When he reached her side, he paused and looked down. “Started doodling, I see.”
Something small and hard appeared in her throat: something that was difficult, but not impossible, to swallow down.
“Tasty looking, isn’t it?” he said. “I should fry it up for dinner.”
8
1998
HIS NEXT MESSAGE, MUCH LIKE HIS FIRST, COMES at her from beyond the aquarium’s walls.
Outside on Cannery Row, the crowds gather and roll. The little squid’s internal spillage is still fresh on her hands, the food room’s brightness still blinds her. An unrest. An imbalance of power neither unpleasant nor new. Her first and last nights with Ricketts.
And more recently—but not too recently—the aquarium’s opening day. Almost fourteen years ago now: October 20, 1984. There was a festival to commemorate the occasion, which she had specifically designed to appear homey and nonthreatening. A Dixieland jazz band made up of local musicians. Kids in hand-sewn sardine costumes, tinfoil scales falling from their arms and legs as they sang and danced in what barely resembled unison. Speeches by a handful of surviving cannery workers, all of them visibly inebriated. Balloon animals. Food trucks. Beneath it all, though, beneath the rough-hewn feel-goodery and Sicilian-style calamari, there was an unmistakable taste of something sleek and epic, audible whispers of the double-edged reward of impending world renown, of just how long it would take for the entire town to become unrecognizable as a result.
And has it come to pass? Is it unrecognizable? It’s a question she asks herself often, especially now that historical preservation has come into vogue. Yes and no, she always says, like how a fingerprint does and does not resemble an actual finger. Sometimes you have to look hard—you have to look beyond the T-shirt shops and the laser tag—but the past is still there, a past even more necessary than Steinbeck’s: the Costanoans and their lost, peaceful, shellfish-hungry tribes; the Spaniards who conquered and catholicized California, their fervor outwardly attributable to divine right and the glory of a distant throne, but that on closer inspection emitted the wet, fragrant heat of personal vendetta.
As for his message, it’s not hard to spot. In many ways, it’s as obvious as the beaching of the Humboldt squid. This time, however, it has taken human form: the two aquarium employees entertaining the visitors in line. The first is an intern in a full-body otter costume. The second is a banjo player singing well-known popular tunes rewritten in honor of the aquarium’s residents: the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” rewritten as “Eight Arms and a Beak,” referring to the eight arms of the octopus and the calciferous mandible concealed therein; the Kinks’ “Lola,” which is about a transvestite, rewritten as “Mola,” which is one half of the scientific name of the Mola mola, the gigantic fish she still needs to figure out how to release.
Work, then, is calling: loud as it ever has, loud as it always will. But so is he. Stay, he says. Watch and listen. And she’ll be damned if he isn’t right. The intern is a girl of fifteen. The banjo player was once Monterey’s only known homeless man. To anyone else, it would seem like an unfortunate pairing, but not to her. It reminds her of the good times—of October instead of May, of mammals instead of cephalopods—which means she’s now following his instructions and then some. She hurries to the sea otter exhibit, right there among the paying public. She watches the little captives float and flip, somnolent one moment, clownish the next, fiddling with the hamster balls full of prawns and the tangled lengths of neoprene kelp: toys that are supposed to keep them from going mad in captivity.
Then, suddenly, she’s on the aquarium’s roof, standing in the shadow of a very different sort of tank. None of the otters up here are on display. Rather, they are on probation, undergoing a stint in rehab in the wake of maternal abandonment. The whole thing is very scientific, very sound, designed with the noble intention of eventual rerelease. The aquarist surrogate wears a welding mask, a poncho, and rubber gloves, all of it smeared with seaweed to obscure her human scent. The person, in other words, remains separate from the otter. The mother remains separate from the mothering.
