The Line Tender

by Kate Allen

  The drawing looked a little cartoonish, but I felt like I had built the architecture of the scene. I could try to fill in the details later. We usually included one drawing of each animal in the field guide. I wondered whether I would record the contorted fish-out-of-water version of the shark, or if I should eventually draw something that showed the shark in a more natural position for the guide. All of the animals I had drawn before were alive.

  I scratched Fred’s head, to signal that I was finished.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said, turning around to get a look at the drawing. “Looks just like it.”

  I moved closer to the shark to get a better look at the ridges on the serrated teeth, leaning the sketch pad on my left forearm, to make a quick sketch of the steak-knife points. To the left of the shark drawing, the first raindrop hit the page. I finished up the teeth and a quick sketch of the eye before the drops started coming quickly.

  “Get in the car, guys,” said Officer Parrelli, popping the trunk of the cruiser.

  I zipped up my backpack, just as the rain started pelting us.

  “You could fit like four bodies in there,” I said, as Officer Parrelli hefted my bike into the trunk.

  He gave me a look.

  “It was a joke,” I said.

  As we pulled away, I looked out the window at the shark. The rain had picked up and was pelting the snout. The nasty puddle beneath it was growing.

  There were three things on my mind, tangled up like necklaces in a jewelry box—my mom looking me in the eye, the shark that was hanging in the rain, and the empty house I was returning to. None of these felt like problems I could solve.

  I hugged the backpack to my chest and looked at the rain sheeting on the window.

  “She said she wasn’t afraid to swim with them,” I said.

  “What?” Fred asked, turning to me from looking out his side of the cruiser.

  “My mom,” I said. “She wasn’t afraid to swim with sharks.”

  “Yeah, I always thought that was kinda crazy,” he said.

  “Me too,” I said, relieved that Fred felt the same way. “But they left her alone. Maybe she knew how to blend in.”

  “Probably,” he said. “It shook you up when you saw her on TV.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, knowing exactly what he meant.

  “You dropped the phone,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  I could see Officer Parrelli’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  “It took me off guard,” I said. “I’d been thinking about her today because of the shark. When I saw her on TV, it was like she’d read my mind.”

  Fred breathed out through his mouth and looked me in the eye. He didn’t know what to say, but he put his hand against the side of my leg and we just rode like that until the cruiser stopped on the narrow street between our houses.

  “Stay in tonight,” said Officer Parrelli, as he popped the trunk, rain bouncing off the carpet inside. “Go watch TV.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”

  The wind caught the heavy car door and it slammed shut behind me. Fred and I got soaked, pulling the bikes out of the trunk. I was worried about my sketch pad getting wet through the canvas backpack. Fred closed the trunk and Officer Parrelli rolled down the end of Smith Street, making a right toward town again.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I yelled to Fred over the loud rain, as we stood on my side of the road. A narrow river of water ran down the driveway onto Smith Street.

  “You wanna watch the rest of the game at my house?” he said.

  I shook my head. “It’ll be a rainout, or something. I’ll be fine.”

  “Call you in the morning,” he said. “Don’t let your drawings get wet.”

  “I know.” I ran down the driveway.

  Dad’s car wasn’t in the garage. I leaned my bike against the lawnmower and let myself into the house.

  6. Emergency Contacts

  I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, wrapped it around myself like a cape, and flopped into a chair at the kitchen table, thinking about what Officer Parrelli had said. Tomorrow Sookie will cut down it down and dispose of it.

  I went into the kitchen and looked at the phone numbers on the wall, next to a framed picture of Mom and me. There was a list on white paper, stuck to the wall with yellowed Scotch tape that my grandmother—my mother’s mother—had written years ago. Police, fire, Helen and Tom, Ernie and Bea—all the people she might need to call if she needed help. When my grandmother got sick, my parents came and they stayed. And I was born in this house, the year after she died.

  There was another list of phone numbers in my mother’s handwriting. I bet my mom couldn’t take down her mother’s list when she put up her own. Sookie was fourth on Mom’s list, though I had never dialed his number before.

  It was hard to tell which one of my parents had been closer to Sookie. He and my dad grew up on the same street and were best friends. My dad introduced Sookie to my mom in high school and the three of them became close. I remember coming into the kitchen one time and seeing Sookie and Mom sharing a whole pie, laughing about something I didn’t know anything about.

  I picked up the phone and punched in Sookie’s number, wrapping the cape over my shoulders again.

  In the space between the last digit and the first ring, I practiced my line.

  “I think you should call a biologist,” I whispered.

  But it rang and rang. There was no answer.

  7. Isopods

  In the morning, I threw small rocks at Fred’s window from the wet road below. The storm had blown out the July humidity, leaving behind clean air and a dirty road. My foot slipped on mud as I chucked another pebble at Fred’s house.

  Fred’s window slid open and his face moved in toward the screen. I could hear Zeppelin coming from his room.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Why do you listen to that stuff? It’s OLD,” I said, staring up at him while shielding my eyes with my palm.

