Monterey Bay

by Lindsay Hatton

  On the street, Anders plowed ahead and Margot did her best to keep up.

  Earlier, as they had made their way downhill, she had been too distracted to take in the detail of her surroundings, but now she seemed capable of nothing but, the entire landscape suddenly revealing itself as the sort of omen only a fool would misinterpret. There had been a half-dozen whistle blasts in the past twelve hours, so the canneries were full even though the high season was still months away. The buildings convulsed, some of them howling with the expulsion of cooking steam, some of them leaking gray smoke from tube-shaped stacks. The street itself, however, was strangely empty, a shallow, uneasy stillness in the air that made it feel like the moment before the revelation of some very bad or very meaningful piece of news. There were conclusions to arrive at, she told herself, new tactics to consider, second chances upon which to insist. She couldn’t, though. For now, all she could do was try to guess at her father’s next steps.

  When they reached the Row’s terminus, she expected him to turn left on David Avenue, to begin the uphill climb. Instead, he stopped in front of the last building on the street. Unlike some of the neighboring canneries, which featured architectural nods to the Spanish-built missions that dotted the length of the state, this one was a blank white box, a message in its austerity that, more than anything that had just been said inside the lab, made her dizzy with panic.

  “If you’ll just—”

  “I trust you can manage dinner on your own,” he said.

  “Nothing needs to change. You’ve never cared about—”

  “It’s pointless now. Don’t you understand that? What will he tell you—what will you learn—now that you’ve already given him everything he might have wanted?”

  “Might have wanted?” she hissed.

  She straightened her back and stiffened her limbs, preparing herself for the obvious rebuttal. Instead, he did something much worse: he turned and moved toward what appeared to be the cannery’s only door, the heavy, steel portal opening with the push of a single outstretched finger.

  7

  DREAMS, VIOLENT AND VIVID ONES.

  Animals fighting on top of the kitchen table, the blood flying onto the papered walls, onto the grease can and the ants. Their old home in the Channel Islands and their neighbor’s greenhouse, her body bound and gagged in the corner, the plants using their strange, snakelike tongues to lick her as she struggled. The fog suffocating her, the sand eating her alive, the salt water in the bay dissolving her limbs and torso until all that was left was an otter-mauled head that bobbed on the surface and paddled around with the help of ear-shaped fins. When these dreams woke her in the middle of the night, she would sit there on the sofa and rub the scar as if trying to erase it, promising herself that when morning came, she would retrieve the sketchbook from her satchel and record whatever she remembered and then finally commit the evidence to the flames. The sketchbook, however, couldn’t be found—a casualty, most likely, of their hasty departure from the hotel—so the things she might have drawn remained indefinite and free-floating, filling her with an apprehension that persisted well through breakfast, well past the moment at which her father descended the hill and left her alone on the porch yet again with nothing but the bougainvillea for company.

  This time, however, she didn’t find any sort of peace. What she had tried to say to her father outside his cannery had been right. By his own admittance, he had never cared about the lesser mammal aspect of things, or at least he had never seemed to. Her physical self and the way in which she managed it: none of it had ever attracted his concern, much less his critique. A different sort of father might have shown escalating signs of nervousness as the years passed, as the biological determinants made themselves apparent, but even on the day she first began to bleed, Anders had remained professional, expedient, her new bodily complications assessed as drily and succinctly as if he were calculating the depreciation on a piece of factory equipment. But now he was angry about it, and his anger seemed deeper than logic: a fact that, as the days passed, made their interactions twice as distant and volatile as before.

  And then there was Ricketts’s strange comment, the one about the Methodists and the butterflies, the hymns and the tents. It seemed to imply something impossible: that Anders had been to Monterey before and had voluntarily returned, a choice that went counter to everything he had always told her about how lives should progress.

