“In nome de Diu, molla!” he shouted. His men raised their voices in an unintelligible cry, and sprang to action.
Based on what she had read, Iris recognized this as the command to drop open the door to the death chamber and let the tuna in. She looked at Max and his crew, eager to start filming; at the Rais and his crew poised for the kill; at the deep, dark water, for signs of their prey. The rays of the morning sun grew stronger, bouncing off the sea and warming her face and arms, but still she felt a deep chill as she waited. At first, there was just a flicker of movement; seconds later, she could make out the shapes of the long, sleek forms and silvery tail fins circling in the deep blue pen. Iris had never seen such enormous fish, and would be terrified to be in the water with them, but from the safety of the vessel, she could watch them for hours. They were magnificent.
“Issa!” the Rais shouted out in command.
Savage cries filled the air as the men of the ciurma, lined up along the sides of their boats, began tugging at the four sides of the immense net, grunting and shouting as they heaved. As the net was pulled to the bastarde, the floor of the death chamber rose, forcing the tunas higher and higher, until their dorsal fins sliced the surface of the water. The boats closed in on the fish, and they closed in on each other, swimming furiously, thrashing their tails, whipping the water white. Iris could see the shiny skin of the tunas flashing through the foam; she could smell their panic surging in the clear morning air, as they showered her with sea spray. Her heart beat wildly as she watched the fish crash into one another, injuring each other in their frantic efforts to escape, the blood from their wounds tainting the water.
The men chanted and shouted and whistled as they labored, their muscular torsos glistening with sweat and saltwater: round and round the tunas sped, until their movements were crippled by the net closing in on them, making the water too shallow to swim in. Tears blurred Iris’s vision as she watched them flail about helplessly, suffocating, bleeding, exhausted, defeated. Prodded by an instinctual urge, they had swum thousands of kilometers to these waters, in this season when their meat was fleshy, and the bellies of the females swelling with eggs, only to be tricked and trapped by these men. Thoughts of the tuna tartare she had been served at the restaurant the previous evening made Iris want to puke. She shouldn’t have come to witness this ritual, even though she knew her presence was irrelevant to the tunas and to the men who trapped them with their tricks. She looked up at the cloudless sky, thanking God it was finally over. They had their catch, and they could go.
“Aaayyy!” Iris swiveled around to look in the direction of the cry, her eyes widening as she saw one of the men drive a giant hook into one of the fish. The huge tuna, hemorrhaging but still alive, was raised from the bloodied sea amid excited shouts, then laid onto a bed of ice on the deck of the vessel on which Iris stood. One by one, the floundering fish were hooked and hoisted, then lowered to their mass grave, their tails beating out a sorrowful song of betrayal as they bled onto the melting ice. Iris was staring at the scene in horror, not wanting to look, but unable to turn away, when she was showered with the first spray of bloody water by a fishtail. One by one, the captured tunas were forced to join their ill-fated companions, their massive bodies convulsing in the throes of suffocation, their blood spilling onto the melting ice. Desperately flailing tails churned the pool of iced blood, and Iris was doused over and over again, until her clothes and skin and hair were completely drenched, until the metallic stench of blood pervaded every pore. She searched for cover, but there was nowhere to retreat; she was forced to endure the spectacle she had come to witness. She lowered her head in shame and repulsion, closed her eyes, and waited for the massacre to be over, praying for a speedy death to deliver the creatures from their agony.
Finally, like all things, regardless of how beautiful or horrible they may be, it did end, and the expedition headed back to shore. As the boats approached land, they were greeted by the joyful peal of church bells celebrating the successful mattanza. As soon as the vessel was moored, Iris jumped off, ran down to the rocks, and dove into the water fully dressed. She rubbed her skin and hair and clothes with water, but no amount of scrubbing could wash away the stains from her clothes, or the tinny taste of blood from her mouth, or the stench of death from her nostrils. She needed to get out of this place, she needed to go back to the hotel, take a hot shower, change into some clean clothes. Her soaked sneakers squished as she trudged out of the water and over to the van, where she found Max and the crew cleaning off their equipment, laughing and talking excitedly about the scenes they had managed to shoot.
“We got some fuckin’ amazing footage out there,” she heard Max say. “If we got all we need, maybe we can go out again tomorrow just for fun and leave the equipment behind.”
He leaned inside the van, then reappeared seconds later, holding Iris’s backpack.
He waved at her, calling out, “Hey, Capo! Just in time! Your phone’s ringing. Here!” He tossed the backpack to her, but it fell short. “What the fuck happened to you? You’re a mess!”
Iris bent over to pick up her backpack, still too shaken to speak. Her hands trembled as she fumbled with zippers and clasps, trying to remember in which of the many compartments she had stowed her phone. Following a trail of rings and vibrations, she finally got her hands on it, and saw that the call was from an unidentified number.
“Pronto?” she said.
“Iris?” Her sisters all had the same voice, and no matter who this one belonged to, it sounded terribly out of place here.
“Yes, it’s me. Who’s this?” Whoever it was, she shouldn’t sneak up on Iris while she was dripping wet, wearing blood-stained clothes, and on the verge of vomiting.
