“Can you get the penknife back?” she asked Tino as the sun set into the bay, its vermilion snuffed like a candle.
“Consider it done.”
Now, as the Buick began to sputter, she traced the outline of the penknife through the leather of the satchel and watched Ricketts guide the car onto the road’s dusty shoulder.
“Goddamn it.” He gave the dashboard a little slap. “Arthur told me it was fixed.”
He leapt from the car and peered under the hood. From the other side of the windshield, she couldn’t see the whole of him, just a collection of representative parts: his shoulders in his cotton shirt, the back of his sunburned neck. The bay wasn’t visible from this stretch of highway. Rather, it was artichoke and lettuce fields as far as the eye could see: hypnotic, gray-green striations of them. The sky seemed to be fighting for its blueness, the sun for its warmth. She crossed her ankles and buttoned up her vest, watching the two flaps meet and merge with a mental click. If there was any downside to the past several days of near-constant sketching, it was this: the clicks, the machine-symphony of verification when two shapes joined correctly. Usually, it was something she could turn on and off at will, but it no longer seemed voluntary. The shape-clicks now sounded whether she summoned them or not. Even worse, the colors were mixing themselves without her instruction or permission: a phenomenon that seemed to intensify in Ricketts’s presence. The car was repaired now and they were back on the road, but it didn’t feel like they were moving. Rather, it felt like the world beyond the windshield was outlining itself, smudging itself, and filling itself in with browns and greens and blues while she remained perfectly separate from the process, perfectly still.
When the scenery finally became inert, she looked over at Ricketts. He had brought the Buick to another stop: intentional this time.
“Where are we?” she asked
“Elkhorn Slough. About twenty miles up the coast.” He exited the car and she followed. “There are some canneries over there on the island, just like on the Row. And rumor has it they’re going to build an honest-to-goodness harbor here. A wharf even bigger than the one in Monterey.”
As he opened the trunk and began to unload it, she tried and failed to appraise the property without imagining how she’d draw it. A pocket of brackish marshland, an estuary snaking through the low, dry hills before slipping into the mouth of an industrial marina. A series of conjoined mud flats, clusters of yelping gulls, a dense patch of pickleweed separating the land from the water.
Then she considered Ricketts’s face. He was still happy, but not as happy as he had been inside the lab.
“If the harbor was a good idea,” she said, “it would have happened already.”
“Excellent point.” He gave her a bucket of bait. “The same can probably be said for their plans for a power plant and a yacht club.”
“Maybe the power plant. But not the yacht club.”
“I’m glad you think so, because I don’t have a yacht. Just a canoe.”
“You don’t even have that.”
“Guess again.”
He pointed to the pickleweed, in which she now perceived the shadow of an elongated wooden watercraft.
“Technically, you’re right. It’s not mine.” He went over to the vessel and began extracting it from its hiding place. “But Manuel’s more than happy to let me borrow it, provided we bring him back a bat ray.”
“He’s a collector, too?”
“No. He uses a cookie cutter to punch little circles from their wings. Then he fries them up and sells them to tourists who think they’re eating scallops.”
She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to laugh, so she didn’t.
“Bow or stern?” he asked, when the canoe had been packed with gear and carried to the waterline.
“Bow.”
“Naturally.”
She boarded. He handed her a paddle and hopped in behind her. When they pushed off and began drifting through the marina, it was with the practiced ease of people who had known each other for years. The clicks in her head were silent now and the colors were respecting their own boundaries, and it felt like a reprieve. But it also felt like an emptiness that needed filling.
“What’s the marina called?” she asked.
“Moss Landing. Which I’m sure you’ll find hopelessly obvious.”
Instead of replying, she dipped her paddle and watched it work. For a while, the water justified its name: soft, green, inert. Then, as he steered them away from the marina and into a channel, everything changed. A fast, clear current was pushing against them now, the canoe slipping into reverse, the landscape wheeling by in the wrong direction. She began to paddle faster, spurred on by the sound of him doing the same. Soon, she could feel blisters stinging on her palms like cigarette burns, her arms threatening to give out, until, all at once, the current vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The canoe moved effortlessly into the gray brown funnel of the slough’s midsection, into the black green of the eelgrass that reached out from the banks like fingers. She lifted her paddle as the canoe slid ashore. The water here was still and murky again, the dunes wet and fat. The shore curved around them in a lazy crescent, the half-submerged remains of an oyster farm dangling from its southern tip.
As they disembarked and unloaded the gear, she tried to keep her arms from shaking.
“Didn’t think we’d make it, did you?” he asked.
“Seems like a great deal of trouble for a handful of worms.” Her voice was overloud, but she couldn’t help it. She was far more fatigued than she should have been, and there were two strange, symmetrical pains throbbing between her hips.
“Oh, we’re not looking for worms today.” He unrolled a gill net and began to bait it with squid. He, too, seemed spent, but not physically. His earlier brightness was now almost totally extinguished, an odd flatness moving in to take its place. “In fact, I’m not sure what we’re looking for. I just needed to escape for a bit, I suppose.”
