The Empire of Ice Cream (51 page)

The Weight of Words

Story Notes

I'd had the basic idea for this story for years. When I was a kid in school, I always had trouble with math, especially algebra. I think my final grade in algebra was a 30. I never understood why x equaled y, and from that point on it was a rapid descent into failure and plenty of time in summer school. I liked to read and write stories even back then, so when I'd look at the equations in the math book, instead of grasping the concepts taught, I used to see the equations as stories: the numbers were the characters, the functions of division, multiplication, etc. were the twists and turns of the plot. Of course, I'd get carried away by these tales, and then the teacher would call me to the blackboard and I'd have no idea what was going on. I'd pick up the chalk and just start writing down numbers and signs and stuff until she got fed up with my ignorance and told me to sit back down. That idea of numbers as characters and equations as stories stayed with me, and then one day when I was older I wondered if I could reverse the process and turn stories into equations. This idea eventually metamorphosed into the basic idea for “The Weight of Words.” Still, how to write the piece always seemed a conundrum. I couldn't get my mind around it. The idea lay fallow until I noticed Michael Swanwick's “The Periodic Table of SF” stories on SCIFICTION, and although they weren't the same thing, in fact they were the reverse in a way, this brought the story idea back to me again. Then one day I was giving an exam in my Early American Lit class, just sitting there, drawing sketches of the students while they wrote their essays, and
bam,
why or how, I don't know, but the story presented itself to me with amazing clarity; the approach to the story lost all its difficulty and seemed very straightforward. I quickly wrote down notes for it, something I don't usually do, but in this case it seemed like a dream whose memory would vanish if I didn't get it down right away
.

The story was published in the third installment of the anthology series
Leviathan,
edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre. Both the story and the book were nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2003, and
Leviathan Three
actually won (in a tie) for best anthology
.

The Trentino Kid

When I was six, my father took me to Fire Island and taught me how to swim. That day he put me on his back and swam out past the buoy. My fingers dug into his shoulders as he dove, and somehow I just knew when to hold my breath. I remember being immersed in the cold, murky darkness and that down there the sound of the ocean seemed to be inside of me, as if I were a shell the water had put to its ear. Later, on the beach beneath the striped umbrella, the breeze blowing, we ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, grains of sand sparking off my teeth. Then he explained how to foil the undertow, how to slip like a porpoise beneath giant breakers, how to body surf. We practiced all afternoon. As the sun was going down, we stood in the backwash of the receding tide, and he held my hand in his big, callused mitt, like a rock with fingers. Looking out at the horizon where the waves were being born, he summed up the day's lesson by saying, “There are really only two things you need to know about the water. The first is you always have to respect it. The second, you must never panic, but always try to be sure of yourself.”

Years later, after my father left us, after I barely graduated high school, smoked and drank my way out of my first semester at college, and bought a boat and took to clamming for a living, I still remembered his two rules. Whatever degree of respect for the water I was still wanting, by the time I finished my first year working the Great South Bay, the brine had shrunk it, the sun had charred it, and the wind had blown it away, or so I thought. Granted, the bay was not the ocean, for it was usually more serene, its changes less obviously dramatic. There wasn't the constant crash of waves near the shore, or the powerful undulation of swells farther out, but the bay did have its perils. Its serenity could lull you, rock you gently in your boat on a sunny day, like a baby in a cradle, and then, with the afternoon wind, a storm could build in minutes, a dark, lowering sky quietly gathering behind your back while you were busy working.

When the bay was angry enough, it could make waves to rival the ocean's and they wouldn't always come in a line toward shore but from as many directions as one could conceive. The smooth twenty-minute ride out from the docks to the flats could, in the midst of a storm, become an hour-long struggle back. When you worked alone, as I did, there was more of a danger of being swamped. With only one set of hands, you couldn't steer into the swells to keep from rolling over and pump the rising bilge at the same time. Even if you weren't shipping that much water and were able to cut into the choppy waves, an old wooden flat-bottom could literally be slapped apart by the repeated impact of the prow dropping off each peak and hitting the water with a thud.

