The daily Astorian., October 25, 2018, Page 8, Image 8

8 // COASTWEEKEND.COM
Continued from Page 7
Nathan now understood, knowing
what it was like to smell empty draw-
ers, searching for something that will
never come back. He looked out now
upon Black Lake and saw nothing but
the blue, spotted phantoms that coiled
around the edges of his eyes.
Kyle spanked the crab pot, trying to
contort it into its original form. He was
sitting on top of the fish hold and making
quite the damn racket.
“So I know how to find some fish.
You look for a couple of jumpers, maybe
some birds,” Nathan said. “What are you
supposed to look for when you’re fishing
for a dead girl?”
“You don’t know that she’s dead.”
“You don’t know that she isn’t.”
Nathan thought about that for a second.
“I mean, do you?”
Kyle sprung the trap in his hands
back to life.
“So, where to?” Nathan asked.
“The hell if I know,” Kyle said.
“Well, you’re the damn psychic.”
“The hell I am.”
Nathan glanced at the fillet knife
portside and saw Kyle eye the tuna hook
starboard.
“You’re telling me we stole Bill Ling-
ard’s boat, plopped it in this pond, and
you forgot your damn tea leaves?”
“You sonofa— ”
Kyle lunged from his perch and
cracked Nathan’s jaw, scattering a
flurry of electric waves across his face.
Nathan shook him by the collar and
scooped Kyle’s breath with one cut to his
gut. They splashed across the wet and
wobbly deck, all elbows and knees, until
Nathan bit one of Kyle’s pinkie fingers
hard and the venom passed. They both
stood up, sniffling, erecting their verte-
brae, then dipped the crab pot and the net
into the abyss below them and dredged
Black Lake.
Their first haul was a rotten smorgas-
bord. Vintage beer and Coke cans, a few
rusty license plates, lots of limp paper
and cigarette butts, two not-quite-similar
hubcaps, a healthy-sized, flopping bass
and a tennis racket.
Neither man had worked a fishing
boat in a long time. They could both
feel the sting of the work return like a
memory to their shoulders as their welts
took shape.
The trees loomed silent as totems and
there was no other sound save the sputter
of the engine and the persistent tapping
of Kyle’s foot.
“So what exactly are we looking
for?” Nathan said.
“Is that one of those self-help ques-
tions?”
“Would you at least stop tapping your
foot?”
“I’m not.”
Nathan watched Kyle step a little
closer to the tuna hook and kept his own
eye on the fillet knife from where he sat
upon the transom.
Then the engine stopped spitting.
Nathan noticed the bow begin to nod. He
couldn’t see the wink of the shrine any
longer and wondered if the candles had
fizzed or if it had just spun out of sight.
“Crap,” Kyle said, returning from the
wheelhouse. “Out of gas.”
Even with the dim bulb still throb-
bing, the night and the water seemed
to hold thicker until they were just one
black thing. Nathan eased into vertigo,
imagining they were astronauts. Was
there really a dead girl floating some-
where in this outer space?
“You know, I used to envy you, man,”
Kyle said.
“You should aim higher,” Nathan
quipped.
Kyle was still tapping his damn foot.
“Come on,” Nathan said, pointing to
the water.
“No really, man,” Kyle said. “You
had that football scholarship, got into a
good school. That 50-foot boat. Charlene
…”
“Man,” Nathan said, a slug of cinna-
mon still burning his throat. “What the
hell are you talking about? You know
I got cut from the team, couldn’t hack
classes. That boat went underwater
before I could even get it out of port
and give it a proper sinking — captain
and all. I still owe that whole crew three
grand a pop and can’t show my face at
church. As for Charlene, she’s long gone.
My brother won’t talk to me. I’ve never
been a father as far as I know …”
“Hey, hey.” Kyle raised his hand in
peace. “Like I said, man, I used to envy
you. Truth is I have never seen someone
piss so much away.”
Nathan’s mother used to say that it
would be his daydreaming, not his sleep-
walking, that led to his end. By the time
he had finished that thought his knuckles
had found the soft tip of Kyle’s nose and
had opened a spigot that flooded Kyle’s
mustache.
“Bet you didn’t see that one coming,”
Nathan growled.
