The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  The boy is not there.

  Dorotea sweats outside the firelight. Pine needles stick to her knees. Mosquitoes loop, alight, bite. She smears them on her skin. The smoke from the bonfire rises into a windless sky. She holds her breath so long that her eyes lose focus and her chest stings. She goes over the soft smeary faces once more, orange firelit kids around a bonfire on Harpswell Point. His face is not among them. He is nowhere.

  She walks around to the point, a place she has learned so well, the small and secret coves, a deep pool where she saw a white lobster one morning. All the secrets she feels she owes to him. She knows she will see him there, fishing and laughing that she wore her sweater on the hottest night ever. He will be there and he will show her things about the sea. He will lift this cargo that has settled on her.

  He is not on the point either.

  She goes back to the bonfire, walks right to it, this fourteen-year-old girl wound up and strong. The Harpswell kids stare at her. She feels the heat of it. Smoke rolls into her eyes. She says the boy’s name.

  He’s gone, someone says. They look at her, then look away. They stare at the fire.

  Back to Boston. A week ago. His whole family went back. He’s summer people.

  Dorotea walks away. She walks blind; pine boughs scrape her face. She trips, falls into wet grass. Her knees grass-stained, muddy, scratched. She comes to a gravel road. Her head is down. Her insides churn. She passes driveways, a house with windows lit television blue. A dog barks. She hears an owl. Turns down a paved road. Passes a lumberyard. A part of her realizes she is lost. She feels cold very far inside and the sky could not hang lower.

  She walks and runs and she is barefoot and cannot shake the cold inside and could not say which direction the ocean is. She walks a mile, more maybe. The road turns from gravel to pavement. She sits a while and shivers. An hour goes by, then another. The sky turns pink. A truck rattles along the road, fenders sagging, one headlight burned out. It slows beside her. A man in glasses leans across, pushes open the door. She gets in, asks him to the ironworks.

  He lets her off at the high chain-link gate. Her legs are scratched red and muddy, her hair hangs in clumps. Men in caps carry lunchboxes, hurry past her; a Mercedes rolls by, tinted windows and tires crunching gravel. She follows the men through the gate. There is a sign that reads OFFICE. A fat man with a badge in a booth. Beyond him a great corrugated warehouse, a crane swinging. Stacks of culvert pipes on a barge.

  She knocks on the man’s window; he looks up from a clipboard.

  My father, she says. Santiago San Juan. He forgot his lunch. I would like to bring it to him.

  The fat man pushes up his glasses, studies her, her brown and scraped feet. Her shaking fingers. Looks down at the clipboard. Flips through sheets. Glances through time cards.

  What did you say the name was?

  San Juan.

  The fat man studies her again. And finally looks back at the clipboard. San Juan, he says. Here he is. Dock C-Four. Around back.

  She follows arrows to C-4, a concrete pier with a heavy crane hanging above and bordered by boxcars in high stacks. Men in suits and ties and hard hats walk past, rolled plans under their arms. A beeping forklift wheels; the driver gives her a hard look.

  She finds her father at the pier’s edge by a big blue Dumpster, where the river rolls past dirty. Stryofoam cups bob in the current. Gulls screech around the Dumpster, a flurry of white and gray feather. Her father wears tan and grimy coveralls. He holds a broom. Waves it weakly at the gulls. The gulls scream, dive-bomb his head.

  He turns, sees her. Their eyes meet. He looks away.

  Dorotea.

  Daddy. All this time. All these months. You said you were building ships. She cannot say more. She shakes with cold. Stands beside him. He leans on his broom. They watch the river roil out to sea. They stand and Dorotea shivers and her father holds her and still she shivers.

  A destroyer is towed in from the horizon. A throbbing of the tug’s engines, behind it the quiet gray behemoth rolls a giant wake and Dorotea sees the numbers painted on the sides and ship-sinking cannons that look so calm and clean. Its hull is big as an apartment building; she wonders how she could ever believe her father could learn about something so big. How anyone could learn about something so big.

