Monterey Bay

by Lindsay Hatton

  Then one night she awoke to a strangely familiar smell, and when she rose from the horsehair sofa and opened the front door in search of the smell’s source, she was hit with a blast of angry, orange heat. The statue from the Agnellis’ warehouse was on the porch, the saint’s body bright with flame, the bougainvillea bush similarly alight. She ran inside and roused her father, who sprinted to the porch in nothing but his undershorts, and for the next hour they fought the blaze with bedsheets and bowls of water, slapping the plaster woman and leaving the bougainvillea to its own pyrotechnic devices, conscious that their neighbors had also been awakened by the fire but had not found it prudent to help.

  In the lab, too, her hope was being incinerated. Until the night of the second party, the night of Wormy’s return, the lab had been quiet and sparsely populated during the day. Now, however, the activity was unceasing. Wormy herself spent hours at a time drifting in and out of Margot’s field of vision: shuttling from the kitchen to the Chinese grocery and back again, stocking the icebox with crate after crate of unlabeled beer. Fleets of neighborhood boys entered with twitching, snarling sacks and exited with pockets full of nickels. Steinbeck loitered in the front room, choosing a book and then changing his mind and choosing another. Prostitutes from the Lone Star arrived on the doorstep with vague yet urgent medical complaints to which Ricketts gladly tended, his dry, upbeat professionalism belying his continued lack of traditional expertise, before disappearing on collecting trips on which she was no longer invited: expeditions that kept him away from the lab all day and well into the evening.

  And Margot stayed behind the desk. She had stopped drawing humans, so now it was only sea life. For a while, she tried to take an obliterative comfort in it, her stack of sketches ballooning to dimensions that in any other instance would have made her proud, but her sense of dread was so all encompassing that nothing seemed able to puncture it. The entire town seemed to understand it just as well as she did. The cannery workers eyed her with an odd combination of regret and triumph. Arthur moped around the lab as if it were his life, not hers, speeding toward some nameless yet certain upheaval. Even Steinbeck offered what he could in the way of condolences, nodding at her whenever he passed by the desk. It was only Ricketts who remained seemingly unaware of anything ominous, his behavior detached and jovial, his treatment of her totally uninflected with even the barest hint of desire or melancholy. There were times when she considered saying something, pressing forth. For the first time in her life, though, she didn’t have the heart for it. She had become weary and full of self-doubt, even the smallest challenges suddenly insurmountable.

  Which was why she couldn’t even think about her father. She couldn’t even think about the film canister in her satchel. She couldn’t even think about his aquarium and the extent to which Ricketts might have assisted in the idea’s creation. It was grotesque and, like most grotesqueries, she wanted to both wallow in it and run from it. As she continued to kill and draw the little tide pool beasts, the lab’s mayhem roaring around her, she imagined the same animals entering her father’s cannery and staying there, the bodies rotting, Ricketts and her father congratulating each other on the resulting stench, the resulting violation, a crowd cheering them on by torchlight, their allegiance reopening a wound that had been inflicted long before her birth, that long since should have healed.

  It was with little in the way of optimism, therefore, that she arrived at the lab one morning to find it vacant once again. The tide pools were devoid of interlopers, the front room was free of cat hunters. Wormy wasn’t in the kitchen and Ricketts wasn’t down in the garage, so she ventured to the tide pools alone and selected something that seemed worthwhile: a sculpin that almost immediately allowed itself to be pinned against the rocks and scooped up with a net. In the garage, she tended to its demise with a heavy, distracted mind and then took it up to the desk to draw it, its furry head still cocked in what seemed like amusement at its own ruin. Then she added it to the pile Ricketts had reserved for what he called the tourists, the animals that didn’t quite belong in the tide pools but often claimed territory there nonetheless. Then she stood to retrieve her things.

  “You’re learning.”

  The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and when she turned around, she half expected to see nothing. But there he was: smiling at her from the bedroom doorway, the undershirt beneath his suspenders threadbare and yellowed with old sweat.

