Float (8 page)

“You two have really worked this out.” He reached for his lobster pick.

“You trust Annuncia, don’t you?”

Did he? It was true that she would never do anything unethical, but she was not above doing something illegal in the name of keeping the oceans clean. She would want to process as much waste as possible, no matter the source, to control what seeped back into the water table. But she really had no way of knowing what was in it. What if it wasn’t residential garbage at all but toxic or medical waste, the disposal of which were extremely lucrative enterprises when legal, more so when done in the dark of night? What if it was something worse than that? He thought of the knee on Colrain Beach.

“Soup’s on!” Slocum announced, arriving with two steaming bowls. The fumes rose to Duncan’s nostrils, and he felt his lungs contract.

“Eat up,” said Slocum, as he gave Duncan a slap on the back. “It’s new. Can’t wait to see your reaction.”

“We’re honored,” said Osbert, and he picked up his spoon.

Duncan was less honored but dipped his spoon in anyway and brought it to his mouth without touching it to his lips. He thought of Slocum’s trisexual parasite that lived on lobster lips.

“Mmm,” Duncan lied as he put the spoon back down. “Very interesting, Slocum. Anything I’ve ever heard of?”

Osbert fished around in his bowl and produced what looked like limp pieces of skin. “Jellyfish?” he ventured.

Slocum winked at him. “The slippery suckers that’ve been washing in with the tide since the storm. You need buckets and buckets, and you have to condense them without letting them explode.” He touched his singed mustache.

“How do you know they’re not poisonous?” asked Duncan.

“The usual way,” said Slocum, picking up the plate of picorocos. “Trial and error.” And with this he went back to the kitchen, and Duncan continued to go through the motions of eating. Outside, the gulls began to screech as they gathered at the Dumpster, waiting for lunch. Amazingly, there seemed to be no higher rate of gull mortality in the Manavilins parking lot than any other place in town. He thought about Kelp, his rescued gull, who was now a minor YouTube celebrity. One of Josefa’s sons had set up a website so gull lovers everywhere could trace Kelp’s progress and make donations to the cause. Everyone wanted to save Kelp. Why was it that the only person who wanted to save Seacrest’s was Osbert, who came shrouded in suspicion?

“This is very good!” Osbert said, obviously surprised. Duncan watched him eat so he could keep pace with his pretend eating, and when Osbert finished and pushed his bowl aside, so did he. But before they could continue their unpleasant discussion, Slocum arrived with two large plates, which he put down in front of them with a great deal
of ceremony.

“Starry gazey pie,” Slocum said, wiping his hands on his apron. “The dish of kings.”

“Eel pie,” said Duncan, who had seen this sort of thing emerge from Slocum’s kitchen before. “From the Middle Ages,” he explained to Osbert.

“No, it’s not,” said Slocum in an offended voice. “I just killed those eels. And they’re not slime eels either—they’re the real eel.”

Osbert smiled. “Churchill was very fond of eel,” he said. “Henry the First died of a surfeit of them.”

“Surfeit?” asked Slocum. “How is that prepared?”

“It means an excess,” said Duncan. “As in, ‘He who dies of a surfeit is as dead as he who starves.’”

Osbert studied Duncan intently. “Very nice,” he said. “You’re not as thick as you make out to be, are you?”

Again, Duncan pushed his chair back to leave, and Slocum pushed him back in. “We won’t have to worry about too many eels, surfeit or otherwise,” said Slocum. “It’s getting harder to find them, what with the worldwide eel decline. Global warming. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but they have a very narrow comfort zone.”

“I
have a very narrow comfort zone, too,” Duncan said, trying to push back against the chair, held firmly in place by Slocum.

“What is this?” asked Osbert. With his fork he poked at the eel head arranged on top of his wedge of pie, looking at a piece of star-shaped pastry nearby. A sharp little tongue of pimento stuck out from between its circle of teeth.