“From what?”
“From the lab.”
He handed her one end of the net, which she held in place as he got back into the canoe and rowed across the cove. He jumped out, secured his end to a section of the old oyster farm, and then returned to where she was standing. He tied her end to the beached canoe and then sat down on the slough’s wet banks, the mud receiving him with an audible squish. She raised an eyebrow.
“Ah, yes. I’m in the presence of a lady. I keep forgetting.”
He stood and retrieved a tarp, which he unfurled with a snap. Sitting next to him now, the tarp beneath them, she watched him watch the net. As always, the prospect of a capture had him completely focused, and she, too, felt certain something extraordinary was within seconds of happening. This time, however, his attention proved a poor predictor of action. For a long stretch, there was nothing: just the minutes ticking slowly by, the morning starting to deepen and shift into noon, the only sound that of the occasional car rattling up or down the distant road, that of the seals flopping their beefy shapes into the mounds of shattered clamshells that lined the lower edges of the slope.
“What did you bring for lunch?” she asked.
“Hungry?”
“No. Just curious.”
“Fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs.”
“And which shall we eat first?”
His eyes were widening now, his mouth curling, a portion of his good humor starting to resurface.
“Can it be true? Has Margot Fiske attempted a joke?”
“No good? You should have invited someone funnier.”
He wrenched his gaze from the net and let it fall on her face. “Funny or not, you’re the only person on earth I would’ve wanted to come along.”
She looked down and pretended to examine the blisters on her palms, which had begun to surround themselves with little hoods of clear fluid. He was a charming man, and he likely would have said the same thing no matter who was sitting there beside him. To Steinbeck, to Wormy, maybe even t
o Arthur. She didn’t care, though. She had goals in mind, and none of them would be achieved by convincing herself she wasn’t special.
“What did you mean about the lab?” she asked. “About wanting to escape it?”
He tucked both legs beneath him and then reconsidered, stretching them out to their full length, the heels of his boots digging into the mud.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It just feels different in there all of a sudden. I wish I could explain it better.”
“Money’s no longer a problem. That’s probably a relief.”
“Oh, money’s never really a problem.” His focus was on the net again, but a shred of it had been left behind with her. “Yet it’s always a problem. I’m sure you understand.”
She nodded vigorously to conceal her confusion.
“And with the trip coming up, I suppose we can use every penny we can get our hands on, even though I can’t shake the feeling we’re doomed no matter what.”
“What trip? And why is it doomed?”
He gave her a perplexed glance. “I could have sworn we already discussed this at length. Just yesterday, in fact.”
“No. I would have remembered.”
“Hmmm.” He frowned. “Must be mistaking you for one of the girls at the Lone Star. Anyhow, we’re leaving for Mexico in March. A couple of months in the Sea of Cortez, gathering material for the new book. John’s lawyer is finalizing the lease for the boat as we speak and Wormy is preparing the cargo manifest, which is mostly beer, which I’m sure comes as less than a shock.”
She prodded at a blister to make it burn. “Sounds like a productive journey.”
“That’s the idea, but things have gotten so complicated. John is worse than I’ve ever seen him, the poor fellow. He just can’t seem to concentrate and I don’t blame him. The Hollywood contingent is driving him mad. Carol is up north, screaming divorce every time he blinks. As for Wormy, well, she has obligations of her own, which never comes as a surprise to anyone but me. To be honest, it makes me wonder what we’re trying to prove, taking off to sea when everything on land is falling to pieces.”
When he stopped talking, she paused to weigh his words. With only a few luminous exceptions, he had never unburdened himself like this before; he had never dropped the scrim of his friendly optimism. For several seconds, she had no idea what to say. Then, as she looked in the direction of the bay, a useful memory surfaced: the departure from the Philippines, the decisive enormity of the cargo ship, the sea putting a measurable distance between her and happiness, but also between her and defeat.
“Some people think the ocean means freedom. A new start.”
“I’ll bet fish think the same thing about land. And oh, how wrong they are!”
“I’m not sure fish care one way or another.”
“And that, I’m afraid, is where we part ways.”
At this, he shimmied his rear end deeply into the tarp, as if trying to reestablish contact with the mud beneath.
“Should I tell another joke?” she asked.
Still brooding, he looked up at her. “You know why I’m out there every day, don’t you? On the very borderline of the metaphysical?”
“Breaking through with the limpets? Staring the life out of hermit crabs?”
“I had a dream about you last night,” he continued, ignoring her incitement. “Or, more accurately, about your father. He was a Nazi. And you were a Jew.”
“How silly.”
“Is it? I feel like Anders has more than a bit of latent sadism trying to push its way through.”
“I would assume most fathers do.”
“Not mine. Most of his people were ministers.”
“God brings no guarantees.”
