An Incident at Whale Bay
By Jordan Hartt
she stands by the restaurant window and watches the rain oceanwater lifted from the gray roiling ocean drifts as wind-carved islands, thick droplets the size of ants fall toward whale bay: cranberry-sized, needle-sized rain raining onto fishing buoys, rusted chains, fir trees, snags, a bare flagpole rattling in the rainy winter wind, onto the rocks and shells and the houses and cabins by candlelight, they eat buttered snow crabs hardshelled bodies the color of sunset, the suck of sweet worms and mollusks: she’s lifted away by net his pickup broken down on the side of the highway: rain hard in the firs: on the wet highway: on the roof of his pickup lá:yelhp bodies: the swell of light into needles and bubbling as sap: gone, the sweet bodytaste of sunlight but the tight earthgrip on roots remains rain on the roof, she closes the restaurant too heavy to remain aloft the long fall into ponds, onto trailer rooves, traffic lights, cattails, a broken-down pickup parked alongside the highway by candlelight they’ll eat the white flesh of snow crabs, garlic butter, bread tribes of snow crabs lifted and set down by the tides: she breaks open the shell of a snail and scavenges delicious snail flesh he sits in the cab of his pickup: passing cars, trucks grayed in the rain, rain metallic on the roof –i’ll stop the next one, he promises his gearshift, blowing into his cold hands rain falling into the back of a broken-down pickup night, she locks the restaurant door with rainwet keys and checks again to make sure the bank bag’s tucked under her arm rain falling on the rooves of restaurants, the gallery, dave and alice’s tiny hardware store, and down the gravel road leading the auto-body shop, its cars and trucks with their invisible windshields and the piles of black tires the empty highway, her body broken in the rain: he sits in the pickup and counts the cash from her bank bag: one thousand, two hundred forty-five dollars in worn bills and coins: he throws the useless credit-card receipts onto the highway where they wetten and gray in the rain rain falling on all of whale bay, the wide dark empty bay dotted with white boats, the houses of whale bay lit up on the hillsides or smoky dark deep in the firs and cedars or on nelson point, the old fisherman’s cabins now renovated waiting for her shift to be done at the restaurant, floating on pot smoke and drinking meaty red wine, he watches the snow crabs boil on the stove: boiling water looks the same as a pond in a rainstorm, he thinks: it looks cold and metallic: you can’t see its bite, but you know it’s there snow crab the color of buoys: she lays her eggs in the warm spring ocean water, looking like pebbles: the tidal tug of the saltwater roof above her: she feels herself all around herself, lives that will soon not be hers on her way into whale bay to start her shift, she pulls her car to the side of the bluff: standing in the bright cold sun, she looks down at the heavy harbor seals basking fat and gray, like driftwood cedar bodies rising and falling in the mountains of the ocean cold sunny rite aid parking lot: he sells chopped cedar from the back of his pickup: weather coming in off the coast, he sees: he thinks about his screeching fan belt, starting to sound like the call of a barn owl: no one buying firewood these days blue smoke in the forest, sawdust raining onto his boots, the stihl roar candleflicker: snow crabs, pasta, bread, garlic butter cold on the table, white wine warm and it’s near midnight, she should be home by now: he calls again: straight to voicemail: he’s sipping from tepid water now, not the wine: rain slides whitely down the windows: he thinks, at midnight i’ll call the police water falling onto land her car now parked in a strand of rain-grayed cottonwoods, his license plates on her car, the seagull motel shining like an egg in the rain: a hot shower, bed: he counts the bills again, dry as cedar bark, saliva filling his throat like the onrush of high tide their mother long-since gone, the snow crabs emerge in the spring warmth amidst phytoplankton bloom: surrounded by easy food: this is life! life never to be this easy again: they drift in the currents and scoop the green wanderers easily into their mouths she tucks bills into the bank bag: she zips and locks it carefully and leaves the restaurant for the rain: candles, snow crabs, and wine flickering in her mind rain falling onto whale bay: the roads black and blue in the rain, her body, limp in a strand of cottonwoods shining gray
Jordan Hartt is a writer based on Kaua’i, Las Vegas and the Pacific Northwest. Work has appeared in about fifty literary magazines and journals.