“The eel is gazing at the stars,” said Slocum. “That’s why it’s called starry gazey.” He touched the eel head on Duncan’s plate. “They’re closely related to humans. That round mouth? He uses it to attach to his prey and suck the life out of it.” Slocum opened his mouth and made a perfect round just like the eel’s. “There aren’t many species with round mouths, but we’re one of them.”

With this disturbing thought, he picked up Osbert’s empty bowl and left Duncan’s full one, as if he still expected him to eat it. Duncan glanced longingly at an order of fried clams and onion rings at the next table and wondered why, if Slocum could produce such reliable, tasty fare, he continued to experiment with odd ingredients and complex techniques, reaching for some elusive goal. Slocum was still standing behind them, looking out the window, transfixed by the waterfront, where lobster boats swayed at their berths and cranes pointed to the sky. “We should all gaze at the stars now and again,” he said, before heading back to the kitchen.

“Do you believe, Leland, that a man’s crust is formed at an early age?”

Duncan watched as Osbert cut into his pie as meticulously as a surgeon.

“Or do you think change is always possible? Do you think, for instance, that you could stop pondering your own mortality long enough to consider actually living?”

Before Duncan could open his mouth, the little bell on the restaurant door tinkled and, with a blast of wind off the water, in walked Syrie. She shook her hair free of her chiffon scarf, and the small dog under her arm shook its head as well. Syrie’s face glowed when she saw Duncan. He was surprised and a little frightened. He could still feel the smooth touch of her foot on his at the Club. It had brought back vivid memories of their past physical relationship, which had been fiery in a way that only youth could have fueled. This made him worry in a whole new way about his marriage. He missed Cora. He wished she would call. He wanted to go home.

“There she is!” said Osbert, half standing as she approached the table. “Syrie, I’m afraid I’ve scheduled back-to-belly appointments today, and I’m not quite done with Mr. Leland. Sit and charm us with
your company.”

At this Syrie laughed with a shake of her shoulders. “Back to belly. That sounds intriguing, doesn’t it, Duncan?” She wore tight black pants and a blue silk cardigan with buttons in the form of seashells, clothes meant to attract attention to the body, so very different from how Cora dressed, in a style that could best be described as mismatched. Sneakers with skirts, sweaters with shorts, reds with oranges, and plaids with anything at all. Hats with everything. And yet, the package as a whole worked, even at her office, where she threw a thin shawl over her shoulders and looked like the wise and patient therapist she was known to be.

Duncan stood up uneasily, causing his fetid soup to slosh out of its bowl and onto the table. He threw a few paper napkins on the spill. Densch, pushed by Slocum from behind, came running over with another chair for Syrie, and they all sat down. Osbert returned to his lunch.

“Eel pie?” asked Duncan, edging his plate toward her.

“Thank you, no,” she said, leaning away, clutching her dog to her bosom. “I don’t eat parasites.”

Duncan stared at his plate. The eel stared back at him, with its round human mouth, so he picked it up to turn its face away, but when he saw that the neck was a hollow socket, he could not resist. He forced it over his right index finger, then began to speak in an eely voice as he flexed his finger. “Help! Help! Global warming is making me ill!”

Osbert stared at him for a moment with what Duncan thought was a glimmer of a smile, but no. Osbert suddenly leaned over and yanked the head off Duncan’s finger and flicked it across the room, where it skidded to a dark corner. If people hadn’t been watching them before, they certainly were now. “Don’t play with your food, Leland.”

Duncan stared at him. If he let him get away with this bullying now, it would never end. He was still the boss—Osbert was only a potential investor. “Don’t tell me what to do,” said Duncan, and he reached over to Osbert’s plate and took his eel head and put it on his finger.

“You must behave like a man of business, Leland,” said Osbert, barely moving his lips when he talked. “Or you are wasting everyone’s time.”

“The oceans are heating up! Eels are dying, I’m dying … ” said Duncan, letting his voice trail off as the eel head drooped on his finger. He smiled at Osbert as he removed his finger puppet and put it in his jacket pocket to keep him from taking it back.

