by Joe Clifford
There is dried blood on the shift handle and for a moment I am consumed with rage. At myself, my own sloppiness. I have always kept the car spotless. At least there is none on the leather. I scrub at the blood with a Kleenex. The glossy wooden grip shines. I open the window and throw the pink-streaked tissue on the ground.
The ride back into town takes only a few minutes. Ronnie's grocery-deli sells me two tuna fish sandwiches, a liter of Evian water, two twenty-ounce plastic bottles of Diet Coke, an apple and a banana. Normally, I would have preferred roast beef sandwiches, but Marlene is vegan and I do not want to look at red meat right now.
Tom is late. Again, the suspicion that this is merely a prank creeps into my mind I will sit on the end of this dock holding my paper bag of food and wait all day. Tom will not return. Or maybe he will. I look back at the bar, half expecting to see Desmond, the bartender, peeking out of the filthy front windows and smirking. But he's not there.
A cloud of minnows swirls beneath the green water below me—restless, swirling motion, seemingly without purpose, until, with a flash of silver they leap an inch or so out of the water, splash down and, in a blink, disappear.
Marlene told me I was no longer welcome at her apartment. She had 'moved on'. I understood that But I needed to talk. I had just been laid off. No, fired. I had been fired. I had complained too often, too loudly, too insistently, that Jim McKendricks—the head trader in our group—did not fully appreciate my talents. It was obvious. He gave the lay-up business to his favorites. The B-school grads. I was left with the highly technical, low margin business. You can't make serious money there. I know I was the only one on the desk who understood the technicals, but he should have taken care of me. Why not give me a leg up once in a while? Perry agreed with me. He always agreed with me. A friend always has your back.
When the trading manager brought me in, I thought for just a moment that he had finally seen the light. He was going to remove McKendricks and put me in charge of the desk. That was the right move. It made sense. Then I saw the fat girl from HR. The only time she showed her mashed potato face on the trading floor was when people were being let go. The Angel of Death, we called her. Not to her face, of course.
I spent the next two hours in Harry's. Getting hammered.
I had not waltzed into a job on Wall Street like all those other guys from big name schools. I had worked my way up from accounting. It had taken me six years to get to the trading desk and three years later I was booted out the back door. I'd had my shot. No one else was going to hire a fucking has been, ex-accountant, mid-level stock option trader. I was too specialized, too junior, too senior, too old and too young. They'd smell loser all over me.
The doorman at Marlene's building knew me. We were buds. I had been there often enough over the last year. I slipped him a twenty to watch my car while I was upstairs.
But twenty minutes later, he tried to stop me from leaving. He was my friend and he shouldn't have done that. Friends always have your back. That's what you call a friend—someone who always has your back. Someone who doesn't try to stop you from leaving, yelling about wait to talk to the cops and all that. Fuck him!
I punched him then. I think that's when I got the blood on my shirt and my hand. It must have been then. Or it could have happened earlier. Upstairs. I don't know. I hit him a few times. I didn't want to kill him—I wasn't in a rage or anything. I just wanted to make sure he stayed down until I could get in my car and leave.
The minnows are back.
"I'm not keeping you from anything, am I?"
I hadn't heard Tom return. A boat is now tied up at the end of the dock. It isn't a dinghy. The boat is old and wooden with a short cabin forward and a partially covered deck in the back, maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. It's not the big, sleek, bluewater fishing boat I had hoped for.
I look at him and squint. He seems very far away. I don't answer.
"I've been sitting here for five minutes while you're staring into the water like you might actually be seeing something there."
"No," I say. I've never liked that form of humor. It's not really meant to be funny, is it? Or course he's not keeping me from anything. Some people just don't know any better. They say stupid things like that and take great offense if you challenge them on it. "No, I'm ready. Let's go."
Tom unties the dockline and we leave, moving slowly down the channel between the long rock jetties. A lone fisherman on the rocks casts a sparkling silver lure and retrieves it slowly as he watches us pass. Tom turns to the right after passing the last marker and heads for the open ocean.
