One Road to the Sea
If your daddy was a fisherman and his daddy was a fisherman and so on back to the old country, then further still on to the Creation, then you better love fish. Gaze into the eyes of your catch and feel the heft of your own holy soul. Salt of the earth, your people. Your love of fish must extend beyond the hooking and killing of them on to the cooking and consuming of them. Especially if your dear old Ma is known county wide for the mouthwatering allure of her beer battered cod. Sure, she’ll give you smaller and smaller portions, then slip it away and replace it with grits when your daddy isn’t looking. But there’s the hurt in her soft brown eyes on account of the whole planet except her only son loving that buttery rich fish.
If you live in a house where every floor creaks, where the wood paneling is saturated with the oils of cooked fish and you can never escape the buzz of the TV arguing through the walls, it’s best to get outside. Stash a book under your sweatshirt, hide another in the seat of your pants. The creek behind your house is a good spot to read but it's also within earshot of your parents. Your daddy’s always ready with another chore, no matter how little needs doing. He believes another callus might remake you. You trek further, deeper into the pines. Cockleburs snag at your jeans. The distant whine of chainsaws mingles with the rattle of bark beetles. You retrieve your books, warm from closeness to your skin, and curl against the bole of a towering conifer. Sap smudges the pages as you turn them and pine needles drift into the crease of the binding. The first book speaks of deserts. A camel’s tongue laves the neck of its robed master, who scans the white sweep of sand in search of a lost oasis. The other book roams the cold void of space. A glimmer on a distant star promises refuge from the acid-drenched remnants of Earth. Twilight descends. Shadows envelop the text. The books tell you what you're gonna need: A way out. Because if you don't love fish, whether the killing or the cooking, then this place might devour you.
One morning at the crack of dawn, your daddy nudges you awake with his boot. The men take you out on the boat for the first time and proceed with an initiation ritual of sorts--back-slapping, manhood, all that. An ivory mist purls the bay. Seagulls hoot. The first time the fishermen haul their nets over the side and splash the deck with dozens of wriggling, flopping, sea-slick, wild-eyed fish, you vomit all over the catch. The men chuckle and jeer. Your daddy watches your regurgitated breakfast seep into the cracks. You repeat this behavior after the next catch and by the third all that’s coming out is yellow foam. The other men join your daddy in silence. A grayhair by the name of Giddy Perkins, who might be a thousand years old with a craggy face that looks like the bough of a tree, whistles: “Boy howdy, we got ourselves one of those.”
Word spreads. You may not be sure exactly what old Giddy meant, but your classmates have no doubt. They teased you before. Now they hunt you. Each voyage from home is fraught. Ma needs butter. You leave your boots at the door since you’ll be faster than the other boys when barefoot. Your eye scans the roadside ditches. Best to know which are deep enough to hide in. You pad down Main Street. Whispers pursue you like smoke. Turn and you’ll find coal-eyed girls clustered like sparrows on a rotting fence post or a fragment of stone wall, sharing a private joke at your expense. Something wet grazes your ear. The apple core that the horsey girl was nibbling rolls in the dirt near your feet. “Them little birches.” Jules Weston, owner of the Bait and Tackle, watches with his hands on his hips. “Listen kiddo, they try that again? Do like this.” He hitches his belt, bends to collect a rock and, adopting a pitcher's pose, drills it off the fence, an inch from one of the Switz girls' knees. The girls shriek and scatter. “Don’t gotta hit ‘em. Just make ‘em flinch. Trust me.” Jules laughs. Past the Post Office and the General Store, where the dirt road turns to pitted tar and slopes down to the piers and the waiting ocean, you turn left down a line of squat cottages interspersed with trailers. Outside his trailer, Bill Parquette holds a dead fox by the tail and waves it in front of a group of snickering boys. He gestures with the rifle in his other hand, delivering instruction. The sight of the white snout dribbling blood turns your stomach, but you're drawn towards the circle. You pause. Odds are that soon it'd be you trussed up by your tail. You give them a wide berth, then dart around the neighboring cottage to the back of the trailer. You jab the siding with your elbow a few times. The ruddy cheeks of Bill’s sister Silv appear between the parted curtains. The back door swings open. Silv slaps an ample hunk of plastic-wrapped butter into your palm. She waves off your crinkled dollar bill. “Tell your mama not to forget me at Christmas. Lord, ain’t you a lucky one. That lovely cooking anytime you please.” She sniffs the air. “Lucky, lucky boy.”
