The Sea Beach Line (5 page)

For breakfast, my father put out slices of black bread. This bread was far denser than the bread I was used to eating, and though it seemed a little stale, he didn't offer to toast it. I vaguely remembered eating bread like this when I was younger, but I'd grown used to eating fluffy grocery store wheat bread. I smeared on lots of butter—at home we were only allowed margarine—and used all the muscles in my throat to choke the morsels down.

When we were ready to go, Alojzy hoisted an army surplus pack full of gear onto his back, and handed me an empty cooler to carry.

“What about the rods?” I asked.

“Rods?”

“We're going, like, fishing. Right?”

“No rods, fella. For crabs you use traps.” He tapped his pack.

We walked down the Coney Island boardwalk. I'd been there a few times with my family, but only in the afternoon. Families didn't hang around Coney after dark back then. Now, in the early morning, it was pretty much deserted, aside from a few old Russian women who looked like they were rushing even though they were strolling, a shirtless man drinking a tall can of beer, and some homeless people who'd crawled out from under the boardwalk, squinting at the sunlight.

We turned off the boardwalk and up the T-shaped fishing pier that stretched much farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than I could swim. A pile of break rocks extended out from the shore, parallel to the pier, and we stopped just across from where they ended.

“Here,” said Al, kneeling down to reach into his backpack. He pulled out two hooped wire baskets and a greasy brown paper bag.

“What's in there?”

“Chicken necks.” He showed me the yellow-gray mottled lump before he began fastening it to the bottom of one of the baskets with a piece of twine.

“Those are the real necks of chickens?”

“Of course.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Butcher shop. Where else? It's good crab bait. Cheap meat. Crabs are bottom feeders. They love this kind of meat.” He scored the necks with his pocketknife, so that the yellow skin separated and the pink flesh was exposed.

“Do people eat them?”

“Sure, if they're hungry. You eat chicken, don't you?”

“Yeah, chicken wings. Not chicken necks. People cook them up like chicken wings?”

“No, there's not so much meat for that. It's more for a stew. Listen, trust me, if you're hungry enough, you'd be happy to eat chicken-neck stew. Maybe today you'll find this out, if we don't catch any crabs.” My face must have betrayed my fear, because Alojzy let out a deep laugh.

He tied the baskets onto some braided lines, and tied the other ends of the line onto the railing of the pier. The rail was full of grooves worn by similar lines, which made me think that what we were doing wasn't so strange.

Alojzy showed me how to toss the trap out over the water like a Frisbee. The baskets opened fully in the air, then fell straight into the water. We gave it a couple minutes to give the crabs time to smell the bait. When we finally pulled the baskets up, I was sure that I felt the weight of crabs in mine, but as soon as the basket rose into the air, I realized it had just been the pressure of the water.

We threw the baskets back in. In the distance was a big boat, stacked high with different-colored shipping containers. Beyond that, I could make out a distant coastline.

“What's that out there?”

“There? A boat.”

“No, not that, the land.” I could make out a mass in the distance. “Is that New Jersey?”

“No. Staten Island. Still New York City.”

“Oh. So can you swim there?”

“Me? Sure I can.”

We pulled the traps in again, and to my delight a crab was in one of them. I hadn't actually believed that we would catch anything. It was a terrible thing we caught, with wart-like growths and splotches of mud across its uneven shell.

“Look! Dad! I caught one!” I usually referred to him as “Alojzy,” or “my father,” but when I was speaking to him the word “Dad” came smoothly and affectionately from my lips.

“Yeah, so I see. Or maybe it caught you? But it's just a spider crab. No good for eating.” He took the trap from me and turned it upside down, shaking it until the crab fell back into the ocean. I felt a little cheated of my catch, but at the same time was happy to see the thing gone.

Next throw, we pulled up a couple spider crabs each. Alojzy dumped them on the pier and kicked them hard, so that they skidded across to the other side. He walked over and kicked them again, booting them far out into the water. I understood why he did it. They were ugly, and deserved to be kicked.

“We don't want them on same side as us,” he told me. “They'll keep coming back now that they know about the bait.”

We moved farther out on the pier, and our luck changed. My father pulled in two rock crabs. They were about the same size as the smaller of the spider crabs but had smoother backs and looked altogether more sanitary. After that, we started pulling them in left and right.

“This is the spot,” my father said. We threw back four because they were too small, and one because it was pregnant. You could see its
bloated egg sac hanging from its underside. In the end, we came away with thirteen crabs, five of which I had hauled in myself. Not bad.

My father had been sipping from his thermos all morning, so he needed to take a piss in the restroom on the boardwalk before we headed out. He left me to watch our crabs. Now that we had moved farther out on the pier, we were close to the old men who had been fishing when we arrived. Two of them sat across the pier from me on plastic crates, and passed a small bottle of something purplish back and forth. Their long fishing poles were propped up against the railing. I wondered how they would know if there were a fish on the line. One of the men caught me watching. He gave me what would have been a toothy grin if he'd had any teeth, and raised his bottle in a mocking toast. A lengthy filet knife was tucked in his belt. It looked like a fearsome dagger that could cut me wide-open. I was scared, but then I remembered that my father would be coming back any moment.

