25
1948
THEIR TRIP DOWN THE HILL WAS FAST AND SILENT.
Along the way, sobriety appeared and disappeared like a mirage, the boy keeping several steps in front of her.
When they finally arrived on the Row, it was like being stabbed. There were still small groups of workers pacing the streets, still a pillar or two of exhaust wafting from the canneries’ smokestacks, still a glowering cluster of packers standing outside the Del Mar building and gossiping over their cigarettes. Otherwise, it was empty.
And then they came within sight of the lab.
“What’s happening?” she asked the boy.
Outside, at the base of the front steps, there was a crowd twice as large and loud as the ones that used to attend his parties, faces upturned, cameras snapping like claws.
“So many of them,” he scoffed. “Ever since that damn book.”
She tried to see above the heads but couldn’t.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get to the front.”
For some reason, she tried to take the boy’s hand, but he had already disappeared. So she moved forward on her own and then stopped. Ricketts was standing on the stairs, his back against the door, something huge and ugly in his hands.
A massive tentacle found his arm. A flashbulb popped. He peeled the tentacle away to reveal a stripe of bloody welts, some of them the size of silver dollars. The crowd murmured and flexed.
“What is it?” yelled one of the onlookers.
“Humboldt squid,” he yelled back, his voice so familiar to her that it almost sounded fake. “Dosidicus gigas. Not usually found this far north.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Came up in one of the nets last night alongside the smaller ones. Seemed to be eating them.”
The tentacles writhed. The crowd surged. He lifted his chin and stared out into the masses, and that’s when she saw him become fully revealed by the strobe of the flashing cameras. He was dressed exactly as she remembered—long apron, knee-high black rubber boots—but his face was different. The beard was gone, and in its absence his cheeks and jaw seemed sunken and creased, a downward slant to the corners of his mouth, a slackness in his lips, his skin bright white against the dark wall behind him. He looked both appreciative of his audience and dismayed by it, like an aging magician who had long since forgotten his best tricks but not the applause that used to accompany them.
Another flashbulb, another wince. His eyes found hers. She clenched her teeth. He appraised her for a moment and then extracted a damp hand from beneath the creature’s mantle and beckoned her to his side. She began to push her way through the crowd again, but her progression seemed ten times as slow and laborious as before.
By the time she reached his side, the crowd was heckling her and she was breathing heavily.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“You remember this fellow? From that very first bucket I sent up the hill?”
She nodded.
“We’ll need to narcotize it before fixation.” He was whispering now, his lips on her ear. “Decrease the salinity—slowly—and add a dash of ethanol if the arms are still moving after a couple minutes.”
She nodded, ignoring the shouts at her back.
“And a formalin immersion won’t work on this one.” He smiled. “Find a syringe. We’ll have to inject.”
Later, she would remember the colors. Skin flashing devil red with the body’s last angry pumpings. The chromatophores’ final, dramatic assertions. A huge eye looking up at her from the bottom of the garbage barrel. The heart-stopping paleness of its sloppy weight as they hoisted it into the tallest glass display cylinder they could find.
When it was all finished, they put the cylinder in the corner because it was too big for the hutch, and then they went upstairs, Ricketts to the kitchen and Margot to the desk. She sat there and waited until he reappeared in the kitchen doorway with a beer in each hand. He put the beers on the bookshelf and ran both hands through his hair, which was sweat-heavy and unkempt, matted down around his temples and sticking up in the back like the plumage of a dark, flightless bird. He opened one of the beers and held it out to her, smiled a bit when she accepted it, and then settled himself into Steinbeck’s old rocking chair. Her breath caught. Inside the lab, the squid safely bottled, he looked nothing like he had outside in front of the crowd. The weariness and pallor had disappeared, replaced by a handsomeness so potent, she could feel it taking up residence inside her.
“I don’t suppose you have anything stronger,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow and stood.
“I’m fresh out of formaldehyde, but let’s see what else I can find.”
He disappeared into the kitchen again and returned with a dusty ceramic jug.
“The boys gave this to me a month ago,” he said. “I took a taste the other night. It cured my toothache, but I couldn’t hear for a full minute afterward.”
She took it from him, removed the cork, and sniffed its contents before putting her lips to the rim. When she drank, the effects were different from what he had described, but just as intense: her jaw went numb and her eyes started to water, almost as if she had begun to weep.
“Nothing has changed in here,” she said, wiping her cheeks and trying not to cough.
“Really? I feel like it changes every time I blink. Sometimes I’ll reach for a piece of paper or a book only to find that it no longer exists. That even the place where it stood was gone. But I suppose that happens to everyone.”
He watched her take another sip, and the completeness of the inspection would have thrilled her were it not for its unimpeachable politeness. It was as if he were kicking the tires of a car he didn’t intend to buy.