"There's a folding chair in there. You can bring it out and get comfortable," he says pointing to a short doorway. "It's going to be a couple hours 'til we're out there."
There is no swivel-mounted fishing chair like you see on all the big boats on the Fishing Channel, just a pair of waist-high coolers, and a narrow passageway facing the transom at the back of the boat.
I open the little door. This small space is Tom's home. The walls are lined with storage bins, filled with clothes, books, plates, pots and cooking utensils. There is a tiny refrigerator, dorm-room sized. I put my paper bag inside. Above the fridge is an electric kettle and a hot plate, ancient, faded and heat-crazed across the top surface, but clean and well-maintained. Like everything on the boat. Old and well-used, but in good working order.
I bring out the folding chair. It's a nylon and aluminum folding beach chair, with salt-pocked arms and fraying tassels of blue and white nylon thread hanging from the back. I set it up and ease into it and suddenly I am tired. Exhausted. I don't remember sleeping after leaving Marlene's. I stopped at a liquor store for more scotch. Sometimes it helps with the migraines. I drove a lot. Then it was beginning to get light and I stopped at a gas station for coffee. By then I was already at Exit 64 on the LIE, so I just continued on. And came to Montauk.
We pass the RVs parked along the north-facing beach, the lighthouse, the point. The easy lift and flow of the first ocean swells comforts and caresses me.
I finally sleep.
When I wake, the swells have changed. I feel only slightly nauseated. The long, slow fugues of storm-driven water movement have taken over. The boat rises and falls on smooth hills of blue-green that allow only occasional glimpses of a featureless horizon. There is no wind, no froth, no choppy waves—just the swells and the sky. The gray clouds are oppressive, like the low ceiling in my old basement apartment before I moved to Battery Park, where keeping my head bent forward, as though in submission, grew to feel almost normal. The waves are no longer measured and uniform. They are larger, longer, and more erratic. The boat lurches over them, rather than swimming through them. I make a decision—I will not be sick.
"You all right? You look a bit green." Tom grins and his missing teeth manage to smile at me.
"I'll be okay," I say. "Where are we?"
"On a boat."
Both a fisherman and a wit.
"Seen any sharks?" I say.
"They're here," he answers. "The water's warm. Global warming, I guess. It's been bringing fish up here we never get. Jacks. Spots. Redfish. The sharks follow."
He slows the engine and engages the auto-pilot, then moves to the back of the boat and opens one of the over-sized ice chests that are strapped to the deck. A revolting stench of decomposing protein rises from the box and threatens to strangle me.
"Time to fish or cut bait."
"What do I do?"
"Chum."
He hands me a bucket and a ladle. I stand at the back of the boat, inhaling exhaust fumes, spooning a noxious mix of blood, fish guts and oatmeal—the 'thickener', he says—into the water behind us, as we motor along at slow speed. It is hot and so humid that each breath is an effort. We slide down one wave, lurch, and slowly climb the next.
I'm sick. I manage not to vomit inside the boat—beer, cheap coffee and expensive scotch. It is almost all liquid.
Tom turns from the helm and laughs. "Sharks like a
little of that mixed in with the chum. You're doing fine."
Remarkably, once I void I feel better, more in control of my senses. I can ignore the diesel fumes and the miasma of decay from the bucket. My stomach no longer heaves in protest as the boat rides the swells.
"How long do I do this?"
"Getting bored?"
"No. Hungry."
I have not eaten since lunch the previous day. Almost twenty-four hours. Now that I am not sick, I am famished.
"All right. Take a break. I'll rig lines while you eat."
I should have gotten roast beef. I feel better, no longer sick, no longer stuck in the loop of seeing the events of last night play across my mind. I feel strong, ready to do what is necessary.
"What the fuck is that?" Tom is yelling at me. His eyes have changed. For a moment I am terrified of him. I must face my fears. Rage swallows fear. He carries a long filleting knife on his belt. If he reaches for it, I will get there first.
"Fucking hell!" Tom grabs the banana lying next to my sandwich and tosses it as far as he can out to sea. "You don't bring bananas on a boat. Nobody ever taught you that?"
