Wild Child and Other Stories

ANACAPA

The boat left at eight a.m., and that wouldn’t have presented a problem, or not especially, if Damian hadn’t been in town. But then Damian was the whole reason for being here on this dock in the first place, the two of them hunkered over Styrofoam cups of coffee and shuffling in place with an assemblage of thirty or so males and two females (one of whom would turn out to be the deckhand), waiting in a kind of suppressed frenzy to board and lay claim to the prime spots along the rail. Hunter didn’t like boats. Didn’t especially like fish or fishing. But Damian did, and Damian — his roommate at college fourteen years ago and a deep well of inspiration and irritation ever since — always got his way. Which was in part why eight a.m. was such an impossible hour on this martyred morning with the sun dissolved in mist and the gulls keening and his head pounding and his stomach shrunk down to nothing. The other part of it, the complicating factor, was alcohol. Gin, to be specific.

They’d drunk gin the night before because gin was what they’d drunk in college, gin and tonic, the drink of liberation, the drink of spring break and summer vacation and the delirium of Friday and Saturday nights in the student clubs with the student bands pounding away and the girls burning like scented candles. Never mind that Hunter stuck almost exclusively to wine these days and had even become something of a snob about it (“Right over the hill in the Santa Ynez Valley? Best vineyards in the world,” he’d tell anyone who would listen), last night it was gin. It had started in the airport lounge when he’d arrived an hour early for Damian’s flight and heard himself say “Gin and tonic” to the bartender as if a ventriloquist were speaking for him. He’d had three by the time Damian arrived, and then for the rest of the night, wherever they went, the gin, which had managed to smell almost exactly like the scent of the jet fuel leaching in through the open window, continued to appear in neat little glasses with rectangular cubes of ice and wedges of lime till he and Damian collapsed at the apartment five short hours ago.

He stared blearily down at the blistered boards of the dock and the tired sea churning beneath them. For a long moment he watched a drift of refuse jerking to and fro in the wash beneath the pilings and then he leaned forward to drop a ball of spit into the place where, he supposed, waxing philosophical, all spit had originated.

Spit to spit. The great sea. Thalassa, roll on. The water was gray here, transparent to a depth of three or four feet, imbued with a smell of fish gone bad. He spat again, watching transfixed as the glistening fluid, product of his own body, spiraled through the air to vanish in the foam. And what was spit, anyway? A secretion of the salivary glands, serving to moisten food — and women’s lips. His first wife — Andrea — didn’t like to kiss while they were having sex. She always turned her head away, as if lips had nothing to do with it. Cee Cee, who’d left him three weeks ago, had been different. In his wallet, imprisoned behind a layer of scratched plastic, was a picture of her, in profile, her chin elevated as if she were being stroked, her visible eye drooping with passion, the red blaze of a carnation tucked behind her ear like a heat gauge. He resisted the impulse to look at it.

Damian’s voice—“Yeah, man, that’s what I’m talking about, forti-fication!”—rang out behind him and Hunter turned to see him tapping his Styrofoam cup to those of a couple in matching windbreakers, toasting them, as if there were anything to celebrate at this hour and in this place. Damian had a flask with him. Hunter had already been the recipient of a judicious shot of brandy — not gin, thank god — and he presumed Damian was sharing the wealth.

The woman — she was small-boned, dark, with her hair wrapped like a muffler round her throat — looked shy and sweet as she sipped her infused coffee and blinked her eyes against the burn of it. In the next moment, Damian had escorted the couple over to the rail and was making introductions. “Hey, Hunt, you ready for another?” he said, and Hunter held out his cup, hoping to deaden the pain, and then they were all four tapping the rims of the spongy white cups one against the other as if they were crystal flutes of Perrier-Jouet.

“This is Ilta’s maiden voyage, can you believe it?” Damian crowed, his voice too loud, so that people had begun to stare at him.

“This is correct,” she said in a small voice animated by the occasion, and, he supposed, the brandy. “I do it for Mock.” And here she looked to the man in the matching windbreaker, whose name seemed to be either Mack or Mark, Hunter couldn’t be sure.

“I’m a regular,” the man said, grinning as he tipped back his cup and then held it up for Damian to refresh, “but my wife’s never been out.” He looked harmless enough, one of those ubiquitous, fleshy-faced, pants-straining, good-time boys in his forties who probably sat behind a computer live days a week and dreamed in gigabytes, but Hunter would have killed him in a minute for the wife, whom he clearly didn’t deserve. She was a jewel, that was what she was, and that accent — what was it? Swedish? “She eats the fish, though,” Mack or Mark went on. He gave her a good-natured leer.

