Of Sea and Cloud

by Jon Keller

  So?

  So that’s why he gave ’em to me, I figure. Those traps are a hundred fifty bucks a piece.

  Charlotte laughed and kissed him then slid her mouth over his nose and gently bit down. Good job figuring, Jonah. You think he’s paying you because you’re screwing his eighteen-year-old daughter? Charlotte smiled and pulled more chest hair. That’s what you’re figuring? You aren’t too bright sometimes.

  The wind rushed against the walls and the trailer shifted and Jonah cupped a hand over the top of her hip and said, I love you.

  I love you too. But I’m too young for you. You need a girl your own age.

  You’ll be my age by the time we’re old. When you’re eighty I’ll only be ninety.

  She touched his cheekbone and traced her hand around his jawline. Are you going to be okay, Jonah? I’m worried about you.

  I’m fine. I didn’t know him that well anyways.

  He tucked a flake of her hair behind her ear then set his thumb on her chin.

  I know, she said. But he was your father.

  Well there’s not much to do about it now, is there?

  I guess not. But I’m still worried about you.

  I’ll be fine. Bill’s the one we got to worry over.

  I know it, Charlotte said and her voice became loud and animated. It’s crazy about him and Erma Lee, isn’t it?

  People get pregnant all the time.

  I know. But it’s different. I never figured on your brother knocking someone up, you know? He doesn’t seem like the type. You, I’d believe that. I could see it if you knocked Erma Lee up.

  I bet you could.

  Charlotte leaned down and kissed him then went to the bathroom. He heard her piss and heard the toilet flush and she returned and dressed in the darkness. She sat on the bed and pulled the blankets up to his chest and leaned over him with the ends of her hair on his cheeks and said, Are you sure you’re going to be all right?

  Why don’t you stay? I’ll deal with Virgil if he says something.

  She kissed him for half a minute then said, I can’t tonight, Jonah.

  Two days later in the predawn black with a waning moon slung like an anchor in the south sky Jonah fired his boat’s engine and the diesel roar echoed across the harbor. He flicked the overhead running lights on. The light bounced off the water. The point glow of his single cigarette moved about the boat deck. The wind blew cold and empty out of the northlands and knocked the high seas down but the broken waves still slopped and slammed against the granite shoreline.

  Jonah wore his hood up and he flicked his cigarette overboard. This was the first time since his father disappeared that he’d been on the water and not searching for a body and it felt good. He’d grown up surrounded by talk of deaths at sea so had always known drowning to be a separate and feared form of death and it wasn’t just the absence of a body to mourn over that made it so. Since his father’s disappearance Jonah had wondered if what separated drowning from other deaths was the sea’s claim on the human soul. He’d never been one to believe in the idea of a soul but lately he could not fight the feeling that some remote piece of his father now belonged forever to the sea.

  His boat slid through the black water. A few houselights glowed in the small village but most of the coastline was dark land that pinched the harbor like a claw. To the south the open ocean lay empty and calling and every eight seconds the whistler buoy off the western edge of Two Penny Island flashed and seven miles beyond that the light on Drown Boy Rock made its 360-degree sweep.

  The air was cold on his face. He tapped the brass throttle lever down with his knuckles and the bow of the Jennifer lifted and sprayed. He stomped his feet to warm himself as the boat rocked and pitched in the slop. The island called Ram’s Head appeared as a green blob on his radar screen but as he veered westward the actual black island built of cliff and nettle rushed past not ten yards off his port rail.

  He passed the red can whistler buoy off Two Penny as the sun wove like a stitch through the horizon. He heard static over the two-way radio then heard Bill’s voice, Don’t the harbor look empty without the Jennifer this morning?

  Jonah took his microphone from the roll of duct tape he kept it balanced in. The radio was mounted overhead and it was covered in specks of fish grease. He thumbed the button and said, Guess ain’t nobody with a brain would be enduring this for a buck fifty a pound.

  Bill laughed into the microphone and Jonah heard the background rumble of Bill’s boat Gale Warnings. I guess that’s so, by Jesus. But I’m thinking this is the first time I ever did see the Highliner’s mooring empty. Here it’s December and you’re geared up to hang down.