  So, restless with confusion and sour with dreams, she took the only action she could. She gathered information. She left the house and began to explore the town much as she had once explored the manor in the Philippines: mapping it out in her mind’s eye, alert for patterns or aberrations. She went up and around the hill on which they lived, she saw the richest neighborhoods at its peak, the poorest neighborhoods at its base. She went over the hill and down Pacific Street, where she encountered the big, Federalist-looking anomaly that had once housed the state’s constitutional convention. She dipped down into the badlands at the head of the wharf and watched the prostitutes melt away into the old adobes when they saw her approach. She paced the perimeter of the large Chinatown on Washington Street and the smaller one on McAbee Beach. She even went back to the Hotel Del Monte to see if it was still empty of guests, which it was.

  The only place she didn’t go was Cannery Row. As long as everything was still so flammable, such proximity seemed unwise. So she went only as close as seemed strategically advisable, to a little outcropping of land at the base of David Avenue beneath which lay a small beach and a small building with what seemed like too many windows. Here, she sat on a rock and read the local paper, absorbing whatever details seemed most relevant: about how there were battles under way between the reigning Italian fishing conglomerate and the unions; about how the Japanese and the Chinese were also in the mix, fighting for a share of what seemed to be a dwindling cache of spoils. Something was happening here. Something much like the cycle of abundance, exploitation, and famine that her father had once taken such pleasure in describing.

  The next morning at breakfast, she broke several days’ worth of silence to voice the obvious concerns.

  “Permission to speak candidly?” she asked.

  “Granted,” her father replied, his eyes boring holes into his toast. They weren’t cooking together anymore. Instead, they were cobbling together ad hoc, unplanned meals or, whenever that felt too intimate, not eating at all.

  “The canning industry seems like an unworthy target. Too complex. Too corrupt.”

  “Like I said before, my interests lie elsewhere. Dramatically so.”

  “Reduction, then. More profit, less labor. And the laws still haven’t caught up. Did you know there are floating reduction plants just offshore? Domiciled at sea to avoid municipal regulations?”

  “A compelling opportunity,” he hummed. “But not for me.”

  At this, a brief thrill. For the first time since their squid dinner, he was challenging her, goading her into playing along, and the urge to continue was almost irresistible. But she didn’t want to give him what he wanted. She didn’t want to surrender to his momentum, especially when she knew that by the time they finished, everything would probably remain unclear. So she put her dishes in the sink, went outside, and remained standing as she made her usual inspection of the hill, her eyes drawn inevitably to the street at its base. It was why people climbed mountains, she realized, or at least why they should: the clarifying loneliness of altitude, the resulting shift in perspective, the question of her father’s work suddenly paling in comparison with the question of Ricketts’s lab. As if in answer, a familiar cannery whistle: short, long, short. And the impulse that followed was one she was eager to indulge: jumping from the porch to join her neighbors on their downhill sprint, the cannery workers rushing headlong toward the sea as the sardines rushed headlong out of it.

  At the Del Mar cannery, she stopped, caught her breath, and let the crowd move ahead. If Arthur had come here from the lab, which was most
likely, he would already be inside, which meant she would have to wait. So she waited. She waited beneath the white sky, the air cold and foul. She counted the rats as they zipped between the buildings. She heard more whistles, she watched more cannery workers run. And what would happen, she wondered at some point when the crowds became unmanageable, if they didn’t stop? What would happen if they simply ignored the canneries and just kept running down the full length of the Row, past the Coast Valleys tanks, past Lake El Estero, past the Hotel Del Monte, until they collapsed from exhaustion among the dunes, the sand reluctantly conforming to their bodies? She remembered something her father had once told her about her mother’s death—about how even after the fire had finally consumed her flesh, the bones remained aloft in the mud like leaves on a pond—and this, she cautioned herself, was how it would end if she didn’t start being more deliberate, more clever. Mud and bones and collapse: all of it in service to ambitions that might not even be hers.

  “Cigarette?”