“Don’t you, dumpling?”

“Who doesn’t?” Damian put in, just to say something. He was the type who needed to be at the center of things, the impresario, the star of all proceedings, and that could be charming — Hunter loved him, he did — but it could be wearing too. “I mean, fresh fish, fresh from the sea like you never get it in the store?” He paused to tip the flask over the man’s cup. “I mean, come on, Ilta, what took you so long?”

“I do not like the, what do you say? The rocking.” She made an undulating motion with her hands. “Of this boat.”

They all looked to the boat. It was big enough, a typical party boat, seventy, eighty feet long, painted a crisp white and so immovable it might have been nailed to the dock. In that moment Hunter realized he hadn’t taken his Dramamine — the label advised taking two tablets half an hour to an hour before setting out — and felt in his jeans pocket for the package. His throat was dry. His head ached. He was wondering if the little white pills would have any effect if he took them now, or if they worked at all no matter when you took them, remembering the last time he’d been talked into this particular sort of adventure and the unrelenting misery he’d experienced for the entire six and a half hours of the trip (“There’s nothing more enjoyable — and tender, tender too — than seeing somebody you really admire puking over the rail,” Damian had kept saying). The memory ran a hot wire through him and before he could think he had the package out and was shaking four pills into the palm of his hand and offering them to Ilta. “Want a couple of these?” he asked. “Dramamine? You know, for motion sickness?” He pantomimed the act of gagging.

“We gave her the patch,” the husband said.

Ilta waved a finger back and forth, as if scolding Hunter. “I do it for Mock,” she repeated. “For the anniversary. We are married today three years ago.”

Hunter shrugged, cupped his palm to his mouth and threw back all four pills, figuring the double dose had to do something for him.

“In Helsinki,” the husband put in, his face lit with the blandest smile of possession and satisfaction. He put an arm around his wife and drew her to him. They kissed. The gulls squalled overhead.

Hunter looked away. And then suddenly everyone snapped to attention as the other woman — the deckhand in waiting — pulled back the bar to the gangplank. It was then, just as they’d begun to fumble around for their gear, that the man with the spider tattoo thrust himself into the conversation. Hunter had noticed him earlier — when they were in the office paying for their tickets and renting rods and tackle and whatnot. He was a crazy, you could see that from across the room, everything about him wired tight, his hair shaved down to a black bristle, his eyes like tracers, the tattoo of a red-and-black spider — or maybe it was a scorpion — climbing up the side of his neck. “Hey,” he said now, pushing past Ilta, “can I get in on this party?” And he held out his cup.

Damian never flinched. That was his way. Mr. Cool. “Sure, man,” he said, “just give me your cup.”

In the next moment they were shuffling forward to the reek of diesel as the captain fired up his engines and the boat shivered beneath them. Everything smelled of long use, fishermen here yesterday and fishermen coming tomorrow. The decks were wet, the seats damp with dew. Fish scales, opalescent, dried to a crust, crunched underfoot. They found a place in the cabin, room for four at one of the tables lined up there cafeteria style, and the spider man, aced out, made his way to the galley. Hunter had a moment to think about Cee Cee, how she would have hated this — she was a downtown girl, absolutely, at home in the mall, the restaurant and the movie theater and nowhere else — and then there was a lurch, the boat slipped free of the dock and beyond the salt-streaked windows the shore broadened and dipped, and very slowly fell away into the mist.

It was an hour and a half out to the fishing grounds. Hunter settled in gingerly, his stomach in freefall, the coffee a mistake, the brandy compounding that mistake and the Dramamine a dissolve of pure nothing, not even worthy of a placebo effect. It wasn’t as if it was rough — or as rough as it might have been. This was June, when the Santa Barbara Channel was entombed in a vault of fog that sometimes didn’t burn off till two or three in the afternoon — June Gloom, was what they called it in the newspaper — and as far as he knew the seas were relatively calm. Still, the boat kept humping over the waves like a toboggan slamming through the moguls at the bottom of a run and the incessant dip and rise wasn’t doing him any good. He glanced round him. No one else seemed much affected, the husband and wife playing cards, Damian ordering up breakfast in the galley at the front of the cabin, the others snoozing, reading the paper, scooping up their eggs over easy as if they were in a diner somewhere on upper State Street, miles from the ocean. After a while, he cradled his arms on the tabletop, put his head down and tumbled into a dark shaft of sleep.

