The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner Read Free Book Online Page B

castle, if my grandmother would come flying through the water, if Second would simply pluck my brother from the sea.
    Second barked, and then barked again, and started swimming in a tight circle around the buoy. He kept ducking his head under the surface. I lined up the boat, one cold hand on the throttle, one cold hand on the wheel—I wasn’t wearing mittens, for some reason—and I heard Daddy yell, “Stop her!” He meant for me just to throw the throttle into neutral, but I panicked and killed the motor, killed all the power on the boat, killed everything.
    Daddy gaffed the rope neatly and slapped it into the hydraulic, but nothing happened. When I killed the motor I’d cut the power to the hydraulic; the rope hung tight, not moving, doing nothing to take Scotty from the depths.
    How long did it take before Daddy pulled the rope back and started hauling it by hand? Half a second? One second? Two?
    Second kept barking. With the motor cut, the sound of the dog and Daddy’s breath competed with the waves and the few gulls overhead.
    Maybe a minute had passed since the dog had knocked Scotty into the traps. I left the wheel and hurried to start stacking the wet warp—the rope—on the deck behind Daddy, though I had no hope of keeping up and no real sense of why such a thing would be useful. We were over the shelf, and the water wasn’t that deep,three, four fathoms, which was the only reason why the buoy, with all that fouled line, still shone on the surface. By the time I got behind Daddy, he’d already pulled twenty feet of warp from the water, the first lobster pot breaking the surface. I gasped at the sight of my brother’s body: he was pressed tight against the trap, a loop of warp around his neck, the rest of the line tangled against his nine-year-old body and the trap, his arms splayed out. When he broke the surface, he wasn’t breathing and his skin had turned pale and headed to blue, though I didn’t know if it was from the cold or the lack of air.
    I couldn’t look at my brother, and I couldn’t look away, but there was something to the side of him that caught my attention: a small movement among all of the other movements of the waves and the water. I leaned over the rail and extended my hand toward the water, the sun and the reflection of my fingertips in the foam bouncing back to me, and for an instant I thought it was not a reflection, but some other creature reaching from the water to grasp at my hand, to pull me under, like in Brumfitt’s painting. And then that instant was broken by Daddy’s voice.
    “Call it in, Cordelia,” Daddy said.
    I looked again at the water, but it was just my hand and my own reflection. I straightened up and watched as Daddy reached over and grabbed the trap and hauled it—and my brother’s body—up from the ocean. At the time I could have lifted neither my brother nor a wet wooden trap. The trap could have easily hit eighty or ninety pounds, more with the second trap trailing behind, and Scotty must have weighed another eighty or ninety. But my father made it look effortless.
    I ran to the radio and I remember that there was the sound of someone laughing and then a moment of static, a transmission cut off, before I grabbed the mic and started asking for help. It was George Sweeney who answered, and the few times he’s talked about it with me he said that it still gives him the creeps how calm I sounded when my voice came across the radio and said, “We need help, George. We need help. Scotty’s dead. Scotty’s dead.”

E xcept he wasn’t. By the time I clipped the radio back to its mount, Daddy had gotten Scotty untangled from the trap, had pounded his back, had blown air into his lungs, and Scotty was puking water and coughing and shuddering, his lips blue and chattering, a red, raw line marking where the rope had pulled tight against his throat.
    It only took George Sweeney five minutes to pull alongside, John O’Connor with him for the ride. Daddy had