  “I thought I was alone,” she said.

  “I’ve been trying to rest up. It’s bound to be a long night in the tide pools. The first proxigean spring tide in more than a decade.”

  When he approached the desk, she wanted her feelings of apathy to remain. His nearness, however, was still as potent as the chemicals in which his specimens met their end.

  “I feel as if I’ve barely seen you lately.” He picked up one of the piles and began to shuffle through it. “You work so hard, you practically disappear.”

  “Things have taken a turn. With my father’s project.”

  “I know. And just when everything was going so well!”

  There was the urge to contradict him, to speak of Anders’s predestined failure, to speak of her own. But he was sitting on the edge of the desk now, his body closer to hers than it had been in days.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Stay for a drink. Drown your sorrows.”

  She looked out the window.

  “I should go.”

  “Tonight, then. At eleven. Come back and help me collect.”

  For a moment, everything was finally clear, finally predictable: the efficacy of restraint, the value of dignity.

  “No,” she replied calmly.

  “There must be a way to convince you.”

  “There’s not much—”

  And then he was touching her scar, running the tip of his index finger along its numb length and then down her nose until it came to rest between her lips.

  “Eleven,” she said.

  “That’s right.” He nodded, removing his finger. “Wear your boots.”

  That night, she watched the clock with an executioner’s eye. With the proper focus, she told herself, time itself could be bullied. It could be bullied into moving faster, so fast that by the time the agreed-upon hour arrived, she would be a grown woman capable of everything and answerable to no one.

  When she poured her fourth cup of coffee, Anders put down his cards and glared at her.

  “You keep drinking that,” he said, “and you’ll be up until dawn.”

  She took another sip and stared even harder at the clock’s pendulum. Its swinging looked especially rhythmic tonight, in a way that spoke not of mortality but of mortality’s opposite: the universe winding itself up with such intense tightness that it might never be able to wind itself down.

  “It’s your move,” he said.

  “I think I’m done.”

  She placed her cards on the floor and stood.

  “Giana Agnelli was right.”

  She sat back down. She looked at the ceiling. Her mother’s head was there again, and it was looking at Anders, but it didn’t seem particularly concerned with what he was about to say.

  “What was she right about?” Margot asked.

  “About me,” he replied after a long moment. “But she was also wrong. For one thing, I wasn’t a Methodist. I just lived with them because the tents were cheap. For another thing, the girl didn’t fish for squid or clean them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Her family owned one of the little carts that used to park at the entrance to the Seventeen-Mile Drive and sell things to the tourists. Junk, mostly. Painted abalone shells. Driftwood whittled into dollhouse figurines. Sometimes a whale vertebra or a shark’s jaw. But for the customers who were willing to pay, there were other things, too.”

  She held her breath.

  “Sea creatures,” he clarified. She exhaled. “Live ones. The girl would put them in jelly jars that you could take home with you. I bought them because I loved he
r. I followed her around like a dog, to be honest, and she trained me like one, too. She trained me in how the cart made and reinvested its money. She trained me in the concepts of scarcity and abundance, or at least the appearance of them. Before coming to California, I thought I knew. I thought New York had taught me everything I’d ever need to know. But this was business on a completely different level: shrewd, elegant, discreet. When she was confident I was ready, we opened our own little sideshow just outside the hotel grounds. All of our fish and crabs and snails arranged together in one big display. The children could look for free, but the adults had to pay.”

  When he paused, she looked away. So I wasn’t the first, she told herself. And neither was he.

  “And when the girl ended up preferring one of her own kind—a man who lived in the same fishing village—I didn’t know what to do. I got so jealous I poisoned the water in the jars. I busted the spokes of the wheels on her family’s cart. I wasn’t sure what point I was trying to prove.”

  He shut his mouth abruptly, an awful bewilderment in his eyes. His hair was falling down around his face and he made no attempt to slick it back.

  “What happened to her?” she asked.

  “Her village burned to the ground.”