*
You grow up some. Still can’t stomach fish, but other dormant genes activate. One day you sound like Mickey Mouse, the next like a six-pack-a-day chain smoker. You find yourself ducking under doors and your shoulders get so wide you start walking sideways around people after knocking an old biddy to the pavement. Still you, though. You tromp down dirt roads to the paved state roadway. If you hold up a thumb, eventually a lonely trucker or yacking traveler will slow and let you inside. In other towns along the coast, the people look the same as your people. Many fish. They tote liquor wrapped in paper bags and frown at their lottery tickets. But they do not know you. Some towns have small bookshops. You’ve grown bored of spaceships. You flick open a battered copy of Emily Dickinson and read: The revery alone will do, if bees are few. Another ride with a silent trucker, watching his heavy hand palm the gearshift, and you’re back home under the same dim sky. The stench of baked sea bass pours from the doors and windows of your house. Your daddy judges few sins worse than lateness to supper. “Ain’t too old for the belt,” he reminds you, eyeing the clock. You hide your books. From your daddy. From everyone. In attic eaves, in plastic bags nestled in the branches of trees. You’re extra careful to hide your poetry, for the same reason you understand the difference between ‘ain't’ and ‘isn’t’ and ‘don’t’ and ‘doesn’t’ but choose not to utilize that knowledge: You’d rather not be labeled a queer. It’s a small town. Your efforts are in vain.
After your daddy locks you out of the house one Friday night until you 'act normal', you join the other teens on a muddy overlook jutting above the ocean. Below, waves crash and howl. The boys pop wheelies and smash bottles. The girls sit in a grounded rowboat, chittering, and sip the sweet brandy their mothers adore. You stand at the edge like an herbivore keeping its predators in sight. Salt water spatters your face and drips between your lips. Your backpack is stuffed with a blanket and a few books–you’ll sleep in the sea caves if you must. You watch the boys, always on the lookout for a sudden spread of laughter or dirtbikes swerving ever closer. The thing is, you forgot about the girls. A couple of them creep behind you and unzip your pack. Jane Switz dances away with your books and deposits them in the mitts of a lispy bruiser called Doogie. Doogie laughs and chucks a book into the sea. You wince. Then another. Goodbye Dickens, goodbye Woolfe. Then Doogie holds up a smaller book, a gilt-edged collection of Robert Frost poems you hitched halfway to the city to purchase. Something breaks. Before you know it, you’ve reached Doogie, who your daddy once described as a distant cousin owing to the shape of the brow, and your hand becomes a fist that becomes a mallet colliding with Doogie’s jaw. There’s a wet crack. Doogie stumbles backwards and you lash out a foot to ensure he falls. His skull thuds beside your poems. The pages splay across the muck, gilt edges blackened. You straddle Doogie’s chest, grab the book, and ram Robert Frost into the gurgling bloodied mess of Doogie’s mouth. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I shattered a redneck’s jaw.
You hide out for a few days, feign sickness, skip school. Retaliation on your mind. Doogie’s people are one of the few families in town not involved in fishing. Touting a proud history as strikebreakers, enforcers, and hired muscle of all stripes, they’ve been known to burn crosses and howl at the moon. Your solitude lasts until late Thursday afternoon, when your daddy bangs on your door. “Visitors,” he huffs with an odd look on his face. Hanging your head, you plod downstairs and find dear old Ma beaming beside the stove where a mackerel stew simmers and reeks. She pats her apron “Your friends are here, honey.” Your daddy ushers you out the front door. On the porch, Mike Perkins grins from under a ratty cap, forearms tensed from the weight of a 24-pack in each hand. Beside him, an incipient tweaker called Johnnyboy licks his lips and tosses a burlap sack from hand to hand. Your daddy glances at Mike's beer but says nothing. He calls you "buddy" and closes the door.
You follow the other boys down the creaking wooden steps. Mike drops one of his 24-packs, turns and slaps you on the back. “Ho-Lee Cow! Old Doogie, man. Got hisself two wires and a bunch of screws through his face.” He holds his hand to his jaw and mimes turning a screwdriver. “They say he ain’t gonna chew a solid piece of meat again till kingdom come.” Mike guffaws. Johnnyboy sniggers. You stare. Mike slaps your back again and says, with a touch of uncertainty: “You got him good, boy.”
The three of you cut across your crabgrass yard into the pines. Half a mile deep lies a secluded pocket that serves as a scrapheap for a dozen burnt out cars. Shoulders slumped, you drag your feet into the clearing. Autumn sunlight dapples the roasted cars. Tractor country lilts from a radio. There’s about twenty people present, ranging from highschool classmates to early twenties workers already stinking of fish. They lean against the cars, smoking or drinking, chatting and waving their hands. Mike slams his beer onto the hood of the nearest car to a round of cheers. Johnnyboy tosses his sack to his twin brother, Herbie, who prances around in a jingling jester's cap, pupils the size of sand dollars, twirling the stars and bars around as a cape. The girls huddle around a tailgate, handling glass bottles and arraying paper cups. You recognize Jane Switz and a buck-toothed dropout called Horse.
You step foot to foot and avoid eye contact until you become aware of whispering. Mike guffaws and Horse shushes him. Suddenly everyone is looking at you, grinning a little bit. Something thuds behind you. You turn and find Johnnyboy pressing one of those two-tone squeaky plastic lawn chairs into the earth. He nods downward with his chin. The radio croons. A light breeze rustles the pine trees and needles rain. You sit down. The girls raise their cups in salute. Herbie hops around in front of you, blowing a pinecone like a bugle. He reaches into the sack and flourishes a small rectangular object that captures the sunlight and sheens. Herbie falls to his knees, jangling. He lowers his head and presents you the object.