There was a time, however, when it wasn’t like this. Not at all. In the aquarium’s early days, it happened right there in the little man-made cove below the deck. The aquarist surrogate—usually a woman, undisguised and unfragranced—would teach the poor orphan everything a mother otter would have. How to dive, how to hunt, how to get the clam and the rock, how to bang them together, how to clean up afterward. When the lessons were over and the final test was administered, the losers would be put on exhibit while the winners would be fitted with orange flipper tags and sent on their way. But then one day, disaster. A released otter returned to the cove, heartbroken and homesick and vengefully jealous, and charged the aquarist surrogate as she swam with her newest pup, biting down onto the ex-mother’s face, thrusting ineffectually, and refusing to let go.
And as she stands here now—the Humboldts beginning to rot on the nearby beach, their corpses filling the air with a scent that is both inadvertent and authentic—she can turn her back on the rehab tank and look down onto Cannery Row from above. She can see the intern and the banjo player, she can imagine them failing and being placed inside a tank of their own. Tourists are everywhere, invasive and necessary, giving the street life and taking it away. There is a desperation to their desires, which she supposes would be all right except for one thing: the fact that desperation never arises out of certainty. Beneath all of this—beneath all the tributes and distractions and renovations—is a deep and fundamental doubt, and the aquarium is not immune. The real version can never peacefully coexist alongside its imagined twin, which is why the real bay and the fake one probably fight each other when the doors are closed and no one is looking, two thirsty giants battling for ownership of the night.
In her own life, it’s happened before. She can trace the scar on her forehead to several verifiable sources, some obvious, some not. Some imagined, some actual. Today, however, only one seems to matter, only one seems to provide a rebuttal to his assertions. A collecting trip not in his tide pools but in the Amazon—she plus three other aquarists in search of arapaimas and traíras and peacock bass—during which a botfly bit her on the head. For the week following the implantation, she endured. She allowed the egg to gestate within a walnut-sized lump directly beneath the old scar tissue, the irritation growing each day, reaching heights she had never anticipated, until one night, alone in her tent with the river outside sloshing its way through the sort of mud that starts and ends civilizations, a tragedy took place, a tragedy even worse than the prodigal otter. The subcutaneous squirming and itching became too much and she was forced to expel the little embryo with a long, sad breath and a gentle application of the fingernails. Two lives at a mutually exclusive crossroads. A parasite and a host, a tourist and a local, and it’s up to her to determine which is which.
9
1940
“YOU GET THEM WITH A KNIFE,” ARTHUR EXPLAINED. “Slide it under the foot. I’ve got a Japanese friend in Chinatown who dives for them and eats them alive.”
Margot continued to draw. An abalone today, a mollusk about the dimensions of a rugby ball, a scythe-shaped trail of pinholes marking the uppermost curve of its terraced shell, dark feelers emerging from the holes like tendrils of spilled ink. Yesterday, it had been an orange sea star, its plumpness veined with a net of prickly white. The day before, a turban snail, its black spiral topped with an opalescent crown. And in the days preceding it had been worms, what seemed like hundreds of them—flatworms, roundworms, polychaete worms, tube worms, fat innkeeper worms—their interminable numbers accompanied by Arthur’s equally interminable monologues about the local sea life, the detail and enthusiasm of which stunned her. It was clear he was trying to imitate Ricketts: his unrushed cadence, his casual erudition. Most of the time it didn’t work, but sometimes it did. Sometimes she would listen and respond, especially when the information seemed exotic or violent. Mostly, though, s
he kept to her sketchbook as he yammered on, his voice acquiring the same bland omnipresence as the surrounding fog.
