The Sea Beach Line. Ben Nadler

The Sea Beach Line - Ben Nadler


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did you get them?”

      “Butcher shop. Where else? It’s good crab bait. Cheap meat. Crabs are bottom feeders. They love this kind of meat.” He scored the necks with his pocketknife, so that the yellow skin separated and the pink flesh was exposed.

      “Do people eat them?”

      “Sure, if they’re hungry. You eat chicken, don’t you?”

      “Yeah, chicken wings. Not chicken necks. People cook them up like chicken wings?”

      “No, there’s not so much meat for that. It’s more for a stew. Listen, trust me, if you’re hungry enough, you’d be happy to eat chicken-neck stew. Maybe today you’ll find this out, if we don’t catch any crabs.” My face must have betrayed my fear, because Alojzy let out a deep laugh.

      He tied the baskets onto some braided lines, and tied the other ends of the line onto the railing of the pier. The rail was full of grooves worn by similar lines, which made me think that what we were doing wasn’t so strange.

      Alojzy showed me how to toss the trap out over the water like a Frisbee. The baskets opened fully in the air, then fell straight into the water. We gave it a couple minutes to give the crabs time to smell the bait. When we finally pulled the baskets up, I was sure that I felt the weight of crabs in mine, but as soon as the basket rose into the air, I realized it had just been the pressure of the water.

      We threw the baskets back in. In the distance was a big boat, stacked high with different-colored shipping containers. Beyond that, I could make out a distant coastline.

      “What’s that out there?”

      “There? A boat.”

      “No, not that, the land.” I could make out a mass in the distance. “Is that New Jersey?”

      “No. Staten Island. Still New York City.”

      “Oh. So can you swim there?”

      “Me? Sure I can.”

      We pulled the traps in again, and to my delight a crab was in one of them. I hadn’t actually believed that we would catch anything. It was a terrible thing we caught, with wart-like growths and splotches of mud across its uneven shell.

      “Look! Dad! I caught one!” I usually referred to him as “Alojzy,” or “my father,” but when I was speaking to him the word “Dad” came smoothly and affectionately from my lips.

      “Yeah, so I see. Or maybe it caught you? But it’s just a spider crab. No good for eating.” He took the trap from me and turned it upside down, shaking it until the crab fell back into the ocean. I felt a little cheated of my catch, but at the same time was happy to see the thing gone.

      Next throw, we pulled up a couple spider crabs each. Alojzy dumped them on the pier and kicked them hard, so that they skidded across to the other side. He walked over and kicked them again, booting them far out into the water. I understood why he did it. They were ugly, and deserved to be kicked.

      “We don’t want them on same side as us,” he told me. “They’ll keep coming back now that they know about the bait.”

      We moved farther out on the pier, and our luck changed. My father pulled in two rock crabs. They were about the same size as the smaller of the spider crabs but had smoother backs and looked altogether more sanitary. After that, we started pulling them in left and right.

      “This is the spot,” my father said. We threw back four because they were too small, and one because it was pregnant. You could see its bloated egg sac hanging from its underside. In the end, we came away with thirteen crabs, five of which I had hauled in myself. Not bad.

      My father had been sipping from his thermos all morning, so he needed to take a piss in the restroom on the boardwalk before we headed out. He left me to watch our crabs. Now that we had moved farther out on the pier, we were close to the old men who had been fishing when we arrived. Two of them sat across the pier from me on plastic crates, and passed a small bottle of something purplish back and forth. Their long fishing poles were propped up against the railing. I wondered how they would know if there were a fish on the line. One of the men caught me watching. He gave me what would have been a toothy grin if he’d had any teeth, and raised his bottle in a mocking toast. A lengthy filet knife was tucked in his belt. It looked like a fearsome dagger that could cut me wide-open. I was scared, but then I remembered that my father would be coming back any moment.

      On the ride back to his apartment, I sat with the Styrofoam container on my lap. I couldn’t believe that I had a box full of wild sea creatures with me on the train, and I kept lifting the lid to look at them, until my father told me to stop.

      When we got home, he took the cooler from me and dumped the crabs into his empty bathtub. A few of them landed on their backs. Alojzy found a flathead screwdriver on the windowsill, and flipped them right side up. A few more adventurous crabs scuttled across the floor of the bathtub. The rest sat where they landed, flicking their little mouths and occasionally flexing their pinchers. One didn’t seem to be moving at all. My father jabbed it with the screwdriver. Its little mouth moved, and some bubbles flitted through the little bit of stagnant water pooled in the bathtub. They were alive. Life was the opposite of death. That they were really alive meant that we were really going to make them dead. A stream of liquid trailed behind one of the scuttlers.

      “What’s that?” I asked.

      “It’s shit. You don’t know shit when you see it? That’s something you’re going to have to learn, you want to get by in this world.”

      Alojzy turned on the faucet, washing the shit and sand down the drain. When they were clean, he grabbed them one by one by the back legs and tossed them into a paper grocery bag. We went into the kitchen, where he put the bag into the freezer.

      Alojzy put his one pot on the stove, and twisted together a long tinfoil spiral.

      “What’s that?”

      “A rack. To hold the crabs.”

      He cracked a twenty-four-ounce beer from the fridge, took a good long swig, then poured some into the pot.

      “Why did you pour that in there?” I asked.

      “We’re going to steam the crabs in the lager.” Lager meant beer? Would I get drunk from eating beer crabs?

      “I’m just a kid, I can’t have beer.”

      “Feh. When I was your age, already I was drinking beer. That’s the way in Poland.” I tried to picture him at my age, and saw a tough little boy with scars, stubble, and gold chains drinking beer. “Besides, the alcohol boils off.”

      “Oh. So can I have a sip of the beer?” I held my hand out for the can.

      “No.” He took a swig.

      He took the bag of crabs out of the freezer, and dumped them into the pot. I peeked in. They weren’t moving.

      “Are they dead?” I asked nervously. Had I helped kill something without even realizing it?

      “No, no. You can’t cook dead crab. Bacterias. They are just stunned, slowed down from the freezing.”

      “So we’re going to eat them alive?”

      “No, of course not. They will die in the steam.”

      “I don’t think I want to eat a crab.”

      “What? We go to the trouble of catching nice crabs all morning, and you don’t even want to eat them?”

      “I don’t . . . I don’t think so.” I had been interested in the crabs as bounty, but the idea of eating whatever was inside these rough shells was physically repellent to me.

      “Look at the rich American boy, so soft, so picky. So pachech.” At home, there were no foreign words in conversation, only English. When Alojzy spoke I always understood what he meant, even if I couldn’t always define the words or their language of origin. “Maybe


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