  Her blood went cold.

  “Don’t worry.” He sighed. “By that point, I had already been gone for years.”

  She nodded. He stared at the empty fireplace. Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty. At half past ten, he finally rose and went to the bedroom. She went outside without trying to camouflage the sound of her footsteps. The stars were shifting and she didn’t need to look at the clock to know it was time, but she lingered for a bit longer, staring out at the bay. Her clothing—a pair of trousers in a lumpy brown tweed, a sweater with a rough cable knit the approximate width of a human forearm—suddenly felt unbearably tight, ill suited for the rounder, more specific body she had acquired since their arrival in town. So she went back inside and rummaged through her trunk in search of the dress she had worn to the Agnellis’ church. She put it on and left the house. On the Row, it was silent. His front door was unlocked. The lab was empty. She went down to the garage, selected a bucket, a flashlight, and a net, and went out to the tide pools by herself, confident that when he arrived at the appointed time, he would see her standing there in the water, a beloved ghost among the sand and rocks.

  And even though she was alone, she could feel the presence of others. Crawling things, shrinking things, things shutting and sealing themselves against an exposure that, to their tiny minds and bodies, must have seemed apocalyptic. The waterline, owing to a rare lunar aberration, had plunged dozens of feet beyond any low-tide mark she had ever seen, and the entire universe seemed stunned by the novelty of it. The gulls and sea lions were quiet, the moonlight wavered. She could hear noises in the lab’s garage now, sounds that carried easily across the calm water. I’m ready, she told herself. So she put a final creature in her bucket, took a final look at the bay, its depths entirely knowable, entirely hers, and then made her way through the grid of shark tanks and into the garage.

  He was standing at the sink. She placed her bucket on the floor. At the sound, he turned to look at her. And that’s when she saw Arthur’s face.

  “He’s already gone,” the boy explained.

  She couldn’t speak.

  “To Mexico,” he continued. “The Sea of Cortez, to be precise. The boat was ready a few days early, so they decided to take advantage of it. Him and Steinbeck and Steinbeck’s wife and a few hired hands for good measure. Won’t be back for a month or two, so he put me in charge.”

  Even though her eyes were burning, she could see everything clearly. In a manner too precise to be unintentional, he had garbed himself exactly like his employer: apron, visor, black rubber boots, a woolen cap obscuring his hair. His movements, too, aped the older man’s gestures as he picked up her bucket and held it to his chest.

  “It’s strange out there, isn’t it?” He grinned. “Feels like a dream.”

  She looked at the chemicals in their bottles, the specimens in their jars. So much glass, she thought. So many things to break. And with the shards, she knew exactly what she’d do. She’d find the sharpest edges and wield them like scissors, cutting the clothes from Arthur’s body, cutting his skin and hair.

  “Show me how to do it,” he said.

  “All right,” she whispered.

  But she didn’t join him at the sink. Instead, she turned for the door and ran outside. The tide was coming back in now, the sea reclaiming the shore with an audible speed, the sand hissing beneath the water’s sudden weight. Over the past several weeks, all the sharks had been euthanized and preserved and sold in fulfillment of her fake orders, except for one: his largest, his favorite, his pet, the animal to which she had once fed the bloody morsel of meat. She hurried to the edge of its tank, and when she plunged her arms into the water, she expected to have to fight for it, just as she had fought for everything else. But the shark’s body was already perfectly aligned, its rough skin raking against hers. A moment later, its gills were fluttering across her fingers like the pages of a book, so she made her fingers into hooks and cried out with the effort as she lifted the animal into the air.

  “Margot, don’t—”

  “Empty the trash barrel,” she growled. “And fill it with as much benzocaine as you can find.”

  He stared at her, terrified, and then rushed back to the garage. She carried the shark inside, its body like a single, rough tendon, its jaws snapping in fear and futility. When she got there, everything was ready. Her arms shook as she dropped it into the barrel. First, the fury of recognition, mouth wide in what might have been a scream. Then the paralysis and collapse, a stiffness to its shape as it sank to the bottom of the barrel like a stone. Then the relaxation that in any other instance might have felt sweet: the shark loosening and bending and returning, in its death, to the posture of its birth, curled head to tail like an elongated fetus.