  Guess I couldn’t sleep is all, Jonah said. Or might be that Erma Lee’s got you sleeping late.

  That might be, Bill said. That just might be.

  • • •

  As the sun rose the sky and seawater turned blue. The quarter moon arced across the southwest sky. It took Jonah twenty minutes to reach his first traps and by then the moon had stepped and the sky had clouded with a dark bank that faded into the horizon. His boat lifted on its wake and settled. The buoys in front of him were all Styrofoam and the traps below the buoys were vinyl-coated wire but Jonah could remember a time when he and his brother had sat beside the wood stove in his father’s trap shop and watched Nicolas paint his wooden buoys with an old brush and build his wooden traps with a hammer and nails. Those had been days of family and the smell of wood chips and fresh paint permeated his memories making them feel somehow gentle but all of those gentle memories ended with the end of his mother.

  That was twenty years ago.

  Twenty years since Nicolas threw Jonah overboard and hollered, Goddamned poison aboard here is what you are. Then pulled him aboard and hugged the boy to his chest while the boat circled and pounded upon its own wake. Nicolas shook and cried and that was the only time Jonah had ever seen his father cry despite a newly dead mother. His father’s breaths came heavy and begrudging as if each one were a separate piece of gut that had to be grabbed and jerked from his throat. Jonah clutched the quaking back and stared at the gray water that danced against the hull and this final hug was a goodbye but Jonah understood the opposite.

  Nicolas had set Jonah down and put a jacket over him. He hugged Bill briefly and put a jacket over him too. Then Nicolas pointed his boat Jennifer north to the harbor and piloted a straight line with the bow pounding an easterly chop. Jonah spent the entire hour forgiving his father but when they hit the harbor Nicolas was gone. He’d sealed himself away and Jonah saw this instantly. Just a kid and with a single glance he understood that his father had gathered himself into a coil that could never be unwound.

  • • •

  Now the Jennifer drifted on the smooth sea surface. Jonah lifted the cover from the bait box and peered in at eight bushels of salted herring. Some of the fish were stiff and some were mashed and all of the dead eyes stared red and loose at him. He breathed the bait air and tasted it like a wave of rot starting in his stomach and cresting within his eyes. He set the cover down and pulled a bucket of nylon mesh bait bags out and stuffed them with fistfuls of baitfish.

  Thirty fathoms below lay an undersea badland that was nothing more than the foothills of an ancient mountain range gone to flood and erosion. The Jennifer idled and as he worked Jonah pictured the kelp forests and sand canyons below. He pictured his traps on bottom with lobsters and sculpin and wolffish all swarming like flies and so too did he picture his father’s dead body down there. He carried a bait bag to the washrail and leaned his weight over the side and stared into the water. He caught himself again feeling that his father’s soul was within that of the sea and now after so many years he felt the sudden urge to join him. He looked up at the flights of clouds and tried to laugh at himself and wondered what was happening within his heart to rally such thoughts because never on dry land had he felt such a sheer urge to be with his father.

  • • •

  Later that day and
ten miles offshore. Two black and red metal Coast Guard buoys rode the shoal water waves. The water shone alabaster in the slanted end of fall light. His father’s big yellow buoys lay on the waves like beacons between the metal buoys. Jonah stared at them thinking that one day soon he would not see those buoys on the water ever again and the thought made the sea seem somehow hollow. As a child before his mother’s death he’d spent days and days aboard his father’s boat with his eyes trained on the water in search of those yellow buoys. Then later when the Jennifer was handed down from Nicolas to Bill to Jonah those yellow buoys became a sign that his father had been there and would be there again. The buoys were footprints that made the ocean familiar and knowable. Now he and Bill and Virgil would bring load after load of Nicolas’s traps ashore until all 800 of them were gone and all that would remain would be the relentlessness of wind and wave.

  Beneath the buoys spread a stone-flanked seamount broken by canyons and fissures and pits. This was the Leviathan Ground. Jonah steered for his father’s first buoy but his eye caught a flash of red that stopped him. He squinted. He waited. A wave train rose like flayed skin and when the train fell Jonah saw a red lobster buoy. His gut dropped. He watched over the sea until he saw a line of ten red buoys.