It’s your poems. Smudged but polished, scrubbed with only a smattering of dark dried blood. You gently take it from Herbie’s cupped hands. The pages are nicked and uneven along the bottom. The book falls open to a scuffed page. You run your finger over the unmistakable imprint of a human tooth. A sea of faces forms a circle around you. Your eye twitches. You raise the poems in your fist and squeeze so hard the spine cracks. The awesome silence lifts and the party resumes. Chatting, guzzling. Jane Switz plants herself in your lap and drapes an arm around your neck. She smells of salt and jasmine and the pine needles in her hair. Moments later, after your dick turns into a railroad spike, she wriggles her fat ass against you. Everyone present has called you a faggot at least once, Jane more than most. She beckons to Horse, who stomps over with a pair of paper cups. When Jane holds the cup to your lips and tilts sharply, hot whiskey gushes into your mouth. Ah. There. How it fills you. You absorb it like a parched seed. Wonderful.
You don’t recall standing, but there you are clashing your paper cup against a dozen others, droplets splashing across your wrist to cling to your arm hairs like dew. You, mingling. Drinking. You’ve tasted beer before and it might as well’ve been ratpiss, but this dollar-store whiskey? Doors swing open. Certain interior muscles relax. Now you’re standing in front of Doogie’s oldest sister, Kellyanne Goddard. She turns her head and spits: “Had it comin’, I bet.” And he did, didn’t he? Your vision wobbles, then sharpens, keen. Mike Perkins tries to loop a six pack around each finger and starts screaming when something tears. Drink. You’re slapping backs and asses. You search out a prick named Tommy Jenks. Newly graduated and slick with fish guts, he spent your first two years of highschool sneaking earthworms, chewed gum–once a condom–between the spongy white bread of your lunch. Couldn’t shake the stab of anxiety every time you opened your mouth to bite. Jenks looks up at you, eyes white. You grab a handful of his ginger hair and push down and down. When he's level with your crotch, you retrieve Robert Frost from your back pocket. Flipping it open with your thumb, you press it between Jenks’ lips and make him bite. A respectful round of applause, then Johnnyboy vomits pinkly. The next round sloshes down your throat and it’s all starting to make sense. Horse yanks your collar and whispers secrets in your ear: “Jane’s a ghost. Completely dead inside. A house without furniture.” Then: “Johnnyboy and Herbie went into the woods and swapped clothes to see if anybody’d notice. Go on, tell me I’m wrong.” You can’t believe how mistaken you’ve been all this time. Remember the scandal last winter? A hunter up north built nativity scenes from bones and offal and had them set up in front of the local churches. Gorgeous tableaus of deer and elk bones fastened with gristle. Baby Jesus wrapped in fawnskin, peeking face smooth and pink as a fresh liver. Robert Frost is making the rounds of the party, collecting further signatures, a tooth print for each poem. Or how about the story, surely apocryphal, of a stranger who crossed the state seeking the seediest drinking holes. The women he lured back to his truck remembered only the sweet-smelling rag held over their face and then waking, alone and physically unharmed, a stack of glossy photographs clutched in their hands: themselves, posed like famous paintings: Venus, Madame X, with a parasol or a fan. True or not, the pictures circulated. Girls at school huddled around them, whispering: sick, disgusting, but. Turns out your people have an appreciation for art after all.
The bloody poems are a brick in your first. Surrounded by dead cars and leaning pines, you tell them: I was wrong. A wick of phlegm and liquor slithers from the corner of your mouth. You tell them all, shaking Herbie/Johnnyboy by the shoulders while his head lolls to and fro. Mike hugs you from behind and calls you brother, boy, man. Jane sips whiskey and slobbers it into your mouth, expressionless. “All of this has happened before,” Horse whispers in your ear. You tell them, tears running down your cheeks. You’re so sorry. You thought they were all the same. You’ve been wrong all this time.
*
Things change. You change. Everyone thought you were done growing. They were wrong. You bulge and thicken. Buttons pop, seams stretch. Stones shift, floorboards creak for you alone. But you're no brute. With every action you demonstrate an exquisite gentleness. Lest you break things: Handles, cups, pets, bones. You never stop reading. The beatniks and the PO-MO’s, genre trash and lost eloquence found at the back of the last library shelf. You drink. Usually whiskey but vodka will do. Rum mixed with the tubes of orange-from-concentrate every family has in their freezer. Books, booze. Sing them aloud. Your thirst cannot be quenched.