  She wheeled around. When their eyes met, she expected him to smile, but he just stared at her with a dishonestly straight face, as if he were physically suppressing something. The first few times she had seen him, she hadn’t really noticed his appearance; the magnetism of Ricketts’s presence had made such lesser observations impossible. Now, however, she was able to take stock. Seventeen years old, she guessed, possibly eighteen, short for his age yet solidly built, as if, had it not been for the stunting effects of poverty, he might have been taller than she and a good deal heavier. His clothes were old and colorless and almost insolently ill fitting, and his bearing was humble and nondescript. It was only his hair—wild and orange—that had any hint of extravagance to it, the curls sprouting from his skull like mutant carrots.

  “I don’t smoke,” she replied.

  “Me neither. I just tell the foreman I do so I can take a break when everyone else does.”

  He jerked his head toward a cluster of women standing behind him in the cannery’s shadow. They were studying Arthur and her with an exhausted superiority, cigarettes pinched between thumbs and forefingers.

  “Don’t mind them,” he whispered. “They think Sicily is the center of the universe.”

  “Then they probably should have stayed there.”

  Arthur winced, stepped forward, and drew her aside.

  “Please,” he said. “They’ve only just stopped hiding my boots in the steam cookers. I don’t want to start anything.”

  At first, his hand on her elbow felt menacing. It reminded her of that moment in Ricketts’s lab: her father holding her shoulders and shaking them. Say it. Say it in words. Arthur’s grip, however, was neither strong nor coercive. If anything, it had a gentleness to it that almost seemed grateful, as if the threat of the steam cookers had been little more than an excuse to touch her. To confirm, she looked in his eyes and there it was. A dopey, irrepressible gladness. A crush. Unrequited, naturally, and more than a little sickening. But useful nonetheless.

  “I wonder if you can help me,” she said.

  “I’m sure I can.”

  “I need my job back.”

  “Oh.” He let go of her elbow and glanced conspiratorially in the direction of the lab. “I heard the whole thing was pretty nasty.”

  “What else have you heard? Has he found someone new?”

  “To do the drawings, you mean?”

  “Of course that’s what I mean.”

  “Not that I know of. There’s a man in Carmel who sometimes does photographs… .”

  “But not drawings.”

  “Like yours?” His smile was so sweet, it made her stomach hurt. “No. There’s no one around here who does anything like that.”

  “Then you’ll ask him. As a favor to me.”

  “I’d be honored. But only if you’re certain.”

  “Certain of what?”

  He puffed out his cheeks and shuffled his feet. Then he dipped his head and took a step closer. She braced herself for another unwanted touch and was glad when it didn’t occur.

  “Don’t wait here.” He indicated the Sicilian women. “If they start to suspect something, I’ll never hear the end of it. Go to that little outcropping above the beach where you read the paper every morning. I’ll meet you as soon as I can.”

  By the time they reunited, it was late afternoon.

  From the agreed-upon location, she watched the water. The tide was low in the yellowing light, the refuse from the canneries shining on the surface. Sardine scales glinted like flecks of tarnished silver. Sardine heads rolled in and out with the modest waves, grayish pink intestines trailing behind. Here and there, wherever a good-sized clump of entrails had been washed onto the beach, opportunistic clouds of flies formed: mobile, black tumors that refused to disperse even when the seagulls swooped nearby. The guts and the flies were very interesting to her, as guts and flies tended to be. Even more interesting, however, were the half-dozen men combing the filthy sand with boots on their feet and buckets in their hands, just like Ricketts on the morning they first met.

  When she felt Arthur’s presence at her side, she made a point of not looking at him.

  “You know,” he said. “I sleep down there some nights. Pretty well sheltered from the wind. And when there’s enough dry driftwood to make a bonfire—”

  “What are they doing?” she asked, indicating the men.

  “The scientists? Same thing as Doc, I guess, only they get paid a little better for it. That building over there is Stanford property: the Hopkins Marine Station.” He gestured to the multiwindowed structure she had noticed on her prior visits. “Top-notch research facility, modeled after the one in Woods Hole.”