“I’ll wait next door at the coffee shop,” said Syrie, standing. “It doesn’t seem like you two are finished with your discussion.”

“It’s quite all right, my sweet,” said Osbert, reaching for her elbow to pull her back down to her seat. “As Churchill said, ‘I like a man who grins when he fights.’” Then he returned to eating as if nothing had happened, but Duncan knew that blood would stay in the water.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Syrie.

“Osbert is financing my expansion.” She used her wrist to push back a wisp of blonde hair.

He wondered why Syrie had warned him about Osbert if she was ready to do business with him herself, but that was not something they could talk about in front of him. “Osbert certainly has his finger in quite a few pies,” said Duncan.

Osbert turned to Syrie. “The Seacrest’s pie, too,” he said. “We’ve just agreed in principle.” He went back to eating without even looking at Duncan, and in the following silence the deal was done. Duncan had neither agreed nor disagreed but had let the deal wash over him.

“I was just talking to Chief Lovasco,” said Syrie, stretching her feet under the table, causing Duncan to twist his body away. “He says they’ve confirmed that the foot the racers found on Saturday belongs to Marsilio.”

“Belonged,” corrected Duncan, and he looked over at the kitchen. Slocum would shed no tears for the man, who was known to be unfaithful to his sister.

“DNA come in?” asked Osbert, finally moving his plate aside and wiping his lips with his napkin.

“No,” she said, pausing to scrunch her face up. “His head was pulled up in a flounder net this morning.”

Duncan felt ill. “In the water all week and still identifiable? Not eaten away?”

“Dental records, I’m sure,” said Osbert. “Teeth are tenacious little bastards.”

“They’re trying to figure out if he died during the storm … or not,” said Syrie, as she played with the tiny edge of cobweb lace on her collar. “It seems the foot was sawed off at the ankle, not snapped off by a propeller.”

“They used to tell the time of drownings by when the watches stopped,” said Duncan, “but they’re all waterproof now.”

“He wasn’t wearing a watch,” said Osbert.

“How do you know that?” asked Duncan.

There was a dark silence during which Osbert picked up his cigar and put it back in its case. “It’s what the man’s wife told the police. It was in the paper. You do read, don’t you? Or do you just play with eel heads?” He took his napkin off his lap and retrieved his stick. He turned to Syrie and gestured at the wall with it. “Shall we go next door for coffee?”

Syrie stood up by way of an answer and shook her clothes back in place.

Osbert rose like an iceberg. “I’ll settle lunch on my way out, Duncan, and I’ll have papers sent over later today for you to look at. They’re all made up.”

All made up. Their partnership was not five minutes old, and Duncan hated him already. He stood to shake hands, and it felt like holding a mackerel. Syrie leaned across the table and kissed Duncan on the cheek. He felt her tongue on his skin, and then he felt it slide to his lips, which made him jerk back, bumping the table and spilling more of the soup. Syrie turned and flounced to the door, laughing to herself. He noticed one or two people turning their heads to look at them, and he quickly busied himself sopping up the soup. When he peeled away the thick layer of napkins, the varnish came off with it.

He stared at Osbert’s perfectly suited back at the cashier’s station by the door. Osbert removed a roll of bills from his pocket like plunder and was beginning to count out the money when he suddenly pitched forward and grabbed the counter. His walking stick fell to the ground with a loud clatter. Duncan could not see Osbert’s expression, but he could guess. Right now, the soup must be burning through the lining of his stomach.

“Osbert!” Syrie shouted as he dropped to the floor, knees first, then forehead, before folding up on himself completely. The dog barked.

Slocum and the staff came running out from the kitchen. Marney called 911 on her cell phone, then stood next to Duncan, shaking. He held up his bowl. “Could I get some of this soup to go?” he asked, and she looked at him as if he had two heads. Off in the distance they heard the first siren. Slocum threw open the door to wave them down, and a wall of wind pushed into the restaurant, blowing Osbert’s wad of ten-dollar bills around the room in a storm of money.