When he woke, it was to the decelerating rhythm of the engines and a pulse of activity that rang through the cabin like a fire alarm.

Everybody was rising en masse and filing through the doors to the deck. They’d arrived. He felt a hand on his shoulder and lifted his head to see Damian looming over him. “You have a nice sleep?”

“I dreamed I was in hell, the ninth circle, where there’s nothing moving but the devil.” The boat rolled on a long gentle swell. The engines died. “And maybe the sub-devils. With their pitchforks.”

The flask appeared. Damian pressed it to his lips a moment, then held it out in offering. “You want a hit?”

Hunter waved him away. He still hadn’t risen from his seat.

“Come on, man, this is it. The fish are waiting. Let’s go.”

There was a shout. People were backed up against the windows, clumsy with the welter of rods that waved round them like antennae.

Somebody had a fish already, a silver thrashing on the boards.

Despite himself, he felt a vestigial thrill steal over him. He got to his feet.

Damian was halfway to the door when he turned round. “I put our stuff out there in back on the port side — Mark said that was the best spot. Come on, come on.” He waved a hand impatiently and Hunter found his balance all at once — it was as if he’d done a backflip and landed miraculously on his feet. Just then the sun broke through and everything jumped with light. Damian went flat as a silhouette. The sea slapped the hull. Someone else cried out. “And wait’ll you get a load of Julie,” he said under his breath.

“Julie? Who’s Julie?”

The look Damian gave him was instructive, teacher to pupil.

After all, as Damian had it he’d come all the way down here for the weekend — for this trip, for last night and tonight too — to cheer up his old buddy, to get him out of the house and back among the living, waxing eloquent on the subject of Hunter’s failings into the small hours of the day that was just now beginning. “The deckhand, man. Where you been?”

“Sleeping.”

“Yeah, well maybe it’s time to wake up.”

And then they were out in the light and the world opened up all the way to the big dun humps of the islands before them — he’d never seen them so close — and back round again to the boat and its serried decks and the smell of open water and Julie, the deckhand, freshly made-up and divested of the shapeless yellow slicker she’d worn back at the dock, Julie, in a neon-orange bikini and sandals with thin silver straps that climbed up her bare ankles, waiting to help each and every sportsman to his bait.

So they fished. The captain, a dark presence behind the smoked glass of the bridge that loomed over them, let his will be known through the loudspeakers on deck. Drop your lines, he commanded, and they dropped their lines. Haul in, he said, and they hauled in while he revved the engines and motored to another spot and yet another. There were long stretches of boredom after the initial excitement had passed and Hunter had an abundance of time to reflect on how much he hated fishing. At long intervals, someone would connect, his rod bent double and a mackerel or a big gape-

Microsoft Word — Wild Child.docx

mouthed thing variously described as either a rockfish or a sheephead would flap in over the rail, but Hunter’s rod never bent or even twitched. Nor did Damian’s. Before the first hour was up, Damian had left his rod propped on the rail and drifted into the cabin, emerging ten minutes later with two burgers wrapped in waxed paper and two beers in plastic cups. Hunter was hunched over his knees on one of the gray metal lockers that held the life jackets and ran along both sides of the boat, his stomach in neutral, trying all over again to get used to the idea of lateral instability. He accepted the burger and the beer.

“This sucks,” Damian said, settling in beside him with a sigh.

Their rods rode up and down with the waves like flagpoles stripped of their flags.

“It was your idea.”

Damian gazed out across the water to where the smaller island, the one separated from the bigger by a channel still snarled in fog, seemed to swell and recede. “Yeah, but it’s a ritual, it’s manly. It’s what buddies do together, right? And look at it, look where we are — I mean is this beautiful or what.”

“You just said it sucks.”

“I mean this spot. Why doesn’t he move us already?” He jerked his head around to shoot a withering glare at the opaque glass of the bridge. “I mean, I haven’t caught shit — what about you? Any bites?”

Hunter was unwrapping the burger as if it were crystal, thinking he’d maybe nibble at it — he didn’t want to press his luck. He set it down and took the smallest sip of beer. In answer to Damian’s question, he just shrugged. Then, enunciating with care, he said,

“Fish are extinct.”

“Bullshit. This guy on the other side got a nice-sized calico, like eight or nine pounds, and they’re the best eating, you know that…”

He took a massive bite out of the hamburger, leaning forward to catch the juices in the waxed-paper wrapping. “Plus,” he added through the effort of chewing, “you better get on the stick if you want to win the pool.”

