Saundra Mitchell: Mistwalker

“I did it, all right?” I faced Ms. Park, clutching the edge of the sink behind me. “He kept dropping his gear on ours, and nobody’d do anything about it. He’s not even from here. What’s he doing fishing our waters?”

Ms. Park opened one of her folders. “Start at the beginning.”

“You already got the beginning,” I said.

I closed my eyes and listened to the sea in my memories. That night was so clear, I felt it on my skin. Cool wind and hot blood and the way my world ended in slow motion.

I didn’t know it was ending, not at first. My laughter echoed across the deck of the Jenn-a-Lo, a little eerie and removed. A few minutes before, the night was bright and clear—a black sky spattered with stars, hung with a fat, silver moon.

But pearly silk fog suddenly blotted out the sky, the shore. I couldn’t hardly see Levi in the wheelhouse, and he was three steps away. No one else could have seen us in the swirling haze, and that was good.

“How many are we going to do?” Levi asked. The question floated out to me, disembodied.

“All of them,” I said.

I leaned on the rail. Dark waters stretched out all around me. They murmured against the side of the boat, sea whispers that lulled me to sleep at night and called me to fish in the morning. They taunted me when I was stuck in school. Better than anywhere in town, I could see the harbor from school.

One day, Daddy was gonna retire. I’d be captain then. And my kids or Levi’s, they’d take up the stern. We’d been fishing in the shadow of Jackson’s Rock for three hundred years. If I’d had my way, it woulda been three hundred more.

And that’s why Levi and I snuck out in the middle of the night. It’s why we stole the keys from Dad’s pocket and slipped away from the wharf without a word to anybody.

Wielding the long, hooked gaff, I waited for the Jenn-a-Lo to glide up to the next green and blue buoy. I snagged it with the hook, and with a quick twist, I pulled it into the boat.

I wrapped the buoy end of the rope into the block, then wound it into the hauler. The whole time, I hummed the same note the hydraulics did, and watched as the lobster pot rose to the surface. Two fat lobsters waved their claws from behind wire mesh.

Sea spray stung my face; when I breathed, I tasted salt water and southwestern wind, and it was delicious. Trading the gaff for my knife, I cut the line between the buoy and the trap, then threw everything back in the water.

The lobsters would slip free on their own, but the traps would be lost, and that was the point. That’s what this bastard from Daggett’s Walk got for dropping trawls in Broken Tooth waters.

As the pot disappeared beneath the waves, I punched the air, burning on adrenaline. “Try hauling that!” I shouted.

Levi sped the engine and said, fondly, “Shut it.”

“Your face!”

With that, Levi laughed too. “I refuse to upgrade to ‘your mama’s face . ’”

“No wonder you’re her favorite.” I grabbed the gaff and leaned over the side again. The Jenn-a-Lo cut through the night, steady and sure, toward the next pair of pots.

It should have been hard to locate every line dropped by another lobsterman. After all, part of the captain’s job was plotting his own lines into the GPS so he could find them again later. And part of legacy fishing was having your own waters. Your own secret places, where nobody fished but you.

But the interloper had found every red-striped Dixon buoy and dropped his gear right next to them.

The first time it happened, Dad was willing to call it an accident. Piss-poor fishing by a piss-poor fisherman, he figured.

We dragged his traps away from ours. That knotted up his traps underwater and left him a mess to clean up. It should have sent a message. And since we had plenty of water left in the season, we moved our traps closer to Jackson’s Rock.

Not two days later, green and blue buoys bloomed beside our trawls again.

This guy wasn’t just sneaking into waters that didn’t belong to him. He was outright stealing our catch and something had to be done.

Dad asked around and finally figured out it was Jackie Ouelette’s cousin doing it. Carrying a six-pack and his calm, Daddy went up the hill to Jackie’s place to talk to her about it.

Terry Coyne was there, and instead of talking, they had words. Coyne mentioned he was a boxer; Daddy pointed out he had a shotgun. Jackie got between them and sent my dad on home.

Not surprisingly, that little talk didn’t fix anything. The next time Coyne’s traps showed up on ours, Dad reported it to the Zone Council. He made sure everybody at the co-op knew where Coyne’s lobster was coming from. They refused to buy his catch, but other than that?

Nothing.

Nothing happened, nothing stopped him. It added an extra hour to his day to sail to the next co-op, and they didn’t give a damn where the lobster came from. Back in Broken Tooth, we were hurting, and nobody wanted to do anything about it.

So I bribed Levi to pilot the boat while I cut the lines on Coyne’s gear. Levi would have been happier at home drawing manga or sitting on the roof with Seth and Nick, talking about anime. He went along because I was his big sister. Because I asked him to. Because he liked being out at all hours of the night.

But for me, it was payback, straight up. If nobody wanted to help, I’d help myself.

The ocean agreed with me; the sea was on my side. It was smooth as glass that night. The fog wrapped around me; it felt like a kiss. Pulling twenty of Terry Coyne’s traps, I cut off every one and laughed the whole way.

Levi and I slid up to our slip at the wharf, still smiling. Me more than him, but it was one of those things. The thrill of getting away with something together. He hopped off the deck first and held his hand out for mine.

It never crossed my mind that Coyne might be out on the water too. He must have cut his engine the same time we did, so we didn’t hear him approach.

“Hey, Dixon,” he shouted.

We both turned, just in time for Coyne to appear in the mist. Just in time to see the gun, but not fast enough to do anything about it.

He fired twice.

It sounded like a wire snapping, hollow and high-pitched. It echoed forever, ebbing into the distance. I understood what happened, but I didn’t know it. Not until Levi stumbled back onto the boat and fell into me.

Black blood spread on the front of Levi’s shirt. And then it started spitting. His air poured out through his chest instead of his throat. My body moved on its own because I wasn’t thinking.

Silence swallowed me. I snapped the tab on our EPIRB, our emergency beacon. The radio inside it crackled to life, sending a mayday to the Coast Guard. And because we were supposed to use it out at sea, a strobe burst to life on top of it.

Blinded, I sank to the deck and clapped a hand over the hole in Levi’s chest. Heat spilled from it. Dark foam bubbled between my fingers. In my shock, I thought I saw his soul slipping out, a grey ghost that lingered near his chest.

But it was cold that night. It was just frost forming on the heat of his blood, the same way my breath hung in the air. Above us, the rescue beacon pulsed, lightning that bounced off the fog in eerie patterns.

“Coast Guard’s coming,” I told Levi.

The last thing Levi ever said was, “’Kay.”

I kept thinking, Too bad Dad doesn’t smoke anymore, because every time he watched Platoon, he’d tell us that the plastic wrap on a pack of cigs could close up a bullet hole. Slap it on, good as new. It was stupid trivia. Who even knew if it was true?

But that’s what I was thinking while I tried to hold in my brother’s last breath .