  “Why doesn’t he work there instead of at the lab? If the pay is higher and the reputation is better …”

  Arthur laughed. “Pay and reputation are probably the two things in this world he cares the least about. And there’s no way they’d buy into his theories. Not yet.”

  She remembered the manuscript and its odd, energetic phrasing. Most of all, she remembered the Styela resting in her palm, the beating of its primitive, unseen heart. She finally looked at Arthur. In one of his hands was yet another bucket. In the other was a mostly empty fish-meal sack.

  “So. He wants me back?”

  Arthur grimaced. “Yes and no. He wants you to steer clear of the lab. But he also wants you to work.”

  “Pictures for the specimen catalogs?”

  “Yes.”

  He offered her the bucket. There was a damp dishrag stretched across its opening.

  “Your first assignment,” he explained.

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me. I barely had to ask.”

  “And the sack?”

  “Oh. That one’s mine, I’m afraid. Empty coming up the hill, full coming down.”

  In the silence that followed, he gawked at her like a child.

  “With a sack full of cats,” he clarified, “it’s a whole lot harder going down than coming up.”

  Silence.

  “Going up, it’s easier without the cats.”

  “Yes. You mentioned that.”

  He frowned and looked at his feet. “I suppose I did.”

  “Until next time.” She turned away.

  “Wait!”

  When he reached into the fish-meal sack, she half expected him to withdraw something furry and dead, teeth bared in protest. Instead, he produced her satchel, the heft of the sketchbook visible inside. She snatched it from him, took out the sketchbook, and ruffled the pages under her thumb. Some of them still felt wet.

  “You left it at the lab after your accident. He wanted to return it to you the other day, but you and your father left before he got the chance.”

  She packed the sketchbook away and slung the satchel over her shoulder.

  “And between you and me,” he continued, “there’s some funny stuff in there. Almost gave me nightmares.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have looked.”
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br />   “Oh, I’m glad I looked. It just seemed unusual, that’s all. That such a lovely person could draw such ugly things.”

  She glared. He cringed. The scientists from Hopkins were retreating now, the gulls seeming to chuckle at them as they walked up the beach and toward the building on the point. In the distance, she could see the canopy of a dying kelp forest, its fronds transparent and sparse.

  “Just this?” she asked. “Just what’s in the bucket?”

  “That’s right. I’ll come up the hill to collect it in a couple days.”

  “I’ll be done tomorrow morning.”

  “That soon?”

  “Yes. Best of luck with your cats.”

  When he was gone, she waited a bit to make sure he wouldn’t return. Then she put the bucket on the ground and tore away the wet dishrag. At first, she couldn’t even guess at what she was seeing. It was plantlike in shape, a thick, tapered, semicoiled, leafless frond. In color and consistency, however, it was all animal: a disruptively fleshlike appearance to its pale skin, an asymmetry to it that implied a former attachment to something much larger.

  It was only once she had taken the hill at a run, climbed the front steps, and dumped it out onto the porch that she understood. In her travels, she had heard of such things, but only from people whose penchant for superstition had made their tales fundamentally implausible: tales of a boneless beast, a creature of the darkest depths, a monster with a vulture’s beak, with suction cups the size of dinner plates. She poked the tentacle with her pencil and flipped it over. Dinner plates, no, but large nonetheless, large enough to be frightening, large enough to hint at the dimensions of something as incredible as it was evil. Shivering, she retrieved the bucket and placed it upside down over the bloated squid arm, concealing it from view. Then she began to draw, filling page after page by memory until the sun had set, at which point she looked up from her drawing and out at the ocean. The sky was lit as if with a strange, gray fire. The trees were making the sound of arthritic joints, the air sharp with pine sap and salt. Her father was halfway home, halfway through his daily climb. She closed her sketchbook and began to tuck it beneath her. At the last moment, however, she reopened it and put it back onto her lap, its pages turned to her most recent and most accurate work.