All Due Respect Issue #2 (3 page)

Things revert to normal when you’re back on the fishing grounds. Earl doesn’t talk about the hot springs, the muttered threat. Chad doesn’t mention it, either.

You fish out the trip in an uneasy peace. Fill the hold with good product. You figure you’re getting better; you run the gear fine. Chad’s still struggling, over on the starboard side. He still walks like a boss, though. Wears his tattoos like war wounds and his jewelry like trophies, oblivious to the shadows Earl casts in his direction.

You don’t care about all that. The trip’s nearly done. The end is in sight. You’re seeing Prince Rupert, Port Hardy, a tall frosty mug. You’re thinking about making your own stories, maybe hitting the Brass Rail. Maybe asking a dancer for a jar of mayonnaise, just to see what she says. Just to see what Earl says.

Then one day, it’s all over. The skipper pokes his head out of the wheelhouse, looks at you. “Haul the gear in,” he says. “Tidy up. We’re done.”

Done. You’re euphoric. A sleep and a shower. A beer and a burger. A lap dance and a lay. You run the last of the gear and mop the slime off the deck. Steal a glance at Earl; he’s a thousand miles distant. Staring off over the water, his gaze dark. He’s gone quiet lately. He’s not telling his stories. He sulks in the cockpit and glowers at Chad like an approaching storm.

The skipper turns the boat eastward, toward the shore. The harbor lies a hundred miles distant, an overnight run. You finish up on the deck. It’s your night for dinner. You cook and you eat and you take the first watch. Point the bow toward home as the sun sets behind you.

Chad’s on second watch. He comes up to relieve you. It’s dark now, and the weather’s picking up again. A following sea. Supposed to blow thirty knots early tomorrow.

Chad ducks into the galley. Makes a fresh pot of coffee. “Gotta stay awake somehow,” he tells you. “Sweet dreams.”

You hand over the captain’s chair, check the autopilot. Tell Chad goodnight and slip down to the fo’c’sle. You’re dead asleep before you’re half in your bunk.

The skipper’s mouth is granite when you crawl out the next morning. He stares through the windows and out across the bow, his eyes flinty hard as the boat bucks the waves. In the distance, the island is a long, low, thin line. The wheelhouse is empty, the skipper excepted.

“Must have gone out for a piss,” the skipper says. He doesn’t take his eyes off the water. “Waves kicked up last night. Must have washed him over. Not much we can do about it now.”

You duck into the galley. Pour a cup of coffee. Watch your hands to see how they shake.

“The coast guard,” you say.

“Called it in,” the skipper says. “They’ll run a search, I imagine. Too much ground to cover to really get your hopes up.”

You drink your coffee. You stare out the window. Outside, the land still seems so far away.

Chad is on the back deck when you come out of the wheelhouse. He’s sat on the hatch cover, scrubbing out buckets. He looks up as you step out on deck.

“Shame about Earl,” he says, his expression unreadable. You stare back at him. Steady your coffee mug in your hand.

“Accidents happen,” he says. “Kind of a drag.”

You nod. “Yeah,” you say. You force down more coffee.

“Guess we’ll split his share even,” he says.

“Yeah,” you say. “I guess so.”

Chad says nothing for a while. Goes back to scrubbing buckets. You walk to the stern, steady yourself on the rigging. Drink your coffee as you stare back at the grey waves, the white turbulent wash.

Chad appears beside you. He’s holding the washdown bucket, the one with the hole in it. “Don’t know why we keep this,” he says. “The damn thing’s N.F.G.”

You watch as he flips the thing over. Stabs a couple more holes in the bottom with an old gutting knife, long and jagged and torn. Rights the thing, straightens, studies his work.

“Should have done this a long time ago,” he says. Then he chucks the thing over. Watches it settle in the wash. Then he turns away again, goes back to his buckets.

You stand at the stern, drinking your coffee. Watch the washbucket as it settles in the waves, the angry letters scrawled. N.F.G.

You watch the washbucket until it sinks out of sight.

Owen Laukkanen
is the author of the critically-acclaimed Stevens and Windermere series of crime thrillers. He has worked on fishing boats on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and traveled the world writing about the glitz and glamor of high-stakes poker tournaments. Laukkanen’s third Stevens and Windermere novel,
Kill Fee,
will be released in March 2014.

Decomposition is the Universe Forgetting Itself

By CS DeWildt

T
OMMY SKAGGS WOKE UP
wondering where he was going to come up with the three hundred dollars he needed to pay off Myers. He lay on the top bunk, his little brother snoring below. Tommy rolled quickly, jumped down from the bunk and landed soft as rock, his last cigarette dangling from his lips. He kicked his sleeping brother in the back.

“Corbin,” he said. “Wake up you little fucker. You got money?”