  “We don’t have a display jar big enough,” he said.

  For a moment, she envied Arthur’s innocence. But then she loathed it, her hands moving of their own accord now, unbuttoning the front of her dress, slipping it from her shoulders.

  “What was wrong with me?” She was screeching like a harpy, her voice hateful and shrill.

  “Margot …”

  “What did I do?”

  “Margot, he has a wife. She lives a few miles down the coast, up in the Carmel Highlands with their daughters. The oldest is just about your age.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And then there’s Wormy, who has a husband of her own. And the dozens of women before that… .”

  The bodice of the dress was crumpled around her hips now, her breasts bare. She looked at Arthur, expecting to see shock or desire in his eyes. Instead, she saw the same seriousness that had been on his face that very first day inside the lab.

  “I’m a good person, Margot. Everyone knows that. And I’ve been watching successful men, men like your father. I’m figuring things out, doing what I can to make life good. I’ll buy a house on the hill, get a better job in the canneries: one that will support a family. Doc says we’re a perfect match, and if you’ll have me …”

  “I don’t need you.”

  At this, he finally looked at her breasts. She looked at them, too. They were swollen, sickeningly opaque, marbled with blue veins. Her stomach protruded.

  “You’ll need someone.”

  Instead of responding, she stepped out of the dress.

  Then she sat on the Buick and slowly spread her legs until the appropriate expression was on his face: gratitude, disbelief, delight. He started to remove his hat, but she shook her head.

  “Leave it.”

  “All right.”

  And she could hear the shark, even though she knew it was dead. She could hear its ghost fins slapping and rubbing, applauding her as she leaned back and let him in.

  20

  T
HE NEXT MORNING, THE SMELL FROM THE canneries reached its apex.

  Just as Giana Agnelli had predicted, the winter had been one of record-breaking sardine hauls, and now, as spring creaked in, the town found itself awash on a quickly souring tide, the supply vastly outpacing the demand. The municipal authorities, recognizing that a good portion of the populace had already gone half-mad from the stench, dusted off Ordinance 106: a dictate that all canneries and reduction plants install the proper deodorizing equipment, a violation of which was punishable by ninety days in jail. When the threat of the ordinance failed to enact the sort of change the townspeople had been promised, they took matters into their own hands and formed five-man “smelling committees” that roamed the Row at peak canning hours, enforcing a haphazard type of vigilante justice that climaxed in the citizen’s arrest of the seventy-five-year-old superintendent of the Carmel Canning Company.

  And as the smell blossomed and bred, compelling everyone in Monterey County to consider the downside of taking from the sea exactly what they thought it had offered, Margot became a corpse. A corpse lying on the horsehair sofa, the hours inching by. Everything was merciless, aggressively lit, and all those details she had taken such great care not to notice—her earlier sickness, her recent fatness, the absence of her monthly bleeding—were insisting upon themselves, repeating themselves in the opposite of prayer.

  A resurrection, in other words, didn’t seem likely, but it occurred nonetheless. She wasn’t sure where to go. She no longer had a mutiny in mind or a riddle to solve, so she just proceeded aimlessly, visiting all the places she knew would disturb her with their aftertaste. She returned to the Hotel Del Monte. She sat beneath the sickly palms and watched a skeleton crew of Japanese botanists dance through the pest-eaten topiaries in their small black shoes.

  When she had grown tired of the hotel, she climbed the hill to the Presidio, sneaked through the gates, and gazed blankly out at the vista that, more than three centuries earlier, had been claimed under the authority of a careless empire. She loitered around the outskirts of her father’s cannery and listened for the noises she feared. She went to the Agnelli warehouse on the wharf and found Tino standing outside, a bag of saltwater taffy in hand.