  Osmond’s here, Jonah whispered. He couldn’t quite believe his own eyes but without thought he spun his boat and gaffed Osmond’s first buoy and looped the rope over the stainless block and around the pot hauler discs. He gripped his gaff with his right hand and operated the brass hydraulic hauler lever with his left. The boat spun in a slow circle. Rope faked at his feet.

  The buoy and rope both were clean and new and the stiff rope screeched through the pot hauler. There were two traps for the one buoy. They surfaced one by one with seven fathom of float rope between them. Jonah pulled each trap onto the rail with a full-body heave and stood between them with a hand rested on each. His boat idled. The traps were five feet long and looked like small coffins made of gray wire. They held bait bags the size of a man’s head in both ends. The bags were still full and the herring fresh and silver. The traps must have been set only the day before but already they held a few lobsters each.

  Jonah felt a nauseous stirring. His father’s body was still lost at sea and Osmond Randolph had already set traps on the Leviathan and if there is one thing a fisherman does not do it is this. He thought of calling Virgil and Bill on the radio but decided against it. He pulled a glove off and spilled his pack of cigarettes onto the bulkhead. He pulled one from the pile and twisted it in his fingers while his heart pounded.

  He ducked his head and lit the cigarette. He blew a pile of smoke out. He squinted at several boats working in the distance. What if he cut Osmond’s ropes and tossed the buoys overboard and left Osmond’s traps lost like trash on the seafloor? Then Osmond would cut Jonah’s traps off and Jonah would have to cut more of Osmond’s traps off and soon someone’s boat would sink in the middle of the night and not long afterward someone would get shot.

  Jonah looked at the water and said, What do I do, Old Man? You tell me. He was your friend.

  But all Jonah could imagine his father doing was turning blood red in the face as he silently hurt somebody. Or sent their boat to bottom. Nicolas had been fishing the Leviathan since before Jonah was born and territory was lineage. Osmond knew that. Osmond was of the old guard so he existed by the old rules but the rules went both ways.

  Jonah walked to the stern and back then tossed the lighter on the fiberglass bulkhead and nodded to himself as if finally agreeing with his own thoughts. His father was gone and he was here and to hell with Osmond. If he let Osmond fish his territory then he may as well not fish at all. He knew what Bill would do if he was here. He would cut every damned buoy that was not his own because nobody would fuck with Bill. But Bill was not here and neither was Nicolas. It was just Jonah and he spat and grabbed his knife from the bulkhead and he said out loud, Come on and get me, Osmond.

  He worked his way down the string. He hauled each trap and cut the nylon heads open so the traps would not continue to fish. Then he cut each buoy off and tossed the mess overboard and he watched as lobsters and traps and ropes together disappeared to the deep. He’d never before done such a thing to another fisherman but never before had another fisherman tried to fish his ground. Of course he’d heard stories over and over again about trap wars with fishermen carrying rifles and shotguns aboard their boats and the sounds of gunfire echoing over the sea and this right here was how those wars started but whether Jonah was ready for that to come down or not he did not know.

  • • •

  An hour later he gaffed the first of his father’s yellow buoys. He turned it in his hands like a quarterback would a football. The buoy was clean but the paint was slightly faded by sunlight and seawater and bleach. He tried not to think about Osmond so instead he thought of his brother but that didn’t last long. He could have warned Osmond. He could have taken some time and settled the fuck down and maybe tied a knot in Osmond’s ropes or cut out a few trap heads like a normal fisherman and thereby given Osmond a chance to move the traps.

  But not him. Not Jonah Graves.

  Jesus Christ, he said out loud. I did it now.

  He’d destroyed nearly five thousand dollars’ worth of gear and that didn’t include Osmond’s time or the catch Osmond wouldn’t have. He tried to silence his mind and its fear as he worked his way around the Leviathan and he kept muttering, Fuck Osmond but that did little to reassure him. He stacked his father’s traps aboard his boat and he told himself that his father would have done exactly what he’d just done but the more he thought about it the less certain he was and the more certain he became that he’d just started something he could not finish.

