Monterey Bay(69)

Or perhaps “exhibit” is putting it a bit too strongly. It’s more like a display, small and unpopular, an enclosure barely four feet high and six feet wide, a preserved fetal dogfish or two arranged in their jars as if on a liquor store shelf, the only known snapshot of Ricketts and Steinbeck in a thick black frame. A wooden beer crate. A disembodied drawer from one of his file cabinets. Approximately twenty sheets of sketchbook paper on which one can see the shadows of someone else’s doodles. The lighting here is strange—half-natural, half-incandescent—which makes everything look like an object in a bad still life, especially the Humboldt squid in the big glass cylinder. It’s the one they anesthetized and preserved on their final night together, its body grown flaky and stiff from a half century of formaldehyde immersion, its actual length and girth so much more modest than memory always seems to insist.

Then the part that should trouble her the most but doesn’t. No explanation of a life is complete without an explanation of the life’s end, and in this regard, everyone did their level best. A carefully worded informational placard in the trademarked font, a photo of the immediate aftermath. The image is out of focus, the action framed at a slippery diagonal, a huge train engine looming in the background. There’s the wreckage of an old black Buick, emergency personnel and onlookers, a body laid out on a stretcher. She remembers how slyly she stole one of the tourists’ cameras, how expertly she lined it all up, how decisively she pressed the button even though her hands were shaking. It was not her fault, she recalls repeating to herself. It was not murder. She simply sent him out for more booze and he never came back. She had nothing to do with how the Buick stalled on the tracks. She had nothing to do with the train conductor: a weepy, tongue-tied fool who, having seen the obstruction, had neither the time nor the inclination to stop.

“So. You made it back alive.”

Does Arthur understand? He must. He once suggested that, when Ricketts’s body flew through the windshield, it probably looked like a fish-meal sack full of cats.

“Word traveled, then?” she asks.

He nods.

She cringes and closes her eyes. The crew of the squid boat will likely tell this story for years to come: how they noticed her buoyancy was incorrect the second she hit the water, how one of them was able to dive down and retrieve her before she got too deep. Usually, she doesn’t feel like she’s seventy-three years old; not even close. But as they hoisted her back onto the deck of the boat, her body limp and brittle in their arms, her weight belt jammed with too many weights, her BCD underinflated, she felt like the smallest, most decrepit soul in existence. She was too embarrassed to let them take her to the hospital. Instead, she made them drive her home, and now, if she’s thinking of her long-ago accident in the tide pools and the brief convalescence that followed, it’s not in the spirit of forcing parallels. Not in the least.

“You know it’s the same one, right? The train engine at the playground?”

She nods. Of course she knows. They’ve joked about it—darkly, nervously—for years. What he doesn’t know is that she’s never found it funny. She used to go there, not all that long ago, and watch the action in secret. She would watch the kids climb to the top of the same Del Monte Express engine that killed Ricketts. She would watch them laugh and fall and howl, and she knew that if she had ever had her own daughter, she wouldn’t have been craven and she wouldn’t have been foolish. She would have let her daughter climb all the way to the top and hit the big bell with the edge of a quarter. And when her daughter fell from the engine’s tallest point, which she doubtlessly would have—because there is, after all, a symmetry to these things that makes them worth pondering in the first place—there would have been nothing in the way of hindsight or regret. They would have simply held each other and cried, shocked by their sudden reacquaintance with the type of thing that, as the old saying goes, should have only made them stronger.

“There are those who still think it was planned. That he did it on purpose.”

“That’s insane,” she snaps. “He wasn’t that kind of man.”

“And you aren’t that kind of woman.”

“You’re right. I’m even worse.”

“Oh, Margot.”

“I’m going home.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’ve arranged a little something. In your honor.”

“Right now?”

“No. Tonight. Just after closing.”

“What is it?”

“The Mola release.”

She stares at him. He shrugs and smiles.

“You told us to surprise you.”





To pass the time until closing, she indulges in an old habit. She explores the town on foot.

First, she drives her truck to the head of the bike trail, to a little parking lot within spitting distance of the Naval Postgraduate School, the former site of the Hotel Del Monte. She gets out of the truck and inhales. There are eucalyptus trees here—planted long ago by a foreign-born boatbuilder who mistook them for teak—and it smells just like the menthol in Ricketts’s lab.

Then she begins to walk down the bike trail in the direction of the Row, in the direction of the aquarium. Back in the late 1980s, when the aquarium was still brand-new, the bike trail was laid directly over the old railroad tracks, and she can almost feel the steel ribs beneath her feet. She walks past the dunes and the beach, joggers and in-line skaters swerving around her without pause or complaint. When she reaches the adobe plaza above the wharf, she makes a point of visiting the bocce courts. The elder Agnellis, who still control this part of town, play here every day, rain or shine, and they bid her a polite “Good morning” as she passes.