  “Because it’s GOOD,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Big storm.”

  “I know,” he said. “Did your dad make it home?”

  “Yup. About two thirty this morning.”

  “And he’s back at work already?”

  “Yup. You free?”

  “Sure. What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “I want to talk to Sookie. Let’s go down to the dock.”

  “Okay. Let me just get ready.”

  “Fred,” I called out. “Can you bring me something for breakfast?”

  “Sure,” he said, before walking away from the open window. I was so hungry, he could have brought me a plate of grass and I’d eat it.

  There were branches in the street. I pushed a couple of them to the side of the narrow road as I walked over to Mr. Patterson’s porch to wait for Fred.

  “Morning, Mr. P,” I said, climbing up the stairs. Mr. Patterson was sitting on the porch, in a pair of pants with no wrinkles and a collared shirt. It wasn’t that he was into ironing his slacks, as he would call them. They were just made of synthetic material that never wrinkled. It was big in the 1970s, “which must have been when he stopped shopping,” my mother had once said. “Probably not long before Mrs. Patterson died.”

  He might not have cared about his clothes anymore, but his hair was always combed into a neat white hairdo. Fred and I liked Mr. Patterson. He was never too busy to talk.

  “Hello, Lucy. Did you lose power last night?”

  I took a seat. The police radio farted. “We must have. The clock was blinking this morning. I slept through the whole thing.”

  “Well, then you missed a lot.”

  “Like what?” I asked, pointing to the scanner on the table between us.

  “Trees down. Po
wer outages. There was a break-in on Marmion Way,” he said, pointing southeast. “And the shark is gone.”

  My stomach bottomed out. “Sookie took it down?” I asked.

  “No. That’s the unusual thing. They have been saying on the radio that Sookie reported it missing.”

  “Where did it go?” I asked.

  “The police don’t know yet,” he said, shaking his head.

  Fred’s screen door slammed shut and Fred walked out into the street before spotting me on Mr. Patterson’s porch. He came jogging up the steps and handed me a bagel wrapped in tinfoil. It was still warm from the toaster.

  “Thanks,” I said, unwrapping the package.

  “What are you guys talking about?” He looked from Mr. Patterson’s face to mine, which must have looked confused. Fred’s brow furrowed.

  “The shark is gone,” I said, my lips slick with salty butter.

  “What?”

  “And Sookie doesn’t know anything about it.”

  In seconds, Fred and I were on our bikes. I steered with one hand and ate the bagel with the other. The storm had made a mess of the beach, dredging up everything in the ocean and dumping it on the sand—seaweed, logs, and trash. The sewer drain sounded like a river.

  Even though it was barely nine, tourists were just beginning to clog the sidewalks. We rode on the narrow street, past the big white Congregational church and the Art Association. The door to Tuck’s Candies was wide-open. I could smell chocolate as we whizzed by. Fred and I coasted downhill, whirring like ghosts as we curved right at the fork. We turned onto the wharf. Two Rockport PD cruisers sat by the hoist. Sookie stood with his father, Paulie, and Lester. The straps that had suspended the shark from the hoist had been sliced and frayed. They dangled in a sinister way. The shark was really gone.

  We crossed the gravel lot to the dock where the fishermen stood.

  “Where’s the shark?” I asked, looking from Sookie to Officer Parrelli. They looked like opposites—Sookie with bedhead and Officer Parrelli in uniform.

  “It’s gone,” Sookie said.

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I mean gone,” he repeated, irritated. Sookie touched the torn strap.

  I looked at Officer Parrelli. “What happened? I thought you were watching the shark?”

  “There was a break-in on Marmion Way. People take precedence over dead sharks, Lucy.”

  Fred was looking up at the straps, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Do you think someone took it?” he asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Officer Parrelli answered. “Something must have happened during the night. It could have been a prank, but it’d be next to impossible to move that shark.”

  Officer Parrelli walked over to his cruiser and sat in the front seat with the door open, scrawling something in a notebook. I scooted my bike up to Sookie and Paulie. Sookie’s face looked redder than usual.

  Sookie turned to Paulie. “I don’t know what’s worse—some moron stealing my shark or hauling that thing twenty miles to shore only to have it fall in the harbor.”

  I could tell that Sookie was in a mood, and while I wanted to bombard him with questions, I figured it was the wrong time. Besides, Officer Parrelli was striding across the gravel lot toward us. Sookie headed him off.

  “Anything else? I gotta go make some money. It’s already too friggin’ late in the day.”

  “No, nothing new. Maybe I will have something for you by the time you come back to the wharf.”

  Sookie nodded, and he and Paulie set off for the boat.

  “Bye,” I said.

  Paulie turned around and waved.

  “See you, Lucy,” Sookie said.

  Officer Parrelli drove away.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked Fred.

  He looked up at the hoist with the frayed straps hanging down. “I don’t know, Lucy. Remember how many guys it took to carry that thing? I don’t know how anyone would have left the parking lot with the shark without being seen. This town has like a million eyes in the summer and all of the houses are on top of each other. I bet something happened during the storm.”