“You’re quite right. But in this instance, the book matched its cover.” His smile was sad but thankful. “His mind wasn’t especially keen, I’ll grant you that, but his soul was good. He encouraged me to read and exercise. To sleep out in the snow, to harden myself a little. When I dropped out of school with the intention of walking through the southern states by day and sleeping in graveyards by night, he didn’t question it. He saw me off with encouragement and pocket change, and then, in the lab’s early days, he even worked alongside me for a spell. It was wonderful.”
Another flurry of confessions. How to best receive them? she wondered frantically. How to keep them coming?
“And where is he now?” she asked.
“Dead.”
“Oh.”
She expected him to sneer at the grief and shove it aside, as she usually did. Instead, he put a hand over his heart, as if palpating the ache.
“Almost four years now, but it’s still pretty fresh. Same year as the fire in the lab—the one that destroyed practically everything I owned—and, even now, it’s like two halves of the same terrible thing. It’s like the two events are related. Not in terms of one causing the other, but in terms of being linked in some primal, toto manner. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
Fire and the death of a parent. Yes. She knew.
“But there are plenty of good people left,” he continued. “That’s what I try to remind myself every day, especially when things seem dark. John, Wormy, Joe, Ritchie, Tal, George, Xenia: they understand and that’s what matters. Even if the boat sinks, I’m still out there doing good work, and that’s something even a failure can be proud of.”
She watched him shut his eyes and then reopen them.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“Where?”
“On the trip to Mexico.”
“What?” He laughed. “No!”
“Why not?”
“Oh Christ.” He leaned across her and peered mournfully inside the picnic basket. “And to think I forgot to pack the beer.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Tell me what I’m up against.”
At this, the net gave a twitch, but not one big enough to warrant attention.
“You’re not up against anything, that’s the point.” If he was annoyed with her now, he was doing a decent job hiding it, his eyes fixed on the net’s false alarms. “You’ve made yourself completely essential and I’m not sure if I like it or not.”
“Of course you like it.”
He looked insulted. But then his mouth broke open, the day’s first genuine smile lighting up his face.
“I need to pee.”
“You’re in the presence of a lady. You said so yourself.”
“I know. I always use the word pee around ladies because it’s so much more elegant than piss. Everyone knows that only horses piss.”
“I’ll wait here and pretend I’m not listening.”
He groaned and scratched his beard. “If John doesn’t write a book about you, he’s a goddamned idiot.”
He stood, climbed the slick dunes, and half disappeared behind them. She heard the intimate, expected sounds—the unzipping of a fly, the splashdown of an elevated stream—and then there was a tremor of the net that made her jump. She sprinted to the water’s edge. In the net, only a few steps from shore, was a bat ray nearly four feet long and equally as wide, thrashing and brown and cat-eyed.
“Ed!”
For the first time ever, she had called him by his given name, and the sound of it was like a gunshot. The commotion in the net mirrored the commotion at her back—the tucking, the zipping, the scrambling—and before she knew it, he was at her side, lunging for the captive, bringing it out of the water and into his arms, not in the competent way he handled most things, but with an almost vengeful, disorganized force. He looked desperately around him at the mud and the weeds, and then at her.
“The knife in the picnic basket,” he grunted. “Get it.”
She bent down and snatched up the implement. In her hand, it felt insubstantial and weightless, unlikely to survive a passage through a stick of butter, much less through living flesh. So she tossed it into the mud and withdrew her father’s penknife from th
e satchel. She flicked it open.
“From gills to gills, right below the jaw,” Ricketts said, unaware of the blade’s substitution. “And then stand back.”
“I’ll ruin it.”
“No, you won’t. Manuel just needs the wings.”
As if in response, the animal sucked Ricketts’s hand into its throat, its tooth plates grinding down, its mouth curled permanently upward as if smiling. Ricketts yelped and tore his fingers free. She stepped forward and paused for a second, waiting for the right opportunity, and when it arrived, there was no hesitation. It was just like the flatworms and the microscope slide: total precision, total inevitability. The flapping of the wings made it more difficult than expected, as did the puppylike softness of the ray’s skin, as did the puppylike roundness of its skull. She proceeded, however, cutting right where he had instructed, right below the jaw as if she were making a second mouth. There was a gush from the arteries, her fingers suddenly hot and wet and red. Stunned, she stepped away and let him manage the death throes on his own, the ray flapping against his chest like a big, featherless bird.
When it was all over, she wiped the blade against the eelgrass and washed her hands in the water. He lowered the ray into a patch of mud that had turned mauve with blood.
“When I die,” he said quietly, watching the animal make its final twitch, “I’m nearly certain they’ll all be waiting for me. Everything I’ve ever killed, waiting for me in one big room.”
That’s crazy, she wanted to say.
“That’s beautiful,” she said.
He picked up the dead ray as if it were a sleeping child, wrapped it in the tarp, and then placed it inside the canoe.
Monterey Bay Page 14
