He continued, "And now the only shells left living on this beach are big Lightning Whelks, which are all brown, hence the sand, and they’re not worth very much. Not near as much as Junonias" He re-casted his bait and the saw-toothed sound of reeling was like short-wave radio static. "But they have Lightning Whelks in Florida too…where we’re from," He raised his eyebrows at me. It made me think he liked me, but couldn’t take looking at his sunburn and I felt good when turned away, back to the ocean and continued, "so I sell Lightning Whelks in Florida too; you know, the tourists in Florida assume the shell is from Florida, an official Florida Lightening Whelk…shipped from Costa Rica."
He laughed that creamy laugh that makes me want to be more like him. But I didn’t like this new information; the brutality about the Whelks and whatnot.
I confronted him straight, "Wait a minute," I said, "You wiped out a species?"
"You can never wipe out a species," he said, reeling in. "But me and my mom seriously depleted several." When his baited hook was near the tip of his rod he re-cast, then bent over, set the pole down on the dry, wood dock and began walking toward me. I didn’t know why. As he neared, I studied his pitiful sunburn. He was white like a ghost who’d stood beneath a shower of fire-engine red paint. He was sunburned to purple across the top of his distended gut. His gut was bigger than mine, but not soft. When reached me, he bent down and grabbed a yellow rope tied onto the piling. When he bent, his gut was round and tight like a fresh, white eggplant. Mine was covered by my T-shirt. But under there, when I folded 90 degrees at the waist, my gut melted in my lap like a Dali painting.
The yellow rope was taught as he pulled it up through the water, to the dock. He cranked the rope and his meager muscles plumped up under his red skin, ready to split open like hotdogs on a grill. Eventually, a black, square mass was rising to the surface at the end of the yellow line.
"There are still Junonias to be found in this gulf." He said, as a square cage made of chicken wire surfaced. He counted to three under his breath and yanked the cage up onto the dock. Inside it were small sea animals. Every color, every kind, things I’d never seen. Rays and starfish and octopus and crabs and mollusks, but mostly fish; all packed, bursting, so dense that the cube of pressed fish might retain its shape if the chicken wire were cut away. The sharp edges of the wire made long silver cuts. Many of the aniamls, while still beautiful, were dead, cramped and broken at strange angles to accommodate the square cage. One parrot fish’s beak was pried open and slit to the gills by a cage bar. The fish in the center of the cube could not be seen. I thought of holocaust victims, trapped and suffocating on tight, torture trains. The fish cage was a big, square, technicolor death. It was an abhorration. I’d never seen a real abhorration before.
I studied it closely as Milton Chapman walked around it, observing the cage from angles as it dripped in the dry sun. If they had room, the fish would have flopped frantically. But there was only a tense, low hum coming from the packed cube, the sound of potential but un-occurring action, like a room full of quiet people talking, making meaningless plans.
Milton didn’t find what he wanted to find, so he grabbed a corner of the trap and flipped the big thing a couple inches in the air like a giant die. It hit the dock with the thump of meat, landing on a luckier side. "Here’s two of ‘em right here!" He called out, pointing at a couple of white and orange sea shells, the mollusks clamped to each other, entwined like tongues, as if wanting to experience their last moments of life while tucked in each other’s slimy embrace. Milton pointed at the Junonias and reasserted through his bleeding lips, "You can’t wipe out a whole species."
"What is that thing?" I asked, pointing at the humming cage. The cage pained my eyes more than his sunburn but I couldn’t look away, I just stared at all those animals; it was the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen.
"Well, it’s a crabtrap" He answered as he unlatched a small door in the chicken wire and removed the two kissing shells. They winced and retracted when he set their wet skin on the hot dock. "But I use it for Junonias." His voice was slowing down again. I worried that I might need to get him high again or his explanation would take an hour, if he still felt like explaining at all. But he did continue, "You put bait…meat or whatever…in a little tiny cage in the middle. And the smell leaks out and crabs come in them holes on the sides." He pointed to an mouth-like, concave opening in trap. "They go in there but then they can’t get out. I’m not sure how that works..."
"That’s fucked up, man." I said, staring at the cage. "You nearly depleted them and you’re still scraping the bottom for the last ones?"
"Junonias, they’re so rare now; now they’re worth a lot more." He bent down, grabbed two sides of the crap trap and asked me, "Are you ready?"
