Float (13 page)

“Is that coconut?” asked Duncan, pointing to white sprinkles on the Tater Tots.

Slocum nodded. “Whitecaps. Look at this little dude.” Slocum pointed to a whiting that had been harvested in the act of eating a smaller whiting, so that a head stuck out of its mouth. “That’s how I found him. I love when that happens.” He put the fish on Duncan’s plate, along with a half dozen others.

“Isn’t Harley eating?” Duncan asked, hoping to share the wealth.

“I don’t want to interrupt his work.” They heard the tinkle of glass hitting the floor. “He’ll eat later. He prefers his food after it’s been thoroughly nuked in the microwave anyway.”

Duncan pulled bits of flesh off the bones of the double fish. It did not taste any different from any other fried fish: crunchy on the outside, moist on the inside, with an elusive ocean flavor. It was the two-headed skeleton that remained on his plate that was so disturbing. He put his fork down. Slocum, however, attacked his meal like a feeding shark, popping the little fish whole into his mouth. “Eat,” he said. “We need to fill the hatches as ballast for the drinking we intend to do later.” To augment the coconut-crusted Tater Tots, he shook some ketchup on his plate like a pool of blood, and when he put the plastic bottle down, it gurgled as if it were alive.

“I can’t.” Duncan poked at the skeleton. “It’s too … dog-eat-dog.”

“Did you hear about the cannibal who made superb finger sandwiches?” Slocum asked as he dipped a fish head, cut side down, into the ketchup. Duncan blinked in response.

“Come on, Dunc, laugh, we’re supposed to be celebrating!”

“I am what I am.” Duncan pushed away his plate.

“What? Popeye?”

“I mean, I can’t change the way I feel. You can’t make anything out of cookie dough except cookies.” But as the words fell out of his mouth he knew he was talking to the wrong person.

“I once stuffed a turkey with mint-chocolate-chip cookie dough,” said Slocum, as he belched in three keys. “Added rosemary, whipped it in a blender with egg whites, and pumped the foam into the cavity. It gave the bird a rare and fetching flavor and was a great success. The guests were surprised and delighted because their minds were open to the possibilities. You can make something out of anything, my friend, if you put your whole heart into it.”

~

After dinner, of which Duncan had eaten not much more than the double whiting, they walked down the street to Ten Bells and put their whole hearts into drinking. Ten Bells was the seediest bar in a town belly-deep in seedy bars. Three stained and threadbare pool tables provided entertainment, hard-boiled eggs from a jar of cloudy liquid gave sustenance, and the price-per-shot of liquor was written in Magic Marker on each bottle of booze on the shelves. They sold no wine, at any price. In the back room were two old-school pinball machines and a glass tank of lobsters, where for five dollars patrons got a chance at catching one with a small crane, like an arcade game. Ten Bells’ doors opened at 5:30 a.m. so that dock workers could get a quick snort before work, or to offer amber consolation if there was none. In the past, and perhaps even into the present, the bar was known as a place where captains, short of men for some dangerous journey or another, would troll for crew, make them paralytic with drink, then carry them on board on stretchers and lay them out like corpses in the hold. And that was exactly how Duncan felt the next morning.

“
Sassafras,
” he croaked without opening his eyes. Thanks to several more oyster shooters after dinner, Duncan had already reached his waterline by the time they left Slocum’s apartment, then he took more on board at Ten Bells. Bottom-shelf bourbon, $3.05 a shot. He’d ended up, somehow, fully clothed on the sofa in his office and woke to the sound of a rally outside his window. Annuncia’s basso profundo blared through a loudspeaker. “A clean sea is a profitable sea!” she shouted. It was 10 a.m.

He curled tighter into the ball he was already in and pulled his windbreaker over his head. He’d forgotten that he’d told her she could launch her Boat Garbage Project from Seacrest’s loading dock today, but it was coming back to him loud and clear now. He had assumed she meant at the end of the workday, but of course, she would want to do it early enough to catch that evening’s news cycle.

The crowd started to chant, and the steady noise bore through his eardrums like sea worms. “Bring the garbage back to shore! Bring the garbage back to shore!”

Annuncia quieted them down and continued speaking. “We complain about the crap from outfall pipes and pollution on our fish, and then we throw our own garbage overboard. What’s up with that?”