Hunter had been so set on simply enduring that he’d forgotten all about the pool or even the possibility of connecting, of feeling some other force, something dark and alien, pulling back at you from a place you couldn’t imagine. “What are you talking about?”

“The pool, remember? Everybody on the boat put in ten bucks when they gave you the bag with your number on it? You must really be out of it — you put in a twenty for both of us, remember, and I said I’d get the first round?”

“I’m not going to win anything.” He let out a breath and it was as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs.

Mostly, the night before, they’d talked about sex. How when you didn’t have it you were obsessed with it, how you came to need it more than food, more than money. “It’s the testosterone clogging your brain,” Damian had said, and Hunter, three weeks bereft, had nodded in agreement. “And I’ll tell you another thing,” Damian had added after a lengthy digression on the subject of his latest girlfriend’s proclivities, “once you have it, I’m talking like five minutes later, it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops.’” Now, because he couldn’t seem to resist it, because they were in college all over again, at least for the weekend, he said, “fust keep your rod stiff,

’cause you never know.”

And then Mark was there, in a pair of disc sunglasses and a baseball cap that clung like a beanie to his oversized head. He had his own burger in one hand and a beer in the other. The boat slipped into a trough and rose up again on a long debilitating swell. “Any luck?” he asked.

“Nada,” Damian said, his voice tuned to the pitch of complaint.

“The captain ought to move us. I mean with what we’re paying you’d think he’d work his fish-finding mojo just a little bit harder, wouldn’t you?”

Mark shrugged. “Give him time. I know the man. He can be a bit of a hardass, but if they’re out there he’ll find them. He always does. Or almost always.” He looked thoughtful, his lower face arranged around his chewing. “I mean, sometimes you get skunked.

It’s nature, you know, the great outdoors. Nobody can control that.”

“How about Ilta?” Hunter heard himself say. “She get any?”

Mark drew a face. “She’s not feeling so well, I guess. She’s in the head. Been in the head for the past fifteen minutes.”

“Green in the gills,” Damian said with a joyful grin, and Hunter felt his stomach clench around the tiniest morsel of burger and bun.

“Something like that,” Mark said, gazing off into the distance.

“She just needs to get her sea legs, is all.”

“I shouldn’t have brought her. She only did it for me — to please me, you know? The only time she’s been on a boat before this was the ferry between Copenhagen and Goteborg and she said she vomited the whole time — but that was years ago and I figured, we both figured, this would be different. Plus, we got her the patch.”

Hunter thought about that a moment, even as Damian started in weighing the relative merits of patch and pill as if he’d just stepped out of pharmacy school. He was feeling bitter. Bitter over the day, the place, the fish, the lack of fish, over Cee Cee and Ilta and Julie and all the rest of the unattainable women of the world. He was picturing Mark’s wife in the cramped stinking head, cradling the stainless steel toilet, alone and needful while her husband gnawed his burger and guzzled beer, and he was about to say something cutting like “I guess that just proves the seas’s no place for a woman,” when the captain’s voice droned through the speakers. Haul in, the captain commanded, and Hunter went to his pole and began to crank the reel, the weight of the sinker floating free, and the hook, when it was revealed, picked clean of the wriggling anchovy that Julie, in her bikini, had threaded there for him.

Mark didn’t move. “I’m already in,” he said, by way of explanation. “But you watch, he’s going to take us southeast now, nearer the tip of the island.” He paused, chewing. “That’s Anacapa, you know. It’s the only one of the Channel Islands with an Indian name — the rest are all Spanish.”

Hunter didn’t resent him showing off his knowledge, or not exactly — after all, Mark was the authority here, the regular, the veteran of scute and scale and the cold wet guts and staring eyes of the poor brainless things hauled up out of the depths for the sake of machismo, buddyhood, the fraternity of hook, line and sinker — but he didn’t want to be here and his stomach was fluttering and for all he knew he’d be next in the head, like a woman, like a girl, and so he said, “Don’t tell me — it means Soup-can in the Indian language, right? Or no: Microwave, Microwave Oven.”

“Come on, Hunt, you know they didn’t have any of that shit.”

Damian had set down his burger to reel in, the plastic cup clenched between his teeth so that his words were blunted. He was warning him off, but Hunter didn’t care.

“It means illusion,” Mark said, as the boat swung round and everybody, as one, fought for balance. “Like a mirage, you know?

Because of the fog that clings to it — you can never be sure it’s really there.”

