The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  Griselda herself answered, leaning through the open door, one foot on the running board, stooped so she could push her head out, orange hair framing her face. She looked like a very tall Rosemary, squinting at him like Rosemary did when she was trying to figure something out. I’m Duck Winters, Duck said. I know all about you. He stammered, he smiled, he asked if she would like to come over the house for tea, or beer, or whatever. I think you should see your sister, he said. It might be good. I lost my job today. He tried for a smile that was more like a shrug. Griselda smiled back. Okay, she said. Once the truck gets loaded.

  So that’s how it came to be that Duck Winters drove through the snowy and quiet residential streets of Boise’s North End, steering slowly and cautiously home, after midnight, with a lurid eighteen-wheeler inches from his rear bumper, its roof knocking snow from overhanging branches.

  Rosemary woke to airbrakes sighing in the street. She heard boots on the front walk, low voices, and the refrigerator door unstick as it opened. She pushed herself up in bed. Duck appeared, prancing down the hall, tracking snow along the rug. His hair was slicked down with sweat, his cheeks flushed. He put his mittened hands on her shoulders. Rosie, he hissed, you awake? You’re not going to believe it. He was bursting over. You’re just not go-ing to be-lieve it.

  He took her by the wrists, pulled her out of bed, her hair frizzed, wearing only a tight T-shirt and green sweatpants. He hauled her down the hall, through the melting tracked-in snow, to stand in the kitchen doorway and behold her sister, seated at the kitchen table, towering and radiant and glittering in a red kimono, holding hands with a little man in a black tweed suit with an awkward look on his face. On the table, in front of each of them, stood an unopened can of beer.

  Rosemary found it impossible to look at Griselda—her presence was too solar for this kitchen with its cracked countertops and veneered cabinets, a box of stale doughnuts, a wilted amaryllis slumped out of its plastic pot, a porcelain Santa on the windowsill that should have been put away weeks ago. Moonlight fell in parallelograms through the kitchen window. In the basin of the sink sat a bowl half full of sludgy cereal.

  Duck squeezed past her, fussing, twitching about with little jumps, his belly quivering under his jacket. This is your sister, he gushed, and her husband, Gene. You should have seen them tonight, Rosie, the show they put on. It was incredible! Incredible! You’d never believe it! You guys should talk, Rosie, you and your sister, is what I was thinking, it’s her first time home in twenty years! She said she wrote a letter. It was nice of them to come, wasn’t it? Their truck’s outside. They actually live in their truck! We have tea if you guys don’t like that beer.

  Out the kitchen window Rosemary saw many of us—maybe two dozen neighbors—laboring across the lawn, figures examining the cab of the metal eater’s truck, faces peering in the living room window. Griselda asked Rosemary if she’d been getting the letters and Rosemary managed to nod her head. Griselda said something about the new light fixture above the sink, about how it was nice. Rosemary watched a slushy bootprint turning to water on the kitchen floor.

  Duck was toddling around the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge. He offered the guests summer sausage, noodle salad, pushed a can of beer into Rosemary’s hand and announced that the metal eater had an entire suit of armor inside his stomach, right here, Rosie, in our very own kitchen. Isn’t it something?

  Rosemary stood rigid and barefoot in the doorway. Her sister, the men, the peeping neighbors and the eighteen-wheeler outside—all this loomed in the outskirts of her vision. She blinked her eyes several times. The beer can in her hand was cold. The bootprint of snow on the kitchen tile was turning to water.

  She moved through the kitchen, set the beer on the table and tore a paper towel from the rack under the sink. She swabbed at the bootprint on the floor, watched the paper absorb the gray slush. Duck and me, she said, we’ve been married fifteen years. You know that, Griselda? Her voice didn’t shake and she was glad for it.

  She stood and leaned on the table, the damp and crumpled paper towel in her fist. You know Mom would go to sleep with one of your volleyball trophies in her arms? You know that after she died we poured out her ashes in the backyard? Did you know that? At work I dye giant sheets of linen and guide them onto spools all day. That’s what Mom used to do; she used to do that while we were at school. Every day.

  She took Duck’s hand and held it. I used to want to leave, she said. I used to want to get out of Boise so bad. But this—she gestured at the kitchen, the bowl of abandoned cereal, the amaryllis and the porcelain Santa—this is a life at least. This is a place to come home to.

