by Jon Keller
Jonah aligned the boat with the bow facing the house. He cranked the windshield open and pointed the rifle through the opening. He reached down and flipped the overhead lights on and blasted Osmond’s house with light and suddenly there in the window stood Osmond Randolph naked and white and frozen in time with his black hair wrapped along his jawline and his arms spread like the reaches of a cross. Jonah’s blood surged and he heard pistons slide in his ears. He struggled to catch his breath. He tried to settle the crosshairs but his mind flashed to Osmond’s hand upon his face and he remembered feeling from that palm that death was on its way.
The crosshairs danced over Osmond’s body. Jonah shouldered sweat from his forehead. He jammed his eyes closed then open and felt the salt sting. He thumbed the safety off. He smelled gun oil. He worked his finger against the trigger and even with the rise and fall of the sea and the shaking of his body the crosshairs found Osmond’s trunk.
The Cinderella drifted toward shore.
Jonah whispered to himself, You, Osmond, you.
He thought of his brother. He blinked over and over and tried to refocus. He felt the stock now warm against his cheek. He told himself that Bill would have shot by now but in truth he doubted it. He tapped his finger against the trigger and the barrel end wavered out in front of him. He wished Osmond would duck or run or charge but all Osmond did was stand like a target with his arms spread wide.
Jonah lifted his head to see Osmond through naked eyes. Osmond leaned forward and pressed his body against the window and with that slight movement Jonah understood what Osmond was after. The Cinderella rose sharply on a steep wave and Jonah looked around and saw that he’d drifted into shoal water. Waves lifted from beneath him then curled and broke. He faced Osmond. He held the rifle vertically out over the water with its barrel pointed skyward and with a last glance at Osmond he released it. The rifle fell with barely a splash.
Jonah shut the overhead lights down. The engine rumbled in the darkness. Then easy like a coyote backing across a snow white plain he reversed the Cinderella until all that remained of Osmond’s home was a distant shining light holding the shape of a man.
• • •
Osmond Randolph moved. He stepped naked from his house into the bitter dark. He eased the door closed. He walked the ledges to his wharf and his bare feet melted tracks into the frozen granite and into the frosted wharf planks but the footprints quickly glazed with ice making it appear that his passage had been long ago.
Osmond made his way to the end of the wharf. He watched the Cinderella round the peninsula but the echo of its engine still throbbed across the waters. He held a pistol in his hand. He stood with the toes and balls of his feet out over the end of the wharf. He looked first to the unclouded heavens then to his boat and last to the ebb and swirl of seawater. He said something that nobody heard.
• • •
Jonah slammed the throttle down. He sped east with Orion off to the south and the moon easing into the west and gradually his breathing slowed and his heart settled but the image of Osmond begging for end burned in his mind.
When he reached the harbor mouth he slowed to an idle. He saw to the north the few lights of the small village and the shape of the wharf with its bait house roof sheathed in frost and moon. He looked east to the shape of Stone Island and saw the faint glow of a lantern burning in his camp like the soft reflection of flame on rock.
He looked south and considered the world out there. A smile cracked across his face. He spun the Cinderella and charged offshore with Orion over his bow and the full open eye of the moon sliding beneath his starboard rail. A pair of auks bobbed off Ram’s Head and scattered as he passed. He swung tight against the ledges off Two Penny and a flock of sandpipers lifted from the rocks and their white undersides flashed in a single wave. The abandoned lighthouse rose in the moonlight and he saw first the reflection of the moon in the glass dome at its peak and then the passing glint of the Cinderella.
He held an unlit cigarette in his lips. He braced his hand on the brass wheel that was worn to fit a dead man’s fist. The Drown Boy Rock lighthouse rose like a steeple out of the water and far beyond stood a mountain. As he steamed south the mountaintop began to burn with the first trace of sunrise and soon it appeared not that the light descended the mountainside but that the mountain itself rose to the light.
• • •
Clouds came with the sun. Jonah drifted above the Leviathan Ground. The moon had sunk and all was gray and he could not tell where the sea ended and the clouds began. He thought of his father down below. He thought of his brother on dry land. He thought of Osmond with his vertical wheals of skin like ruts and his eyes like rust holes. He thought of Virgil and of going and taking the man in his arms and telling him all was forgiven. He thought of Charlotte asleep at his camp and he knew that the girl he’d known was gone from him forever.
He dropped his fist onto the throttle and spun the wheel. The bow of the Cinderella arced through the waters until it faced north and eclipsed the vacant lighthouse on Two Penny. Beyond Two Penny was an island called Burnt and within the grip of Burnt Island stood a slat-wood dam and a riprap causeway which together formed a lobster pound. He sailed north for home and the diesel engine echoed but Jonah heard only the gentle slide of water like voices calling and his eyes searched the mist that sprayed from the chines as if he would find a loved one there. He felt he understood something although he could not say what so he knocked his fist against the boat’s bulkhead as if to reaffirm the center of the earth.
Copyright © 2014 by Jon Keller.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by TYRUS BOOKS
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.
www.tyrusbooks.com
ISBN 10: 1-4405-8022-7
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8022-2
eISBN 10: 1-4405-8023-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8023-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keller, Jon,
Of sea and cloud / Jon Keller.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4405-8022-2 (hc) -- ISBN 1-4405-8022-7 (hc) -- ISBN 978-1-4405-8023-9 (ebook) -- ISBN 1-4405-8023-5 (ebook)
1. Lobster fishers--Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.E4244O37 2014
813'.6--dc23
2014007792
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their product are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.
Cover design by Frank Rivera.
Cover images © duplass/123RF.
Author photo by Abi Maxwell.