He is no longer yelling. His eyes are brown again. Small mean eyes, but not frightening. He has brought me here. Not my savior, but my deliverance.
"Sorry," I say.
He shakes his head and goes back to rigging two sturdy poles. He places them in metal holders—one on each side, the lines running back into the sea behind us. A minute later he mumbles. "How were you supposed to know?" He flashes that broken-toothed smile at me and I forgive his burst of anger. "It's unlucky. Bananas on a boat. So now you know. You with me?"
I nod, though his primitive superstition surprises me—almost disgusts me. It is the twenty-first century and yet he subscribes to a mindset that would have drawn the scorn of a reasonably-educated Athenian twenty-four hundred years ago.
"Now we fish," he says.
But of course, we don't. I continue to spoon the slimy liquid over the back of the boat. Tom drives. The baited lines follow the boat. There is nothing else but ocean and clouded sky. Each second is marked by the steady thrum, thrum, thrum of the diesel engine and the gentle cough of the exhaust.
"So, what are you? A lawyer? That's my guess."
I don't care to chat. "No."
"I could never see it. Lawyers. Always trying to catch you out. Writing things so even they don't understand. Then they get to charge you even more money to go to court and fight about it."
I focus on the pattern the chum makes as it splatters into the water. A red ball dissolving into a pink cloud that disappears in seconds.
"I could have gone to college. Couldn't be bothered. Live my life cooped up in some gray building. Marking the change of seasons by when they turn the heat off. When they turn the AC on. Fuck that. Look what I've got. The whole fucking ocean is my office, man. I don't need a fucking convertible BMW. Right here. Top's down."
Splat. Swirl. Swoosh. Gone.
"What kind of law do you do? Contracts, right? I don't see you to be the type for standing up in court. Arguing over whether the other guy gets to ask a question. Telling some drug dealer you'll get him off so he can go out and give AIDS to some teenage girl or some shit. No. I see you at a desk, making sure all the commas are in the right place. Clean living. Do that for ten hours a day and they pay you a half a mil or something and you think you're on top of the world."
I see the shark. The fin cuts the surface about thirty yards out and for a moment I feel my heart stop. It is terrifying. And beautiful. Then it slides back beneath the surface. Was it really there? I want it to be. I want it back. I pick up the bucket and pour half of the remaining contents into the water.
"Hey!" Tom yells. "What the fuck? I pay money for that."
I do not turn to see Tom's eyes. They won't frighten me now. The shark is here. I can feel his eyes on me, staring up from beneath the surface.
Click. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzeeeeeeeee. The fishing reel sings a single screaming note.
"Whoa! Fish on, dude! Grab that rod. Let him run, but keep that tip up. Don't horse him, but let him know who's in charge."
I take the rod from its holder. The reel continues to feed out line. I keep the tip up. I have a shark on.
The fish is frightened, but he knows the secret of fear. Turn the fear to anger. Let the rage destroy the fear.
For an eternity I stand at the railing, the rod straining my forearms, my biceps aching, my shoulders almost frozen in agony. The fight's not elegant. There is no finesse to what I am doing. It is a contest of brute force versus leveraged brute force. And I am winning. The shark fights less. I reel it closer until it is directly beneath me.
It's a four foot long blue shark. I know this because I have studied the pictures and because he is blue. A beautiful blue. A blue like the Beemer I didn't buy, because I thought the green looked more professional. People would look at me in my green convertible and think that I was important. Not just a Wall Street stock options trader, but a force. Someone who makes markets move.
The shark is lying on one side and staring up at me with a single eye. The eye is flat and black and empty and if the shark is afraid, or angry, or concerned that he may be about to die, he doesn't show it. If anything, he looks hungry.
Maybe he's bigger than four feet. Maybe more like five. I'll say he's five. A five foot long blue shark.
"Keep the tension up. Let me get a line around his tail and then we'll haul him up and tag him."
Tom makes a lasso with a bit of rope and drops the loop around the shark's tail.
I can tell that Tom is proud of me. I hear it in his voice He could be a friend, if there were time. He would always have my back.
