Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 37

Sandy waited on the Keasling dock, shivering in her fleece.

She carried a bag with her slicker and gloves and rubber boots because he'd told her she might need them and that had got her curious. But he'd refused to tell her why and that got her mad.

When the boat materialized out of the fog, she cursed. It was the Outcast.

When Lanny pulled Robbie Donie's pathetic old fishing vessel up to her dock, she leapt aboard with another curse.

But the look on her brother's face curdled her fury.

He looked so nervous. And proud. He wore his usual Sea Spray fleece and red beanie but the way he stood the deck of the Outcast was not the usual. He stood like a captain. Exactly the way she stood.

“What is this?” she said. She pointed to his slicker and gloves and boots on top of the gear locker, where she'd tossed her bag. “We going anchovy fishing? Keasling family nostalgia day?”

He gave a nervous grin and shook his head.

In a way, she was sorry.

Lanny piloted the old tub with surprising skill.

Eh, she thought, not so surprising. She'd taught him well, on the Sea Spray. And the Outcast was a simpleton's vessel, the kind of boat made for a fisherman who doesn't want to be bothered with complicated equipment. Who can only afford a second-hand low-tech basic tub. It had suited Robbie Donie to a T, she thought.

And, she thought with a twinge, it suited Lanny to a T.

The Outcast plowed ahead through the fog.

The wheelhouse was bare-bones, just basic nav screens and wheel and pilot's chair. She'd been reading the screens over Lanny's shoulder. She knew where they were, she knew these waters off the Morro Bay coast like she knew the way from her bedroom to her bathroom in the dark. What she didn't know was where they were headed or what 'the mission' was.

Lanny called it The Mission.

He told her he had a job to do and that job would make her proud.

She'd tried blustering, threatening, but he wouldn't explain anything more. He wanted to show her. She'd finally decided it was easier to wait and see. No — the truth was that she'd seen that she couldn't make him tell her. She'd seen that something had changed between them. She no longer had the automatic upper hand. Maybe it was because they were aboard Lanny's boat. Didn't matter that he'd confessed to 'borrowing' it this morning, to using bolt cutters to cut the cable that secured it to the cop storage dock — and where had he learned that trick, she wondered? Didn't matter that he swore he was going to pay for the damaged cable and buy the boat from Robbie's aunt as soon as he could borrow five thousand from Sandy — and where did Lanny get the idea that she had five thousand to toss around? None of that mattered this morning. Lanny had claimed the boat. She saw that, in him. Pride of possession.

That's what had changed.

That's what made Sandy Keasling a passenger.

She would bide her time.

Meanwhile, she cast a buyer's eye over the vessel. Not that she was planning on financing Lanny's folly — she just couldn't help assessing. The tub showed its age but at least it was operable. She moved to the cabin doorway and examined the afterdeck. The wooden decking was still stained with squid ink. She'd heard about that but this was the first she'd seen it. Sure looked like somebody had hauled a Humboldt aboard. She shook her head. The whole damn deck would need scraping, sanding, re-coating. She moved to look at the anchovy setup. The small drum mounted amid-deck had a net rolled on it, and the winch seemed to have all its parts, and that was just about that. Robbie Donie was a small-time bait fisher making do. No wonder he'd had a go at squid jigging. All in all, the Outcast stank of failure.

And her pathetic brother called himself captain of this tub.

What really got her was the flag tied to the railing, hanging limp and damp in the fog. It was black and red, pirate colors, but instead of the skull and crossbones there was a cartoon in black of a spiky sea urchin with big red eyes.

The Keasling kids flag. They'd had them done at a T-shirt shop. She hadn't known Lanny kept his. She had no idea what happened to hers. She figured Jake had long ago tossed his in the trash.

She knew where she could come up with five thousand. She could cash in a savings bond.

She turned and headed around the cabin to inspect the small foredeck.

There was a pile of dive gear stacked against the cabin wall. For just a moment she thought it must have belonged to Robbie, only why would Robbie have diving gear? And then she saw the name in black marker on the tank: Lancelot Keasling.

She didn't know what made her madder — Lanny bringing dive gear, or seeing that dumb-ass name her father had saddled him with. If she hadn't set Lanny straight as a kid he would have grown up calling himself Lancelot — all the other kids laughing their asses off at her brother. At a Keasling. Every once in a while, though, she found him using it. Like now. Shit. She bet Fred Stavis and his crew had a good laugh, if that was the gear Lanny used on Dive Solutions jobs.

