Float (7 page)

Whatever. It wouldn’t hurt to hear Osbert out on Monday. He had nothing better to do. And he was in no position to refuse a free lunch.

There was a commotion at the side of the building. Two police cars tore into the drive, blue lights flashing, followed by an ambulance whose wheels shot bits of marble gravel into the air as it skidded to a stop. Chandu stood up and barked.

“I don’t know why they’re in such a hurry,” said Syrie. “There’s no point trying to resuscitate a foot.”

And with that, Duncan felt one of hers upon his.

“I’ve got to go home,” he said, standing up so quickly he almost fell on her. Chandu, anxious to join the emergency outside, pushed open the screen door with his nose, and Duncan slipped out with him. Syrie’s laugh continued to echo on the porch and in his mind, long after he was actually out of range.

When Duncan and Osbert walked into Manavilins on Monday, the entire staff and a few customers, including Dr. Zander, Bear Peterson, and a postal worker who should have been out on his route, froze in nonchalant poses around the counter. Duncan immediately regretted his choice of restaurant before remembering it wasn’t his choice. Osbert was calling the shots. Duncan asked the waitress for a booth in the back; Osbert insisted on a table by the window and got it.

“I like to see what I’m eating,” he announced as he settled in his chair and rested his stick on the floor.

“A mixed blessing,” said Duncan. “Maybe if you took off those sunglasses, you’d see better.”

Osbert pointed to his eyes. “Extreme sensitivity.”

“All the more reason to sit in the back where it’s dark.”

“And miss this?” Osbert held his hand out to the industrial waterfront right outside. A Whole Foods reefer truck was trying to back up a narrow passage to an aluminum fish warehouse, stopping traffic both ways. Cars sulked on their horns as two men shouted at the truck driver to turn the wheel to the left and swing to the right with such animated signals they looked as if they were doing calisthenics.

Duncan sat down. What downtown lacked in natural beauty, it made up for in drama. He looked around to see who might be lurking in the dark recesses of the booths, but he couldn’t identify anyone because they all seemed gripped by a sudden interest in their menus, nearsightedly so. He had hoped not to give his meeting with Osbert any particular significance, but their lunch seemed to have turned into a spectator sport. It had been worse at the plant that morning, when his employees had fawned all over Osbert. Annuncia must have told them about his financial interest in Seacrest’s because they treated him like the golden messiah of job security. Wade led the way, holding aloft a droplight to illuminate hidden corners, discussing the stainless steel grinder and emulsion tank in intimate detail, while opening closets and bins for close inspection. Employees gathered in tense knots to watch their progress, and Duncan felt the weight of the community upon him. Every time employees looked straight at him, he imagined them to be mouthing the words, “Don’t fuck this up.” He might own Seacrest’s, but they were the ones who depended on it. If it closed tomorrow he might continue to bob along, but they would sink into chronic unemployment and borderline poverty.

As Osbert examined the menu, Duncan tried to arrange his legs under the table. He wanted to be comfortable for this exchange, but even that seemed impossible. His knees grazed hardened wads of gum attached to the underside of the table, and one leg of his chair was shorter than the others, making it tippy. Osbert replaced the laminate menu back in its chrome holder. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

“On we go.” Duncan spread his hands out on the varnished table to clear an imaginary space between them. Under his palms, gouged deep into the wood, he felt the lobster-pick carvings of crude hearts, oaths of love and profanities.
History.
Years of Port Ellery history. He could not get away from it. The walls around him were painted pearlized green, shimmering like water and hung with buoys, plastic lobsters, nets, and glass floats, so that he could not forget that the city’s life turned at the fragile intersection of commerce and the sea. If he refused this business transaction and let Seacrest’s go under, the local fishermen would have to contract for their wastes at a gurry plant in another town, at greater expense. Once they were doing that, they might as well sell their fish there, too. Then they might as well stay. The leakage would continue until the bucket ran dry.

Duncan glanced at the familiar menu and put it back. As high in calories as it was, the only safe thing to eat from Slocum’s kitchen of deep-sea horrors was a standard fry plate. He wiped his hands on his jeans and wondered if he ought to have put on a suit. He wore a tweed jacket that needed pressing, maybe even fumigation, since it was the jacket he kept in the closet at work. In comparison, Osbert smelled of leather and shaving cream and was so crisp he seemed to have stepped inside his black suit without disturbing the fabric. His silk tie was nearly invisible against his shirt, both in subtle variations of lavender-black, and his batwing collar was so starched it was a wonder he did not choke. Just looking at him made Duncan’s own throat constrict, and he put his hand to his neck.

