by Rick Hautala
Before long, she thought, I’ll be giving all of you guys a little show … a little wet burp. She chuckled softly to herself when she thought of Bri’s euphemism for throwing up.
Wet burp, indeed.
“We can do a short haul today,” Randy said, straining on the oars. “I don’t expect we’ll be more’n three or four hours.”
Oh, great, Julia thought as the dinghy lurched from side to side. My stomach will never last that long.
She faced into the wind and inhaled the fresh sea air, trying to get the smell of rotting fish smell out of her nose. Her only hope was that, once they were on the lobster boat, she could get a bit more distance between herself and the bait barrel.
Soon enough, Randy shipped the oars and, standing up quickly, grabbed the side of his lobster boat before they hit it. Pulling the punt in as close as he could, he nodded toward.
“All a’board,” he said. “Welcome to the Bait Barrel.”
Appropriately named, Julia thought as she clambered over the side, grateful for the relative stability of the larger boat. Her movement made the underside of the punt slap against the water, but Randy apparently didn’t think he was in any danger of getting swamped. Once she was on board, Ellie and John climbed up, and Randy tied his punt to the mooring.
“Grab this, will yah?” Randy said to John as he muscled the bait barrel over to the side and lifted it.
Wrinkling his nose, John carefully took hold of the splintery container and swung it down to the floor.
“Christ,” he said, wiping his hands together. “Don’t I get rubber gloves or something?”
“I’ve got some you can wear,” Randy said as he leaned over the side of the punt, making sure it was securely tied to the mooring. “But it’ll wreak havoc on your hands if you wear ‘em all day.”
John brought his hand to his nose and gave it a quick sniff.
“Might want to chance it,” he said, shaking his head, but this was just the beginning of the ordeal. Randy climbed into the boat, ran though a quick check of his equipment, and then started up the engine. It took a few tries to get the old machinery going, but before long the Bait Barrel was putt-putting away. Randy cast off and steered a course through the harbor mouth and out to sea.
In the time it took them to load up, the sun tipped its orange disk over the edge of the horizon. With a fresh, dry wind blowing off the land, it promised to be one of those achingly clear November days — the kind you can find only along the Maine coast, and which would be perfect if there weren’t the darkening threat of winter approaching.
John donned some oilskins and gloves and was talking to Randy as he set a course out around the harbor entrance. From the harbor mouth, Randy cut to the left —”hard a’ port,” as he informed his guests — and angled away from Glooscap. Behind them, gulls flew low over the water, keeping pace with the boat, drawn by the prospect of an easy breakfast if any bait chanced to fall overboard.
The slanting morning sun touched the island with a lance of gold, bringing out sharp details of the still-sleeping island. Beyond the gentle white curve of Sandy Beach, the smooth, bare hump of Bald Hill rose above the evergreen woods. With most of the deciduous trees stripped of leaves, Julia thought the hill did look like a man’s balding head. Farther along the shore, lined with picture-postcard quaint houses — at least at this distance — the rocky coast stretched around the curve of the island.
“Is that where the condos are going?” Julia asked Ellie, pointing to a bright yellow and brown stretch at the tip of the island. The morning sun illuminated the freshly laid roads, making them look like dark scars on a land colored with the yellows and browns of autumn.
Ellie nodded, but John, thinking she was talking to him, leaned out of the boat housing and, cupping his hands to his mouth, shouted, “What?”
Julia simply shook her head and waved him away.
“If you ladies get too cold up there, you can always come inside the cabin here to warm up,” Randy shouted to them. “I’ve got two thermoses of coffee.”
“Maybe in a bit,” Julia said, fully enjoying the brisk wind in her face. She figured once the sun had been up awhile, she would warm up. She looked out over the water.
The bow of the boat was slapping into a light chop, sending white foam flying to either side. Up close, the water looked cold … menacing, even. Julia wondered if she would be able to last even a few minutes if she fell overboard. She grabbed on to the gunwales tightly for reassurance as the boat headed further out into Casco Bay.
One thing that struck her as strange was how different real lobstering was from the tourist image of it — which, in point of fact, was all she’d had until now. Postcards and books about Maine always made the job look so quaint, completely glossing over the dirty, smelly aspects. She found it hard to imagine that this was what Randy had to look forward to every morning, heading out to sea in cold weather and sometimes worse.
The steady throbbing of the engine was lulling her into dreamy thoughtfulness, so she was startled when the engine suddenly cut to a low idle. She turned around and saw Randy, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a long wood handle with a hook on the end. It didn’t take her long to realize that he was going to snag one of the buoys she saw bobbing in the swells.
Randy and John were talking, and Julia was interested in hearing what they were saying, but she didn’t want to leave Ellie alone up front, so she stayed where she was and watched as the boat slowed to a stop. Randy leaned out over the side with the gaff, and with one quick swipe, hooked the buoy line and pulled. When the rope was close enough to grab, he leaned the hook against the side of the boat, grabbed the rope, and started pulling.