At that point in my life, it was the second of my father's two rules that was giving me trouble. In general, and very often in a specific sense, I had no idea what I was doing. School had been a failure, and once I'd let it slip through my grasp, I realized how important it could have been to me moving forward in my life. Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years subtly beginning to rise around me. The job of clamming was hard work: getting up early, pulling on a rake for eight to ten hours a day. There was thought involved but it didn't require imagination, and if anything, imagination was my strong suit. Being tied to the bay was a lonely life, save for the hour or so at the docks in the late afternoon when I would drink the free beer the buyers supplied and bullshit with the other clammers. It was a remarkable way to mark time, to be busy without accomplishing anything. The wind and sun, the salt water, the hard work aged a body rapidly, and when I would look at the old men who clammed, I was too young to sense the wisdom their years on the water had bestowed upon them and saw only what I did not want to become.

This was back in the early seventies, when the bay still held a bounty of clams, a few years before the big companies came in and dredged it barren. There was money to be made. I remember certain weekends when a count bag, five hundred littleneck clams, went for two hundred dollars. I didn't know many people my age who were making two to three hundred dollars a day.

I had a little apartment on the second floor of an old stucco building that looked like a wing of the Alamo. There was a guy living above me, whom I never saw, and beneath me an ancient woman whose haggard face, half-obscured by a lace curtain, peered from the window when I'd leave at daybreak. At night, she would intone the rosary, and the sound of her words would rise through the heating duct in my floor. Her prayers found their way into my monotonous dreams of culling seed clams and counting neck. I drove a three-door Buick Special with a light rust patina that I had bought for fifty dollars. A big night out was getting plastered at The Copper Kettle, trying to pick up girls.

In my first summer working the bay, I did very well for a beginner, and even socked a little money away toward some hypothetical return to college. In my spare time, in the evenings and those days when the weather was bad, I read novels—science fiction and mysteries—and dreamed of one day writing them. Since I had no television, I would amuse myself by writing stories in those black-and-white-marbled notebooks I had despised the sight of back in high school. In the summer, when the apartment got too close, I'd wander the streets at night through the cricket heat, breathing the scents of honeysuckle and wisteria, and dream up plots for my rickety fictions.

That winter the bay froze over. I'd never seen anything like it. The ice was so thick you could drive a car on it. The old-timers said it was a sign that the following summer would be a windfall of a harvest but that such a thing, when it happened, which was rare, was always accompanied by deaths. I first heard the prediction in January, standing on the ice one day when some of us had trudged out a few hundred yards and cut holes with a chain saw through which to clam. Walking on the water that day in the frigid cold, a light snow sweeping along the smooth surface and rising in tiny twisters, was like a scene out of a fairy tale.

“Why deaths?” I asked wrinkle-faced John Hunter as he unscrewed a bottle of schnapps and tipped it into his mouth.

He wiped his stubbled chin with a gloved hand and smiled, three teeth missing. “Because it can't be any other way,” he said, and laughed.

I nodded, remembering the time when I was new and I had, without securing it, thrown my anchor over the side into the deep water beneath the bridge. The engine was still going and my boat was moving, but I dove over the side, reaching for the end of the line. I managed to grab it, but when I came up, there I was in forty feet of water, my boat gone, holding onto a twenty-pound anchor. The next thing I saw was old Hunter, leaning over me from the side of his boat, reaching out that wiry arm of his. His hand was like a clamp; his bicep like coiled cable. He hauled me in and took me back to my drifting boat, the engine of which had sputtered out by then.

“I should've let you drown,” he said, looking pissed off. “You're wasting my time.”

“Thanks,” I told him as I climbed sheepishly back into my boat.

“I only saved you because I had to,” he told me.

“Why'd you have to?” I asked.

“That's the rule of the bay. You have to help anyone in trouble, as long as you've got the wherewithal to.”