“You look just fine,” he said.
She looked down at the span of skin between her wrists and elbows. It was marked with welts from the squid’s suction cups, just like his.
“Likewise,” she replied.
“I heard about your father.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been running the show on your own, then?” He sat down.
“No. I’ve been selling everything off.”
“You must be very rich now.”
“I am.”
“And you dress like it, too. Although I must say I miss the days when you used to walk around here looking like an overgrown newspaper boy. Where’s that funny little bag you always used to carry?”
To punctuate the ensuing silence, she drank again. As the liquid ran down the ladder of her ribs, she closed her eyes, hoping it would wash away everything her heart didn’t need. For a moment, she actually could feel her body become cleaner, her mind lighter. When she opened her eyes, however, the sensation was immediately reversed. He was on his feet now and making his way in her direction.
“And you?” she asked.
“And me?”
“You’ve been well?”
His smile betrayed a lack of conviction that alarmed her.
“I suppose so. It’s been interesting with the sardines or, rather, the lack thereof. We’ve got a top-notch population biologist on the case, woman by the name of Frances Clark. And a young chap from Long Beach has been making the trip up and back, advising on new technologies and the like. Works for the bureau of fisheries. Last name Casey. Don’t remember the first.”
“And the lab?”
“Oh, this old thing?” He waved a hand in a circle above his head. “Hard times, I’m afraid. During the war, I tried to keep it solvent by working up at the Presidio, running blood and urine tests for the army. Then a stint at Cal Pack as a chemist. And then a shred or two of hope regarding the Guggenheim, but that never came to pass.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Don’t be. The money will come from somewhere. It always does.”
There was the heat of a certain look, but then it subsided.
“And Wormy?”
&nb
sp; His eyes narrowed, his arms beginning to fold themselves across his chest.
“Pardon?”
“The woman—”
“Ah yes. She finally came to her senses while the rest of us were away in Mexico, for which I don’t blame her, although I must say it took me somewhat by surprise. As did the departure of our old friend Arthur. Here one day, gone the next. No explanations, no good-byes. Just picked up and went south. Last I heard, he was working in the canneries on Terminal Island.”
He went over to his collection of record albums, selected one, and then put it back down.
“But I think it’s John who’s taken it the hardest of anyone,” he continued. “After his book, things here took a bad turn and he started to feel responsible, so he hightailed it to New York.”
“I was under the impression the book did quite well.”
“It did. And perhaps that was the problem.”
He glanced over at the window, at the faces that were now looking in on them, noses pressed to the glass, eyes leering without compassion or shame.
“You could close your curtains,” she suggested.
“And become a prisoner in my own home? No. I’d rather have people look if that’s what they want to do.”
She turned away from him and met the gaze of the strangers outside. She thought of the huge squid eye, its exaggerated roundness like an artist’s rendering of a shiny black sun, bright with the cruelty of never being able to set. She took another swig from the jug.
“Powerful stuff, isn’t it?” he asked cautiously.
“Are you angry at him?”
“Who? John?”
She nodded. He shook his head.
“His only crime was remembering things a certain way,” he said. “And I just happened to be in the middle of it.”
She drank again.
“You might want to take it easy,” he cautioned. “I only had one sip and it just about knocked me down.”
“Then why don’t you help me finish it?”
He let loose with a stilted laugh. And that’s when he finally closed the distance between them, walking up to the desk and taking the jug from her hands.
“You know,” he said, sipping and then wiping his mouth, “the worst part about getting older isn’t the fear of death. It’s the sadness of things that aren’t anymore. All potential can’t become reality. You’ve got to select. And it can make a person very sad.”
“When I w-was a girl,” she stammered, “on the night of the low tide, when you didn’t come and you sent Arthur to—”
“I kept your original sketches,” he said. “All of them.”
She looked at the window again, at the faces that were still tracking her and Ricketts’s every move despite the fact that they hadn’t done anything worth watching. Not yet.
She gripped the edges of the desk.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you need to lie down?”
“You’re not—”
But then a sound at her back, and as she turned around she knew, somehow, exactly what she would find. A woman in the bedroom doorway, lovely and small, clothed in a child’s white frock.
“Hello,” the woman said.
“Hello,” Margot replied.
There was the scent of perfumed soap as she walked past the desk and toward the phonograph. When the music started, Margot prayed for the fugue: for the baker’s dozen of opening notes, measured and solitary. But it was chords instead, blaring and insistent. The woman fell into Ricketts’s arms. Margot buried her chin and smelled herself. Cigars, menthol, moonshine.
“Hello, Wormy,” he said, kissing the woman on the forehead and then slowly releasing her. “Will you be able to make it on time?”
