RESTING DEEP
A friend was telling me a story he had read about a father who takes his son fishing with a storm on the horizon. Immediately, I constructed an entire plot about why they were going fishing and what would happen in the story. That story, of course, went in a completely different direction—the only similarity was a fishing boat going out in a storm. Many times we are inspired by other authors. The trick is to take that inspiration and create something that is uniquely your own.
RESTING DEEP
My parents dropped me off at his house late last night.
Greaty’s house.
That’s what I call him, “Greaty”—short for Great-Grandpa. He’s the oldest in the family. He’s buried two wives, two sons, and one daughter.
His house is small: a living room, a bedroom, and a tiny kitchen. It’s really a shack in a row of other shacks, where ancient people cling to their last days.
It smells old here. It smells salty, like the sea. And Greaty’s always eating the fish he catches.
“Good to see you, Tommy,” he said to me at the door, smiling his long-toothed smile.
Whenever I see his smile, I run my tongue along my braces, feeling the crooked contour of my own teeth, wondering if one day mine will look like his, all yellow and twisted.
“Ready for a good day of fishing tomorrow?” he asked.
“Sure, I guess.”
My parents left me here to spend a night and a day. They do this every year, four times a year. It started when I was little. It had to do with my fear of water. Mom and Dad decided that the best way for me to get over it was to send me out with Greaty on his big fishing boat. Then I’d see how much fun water could be.
But it didn’t work that way.
Greaty would always tell tales of sharks and whales and mermaids who dragged fishermen down to their watery graves. Going out with him made me more afraid of the water than I had been before, so afraid that I never learned to swim. Still, I went out with him and continue to go. It’s become a family tradition. Sometimes, I’m ashamed to say, I hope for the day when Greaty joins his two wives, two sons, and one daughter so I don’t have to go out to sea with him ever again.
It is an hour before dawn now. Greaty and I always set out when everything is cold, dark, and still, and my veins feel full of ice water. I watch him as he prepares his boat. It’s an old fishing boat, its wooden hull marred with gouges from years of banging up against the dock. When a wave lifts it high against its berth, I can see the barnacles crusted on its belly. It has been years since Greaty has bothered to have them scraped off.
He calls his boat the Mariana, “named after the deepest trench in the ocean,” he once told me. “That trench is seven miles deep, and it’s where the great mysteries of the world still lie undiscovered.”
I sometimes think about the trench. I think about all the ships and planes that have fallen down there in wars. I imagine being in a ship that had seven miles to sink before hitting bottom. That’s like falling from space.
We set out, and by the time dawn arrives, we are already far from shore. I can tell that the day is not going to be a pleasant one. The sun is hidden behind clouds. There is a storm to the north, and it’s churning up the surf.
Greaty heads due north into the choppy waves. He stares at the horizon and occasionally says something to me just to let me know he hasn’t forgotten me.
“Today’s going to be an exceptional day,” he tells me. “One day in a million. I can feel it in my bones.”
I can feel it in my bones, too, but not what Greaty feels. I feel a miserable sense of dread creaking through all of my joints. Something is going to happen today—I know it, and it is not something good. I imagine giant tidal waves looming over us, swallowing us in cold waters and sending us down to the very bottom, where it’s so dark the fish don’t have eyes.
Half an hour later, the shore behind us is just a thin line of gray on the horizon. Greaty has never taken me out this far before. Never.
“Maybe we’d better stop here,” I tell him. “We’re getting kind of far from shore.”
“We’ll stop soon,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
Almost where?I wonder. But Greaty doesn’t say anything more about it. His silence is strange. I don’t know what he’s thinking—I never do.
And then something suddenly strikes me in a way that it has never struck me before—I don’t know my great-grandfather. I’ve spent days and weekends with him every few months for my entire life, but I don’t knowhim. I don’t know what he thinks and what he feels. All I know about him is the way he baits his hooks, the way he talks about fishing. I can’t get the feeling out of my head that suddenly I’m out on a boat with a stranger.
“You know how many great-grandchildren I have, Tommy?” he asks, shoving a wad of chewing tobacco into the corner of his mouth. “Twelve.”
“That’s a lot,” I say with a nervous chuckle.
“You know how many of them I take fishing with me?” He stares at me, chewing up and down, with a smile on his crooked, tobacco-filled mouth.
“Just me?”
He points his gnarled bony finger at me.
“Just you.”
He waits for me to ask the obvious question, but I don’t.
“You want to know why I take only you?” he asks. “Well, I’ll tell you. There’s your cousins, the Sloats. With all the money they’ve got, they can buy their kids anything in the world. Those kids are set for life. Then there’s your other cousins, the Tinkertons. They’ve got brains coming out of them like sweat. They’ll all amount to something. And your aunt Rebecca’s kids—they’re beautiful. All that golden hair—they’ll get by on their looks.”
“So?” I ask.
“So,” he says. “What about you?”
What about me?I take after my mother—skinny as a rail, a bit of an overbite. And I got my father’s big ears, too. Okay, so I’m not the best-looking kid. As for money, we live in a small, crummy house, and we probably won’t ever afford anything better. As for brains, I’m a poor student. Always have been.