  When he had a load of traps aboard he steamed north toward home and he kept saying fuck, fuck, fuck and he couldn’t see any land except a single mountaintop which rose sprawling in the western sky as if to hold sway over the seawater and he wished something so powerful would hold sway over him.

  Virgil and Bill in their bigger boats caught up with Jonah as he neared the coastline. Each boat was stacked high with Nicolas’s traps and flocks of sea ducks like firecrackers burst from the water and flew before the boats. Together with the birds the three boats steamed into the harbor like a funeral procession with Bill in the lead and Virgil at the tail and the three men were silent on their radios as each thought his own thoughts about Nicolas and about the ocean which was different than it had ever been before.

  When the boats were unloaded they trailered Nicolas’s traps to the pound and parked in the small field that backed up to the marsh. A twisting section of tidal stream ran through the middle of the brown grass and beyond it stretched a thick patch of alder. The light faded and the sea lay flat calm in the twilight. A band of eiders bobbed in the surf and far offshore the clouds and sea fell to a deep blue and disappeared.

  The pound was a three-acre body of water shaped like a horseshoe. At its head stood a causeway which at one time had been only a gravel bar but now held tons of blast rock that Nicolas had hauled from the upriver quarry. The causeway led to a small island called Burnt and causeway and island together formed one edge of the horseshoe. From the tip of Burnt Island a slat wood dam crossed to the mainland and thus closed the mouth of the horseshoe like a row of teeth. The tidewater came and went through these teeth every six hours but the lobsters that Nicolas and Osmond had put in the pound were there to stay. The base of the dam was solid concrete like a giant gum beneath the teeth that held at least six feet of water at low tide.

  Jonah climbed onto the trailer and didn’t speak as he handed the traps to Bill. Bill stacked them five high. Virgil watched in his mirror and pulled the truck forward when they needed room for another row. When they finished stacking the traps Bill and Jonah stood next to Virgil’s window and listened to the engine idle as the smooth rolling waves whapped the riprap causeway and the ghost calls of the eiders filled the air.

  Chowder rose up
on her ass with her front paws on the truck door.

  Frigging dog, said Jonah.

  Virgil eyed the gulf. He played with Chowder’s ears. Bill kicked at a rock with his rubber boot and when he freed it from the ground he kicked it across the dead grass.

  Jonah gathered himself and cleared his throat. I hauled a string of Osmond’s out on the Leviathan today.

  Bill peered at Jonah for a second then said, A whole string? Oh, fuck me.

  Virgil waited.

  Five footers and double baited. He must’ve set them yesterday or the day before. Hell, he had to average three pounds a trap.

  That’s a hell of a day to set a offshore string, Bill said. She was blowing a gale and them seas would’ve been breaking over that mountain all the day long. Bill rubbed his eyes with frustration. How in hell’d he set them, from a chopper? Don’t tell me he was out there in a boat. And I’m guessing them bait bags weren’t small. Fuckachrist, that’s a half bushel of bait per pair.

  That’s right, said Jonah.

  That’s over a grand a day in bait alone, Bill said. He’s got to be landing a ton of bugs a day to make a day’s pay. He’s burning five hundred in fuel easy. How’s he landing a ton a day?

  He sold his soul is what he done, Virgil said.

  Bill worked a glaze of moisture from Virgil’s rearview mirror and flicked it off the edge of his palm. I don’t know how he does it, the cocksucker. But he’d be better off with forty-three-and-a-half-inch traps on that bottom. A single parlor’ll fish better there.

  Guess not, Jonah said. The old man’s strings didn’t have shit.

  Bill ignored him.

  Where’s he at on the mountain, Jonah? Virgil said.

  Off the southwest ridge.

  Bill blinked. He scratched his temple. You hauled them? All of them? Oh shit. What’d you do? Don’t tell me you cut them.

  Don’t you go fretting all over the place with yourself.

  I ain’t fretting. What’d you do? Fuck me, you did, didn’t you? You cut off a string of Osmond’s? A whole string? Of Osmond Randolph’s?