  Griselda had begun to cry, quiet sobs like whispers. Rosemary stopped. A moment like this—the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp—could never accommodate all the things she had to say. She went to the metal eater and took him by the wrist and led him out the door, into the snow. Hey, she yelled, at the eighteen-wheeler, at the foothills standing up white under the moon, at all of us standing there on her lawn. Here he is! I want you all to get a good look. Look at him! She was screaming. You think eating metal is any harder than what I do, than what each of you do? You think this man is amazing? Look at him!

  But—and this is what we remembered later—she was the one we looked at: her hair trembling on her head like flames, her shoulders back, her chest quaking—an image of power and fury. She burned, magnificent, in the snow, barefoot, in a T-shirt and green sweatpants, shouting at us. Griselda appeared and took the metal eater by the arm and led him out to their truck. Duck brought Rosemary inside and shut the door and the lights in the house went off and the curtains snapped shut. We watched the big truck labor into gear and rumble past the drive and each of us filed through the snow back to our homes and the sounds of the night finally faded until there was nothing to hear but snow coming down from the hills and pressing against the windows of our houses.

  A shouting in the streets. The heart wavers, surges to life, wavers again. Griselda’s letters still came once a month and Rosemary and Duck went on living their lives; Duck found work as a grill cook at a steakhouse; Rosemary inherited a beagle from a deceased coworker. This was when Boise was growing like mad and there were always new people around, people building mansions in the hills, people who didn’t know there had ever been a Shaver’s Supermarket.

  Sometimes, in the spring, we’d stroll past the bungalow and see Rosemary on the front step, doing the Find-A-Word in the Statesman, Duck dozing in the chair beside her, the beagle watching us from between their feet. Rosemary would be chewing the end of her pencil, thinking hard, and we’d begin to tell whoever was with us the story and we’d hike up into the hills, gesticulating as we talked, up the steep paths to a place where we could see the mountains beyond the hills, jagged and endless, illuminated under the sun, folding back on each other all the way to the horizon.

  JULY FOURTH

  By July fourth it was all but over. The Americans went to fish the River Neris one last time. They boarded a trolleybus outside the Balatonas Hotel, squeezed shoulder to shoulder with grim Lithuanians—whiskered old ladies, sullen-faced men in thin ties, a miniskirted girl with a cluster of nose rings—and stood in their rubber waders, holding their bamboo poles out the windows to keep them from being snapped. The trolley rolled past the green market stalls and awning-fronted shops on Pilies Street, past the cathedral and belfry below the castle on the promontory. It rattled to a stop at the Zaliasis Bridge and the Americans pushed off and slumped down the slick grassless slope underneath the arches where the river slogged between concrete banks. They spread out along the cobbles, impaled cubes of bread on their hooks, and pitched them into the current.

  At noon they laid down their poles and brooded on the sidewalk stones, not talking. Before long the slim-legged school teacher brought her students to the river, as she had done every noon that week, to point at the Americans and call them fools.

  But the story gets ahead of itself. Fi
rst, the beginning.

  For that we need to be in America, Manhattan, in the leather armchairs of an uptight anglers’ club with mounted marlin, brass urns and hushed speaking. The Americans, retired industrialists, angling members all, sat in a row at the bar, picking at platters of tempura and sipping vodka martinis. Behind them a gang of British sportfishermen were guzzling margaritas and insulting the Americans’ fishing prowess. Things progressed. Soon the Brits were clog-dancing around the billiards tables and hollering indelicate and anti-American boasts of recent shark-fishing successes. The Americans kept dipping their tempura, but eventually took offense.

  There were the standard provocations: tequila, reminders of the Marshall Plan, rudely phrased questions about the queen’s gender and the president’s bedside fancies. It mounted to a challenge, as these things do, and a contest was born. Limeys vs. Yanks. Old World vs. New.

  The contest would consist of this: the first side to land the largest freshwater fish on each of the continents won. A month per continent. The losers had to parade naked through Times Square waving We Can’t Fish placards. Europe would be first. The contest would begin immediately.