The crowd emitted a low boo, and he could hear Wade’s voice leading the pack. Even though Annuncia was at the microphone, this project was really his baby. On Earth Day that spring, instead of cleaning beaches with the other volunteers, Wade decided to motor from boat to boat asking for garbage. When they saw how successful he’d been, a group of kids started making the rounds every weekend in a pedal-driven barge built from plastic water bottles, and it wasn’t long before some of the fishermen and pleasure boaters started to bring it in on their own. The problem, as always, was that there was no place to put it. Often the bags were just left on the docks at the mercy of the gulls and crows, and that meant debris scattered everywhere, on land and water. Annuncia hadn’t realized the extent to which everyone had been throwing their trash overboard before that. It was against the law, but they had to catch you first, and the ocean was a mighty big place. The only people who ever got caught were people like Duncan. Two summers before, he and Cora had motored outside the harbor in a borrowed Whaler, a rare water adventure for them both. Cora had always complained about the shortage of the color blue in sea glass, so she collected the empty Skyy vodka bottles from the Boat Club for a few weeks then asked Duncan to take her out to sea to dump them so they could begin their long transformational journey. Cora was a woman who liked to plan for the future. Unfortunately, Duncan was out on the water so infrequently that he failed to recognize the dark green boat of the Environmental Police coming up behind them as they were tossing vodka bottles into the sea. They got a $500 citation and lots of laughs back at the Club.

Annuncia raised her voice. “Our fish and lobsters need a clean home, so from now on I want you to bring your garbage back to shore, all of it—the soda cans, the plastic wrap, crumpled tin foil, coolant jugs, even dental floss. Always, always, always bring back old fishing line. This isn’t to keep the beaches clean for tourists; it’s so our children won’t have to fish from a garbage dump. So we can have children at all. Fish eat the plastic, and if it doesn’t kill them by blocking the guts, it messes with their hormones. Any more plastic in the sea and our own systems will be so twisted we won’t be able to reproduce anymore, never mind the fish.”

There was some sniggering from the audience, probably single men, for whom this might be a very good thing. Duncan thought of his own reproductive failure and wondered, but wondering put too much stress on a brain so riddled with oyster shooters. “If we want the rest of the world to stop trashing the water,” she continued, “we have to set the example. And you commercial boats, before we unload your gurry, I want to see full bags at the end of every trip.”

“Annuncia,” said Duncan, as if she could hear him. He struggled to sit upright. “Don’t threaten our clients.”

“We believe in this project so much that we planned to take your garbage for you,” she announced. “Right here, in the parking lot.” There was loud applause and whistles.

“
We?
” Duncan asked. He patted the floor for his glasses and pulled himself up, inch by painful inch, until he was standing, then somehow hobbled over to the window without falling.

Annuncia continued. “But, instead, the mayor has agreed to install Dumpsters and recycling bins on the docks in support of a cleaner city and sea.”

There was more applause, and Duncan peeked through the window blinds. It was an overcast day, but sheaves of light fell through the cracks in the sky. The mayor stood next to Annuncia, waving at the crowd and proclamating as mayors do. “What’s good for the sea life is good for our life!”

There was a polite smattering of applause. He was not a popular man with the local fish movement because he was always courting foreign boats to land in Port Ellery, but he must have learned by now that saying no to Annuncia would only double her efforts. Duncan had learned that lesson long ago, and so he was relieved that she’d decided the Dumpsters should go on the docks and not Seacrest’s parking lot. If the garbage was here, she would have wanted to process the trash, too, and he was processing quite enough garbage as it was. Annuncia held up a large green plastic bag emblazoned with Seacrest’s logo to the cheers of the crowd.

“Seacrest’s?” he said, once again to no one. He did not remember telling her the company would finance the project—in fact, he knew he hadn’t. He scanned the crowd, a bunch of scruffy harbor denizens of lumpers and lobstermen, along with some pierced environmental kids and the recently unemployed of all ages, for whom any event in the middle of the day was a welcome distraction. He recognized many faces, including a few well-dressed members from the Boat Club. Signs bobbed above all the heads:
To save the planet, save the seas
and
Bring it back to shore
. Marney, the waitress from Manavilins, waved a sign that read
Seacrest’s kills sea animals. Support sea animal rights
.