Sometimes you skip school. Not because you’re a slacker– you can ace the tests your exhausted teachers throw at you while half-asleep, drunk. Your friends need you. What once seemed like pointless bravado on the part of Mike Perkins and his penchant for destroying his own body you now realize is the ultimate self-discovery, a form of becoming and re-becoming. He dislocates his shoulder grabbing onto the handrail of Grandpa Giddy's pickup as it speeds down Main Street, then fractures the opposite wrist rocketing off the boathouse on a dirtbike. "Name me one other thing you can break over 'n over and it always comes back." He slaps your back and cries out in pain. "'Sides your mama, I mean." Johnnyboy knocks on your door and without a word you follow him to an abandoned cabin in the woods. There, he meticulously arranges vials and pillboxes atop a polished oak dresser. You hold him while he writhes and chases infinity. And Jane, who in previous eras might’ve been a mystic or an anchoress or burned at the stake, who might’ve painted stone or petrified wood with the mixed juices of brilliant insects, is chained to the banality of Now where she has only a razor and the soft skin of her thighs and inner arms. She can stare a hole right through you. Robert Frost is with you always, tucked into your back pocket. A reminder of what you’ve become.
Your parents don’t mind the changes. They turn their heads to your transgressions. Late nights, truancy, and occasional violence should be expected in a young man. Or maybe your parents just don’t have a choice. One Saturday your daddy orders you to split and stack the firewood. You tell him to kiss your ass. He threatens. All bluster. You shove him around a bit. When he backs down, he is no longer your daddy, but your little old Pa. Dear old Ma watches, shaking her head. There’s the hurt in her soft brown eyes.
Things change. But there is one constant. You cannot bear fish. The scent, the sight, the taste, the grade-school revelation that Earth is 70% water, teeming with terrible fish. Your stomach roils if you so much as walk near the piers. Mike is a year ahead of you and dolefully considering his fate. He'll piss and moan but he's already got one foot on the boat. Not you. You’ll die before you become a fisherman. “Die, like by a knife?” asks Jane with a glitter in her dead eyes. Horse titters and paws at your flesh. “Jane, you’re gonna hafta’ carve deep to kill all this.” People looking to get under your skin, whether they be little old Pa or that prick Tommy Jenks, leer and quip about your near future and total absence of options. The day when you finally get over it, be a man. The contours of the last shift with time, from an open craving for violence and alcohol and pussy on to the sick satisfaction found in hating what you do all day and wishing others to experience the same. But what else is there? College isn't completely unheard of. It has happened before, even out here. Jane’s Uncle Veggie went off to higher learning, but before the crash he could sling a pigskin through a hula hoop at 65 yards. And there was the girl they called Saint Em, who, after the Weston-Goddard farm house burnt down and she alone survived unscathed, was said to have a special relationship with God. You try to shrug off the jeers, but the jut of your jaw does nothing to stop the nightmares. Fish swallow you in your sleep. You throw off the covers and find your skin scaled and slippery, then wake again drenched in sweat. You cannot sleep in your bed. You turn up on Mike’s couch or sprawled across the shore at dawn. On the bench outside the post office in February, you wake and can’t feel your legs. “I was watchin’ you die.” You jolt upright from Horse’s whisper in your ear.
Junior year ends and a long wet summer ensues. The boys go shirtless, the girls in bikini tops, both wear cut jeans, sun browned skin slatted against clammy whiteness. Panting mutts slink down the streets. Old men hold dripping beer cans and sit on porches, contemplating all that went wrong. The sun is a puckered, bleary eye. God, how you sweat.
Jane Switz gets pregnant. You become scarce. You roam and roam, sap on your hands, hitching north south west, listening to lonely drivers–always men–prattle or breathe in silence. Get out at a forgotten trailhead, decipher the script etched on an ancient stump: Black Flume, The Devil's Bed, Hanged Damsel Creek, Precipice Falls. Find yourself beside a crisp alpine lake or a placid pond broken by scurrying water bugs. Always the same reflection in the water. To be alone seems like an antidote until you are alone. Down muddy trails into the deep woods lie the logging camps. Saws shriek and the earth rumbles from heavy machinery caught in glimpses from between the dense pines. There's an appeal found in the final crack followed by the swishing of branches as a tree, now timber, grasps at its shivering fellows. Then the heart-thumping crash. The loggers live in little clapboard huts. They trade cigarettes and swap stories over the campfire and don’t care that you sit outside the firelight and listen. They ferment corn mash in the same plastic bins they use to bathe, then retrieve a copper kettle and fix their own moonshine. After you agree to stand as lookout and cry like a wren should the pigs come sniffing, you’re given a mug. The firewater burns sweetly, suffusing your guts and jogging your limbs.
The loggers spend evenings in each other’s beds. This comes as no surprise. Again and again you’ve witnessed the chasm between what people say and what people do. You befriend a man a few years older than you with a cropped mustache and retreating widow’s peak. His head doesn’t reach your shoulder. Dale. Even in the dead of night, the air is sweltering and thick. You soak his sheets with your sweat. It’s not so much attraction as hunger. Something about the nights in Dale’s ramshackle hut remind you of what you felt that night Doogie attacked you and your books. Like a boulder crackling free from an enormous sheet of limestone. One morning, Dale reclines on his sodden bed and raises his arm to the toy window; sunlight gloms along corded sinew and a freshly inked tattoo of a naked woman riding a serpent while waving an American flag. With his other hand, he picks books out of your backpack and flicks through them. When you ask him to pass you the Bronte, he frowns at the pile. His mustache crinkles. Dale can’t read. Then you're gushing about it all: your family, your people, Jane Switz, the bloody poems in your pocket, the boulder and limestone, the fish awaiting you with their slick bodies and open mouths. Through it all, Dale says “And so.” and “OK.” and “Well, huh.” and “Gee.” Finally, when you run out of breath, Dale sighs and asks: “So whaddya gonna do?” That’s the first time you say, write.