  Dorotea stays cold. She can’t shake it and she gets sick. She lies in her sleeping bag all day. Her fly rod leans against the wall of her room. She can’t look at it. The ocean in her ears makes her sick. The whole world’s turning makes her sick. She feels frost creep up from somewhere between her legs and it climbs all the way to her neck. She holds her breath as long as she can, and then longer, until her vision goes splotchy, until at last a switch inside she can’t control throws itself and the air pours out and back in and her vision straightens a bit.

  She curls in her sleeping bag and shivers and dreams of winter blowing in. The sea cement gray and the horizon burying the sun before it ever gets a chance to get going. Nights winterlong. Stars like the points of hooks. Snow creaking under her bare feet. In her dream she crouches on Harpswell Point and watches the wind blow down the wavetops. The boy is nowhere. There is nobody anywhere, no birds, no fish. The fish have fled, left the river, darted into the widening sea in schools. The ocean and river emptied. The rocks scoured of limpets, barnacles, weed. There are horrible tangles of lines around her ankles, thick ropes, coiled spider webs. She becomes a fish flailing in a net. She becomes her father. His whole world a nasty tangle.

  Her mother is there when she wakes. She brings Dorotea hot water. Her mother now a fraction softer with this role to play. Her mother with Dorotea back, still half-believing her husband is somehow managing to design hulls of ships. Dorotea looks at her mother by her side, at the tight and narrow cords in her mother’s neck. Dorotea has cords like that in her own neck. She lies half-asleep and listens to her mother move through the house, hears her wash pans in the sink.

  Early August. A knock on the door at dawn. A rapping so loud and out of place that Dorotea jumps from her sleeping bag. She is at the door before her mother has left the kitchen. Heat crackling inside her. She squints into the morning. A massive figure in the door frame. The giant from the hardware store. In his giant hand a sleek fly rod.

  His voice is so loud the tiny house can’t hold it. Morning, morning, he booms. Thought you might like to do a bit of fishing this morning. If you have the time.

  He looks only at Dorotea and Dorotea stands in her sleeping clothes and smells the giant who smells like sea and pine. Her mother peers out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.

  They walk along Popham Beach, the giant’s huge strides eating up yards. She half-jogs to keep up. The day blue and true all the way to the horizon. They wade out to fish side by side. Dorotea feels the ocean tugging at her legs. The giant fishes with a cigarette bobbing from his lip. Occasionally watches her cast, smiles at her tangles, praises her when she lays it out nicely.

  The giant fishes ugly. His line does not dance beautifully; he does not bother with the false casting the boy did. He just flings it back once, then sends it singing over the wavetops. Strips it in with one giant pink hand. Casts again.

  Fishing is about time, he tells Dorotea. It’s about how much time you can keep your line in the water. Can’t catch fish if your line isn’t in the water.

  They fish until noon and catch nothing and they sit on a piece of driftwood. The giant has raisins in a plastic bag and they eat those. She asks him questions and he answers and she feels the sun straight overhead touch a spot inside her.

  In the afternoon the giant begins to catch striped bass, one after another, his line shooting way out there, and each time his rod tip bends into a steep parabola and he fights the fish in and knocks one over the head with a rock and puts it in a plastic shopping bag and leaves it on the beach.

  In the evening Dorotea stands beside him and watches the giant gut his striper, his quick belly cut, loops of viscera swinging into the surf. T
his is Maine, too, she thinks, this fisherman cleaning a fish on the sand and she realizes that new or old she is Dorotea, will always be Dorotea, that there are still plenty of chances left in this world.

  When the giant leaves with his fish, he looks at Dorotea and smiles and tells her she is a fine fisherwoman and wishes her luck. Buena suerte, he says, which is funny because he sounds like a giant gringo from Maine when he says it, but it is nice all the same.

  Dorotea casts still and the horizon slowly fixes itself down around the sun. Her arm burns from the effort, but she is making nice casts now, she is laying it out there, presenting her streamer like the giant showed her, and she is reading the water too, seeing how a fish might sit in a cove, hole up. She watches for passing bait fish or the birds that might be feeding on them. Her arm goes leaden. Her legs numb. Her legs feel more connected to the ocean than to her.

  The sunset, a furnace of light, paints the clouds with color. And it sends, too, submerged wedges of light into the cove where Dorotea strips in her streamer and for a miraculous moment she sees her streamer flit through a haft of blue and that is when a striped bass takes it.