“Sounds like my marriage,” Hunter said, and then, as casually as if he were bending over the coffee table in his own living room to pick up a magazine or the TV remote, he leaned over the rail, the sudden breeze catching his hair and fanning it across his forehead, and let it all heave out of him, the burger and bun, the beer, the coffee and brandy and Dramamine, and right there at the end of it, summoned up from the deepest recess, the metallic dregs of the gin.

The next spot, which as Mark had predicted, was closer to the island, didn’t look much different from the last — waves, birds, the distant oil rigs like old men wading with their pants rolled up — but almost immediately after the captain dropped anchor, people began to hook up and a pulse of excitement beat through the crowd. One after another, the rods dipped and bent and the fish started coming over the rail. In the confusion, Hunter dropped his burger to the deck, even as Damian’s rod bowed and his own began to jerk as if it were alive. “You got one!” Damian shouted, stepping back to play his own fish. “Go ahead, grab it, set the hook!”

Hunter snatched up the rod and felt something there. He pulled and it pulled back, and so what if he’d inadvertently slipped on the catsup-soaked bun with its extruded tongue of meat and very nearly pitched overboard — this was what he’d come for. A fish. A fish on the line! But it was tugging hard, moving toward the front of the boat, and he moved with it, awkwardly fumbling his way around the others crowding the rail, only to realize, finally, that this was no fish at all — he was snagged on somebody else’s line. In that moment, three people up from him, the spider man was coming to the same realization.

“Jesus Christ, can’t you watch your own fucking line?” the man snarled as they separately reeled in and the tangle of their conjoined rigs rose shakily from the water. “I mean you’re down the other fucking end of the boat, aren’t you?”

Yeah, he was. But this moron was down on his fucking end too.

It wasn’t as if it was Hunter’s fault. It was nobody’s fault. It was the fault of fishing and lines and the puke-green heaving ocean that should have stayed on the front of a postcard where it belonged. Still, when he’d finally made his way down the deck and was staring the guy in the face, he ducked his head and said only, “I’ll get my knife.”

That decision — to shuffle back alongside the glassed-in cabin and across the open area at the stern of the boat, to dig into the tackle box Damian had brought along and come up with the bare blade of the gleaming Swiss-made knife there and measure it in his hand while everyone on the boat was hooking up and the deck had turned to fish and a wave bigger than any of the others that had yet hit rocked the boat like a potato in a pot — was regrettable. Because the captain, hooded above, outraged, pressed to the very limit, let his voice of wrath tear through the speakers: “You with the knife — you, yeah, you! You trying to stab somebody’s eye out?”

Hunter lurched like a drunken man. He squinted against the sun and up into the dark windows that wrapped round the wheelhouse till it seemed as if the boat were wearing a gigantic pair of sunglasses. He saw the sky reflected there. Clouds. The pale disc of the sun. “No, I’m just—” he began, but the captain’s voice cut him off. “Put that goddamned thing away before I come down there and throw it in the goddamned ocean!”

Everyone was looking at him while they pumped their bent rods or hustled across the deck with one writhing fish or another suspended by the gills, and he wanted to protest, wanted to be the bad guy, wanted to throw it all right back at the dark god in his wheelhouse who could have been Darth Vader for all he knew, but he held himself back. Shamefaced, he staggered to the tackle box and slammed the knife into it, the very knife Damian had insisted on bringing along because men in the outdoors always had knives because knives were essential, for cutting, hewing, stabbing, pinning things down, and when he turned round, one hand snatching at the rail for balance — and missing — Julie was there. The wind took her hair — dark at the roots, bleached by the sun on the ends — and threw it across her face. She gave him a wary look. “What’s the problem?”

she asked.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I just wanted to cut a tangle, that’s all, and he — this guy up there, your precious captain, whoever he is, unloads on me …” He could hear the self-pity in his voice and knew it was all wrong.

“No open knives allowed on deck,” she said, looking stern. Or as stern as a half-naked woman with minute fish scales glittering on her hands and feet could manage to look on the deck of a party boat in the middle of a party.

He could have blown it, could have been a jerk, but he felt the tension go out of him. He gave her a smile that was meant to be winning and apologetic at the same time. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t know any better. I’m not a regular, but you already knew that, didn’t you — just from looking at me, right? Tell you the truth, I feel a whole lot better experiencing the mighty sea from a barstool in that place back at the wharf — Spinnakers, you know Spinnakers? — with a cocktail in my hand and the fish served up on a plate, and maybe a little butter-lemon sauce? To dip? And lick off your fingers?”