And the fog. The fog. Always the fog. It was the most persistent phenomenon, meteorologic or otherwise, she had ever seen. Each morning as she stepped out onto the porch, there it was. Occasionally, it burned off in the afternoons to reveal a porcelain-like blue, but most of the time it stayed put, causing each passing hour, each passing day, to appear identical to the one before it. In any other instance, it would have been intolerable. Here, however, it meant something. It was a blank canvas on which she could envision a huge and glorious design, an abstract blueprint of her future inside the lab. With each new creature she was asked to draw, she could feel her desire taking shape again, her earlier doubts fading into something as useless and desiccated as the squid tentacle, which, after she had finished drawing it, had been kicked off the porch and into the dirt beneath the bougainvillea. And it was only a matter of time, she reassured herself whenever it caught her eye. Only a matter of time until she was once again in the center of things, until the right opportunity presented itself, until she could reclaim what had been promised her and unpack it with gratitude and greed.
“Once you hit bottom, you have to start running along the ocean floor. You have to run or else they’ll have time to hide in the rocks. And then there are the sea otters, which are another problem entirely.”
She lifted her pencil and made a critique. Yes, success was imminent, but it wouldn’t be easy, especially with work this deceptively simple. Seeing an object, isolated and context free, and then drawing it: a path that looked flat and straight on the map but that, once traveled, proved itself aggressively otherwise. The abalone, for instance. Its shell was correct—big, rough, oblong—but its foot was not, so she turned to a fresh page and began again.
“And that’s why you should never trust Chileans. Because what they call an abalone is actually a rock snail, even though—”
Arthur fell abruptly silent. She continued drawing.
“Look,” he resumed. “Down the hill.”
Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes from the paper. Her father was making the climb to the house, which wouldn’t have been remarkable except for two things. First, he was returning midday instead of in the evening: a dramatic disruption to his usual routine. Second, he was not alone. He was flanked by a woman and a boy, the sight of whom caused Arthur to fidget with nervousness. They didn’t move like rich people, she noticed as the visitors continued to ascend, but they took great pains to dress like it: in clothing as well made as it was ill suited to even the mildest exertion. The woman, especially, seemed atrociously uncomfortable in her high-necked linen dress, the crisp fabric wilted with perspiration and clinging to her round limbs like butcher paper. She clutched a delicate straw boater in one substantial fist. The other fist dabbed at her forehead with a pink silk handkerchief, using the sort of care normally lavished on an open sore. She was panting from the effort of the climb but laughing, too, which produced something akin to the noise of the cannery whistles.
The boy, however, didn’t make a sound. Like the woman, he was dressed in a way that indicated a specific type of masochism, but he didn’t seem nearly as amused by it. His shoulders were hunched, his hands were clenched, and on his pale, sunken, strangely pious face was the pained expression of a convalescent forced from his sickbed instead of being allowed to die in peace.
“Oh no,” Arthur said.
“Who are they?”
The trio came to a stop at the foot of the porch. She closed the sketchbook and wedged the pencil between its pages. Her father gave Arthur an obscure half smile and then turned to Margot.
“Allow me to introduce Mrs. Agnelli, my new business partner.” He was speaking slowly and deliberately, giving his subtext ample time to sink in. “While we’re inside, I trust you’ll entertain her son, Tino.”
Tino gave what Egon Schiele might have deemed a smile.
“I’ll do my best,” Margot said.
Anders escorted the woman up the porch steps and into the house. Arthur exhaled loudly. Tino remained standing in the street, his gaze aimed sullenly at the treetops. Margot opened her sketchbook and began working again. The interruption was inconsequential, she told herself; she would return to her sketches undeterred. But the sudden urge to do something decisive and physical was too strong, so she drew back her hand and lined it up with the bucket. A slapping contest, as Ricketts would have said, that would send the abalone down into the dirt alongside the tentacle. Before she could make contact, however, a cannery whistle was sounding and Arthur was jumping to his feet.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
“No hurry.”
“Tomorrow?”
“If we must.”
He gave a manic smile and what almost looked like a curtsy, then sprinted down the hill twice as fast as the neighboring workers. When he had disappeared from view, Tino cracked his neck and unbuttoned his topcoat with a flicker of his thin-fingered hand. One eye seemed to be studying her sketchbook while the other eye scanned the perimeter of the house.