John stood off to the side. He signaled for Julia to join him. Being careful not to lose her balance, she made her way to the other side of the boat. Looking as though she would have much preferred to be at home, Ellie stayed where she was, watching them with indifference.
Randy had to yell to be understood as he described what he was doing. After pulling the rope up enough so the buoy and a smaller float were inside the boat, he laced the rope — or “warp,” as he called it — around a pulley, then wound it around the drum wheel.
He flipped a switch, which started a motor that was much louder than the boat’s. The rope caught and started to come up easily, All Randy had to do was guide it to make sure the rope didn’t foul as the lobster pot lifted up off the ocean floor.
The drum on the pot hauler wrung briny water from the rope, sloshing the deck. If Randy hadn’t been wearing oilskins, he would have been soaked through within seconds. Before long, the lobster pot banged up against the protective wooden slats nailed to the side of the boat, and Randy swung it up and over onto a roughly built wooden stand.
“You got one,” Julia said excitedly when she saw a dark green, almost black lobster angrily flipping its tail inside the trap. Its claws clattered like maracas on the wet slats of wood.
Randy turned off the pot hauler and opened the trap door. Grabbing the lobster by the back, he held it up in the air for a quick inspection before banding its crusher claw and dropping it into the holding tank. With barely a glance over his shoulder, he stuck his hand —
God, Julia thought, his bare hand!
— into the bait barrel, grabbed one a fish head, stuck it onto the bait hook inside the trap, then shut and locked the trap door.
“That’s all there is to it,” Randy said before he dropped the trap over the side and played out the line as it sank to the bottom. “One down … fifty-six to go.”
John nodded approval, and Julia, who had been thinking it didn’t look all that tough, sighed when she considered how many more traps he had to haul today.
“At the dock, you said you had a short haul today,” Julia said. “What did you mean by that?”
Randy was back at the wheel, steering a course for his next buoy. The engine was racing loudly again, so he had to lean close as she repeated her question.
“Altoge
ther, I’ve got more ‘n three hunrit ‘poverty boxes.’“
“Poverty boxes?”
“Lobster traps … That’s what we call ‘em. In the summer, I do all right. Now that winter’s comin’, I start takin’ ‘em out of the water, but I’ll still have over a hunerit and fifty. A short haul is when you pull little less than half of your traps and leave the rest for the next day. By alternating back and forth, you don’t bust your ass quite so bad. No reason to, now that tourist season’s over.”
Julia nodded and then rejoined Ellie at the bow, grateful to be away from the nauseating bait smell. No matter how interesting all of this was, she didn’t think it was worth putting up with the stomach-churning stench, which now saturated Randy but — hopefully — not John.
Randy pulled a few more traps, and John pitched in, helping out. At first, Julia thought his motions seemed tentative as he flailed with the gaff and tried to hook the buoy. After a while, though, with Randy’s help, he started getting relatively proficient at it. Several times, either when his grip on a pot would slip or he held on to the warp too long when throwing the pot back in, he and Randy would hoot and holler, and Julia was happy to see her husband genuinely enjoying himself. Randy broke out a thermos of coffee, and Julia and Ellie came back to share it with them, but mostly they kept to the front of the boat, letting the sounds of the men working as well as the conversation-killing steady throb of the engine and the lapping of waves lull her into a relaxed, dreamy state.
As the sun rose higher, cutting but not entirely removing the chill, the ocean turned brilliant blue. Farther out to sea, Julia saw rough-looking whitecaps —”heavy chop,” Ellie informed her. But here in the shelter of the islands, the water was calmer. Shimmering light so bright it hurt to look directly at it trailed alongside the boat as Randy took them further out to sea. Randy explained that they would make a wide loop out around Chebeague and then circle back so they could get a good view of Portland harbor … the “tourist trip,” as Randy called it.
After more than two hours, Randy had quite a catch of lobsters, and John worked efficiently alongside him now, no longer a hindrance. He was opening traps, rebaiting hooks, and sinking the traps almost as quickly as Randy could.
And as they worked, Julia noticed that John and Randy related better. The night they had visited Randy and Ellie, and even this morning when they were starting out, John had treated both Randy and Ellie with a cool distance that, Julia thought, hid more outright hostility. But now Randy and John seemed to have rediscovered and started to share whatever they’d had as best friends in high school. They traded off-color jokes, which Julia and Ellie chose to ignore, and good-natured goofing around, trading insults and verbal abuse the close friends do. It made Julia doubly enjoy the morning and the fact that, even at the expense of her stomach, she had come along.
It was while they were stopped, after John had gaffed a pot and started to haul it up, that Julia glanced over the side of the boat and saw something.
“What the — ?” she said aloud, shifting into a sitting position but not taking her eyes off the water.
There had been a flash of motion to the side of the sun’s reflection — something that hadn’t looked quite right.
“You seasick?” Ellie asked, concern registering on her face as she moved closer to Julia.
“No,” Julia said, “I —”
She cut herself off, and then, as she was leaning over the rail, straining to see what had been shimmering below the surface next to the boat, John let out a loud shout.
“Come on, you mother-humper!”
“Did it fetch up on you?” Randy asked, leaning from the house.
