Float Page 3

  “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 ba
ck 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.

  “Hmm,” Slocum said at last. “No response.” He gave Duncan a worried look, then smiled. “We’ll have to preserve you in a specimen jar and bring you to the science fair—the non-responsive wonder.”

  Annuncia appeared at Duncan’s side. She was still in her work clothes. Her red smock, with Seacrest’s embroidered in white on the pocket, strained at the hips and was streaked with black fish powder. Her bushel of dark hair was pulled up under a tight red snood. “Hull-sucking sea worm,” she said, turning back to face Kendrie, who did not look up from his mountain of onion rings. “There are fishermen who make a living fishing, and then there’s an industry that wants to make a killing,” she said even louder. When Kendrie refused to rise to the bait, she picked up her takeout bag. “Don’t look at me like that, Dun’n.”

  “We need every customer we can get right now, Annuncia. Don’t single him out for killing off the human race. You’re as subtle as a pile driver.”

  “Whale balls. Puddingheads like Kendrie, they’ve got to understand what the stakes are. It’s not like we can go somewhere else when we fuck it all up. This band of temperature, this mix of oxygen—it’s all we can live in, and it all depends on the ocean to keep it stable. Kendrie’s Neanderthal skull can’t compute that saving the ocean means saving his own sorry ass.”

  “Can this wait until our business is a little more stable?” Duncan whispered.

  “Dun’n, don’t compromise yourself for money.”

  “I have nothing left to compromise myself for.”

  She looked around the restaurant. “Where’s Wade? He’s giving me a ride home.”

  “Here!” Wade stepped out of the walk-in cooler behind Slocum. After work, he sometimes ran fish from his cousin’s boat to local restaurants. He wanted to save family fishing boats in the same way that family farms had become a national cause. He was so disgusted with the corporately owned industrial fleet that he frowned on Seacrest’s accepting its fish waste, which was substantial. Between Wade’s local fishing and Annuncia’s green fish, Duncan felt as if the financial health of Seacrest’s was far down on his employees’ lists of priorities.

  “We’re leaving, Dun’n,” said Annuncia. “Come on, Wade. See you Monday, boss.”

  “Wait.” Wade picked up a Support local fishing bumper sticker from a pile on the counter and handed one to Duncan. “I know you’ll want one of these. To save the fishes.” And with this he slapped his heart.

  “Of course,” said Duncan, and he moved to put it in his pocket, but Wade pulled it from his grasp.

  “I’ll put it on the truck for you on my way out,” he said. “No problem.”

  Duncan cringed. Yes, local boats needed every extra consideration to survive, but so did he. He hoped Kendrie, or any of the other factory boat captains, would not recognize his truck.

  Annuncia and Wade smiled at him as they turned away, but come next Friday when there was no paycheck, they would eat him alive. He wanted to reach out and pull them to his chest so he could point to the crumbling edge of the cliff on which they all stood. But that would only cause panic, and God knows he already had plenty of that.

  When the door closed behind them, he looked around the restaurant, as long and narrow as a shipping container, filled with the comforting warmth of human bodies. Young lovers dipped fried oysters in tartar sauce and brought them to each other’s mouths; children licked ketchup from white paper cups and got it on their noses; married couples eyed dishes sprung from Slocum’s misplaced imagination, smiled, and dared each other to go first. They were happy. Duncan could be happy. He should take Josefa’s advice and devote his energy to getting back with Cora and let Seacrest’s sink or swim on its own. He could not play God; he could not part the sea. And besides, maybe next week the banks would reconsider. After all, wouldn’t they rather keep him as a customer they could continue to suck dry than lose him to bankruptcy? He felt light and free at the thought, as if he were floating above his earthly troubles. He smiled as he saw Slocum pack up his order, he smiled as he handed him the credit card, and he kept right on smiling past the point when his card was rejected.

  “Sorry,” said Slocum, handing it back to him.

  Duncan ran his thumb over the raised, useless numbers on his plastic. The bank must have found out that he’d paid out of pocket for payroll that day, and to make sure he didn’t put it on his card the following week—which he’d been considering—they must have canceled it altogether.

  “I’m supposed to cut it in half,” whispered Slocum. “But you keep it. Pay me whenever. And wait.” He held up a batter-coated finger and called to a waitress. “Bag up a special for Duncan here.”

  Duncan adjusted his glasses as if it had all been a matter of faulty vision. Either an embarrassing silence had swept across the room or else he had a case of hysterical deafness. Slocum placed a bag on top of his box. “Pulpo gallego! That’ll cure what ails you.” He lowered his voice and put a hand on Duncan’s shoulder. “Call me, my friend, we’ll get you back on course. Remember—a dead calm comes before a new wind.”

  Duncan gave him a sickly smile and left. In a time like this, if all his best friend could do was to give him some oily octopus and a maritime platitude for comfort, then the end could not be very far away.

  four

  Balancing the grease-stained bag of pulpo on the box of calzone, Duncan climbed the irregular steps of the wraparound porch of his childhood home, the octagonal beast that had come down through his mother’s side of the family. All was dark except for the third floor, whose glow extended up into the glass cupola that topped the roof, like a baby beacon to match the lighthouse at the curved tip of Batten Cove. When he paused at the door to straighten out the sea-grass welcome mat with his foot, the fibers clung to his sole. The mat created more debris than it caught, an
d yet it stayed, year after year, deteriorating but not going away. His legs became immobile, and he could not move. As the heat of the food dissipated into the air, he felt his own body cooling down with it. How had he regressed to this? Neither he nor Cora had intended that he go live with his mother. He wasn’t even sure she knew he was here. She’d have a field day with that, but he could not continue to live above Manavilins. Sleeping on Slocum’s sofa, numb from the barstool remedies for marital woes pressed upon him by friends and wrapped in a blanket of fryer fumes, he felt himself sliding back into the stupor of college life. Every night he seemed to sink deeper into emotional time, until one day he went to his mother’s house to do his laundry and never left. Now it was beginning to feel normal, and he worried he might never find his way out again.

  A mosquito buzzed his ear. “On we go,” he said, with weak determination. He grabbed hold of the unpolished knob as he pushed his shoulder against the door, a rough-hewn slab that looked like a boat hatch. Its ornate keyhole served many purposes—decoration, spying, letting in the northwest wind—but locking was not one of them. It had no key. According to family lore, his mother’s great-great-grandmother, Ethel Tarbell, asked to be buried with it so she could let herself back in “later on.” It wasn’t that she was crazy enough to ask—which, by all accounts, she most certainly was—but that old man Tarbell was daft enough to grant her wish, and for generations the house stood waiting for a ghost that never arrived. No one thought to have the lock replaced or to have another key made, but after his recent encounter with Beaky Harrow, security was much on Duncan’s mind. The only deterrent to intruders was the fact that the doors and windows in the house were usually swollen shut from the damp sea air. With one practiced shove, the door released with a start, and then he closed it behind him with a kick. He’d offered to take the door off its hinges and plane it, but his mother refused, claiming that the kick forced people to knock the sand off their shoes.