The contract landed on Duncan’s desk later that afternoon, as promised, even while Osbert was still in the hospital having his stomach pumped.

“For your viewing pleasure.” Beaky bowed from the hips, and as he bent forward his ferret slid off his shoulder and leaped to the desk. Duncan took a swipe, and it was gone in a flurry of fur. The air was heavily perfumed with ferret musk.

“I’ve got to hand it to Fingers,” said Duncan. “It takes a lot of B.O. to overpower rotting fish.” He cracked open the window and was instantly fixated by the blinding glare of the sun on the water. A trawler made a black shape against the light as it pulled into Petersen’s Marina, surrounded by a white mist of gulls that had followed it in from the sea.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” said Beaky.

“Yes,” said Duncan, not expecting someone like Beaky to appreciate the beauty of anything other than money. “No need to wait. It’s going to take a while.”

Beaky picked up the ferret from the floor. “It would be a shame if all the pretty fishing boats started to disappear just because you won’t sign the contract.”

Beaky tucked Fingers in his jacket pocket and turned away. Duncan listened to his retreating steps on the stairs that led down to the factory floor, and above the din of the machinery he heard Beaky call up to him. “Leland! You have until tomorrow!”

Duncan started humming “Tomorrow” from
Annie
. Maybe he’d build a playlist around it for the factory. Then his problems would be over because they’d lock him up. He felt a strong pull to the window but resisted the urge and sat down at his desk, determined to tackle the contract. He arranged the manila envelope in the exact center of his desk. DUNCAN LELAND was penciled with precision on the envelope. He touched the “D” with the tip of his finger. The lead point had dug in deeply, like engraving on a tombstone. He pulled the contract out of its envelope and let his eyes wash over the words, which were typed in an unusual, severe font, but his brain could not process the information they were meant to convey. The more he focused, the more the words floated beyond his grasp, drifting about his mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship. Everything—the lines and paragraphs, the subheadings and punctuation, even the page numbers—seemed like sad, isolated units yearning to join together in some grand design. And yet they composed a peculiar beauty that made him forget for a moment his agonized situation. He felt he was in one of those modern art museums Cora used to bring him to, where he understood nothing but left changed in spite of himself.

She was always so good for him that way, exposing him to the new and unusual, asking him to see the world with fresh goggles. She was a native New Yorker, a single Upper West Side child raised by her divorced mom, who’d become a therapist after Cora’s dad abandoned them both to find fulfillment on an ashram in California in the late seventies. Cora had been finishing her own master’s of social work degree at NYU when she met Duncan on campus. He was there to recruit students for lab experiments at Revlon. He gave her a bag of free makeup samples, and they became inseparable. She introduced him to foreign movies, exotic food, obscure books, alternative music, and other cultural goodies. Gift baskets for his brain, she called them, as if she were fattening up his intellect for marriage.

And what did she get out of their marriage other than managing his anxieties? She hadn’t even gotten a baby, though she often told him how grateful she was that he’d brought her to live by the sea, so fully immersed in the natural world, so different from the one she grew up in. They were a good match that way, she’d said—she brought urban culture to the marriage; he brought the water. But now that she lived here, maybe there was nothing left for him to do.

“Enough.” He shook off this dangerous heading and got down to business. He read what he could manage of the contract, then faxed a copy to Mallory Cole’s law office and called to ask him to do a quick once-over. While he waited for him to respond, he stood at the open window and breathed in deeply. Next door was Petersen’s Marina, which did not cater to the yachting crowd as other marinas in town did but serviced the commercial fleet, supplying ice and diesel and doing complete haul-outs. It had always been in a state of picturesque decay but lately seemed to be in unromantic decline, surrounded as it was by rotting pilings and sinking floats. At the dock, two pleasure fishing boats were in line to be pulled for the winter. It was not exactly a rush. Usually in September boat owners were clamoring to get out of the water before a nor’easter did the job for them, but last spring many of them couldn’t afford to put their boats in for the season. So much unemployment, and yet no one could enjoy their free time. He watched Bear Petersen, grandson of the founder, supervise a lobster boat being run up on the ways to have her bottom scrubbed. The hull, dripping with water, was thick with sea vegetation and barnacles, and the boat seemed to groan with world weariness as it settled into its cradle. He wondered if Bear, who sometimes relaxed in a dress and heels in private, ever felt trapped in the family business. He wondered if the cross-dressing was a way of accepting it and rejecting it at the same time. He’d asked Cora what she thought about it once, and she’d only shrugged. “It fills a need.”