Then Jane Switz isn’t pregnant anymore. You drift back home. Your parents look up at you, bewildered. A stranger. The heat burns off into a sudden September cold snap. Goosebumps prickle the fat on the backs of arms and sweatshirts are pulled over bikini tops. The same mournful weight plunges through everyone’s chests. The leaves turn early. Another summer lost. You go back to school. When you start fulfilling your assignments with excessive vigor, answering not just the essay questions but speculating in great detail on the back of the page, your teachers give you the same look as your parents. Mrs. Hibberd writes “Good Job!” on your sonnet homework but the exclamation point is scratched over a question mark. Jane is sent away. You learn this from Horse. “Shanghai’d by her own flesh ‘n blood! Shipped offta’ some Catholic prison for bad girls!” she wails.
You drag an old workbench and stool up the stairs to your room. Night after night, illuminated by a pilfered candle, you blacken pages with manic verse. You wake, bent face down on the bench, hand caked in wax, to pebbles clattering against your window. The moon shines a spotlight on Mike Perkins, capless in coveralls damp with seawater. Outside, the dewey crabgrass sucks at your bare feet. “Oh man, oh brother.” Mike moans. “Ever since I started on the boat. . . whenever I pop open a can. . .” He starts sobbing. “It tastes like fish oil. Don’t matter if it a Bud or a Miller. Don’t matter if I scrub for hours. All tastes the same.” Mike falls to his knees and hugs your legs. You run your fingers through his hair while wrinkling your nose against the stench. You need a plan.
You can’t make bread from verse. You figure someday there might be gilt edged books with your own name on it, but that’s a dream for tomorrow. Pa is rubbing his mitts together in anticipation of booting you to the curb should you finish school and fail to bring home any money. Not that you want to stay, but stay or go, you’re gonna need dollars. If ready cash was easy to come by, the men of your town would drink better whiskey. If they had full wallets, they wouldn’t spend their days on leaky boats letting the wind lash their faces red. But you’re not them. Use your head. Only half the town is dirt poor, the rest can afford to wash their shirt come payday. It’s a question of redirecting the pennies that briefly oxidize in their palms from their pot to yours. Start with: Where do all those pennies go? Cigarettes, lottery tickets, alcohol.
You return to the logging camp. Dale’s eyes light up when you barge through his door and then dim when you start interrogating him on the proper method to prepare corn mash. Your boots crackle the underbrush as he leads you to the tubs. Dale says “You can mash your corn with a hammer but you really oughta use a mallet, the flat side of a shovel in a pinch.” and “You gonna need a fifth part barley and I ain’t one for thieving, just sayin’ it’s somethin’ that might be stolen, ain’t nobody gonna miss a few pounds of barley.” and “Yeast from your mama’s cupboard.” and “Use clean water or else some creepy crawlies gonna birth in there.” and “Gittit nice n’ hot but no boil, just enough to burn your tit.” and “You seen me use the strainer, same story. There’s your mash, let it do its work a few weeks, wa-la!” Then Dale tells you he’s been catching rides to the local village and spending evenings with the school marm. “I’m learnin’ ta’ read.” he grins shyly.
You scavenge a clawfoot tub from one of the trash heaps more than one local clan has been dumping in the woods for generations. Your back aches after you drag it to the creek behind your house. You enlist Johnnyboy and Horse. The latter has a cousin, also called Horse, drinking himself to death amid the ruins of his dream farm a few miles south. Tickled by your plan, Cousin Horse lends you the corn and barley in exchange for the future promise of a snifter of his own. Two nights later, Johnnyboy holds a flashlight in his shaking hands and it judders over Horse pouring ingredients into the tub while you heat the water over a fire. Then the mixing, followed by the waiting. The creek murmurs in the darkness, though its inky surface appears mirror sharp. Horse and Johnnyboy pass a joint back and forth while you hold the flashlight over a novel about sifting gold dust in 19th century Mexico. A couple hours later you strain the mash through a finely woven fishing net and dump the solids in the creek. After tarping the tub, the three of you promise to take turns checking on the mash every night. Horse bares her buck teeth and flicks a pocket knife open and shut. “I’ll skewer the pissbag who lays a finger on my mash!”
