The Line Tender

by Kate Allen

  “Holy fish,” I whispered, grabbing on to Fred’s gold mermaid around my neck.

  It was an image of a man in a kayak, looking over his shoulder at a large fin sticking out of the water behind him. I skimmed through the article for the key details. The shark followed the kayak, as the man paddled to shore, but then it swam away—no damage to the boat, no injuries.

  White sharks were pretty rare off the coast of Massachusetts. My mom had always said they were there. But up until that summer, I had never heard of a real sighting. Now there had been two in almost as many weeks. That seemed kind of strange. For a second, I had a crazy thought that maybe Fred had sent me the story in the Globe, as a response to my postcard. I shook it off.

  “Dad?” I yelled.

  “What?” he yelled from the couch. “Come here.”

  I stood in the doorway. “Did you read about the white shark on Cape Cod?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I saw that,” he said.

  “What was Mom’s research proposal about?” I asked. “The one that Fiona threw out the window.”

  He made a half smile. “White sharks on Cape Cod.”

  “Do you think the kayak shark is connected to Mom’s study?”

  “Maybe,” he said, nodding.

  “And Sookie’s shark?”

  “Maybe.”

  I ran upstairs, pulled the proposal out of Fred’s backpack, and looked down at the cover page.

  PROPOSAL FOR CAPE COD WHITE SHARK AND GRAY SEAL STUDY

  I opened the proposal, skimmed through the table of contents, and flipped the pages one at a time, trying to make sense of her plan.

  The background section explained the idea of the study like a story. The gray seal population off Cape Cod had shrunk because they had been hunted for their meat, oil, and skins. Then, Congress passed a law to stop humans from killing marine mammals. Slowly, the seals had started to return, and Mom and her research partners were watching them.

  My mom’s interest in the seals was more of an afterthought. She was a shark expert. Fishermen spotted white sharks every once in a while, but they were rare in the waters off Massachusetts. However, it was known that they liked to eat seals, so Mom and her partners thought that if the number of seals off Cape Cod increased enough and the ocean began to warm slightly, the great whites might start coming north. Small seal colonies were starting to form on some of the islands around Nantucket and Cape Cod. Mom had been watching those seal pods for one very large predator.

  The next part of the research was a little more confusing to me because of the technical language. From what I understood, mostly from the illustrations, Mom and the researchers wanted to take a harpoon fishing boat into a stretch of Cape Cod where fishermen had spotted white sharks. A harpoon boat has a long catwalk that hangs over the water, so a fisherman can get closer to the big fish. Like Moby Dick close. Mom and the researchers would have to fit the harpoon with an acoustic tag (whatever that was) that would allow them to track the shark. An experienced fisherman would walk to the end of the plank, launching the tag into the shark’s dorsal fin. Mom had named a fisherman in the proposal: Paul Sawyer. Sookie.

  I walked downstairs and stood in the doorway. Dad was flipping a magazine page.

  “What are you up to?” he asked.

  “Reading,” I said.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “Mom’s study,” I said.

  He looked up from the page. “That’s some light reading,” he said.

  “It’s not bad,” I said. “Did the idea of Mom tagging white sharks freak you out?”

  “She would have had help,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have been able to talk her out of it anyway.”

  “You read the proposal?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “So you knew that Sookie was gonna help her?”

  “Yup,” he said, looking at me sideways, like he wondered where I was going with the question.

  “What about Vern?”

  “Vern wasn’t planning to be on the boat. I think they collaborated on the idea, but your mom was gonna execute it.”

  He rubbed his face and shook out his dark curls with his hand. “What made you and Fred decide to read Mom’s paper?”

  “We were looking for books about white sharks to help with the field guide. And Fred found a bunch of her papers on the shelf,” I said. “But you know when you go to a bookstore and one book stands out from all of the others? And when you read it, you feel like it picked you?”

  “Yup,” he said.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Actually, Fred picked it, but I took it from him.”

  Dad smiled. “What’s that around your neck?” he said.

  I put my hand to my heart and clutched the gold mermaid. It was cold and heavy.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I found it.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “Let me know if you have any questions about Mom’s research,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, stuffing the mermaid into the neck of my shirt. I didn’t want to have to explain the pendant to anybody and I didn’t want anyone to try to take it away. I took the stairs two at a time and went back to my desk.

  I looked down at the research proposal, not ready to tackle the physics of an acoustic tag. I looked out the window across the street. Fred would have been good at figuring out that part.

  I closed the cover of the proposal and pulled the postcards from my drawer and I wrote another note to Fred.

  I hopped on my bike and headed into town with the postcard in my back pocket. I thought about the seals that were multiplying off Cape Cod and how if I ever saw them hanging around the beach, I would stay out of the water. Then, I realized that after what I’d been through, it was unlikely I’d be in the water anyway, so I imagined myself warning others. There weren’t too many animals on the planet that were capable of eating a human and I had conflicting thoughts about this. On the one hand, I understood the fear that people had about sharks, especially a great white. The possibility of being eaten by a wild animal was a primal fear.