Before he knew it, Kyle had tackled
him. As Kyle reached for the tuna hook,
Nathan bonked him on the head with his
fist. Kyle deposited a series of elbows to
Nathan’s pelvis before they both threw
up their hands. They stood wearily; older
than they ever once expected to be. Kyle
wiped his face. And then they swept the
pot and the net over the transom into the
soup and dredged Black Lake.
Kyle jerked the dripping crab pot
onto the deck, but Nathan felt the net
snag against some reeds below and, for
a second, had the sensation the lake was
calling him in. As he tried to cuss the net
above surface, the only other sound was
Kyle’s foot tapping, tapping.
“Phew.” Kyle rubbed his swollen
cheek. “I told you I’m no psychic, but
you know what? I kind of did see that
one coming.”
Nathan let the net slack until he could
tug it free.
Somehow Kyle’s tapping pounded
louder, like some undiscovered drip in a
ceiling. But then why did it sound bone-
dry? The deck was soup.
He tried to see if Kyle was eying
either port or starboard, but couldn’t tell
with his back to the bow.
Hand over hand, he drug the net
back toward the stern, but couldn’t erase
Kyle’s broken metronome.
“I asked you to stop tapping your
damn feet,” he said low.
“I’m not,” Kyle said.
Then, and this might have been an
accident, but when Nathan flopped the
net and its treasures over the stern, he
clocked Kyle, slapping him onto the
deck. When Nathan next pounced, there
was no more debate about fault. So they
bit and fought and got roped in the net
and then tried to snuff each other in the
nostril-deep water, and one of them prob-
ably would have succeeded this time, if
the fish hold hadn’t opened, letting one
slender hand emerge.
They froze, swallowed in the foul net,
as Ansa Lingard climbed from the fish
hold as naked and white and thick as raw
milk, holding something that looked like
a deflated panther in her hand.
Even the dull bulb illuminated the
porcelain glint of her skin. She looked
down at them without a lick of modesty
as she shucked the rest of her ties.
“Oh god,” she hissed. “You two.”
Then she asked, “Where’s William?”
“Ansa?” Nathan gawked in disbelief.
“What the— ?”
Turns out Ansa had met Bill the
old-fashioned way: when he yanked
her from the drink in his trawl. “I got
caught,” she shrugged. “It happens to a
selkie, like, three or four times in their
life.”
Since he had her seal skin, dooming
her to remain human, they decided to
make a go of it. “It’s traditional,” she
said.
But Ansa began to crush hard for the
sea, spilling Morton’s into her bathwater.
“It’s so hot and dry on land,” she com-
plained. “How do you stand it? And it’s
getting hotter every year.”
Come their third wedding anniversa-
ry, Bill returned her skin, but it wasn’t a
gift. “It was a test,” she admitted, “which
I failed.”
When she tried to escape to the har-
bor, Bill was there. He locked her in the
fish hold, weighting it down.
“I was his wife for three years, his
prisoner for four — hmph, so his slave
for seven.”
As she spoke she began to squeeze
into her skin like it was a wet suit three
times too snug. Nathan and Kyle strug-
gled in the net.
“During the day, he would sing to
me, read to me, plead like a broken little
boy.” She shook her head as she slipped
beneath her true face. “At night he would
visit.” She spat. “And we’re the ones you
call animals.”
Her prison had been painted with her
name twice, announced plainly for all to
see.
She nodded to the fish hold wistfully
and sighed. “I never should have come to
the Pacific.”
She stretched her skin across her
chest as if about to button a sweater and
her whole body flopped to the deck,
bipedal no more. Nathan and Kyle shed
the net and watched the longest, sleekest
seal-like creature they’d ever seen whack
her tail against the trembling boards.
Her eyes, now black and polished as
marbles, cut straight to Nathan. He was
surprised that even after her parlor trick,
her voice didn’t waver, didn’t change
tone, when she said to him, “Why do
so many men confuse love with posses-
sion?”
He cocked his head in confusion.
“Do you want to capture me too?”
Ansa said. “Make me your wife? Your
pet?”
Nathan suddenly realized he was still
holding the net. He dropped it at his feet
and slipped a step back, eying the fillet
knife portside, the hook starboard.
“And you!” She threw her snout
toward Kyle, whose mustache shivered.
“You knew about this!”
“What?” he said. “That’s nuts!”