On the ride back to his apartment, I sat with the Styrofoam container on my lap. I couldn't believe that I had a box full of wild sea creatures with me on the train, and I kept lifting the lid to look at them, until my father told me to stop.

When we got home, he took the cooler from me and dumped the crabs into his empty bathtub. A few of them landed on their backs. Alojzy found a flathead screwdriver on the windowsill, and flipped them right side up. A few more adventurous crabs scuttled across the floor of the bathtub. The rest sat where they landed, flicking their little mouths and occasionally flexing their pinchers. One didn't seem to be moving at all. My father jabbed it with the screwdriver. Its little mouth moved, and some bubbles flitted through the little bit of stagnant water pooled in the bathtub. They were alive. Life was the opposite of death. That they were really alive meant that we were really going to make them dead. A stream of liquid trailed behind one of the scuttlers.

“What's that?” I asked.

“It's shit. You don't know shit when you see it? That's something you're going to have to learn, you want to get by in this world.”

Alojzy turned on the faucet, washing the shit and sand down the drain. When they were clean, he grabbed them one by one by the
back legs and tossed them into a paper grocery bag. We went into the kitchen, where he put the bag into the freezer.

Alojzy put his one pot on the stove, and twisted together a long tinfoil spiral.

“What's that?”

“A rack. To hold the crabs.”

He cracked a twenty-four-ounce beer from the fridge, took a good long swig, then poured some into the pot.

“Why did you pour that in there?” I asked.

“We're going to steam the crabs in the lager.” Lager meant beer? Would I get drunk from eating beer crabs?

“I'm just a kid, I can't have beer.”

“Feh. When I was your age, already I was drinking beer. That's the way in Poland.” I tried to picture him at my age, and saw a tough little boy with scars, stubble, and gold chains drinking beer. “Besides, the alcohol boils off.”

“Oh. So can I have a sip of the beer?” I held my hand out for the can.

“No.” He took a swig.

He took the bag of crabs out of the freezer, and dumped them into the pot. I peeked in. They weren't moving.

“Are they dead?” I asked nervously. Had I helped kill something without even realizing it?

“No, no. You can't cook dead crab. Bacterias. They are just stunned, slowed down from the freezing.”

“So we're going to eat them alive?”

“No, of course not. They will die in the steam.”

“I don't think I want to eat a crab.”

“What? We go to the trouble of catching nice crabs all morning, and you don't even want to eat them?”

“I don't . . . I don't think so.” I had been interested in the crabs as bounty, but the idea of eating whatever was inside these rough shells was physically repellent to me.

“Look at the rich American boy, so soft, so picky. So
pachech
.” At home, there were no foreign words in conversation, only English.
When Alojzy spoke I always understood what he meant, even if I couldn't always define the words or their language of origin. “Maybe you'd prefer lobster? Well, fine then, more crab for me.”

“Listen, I don't want lobster either.” I reached for any justification other than the fact that I was a pussy. “People can't eat shellfish.”

“Oh, can't they?”

“I mean, shouldn't. It's wrong.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“At the synagogue.” They had warned us about pepperoni too, but shellfish seemed far more serious.

“What synagogue? Who took you to the synagogue?”

“Bernie.” Since we'd moved in with Bernie, he'd started taking us to shul with him every Friday evening. He and my mother also sent me to a religious instruction class on Saturday mornings and to a Hebrew class on Wednesday evenings. Alojzy had no time for such institutions.

“Who's Bernie. Nu?” I wasn't sure how to answer this question. It felt as if Alojzy and Bernie existed in two completely different worlds, and there would be no way to explain one to the other.

“You know who Bernie is. My stepfather.”

“No. Wrong. Stepfather? What's that? He's your mother's husband.” He turned on the burner. “I'm the only kind of father you got.”

“I know.” I nodded my head in affirmation.

“Good. It's good that you know.” The beer began to boil. Soon the crabs would die a hard death in the pot. I took a deep breath. It was okay. I went into the cabinet, found some plates and silverware, and began to set the table.

The crabs were surely dying now. Soon they would be dead and cooked. My father and I would crack them open with butter knives and eat their flesh with dessert forks. The meat would be the richest thing I'd ever had in my stomach, and bits of sand we had not managed to wash off would grind down my teeth. The crabs were dead, but I was alive and my father was alive, and we were together.

I had started on a path with Alojzy that day, then later diverged from it. There was a lot more I could have learned if I had stuck with him. He knew secrets of the streets that a thousand years in college couldn't teach me. He knew the difference between the real stories and the sentimental fabrications. Now I needed to find him, or at least the path he had left for me.

I caught a Manhattan-bound express train at the Sheepshead Bay station, and watched southern Brooklyn intently from the elevated tracks. A man stood on a rooftop, swinging an orange safety flag on the end of a stick. White pigeons circled above him as he called them home to their coop. On the way down to Coney Island, I'd been too busy anticipating my meeting with Goldov to pay attention to the outside world.

In college I knew several kids from Park Slope, and other parts of brownstone Brooklyn, who liked to talk about how much their neighborhoods had changed. But southern Brooklyn was a different world from theirs, and it moved at a slower speed. The area had not changed all that much in the past ten years, aside from the scattered newer condo buildings. Even some of the billboards and faded graffiti on the old rooftops was the same. My fingers remembered tracing the letters on the train window when I was twelve years old.