  The fish is strong and she fights it and her rod bends more than she ever imagined it could and she swallows panic by slowly walking the fish backward to the beach. The fish thrashes, fights her treachery. Dorotea clings. Feels its strength come through the line. Such noble fight. Such fighting for its life. She fights too.

  When finally she lands it, she drags it gasping and flopping onto the sand and stands over it and works the hook out of its mouth. This big striped translucent fish in the near-dark. She pinches it by the lower jaw, holds it up and stares into its big unintelligent eyes.

  She cradles the fish in her arms and wades out into the sea. To her shoulders. Takes a deep breath, holds it in her lungs. She holds the fish beside her. Feels its muscles, its packed columns of flesh. Feels her own muscles, sore and ragged and strong. She lowers herself into the sea. Counts to twenty. Lets the fish swim.

  FOR A LONG TIME THIS WAS GRISELDA’S STORY

  In 1979 Griselda Drown was a senior volleyballer at Boise High, a terrifically tall girl with trunky thighs, slender arms and a volleyball serve that won an Idaho State Championship despite T-shirts claiming it was a team effort. She was a gray-eyed growth spurt, orange-haired, an early bloomer, and there were rumors about how she took boys two at a time in the dusty band closet where the dented tubas and ruptured drums were kept, about how she straddled the physics teacher, about her escapades during study hall with ice cubes. They were rumors; whether they were true or not didn’t matter. We all knew them. They might as well have been true.

  Griselda’s father was long gone; her mother worked two shifts at Boise Linen Supply. Her younger sister, Rosemary, too short and plump to play, was equipment manager for the team. She sat on a fold-up chair and flipped scoreboard switches, penciled statistics, occasionally pumped air into flat volleyballs while the coach made the team run windsprints.

  It began on an August afternoon, after practice, with Griselda on the sidewalk, in the shadow of the bricked gymnasium, a social studies book slipped under one long arm, listening to the airbrakes of school buses and the wind rasping in a thin school-front stand of aspens. Her sister, curly-headed, eyes just clearing the dash, pulled up in the rust-pocked Toyota the girls shared with their mother. They headed for the Idaho Fairgrounds, the Great Western Fair, Griselda in the front seat with her big knees wedged against the glove box, leaning her long face out the window to catch the wind. Rosemary drove slowly, stopped completely at stop signs, was clumsy with the clutch. They didn’t speak.

  At the fairgrounds we saw them in the parking lot inhaling the effluvium of carnival, the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinnamon, the flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs, voluptuous sounds bouncing down tent ropes and along the trampled dust of the midway. Wind-curled handbills staple-gunned to telephone poles, the hum of gas-powered generators and the gyro truck, the lemonade truck, pretzels and popcorn, baked potatoes, the American flag, the rumblings of rides and the disconnected screams of riders—all of it shimmered before them like a mirage, something not quite real.

  Griselda strode to the rope-gate entrance, the ticket seller’s cage, where a dwarfish ticket taker stood on a stool, and Rosemary plodded behind, the foothills of Boise lifting beyond the tent peaks, brown and hazed, into a pale sky. Griselda dug a pair of wrinkled singles from her pocket and passed them through.

  This is how we told Griselda’s story, later, in check-out lanes or in the bleachers during volleyball games: two sisters strolling the midway, single file, Griselda in the lead and Rosemary behind. They bought cotton candy for a quarter, moved about with faces half-wrapped in a pink cumulus of sugar, plodding through the catcalls of game operators: Squirt the gun in the clown’s mouth! Break the balloon, now, girls! They paid quarters to sling rings over Coke bottlenecks. Rosemary pulled a rubber ducky from a water trough with a fishing pole and won a small and smudgy panda with plastic button eyes and a scowl made of thread.

  The sunlight went long and orange. The sisters drifted among the booths and rides, feeling vaguely sick, cotton candy dissolving in their mouths. Finally, in the purpling dusk, they arrived at the metal eater’s tent, at the far corner of the fairgrounds. A crowd had gathered, men mostly, in jeans and boots. Griselda stopped, hipped herself a place between them, easily saw over the capped and hatted heads. There was a card table at the back of the tent, set up from the ground on risers, spotlit yellow. She smelled the rubber tent-smell, saw the lazy lift of insects in the spotlight, heard the men around her discuss the impossibility and strangeness of metal eating.