  But on the other hand, I thought about what my mom had said in the TV clip. You just have to remember that you are swimming in their home. You have to know how to behave when you are the guest.

  Humans were guests in the ocean. If white sharks were heading north, what if humans had to adapt?

  I dropped the postcard for Fred into the mailbox.

  I know you can’t write me back, but maybe you could send me a sign.

  I looked at the ordinary mailbox and steered my bike back onto the road. I headed straight to Sookie’s boat.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  Sookie paced around the dock, while Sookie’s dad and Lester seemed to be arguing about something. I rode up close to the boat for a better view. It was the first time I’d seen Lester since the accident.

  “You’re gonna need stitches,” Lester said, tugging gauze tightly around Paulie’s finger. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose the whole thing.”

  “You just do it here.”

  “No, Paulie. I’ll drive you to the hospital,” said Lester. “You want to have a doctor do that. In case you got nerve damage or somethin’.”

  “Why? If it’s damaged, it’s damaged. What am I gonna do about it? I got things to do,” said Paulie.

  I was still watching Lester’s wrap job, wondering what sort of pulpy mess lay beneath the layers. The blood soaked through as fast as Lester could wind.

  Lester taped the end of the gauze and let go of Paulie’s hand.

  “I think you should see a doctor,” I said.

  Lester looked up, noticing me for the first time.

  “Lucy,” Lester said.

  I waved.

  He walked over to the side of the boat. “How are you doin’?”

 
I shrugged.

  “I miss your buddy,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  We looked at each other. My eyes stung.

  “I’m bleeding out here!” Paulie said, in an annoyed voice.

  “Dad! Go to the hospital!” Sookie said, throwing his gloves across the wet deck.

  “Lester’s an EMT. That’s just as good and he won’t bankrupt his parents to pay for med school,” Paulie said.

  “I think people take out loans for that,” I said.

  Lester shook his head. “I just started trainin’ in June.”

  “Whatever. Just sew it up,” Paulie yelled. “Sook, do we have any Tylenol?”

  “You’re gonna need more than that, old man,” Sookie said, shaking his head.

  After several minutes of arguing, Lester opened the passenger-side door of his truck for Paulie, to which Paulie barked, “You ain’t my prom date.” He slammed the door and opened it again with his good hand.

  Once Paulie was safely in his seat, Lester walked in front of the car and grinned at Sookie and me, then rolled his eyes.

  “What happened?” I asked as the Bronco pulled away.

  “Dad cut his hand on a bait hook. Clear to the bone.”

  The image of Paulie seeing part of his own skeleton made my stomach bottom out. “Ew,” I said.

  “You want to help? I’m short a crew,” he said.

  “What? Me?”

  “Sure,” said Sookie. “I’ve some fish to clean.”

  “On the boat?” I asked.

  “Yeah, on the boat,” he said.

  If he’d asked me the day before, I would have told him he was on his own. He came closer to the side and held up his hand to invite me aboard. I didn’t like the green canal between the dock and the Clara Belle, but I quit looking down and planted my foot on the side of the boat. Sookie pulled me aboard.

  On the boat, he handed me a set of gloves. “Take Lester’s.”

  I slid my hands inside. They were huge.

  He passed me a butcher’s apron that could have wrapped around my body twice.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  He grabbed a fish from a pile of others heaped in a large wooden pen. He threw it onto the counter. With a knife he made a few small cuts above the tail, a couple of clean cuts at the head, and one deep slice up the belly. In a fistful, he yanked out all of the guts, snapped off the tail, and threw the meaty shell into a plastic tote to be weighed and sold. Sookie was all business.

  “You try,” he said.

  He prepared two others before I selected a victim and picked up my knife.

  I sawed into the flesh at the tail. “Do you ever get used to the smell?”

  “What smell?” he asked.

  I looked at him to see if he was joking, but his sunburned face was expressionless. I thought about how he used to come over our house a lot before Mom died and how it had been a while since I had spent any real time with him. Strange, but it felt normal to be disemboweling fish together.

  “Am I doing this right?”

  “You’re doing fine,” Sookie said. “I was thinking about coming to see you and your dad after the funeral. But I didn’t know if I should. How’s his foot?”

  “Broken,” I said.

  “And how are you?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m real sorry about your friend. It’s just awful. If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  His voice trailed off. I knew Sookie was being kind, but there really wasn’t anything he could do. I nodded, terrified that I would start bawling on Sookie’s boat if I opened my mouth. I looked down at the wet floor and I knew Sookie was still focused on me. It was probably the longest period of time he remained idle on his boat in the history of the Clara Belle. Then he grabbed another fish.

  “Sookie?” I said, sawing through to the bone.

  “What?”