When he mentioned Spinnakers, she’d nodded, and now she was smiling too. “It’s all right,” she said. “Here, let me help you.” She took him by the sleeve then and led him across the deck to where the spider man, his face at war with itself, stood waiting.

What happened next remained a bit fuzzy, but as it turned out Hunter wasn’t destined to be the bad actor, not on this trip. The spider man stepped forward to claim that role, and his transformation from bit player to full-blown menace needed no rehearsal. There was Julie, quick and efficient, her legs flexed and breasts swaying with the motion of the boat as she pulled in the tangle and cut the lines free with a pair of nail clippers she’d magically produced, and in the next moment she was handing each of them their rigs. She looked to Hunter first — and he was deep inside himself, fixated on the question of the nail clippers and where she could possibly have kept them given those two thin strips of cloth and the way they seemed to grow out of her flesh — and asked if he needed help rigging up again. Before he could say yes, because he did need her help in unraveling the mystery of the sinker so that it would swing away from the leader instead of snarling up the minute he dropped it overboard, and because he liked the proximity to her, liked looking at her and hearing her voice in the desert of this floating locker room, the spider man spoke up. His voice was ragged, jumping up the scale. “What about me?” he demanded.

“This dickhead’s the one that snagged me and I’m the one losing out on fishing time. You going to give me a refund? Huh? He can wait.

He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, anyway.”

The boat lurched and Hunter grabbed the rail to steady himself.

“Go ahead,” he said, “do him first, I don’t care. Really. I don’t.”

The spider man looked away, muttering curses, as she bent to retie his rig. “What about bait,” he said. “This clown”—he jerked a thumb at Hunter—“fucked up my bait. I need bait. Fresh bait.”

She could have told him to fetch it himself — she was there to help and smile and show off her physique in the hope and expectation of tips, sure, but she was nobody’s slave and any five-year-old could bait a hook — and yet she just gave him a look, padded over to the bait well and came back with a live anchovy cradled in one hand. But he was off now and there was no bringing him back, his harsh cracked voice running through its variations — she was wasting his time, and the whole thing, the whole fucking boat, was a conspiracy and he wanted a refund and he was damned fucking well going to get it too and they could all kiss his ass if they thought he was going to put up with this kind of cheat and fraud because that’s what it was, screwing over the customer, eight bucks for a goddamned burger that tasted like warmed-over shit — and when finally she’d threaded the anchovy on his hook he said, loud enough for everybody to hear, “Hey, thanks for nothing.

But I guess you’re peddling your little ass for tips, right, so here you go”—and before she could react he stabbed a rolled-up bill into the gap between her breasts.

It wasn’t a happy moment. Because Julie wasn’t frail and wilting, wasn’t like Ilta, whose sweet suffering face stared out of the vacancy of the head every time one of the sportsmen pulled back the door in an attempt to go in and relieve himself. She was lean and muscular, knots in her calves and upper arms, her shoulders pulled tight. In a single motion she dug out the bill and threw it in his face without even looking at it, and then she slapped him, and this was no ordinary slap, but an openhanded blow that sent him back against the rail.

For a split second it looked as if he was going to go for her and Hunter braced himself because there was no way he was going to let this asshole attack a woman in front of him, even if he had to take a beating for it, and he would, he would take a beating for Julie.

Gladly. But the spider man, a froth of spittle caught in the corners of his mouth, just glared at her. “All right!” he shouted. “All right, fuck it,” and he swung round, whirled the rented pole over his head like a lariat and flung it out into the chop, where gravity took it down just as if it had never existed.

Later, after the captain had come down personally from his perch to restrain the spider man and the command went up to haul in and the engines revved and the boat began hammering the waves on the way back to the dock, Hunter took a seat in the cabin to get out of the wind and for the first time since the night before he felt a kind of equilibrium settle over him. Mark and Damian were at the counter, leaning back on their elbows and sipping beer out of their plastic cups. Ilta was stretched out on a bench in the far corner, her face to the wall, a blanket pulled up over her shoulders. The others milled round in a happy mob, eating sandwiches, ordering up cocktails, reliving their exploits and speculating on who was going to win the pool, because apparently it wasn’t over yet. In announcing the problem that had arisen with one of the passengers, the captain had promised to make up the lost time with a little inshore fishing — an hour or so, for halibut — once they’d deposited the unhappy sportsman back at the dock. An hour more. Hunter would have preferred an hour less, but he found himself drifting up to the counter to order a gin and tonic — as a calmative, strictly as a calmative — and then taking it outside, in the breeze, to where Julie stood over a pitted slab of wood at the rear of the boat, filleting the day’s catch.