You check the tub far more often than agreed upon. A clock ticks within your barrel chest. Rubbing your sandy eyes, you try to read, but all you see is words. You plod down Main Street. A gaggle of children flock around you waving a dead rat impaled on a stick. They're already gone by the time you kneel to collect a rock. People keep asking why you’re grinning but that’s just the way your lips curl when you’re grinding your teeth. On the back porch of the Perkins’ sagging house, liquor is always in ready supply. Old Giddy, laid out by a stroke last summer, sits in a rocker cocooned in a quilt. He slurps whiskey from a straw. Beside him, Mike sits and sips a beer, grimacing. You quaff a cup of Giddy’s whiskey and blanch. It is not your whiskey. Your whiskey will sing. Mike tells you that there’s a stranger with a clipboard walking the piers and asking folk about overfishing. “Overfishin’? Buddy boy, how ‘bout you and I go down and teach this fella a thing or two about the bounty of the sea?” Mike crumples his beer can in the crook of his elbow. Giddy spits. You leave without a word. At the tiny library, stalking past rows of dusty almanacs, you’re short with Mrs. Saltier, possibly the only person in town who has never done you ill. Disgusted, you return home and check the mash tub. From across the supper table, forking his battered cod, Pa grunts. “You’ll get useta’ it. Ain’t the first prissy boy we had to drag on the boat a few times ‘till it stuck.” Ma frowns “Now, Pa–”. He leers at you. “Don’t even gotta start on the boat right away, we can get you settin’ and checkin’ the eel pots.” Ma smacks her lips. “Ooh, been an age since we fried an eel in lemon.”
The day comes. You lift the tarp and stagger under a whiff of pure alcohol. You await the next full moon and set off with a copper pot and pipe, a five-gallon plastic pail with puncture holes, and a glass jug that your grandmother used to stack trifle cakes in. Your jaw relaxes, your step is light. When you reach the mash tub, an eclipse of black moths bursts from the tarp and in the pale moonlight you watch each one flutter into the canopy and rest on the remaining leaves. You kick off your boots and the creek froths around your ankles. Johnnyboy arrives higher than a kite, higher than Saturn. Horse trails him, half as high and gaining. They squeal and whip each other with cattails. “I know you’re the other one, I know your mug, Herbert.” says Horse. You’ll have to do this yourself.
You light a fire from twigs and brush and circle it with stones. Balance the pot on the tallest stones and trust your gut to keep the temperature just so. Scoop the pot half full of pungent mash. Run the pipe to the plastic pail, perched beside the creek in reach of cool water, then through a hole in the base to the waiting trifle jug. You’ve watched Dale and the other loggers do this plenty of times. The pot simmers and the heady scent of hot, fermented corn fills you. Before long, the first toxic pearls of moonshine rise into the copper pipe. Using a plastic tube lent from Mike, who uses it to siphon gas from strangers’ cars into his dirtbike, you suck water from the creek into the coolant pail. The heated water sprinkles back into the creek while droplets of your future enterprise drip into the jug. You keep the fire steady, suck the tube and hold it over the pail. Between the fire and effort, sweat glues your shirt to your back. You shrug it off, then slip out of your jeans and toss them to the bank. If you had a spare breath, you’d growl, roar. Beat your chest.
The whip and squeal of Horse and Johnnyboy's scuffle cracks your focus. You look up in time to see them swerve towards the copper pot. With the siphoning tube between your teeth, you cannot scream. Johnnyboy’s back foot slides through the underbrush and kicks a stone free from the fire. The pot wobbles. You surge up the bank and grasp the handle. The hot metal sears your hand but you don’t let go until you’re sure it’s steady. Finger flesh peels when you let go. An enraged bellow erupts from your lips. You wrench Johnnyboy’s shoulder. All skin and bones, he loses his footing and tumbles into the creek. You leap back to the water's edge, grab the siphoning tube and redirect the creek water back into the pail. Horse skips over and whines: “Aw, we was just playin’–” Her eyes go wide. With the circle broken, the fire flickers through the gap and ignites the dry brush. You kick at the flames, but still bootless, you yank your foot back. The fire expands as you hunt for your boots. Horse backpedals, then turns to run. Johnnyboy thrashes in the creek. Boots on your hands, you whack the growing flames. Clutching a vain hope at salvaging this, you don’t smother the source. The heat intensifies. The pot pops and jumps. The pail goes first, hissing down the bank into the creek. The copper pipe jerks after, fountaining moonshine. The pot smashes into the fire. The trifle jug remains intact, barely filled, safe amid a ring of fire. You turn to follow Horse, but as the fire scorches your discarded jeans, a glint catches your eye. Robert Frost slips from the back pocket. You scrabble at your jeans, hands slick with sweat. Flames lick future scars up your chest. Robert Frost shoots out of your hands like a slippery fish, directly into the heart of the blaze. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I burnt it to the ground.