She flushed.

She stomped back to the cabin door and pushed inside. “Why did you bring your dive gear, Lanny?”

He turned. “You're not supposed to ask questions.”

She thought, five thou my ass. She exploded. “The hell I'm not! You steal a boat to go on some secret mission and now I find out it's diving? I don't dive, Lanny. You don't dive alone. You dive with Fred's crew. What the hell are you up to?”

“Nothing that's bad.” He turned his back on her.

She came around beside him and leaned in close. “I'll tell you about bad. My boat got its rub rail dinged up and I don't know how or why. But I did find out who was driving it. Your big brother — the night Robbie disappeared. You know anything about that?”

Lanny ducked his head and stared at his screens. “No.”

“You know what happened to Robbie?”

“No.”

“I call bullshit,” she said. “And here's something else bad, something I know you know about. You stole a red float from that diver we rescued — Joao Silva. The diver who got poisoned. What about that float, Lanny?”

He shook his head.

She thought she was going to scream. “And what about the other float, the yellow float. The one those geologists came asking about on our beach. The one they say Robbie hid.”

Lanny checked some handheld GPS unit and then fiddled with one of the nav screens.

She couldn't get a look at the handheld but she sure recognized the fish finder on the nav screen. She remembered Dad using one to track anchovies, looking for the shadow on the finder that meant a bait ball, back when she gave a shit about finding fish.

She leaned in real close and said, “You tell me what's going on or I call Doug and tell him you stole this boat.”

“Don't.”

She took hold of the wheel. “You're not fit to be a captain. Captains don't lie.”

His mouth hung open. He looked like a gasping fish in a bucket.

She couldn't look at him so she looked at the wheel, their two hands side by side gripping the wheel. She yanked the wheel, hard, and he lost his hold. She snapped, “I'm calling Doug.”

“Don't. If you don't call Doug okay I'll tell you.”

She looked at him now.

He looked a little desperate. “It was a job, with Fred. I messed up.”

“How did you mess up?”

“I broke something.”

“What?”

“Just a… Just a remote controller. Like a TV clicker.”

“That handheld you just checked? The one you put under your shirt?”

“No. I don't have the one I broke.”

“Then what's this handheld for?”

“I'll tell you in five minutes.”

“What happens in five minutes?”

“Maybe a little longer.”

“Damn it Lanny you don't get a little longer — I'm going to call Doug right now.”

“No, don't, okay I'm telling you about the thing I broke. It was a remote and it controlled some switches only that's not what broke the yellow float, that was something else, the yellow float had a bad hook, and I lost it.”

She pressed her fingers to her forehead, where the headache was uncoiling. She dug hard, like she could grab that sea snake and rip it out. Lanny's dodging and weaving was going to kill her someday, just give her a massive stroke.

Lanny said, “Don't be mad.”

“What,” she asked, as calmly as she could manage, “was this job? What kind of switches did your controller control?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Fred would get mad.”

“Screw Fred. You tell me.”

“I can tell you about the red float, okay?” He put his hand on the wheel again, beside hers. “You wanted to know that. That float came from the job too. I guess it got broken too. When I saw the diver with it… I was afraid, Sandy.”

“Of what? Fred finding out?”

“Jock finding out.”

“Jock?” She rolled her eyes. “You and Jacques Cousteau.”

“He's in heaven. He sees us, when we do bad things to the ocean.”

She went cold. “What bad things did you do?”

He sealed his lips and shook his head.

She put her free hand in her pocket and took out her cell phone.

“Please Sandy. I need to fix it. I need to show you.”

Her heart turned over. And then it hardened. “This thing you broke? This controller? Is this gonna mess me up? Like you messed me up back when you played deckhand on my tug?” She'd been working her dream job at the Port of Los Angeles, the big time for a tugboat master, and Lanny had been living at the hacienda with Jake, and she'd invited Lanny for a visit and Jake had put him on a bus and she would spend the rest of her life regretting that invitation, regretting taking Lanny for a spin on her tugboat, showing off, she'd goddamn showed off for her little brother, and Lanny had fallen in love with her job, and he'd pushed and pushed wanting to learn and she'd given in, just one little lesson, she'd taught him how to throw a line, and he'd 'helped' tying up to a barge and he goddamn screwed up and the line snapped. “The collision with the barge? Cost me my license?”