  “Remember the day you caught the white shark?”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  “Why didn’t you call the biologists,” I said.

  I could tell he wanted to drop the whole thing, but he looked at me and then he said, “I was thinking about it. Like I said, if your mom had been here, I’d have called her right away. But I don’t know . . . And then I saw your mom on TV.”

  My eyes bulged wide.

  “And I just lost it.” His voice cracked a little. “So I went out with my buddies. And when I came home, I called your mom’s old office. Got an answering service. I left a message for them to come in the morning, but by then, it was too late.”

  Even though everybody watched the local news, I couldn’t believe that Sookie had seen Mom too. I wanted to ask him a million questions. Did you see her smile? Did it feel like she looked at you and only you? Did it make you feel like she was coming home for dinner after the interview? But I figured Sookie would think I was nuts, so I said, “What made you call the biologists?”

  “Because if she were here today, she would have loved to get a crack at that thing,” he said.

  “Do you have any idea why she liked dissecting sharks?”

  He snorted. “I think she was just interested in seeing how different animals were made. She used to get pretty excited when we were out on the boat and we found something new.”

  “Just like Fred,” I said.

  “I remember her showing me a squid with three hearts once.”

  “Why does it need three hearts?”

  “Exactly. All biologists want to know why. Just like your mom and Fred,” he said, ripping another sack of ugly from the inside of a fish.

  “Do you remember why a squid has three hearts?”

  “No, but I can tell you how much money squid fetches per pound at the dock.” He smiled.

  “She was waiting for the white sharks to come. You knew that,” I said. “I read her proposal. You were going to help her tag them.”

  Sookie nodded.

  “You ever use a harpoon before?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I used to own a harpoon boat. We used it for tuna and swordfish,” he said. “I sold it to a buddy of mine, but we had a deal worked out, so I could borrow it back for your mom.”

  “What’s happening with the study now?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “A couple of biologists called a few months ago, but I never called back.”

  Sookie gutted ten fish for every mackerel I threw in the tote.

  “Hey, I found something for you.” Sookie took off his gloves, went to the wheelhouse, and came back holding an old photograph with faded colors. I looked it over as he pinched it in front of my face.

  Dad and Sookie were the bookends with my mom in the middle. She was laughing with a gorgeous mouth and shiny long hair. Sookie wore a huge beard, but my dad looked clean cut, with a short-cropped haircut. He smiled and looked handsome.

  “When was that taken?” I asked.

  “When we were eighteen.”

  “Did you have a crush on her?”

  “Don’t hold back, Lucy!” Sookie snorted. “Everybody wanted to be with your mom. She was smart and funny. And the best part was, she didn’t care about any of the boys. I mean, she cared about us, but she wasn’t sittin’ around waiting for someone to call her. She was always doing somethin’ you didn’t want any part of. But it made her interesting, you know?”

  I understood. I thought about Fred and his filthy aquarium.

  “But your mom and dad were meant to be together,” he said. “I love them both.”

  Sookie’s brow folded into the center of his face and he looked pained.

  “Why don’t you and Dad hang out anymore?” I asked.

  “I guess we’re just busy,” he said. He was quiet for a minute. “I guess your mom was always the one t
o call first, to invite me over for things.”

  “Are you saying that she liked you more than my dad does?” I asked.

  “No. Well, I don’t know,” he said. “All I am saying is, she was better at reaching out to people than your dad and I are.”

  I nodded.

  “You ever want to come out with me and Lester on the boat?” he asked. “We could use an extra hand.”

  “I’m not crazy about the water these days,” I said. “But thanks.”

  “Then come down to the dock,” he said. “Like today. We’ll gut fish.”

  “That’s tempting,” I said, looking at the pile of innards. “Maybe. Thanks for the picture.”

  I stuffed it in my pocket and pedaled away. As I rode home, I felt sorry for Sookie. He had lost both my mom and dad.

  When I passed by the taffy pull in the window of the candy store, I thought about calling Fred to see if he wanted to watch the game or hang out. My throat tightened when I realized this was impossible. I stopped the bike and didn’t start riding again until I was able to swallow.

  20. Vern Devine

  I rode the rest of the way home in a funk of fish guts and sweat. I was thinking about Sookie tagging sharks and a squid with three hearts. I needed a biologist to explain how both of those things could work, but instead I saw Mr. Patterson, a retired engineer.

  Mr. Patterson was in his chair on the porch. He had fed an extension cord through a crack in the screen door, connected to a box fan that blew at his feet.

  “Hey, Mr. Patterson,” I said, ascending the steps.

  “Hello, Lucy.”

  “Can I share your breeze?” I asked.

  “Go right ahead.”

  I took a seat on the warm floor planks at Mr. Patterson’s feet.

  “Neighbors are supposed to check on old people when it’s hot outside. To make sure they’re okay. You okay?”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m just checking.”

  “It’s only eighty-five degrees and we live a block from the ocean. But thanks.”