Of Sea and Cloud by Jon Keller Read Free Book Online

thoughts because never on dry land had he felt such a sheer urge to be with his father.
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    Later that day and ten miles offshore. Two black and red metal Coast Guard buoys rode the shoal water waves. The water shone alabaster in the slanted end of fall light. His father’s big yellow buoys lay on the waves like beacons between the metal buoys. Jonah stared at them thinking that one day soon he would not see those buoys on the water ever again and the thought made the sea seem somehow hollow. As a child before his mother’s death he’d spent days and days aboard his father’s boat with his eyes trained on the water in search of those yellow buoys. Then later when the
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was handed down from Nicolas to Bill to Jonah those yellow buoys became a sign that his father had been there and would be there again. The buoys were footprints that made the ocean familiar and knowable. Now he and Bill and Virgil would bring load after load of Nicolas’s traps ashore until all 800 of them were gone and all that would remain would be the relentlessness of wind and wave.
    Beneath the buoys spread a stone-flanked seamount broken by canyons and fissures and pits. This was the Leviathan Ground. Jonah steered for his father’s first buoy but his eye caught a flash of red that stopped him. He squinted. He waited. A wave train rose like flayed skin and when the train fell Jonah saw a red lobster buoy. His gut dropped. He watched over the sea until he saw a line of ten red buoys.
    Osmond’s here, Jonah whispered. He couldn’t quite believe his own eyes but without thought he spun his boat and gaffed Osmond’s first buoy and looped the rope over the stainless block and around the pot hauler discs. He gripped his gaff with his right hand and operated the brass hydraulic hauler lever with his left. The boat spun in a slow circle. Rope faked at his feet.
    The buoy and rope both were clean and new and the stiff rope screeched through the pot hauler. There were two traps for the one buoy. They surfaced one by one with seven fathom of float rope between them. Jonah pulled each trap onto the rail with a full-body heave and stood between them with a hand rested on each. His boat idled. The traps were five feet long and looked like small coffins made of gray wire. They held bait bags the size of a man’s head in both ends. The bags were still full and the herring fresh and silver. The traps must have been set only the day before but already they held a few lobsters each.
    Jonah felt a nauseous stirring. His father’s body was still lost at sea and Osmond Randolph had already set traps on the Leviathan and if there is one thing a fisherman does not do it is this. He thought of calling Virgil and Bill on the radio but decided against it. He pulled a glove off and spilled his pack of cigarettes onto the bulkhead. He pulled one from the pile and twisted it in his fingers while his heart pounded.
    He ducked his head and lit the cigarette. He blew a pile of smoke out. He squinted at several boats working in the distance. What if he cut Osmond’s ropes and tossed the buoys overboard and left Osmond’s traps lost like trash on the seafloor? Then Osmond would cut Jonah’s traps off and Jonah would have to cut more of Osmond’s traps off and soon someone’s boat would sink in the middle of the night and not long afterward someone would get shot
.
    Jonah looked at the water and said, What do I do, Old Man? You tell me. He was your friend.
    But all Jonah could imagine his father doing was turning blood red in the face as he silently hurt somebody. Or sent their boat to bottom. Nicolas had been fishing the Leviathan since before Jonah was born and territory was lineage. Osmond knew that. Osmond was of the old guard so he existed by the old rules but the rules went both ways.
    Jonah walked to the stern and back then tossed the lighter on the fiberglass bulkhead and nodded to himself as