The old man sees me mulling myself over. “Now do you know?” he asks.
I can’t look at Greaty. I can only look down, feeling inadequate and ashamed. “Because I’m ugly . . . because I’m poor . . . because I’m stupid?”
Greaty laughs at that, showing his big teeth. I never realized how far the gums had receded away from them, like a wave recedes from the shore. He should have had all his teeth pulled out and replaced by fake ones. The way they are now, they’re awful, like teeth in a skull.
“I picked you because you were the special one, Tommy,” he says. “You were the one withoutall the things the others have. To me that makes you special.”
He turns the wheel and heads toward the dark storm clouds on the horizon.
“I was like you, Tommy,” he tells me. “So you’re the one I want to take with me.”
The waves begin to get rough, rolling up and down like tall black hills and deep, dark valleys. The wind breathes past us, moaning like a living thing, and I feel seasickness begin to take hold in my gut.
Greaty must see me starting to turn green.
“How afraid of the water are you, Tommy?” he asks
“About as afraid as a person can get,” I tell him.
“You know,” he says, “the ocean’s not a bad place. When I die, I would like to die in the ocean.” He pauses. “I think I will.”
I swallow hard. I don’t like it when Greaty talks about dying. He does it every once in a while. It’s like he sees the world around him changing—the neighborhood being torn down to build condos, the marshes paved over for supermarkets. He knows that he’ll be torn off this world soon, too, so he talks about it, as if talking about it will make it easier when the time comes.
“Why are we heading into the storm?” I ask Greaty.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time.
“Don’t you worry about that,” he finall
y says coldly. “A man can catch his best fish on the edge of a storm.”
We travel twenty minutes more, and as we go I peer over the side, where I see fins—dorsal fins, sticking out of the water—and I’m terrified.
“Dolphins,” says Greaty, as if reading the fear in my face.
Sure enough, he is right. Dolphins are riding along with the boat. As I look into the distance, I see dozens of them, all running in line with us, as if it is a race. And then suddenly they stop.
I go to the stem of the boat and look behind us. The dolphins are still there, but they wait far behind. The bottle tips of their noses poke out of the water, forming a line a hundred yards away, like a barrier marking off one part of the ocean from another.
I look down at the waters we’ve come into and could swear that, as black as the waters were before, they’re even blacker now. And the smell of the sea has changed, too.
Greaty stops the boat.
“We’re here,” he tells me.
He gets out his fishing rod, and one for me. Then he pulls out bait, impaling the small feeder fish onto tiny barbed hooks.
Suddenly the boat pitches with a wave. It goes up and down like an elevator—like a wild ride at an amusement park. My stomach hangs in midair and then falls down to my toes.
The water rises around the boat, almost flowing in, but the boat rises with it.
“You know why a boat floats?” he asks me.
“Why does a boat float, Greaty?”
“Because it’s too afraid of what’s under the water,” he says, completely serious.
Greaty throws his line in, and we wait, he sitting there calmly, and I, shivering, with sweaty palms. I watch lightning strike in the far, far distance.
Greaty knows what he’s doing,I tell myself. He’s been fishing his whole life. He knows how close you can get to a storm and still be safe . . . doesn’t he?
I haven’t thrown my line in yet. It’s as if throwing a line into the water brings me closer to it, and I don’t want to be closer to it. I watch my feeder fish, sewed onto the steel hook, writhe in silent agony until it finally goes limp. Greaty watches the fish die.
“Dying is the natural course of things, you know,” he says.
“Bad thing about dying, though, is having to die alone. I don’t want to die alone.” Then he turns to me and says, “When I go, I want someone to come with me.”
He takes my line, casts it into the water, and hands me back the rod. I feel the line being pulled away from the boat as the hook sinks deeper and deeper. Lightning flashes on the distant horizon.
“The person who dies with me, though, ought to be someone I care about. Someone special,” he says.
“I gotta use the bathroom,” I tell him, even though I don’t have to. I just have to get away, as far away as I can. I have to go where I don’t see the ocean, or the storm, or Greaty.
I go down to the cabin, and there I feel something cold down on my feet. I look down and see water.
I race back up top. “Greaty,” I say. “There’s water down below! We’re leaking.”
But he isn’t bothered. He just holds his line and chews his tobacco. “Guess old Marianadecided she’s not so afraid of the ocean after all.”
“We gotta start bailing! We have to do something!”
“Don’t you worry, Tommy,” he tells me in a soft, calm voice.
“She takes on a little water now and then. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
Then Greaty’s line goes taut, and his pole begins to bend. He skillfully fights the fish on the other end, letting out some line, then pulling some in—out, in, out, in, until the fish on the other end is exhausted.
In the distance behind us, the dolphins watch.
I hear the snagged fish thump against the boat, and Greaty, his old muscles straining, reels it in.
At first I’m not sure what I’m seeing, and then it becomes clear. The thing on the line is like no fish I’ve ever laid eyes on. It is ugly and gray, covered with slime rather than scales. It has a long neck like a baby giraffe, and its head is filled with teeth. It has only one eye, in the center of its forehead—a clouded, unseeing eye.
