Monterey Bay(53)

19


    1940




FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, WAR.

It started out slowly, somewhat prosaically: the defacing of the exterior walls of Anders’s cannery, the breaking of windows.

Then there was a brief truce, just long enough for Margot’s father to relax, followed by a barrage of vandalism as inventive as it was disturbing. Live squirrels were put inside the pump house, clogging the mechanism with bones and fur. Human excrement—what seemed like tons of it—was piled up in front of the cannery’s main door. She expected him to retaliate, to do whatever he could to inflict an equal degree of suffering upon his rival, but he continued on just as before, utterly immersed in his work, eerily unmoved, the ill will aimed in his direction little more than a distraction that, with the right combination of denial and willpower, he could endure unscathed.

Then one night she awoke to a strangely familiar smell, and when she rose from the horsehair sofa and opened the front door in search of the smell’s source, she was hit with a blast of angry, orange heat. The statue from the Agnellis’ warehouse was on the porch, the saint’s body bright with flame, the bougainvillea bush similarly alight. She ran inside and roused her father, who sprinted to the porch in nothing but his undershorts, and for the next hour they fought the blaze with bedsheets and bowls of water, slapping the plaster woman and leaving the bougainvillea to its own pyrotechnic devices, conscious that their neighbors had also been awakened by the fire but had not found it prudent to help.

In the lab, too, her hope was being incinerated. Until the night of the second party, the night of Wormy’s return, the lab had been quiet and sparsely populated during the day. Now, however, the activity was unceasing. Wormy herself spent hours at a time drifting in and out of Margot’s field of vision: shuttling from the kitchen to the Chinese grocery and back again, stocking the icebox with crate after crate of unlabeled beer. Fleets of neighborhood boys entered with twitching, snarling sacks and exited with pockets full of nickels. Steinbeck loitered in the front room, choosing a book and then changing his mind and choosing another. Prostitutes from the Lone Star arrived on the doorstep with vague yet urgent medical complaints to which Ricketts gladly tended, his dry, upbeat professionalism belying his continued lack of traditional expertise, before disappearing on collecting trips on which she was no longer invited: expeditions that kept him away from the lab all day and well into the evening.

And Margot stayed behind the desk. She had stopped drawing humans, so now it was only sea life. For a while, she tried to take an obliterative comfort in it, her stack of sketches ballooning to dimensions that in any other instance would have made her proud, but her sense of dread was so all encompassing that nothing seemed able to puncture it. The entire town seemed to understand it just as well as she did. The cannery workers eyed her with an odd combination of regret and triumph. Arthur moped around the lab as if it were his life, not hers, speeding toward some nameless yet certain upheaval. Even Steinbeck offered what he could in the way of condolences, nodding at her whenever he passed by the desk. It was only Ricketts who remained seemingly unaware of anything ominous, his behavior detached and jovial, his treatment of her totally uninflected with even the barest hint of desire or melancholy. There were times when she considered saying something, pressing forth. For the first time in her life, though, she didn’t have the heart for it. She had become weary and full of self-doubt, even the smallest challenges suddenly insurmountable.

Which was why she couldn’t even think about her father. She couldn’t even think about the film canister in her satchel. She couldn’t even think about his aquarium and the extent to which Ricketts might have assisted in the idea’s creation. It was grotesque and, like most grotesqueries, she wanted to both wallow in it and run from it. As she continued to kill and draw the little tide pool beasts, the lab’s mayhem roaring around her, she imagined the same animals entering her father’s cannery and staying there, the bodies rotting, Ricketts and her father congratulating each other on the resulting stench, the resulting violation, a crowd cheering them on by torchlight, their allegiance reopening a wound that had been inflicted long before her birth, that long since should have healed.

It was with little in the way of optimism, therefore, that she arrived at the lab one morning to find it vacant once again. The tide pools were devoid of interlopers, the front room was free of cat hunters. Wormy wasn’t in the kitchen and Ricketts wasn’t down in the garage, so she ventured to the tide pools alone and selected something that seemed worthwhile: a sculpin that almost immediately allowed itself to be pinned against the rocks and scooped up with a net. In the garage, she tended to its demise with a heavy, distracted mind and then took it up to the desk to draw it, its furry head still cocked in what seemed like amusement at its own ruin. Then she added it to the pile Ricketts had reserved for what he called the tourists, the animals that didn’t quite belong in the tide pools but often claimed territory there nonetheless. Then she stood to retrieve her things.

“You’re learning.”

The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and when she turned around, she half expected to see nothing. But there he was: smiling at her from the bedroom doorway, the undershirt beneath his suspenders threadbare and yellowed with old sweat.

“I thought I was alone,” she said.

“I’ve been trying to rest up. It’s bound to be a long night in the tide pools. The first proxigean spring tide in more than a decade.”