His face turned red as his beanie. “This won't mess you up.”

She glared at him. “It better not.” She let go of the wheel and moved to the doorway and stared out at the sea.

She'd tried, after her dream went sour. She'd moved back home and ended up a sorry-ass whale-watching driver. She'd tried to forgive Lanny. She'd taken him on and turned him into a competent deckhand. She'd tried to make her peace. She'd really really tried.

And now, what had he screwed up this time?

She had a real bad feeling about this.

She was, she had to admit, a little bit scared.

They drove on through the fog.

She moved back to her spot in the doorway and leaned against the jamb and folded her arms.

She shivered.

The damn fog.

They motored on.

And then Lanny powered the engine down to an idle and she moved behind him and looked over his shoulder and saw him tracing a finger on the screen of the fish finder.

She saw big shadows on the screen. Looked like bait balls, she thought. “Chovies? We hunting chovies after all?”

“I have to catch…” He shook his head.

“Catch what, Lanny?”

He just stared at the screen.

“All right then little brother, you tell me this. You came out here hunting something. How'd you know how to find it?”

“I just know.”

“Oh yeah? Jock tell you?” She spat the name.

“That's not nice.”

“Neither are you,” she said. “Bullshitting me.”

“I'm not. I'm using equipment.” He pulled the handheld out from under his shirt and showed it to her. “I said I'd show you. It tracks things in the ocean, you put a chip in them and then a satellite can watch them and it shows where on my tracker.”

“Fred gave you that? Part of your messed-up job?”

“I borrowed it, he doesn't know but he won't get mad because I'm going to fix everything.”

She peered at the tracker. A little satellite icon in the corner. Blips on the screen. “Can you even read that thing?”

“Yes. And that's not all.” Lanny straightened in his captain's chair. He angled his head to look up at her. “I know things, Sandy. I know how to read charts. I know how the shape of the bottom makes currents go, and I know where there's a canyon that…”

She stabbed a finger at the chartplotter, at the seafloor contours. “There's no canyon down there.”

“It's somewhere else. It makes currents like in a funnel and it funneled things up and so I know where they came from, but they move so I have to use the tracker to find them now.”

“What things?”

“You'll see.”

She wasn't sure she wanted to see.

“It's my fault they escaped,” he said. “I have to catch them and then I have to fix the other thing and we have to hurry.”

She didn't like this. Not one bit.

She geared herself up to start in on him again but he leapt up and brushed past her to the afterdeck, to the winch control panel.

She was right on his heels.

She watched him set the lever to the free-wheeling position. She watched him grab the anchor buoy lead that pulled the bunt end of the net off the drum, that started the net unrolling. She watched him guide the net to the stern and throw the buoy overboard, pulling the net into the sea.

Simple moves, but she held her breath waiting for her brother to screw it up.

He didn't.

Muscle memory, she thought. Drum netting off Dad's boat. It was bred in Lanny's bones.

Hers too.

She moved to help, to guide the unrolling net and keep the small white floats of the float line from tangling.

Lanny turned and gave her a nervous smile and went into the wheelhouse to start the engine up.

She remained at the stern watching the net slide into the water, watching as the Outcast pulled away from the anchor buoy and the net began to spread. The float line laid a nice curve along the surface, and down below the weighted lead line would be pulling the net down like a curtain to encircle the chovies.

Her stomach suddenly went sour.

Not chovies, not today, something else down there.

She stood freezing with her stomach churning until the Outcast completed its circle and came back to the buoy. And then Lanny shut down the engine and came out of the wheelhouse.

Without speaking, they both suited up in their waterproof gear.

And then — bred in the bone — she was helping him. Use the boat hook to bring the net buoy back aboard, bring in the other end of the net, wind the two net lines onto the drum, set the winch control lever to reverse and let the drum start reeling in the lines, pulling the net toward the boat, closing up the bottom.

She moved opposite him and the both of them took hold of the cables to help guide the incoming net back onto the drum.

She said, “How were you going to do all this all by yourself?”

He just looked at her, like it hadn't even crossed his mind.

She thought, that's why he called her this morning. Oh sure, he had big ideas of coming out here and fixing up his mess all by himself but in the end he saw that he needed her.

Like always. It made her mad.

It made her needed.

It made her crazy.

And then she caught the look on Lanny's face — gritting his teeth, his worried look — and it made her anxious. She turned to watch the net coming in through the water, no visible catch yet, the catch was down below being corralled by the tightening net, but right now there was nothing to see but black netting on gray sea.