“Let’s order so we can begin,” said Osbert. He took a cigar out of a case in his jacket and placed it carefully next to his knife and fork like another utensil. The sun slipped behind a cloud outside, making the restaurant’s fluorescent lights pulse harder, casting Osbert’s face in blue. Maybe it was better to let Seacrest’s die than to sup with the devil.

Duncan glanced over at the pass-through window of the kitchen, looking for Slocum. A man was staring back at him. Duncan tried to look past him, and the man waved.

“Is that Slocum? He’s lost his beard.”

“It’s a wonder you could recognize him,” said Osbert. “I suppose context is everything.”

Slocum nudged Marney, a waitress who had so much metal on her face it looked as if she’d fallen into a tackle box. She gathered water and bread in both arms and hurried toward their table. Slocum followed, walking swiftly over the raw floorboards, his apron flapping like wings.

“Gentlemen,” said Slocum with a grand sweep of his hand. His sandy hair was sooty, and his watery blue eyes glowed under burnt eyebrows. “May I suggest a starter?”

“Slocum, what’s happened to you?” asked Duncan. “Where is your beard?”

Slocum touched his stubbled chin and smiled. His lush walrus mustache still stood but was singed at the ends. “I was heating up a mountain of jellyfish this morning, and they burst up something good. Full of mystery, they are!”

“And volatility,” said Osbert.

“We should be so lively,” said Slocum, and pinched a burnt end of his mustache. Cooking accidents were not rare events in his life. He did not even have all his fingertips, so what were a few lost hairs in the march of gastro-aquatic progress? His ambitions were high. Aside from hoping to invent a world-famous dish, he also envisioned an underwater restaurant in which to serve it. He’d heard of one in the Maldives, where the dining room was surrounded by coral reefs and bright, jeweled creatures of the sea. But Port Ellery was not the Maldives. What would diners see here in the harbor, if the brown tint of the water ever cleared enough to see anything? Rusted anchors, oil drums, abandoned moorings, scary pieces of ill-fated boats in which mottled gray fish hid in the shadows? It would be an experience, all right, just not the one Slocum was dreaming of.

“We should indeed,” said Osbert.

“Learn something new every day, keeps the blood moving.” Slocum glanced down at his left hand, which was missing half of his pinky and the tip of his index, the result of learning how not to open clams with a cleaver. “Yesterday I heard about a new life form. The
symbion pandora
, a teeny trisexual dude who lives on the lips of lobsters.” He touched his own lips. “Three sexes. Think of that,” he said, looking off into the middle distance before snapping back to the present. “So what’ll it be? Shall we voyage off-menu today?”

“Chef’s choice for the both of us, three courses,” said Osbert, even as Duncan frantically tried to signal
no
.

Slocum was all fired up. It was not often that someone was reckless enough to say those words to him. He pushed his singed hair back from his face. “As the fish yearns for lemon juice and clam dreams of the batter, I go to my stove!”

“God help us,” said Duncan as Slocum retreated to the kitchen.

“That’s an interesting phrase,” mused Osbert. “My father used to call people he’d given up on as a ‘hunk of God help us.’”

They listened to the back door slam. “Great. He’s gone to the eel tanks,” said Duncan. “Giving him freedom was a dangerous thing to do, Mr. Marpol.”

“You’ve got to take risks in this world,” said Osbert. His glasses were as slate-colored as water and just as unfathomable. “Plus, it made him happy. He won’t forget I did this for him. You lived with Slocum not so long ago, didn’t you?” He picked up his cigar and rolled it between his fingers.

Duncan paused, alarmed that Osbert had explored the hidden marshes of his personal life. He’d done no research at all on Osbert, as if his rumored connection with the mob told him everything he needed to know. But he realized now he knew absolutely nothing. “For a few days,” he said, coughing his words into his freckled fist. “I’m out on the Cove now.”

“Your mother’s house.”

Duncan bristled. “The family home.”

“You know, Leland, you’re not intended to live on a life raft. It’s only supposed to get you away from a sinking ship.”

“Is that your buddy Churchill’s saying?”

“No,” said Osbert. “In your case, it’s a popular observation.”

“Well, my marriage isn’t sinking,” said Duncan. “It’s only floating at anchor for the moment.”

“Be that as it may, Seacrest’s anchor is dragging. A dangerous situation. You’re lucky I’m here to help.”

