Monterey Bay (18 page)

She watched the beer bottle come back in on a wave and rebound hollowly against a rock.

“Do you know where I can find a camera?” she asked.

“There's one in the garage. Right next to all those goddamn vials of shark liver oil.”

And then she started laughing. She knew it was a bad sound—unnatural and spooky, just like Mrs. Agnelli's—but she couldn't stop, even when Steinbeck recoiled in confusion. She couldn't stop when he left her alone at the water's edge, or when she slunk into the garage like a chastened animal and found it there, just as he had promised: a Kodak 35 Rangefinder, still in its box, a canister of film accompanying it. Laughing, she loaded the film. Laughing, she left the lab and sprinted in the direction of downtown.

She fell silent, however, when she stepped onto Alvarado Street. She remembered it from her earlier explorations: how the streetlights dropped off into an incense-tinged darkness once a certain corner was turned. At the intersection of Tyler and East Franklin, she slowed down. Then, as she proceeded onto Washington Street, it revealed itself: a purple-curtained, two-story building with an anachronistic gas lamp out front. There was a window in the alleyway that would have been inaccessible to
most voyeurs but that, on account of her height, gave her a direct view of the brothel's most well-trafficked chamber. And although she had to endure the proclivities of seven other clients before finding the client she sought, she didn't lose courage or stamina, she didn't start to laugh again. Instead, she worked with the calmness of a professional, making sure her father's face was in the frame whenever possible, the woman beneath him little more than a compositional afterthought: beautiful and foreign, thin with work and want.

THROW THE FISH, THROW 'EM GOOD. FISH FOR THE
fish. Eat or be eaten. Sardines in the bay? Not anymore, but they're sure as hell inside the aquarium. She stands above their tank on a catwalk. She throws them their food the way Ricketts used to throw his steaks. “Broadcast feeding,” one of the aquarists named it, as if there's a message being transmitted and received, and she can't see the delight of the crowd on the other side of the glass, but she can feel it. She can feel the vacuum of drawn breaths as the sardines tighten their school, as they begin to move as a single undulating tongue, curling around the meal and flashing with satisfaction, a mass of pure instinct shattered and rejoined. The urge to start yelling is nearly uncontrollable. Of course she once saw the horses fight! she wants to yell at him. Of course she did! A clearing in the orchard, a makeshift fence, the snap of torchlight, the waxy leaves of the mango trees
catching the breeze like tiny, black sails. A bad, sweet smell in the air, like a pie being baked from rotten fruit. A crowd of men, her father's long, pale form a crude oddity among the darker, smaller ones. Then the horses, three of them. One: a skinny, nervous mare tied to a stake in the middle of the clearing. Two and three: a pair of stallions, circling the ring, sizing each other up. An involuntary flick of the mare's tail. A hoof to the chest, a gargle of anguish. Teeth sinking into a throat and pulling away a sheet of bloodied hide. The loser falling to his knees, the winner limping forward to claim his trapped prize. After that, she couldn't watch anymore, but she could listen and she could smell. And that, of course, was more than enough.

FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, WAR.

It started out slowly, somewhat prosaically: the defacing of the exterior walls of Anders's cannery, the breaking of windows.

Then there was a brief truce, just long enough for Margot's father to relax, followed by a barrage of vandalism as inventive as it was disturbing. Live squirrels were put inside the pump house, clogging the mechanism with bones and fur. Human excrement—what seemed like tons of it—was piled up in front of the cannery's main door. She expected him to retaliate, to do whatever he could to inflict an equal degree of suffering upon his rival, but he continued on just as before, utterly immersed in his work, eerily unmoved, the ill will aimed in his direction little more than a distraction that, with the right combination of denial and willpower, he could endure unscathed.

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 her. 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.