“Just.”
“Travel safely, then.”
“I will.”
When the woman was gone, Margot tilted back in her chair. Her entire body was brittle, illiquid, a net made of nails and hair and bones. She tried to speak, but her voice had turned to sand.
“That’s Alice,” Ricketts said, his words barely audible beneath the phonograph. “Music student up at Berkeley. We were married in January.”
She looked down at her hands.
“And God, does she love her Mozart. She’s probably transcribed Don Giovanni twenty times by now.”
She squeezed her hands into fists, knowing it was useless to cry, but even more useless not to.
“Oh, Margot,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I always thought you were wonderful.”
She couldn’t hear him, though, and she couldn’t hear the music. All she could hear were the noises at the window. The people there weren’t just watching anymore, she realized. They were tapping. One finger—tap, tap, tap. And then another. And then another, until five fingers became what sounded like five hundred and the sound was indistinguishable from drops of water against glass.
She looked up at him. His smile sprouted and grew.
“Your father once wondered if this town wanted an aquarium,” he said, eyes twinkling. “And I think the answer is finally yes.”
A shot of courage. A sudden change of plan.
“That’s precisely why I’m here,” she said. “To buy back his cannery from the Agnellis. To finish what he started.”
“I’d be happy to assist. If you’ll have me, that is.”
“Looks like we’ll need something else to drink,” she replied, placing the empty jug on the desk.
He stared at her for a long, dangerous moment.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go downstairs and start the Buick.”
26
1998
WHEN SHE WAKES, SHE’S BACK ON THE HORSEHAIR SOFA.
She’s fifteen years old again and living in the small white house up the hill from Cannery Row.
Then she’s back in the lab, back in his bed, the nearby canneries causing the walls to bend and shake.
But then she comes to her senses. She’s lived in this house for well over two decades now—this modernist palace on Hurricane Point in Big Sur—and it’s like this most days: the wind strong enough to make a weaker person question things, strong enough to make it sound as if the windows are popping free from their frames. A fish tank on a cliff is what the antidevelopment dopes once called it. But she didn’t let it bother her, not then and not now. There was a similar peevishness directed at the aquarium once. And look how nicely that’s turned out.
As for last night’s bungled dive from the squid boat, she’d rather not consider it. So she pushes her blankets aside, takes care not to wake her boyfriend, and rises from her bed. From the windows in her bedroom she can see Bixby Bridge, its vaulted span the site of countless suicides and luxury car commercials. From the windows in the kitchen, she can see the road leading up to the house: a dynamite-blasted, switchbacked scar on the face of the gray-green hillside. The driveway is a Zen garden of glinting granite pebbles. The fog is thick, but the wind is doing its best to change that. By the time she washes, dresses, and leaves the house, her little territory will likely be bathed in sun, even if the rest of the coastline is still wet and gray.
Most days, she drives too fast. She takes great pleasure in carving the thirty-minute drive down to twenty, twenty-five tops. Today is different. She goes slowly and tries to pay attention. It’s been years since the collapse of the benevolent hippie dictatorship of the yammering mystics at Esalen, but this stretch of Highway 1 continues to retain a modicum of its upscale stoner cachet nonetheless. As she crosses the bridge, she watches in the rearview mirror as a line of identical rental RVs falls into place behind her like the segments of a mechanical worm. At Monastery Beach, a motorcycle speeds past her on the left, the cyclist howling as he extends the middle fingers on both gloved hands.
When she reaches Cannery Row, she pulls the truck into the loading zone adjacent to the Hopkins Marine Station. She thinks of the Chinese fishing village that once stood on this spot, of the fire that consumed it: a fire her father didn’t start. She closes her eyes
and tries to see the flames. She tries to see herself reading the daily paper. She tries to see yesterday’s squid beaching, but when she sees nothing, she presses on. Through the automatic gates and into the aquarium’s employee parking lot. Through quarantine and straight to her least favorite exhibit: the one devoted to Ed Ricketts and his lab.
Or perhaps “exhibit” is putting it a bit too strongly. It’s more like a display, small and unpopular, an enclosure barely four feet high and six feet wide, a preserved fetal dogfish or two arranged in their jars as if on a liquor store shelf, the only known snapshot of Ricketts and Steinbeck in a thick black frame. A wooden beer crate. A disembodied drawer from one of his file cabinets. Approximately twenty sheets of sketchbook paper on which one can see the shadows of someone else’s doodles. The lighting here is strange—half-natural, half-incandescent—which makes everything look like an object in a bad still life, especially the Humboldt squid in the big glass cylinder. It’s the one they anesthetized and preserved on their final night together, its body grown flaky and stiff from a half century of formaldehyde immersion, its actual length and girth so much more modest than memory always seems to insist.
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