Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

He had already told the crowd of the restaurant’s snappish dying lobsters, those behemoth earwigs on steroids, and then of the busloads of senior citizens in their thin plastic bibs who came to the Steer by the Shore to devour them. They would come for dinner after gazing upon the craggy visage of the Old Man of the Mountain in nearby Franconia Notch-a curmudgeon who had since slid down the side of the cliff-someone inevitably observing that the natural granite bust indeed had a certain Daniel Webster-like resemblance from the side but from the front looked like nothing more than an outcropping of shale and rock.

“No one could cleaver a live lobster as quickly as I could,” he said now, segueing from his well-practiced Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve-Step confessional tone into what he considered his Baptist preacher’s crescendo. “That’s not hyperbole, that’s not immodesty. That’s fact. I could kill two in a minute. One night I killed sixty-four in half an hour and change-enough for the whole bus! That evening every single man and woman on the tour ordered the restaurant’s signature meal, the baked stuffed one-and-one-quarter-pound Maine lobster, and-honest to God, I am not exaggerating-I might have split even more if the restaurant’s ovens had been larger, because there were three buddies from Texas on that sightseeing jaunt with their wives, and each of them volunteered his belief that the only thing better than twenty ounces of baked stuffed Maine lobster… was forty!”

The audience laughed with him, appalled, and he shook his head now, suggesting that in hindsight he couldn’t believe what he had done. And, the truth was, he couldn’t. He remembered those evenings well, especially the nights when there would be those sightseeing tours. As soon as the bus would coast into the dirt-and-gravel parking lot, he would retrieve the wooden coop with the torpid crustaceans from the walk-in refrigerator so that the creatures were right there beside him on the floor. Then, like an automaton, he would bend over and grab one from the container that reeked of low tide and pin the writhing, asphyxiating decapod (five pairs of appendages on the thorax, a word he’d found in the entry on lobsters in the dusty encyclopedia from the Coolidge administration he’d discovered in a spare bedroom in Catherine’s mother’s house) on its back. He would uncoil the springy ribbon of tail and hold down the bulbous crusher claw with his fingers for the split second it took him to line up the cleaver on the lobster’s carapace (an unbuttoned sports jacket, he thought at the time) so that the animal’s abdomen was exposed. Then he would press the metal blade straight down as it breathed.

But not, alas, breathed its last.

The point was to get the creature into the 450-degree oven while it was still alive.

And-whether he was cooking five or six lobsters on a given night or five or six dozen-after he had sliced the animal lengthwise down to the exoskeleton, he would pack the open cavity with rouxlike gobs of Ritz cracker crumbs and margarine, sprinkle paprika on the stuffing, and slide him off the cutting board and onto a baking sheet. Rarely did the animal have an aluminum leaf to itself, usually it would be one of three or four lobsters pressed together, the claws of one beside the tail of another, Y to Y to Y. Then he would deposit the creatures into the oven on whichever rack was not at that moment occupied by swirls of sole (wrapped around ice-cream-scoop dollops of the same Ritz cracker crumb and margarine paste), slabs of bluefish, or chicken breasts buried beneath bubbling puddles of tomato sauce.

“The animal would cook for ten to twelve minutes. I presumed it finished dying within the very first, but that probably wasn’t the case,” he said, his voice softening both for effect and because he knew this was true and it disturbed him.

First it’s the whales, then it’s the dolphins. Next it will be the tuna. It’ll never stop, you know, until someone’s protecting the bloody lobsters! The words of a whaler-an otherwise charismatic old bird with a furrowed, hard-bitten face-spoken to Spencer the year before last at a gathering of the International Whaling Commission he’d attended in Japan. He remembered their discussion now, as he did often when he talked about lobsters. Well, yes, he’d told the whaler. That’s exactly the point.

In addition to being Lobster Boy-Spencer’s title was actually second chef, but the grown men who were waiters all called him Lobster Boy-he also prepared the sole and the bluefish and the chicken Parmesan at the restaurant. The first chef, a burly guy who’d cooked on an aircraft carrier before enrolling in culinary school when he was done with the navy, worked behind a grill the length of a shuffleboard court in the dining room itself, searing the steaks and the chops before any customers who wanted to watch.

When Spencer would return to his girlfriend’s mother’s house, he knew he was sweaty from his hours beside the hot ovens and from his exertions-he moved quickly and he always pressed the cleaver down hard, convinced even then that it hurt the animal less if the evisceration was fast-but he knew he smelled mostly of fish. Consequently, in late June and July and early August, when the nights were still warm, he kept a bathing suit in the car and sometimes he would detour to Echo Lake before going home. There he would dive into the water and swim along the surface until he felt free of the smell of dead lobsters and sole, and the skin on his fingers no longer had an oily film from the bluefish.

He never went skinny-dipping, even though it was dark and he was alone, because he knew the lake was filled with crayfish, and he felt awfully vulnerable among them when he was naked. Most weren’t even as big as his thumb and he didn’t believe they would try to exact revenge for the way he slaughtered so many of their saltwater genus kin, but the idea had crossed his mind and so he always wore a suit-just in case.

He didn’t tell his audience this part of his story. But even at the podium he recalled those swims vividly.

“I must admit, at nineteen I took no small amount of pride in my abilities as second chef, and I understood that Lobster Boy was a compliment of sorts,” he continued. “No one killed lobsters with my supernatural speed, and speed mattered greatly to the waiters-and, yes, to the diners-at the Steer by the Shore.”

The fact was that Spencer took pride in most of what he did, even then, whether it was cranking out a five-page essay on Gogol at the last minute-usually between 6 a.m. and the start of class at 9:10-playing pickup basketball at the gym his first spring semester, or butchering live lobsters in the summer that followed. He knew he was intolerant of ineptitude, and he understood that as he grew further into adulthood he would be the sort of person who was easily annoyed by incompetence. He sensed this both because he was impatient and because he viewed his impatience as a virtue. Serene people annoyed him.

“At the end of the summer,” he said, lowering his voice once more as he prepared to build toward the particular moment in his life that marked the turning point for the sinner-the carnivore!-that he knew he once was, “I took the bus from New Hampshire to the Port Authority in Manhattan. I lugged my suitcase across town to Grand Central in sweltering, Bombay-like late August heat. At nineteen, it never crossed my mind to take a cab, and the only subways I could find then were those that followed the island’s avenues north and south. I met my father at the platform where the 5:57 to Scarsdale was waiting.”

By design Spencer did not add that once he and his father had boarded the train, he asked to see pictures of the new house. While Spencer had been having sex with his girlfriend in northern New Hampshire and scuppering lobsters, his parents had decided to move. Again.