He pulls the noose taut and quickly wraps the line around a cleat. The shark is suspended, its head and gills and half the body still in the water, the long forked tail to the dorsal fin in the air.
"Goddam! Nice work." His eyes are bright in admiration of my feat. He turns and opens a metal box that appears to be filled with an assortment of numbered metal tags. "You got a camera? We'll get you a picture as soon as he's tagged."
I look beyond him out at the water. Another fin appears and almost immediately sinks. Then, impossibly, it rises again immediately forty feet away.
Tom sees my focus and turns to watch the water. "Holy shit," he whispers.
Two fins are now racing toward the boat.
The first shark to arrive is a mako. It is very different from a blue shark. It is much darker and bulkier. When it hits the blue shark's belly it takes a single bite that almost cuts the fish in half. The thresher hits less than a second later. The blue shark's head disappears.
"Aw, Jesus." Tom unties the knot and lets the remains of the blue shark sink beneath the surface.
Tom is upset. I think it is glorious.
"Tom," I say. "Don't be sad. This is perfect. This is just what I wanted. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me here."
Another dark fin surfaces. A second mako? Could it be something bigger? The surface of the sea around us is broken with more fins, circling and darting across our wake. A half dozen big fish. Big sharks.
Tom is staring down into the sea. It's obvious that he has never seen anything like this before in all his years on the water. I'm happy for him. It will be a story he will retell hundreds of times.
I pick up the chum bucket. There's still a quart or so of blood and fish guts in the bottom. Plenty. I step up onto the railing, balancing myself with my free hand on the roof of the cabin.
"Thanks again, Tom."
I step off into the water.
AUTHOR BIOS
JOE CLIFFORD is acquisitions editor for Gutter Books and managing editor of The Flash Fiction Offensive. He also produces Lip Service West, a "gritty, real, raw" reading series in Oakland, CA. Joe is the author of three books: Choice Cuts and Wake the Undertaker (Snubnose Press), and Junkie Love (Battered Suitcase Press). Joe's writing can be found at www.joeclifford.com.
MARIE S. CROSSWELL graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2012. She's studied the art of writing fiction with authors and professors Stella Pope Duarte, Victoria Redel, April Reynolds Mosolino, Jamaica Kincaid, Eric Puchner, and Melvin Bukiet. She is currently working on her first novel. She lives in Phoenix, AZ.
EDWARD HAGELSTEIN lives in Tampa, Florida. His fiction has appeared in The Harbinger, Sundog Lit, Thuglit, Pithead Chapel, A Twist of Noir, Drunken Boat, The Whistling Fire and Phoebe.
ED KURTZ is the author of Bleed, Control, Dead Trash, and A Wind Of Knives, as well as numerous short stories. His work has appeared in Dark Moon Digest, Thuglit, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Beat to a Pulp, Shotgun Honey, and the anthology Mutation Nation: Tales of Genetic Mishaps, Monsters, and Madness. Ed resides in Texas, where he is at work on his next novel and running his genre imprint, Redrum Horror. Visit Ed Kurtz online at http://www.edkurtz.net.
CHRISTOPHER E. LONG's debut young adult novel, Hero Worship, will be published in early 2014 by Flux. His comic book writing has been published by Marvel Comics, DC Comics, IDW Publishing and Image Comics. He only did two things of value during his twenties—graduate from college and marry his wife—everything else was a big, fat waste of brain cells. He lives in Southern California with his wife and son.
JUSTIN ORDONEZ novel, Sykosa, was published in April 2012. It was awarded 2nd place in the Five Star Publications book award for fiction. It was also a semi-finalist in the Kindle Book Review's award for fiction. He's guest-blogged for Novel Publicity, ReaderGirls, CreativeReads, and many others.
MICHAEL SEARS is the author of Black Fridays, nominated for five major awards this year, and the upcoming Mortal Bonds. Before he made the leap and began writing full time, he worked on Wall Street for more than twenty years as a manager and a trader. He lives with his wife in Sea Cliff, NY, home to authors, artists, and sailors.