  “Well, what if it fell in the water? Then what?”

  “Then it becomes food for the scavengers—the isopods.”

  “What’s an isopod?”

  “They look like giant wood lice. They eat carcasses of big fish and whales.”

  I held up my hands to stop him from explaining. “What a waste.”

  I dumped my bike and walked over to the edge of the lot and peered into the water. I half expected to see the shark’s white belly stretched out at the bottom of the harbor, as though its weight had split the bands and the shark had just sunk to the seafloor. But it was too green and murky to see anything.

  “If I ever need to dispose of evidence, that’s where I’m going to put it,” I said, as I headed back to Fred and righted my bike.

  “I guess we don’t need a biologist anymore,” I said.

  Fred looked as though he might cry.

  8. Real Women

  I think losing the shark bothered Fred so much that he had to get out of Rockport, even for a day. He’d been sitting on his birthday money for a month, waiting for Fiona to take us on the train into the city, to Newbury Comics, to browse through music, comic books, and assorted thingamajigs. When she finally had nothing better to do, she sat beside us on the commuter rail into North Station. We followed her underground like baby mice to the Green Line and the Red Line, until we popped out on a dirty street in crowded Harvard Square.

  Fred took the lead and we headed for The Garage, the sound of drumsticks on buckets fading away. I was annoyed because I’d wanted to stop at the art store for some pens for the field guide with the money my dad had given me—a ten-minute mission. But going to a music store with Fred required extreme patience. It was as if he looked at every album in the store before making a decision. He could spend hours there. Fiona looked back at me and rolled her eyes, trying to keep pace.

  The Garage was an old parking ramp that had been converted to a mini-mall. It wound in a spiral, with stores and restaurants on different levels. The smell of pizza instantly made me want to eat. Fred was practically running, as we hiked uphill to get to the top. When we finally leveled off, my legs were burning.

  “What’s he looking for?” Fiona asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Fred passed under the neon letters over the store entrance like he was crossing a finish line. The music from Newbury Comics spilled into The Garage, becoming louder as Fiona and I followed Fred inside. The store was large, but it didn’t take me long to spot the back of his head in the jazz section. Fred had played trumpet in the school jazz band since sixth grade, but he didn’t listen to jazz at home. Fred liked Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and a bunch of other old bands that I could barely tolerate. I decided to give him a few minutes to find what he was looking for before dragging him out to get some pizza.

  While we waited, Fiona spun a rack of sunglasses, and the next thing I knew, we were trying on pairs together. Fiona was the art-school version of Snow White with short black hair, ivory skin, and glossy rosebud lips. She could turn a pillowcase into a skirt and make it look like it belonged in a magazine. Fiona put on a pair of sci-fi sunglasses that were just a bar across her eyes. I would’ve never noticed them if Fiona hadn’t put them on first. On her face, they were the perfect balance of weird and cool. I grabbed the exact glasses and put them on.

  “Twins,” I said, looking into the mirror. Except they looked completely different on me. It was like she was the front woman of a punk band and I was a pubescent alien. We laughed.

  “These,” she said, as she slid a new pair of frames onto my face, giving me goose bumps.

  I looked in the mirror again. She nodded.

  I looked at the lavender, cat’s
eye glasses. As a rule, I didn’t like pink and purple, but the color made my red hair pop. I looked at Fiona like she was some kind of a witch.

  Wearing the glasses, I wandered into the comic-book section of the store and randomly pulled a comic off a rack. The Punisher War Journal. There was a heavily armed woman on the cover, screaming. It looked like she was literally jumping into a disaster, wearing a black scuba suit and a red jacket that a piano teacher would wear for a holiday recital. On her torso, there was a white skull that matched the Marvel Punisher icon on the cover. Her breasts were the eyes of the skeleton face, which drew my eyes to them even faster.

  “Real women don’t look like that,” Fiona said.

  “I know.”

  Fiona was wearing a new pair of sunglasses with square lenses. She leaned over my shoulder. “I don’t look like that,” she said.

  “Me either,” I said. “What am I gonna look like?”

  Fiona shrugged. “Probably like your mom.”

  “Do you look like your mom?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” she said. “Bodies change.”

  I looked at the comic-book woman’s huge gun.

  “She looks pretty tough, though,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I noticed the way the artist defined her huge muscles using light and dark and how her knee was foreshortened, just like we were taught in art class.

  “She’s flying off the page,” I said. I wondered how I could do that with the shark in the field guide, show movement with just lines.

  I flipped through the pages to see other examples.

  “Real men don’t look like that either,” Fiona said.

  She headed for the music section and I spotted Fred. He was still looking through a stack of albums.

  “What’d you find?” I asked.

  He did a double take and gave me a look. “Nice glasses.”

  I pulled the album from under his arm. Miles Davis. I glanced at the title: Bitches Brew. Fred knew that I hated the b-word. I looked at him and he shrugged apologetically.