The form under the blanket moaned and groaned and mumbled angry profanities into the pillow. “Fuck face,” Tommy said.

Tommy grabbed Corbin’s crumpled jeans from the floor and for a moment, over the jingle of spare change, things seemed hopeful. Tommy pulled out a total of seventy-two cents. He shook his head at his little brother as he put the change into the pocket of his long black shorts. He wadded up the jeans and threw them at his sleeping brother. “Broke ass bitch.”

Tommy stood outside the trailer, squinting in the sun as he stretched and coughed. He spat a thick mass of hard brown snot across the way that stuck to the neighbor trailer’s kitchen window. He sat down on the creaking, rotting, wooden stoop and pulled on his black Chucks. He thought about whether or not he needed a shirt. It was already close to eighty degrees, and though the ground was still damp and dark with the previous night’s rain, the heavy wet air was a rousing oppression. Tommy grabbed the black ribbed tank that had been laid over the splintering porch railing. He tucked it into his waistband.

Across the drive, a few trailers down, was Myers’s place. Tommy watched a young girl carrying a limp and ragged teddy bear. She was jumping in the puddles that had collected in the deep potholes than ran the length of the blacktop. He knew the girl’s older sister back in the day, Audrey. She was a couple years older than him and she used to let the park boys watch her shower for a dollar each back when they were in grade school. The milk crate they’d stood on was still there, overturned and unused now, but Tommy remembered clearly, he and the other boys fighting it out for their turn to watch through the bathroom window, as many as five boys holding each other for balance. By middle school Audrey had graduated to trading handjobs for cigarettes and weed. Tommy hadn’t seen the girl since she left the trailer and moved in with an aunt, years back.

“Hey Janie,” Tommy called to the splashing child. The girl stopped dead, ankle deep in the middle of a puddle. She looked at him, blank faced, her teddy swinging. “Your dad home?” The girl shook her head. Tommy smiled. “Let me come in.”

Tommy sat on the couch while Janie poked inside drawers and cupboards. She was almost pretty. Her teeth were straight, but crowded, too big for her small mouth. She was lean and her profile was regal, small chinned and pointy as she was. Janie had the look of Audrey, and her absent mother assumedly, since she seemed to carry nothing of Myers.

“How old are you now, Janie?” he asked.

“Twelve,” she said. “Is Corbin coming over?”

“Fuck should I know?” Tommy said. There was a red cigarette pack on the arm of the couch. Tommy grabbed it, prepared for it to be empty but found three cigarettes inside. He lit one with the book of matches on the coffee table and then put the pack and the matches in his pocket. “You find her number?”

“No,” Janie said. “I’ll check Dad’s room.” Tommy watched her go, sucking on the cigarette and listening to the flies buzz around the mound of dishes in the sink. After a moment he stood and followed into the hallway. He poked his head into the first door. It was a pink and purple disaster of clothes and stuffed animals and cutesy stickers that were affixed to nearly every surface. Pictures of famous boys ripped from magazines were attached to the wall with masking tape. Tommy moved on to the second door and found Janie squatted with her back to him, digging through the nightstand next to Myers’s bed. Tommy watched her for a moment, followed her lines, the curve of her neck and its swoop to the shoulder. His eyes traced down her back where her shirt had ridden up. Tommy could see the girl’s spine at the small of her back. Before she’d left, Tommy remembered, Audrey had gotten a tattoo in the same spot, home done and not too bad except that “Angel” was spelled “Angle.”

Tommy returned to Janie’s room. On top of a single wooden shelf above her bed were a few books and a metallic piggy bank. Tommy grabbed the pig from the shelf and popped its cork. He shook out some change and then stuck two fingers inside the hole, fingering the pig for the paper inside. He pulled out a dollar bill, and then another, and finally a five spot. He shook the rest of the change into his hand and put it in his pocket with the cigarettes and Corbin’s change. He went back to Janie’s dad’s room. She was still at the nightstand, looking through an address book.

“Find it?” he said.

Janie jumped. “You scared me, Tommy.” She stood and handed him the address book. Tommy looked at the open page, read down the list of names.

“Audrey Stevens? She get married?” he asked. Janie nodded.

Tommy clung to the door jamb by his fingertips. He watched Janie stand there, clutching the bear and drilling into the carpet with the toe of one of her wet, oversized shoes. They were Chucks like Tommy’s, but red.

“You got a boyfriend, Janie?” he said. The girl looked up and then away, smiled shyly and shook her head. “Really? I don’t believe that. You’re so pretty. I bet you do. Bet you got lots.”

“Nope,” Janie said quietly. Tommy stared at the girl until she looked at him again.

“What?” she said.

“You’re just so pretty. Your sister was pretty too. You look just like her.”