Why was she picking on his company, which only processed waste and had never killed so much as a clam? That’s what he got for sponsoring a program to help her “sea animals,” by which she must mean fish. He continued to scan the crowd and noticed a sign so beautifully written in archaic script it took him a moment to digest the words:
Recycle or die
. It was nailed onto a sheleighly.

Osbert. He stood out not just by his sign but his dress. He wore a suit fit for an undertaker in a crowd of Carhartt and L. L. Bean. The light reflected off his sunglasses, flashing with his every move. Duncan had not seen Osbert since their lunch at Manavilins three weeks before. “Strange,” Duncan said, but once again, the exertion of thinking hurt his brain, so he put all complex thoughts on hold.

Annuncia waved a bag over her head like a flag. “You’ve got the tools—now get the will! Let peer pressure and public opinion do its magic.” She looked pointedly at the TV camera, and then Duncan thought he saw a look exchanged between her and Osbert.

~

After he restored his body’s ability to function, somewhat, with aspirin from the first-aid kit in the front office, Duncan snuck out of Seacrest’s, not by the fire escape in full view of everyone but through the empty factory. Empty during prime working hours. He rubbed his temples. He felt Osbert tightening the net around him, slowly taking charge of one thing, then another, and using Annuncia to do it. Ducking below the windows, Duncan let himself out of the side door into the alley and wondered which way to turn. He did not have many options. He wanted Manavilins coffee, which was black and brutal, but he could not get there without being seen by the crowd, and he could not bear to talk to anyone right now, least of all Annuncia. He needed to have his head on straight for the conversation they had to have.

Where could he go for coffee? What else was guaranteed to wake him up?

Then he remembered, with increasing queasiness, that he’d woken Cora up at 3:00 a.m., calling her on the phone with sentimentally drunk declarations of his feelings. He could not remember his words, but he was afraid they might have had more to do with his loins than his heart. He believed he’d made the fatal error of saying that Syrie meant nothing to him, which begged the question.

Whatever it was, it had caused her to respond with, “Duncan, go stick your head in a bucket,” before hanging up on him. He remembered that much. She was probably calling a divorce lawyer at that very moment or, at the least, was on the phone to their marriage counselor to process this new bit of self-defeating behavior.

“On we go,” he said out loud, startling a tailless harbor cat out of the Dumpster. “It’s time to act.”

He looked for the ripped section of the chain-link fence that led to Petersen’s Marina. Instead of pushing his troubled marriage out of his head as he’d been doing, he would listen, really listen to what Cora had to say. For starters, he would do as she suggested and go stick his head in a bucket. She wouldn’t have known it at 3:00 a.m., but a bracing wake-up was exactly what he needed right now. He would go one better. Instead of a bucket, he would dunk his head in the immense, life-giving ocean to clear his mind for everything that lay before him. It was time to get back to some kind of normal.

He found the hole in the fence and slipped through it, catching his windbreaker at the shoulder and tearing the nylon shell. It was one of his blue promotional jackets, with the Seacrest’s logo on the back, so it wasn’t much of a loss. He had an unlimited supply of those, thanks to a cousin of Wade’s who got them printed cheap from somewhere far away. As he walked down to the end of the dock, seagulls flapped away at his approach, then settled back down after he passed. Most of the floats attached to either side of the dock had a boat or two attached, and he kept going until he found one that had none. It was low tide, so the metal ramp down to the water was steep, and he experienced a bit of hangover vertigo, but he held on and made it to the relative safety of the wood. He got down on his stomach, but before he made the plunge, he checked underneath the float for harbor seals, who were already moving in. They were winter residents, migrants from farther north coming to live in the relatively gentler climate of Port Ellery for a few months, a reminder that no matter how bad the winters were, there was always someplace worse off. There were no seals beneath the float, but there was plenty of trash pushing up against the foam flotation. Aside from a few Styrofoam Dunkin Donuts cups, he saw a plastic cone used to trap slime eels and some spent chemical glow sticks for attracting swordfish, all of which must have come from some distance at sea, and yet here they were, back forever. “Perfect applications for the jellyfish plastic,” he said, feeling a rush of optimism for the future.