Greaty drops the thing onto the deck, and it flops around, making an awful growling, hissing noise. Its head flies to the left and then to the right on the end of its long neck, until finally it collapses.
Greaty looks at it long and hard. Far behind us, the dolphins wait at the edge of the black waters.
“What is it, Greaty?”
“It doesn’t have a name, Tommy,” he tells me as he heads into his tackle room. “It doesn’t have a name.”
He comes out of the boat with a new fishing rod—a heavy pole, with heavy line and a hook the size of a meat hook. He digs the hook into the thing he caught and hurls it back into the ocean, letting it pull out far into the dark waters.
What could he possibly be trying to catch with something that large?
“Greaty, I want to go home now.” I can hear the distant rumble of thunder. The storm coming toward us is as black as the sea. When I look down into the cabin, the water level has risen. There is at least a foot of water down there, and the boat is leaning horribly to starboard.
“Greaty!” I scream. “Are you listening to me?”
“We’re not going home, Tommy.”
I hear what he’s saying, but I can’t believe it. “What?” I shout at him. “What did you say?”
“Don’t you see, Tommy?” he tells me. “There are places out here—wondrous places that no one has ever charted. Places deeper than the Marianas Trench! Bottomless places where creatures dwell that no man has ever seen.”
The boat pitches terribly. Water pours in from the side.
“We’re going to be part of that mystery, Tommy, you and me, together. We’re going to rest deep.”
“No!” I scream. “You can’t do this! I don’t want to die out here!”
“Tommy, you’re not doing anyone else on this earth any good,” he explains to me. “You won’t be missed by many, and even then you won’t be missed for long. I’m the only one who needs you, Tommy. So I won’t be alone.”
“I won’t do it!”
Greaty laughs. “Well, seeing as how the boat is sinking and a storm’s coming, it doesn’t look like you have much of a choice. Not unless you can walk on water.”
A wave lifts the boat high and water pours in, filling the cabin. And then something tugs on Greaty’s line so hard that it pulls the rod right out of his hand. It disappears into the water.
“I think it’s time,” he says.
I scramble into the flooding cabin and find a life jacket. I put it on, as if it can really help me.
When I come out, the water gets calm, and I feel something scraping along the bottom of the boat—something huge.
I look up to the sky, wishing that I could sprout wings and fly away from the sea. Then something rises out of the water in front of us—a big, slimy black fin the size of a great sail, and beneath that fin, two humps on a creature’s back—a creature larger than any whale could possibly be.
“Look at that!” shouts Greaty.
The fin crosses before us, towering over our heads, and then submerges, disappearing into the black depths.
It gets very quiet. Much tooquiet. Greaty puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank you, Tommy, for coming with me.”
Somewhere below, I hear a rush of water as something coming from very, very deep forces its way toward the surface, getting closer and closer. The water around us begins to bubble and churn.
“No!” I scream, and climb up to the edge of the sinking boat.
I never thought that I would leap into the ocean by choice, but that’s exactly what I do. My feet leave the gouged old wood of the Mariana, and in a moment I am in the sea.
The water is icy cold all around me, salty and rough. I break surface and g
asp for air. My life jacket is all that keeps me from sinking into this bottomless ocean pit. A wave washes me away from the boat.
Then I hear a roar and the cracking of wood. A great gush of water catches me in the eyes, making them sting. I turn back, and see it only for an instant. Something huge, black, and covered with ooze. It has sharp teeth, no eyes, and a black forked tongue that has forced its way through the hull of the boat, searching for Greaty like a tentacle . . . and finding him. The thing crushes the entire boat in its immense jaws. Its roar is so loud, I cannot hear if Greaty is screaming.
A wave hits, and I am under the water again. When I break surface, the beast, the boat, and Greaty are gone. Only churning water and bubbles remain where they had been.
Far away, I can see the dolphins waiting at the edge of this unholy water. I move my arms and kick my legs, teaching myself to swim.
I will not join you in your bottomless grave, Greaty. I will not let you take me with you. You will be alone. And even though I am out in the middle of the ocean at the edge of a storm, I will not die this way. I will not.
Something huge and smooth brushes past my feet, but I don’t think about it. Something rough and hard scrapes against my leg, but I only look forward, staring at the dolphins lined up a hundred yards away. Those dolphins are waiting for me, I know. They will not dare come into these waters, but if I make it back to them, I know that I will be all right. They will carry me home.
And so I will ignore the horrors that swarm unseen beneath me. I will close my ears to the roars and groans from the awful deep. And I will get to the dolphins. Even if I have to walk on water.
SECURITY BLANKET
I was once at a garage sale where an old woman was selling a quilt that meant a lot to her. The quilt, she said, was full of scenes from her life. There was a little girl ice-skating, and a picture of a cabin on a lake. A lot of the squares had faces on them. When sheheld it up, it was as if the faces were all looking at me. Or maybe it was just my imagination . . .
SECURITY BLANKET
I finally snapped on the day we found the quilt.