Behind her, a whole squadron of gulls, interspersed with half a dozen pelicans, cried havoc over the scraps. She looked tired.

Gooseflesh stippled her shoulders and upper arms. Her makeup was fading. She dipped mechanically to the burlap sacks to extract the fish, slamming them down one after another before gutting them with an expert flick of her knife, half of them alive still and feebly working their tails. Next she ran the blade against the grain to remove the scales, a whole hurricane of translucent discs suddenly animated and dancing on the breeze as if by some feat of prestidigitation, and then she teased out the fillets and shook them into plastic bags, dumping the refuse overboard with a clean sweep of the knife. A few sportsmen stood around watching her. The engines whined at full throttle, the wake unraveling from the stern as if from an infinite spool, the birds vanishing in the froth. Hunter steadied himself against the rail and lifted the plastic cup to his lips, his fingers stinking of baitfish, wishing he had a dripping sack of plunder to hand her, but he didn’t. Or not yet, anyway. “You look like you’ve done that a time or two before,” he said.

She looked up with a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “One or two.” Up close, he saw that her torso glittered with the thin wafers of the scales, scales everywhere, caught in the ends of her hair, fastened between her breasts, on her calves and the place where her thighs came together.

“Could I get you a drink?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he added, “I’m having a gin and tonic. You like gin?”

The knife moved as if it had a life of its own. The fish gave in, lost their heads, ribs and tails, while the fillets, white and yielding, disappeared into ice chests, all ready for freezer or pan. And here was Damian’s bag, #12, laid out before her like an offering. He could hear Damian crowing even now because Damian had hooked a lingcod that was bigger by a pound and a half than his nearest competitor’s catch and he hadn’t been shy about letting everybody know it—“I’m going to win that pool, you wait and see,” he’d said before sidling up to the bar with Mark, “and I’m going to tip Julie a hundred and ask her to have a drink with us later, for your sake, your sake only, buddy, believe me.” The thought of it made him feel queasy all over again. “Sure,” Julie said. “I like gin, who doesn’t? But I can’t drink while I’m on duty — it’s against regulations. And plus, the captain—”

“Yeah,” he said, “the captain.”

The boat slammed down hard and jerked back up so that he had to brace himself, but the knife never paused. After a moment he said, “Well, what about afterwards then, after we’re back in, I mean?

Would you like to have a drink then? Or dinner? After you get cleaned up and all?”

“That might be nice,” she allowed. “But we’ve still got a whole lot of fishing to do. So let’s not get premature here—”

He leaned back and let the gin wet his lips. He could see the way things would unfold — he was going to fish like the greatest fisherman on earth, like Lucky Jim himself, and he was going to catch a fish twice the size of Damian’s. A hundred dollars? He’d tip her the whole thing, all three hundred, and she’d hold on to his arm while the spider man stalked off to haunt some other ship and Anacapa faded away in the mist and Damian went back home to sleep on the couch. That was the scenario, that was what was going to happen, he was sure of it. Of course, on the other hand, she must have had a dozen propositions a day, a girl as pretty as that, doing what she did for a living, and besides what would he do with all that fish? Was there room for it in the freezer even? Or would it just sit on a shelf in the refrigerator, turning color, till he dropped it in the trash?

“Right?” she said. “Agreed?”

He took another sip of his drink, felt the alcohol quicken in him even as his stomach sank and sank again. The gulls screeched. The knife flashed. And the shore, dense with its pavement and the clustered roof tiles and the sun caught in the solid weave of the palms, came up on him so quickly it startled him. “Yeah,” he said,

“yeah, sure. Agreed.” He held to the rail as the captain gunned the engines and the boat leaned into an arc of exploding light, then tipped the cup back till he could feel the ice cold against his front teeth. “And just you wait,” he said, grinning now. “I’m going to nail the granddaddy of all the halibut from here to Oxnard and back.”

Of course, given the vicissitudes of the day, that wasn’t how it turned out. If there was a granddaddy out there cruising the murk of the bottom, he kept his whereabouts to himself. Still, Hunter took a real and expanding satisfaction in watching the spider man, his wallet lightened by the price of the rod, reel and rigging he’d tossed, slink off the boat with his head down, while the rest of them — the true sportsmen, the obedient and fully sanctioned — got their extra hour of bobbing off the coast on a sea reduced to the gentlest of swells while the sun warmed their backs and almost everybody took their shirts off to enjoy it. A few people hooked up, Damian among them, and then the captain gave the order to haul in and Damian was declared winner of the pool for his lingcod and he got his picture taken with his arm around Julie in her bikini. As it happened, Hunter and Damian were the last ones off the boat, Julie standing there at the rail in her official capacity to help people up onto the gangplank and receive her tips. “It was awesome,” Damian told her, his plastic bag of fish fillets in one hand, five twenties fanned out in the other, “really awesome. Best trip we’ve ever had — right, Hunt?”