He knew I had no idea what he meant, so I didn’t bother to reply. He continued without prompting, "I’ma pick this cage up…then, when I say ‘GO!’ I’m gonna dump it out on the dock and you start shovelin stuff into the water."
He squatted and lifted. He’s only a bit bigger than me, and he had trouble lifting the living trap. He grunted out more instructions, "Shovel fast, fast enough to save the fish, but not so fast that you release the Junonias. There should be about six or seven shells in there in that mess."
I didn’t nod. I could hear the bail of animals cooking on the hot pier and I blurted out, "Yes I understand, do it!"
"Hang on a second, listen," he said, reaching into his pocket. His fingers conjured the white noise of cigarette wrapper, like the sound of frying fish. He pulled his smokes out. "There will also be some dead stuff." He said. "Most of that, just push off into the water, but save some." He lit his cigarette and kept it in his teeth as he puffed. It looked like a pose. "I use the dead fish, put ‘em back into the trap for bait." He smiled and added, "It’s recycling." Then asked again, "You ready?"
"YES!" I yelled out. I could no longer listening to the sizzling sea animals. But as he was about to empty the frying death cube, Milton’s pole leapt from the dock where it had been laying, into the air, out over the water like the long, silver flying fish that tag along side ocean liners.
He yelled, "FUCK!" and it echoed over the jungle as his rod and reel hit the water running and disappeared. Milton turned away from the trap and walked to where his pole had been. He yelled out over the water, "YOU DO NOT TAKE THINGS FROM ME!" He slowly gathered another breath. "MY FATHER GAVE ME THAT POLE AND IF IT’S…"
Before he could finish his sentence, I couldn’t take it any more and I pushed the poor cage full of fish and animals over the edge of the dock, back into the water. The yellow rope danced and danced in loops until it had depleted itself. The trap was way down there again. Milton stopped yelling and spun toward the big sound of the splash. Then to my face.
"What the fuck?" He asked.
"Well, you seemed like you were gonna be talking to that fish that stole your rod for a while." I thought he might laugh but he didn’t. His mouth was open a little ways and he looked very dumb, but also mean. I shrugged as if I was helpless and said, "They were all frying man so I just…they were gonna die…we can pull it back up and get them out…it’s not a big deal…"
"D’ju close the cage door?" He asked.
I hadn’t.
We both walked over and he took in the yellow rope again as we watched a rainbow of sea life flood out the small, open door of the cage, back to freedom. Some of the animals floated up, birds swooping at their dead, white bodies. By the time he pulled the cage onto the dock again, it was almost empty. The hot wood hissed when Milton emptied out only twelve fish one crab, one ray, and only one more Junonia.
The freed fish in the water below kept close to the pier, together like a survivor’s support group, until two small sharks came in, creating empty blue spaces in the thick school. I hadn’t realized there were so many sharks here.
"You’re an asshole." Milton said to me, throwing the empty cage into the water and kicking the live fish off the dock.
"I’m sorry, man." I said. It sounded absurb, but it was true; I somehow felt truly sorry for fucking that up.
He had only three Junonias, no pole, nothing but his cigarette. He threw it into the water and knelt to pick up the live shells.
I whispered again, "I’m sorry," as his ear passed my mouth then listened to his feet clumping the shaking boards of the pier as he walked off it, onto the beach, then into the jungle where the trees swallowed him like the water had his pole. I felt like an idiot.
(ADD MORE HERE)
After five hours in the crock pot with my own weird guilt about the crab trap thing, I remembered the words, "I’ll be here every night!" And so I went to that bar by the water to see if I could win back his favor.
He was there and he had forgotten about it. He’d let go. I knew he wasn’t so small.
He’s forgiven me but he still didn’t talk much at all. I attributed it to the shortage of weed in the village that I’d heard so much about. I took him to task on it and asked, "So, you don’t really talk too much when there’s not weed in the village huh?"
He turned to me and came a little closer and I noticed that his eyes were indeed glazed and he said, "That’s what everyone will tell you when you first get here, ‘Man, there’s a serious shortage here right now’ and then they smoke yours under the pretense that they have none.
When I said it a starving cat jumped into his lap. It was gray and loving and Milton paid attention to it for a while and then came back to me - I noticed his eyes were indeed glazed - and said
"When I was little my mom used to have a cat that the whole family super loved." He was petting the skinny bar cat. "And it was really a member of the family. I used to grab the end of its tail, pretending it was a simultaneous microphone and attenae to talk to my dead relatives."