He looked at his watch. “Come on, Mallory, call back already.” Since he could not calm his mind with the view, he rifled through the bookshelf for something to distract him. Among the faded vinyl binders of maritime regulations, he found his father’s old copy of
The Little Prince.
He let the book fall open in his hands, to a passage that was underlined twice: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

His father used to read those words aloud to him, preparing him for when he’d be running the business. But he never went into specifics. How did one go about making an employee long for fertilizer? When the telephone rang, he picked up the receiver, which was redolent of fish, and he had to pry a hardened whiting scale from the plastic. He wondered if Annuncia had been poking around in his office again.

“Duncan,” said Mallory, with barely suppressed laughter. “Rescue any gulls lately?”

“This week I’m just trying to save myself.”

Mallory cleared his throat and put on a lawyerly voice. “Basically it says here that the garbage company can make unlimited deliveries of nitrogenous materials—at night—in exchange for a loan sufficient to carry Seacrest’s through the next six months. If at the end of that time Seacrest’s is unable to repay the principal, the company will be transferred to Osbert.”

Duncan took off his glasses. “You know how it is around here. Should I sign it?”

“Depends on how desperate you are. There are a lot of risks. You’ll have more processing and maybe more profit, but only if you can actually sell the new mix to the public. Would people really want to spread other people’s garbage on their gardens?”

“Would I have to tell them what it was?”

Mallory whistled. “Maybe there’s some wiggle-room in the truth-in-labeling laws.”

“In the meantime, I’ll have marketing come up with some other word for ‘garbage.’”

“One more thing,” said Mallory. “On page three, near the bottom? I’d get rid of that ‘death clause’ if I were you. Never get yourself in a situation where you’re worth more to an investor dead than alive.”

“True that,” said Duncan. He’d seen the clause, a disturbing little proviso that Seacrest’s would go to Osbert if something happened to Duncan—something like death. “I’ll talk to him and call you back later.”

“Screech!” said Mallory, in a bad imitation of a seagull, before hanging up in laughter.

Duncan dialed Osbert’s cell phone number slowly, as if he were moving through mud.

“Leland,” said Osbert, answering his phone himself, sounding as crisp as ever in his hospital bed. “Have you signed?”

“My lawyer says I have to cross out the death clause.”

“Bosh,” said Osbert. “It’s all boilerplate, a standard inclusion to prevent you from killing yourself in order to keep the factory in family hands. What are you leaning on your lawyer for? You’re the boss—you can do what you want.”

“I can’t do what I want because I don’t know what I want.”

“You do know,” said Osbert. “Go deeper. The answer is there. Live, Leland—take a chance. Don’t be afraid until you have to be. Beaky will pick up those papers tomorrow at noon.”

Osbert hung up. After a few moments in which Duncan did not quite know where he was, he slid the unsigned contract back into the envelope and closed the metal clasp. He needed another opinion. If things fell apart and he lost the business to Osbert, he didn’t want all the blame to fall on him. He slumped back in his chair and listened to Playlist #18 (early Stones and late Beatles, including some
Sergeant Pepper
) before locking up the office. Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” continued to echo in his brain, and he made a mental note to delete that song from the list. If he did not solve his company’s financial situation, he would soon have plenty of time for projects like fine-tuning his music. It was about a week’s worth of work, which was as far into the future as he could plan. Beyond that be sea monsters, as the ancient cartographers used to say when the world was small and flat.