And then the winch started to creak.

So much for Robbie keeping his gear in shape. She hoped the damn winch wouldn't die before the net got hauled in. Keaslings hadn't hauled in a net by hand for donkey's years.

The winch kept creaking but the net kept rolling in.

And then Lanny let go of his side of the net and moved to the stern and looked into the water.

She dropped her cable and followed him.

The winch screeched. Working its ass off.

The net was coming in.

She thought she felt the stern dip.

She steadied herself.

Lanny let out a sound — croaking like the winch, she thought — and pointed.

She saw.

She wasn't sure what she was seeing.

The gathering net was now close enough to bring its catch up to the shallows. The bag was full. It was a big catch but what the hell was it? It was muck. It wasn't a good catch, it was some kind of seafloor muck caught in the net only she had never seen or heard of such a thing.

The winch screamed.

The net wings continued to roll in across the deck, onto the drum.

The bag of the net in the water tightened, drawing the catch toward the stern, and all of a sudden she could see that the muck wasn't muck. It was pulsating.

They were pulsating.

Jesus. Christ. They were huge, they were bigger than barrels, bigger than she was and she wasn't small, bigger still, big as a nightmare, every one of them big as the double-wide fridge in her kitchen for crying out loud, she couldn't believe them, and they were heavy heavy heavy because as the screaming winch began to haul the net out of the water, the stern of the boat began to dip. The winch couldn't take it. The boat couldn't take it. She couldn't take it, she was screaming at Lanny to get his ass back to the controls and stop the winch—no—put it free-wheeling, let this bag of monsters fall back into the sea.

Lanny was screaming too. “Don't let them get away.”

Now water was coming in over the stern and she gripped the railing to keep from falling and she screamed at him “we're foundering” and she turned to see him at the control levers, frozen, his need to catch this net of giants warring with his need to save his boat.

“Let them go,” she screamed.

He shook his head and sealed his lips but he worked the lever and the drum stopped hauling in the net.

It went into reverse.

Netting rolled off the drum and slithered across the deck toward the stern.

The net bag that had been coming aboard began to settle back down in the sea.

The stern lifted and water sheeted off and the Outcast was no longer foundering.

And then Lanny put the brake on and the drum froze and the net froze and Lanny barreled across the deck toward her, flailing his arms and wailing about doing bad things and these things down in the water were his fault, these things had come because Lanny had messed up and made Jock mad.

She didn't know how it happened, how Lanny lost his footing — maybe it was his flailing — but he fell on his ass and his slicker slipped on the wet deck and shot him into the water.

She froze.

He thrashed around to face the boat, trying to swim, fighting his slicker and his heavy boots, flailing.

She stood frozen, gripping the rail.

He got a hand on the netting hanging over the stern.

He'd lost his glove.

He looked up at her, face pale as death.

She knew how cold the water was. How it froze the muscles. She shivered.

He mouthed help.

He'd lost his red beanie, she saw.

She could not help following the path of the netting — from the partially-wound netting on the drum, to the netting that traveled across the deck, to the netting that hung over the stern, the part that Lanny gripped, and finally to the circle of netting in the water, now neither gathering nor releasing, just floating there with its catch of things she'd never seen, jellyfish the size of refrigerators.

The circle of net in the water was just beyond Lanny.

He saw her looking. He turned his wet head to look, too. He wailed.

They can't get to him, she thought. They're in the net.

But ropes of tentacles were entwined, were sticking through.

He turned back to look up at her and cried out, “Sandy.”

Maybe there are more, she thought. She couldn't see any more of the muck out there but that didn't mean there weren't more. Lanny said they were chipped for the satellite tracking. Did they all have chips? She couldn't tell by looking — tiny microchips would be like a grains of sand on those monsters. Maybe she should dash into the wheelhouse and look at Lanny's tracker and see if any more showed up on the screen. But she shouldn't waste time on that, should she?

Didn't matter, she thought. The cold would get him first.

He really messed up big time here, trying to net monsters, trying to fix whatever the hell else he had done, swamping their boat, probably flooding the engine, stranding them out here, oh yeah he'd outdone himself this time.

She felt like she was going to explode. There was a ticking bomb inside her and it had started ticking way back when she lost her tug license and she'd thought she'd made her peace but she hadn't. The bomb inside her was about to go off.