“My mother’s people should stop torturing him.” He sighed. “He’ll end up just like my father.”
She remembered the Sicilian women with their cigarettes: a school of sharks toying with their next meal.
“Your mother owns the Del Mar cannery,” she guessed.
“Indeed.”
“Is my father buying that one, too?”
“Likely not.” He frowned. “But let’s find out for sure.”
Then, with an abrupt and reptilian speed, he was on the move: sprinting around the side of the house and disappearing within the rearmost branches of the bougainvillea. She stood and followed, the leaves scratching against her face. There was a window here, just above eye level.
“You’re bigger,” he said. “Help me up.”
“No.”
“Only for a moment. I need to see how they’re sitting.”
She squinted at him and then knelt down, hands basketed.
“Longer than a moment and I’m letting you fall,” she warned.
He raised a well-polished shoe off the dirt and into her palms. When he lifted himself to the height of the window and transferred his full weight onto her, she was surprised at how light he was. He was the same age and gender as Arthur, but in terms of their individual physicalities, they couldn’t have been more different: one of them sturdy and inert and almost impossible to get rid of, the other quick and insubstantial and seemingly on the perpetual verge of disappearance.
“Done.” He hopped down without a sound.
“Well?”
“They’re both on the sofa, which means no new business is under way. If there were a potential for that, they’d be across a table from each other. And there would be cake.”
Margot nodded. She, too, could have intuited this at a glance, but she wouldn’t have been able to explain it, which was an important difference.
“So,” she said. “You’re apprenticed.”
“Apprenticed?”
“It means to—”
“I know what it means. I just don’t know what you mean by it.”
She gave him a look meant to convey forthrightness, not pride. “My father has been training me to take over someday.”
“Preserving the legacy.” He winced. “A noble path.”
“And you?”
“Unlike my brothers, I’m not the sort of brute who can endure the canneries. So she totes me around with her instead.”
“Then you should make yourself of use.”
He eyed her disapprovingly. She looked at the dirt. The tentacle was just inches away, pill bugs nestled into its suction cups.
“Let’s go back to the porch,” she said.
“No. I prefer it here.”
He perched himself on a branch that didn’t look capable of supporting a sparrow, much less a human boy. She sat on the ground and gave the tentacle a little kick, which caused the pil
l bugs to wake and scatter. To an onlooker, it would have seemed like a childish thing—hiding in a bush, eavesdropping on the grown-ups—and at first, she felt that way, too. But the longer they sat there, the firmer her contact with the cold, hard earth, the more it appeared that Tino’s preference had been the correct one. Their discussion was about to take a delicate turn, and she was grateful for the darkness and containment the foliage provided.
“So why is she here?” Margot asked. “If there’s nothing new to talk about?”
Tino regarded her mournfully from above. “That’s just the way my people do it, I’m afraid. A signed contract is only the beginning. A true alliance means socializing. Endlessly.”
“Cake must be eaten.” Margot nodded. “Children must meet.”
“Don’t forget all the trips to church.”
He gave a terse, cynical smile. She offered one in return. He thought he wasn’t like her, but he was wrong. They were exactly the same: offspring dragged around by powerful parents and treated as heir or prop depending on the circumstance; captives who, despite their protests, were surprisingly conversant in the language of captivity.
“Tell me about the contract,” she said, rising to a crouch. They were looking directly into each other’s eyes now, the bougainvillea blossoms arranged wreathlike behind Tino’s head, as if by meticulous design. “What are the terms? I heard the cannery went for a very low price.”
“Outrageously low, but only because he agreed to certain conditions.”
“Such as?”
“He can buy sardines from my mother’s fleet, but no one else’s.”
“She owns a fishing fleet, too?”
“The biggest one in town.”
“So by selling the cannery to my father, she now controls both supply and demand.”
“And effectively profits from each step of the production process while simultaneously avoiding the unions’ antimonopoly nonsense.”
Monterey Bay Page 8