Since then he had shown me how to seed a bed, where some of the choice spots were, how to avoid the conservation guys who were hot to give tickets for just about anything. I was skeptical about what connection a frozen bay had to do with deaths in the summer, but by then I had learned to just nod.

Spring came but my old boat, an eighteen-foot, flat-bottom wooden job I'd bought for a hundred and fifty bucks and fiber-glassed myself, was in bad shape. After putting it back in the water, I found I had to bail the thing out with a garbage can every morning before I could leave the dock. Sheets of fiberglass from my less-than-expert job were sloughing off like peeling skin from a sunburn. I got Pat Ryan, another clammer, to go out with me one day, and we beached the leaky tub on a spit of sand off Gardner's Park. Once we landed, he helped me flip it, and I shoved some new occum, a cottony material that expands when wet, into the seams and recaulked it.

“That's a half-assed job for sure,” Pat told me, his warning vaguely reminding me of my father.

“It'll last for a while,” I said, and waved off his concern.

Just like the old-timers predicted, the clams were plentiful that spring. There were days I would only have to put in four or five hours, and I could head back to the dock with a count and a half. It was a season to make you wonder if clamming might not be a worthy life's work. Then, at the end of May, the other part of their prediction came to pass. This kid, Jimmy Trentino, who was five years younger than me (I remembered shooting baskets with him a few times at the courts in the park when I was still in high school), walked in off the shore with a scratch rake and an inner tube and a basket, dreaming of easy money. A storm came up, the bay got crazy very fast, and either weighed down by the rake or having gotten his foot stuck in a sinkhole, he drowned.

The day it happened, I had gotten to the dock late and seen the clouds moving in and the water getting choppy. John Hunter had told me that when the wind kicked up and the bay changed from green to the color of iron, I should get off it as quickly as I could. The only thing more dangerous was standing out there holding an eight-foot metal clam rake during a lightning storm. I got back in my car and drove to The Copper Kettle. Pat Ryan came in at dinnertime and told everyone about the Trentino kid. They dredged for a few days afterward, but the body was never found. That wasn't so unusual, given what an immense, fickle giant the bay was with its myriad currents, some near the surface, some way down deep. As Earl, the bartender, put it, “He could be halfway to France or he might wind up on the beach in Brightwaters tomorrow.”

A week later I was sitting on an overturned basket, drinking a beer at the dock after having just sold my haul. A couple of guys were gathered around and Downsy, a good clammer, but kind of a high-strung, childish blowhard, was telling about this woman who had shown up at his boat one morning and begged him to take her out so she could release her husband's ashes.

“She was packing the fucking urn like it was a loaf of bread,” he said, “holding it under her arm. She was around thirty but she was hot.”

As Downsy droned on toward the inevitable bullshit ending of all of his stories, how he eventually boffed some woman over on Grass Island or in his boat, I noticed an old Pontiac pull up at the dock. A slightly bent, little old bald man got out of it. As he shuffled past the buyers' trucks and in our direction, I realized who it was. The Trentino kid's father was the shoemaker in town and he had a shop next to the train tracks for as long as I could remember. I don't think I ever rode my bike past it when I was a kid that I didn't see him in the window, leaning over his work, a couple of tacks sticking out of his mouth.

“Hey,” I said, and when the guys looked at me I nodded in the old man's direction.

“Jeez,” somebody whispered. Pat Ryan put out his cigarette and Downsy shut his mouth. As Mr. Trentino drew close to us, we all got up. He stood before us with his head down, his glasses at the end of his nose. When he spoke, his English was cut with an Italian accent.

“Fellas,” he said.

We each mumbled or whispered how sorry we were about his son.

“Okay,” he said, and I could see tears in his eyes. Then he looked up and spoke to us about the weather and the Mets and asked us how business was. We made small talk with him for a few minutes, asked him if he wanted a beer. He waved his hands in front of him and smiled, shaking his head.