Geoff Cooper: Shades

The surf droned. The gulls continued screeching. Danny watched the frenzied birds. He noticed they were hovering over one particular section of the water. When he saw why, he almost wrecked the bike.

“Holy shit!”

He hit the brake. Gravel and dust plumed from the Schwinn’s back tire. The insects in the trees lining the path fell silent. Nature held its breath. Even the gulls suddenly seemed quiet. The only sounds were the waves lapping against the stony beach and the sharp clicking of crab shells.

Danny gaped. He’d never seen so many crabs in one place. Not in the tanks at the aquarium, or the seafood restaurants his father used to take him to.

Blinding flashes of sunlight gleamed off their shells as they jostled each other, a huge pile of scurrying segmented legs and clacking claws five feet out into the shallow water. Hundreds of them, right there for the picking. Danny’s heart beat faster. If he was quick enough, he could fill the bucket, pedal like mad up to Haverstraw, get another bucket there, and come back to grab the remainder.

Jackpot.

His salvation, the YZ-125, was within reach. Right here, right now . He could drive it home today. Home? Why bother driving there? With the dirt bike, he could go anywhere . He could be in Jersey in less than half an hour if he took the service road by the train tracks—or so people said. He’d never been down that far himself.

He dismounted the Schwinn and hurried over to the skittering pile. As he approached, Danny realized the tide would come in by the time he rode to Haverstraw and back. If that happened, the crabs would be gone. He needed to get all that he could now, but he had only the single bucket and it wasn’t large enough. He sure wasn’t going to carry an armload of live, angry blue crabs to Haverstraw.

Shit.

He needed a bigger bucket. Or a cooler. Or a backhoe, freight train, tractor trailer. Danny looked around the shore and saw broken glass, cigarette butts, a discarded condom—but nothing useful.

Shit!

Further up the bike path was a small picnic area with unkempt grass around the picnic table and a stone barbeque. The garbage can overflowed with beer bottles, paper plates, and hot dog package wrappers, but he could dump all that and wash the stink out in the river. It would be a bitch dragging the can all the way up to Haverstraw once it was full, but he figured he could manage, if it brought him closer to his dirt bike…and if it took longer than expected and he got home late, who cared? This was worth getting busted for.

Assuming he got paid before being caught.

Bees and ants swarmed the garbage can. Danny upturned it onto the grass and shooed the more persistent bees. He dragged it down toward the pile of crabs and winced. Something stank. Not just the Hudson or the garbage can. This was something else. Like something had died nearby.

Danny plucked the crabs off of each other, avoiding their snapping claws. He felt something moist and spongy on his fingertips. It repulsed him, that single touch. The stench grew stronger. He wiped his hand on his shirt and looked down at the skittering pile. The crabs were crawling on something. His vision blurred when he tried to see what it was. He let his eyes un-focus, and then focused again. Danny carefully snatched away two of the largest crabs and stared into a red mess.

The dead body had no eyes to stare back at him with—indeed, it had no face at all.

Danny didn’t scream, even when a small crab scrambled out of the corpse’s mouth and threatened him with one angrily waving claw. Instead, he stared—surprise, confusion, disbelief. A dead man, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The scavengers had picked off much of the exposed flesh. Raw, red patches had replaced hair and skin. Yellow clumps of fat waved in the shallow water. Between the mass of crabs were glimpses of bone. Danny couldn’t tear his eyes away. He could see into the throat; watched crabs pick at the inside of the chest. They jammed choice clippings of lung tissue into their tiny mouths. Others scurried under the orange jumpsuit.

Above him, the gulls began to shriek again.

He’d found a dead body.

Holy crap! His mind started catching up to the situation. Orange jumpsuit, like the kind they wore in…

Danny glanced across the river. New York’s most infamous prison stared back at him from the other side, white and foreboding and eerily silent. Sing Sing—home of Ol’ Sparky, the electric chair.

There had been an escape yesterday. It was all over the news but he’d paid more attention to the rumors at school. The escaped con, a murderer, was the brother of Mr. Bedrik, Danny’s teacher. Nobody knew how he’d gotten free. It was like he’d vanished from his cell. And the authorities couldn’t find him, either. Nobody could. Not until now. Could this be him? It had to be. How many other dead bodies in prison inmate uniforms were lying on the bank? It had to be Mr. Bedrik’s brother. But it was hard to tell. The corpse’s features looked more like strips of raw bacon than human.

Danny flinched as another crab swatted at him. He had to tell Matt, Ronnie, Chuck, and Jeremy. After they saw it, he would call the cops, but he had to show them first. Otherwise they would never believe him, think he made the whole thing up. But shit! —they were all still at school.

School! Oh, crap.

If he called the cops, he’d have to explain his truancy and what brought him to the river in the first place. If he told them he was selling crabs, they would tell his mom, and if she found out that he had almost enough money for a dirt bike, she would steal the cash and drink it all, leaving him with nothing. And he’d get in trouble for skipping school, too.

In Jeremy’s immortal words, fuck that noise.

So he had two choices. He could either wait until the guys got out of school to show them, or get the hell out of here with his crabs and pretend like it never happened. Maybe the corpse would be safe until then. If so, then he could report the discovery and get the credit. Be on the nightly news. Be the talk of school the next day. Maybe there was a reward, too. The guy was an escaped convict, after all.

If he left now, someone else might find the body and get all the credit.

There had to be a way to sell the crabs, take credit for discovering the body, show his friends before the cops, and not get busted for skipping school again. Before he could formulate a plan, footsteps approached him from behind.

Danny turned. The weird Russian guy, Gustav, glided toward him. Gustav was Brackard’s Point’s resident oddity. Jeremy said that Gustav was queer, but Jeremy said a lot of things—always talking shit. Gustav’s age was undetermined—somewhere between his mid-forties and late sixties. A thick, long beard obscured much of his face. He wore a weather-beaten coat and baggy, threadbare jeans with a hole in one knee. His dirty work boots echoed with each step. One hand was in his coat pocket. The other clutched a cigarette butt tied to a piece of string. The old man held the string out in front of him as he walked. The butt spun like a miniature propeller.

As Gustav approached, the blue crabs scattered, abandoning their feast. The gulls above continued to circle and shriek.

Danny’s legs felt frozen, his mind numb.

Gustav drew closer, and the cigarette butt spun towards Danny. The concentric circles grew smaller. Then it stopped swinging altogether. Gustav looked up, saw Danny standing over the dead body and the fleeing crabs, and stopped.

I am so busted.

The old Russian blinked at him, inquisitive.

Danny offered a smile. “Hi…. Umm… Look what I found.”

The smile was not returned. Saying nothing, Gustav stuffed the string and the cigarette butt in his pocket, and scratched his bearded chin. He gave the body a cursory glance as if it were no more than litter on the freeway, but studied Danny intently. At first, he appeared confused. As the moments passed, he seemed angry, amused, annoyed, and saddened. Finally, he spoke.