John flipped off the hauler and was straining to hold on to the warp. His mouth was set in a hard line, his teeth exposed.
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” he said sharply. “But if you don’t give me a hand here, we’re gonna lose it.”
Leaving the wheel, Randy came over to the side of the boat and took the rope from John.
“I saw something under the boat,” Julia said, looking past Ellie to the men struggling with the lobster pot. She heard the nervous quaver in her voice, and all she could think about was the theme music from Jaws. She had no idea what she had seen, but there most definitely had been something … something long and dark, shifting beneath the surface, just out of sight.
Randy was still holding on to the line, trying to jiggle it free.
“Might be caught up in some kelp,” he said. “Take this and hold tight. Lemme try —”
He didn’t finish the sentence as he handed the rope to John and, easing the engine up a bit, swung the boat around to approach the pot from the other side. Once he had come about, he cut the engine again and took the rope from John, but no amount of pulling would get the trap free.
Julia, meanwhile, was looking back and forth from what the men were doing to the water below the boat. While Randy was bringing the boat around, the blurry motion was still there. It wasn’t much. The rippling surface of the water refracted the light, but she could have sworn she saw a vague white figure swimming alongside the boat even as it turned.
Of course, it was entirely possible that a big fish — a tuna or even a shark — or perhaps a school of fish that looked like one big fish might follow along beside a boat. The only part Julia was having trouble accepting was her conviction that she had seen legs … that the shape underneath the boat had given a quick, powerful kick to keep up.
“Could there be … something like a big fish … maybe a shark tangled in the line?” she asked Ellie.
“I’m not the one to ask,” Ellie said with a shrug of her shoulder.
Julia suddenly got the crazy thought that there was a gigantic lobster down there, holding on to the rope, ready to seek revenge on all the local lobstermen on the island … starting with Randy. Her mind filled with images of giant sea beasts and crabs from half a dozen lame brained science fiction movies from the fifties.
Why not an oversized lobster?
Julia dismissed her wild speculations but found no reassurance in Ellie’s disengaged expression.
There was something down there!
On the port side of the boat, looking away from the sun, the water was darker, impenetrable. It rippled alongside the boat like splotches of spilled ink. Still, Julia could see a hint of motion as though whatever was down there was keeping pace with the boat.
Could it be the shadow of the boat, reflecting in the water?
That was possible, but even as the boat turned, now and again the flicker of motion appeared to travel in the opposite direction. It darted back and forth, keeping close to the underside of the boat. She couldn’t shake the impression that she had seen, for an instant, the blurred image of human legs, kicking as though — crazy though the thought was — someone was swimming alongside the boat a good six feet or more beneath the surface.
“We may have to give up on this one,” Randy said, glancing at John over his shoulder as he continued to try to raise the pot. “‘S funny, though. The bottom here’s usually pretty smooth.”
He pulled on the line so hard the boat started listing seriously to the side. Julia shivered and looked longingly at the nearest land when she imagined all four of them falling over the side of the boat and into the icy water. Could she swim to shore before the cold got her?
“You gotta expect it now ‘n then,” Randy said. “‘Least I can save the buoy.”
Taking a six-inch knife from his belt sheath, he sawed through the strands of rope. When he was about halfway through, the tension on the rope released with a loud snap. The sound reminded Julia of the sound a bullet would make hitting the water, and she remembered that day watching Frenchie unload his rifle at the wharf rats. The rope sucked back into the water so fast she had the impression something down there had yanked it.
Randy coiled up the rope he had salvaged and tossed it to the stern.
“The storm the other day probably stirred up the kelp beds,” he s
aid, shaking his head with disgust. “I hate to lose a pot.”
“Occupational hazard,” John said as he shook out a cigarette and lit it.
Julia was giving them scant attention when Randy opened up the engine and started toward his next buoy. She was still convinced that whatever was under the boat was still there. She jumped with a startled scream when a heavy thump sounded on the bottom of the boat.
“What was that?” she asked, looking anxiously from Ellie to John and Randy.
Ellie shrugged. John and Randy, apparently, hadn’t heard her.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Ellie said, shaking her head. “Maybe we hit another buoy.”
“It sure sounded like … something,” Julia said, her voice tightening.
Glancing over the side again, she froze when she saw eyes —
Human eyes!
— staring up at her.
In the instant her body flooded with panic, she tried to convince herself it had been her own face reflected in the water, but glancing down again, she most definitely saw wide, staring eyes looking up at her. They glowed with unnatural brightness, but even as Julia tried to register what she was seeing, they faded away, sinking down into the murky depths.
“John —” she said, but then she caught herself.
John looked at her, but she simply shook her head, feeling foolish.
“You okay?” John asked, making his way toward her. “You feeling seasick?”
“I should’a given you some Dramamine before we left,” Ellie said apologetically.
Julia tightened her lips and shook her head, thinking, If only it were that simple … I’m seeing things …
No, there … there’s someone following us.”
John glanced around, scanning the ocean, obviously not getting what she meant.
“They’re swimming underwater … beside the boat.