“Iris, it’s Violet. You have to come home. Get here as fast as you can.”
8. Lily
The dilapidated houses lining Rosewood Lane passed in a blur as Lily sped away. She breezed through several intersections, each light turning green as she approached, like gates of providence ushering her frantic retreat. Mesmerized by the white lines dividing the lanes, she neared the end of the road, catching sight of the final traffic light changing to red just in time to slam on her brakes. She watched through tears as a white-haired woman, the burden of her years weighing heavily on her back, stepped clumsily off the curb.
Lily dug through her purse for a tissue, but came up empty. She swiped at her face with the palms of her hands. The old woman began to hobble her way across the street, pushing a wire cart overflowing with plastic grocery bags filled with food, a loaf of bread precariously balanced on top.
Lily continued to dig blindly through her purse, accidentally jamming the tip of a nail file under the nail of her index finger.
“Ow - shit!” She squeezed the flesh of her fingertip and watched as a bubble of blood rose to the surface. The old woman was nearly halfway across the street. “Old woman, you are never going to make it if you don’t get moving,” Lily said to herself.
She picked up the tattered pages of the group’s brainstorming notes from the passenger seat and scoured the list; every possibility had been crossed off. Every one except for Claire’s. The words jumped off the page: “Rent a cottage at the beach.”
The old woman was nearly three-quarters of the way across the street when the front wheel of her cart became lodged in a pothole, sending her tottering loaf of bread up into the air and then down into the street.
“Oh, good Lord!” said Lily, more out of exasperation than pity.
The woman steadied her cart and then began to shuffle over to rescue her loaf of bread. The light for the cross traffic turned yellow. Lily threw her car into park and jumped out in a huff. Like I don’t have enough problems of my own right now, she thought.
“My Monks’ Bread,” said the old woman. “I need my Monks’ Bread for my dinner.”
Lily snatched the bread from the street as the light turned green. She held her hands up and shouted to the waiting cars, “Hold on one second...
just give her a minute.” Lily offered her arm to the woman, and using her free hand, she guided the cart up and over the curb.
“Goodness gracious,” said the woman. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it today, but it was a very important errand. I have to have my Monks’ Bread for dinner, after all.” She shuffled away down the sidewalk without a word of thanks, as though she may not have noticed Lily at all, or perhaps had taken her for an angel, sent at just the right moment for the express purpose of saving the Monks’ Bread, and as if the appearance of a celestial being for such ordinary purposes was quite commonplace.
The air filled with a cacophony of horns from the early evening traffic that lined up behind Lily, each driver needing to get on with their own very important errands. Lily hopped in behind the wheel, buckled her seatbelt, and headed for the lake.
One of the few times Lily remembered going down to Charlotte Beach on Lake Ontario was when Grandma Whitacre visited Rochester and suggested it as a Sunday ride.
“Now I don’t know why y’all don’t come down here all the time,” she’d said to Lily’s mother. “Why if I lived this close to a beach, I would set my lawn chair out on Memorial Day and stay until Labor Day.”
But Lily had known that trips to the lake cost money - twenty-five cents for each ride on the antique Merry-Go-Round, fifty cents for an ice cream cone, not to mention the gas to drive twenty miles “for no good reason,” as her father would say.
Most of what Lily had seen of Charlotte Beach in recent years had been on the news. The public park had fallen into neglect in the late 1980s, due to a lack of municipal funds for maintenance. Its broken benches and pock-marked parking lots had discouraged families from driving in from the suburbs, making the way clear for the local kids on the other side of the Genesee River to walk across the Stutson Street bridge in determined search of trouble, which they found in the forms of fights, vandalism, and the occasional auto theft. A small industrial park, which sat along the river, was a favored target - especially the Kendall bicycle manufacturing plant, whose front lawn hosted an iron sculpture of an old-fashioned bike. It wasn’t uncommon for the local paper to feature photos of the sculpture decorated with toilet paper or adorned with empty beer cans.
In recent years, however, the city had launched an effort to revitalize the area, promoting the assumption that the money invested in cleaning up the beach and developing the surrounding area with restaurants, shops, and lakefront housing would provide a hearty return in the form of tax revenue. The marginalized elements had scattered, finding refuge in the rundown homes that still stood in the few remaining pockets of neighborhood that were separated from the public beaches - and the city’s benevolence - by the Genesee River and the borders of a town that grandiosely referred to itself as Summerville.
The fisherman’s pier at Charlotte Beach was still deserted this early in the season, which meant that Lily could walk along it at a leisurely pace, without being worried about dodging the baby strollers and rollerbladers that crammed the way during the summer months. As she strolled, Lily could see the modest homes of Summerville along the shore to her right. To her left were the stately new homes that had been recently built or remodeled. It was this concrete slab upon which she walked - so littered with the droppings of sea gulls that it appeared to be whitewashed - that separated the haves from the have-nots.