“A board meeting,” he blithely announced to Annuncia as he was leaving the plant with the contract in one hand and a one-gallon olive oil container in the other, but she would have none of that. She took one solid step sideways and blocked the metal door with her formidable self, waiting for an answer. With her bullet-shaped body draped in a red smock and topped with a snood, she looked like the red nun, one of the navigational buoys in the harbor. It was how he often thought of her, anyway. After his father’s death, when Duncan’s family expected that he’d return to Port Ellery to run Seacrest’s, it was Annuncia who drove to New York to convince him that he could do it. It was Annuncia who’d then talked him into staying in Port Ellery when he realized, yes, he probably could do it, but he didn’t want to. Once he was resigned to his fate, it was Annuncia who sat him down in the office and showed him how to navigate the turbulent currents of the business. More recently, she’d helped guide them through the renovation of the building and encouraged him to expand into retail.

But all those decisions had brought him and Seacrest’s nearer to ruin. It was time to start seeking counsel elsewhere, even if it was only his mother.

“What’s that in your hand there, Dun’n?” she said.

“Soup,” he said. Duncan had asked Marney for the jellyfish soup because anything that could lift varnish off a table and stop a man dead in his tracks might have a few commercial applications. Jellyfish had become more abundant than ever due to warmer waters and the overfishing of their predators and competitors, crowding everything else out. If he could find a lucrative use for one of the species, he would have a constant supply, and the fishermen would be happy to have them gone from the waters. So little was known about them, nothing was impossible. For his current needs, he knew that jellyfish were inefficient as fertilizer because of the huge quantity needed to dehydrate into a single spoonful of dust, being 99 percent water as they were, but after seeing how they had exploded in Slocum’s face and then produced a soup as strong as turpentine, he thought they might have potential for a solvent. After the ambulance had left with Osbert, Marney had funneled the pot of Slocum’s jellyfish soup into an empty olive oil can for Duncan and poured the rest down the sink. “Better than Drano,” she said as she pushed him out the back door, one step ahead of the health inspector. She’d been through this drill before.

Annuncia stared at the can as if she could see through steel. “The soup that about killed Osbert?”

“Shh,” he said and put a finger to his lips.

“You don’t intend to do yourself in, do you, Dun’n?”

“Not this way,” he said. “I’m sort of a coward when it comes to gut-wrenching pain.”

There followed a pointed silence during which Annuncia seemed to be contemplating his cowardice in all its manifestations, but she let it pass. “What’s that in your other hand?”

He inspected the manila envelope as if he were surprised to find it in his possession. “Some paperwork.”

“It’s the contract from Osbert,” she said. “Are you going to sign it and save us, or not?”

Wade, who had been heading toward the loading dock, stopped to pick up a broom and started mechanically sweeping around the few square feet in which they stood.

“It’s not an either-or situation,” said Duncan. “If I don’t sign the agreement, there are still ways to save the business.” He looked around the empty factory. The stainless steel tanks had stopped churning for the day, and the cement floor was wet from a rinsing. He looked at his watch. “Where is everyone? The shift isn’t over yet.”

“We got through early, and rather than let them sit on their hands for a half hour, I sent them down to the beach to pick up plastic crap. Don’t change the subject. Tell me about this other ‘or.’ You have payroll for Friday?”

“To pay to have the beach cleaned? No wonder we’re in trouble.”

“Let me worry about whether the work gets done and when.”

“What ’Nun is getting at,” said Wade, who had stopped all pretense of sweeping and was now leaning on his push broom, “is that for things to stay the same, we gotta change. Think long. Like ’Nun here sending workers out to collect the plastic ’fore it taints the fishes.” With that, he slapped his heart. “No fish, no fish guts, no Seacrest’s.”

“Survival means more than just the survival of the business,” she said. “Who else but you can take the world’s mess and transform it into something useful?”

“Annuncia, don’t I have enough pressure right now without adding the weight of a world on me? I can’t do everything.”

“Do something,” she said. “Look past the tip of your nose. As your dear mum would say, keep your hand steady on the tiller and your eye on the horizon.”