Lanny yelled, “Sandy!” He'd got his other hand on the net hanging over the stern but he couldn't haul himself up.

She thought, let him go.

Staring at his panicked face just above the water she pictured his face in the water another time, five years ago that felt like yesterday, Lanny in the water flailing next to the Sea Spray. He'd driven her boat over a submerged rock and bent the prop and she'd said he was goddamn going to fix it and so when they returned to the dock he'd jumped in the water to see how bad the damage was. She'd been so mad she thought she'd pee her pants and she'd stomped away, up the dock to the cafe to use the bathroom — to get away from him, really, before she exploded — and when she'd come out and started down the dock she'd seen him in the water flailing, he'd got himself tangled up in something and as he thrashed he hit his head on the hull and he rolled over like a swamped boat. She'd stood on the dock watching. Frozen. She'd thought of her lost tug license, her dream and her achievement and her pride gone. She'd thought of her future, dragging Lanny like anchor. And the thought had come, let him go. And then she'd turned — to go back to the cafe? She'd never know, because when she turned she saw Fred Stavis up on the deck of the shopping area above the docks, Fred and a bunch of other people but it was Fred she locked eyes with. And she saw him smile. Like he knew her dark heart. She'd spun back around — to run down the dock and jump in the water and save her brother? The shitty thing was, she'd never know. She'd never know because she saw somebody else had already got there. Oscar Flynn, that strange man who always gave her the creeps when she saw him around town, had jumped in the water and was saving her brother.

In the days and months and years afterward she'd carefully probed Lanny about The Shitstorm, what he remembered. She'd needed to know if he remembered his sister watching him flail in the water. If he saw her turn her back. He always said he didn't remember anything.

Fred Stavis did, though. Saw, remembered, and used The Shitstorm to get her to invest in his company, and took Lanny on at shitty wages — holding him hostage she always thought.

And Oscar Flynn saw, she was certain. She'd gone to Flynn a few weeks after The Shitstorm, carefully probing to find out if he'd seen her turn her back on her brother. Her Keasling shame. Flynn hadn't let on what he saw. What he did say, though, gave her the real creeps—“your brother is in my debt.” She'd offered to pay off that debt. Five hundred bucks she couldn't afford. He'd laughed in her face and said “he pays it off every day” and when she'd freaked and asked what that meant he'd said “karma” and told her not to worry.

She did worry. For a while. She'd warned Lanny away from Oscar Flynn and her brother had said okay but now looking back she wondered if that's when her brother had learned to lie. And she herself had been eager to move on, get the whole Shitstorm behind them. She'd told herself that Flynn's karma was good karma because in the days and months and years afterward nothing bad happened.

How blind she'd been. Now she saw. Fred Stavis and — she just bet — Oscar Flynn had gotten Lanny into something ugly. Something that she just bet involved Robbie Donie going missing, something that had sucked in her and Jake and her sad-sack Sea Spray livelihood.

How many more times could she let this happen?

Let him go.

She couldn't look at his face and so she turned away and what did she see? The sad-sack Sea Urchin flag.

She was going to explode.

She rushed up the deck to the winch control and — even now — she was torn between free-wheeling and reverse. Her hand wanted to shove the lever to free-wheel, release the net from the drum, from the boat, just let the net go with its hideous cargo and her brother riding the end of the net.

Into the sea.

But her hand obeyed some primitive command, some Keasling family wiring, and she shoved the lever into reverse.

The drum started rolling in the net again.

The winch started screaming again.

She rushed back to the stern — leaden with defeat or maybe it was acceptance — and got to her knees and anchored one arm around the side railing and watched Lanny rise, attached to the net like a limpet.

Following in the water, being reeled in once again, was the heavy catch.

She was screaming at Lanny to help, to grab hold of her outstretched hand before the catch was winched out of the water behind him, before that lift overloaded the boat, before they got flooded again.

He reached.

She managed to yank him aboard and slide him onto the deck and she left him floundering there and rushed to the lever and put the gear back into free-wheeling to unroll the net and let the catch go.

They were shivering. Shuddering.

She had helped Lanny strip off his wet clothes and grabbed his wetsuit from the foredeck locker and wrestled him into the heavy neoprene. Her own pants were wet below the knees and clung to her icy skin.

She tried the engine again, and again it refused to catch.

She took out her cell and phoned for help.

Then she turned to her brother and hugged him. He hugged her back. The two of them shivered together, hugging for warmth.