Monterey Bay(23)
Silence.
“Going up, it’s easier without the cats.”
“Yes. You mentioned that.”
He frowned and looked at his feet. “I suppose I did.”
“Until next time.” She turned away.
“Wait!”
When he reached into the fish-meal sack, she half expected him to withdraw something furry and dead, teeth bared in protest. Instead, he produced her satchel, the heft of the sketchbook visible inside. She snatched it from him, took out the sketchbook, and ruffled the pages under her thumb. Some of them still felt wet.
“You left it at the lab after your accident. He wanted to return it to you the other day, but you and your father left before he got the chance.”
She packed the sketchbook away and slung the satchel over her shoulder.
“And between you and me,” he continued, “there’s some funny stuff in there. Almost gave me nightmares.”
“Then you shouldn’t have looked.”
“Oh, I’m glad I looked. It just seemed unusual, that’s all. That such a lovely person could draw such ugly things.”
She glared. He cringed. The scientists from Hopkins were retreating now, the gulls seeming to chuckle at them as they walked up the beach and toward the building on the point. In the distance, she could see the canopy of a dying kelp forest, its fronds transparent and sparse.
“Just this?” she asked. “Just what’s in the bucket?”
“That’s right. I’ll come up the hill to collect it in a couple days.”
“I’ll be done tomorrow morning.”
“That soon?”
“Yes. Best of luck with your cats.”
When he was gone, she waited a bit to make sure he wouldn’t return. Then she put the bucket on the ground and tore away the wet dishrag. At first, she couldn’t even guess at what she was seeing. It was plantlike in shape, a thick, tapered, semicoiled, leafless frond. In color and consistency, however, it was all animal: a disruptively fleshlike appearance to its pale skin, an asymmetry to it that implied a former attachment to something much larger.
It was only once she had taken the hill at a run, climbed the front steps, and dumped it out onto the porch that she understood. In her travels, she had heard of such things, but only from people whose penchant for superstition had made their tales fundamentally implausible: tales of a boneless beast, a creature of the darkest depths, a monster with a vulture’s beak, with suction cups the size of dinner plates. She poked the tentacle with her pencil and flipped it over. Dinner plates, no, but large nonetheless, large enough to be frightening, large enough to hint at the dimensions of something as incredible as it was evil. Shivering, she retrieved the bucket and placed it upside down over the bloated squid arm, concealing it from view. Then she began to draw, filling page after page by memory until the sun had set, at which point she looked up from her drawing and out at the ocean. The sky was lit as if with a strange, gray fire. The trees were making the sound of arthritic joints, the air sharp with pine sap and salt. Her father was halfway home, halfway through his daily climb. She closed her sketchbook and began to tuck it beneath her. At the last moment, however, she reopened it and put it back onto her lap, its pages turned to her most recent and most accurate work.
When he reached her side, he paused and looked down. “Started doodling, I see.”
Something small and hard appeared in her throat: something that was difficult, but not impossible, to swallow down.
“Tasty looking, isn’t it?” he said. “I should fry it up for dinner.”
8
1998
HIS NEXT MESSAGE, MUCH LIKE HIS FIRST, COMES at her from beyond the aquarium’s walls.
Outside on Cannery Row, the crowds gather and roll. The little squid’s internal spillage is still fresh on her hands, the food room’s brightness still blinds her. An unrest. An imbalance of power neither unpleasant nor new. Her first and last nights with Ricketts.
And more recently—but not too recently—the aquarium’s opening day. Almost fourteen years ago now: October 20, 1984. There was a festival to commemorate the occasion, which she had specifically designed to appear homey and nonthreatening. A Dixieland jazz band made up of local musicians. Kids in hand-sewn sardine costumes, tinfoil scales falling from their arms and legs as they sang and danced in what barely resembled unison. Speeches by a handful of surviving cannery workers, all of them visibly inebriated. Balloon animals. Food trucks. Beneath it all, though, beneath the rough-hewn feel-goodery and Sicilian-style calamari, there was an unmistakable taste of something sleek and epic, audible whispers of the double-edged reward of impending world renown, of just how long it would take for the entire town to become unrecognizable as a result.
And has it come to pass? Is it unrecognizable? It’s a question she asks herself often, especially now that historical preservation has come into vogue. Yes and no, she always says, like how a fingerprint does and does not resemble an actual finger. Sometimes you have to look hard—you have to look beyond the T-shirt shops and the laser tag—but the past is still there, a past even more necessary than Steinbeck’s: the Costanoans and their lost, peaceful, shellfish-hungry tribes; the Spaniards who conquered and catholicized California, their fervor outwardly attributable to divine right and the glory of a distant throne, but that on closer inspection emitted the wet, fragrant heat of personal vendetta.