The town closes ranks. There’s little old Pa, red-faced with spittle on his lips, facing down a county deputy on the front porch. “You think--MY SON--did, WHAT?” Ma, along with the other mothers in town, cast shameful, tongue-clicking glances at the authorities. “A model student,” Mrs. Hibberd declares, face a mask of maternal disappointment. Alibis form. You were at the library or hitching to the bookstore, disgracing young women and swinging poems like a hammer, fellating a logger or shitfaced in the gutter. The fire department, which is comprised largely of Johnnyboy and Herbie’s people, blame the unseasonable dryness of the wood. Jules Weston gathers a crowd outside the Bait and Tackle and preaches his favorite topic: They Always Had It Out For The Likes Of Us. A brick sails through the sheriff’s window and the baying of dirtbikes circle his house in the middle of the night. Most people don’t say a word. They may not like you or the sheer devastation you unleashed, but they’ll be damned if they let some overfed hogs or the fellas from the environmental agencies with their college degrees and ponytails lay a finger on your blistered, suppurating body.
Of course, there’s a price.
You slosh through the brack water, encased chest to foot in rubber waders. The straps rub against your burns. Dawn’s amber fringe limns the horizon. Cranes call, never seen. Slipping through the reeds, you use a hooked rod to upturn the eel pots and look inside. A full pot is rare enough to be a surprise. The instant you glimpse an eel, which flutter and ripple like paper kites, you unhook the cooler fastened to your back, tear the mesh off the pot and slam the creature inside. If you shut the cooler fast enough, the sound overlaps the splat of the eel hitting the polystyrene. Sometimes frogs are stuck inside the pots and must be ejected. You occupy your mind: Your life isn’t over. You’re not in prison. It’s not as though collecting eels for a few months means you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life. You’re eighteen. Your wounds will heal. The sun crests. If you look down the estuary to the ocean, you can see the silhouettes of the fishing boats on their way out.
Stumbling home from the overlook one night, you see Jane Switz hop from the door of a white van. She looks at you, then looks away. You see Johnnyboy once more after you threw him in the creek. Shirtless and shoeless, he snarls at passing cars from the middle of the road. When you call to him, he darts into the woods. Then it’s you, Mike, Herbie, and the twins’ old man hefting Johnnyboy’s plywood coffin on your shoulders. He seems light, until at the edge of the grave, Herbie falls to his knees, sniveling, and the remaining three of you lurch and heave the coffin into its hole. Herbie wanders the town in his filthy jester’s cap, wailing and begging. Horse isn’t available to question which twin is dead and which is alive. She disappeared weeks back. Nobody seems to be looking for her.
When you move to the boat, a rattling trawler that puffs exhaust like a fat man with a cigar, you’re both disgusted and relieved to find Pa was right: You get used to it. Not all at once and never completely. At first, you vomit. Bent over the side of the boat, the contents of your stomach send eddies swirling across the sea. The other men are unexpectedly kind. They hand you a rag and a can of 7-Up. Then it’s just bile rising in your throat. Your voice turns scratchy and hoarse from the effort of pushing it back down. Best not to open your mouth at all. Your ears grow numb to the whistling of the windlass as it cranks the nets up to the deck. When they release their loads of disparate fish, you join the other men, who you’re determined to keep faceless, and sort the good fish from the bad. Round white bellies go in the coolers. Rotting, peculiar, or unidentifiable? Throw them back.
Tell yourself: You’ll save. You’ll go somewhere. Cheap, distant. Yukon, maybe. You can imagine a shack, rafters black with the residue of spent candles. A desk and a blank notebook. You'll collect little wives and husbands dotted around remote villages and gas stations, visiting them only when you please. Yes, you’ll cut back on the booze and save. The nets come up. Sort the bad fish from the good fish, the crustaceans from the pebbles. Toss them in the coolers. Midday, the other fishermen unpack their lunches. You’re in the prow, sipping from a flask and chuckling while you read Moby Dick. The nets come up. A good haul. Few bad fish. You hold the flask over your head and shake out the final drops. A man passes you a fresh nip. When you look him in the eyes to thank him, a terror seizes you. It’s Doogie. He says something else and laughs, but all you hear is clicking. The nets come up. Nothing but a bloated tuna carcass writhing with bottomfeeders. You wave off help, get a grip on the tailfin, hurl it back. The nets come up. A fish flops across the deck and dies beside your boot. You remember something about Jesus and the mark of a fish. Romans, fires, mass crucifixions. Once there were sirens, since rehabilitated into unattainable beauties. Everyone forgets they started off as hideous fish women. You nudge the fish under the bench behind you. The nets come up. Even wearing thick gloves, the damp of the sea and its denizens numbs your hands. Many of the other men have discarded gloves in favor of the speed brought by scooping fish from the deck and firing them soap-slick out of their fists into the open coolers. The fish spend their final moments in flight, gasping. The nets come up. God, how your back aches. Your bulk was made for hurling javelins or cleaving mountains, not this ceaseless bending and unbending. Your fish peeks from beneath the bench. Its staring eye is perfectly round. The nets come up. Good fish. Bad fish? Having spent such time avoiding them, you’ve never examined a fish up close. Interlocking scales glitter and double. An intolerable symmetry. The nets come up. You skip this one. Overhead, the clouds mask the sky and press closer. The sea thunders. Your fish slides with the rolling of the waves and comes to rest against your boot. You look down. The fish blinks. You think of a verse and scribble it on the back inside cover of Moby Dick with a charcoal pencil. The nets come up.