  In the morning the hungover Americans conferred over sausage and Bloody Marys. There was parley about where to fish. Hemingway had fished Spain, someone offered, but another argued Papa had fished Germany, not Spain, and in any case had caught nothing. Someone else declared that Teddy Roosevelt once pulled a fifteen-pound bluegill from a Venetian canal, and after that the group grew silent, picturing stout Teddy muscling a panfish the size of a manhole cover into a wobbling gondola, sun blazing in one spectacle lens. Finally they were brought a telephone and a teenager at L.L. Bean told them to try the Finnish Reindeerlands. Two weeks, he raved, in the Reindeerlands and you’ll get your fish.

  So they began it with a pair of nights in Helsinki drinking cognac, placing enormously expensive phone calls to America and flirting with hotel maids. They provided the concierge with a list for provisions: Swedish muesli bars (13 cases) and Norwegian vodka (3 dozen jars).

  Then a train north; then an antique motorbus upholstered with violet velvet; then a wet cabin cruiser forty miles up a black river into the silver moorlands of Lapland. The boat motored on into serious wilderness, silent and soggy, the river flanked by impenetrable-looking thickets. A pair of shaggy bears padded over riverside moraine. The Americans stood at the bow rail looking sick.

  The captain backed the boat beside a rotten dock. Behind it sagged an abandoned gold panner’s hut with wire windows and a leaning chimney. He tossed the Americans’ duffels and rod cases ashore and roared off. The Americans stood on the swaying dock and slapped at mosquitoes. Above them rain came crawling in from the fjords and descended on the river, dull and somber.

  They were wet for two weeks. Each evening, shivering, swabbing their noses with their Gore-Tex sleeves, they splashed to the wind-battered hut, peeled down their waders and pulled fleece jerseys over their wet chests. Fourteen days of this for dinner: fire-blackened chunks of salmon flesh on skewers, muesli bars, and jar after jar of Norwegian vodka, crystal, painful. Outside the river rose cold and tea-colored beneath the ceaseless drizzle.

  They reeled in hundreds of foot-long salmon—nothing bigger. Soggy and headachy, grim-faced, the Americans fished on, into the long dusks and drawn-out dawns, wrapped in shrouds of mosquitoes. Their two weeks expired. The largest fish they hooked was a thirteen-inch salmon they photographed and promptly eviscerated.

  The captain who boated them out brought along a reindeer farmer in furs and a Tartan-plaid scarf who could speak a tortured English. He said if they wanted big fish they ought to fish Poland, a bison reserve called Bialowieza. Huge trouts, he said, and showed them how huge with his hands.

  Back in Helsinki the Americans regrouped over diamond-bone sirloins and Doritos. The waiter brought an envelope: inside was a Polaroid of the Brits beaming over a string of rainbow trout, each more than twenty-four inches, silver bodies shining in the camera flash. In the background the Eiffel Tower shimmered, brilliant and unmistakable in June light.

  Fourteen days to go.

  Two overbooked Lufthansa flights later the undaunted Americans tramped through customs in Warsaw. A savage-looking cabdriver accosted them outside, herded them into a Japanese taxi-van. Ah, he nodded, the bison reserve. Bialowieza. He leaned over his seat and winked. It is risky, you know, this place. Risky-risky.

  He winked more, switched off his meter, then stomped the gas and they went hurtling over a dizzying labyrinth of dirt roads. Wet forests hurtled in and out of view, spindly white birch and giant oaks, and between the forests lay fields or clusters of gray cottages. It was near dark when the minivan skidded to a stop beneath a stand of leafy hornbeams. The driver slid open the door, threw down their gear, announced he’d be back in a week. Once they had their big fish. Wink-wink. Hush-hush. His taxi-van spat gravel on its way out.

  The Americans hiked in. Peat moss country: flat, flooded, lush, bogs between copses of spruce, rotted logs and mucky footing. The forest floated before them, a green and black sponge; insects swirled in gray spires between fungus-chewed trunks.

  Munching muesli bars, the Americans clambered over a series of fences, the first split-rail and the last chain-link. At dark they reached a river, its black riffles barely visible beneath clouds of gnats, and pitched tents under a stand of rattling limes. Their dreams were decorated with the leaps of trophy trout.

