Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

When she hears the 4Runner coming up the drive the next day, she pulls on her jeans, threads the knife onto the belt, slips into a T-shirt and flannel. Then she folds up her blankets and sets them by the hearthstones and opens the door. It is Jacob, without Imogen this time. Standing on the porch, he looks past her, and she watches him take in the scrubbed floorboards and clean counters, the scoured fireplace, frying pans hanging on hooks along the wall in the kitchen. The living room smells of powder solvent and oil.

He says, “I like the place. Spare.”

“It’s not spare,” she says.

“All right,” he says, “a little minimalist.”

“This is just how the living room is,” she says.

“All right,” he says, “I like it.”

“You should.”

“Where’s Captain Ahab?”

“Out.”

He lifts a paper grocery bag, rolled down at the top, and says, “My parents think I’m at Brett’s. Brett is at his dad’s in Modesto. I brought picnic things.”

“You ever have eel?”

“I didn’t know we had eels, but now that I know, I’m wondering why we’re not eating eels right now .”

In the kitchen she takes down a skillet and a stick of butter from the warm fridge. Then she walks past him out onto the porch and picks up a can of lighter fluid and a bucket. They go down the hill together beside a deep-cut seam in the grass running with clear water, overhung with currants and thimbleberries. Frogs leap from the grass to the water. They walk through a stand of alders and Jacob reaches up to capture an alder leaf in his fingers and his shirt rises and shows his tawny stomach. Inside the crests of his hip bones, two alluvial hollows, the top of a trim and boyish V going down into his pants. These hollows fill her with excruciating want, a sensation of almost happening, like stepping down from one stair to the next. For a moment she cannot look away.

They duck through the barbwire fence, cross the highway, and climb down to Buckhorn Beach, a broad crescent of black shingle and white foam, blue-stone causeways diked with quartz, green waves among gardens of the large, round cobbles. Buckhorn Island sits a hundred feet from the tide line, out between the two hooks of land that form the cove, and the backwash of the retreating waves funnels through the island’s cave and there meets the incoming set, booming the island like a drum, lofting slurries of white water through the blowhole, hanging foam into the island’s pines, the water slapping down onto the rock. On the southern arm of the cove, there is a redwood mansion and a gardener going back and forth with a lawn mower. These would be Turtle’s closest neighbors, within a fifteen-minute walk of her house. She’s never seen them. The sky is blustery. Beyond the safety of the cove, the surf breaks white on the bare, rocky islands that litter the coast here.

They set their picnic bag behind a driftwood log and Jacob takes off his shoes and rolls up his pants and carries the bucket out to the rocks. When the waves break against the island, the water surges into the tide pools, rises up, and retreats. The tide is not low enough for good tide pooling. Whenever they lift a stone up, the eels careen through channels, pools, fields of sea grass, Turtle and Jacob plunging their hands into the turban-snail-filled bottle necks. When Jacob pulls his first eel out, its head pushing from between his fingers, jaw open, it slithers free of his right hand and he catches it with the left and it slithers from his fist and is gone, winding madly across the rock, Jacob lunging after it, and then the creature is under the next stone. He braces his shoulder to it, and Turtle helps him. They heave the stone aside and the placid pool below is split by ripples as eels flee in every direction, Turtle lifting them by handfuls into the bucket and Jacob trapping one in a dead end. It is an oily-black monster, twenty inches long, thick as a garden hose. He lifts it out of the pool and it squirts out of his fist and he goes hard down on his knees, lunging, lifting it and again losing it. The creature flashes once across the slick blue rock and is gone beneath a wine barrel–sized stone. Jacob puts a shoulder to the stone, but cannot move it.

The eels are black with kelp-brown tiger stripes and doglike faces, jutting jaws. Turtle already has a dozen in the bucket. She and Jacob find iridescent-green centipedes, horned sea lemons with lacy gills unfurled, porcelain incrustations of spiral tube worms. They shift more cobbles. Sometimes, the water beneath will be still, the snails clattering across the mother-of-pearl carpets, the hermit crabs lifting their blue-pink clutch of limbs back into their blue-pink turban shells, the sullen-looking clingfish suckered against the stone, stone-colored themselves. Other times, the tide pool erupts with the spiny backs of the eels. Jacob follows one down a channel, groping through the sea lettuce, trapping it against the wall and losing it, lifting it in one hand, losing it into a knee-deep pool full of urchins.

“Okay,” Turtle tells him, “you’re going to get one this time.”

“It’s like the glee grave robbers must feel, cracking open caskets to see what’s in them.”

Turtle says, “What?”

“You know, lifting aside the stones is like—it’s like opening a hatch that goes into the unknown. We could lift aside one of these rocks and find—anything.”

“What?” Turtle says. “No. You stand there, I’ll push them to you.”

“What is it like for them?”

“It’s not like anything for them,” Turtle says, “they’re eels.”

“They may not be, technically, eels.”

“They’re obviously eels.”

“That’s true.”

Jacob kneels down beside one inlet and Turtle pulls a stone aside. Beneath, the eels split in every direction and Turtle herds them, flashing, slithering, toward Jacob. They boil into his inlet, Jacob trying to block them off, and then he catches one, brings it out of the water in one hand, its head lashing. Then, with a sucking gurgle, all the water drains out of their tide pool.

They both look down at it, stumped. They stand, Jacob brandishing the eel, Turtle thinking, what just happened? Then a bad feeling hits her and she looks up. The ocean around them is gone. It has retreated out past the island, the kelp beds and tide pools crackling and naked. Every pothole and every stand of bowling balls issues a long slurping noise as the water is pulled back into the ocean.

Jacob says, “Turtle—!” and then he boosts up and runs. Turtle, barefoot, goes after him, slips on a wet cobble and falls onto hands and knees. Jacob stops, turns, and looks at her. He looks up. Then she is underwater, being poured across the rocky bottom. Her overwhelming feeling is of surprise. Every effort and thought shrinks to nothing. She is unlocked from her body and becomes vast, enormous, and boundless, while around her kelp strands unfurl and hang upward. Rays of light break through the surface far above. The water looks motionless, uniform and blue, but in the slanting bars of sunlight, she can see grit and kelp crabs streaming past.

Turtle’s forward rush slows. The pressure mounts in her ears. The light dims. She is held in the slackening current. She feels it begin to change as water drains from the flooded cove back out to sea. The undertow peels sand from the bottom in long, undulate ribbons. Turtle thinks, swim, you bitch. Then she is dragged backward, helpless, raked along the rocky floor, bowling balls lurching up from their sockets and bounding after her. The roar is so grindingly vast that every individual sound is lost.

She climbs desperately toward the surface, breaks among creamy heaps of white water, and takes a lungful of air. The black wall of Buckhorn Island is hard beside her, terrifyingly close, shining blue mussels knurled to the rock like so many porcelain razors. Brush that wall, she knows, and she may not make it. She cannot see Jacob anywhere, but ahead of her the beach is flooded, the driftwood thundering against the cliffs. No way he escaped. He is here somewhere, only she cannot see him. The water is still draining backward, even as more waves are pushing onto shore, so the entire cove is filled with muddled, complicated currents. It tosses and heaves like water carried in a bucket.