ’n’ I’ll tell yah.’ He paused, cocking his hips to one side as he fished in his jeans pocket for his lighter. ‘Goddamned fucking law that won’t let me smoke in a bar. Like I come here for my goddamned health!’
While this was going on, Jeff glanced back and forth between his friends. They seemed to have no opinion as to what he should do, so he picked up his beer and followed Pappy out the back door. Out behind the Local was a deck that looked out over the harbor. The screen door slammed shut behind them, sounding like a gunshot in the night. The sound made Jeff jump, and he wondered why he was so keyed up. He had enough beer in him to feel convivial, but he was still a little freaked out by what he had found this morning.
By the light of the moon, which was almost full and shining brightly, and the streetlights lining the road leading down to the wharf, Jeff could see the lobster boats at their moorings. Pappy lit up his cigarette and, leaning forward with both elbows resting on the railing, clasped his hands in front of him as though in prayer. The cigarette dangled from his lower lip, sending up a thin curl of smoke, which made him squint. Moths and June bugs buzzed around the single light by the back door, snapping and popping against the screen.
‘So tell me,’ Jeff said, ‘who the fuck is Old Man Crowther, and why’re you so sure it’s him?’
Pappy inhaled and blew a billow of smoke from his nostrils without taking the cigarette from his mouth.
‘Got to be ’im,’ he said, the glowing tip of the cigarette bobbing up and down like a firefly in the darkness.
‘This sinker I found - he had a length of chain wrapped around his waist. You’re saying somebody killed Old Man Crowther and tossed him overboard?’
‘Either that or he did it to himself.’ Pappy puffed some more on his cigarette as though lost in thought.
‘Maybe they’ll be able to tell when we bring ’im up. How long’s this Old Man Crowther been missing?’
Pappy tilted his head to one side and scratched the white beard stubble on his jowls. His fingernails made a loud rasping sound.
‘Oh, I’d say it must’a been . . . maybe thirty years or more since he disappeared.’
‘Thirty years ago . . . I was still in high school,’ Jeff said. ‘A body can’t last that long down under.’
‘May’ve been even longer ’n that, now that I think of it.’ Pappy turned to Jeff, scowling as threads of smoke rose into his face. ‘ ’Twas back in the early seventies, as I recall.’
Jeff considered for a long, silent moment. Pappy finally took the cigarette from his mouth after taking another deep drag and exhaling.
Jeff pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘Can’t be him. Someone been down there that long, their body’d be long gone. He’d’a been et by scavengers long ago.’
Pappy smiled and shook his head as he took one last drag of the cigarette and then snapped the butt out into the darkness. Jeff watched it fly, spinning end over end until it hit the ground in a small shower of sparks.
‘I saw the body that’s down there,’ Jeff said, ‘ ’n’ there’s no fuckin’ way anyone’d be in that good a condition after thirty years.’
‘You never knew Old Man Crowther. That old cocker had a hide on him’s tough as nails.’
‘Sorry, Pappy, but it’s gotta be someone else
. . .
’
Jeff finally noticed how dry his throat was and realized he was still holding on to his beer. When he raised it and took a swallow, his throat made a funny little gulping sound.
‘You was a kid back when it happened,’ Pappy said, ‘so’s probably you don’t remember.’
There was something in the old man’s tone of voice that caught Jeff’s attention.
‘Remember what?’
‘It.’
‘What do you mean . . .
“it ”
?’
Pappy sniffed and shook his head from side to side as though amused by some private joke or deeply saddened. He reached up to his ear as if to grab another cigarette, then started scratching his head.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘I was born in sixty-eight,’ Jeff said.
‘Okay, so you would’a been . . .’ Pappy did some quick calculations on his fingers. ‘You’d’a been maybe four or five when it happened.’
Jeff was starting to lose his patience. Pappy had a reputation for being full of shit, and he cursed himself for letting himself be suckered in. He was positive the old man was bullshitting him now just to have someone to talk to. There was no way it had been Old Man Crowther’s body he’d found today.
From behind him, he could hear the faint strains of laughter from inside the Local. Even though the evening was warm and pleasant, Jeff wanted to go back inside, where there were people and laughter and aimless conversation. But as his gaze drifted down to the harbor and out to sea, he couldn’t stop thinking about the corpse he had found this morning. A shiver ran up his spine, like invisible fingers.
‘So you don’t remember anythin’ ’bout the plague we had back then?’ Pappy asked.
Jeff almost asked
What plague?
but a faint childhood memory stirred within him.
He’d only been a kid at the time, maybe six or seven years old, but there had been a period of time - it might have been a few months, but it could have been longer or shorter, memory being the tricky thing it is - when his mother wouldn’t let him play outside after dark with his friends like he usually did. As big a deal as it had been at the time, it was only a faint memory now, but Jeff recalled hearing talk about how there was something wrong . . . something weird going on in the town. He remembered his parents and maybe some other adults using words like
disease
and
infection
to describe what was going on. He had always assumed there was some type of flu bug going around they wanted to protect him from.
Against his better judgment, instead of going back into the bar, Jeff said, ‘You gonna tell me about it, or are you gonna just flap your gums?’