Before Duncan could formulate a response, he heard something large and wet being slammed repeatedly against the building, the sound of which only added to his distress. He reached for his red plastic water glass and knocked it over, flooding the table and causing cubes of ice to spin away. Marney came running over with a towel. Densch, the busboy with a jawline beard, appeared with a fresh glass. They were keeping a very short lead on him. Everything was put to rights in a minute as Osbert watched with acid amusement.

When the workers disappeared, Duncan spoke in a low voice. “I don’t need help.”

“Beaky tells me that’s what you’d say,” said Osbert. “But we know otherwise, and so do you. Here’s the deal. In exchange for a chunk of money that would put Seacrest’s back on its feet, I need you to dehydrate something for a side business of mine.”

“Is Beaky your partner in this side business?” asked Duncan. “I hear he—and you—are not always—I don’t know what you’d call it. Legitimate.”

Osbert tapped his cold cigar on the wicker bread basket. “We fill in the trouble spots that are not being served by the usual commercial enterprises. As Ezra Pound once said, credit is the future tense of money. Consider me your future.”

“I see,” Duncan said. He should never have let things get as far as lunch, letting himself be pushed around by the prevailing wind. He used to be so good with details and planning, taking control and managing his life so that nothing happened without his consent, but now—now he found himself too close to the rocks, and he had no one to blame but himself. “As I told Beaky, I don’t need that sort of help. I might not be able to pay it back, and I don’t want to live in fear.”

Osbert leaned forward in his seat and pointed the cigar in Duncan’s face. “You are already living in fear, Leland. You might as well make it worth the effort. It’s fortitude or failure at this point.” He leaned back in his chair, and the two men stared at each other. Duncan felt the leveling emptiness coming on, as if his head had lost its ballast.

“I own a small trash company that serves a few wealthy communities north and west of here,” Osbert continued, idly scribbling on the table with his cigar as he spoke. “It meshes well with the quarry, seeing as I can always use landfill. We started charging extra to customers who wanted to separate out their kitchen wastes for us to compost. Makes them feel good about their impact on the earth, and we have a little extra cash in our pockets. Trouble is, the composting isn’t going as well as we’d hoped. All we got was rats and rot and a citation from the health department. The program has proved so popular we’re afraid of getting caught burying it all at the quarry.”

Duncan took a sip of water and felt blood returning to his brain. “So you are doing something illegal then?”

“Not completely truthful, let’s call it. It’s going to biodegrade in the quarry eventually—it’s just not the closed circle the customers are led to believe. You’re the missing link that will close that circle. You transform fish waste—why not garbage?”

“I don’t want to become a garbage collector.”

“The world is divided into garbage collectors and garbage producers.” Osbert smirked. “You find this sort of thing distasteful, I can tell, but you don’t have a choice. If I stood up and walked out of here this minute, you couldn’t even pay for lunch.”

“Slocum would let me put it on a tab,” said Duncan, pushing himself away from the table. “I can get by without you.”

“Your employees can’t. They don’t all have mommies out on the Cove to run home to when things get choppy.”

Duncan took off his glasses and concentrated on wiping them on his napkin to keep from saying something he might regret. But what could he say in the face of an obvious truth? He could feel the hot breath of the pack on his neck. While his guard was down, Slocum placed a dish in the middle of the table.

“Picorocos!” Slocum waited for a moment as the two men contemplated the four beaked shells sitting on white fists of meat. “Giant barnacles from Chile,” he explained. “Tastes just like crab.” As he pushed Duncan closer in, there was a small explosion in the kitchen, and he hurried back to his stove.

Duncan put his glasses back on and watched Osbert lift a barnacle with his fork and spoon and place it on his bread plate as gently as a baby. He stabbed the insides with a lobster pick, winning a shred of barnacle, then smelled it before putting it in his mouth. “Not exactly like crab,” he said as he chewed. “More like bottom paint.” He put his pick down and reached for his water. “You should take a lesson from your friend,” he said with a wince, and his eyes filled with tears. “You’ve got to keep trying new things in this world. Innovation and daring are the keys to success.” He drained his glass.

“They can be the keys to ruin just as easily.” Duncan lifted a barnacle by its shell, considered it for a moment, then put it back down again. “Slocum’s experiments are rarely successful. Sometimes they’re deadly.”

“He hasn’t killed anyone yet,” said Osbert. “Which is more than I can say for a lot of people. As for Seacrest’s, Annuncia will make sure that no matter what gets poured down the chute, the product will remain consistent. She said we can add fish waste to the garbage and call it Surf ’n’ Turf. A new hybrid marine product, so you still comply with maritime zoning.”