  They woke to the black noses of bison snorting rosemary-scented breath through the tents’ mesh windows. A shaggy and horned herd had stalled on the riverbanks, ruminating, drooling green saliva. When the Americans unzipped their way out, they found a bison herder in shorts rooting through their duffels.

  The bison herder had an automatic rifle and wanted nothing to do with bribes. She waited on a bench outside a Belorussian border station eating confiscated muesli bars while helmeted police unscrewed the Americans’ rod cases, peered into their fly boxes and upended their duffels. As a kind of interrogation, a tiny police captain in pump-up basketball shoes asked the dumbfounded Americans a series of questions about pro basketball. Did Patrick Ewing have a wife? How carefully did American refs call the three-second rule? How much did Americans pay for basketball shoes with built-in pumps?

  When he seemed satisfied he nodded, then deflated and repumped one of his sneakers. All this will have to go, he finally said, sweeping his arm over their fishing gear.

  But we only wanted to fish, the Americans insisted. For trout.

  Oh yes, he nodded, repumping the other shoe. Oh yes. There are trouts, big trouts in the Biebzra. He said something to his men and they repeated, Big trouts, and showed the Americans how big with their hands.

  But you see, the little chief shook his head, Americans must not fish here. It is illegal. The czars shot boars here. And before them, Polish kings. Lithuanian princes. All shooting boars.

  We didn’t shoot boars, the Americans said. We didn’t even fish. We were sleeping. We thought we were in Poland.

  Nonetheless, said the chief, removing his helmet, you must play us in basketball for your things.

  There was a dirt court behind the border station: chain nets, plywood backboards. The Belorussians unclipped their police belts and leapt into a series of pregame drills. When the game started they executed backdoor cuts, shot rainbow jumpers, ran the pick and roll to perfection. They beat the befuddled Americans by forty. Afterward the Belorussians hoisted their small chief onto their shoulders and sang to him. The bison herder on her bench unwrapped another muesli bar and cheered placidly.

  The sweaty Americans were ushered onto a motorbus with cracks in the windshield. You will go to Lodz, the chief told them, picking at a thread on his newly won Gore-Tex pullover. Back to Poland. It is lovely there.

  Halfway to Lodz the windshield fell onto the driver and the motorbus plunged into a drainage culvert and rolled onto its side. The passengers climbed out hatches in the roof and squatted by the roadside in a f
ield of buckthorn. It began to rain. The Americans sat in a soggy cluster, mud seeping through their socks.

  Hours later they were shivering on a speeding flatbed between plastic crates of meat chickens heading south to a Slovakian slaughterhouse. They watched southern Poland scroll past, crumbling apartment blocks, buckled roads, rusted cisterns, weathered steeples, haystacks, the skeleton of a Soviet tank grown over with sawgrass—all the unkempt, haphazard Polish gloom. By the time they got to Kraków they were drenched and ravenous and the swarthy Poles in velour jogging suits who smoked cigarettes on street corners shot them wary scowls.

  The Americans were badly discouraged. Twelve days to go, stripped of their gear, sniffling, they huddled in a Kraków McDonald’s and invoked middle-school platitudes about Cornwallis’s surrender and Valley Forge, about pitching crates of tea into Boston Harbor and bloody-soled snow marches for the good of the Republic. We must not quit now, they mumbled, and dipped their chicken nuggets into a tasteless sauce.

  The morning broke blue and the Americans, having dreamed of Washington and Wayne, Bunyan and Balboa, found themselves hopeful: eleven days seemed like enough time to beat some boorish Brits. They cash-advanced their MasterCards and bought rubber waders, bamboo poles, Japanese hooks, three spools of thick monofilament. A Pole at the sporting goods shop insisted they fish a place called Lake Popradské, only an hour away. It’s the place to fish, he gushed. Insane fishing—muskie imported from Minnesota. He demonstrated the impressive length of the lake muskie with his hands.

  By afternoon the Americans were stepping off a bus in the Carpathian Mountains, jaggy summits collared in peacock greens and mustard yellows. Falcons soared above the sprucetops and breezes brought the scent of glacial carnations. The Americans exchanged smiles, felt a renewed cheer as they descended a comfortable, craggy trail that wound deliberately down to a lodge cozied up against a lake.