A Moment with Chris Seaborne
PDS: Tell us a little about your writing process.
CS: Draconian adherence to a schedule. On weekdays, I set my alarm early, get up, and write. I do it again before bed. Even when I have time, I find it borderline impossible to write during the day. I recently read Kafka’s diaries and apparently he took afternoon naps so he could stay up later at night to write.
The most valuable part of a schedule is that no matter how often I stare at nothing or pace in circles or whatever, I know that. . . eventually. . . the page will fill. It won’t always be good but it’ll be good enough often enough to satisfy. The first decent story I ever finished as an adult was done by committing to write at least one sentence a day.
I’m not one of those writers who ever “gets it all out.” I rewrite individual sentences dozens of times before I move on. I can’t find the story until I know how it’s told.
PDS: Who do you seek to represent or speak to in your work? In other words, what communities & people inspire you to write?
CS: I often write about working people. Usually the dialogue is in the dialect I grew up with, which I still think in but do not dare speak aloud.
But this story is hardly a generous portrait of a working class community. Escaping is the narrator’s prime
concern—and for good reason. Of course, I am well aware that his notion of escape is incomplete and illusory, that there is no alternate happy ending where he goes off into the enlightened, educated world, finds his “tribe,” and thrives as an artist. And so my characters are likely to be “outsiders” to their communities, but I’m skeptical of that word too, since it seems to suggest an exalted status, like the character is taking pride in their lack of belonging. It was important to me to show that the other kids are trying to escape in their own ways.
PDS: One unique aspect about this story is the use of a second person POV. This story seems to break from a conventional use of second person, in that the story is not giving a set of instructions or actions for the reader to perform. What was your thought process for using second person POV for a story like this? Were there any interesting choices you had to make for the second person POV to work for this particular narrative?
CS: Second person definitely has a reputation for that sort of direct reader involvement used in choose-your-own-adventure books. I think it gets a bad rap for that reason. You (heh) need to be immensely clever to pull it off, and it probably needs to remain short and sweet.
But “you” can just as easily be a specific character. For example, a dialogue or epistolary exchange where one character addresses another (“You hurt me today.”) Or, as in my story, it can work much like a first person POV, in the sense that it’s a close telling by an individual character. I don't think there's any doubt that the character who is the “you” in the story is also the one telling it. There’s an “I” hiding behind the “you.”
What second person offers that is unique from the first person is distance. With a topic that is too painful or shameful or difficult for a character to address directly, using “you” instead of “I” allows them to put distance between themselves and events of the story and so be able to tell it. Put another way: second person allows the intimacy of first person without the responsibility. I don’t think you could write “Jane gets pregnant” in a first person story without the narrator reflecting on their role and feelings about it. The reader would likely feel cheated. But with second person, the cheat (hopefully) turns to a source of satisfaction because the reader knows (without being told) that the narrator is too ashamed to reflect on this. If first person is someone telling you a story from the next barstool, second person is someone telling you a story while hiding under a sheet, or with their face obscured by that TV privacy blur.
Additionally, as this character is suffering from a lack of options, the use of second person works as a sort of justification. It’s like he’s saying: Anyone (such as you) would have done the same were you born under these constraints.
PDS: What are some books and writers that have influenced your writing style?
CS: I read a lot of books. One weird thing I noticed is that sometimes I’m writing and run into a problem, stylistic or plot-wise or whatever, and I find a solution by suddenly thinking of a book I didn’t even like.
I mention this because it can be hard to self-assess this point. With that said, some writers who were seminal to my understanding of writing are: Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Ken Kesey, David Foster Wallace. Some contemporary writers who I’ve actively tried to ape the styles of: Fernanda Melchor, Claire Keegan, László Krasznahorkai. I recently discovered Sigrid Undset and was amazed.
PDS: Do you have any tips or words-to-live-by that keep you motivated as a writer?
CS: In the 1981 movie, My Dinner with Andre, there’s a point where Wally, who has up until this point refrained from talking much about himself, starts rhapsodizing on how much he loves his new electric blanket. It changed how he sleeps but also how he dreams. It’s cozy. He is no longer cold. To this, Andre says something along the lines of: But you should be cold. Everyone in New York is cold.
Looking it up now, that’s not the exact dialogue and in fact Andre is suggesting something slightly different from what I remembered, but anyway, it’s a notion I often repeat to myself. When discussing motivation in writing, it's common to ask how to avoid the bad feelings—the second guessing, loneliness, discouragement, impotent rage and overall relentless emotional turmoil. None of the well-meaning, uplifting responses to this ever resonate with me. I guess what I’m suggesting is that you shouldn’t try to avoid it. In some ways, it is it. You should be cold.
Chris Seaborne lives and writes by the sea in San Francisco. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in december and Blue Earth Review.
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