Hunter had dipped his head in acknowledgment, distracted by Julie and the promise he’d come so close to extracting from her out there on the rolling sea. He was about to remind her of it — he was waiting, actually, till Damian went up the ladder so he could have a moment alone with her — when Damian, with a sidelong glance at him, said, “Hey, you know, we’d really take it as an honor, Hunter and me, if you’d come out to dinner with us. To celebrate, I mean.

What about champagne? Champagne sound cool?”

Julie looked first to Hunter, then Damian, and let a slow grin spread across her face. “Real nice,” she said. “Spinnakers? In, say, one hour?”

Which was what had brought them to this moment, in the afterglow of the trip, the three of them seated at a table up against the faded pine panels of the back wall, looking out to the bar crowded with tourists, fishermen and locals alike, and beyond that to the harbor and the masts of the ships struck pink with the setting sun. Julie was in a sea-green cocktail dress, her legs long and bare, a silver Neptune’s trident clasped round her neck on a thin silver chain. Damian was on one side of her, Hunter on the other. They’d clinked champagne glasses, made their way through a platter of fried calamari with aioli sauce. Music played faintly. From beyond the open windows, there was the sound of the gulls settling in for the night.

Gradually, as he began to feel the effects of the champagne, it occurred to Hunter that Damian was monopolizing the conversation. Or worse: that Damian had got so carried away he seemed to have forgotten the purpose of this little outing. He kept jumping from one subject to another and when he did try to draw Julie out he was so wound up he couldn’t help talking right through her. “So what’s it like to be a deckhand?” he asked at one point.

“Pretty cool job, no? Out on the water all day, fresh air, all that? It’s like a dream job, am I right?” Before she could say ten words he’d already cut her off — he loved the outdoors too, couldn’t she tell? He was the one who’d wanted to come out on the boat—“I practically had to drag Hunt, here”—and it wasn’t just luck that had hooked him up with that lingcod, but experience and desire and a kind of worship of nature too deep to put into words.

Hunter tried to keep up his end of the conversation, injecting sardonic asides, mimicking the tourists at the bar, even singing the first verse of a sea chantey he made up on the spot, but Julie didn’t seem especially receptive. Two guys, one girl. What kind of odds were those?

Damian had shifted closer to her. The second bottle of champagne went down like soda water. Hunter nudged Damian under the table with the toe of his shoe — twice, hard — but Damian was too far gone to notice. Halfway through the main course — was he really feeding her shrimp off the tines of his fork? — Hunter pushed back his chair. “Men’s room,” he muttered. “I’ll be right back.” lulie gave him a vague smile.

To get to the men’s, he had to go out on the deck and down a flight of stairs. All the tables on the deck were occupied, though the fog was rolling in and there was a chill on the air. People were leaning over their elbows, talking too loud, laughing, lifting drinks to their lips. Jewelry glinted at women’s throats, fingers, ears. A girl in her teens sat at the far table, the one that gave onto the stairs, looking into the face of the boy she was with, oblivious to the fact that she was sitting at the worst table in the house. Hunter thumped down the stairs and felt a sudden flare of anger. Son of a bitch, he was thinking. He wasn’t going to sleep on the couch. No way. Not tonight. Not ever.

He slammed into the men’s room and locked the door behind him. The stalls were empty, the sinks dirty, the overhead light dim in its cage. He smelled bleach and air freshener and the inescapable odor they were meant to mask. It had come in on the soles of deck shoes, sandals and boots, ammoniac and potent, the lingering reek of all those failing bits of protoplasm flung up out of the waves to be beached here, on the smudged ceramic tile of the men’s room beneath Spinnakers. The smell caught him unawares and he felt unsteady suddenly, the floor beneath him beginning to rise and recede. But that wasn’t all — the room seemed to be fogging up all of a sudden, a seep of mist coming in under the door and tumbling through the vent as if a cloud had touched down just outside. The far wall faded. The mirror clouded over. He rubbed a palm across the smeared glass, then a paper towel, until finally he put both hands firmly down on the edge of the sink and stared into the mirror, hoping to find something solid there.