The light tower stood directly ahead, against a blue horizon streaked with pink cotton candy clouds. The further Lily walked out toward them, the wilder the wind grew. The water of Lake Ontario, which seemed calm closer to shore, began to rock and lurch. Like water hands, waves reached up over the guardrail and then slapped themselves down again upon the surface of the pier, soaking Lily’s shoes. But she didn’t care. She barely noticed; all she could see was the light tower. She set her sights upon it and vowed to keep walking toward it, no matter how wild the wind grew, or how many cold sprays she was caught in. Getting to the end of the pier without turning back seemed like such an insignificant goal given all that she had to deal with in her life, but it was still a goal, and if Lily could make it to the end, at least that was something.
With every step, the trials of Lily’s life grew more distant, as though she had left them in the parking lot, locked in the car with the windows rolled up, their screams for her attention drowned out by the roar of wind and waves. Finally Lily found herself standing directly under the light tower. She rested her body against the railing at the end of the pier, and looked out over the slate expanse of the great Lake Ontario. Even though she knew that Canada was out there, just beyond the horizon, the lake looked like it might stretch to eternity, even to God. A cluster of seagulls was suspended in mid air, riding on a current, like a mobile hung from heaven simply for Lily’s delight. Lily closed her eyes and took in the pungent scent of fish, seaweed, and the trace of a campfire.
“I sure hope you remembered your gun,” said a man’s voice.
Lily jumped with a gasp, turning around to discover a man of about sixty-five years sitting on an overturned white plastic bucket, which had presumably been meant to hold a supply of freshly caught fish. His tattered fishing cap sat askew on his head. He was holding a fishing pole off the side of the pier.
A smile came across the man’s face. “I see you don’t have a rod, so I hope you at least remembered your gun,” he said. “For all the good it will do you with the fish in this pond.”
“You scared me,” said Lily. She placed her hand over her chest. “I didn’t even notice you there.”
“Sorry about that,” said the man. “It is still a bit early in the season for most folks to be out here. That’s why I come. I like the solitude.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Lily. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“Well, aren’t we two of the most polite people you’ve ever seen?” The man laughed, which provoked a coughing fit that lasted so long Lily wasn’t sure if she should continue to stand there waiting for it to be done. She eventually turned away in order to save the man from embarrassment. He finally hawked up one final cough, and Lily heard him spit, followed by the sound of a small splash.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, dabbing at his lips with a white handkerchief.
“That’s OK,” said Lily, turning back around. “What are you hoping to catch?”
“Oh, I won’t catch anything. I’m not even using any bait. Only thing that’s any good this time of year is trout, except that these waters are so polluted my doctor said I can’t even eat it, so what’s the point?”
“Let me get this straight,” Lily said, “You’re sitting there holding a rod with no bait on the hook, not trying to catch a fish that you can’t eat anyway?” His plan sounded only slightly less preposterous than her own.
“When you say it like that,” said the man. “It sounds downright ridiculous, doesn’t it?” He laughed again, which induced another coughing fit, which resulted in another spit into the water. This time Lily watched as a school of tiny fish rose to the water’s surface to nibble at the sputum.
“At least I have a rod,” said the man, wiping his mouth again. “What in God’s name are you doing out here on an evening like this? This wind is likely to pick you right up and toss you in.”
“Actually, I’m looking for a house.” Lily laughed at the thought of how ridiculous that must seem to him.
“You don’t say,” said the man. “Haven’t you got a home?”
“Well, I have a house, but, well, I’m going through a separation so I have to move.” Lily turned to face the lake, enjoying the sensation of the wind tangling her hair into knots. “It’s just a fantasy,” she said, “But I have two little boys, and I’ve been daydreaming about giving them a place around here. It’s so peaceful.”
“What’s your name?” asked the man.
“I’m Lily.” Lily extended her hand.
“Hi, Lily, I’m Curtis.” His hand was warm; his handshake was weak. “Now, what would you say if I told you that I just happen
to have a house for rent right over there?” Curtis gestured to the right, toward the houses in Summerville.
“No way!” Lily’s excitement was immediately supplanted by the recognition that she would never be able to afford a house on the lake, on her budget.
“Yes, ma’am, I do,” said Curtis. “If you’re interested, you can come over and take a look.”
“I don’t know,” said Lily. “I’m sure it’s more than I can spend...”
“What can you spend?” Curtis asked.
“I just started working,” said Lily. She didn’t even want to quote a price, since she was embarrassed, and worried about offending this fisherman without fish. “And I don’t have a very good job yet.”
“Just spit out a number,” said Curtis. “You never know.”
Lily looked down. “I’d only be able to pay about six-hundred and fifty dollars a month - I know that’s not nearly enough for place on the water.”
“Well now, isn’t that a coincidence,” said Curtis. “That just happens to be the exact amount I’m asking.”
It was clearly too good to be true. Either this was a cruel joke, or as her mother would say, this guy was up to something.
“Why don’t you live there?” Lily asked.
“I’ll be living there for another couple weeks, and then I’m headed down to Florida, to stay with my daughter and her family for a bit. Doctor’s orders.”
“Why haven’t you been able to rent it out?” asked Lily.
“I haven’t tried,” said Curtis. He pushed his cap up away from his brow and looked out over the water. “Renting it out was sort of like saying I’m not coming back. But it seems to me that it would be put to better use by you and your boys than it will be by just sitting there waitin’ for me until the end of time.”
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 124