  Rosemary couldn’t see. She shifted from foot to foot. She mentioned that they should go—it was getting late. The crowd filled in behind them. Griselda tore off a puff of cotton candy and pressed it into the roof of her mouth with her tongue. She studied her sister, the panda hanging from her fist. I could lift you, she offered. Rosemary blushed, shook her head. It’s a metal eater, Griselda whispered. I’ve never seen one. I don’t even know what one is. It’ll be fake, Rosemary said. It won’t be real. This kind of stuff is never real. Griselda shrugged.

  The sisters looked at each other. I want to see it, Griselda insisted. I can’t see it, Rosemary whined. Now it was Griselda’s turn to shake her head. Then don’t, she said. Rosemary’s face went stern and hurt. She clumped off toward the car, the panda against her chest like a rueful child. Griselda watched the stage.

  Soon the metal eater came out, and the men in the tent quieted, and there was only the whispering of the crowd and the slow looping of insects in the yellow spotlight and, far off, the plink-plinking of the carousel. The metal eater was a tidy-looking man in a business suit, trim and small and mannered. Griselda stood transfixed. What a man he was, what glinty spectacles, what shiny shoes, what a neatness to his construction, what pinstripes and cufflinks to wear to eat metal in Boise, Idaho. She had never seen a man like him.

  He seated himself at the raised-up table, moving with a delicacy and tidiness that made Griselda want to charge the stage, throw herself upon him and smother him, consume him, flail her body against his. He was madly different, significant, endlessly captivating; she must have discerned something deep beneath his surface, something less acutely evident to the rest of us.

  He produced a razor blade from a vest pocket and slit a sheet of paper lengthwise with it. Then he swallowed it. He kept his eyes on hers without blinking. His Adam’s apple jerked furiously. He swallowed a half dozen razors, then bowed and disappeared behind the tent. The crowd clapped politely, almost confusedly. Griselda’s blood boiled over.

  When Rosemary returned to that place after dusk, indignant and frizz-haired, the metal-eating show was long done and Griselda was long gone, leaning over a plate of sausage patties in the Galaxy Diner on Capitol. Her eyes were still on the gray eyes of the metal eater and his were still on hers. By midnight she was gone from Bo
ise altogether, lying across the bench seat of a Ryder truck, the metal eater crossing into Oregon and Griselda’s head in his lap, his thin fingers in her hair, his little feet stretching for the pedals.

  In the morning Mrs. Drown made Rosemary tell her story to a traffic cop who yawned, thumbs through his belt loops. But you aren’t even writing it down, Mrs. Drown stammered. Griselda was eighteen, he told her, what should he be writing down. By law she was a woman. He pronounced woman loudly and carefully. Woman. He said to have hope. He’d heard the same story a thousand times. She’d come home eventually. They always did.

  Around school the stories about Griselda took on teeth and venom, even left the school and lived for a while in produce sections and movie queues. She’ll be back soon, we told each other, and boy will she be sorry, dashing off with a carnival freak twice her age, a bad seed anyway, you wouldn’t believe the things she’d do. Probably knocked up by now. Or worse.

  Mrs. Drown went sour immediately. We’d see her in Shaver’s Supermarket after work, shrunken, embittered, a basket of celery hung on an arthritic forearm, a handkerchief knotted around her neck. She imagined herself moving at the center of a pocket of formalities—Why, Mrs. Drown, this rain is something, isn’t it?— while her daughter’s story spun all around her, circulating in the town’s whispers, just outside her hearing.

  Within a month she refused to leave home. She got fired. Her friends stopped coming by. They talk too much anyhow, is what she told Rosemary, who had dropped out of school to take her job at Boise Linen. Who talks too much, Mom? Everybody. Everybody talks behind your back. You turn your back and off they go, talking at you, telling each other stories they don’t know the first thing about.

  Of course, it wasn’t long before we stopped talking about Griselda. She didn’t come back. There was nothing new or interesting about a portly sister who worked fourteen hours a day or a mother made bitter by a lost daughter. There were new bodies in the high school, new fodder for rumors. Griselda’s story was scrapped for lack of new material.