Half the time I don’t know where you’re going.”
Quinn offered the flashlight with a note of impatience in his voice. “I want to get out there while the tide is still slack. You take the light. I don’t need it anymore.”
“I don’t need it, either.”
“Take it.”
“I don’t want it. I just want to sit here a while.”
Quinn ignored Rhys’ request and added, “If you don’t want to use the light, just stay behind me and watch where you’re going. It’s getting light, but I don’t want to carry you back with a broken leg.”
Rhys didn’t get up. “Why are we out here in the dark anyway? We can catch crabs anytime.”
“I already told you, pea brain. You catch crabs on an incoming tide just after it turns; tide brings in food, but crabs don’t eat when it starts rippin. They hunker down in the rocks.”
“Smells like the tide’s turning right here and I’m cold. We’re supposed to be hunkered down in bed like normal kids.”
“Normal kids don’t surf. You want to surf?”
Rhys considered the sound and the dark water. “Not out there.”
Quinn’s irritation increased with Rhys’ stubborn refusal to accept his authority. “You want a surfboard; you sell crabs to the Crab Pot. You want to catch crabs; you take the weather.”
Rhys started untying his trap. “You sound like dad. I’m for fishing here.”
“Crabbing dill weed. We need to go all the way to the point.”
“You just want to go out that far so you can see them better. There’s plenty of crabs right here. I’m tired of lugging this crap.”
Quinn began walking. “Fine, you stay. I’m going out where I can catch crabs. I told you not to come – that this was too hard for a little kid. Just sit here for an hour till I get back and don’t fall in a hole if you try to catch up.”
“I didn’t say I was staying. I said I wanted to fish here.”
“Crab. I’ll carry your trap, but I get half of anything that comes up.”
“No way. I’m putting it in here. I’ll get the crabs out when we come back.”
The older boy stopped and looked across the channel at the junction of the north jetty and the sand spit, where headlights appeared and started a slow crawl out the access road that remained intact on the north side. “Alright, I’m waiting three minutes; then I’m leaving. Don’t slide off the rock slime and get drowned.”
Quinn watched passively as Rhys picked the remains of several fried chicken wings from a greasy fast food container at the bottom of his pack and straightened the sticks inside the trap. He baited it by suspending the bones with heavy twine in the center of the crumpled wire cage, and attached a length of clothesline, which he tested as he lowered it into the rocks below the path. Rhys descended to a large flat boulder a few feet above the high water line and dropped the trap beside him, while he secured the rope’s end loop around a sharp corner. He tossed it into a passing swell, but the wire frame remained visible, suspended a few feet below the surface.
Quinn had watched his brother’s slow process silently, but laughed cynically when he saw it wouldn’t sink and added, “You forgot to put rocks inside. It’s never going down without weight.”
Frustrated but determined, Rhys tried retrieving it for another launch, but the trap resisted. As it reached the surface, he saw clear monofilament fishnet snagged by the corners of the wire frame. Hoisting it the last four feet onto his rock ledge, his sneakers slipped on the smooth wet surface as each passing swell tugged hard at the trap, threatening to drag it and him back into the water.
When Quinn shifted his attention from the truck’s progress and looked down again, he saw his brother standing over the trap, staring at the strands of twisted net trailing off into the channel. “Three minutes are up. Five minutes are up. Let’s go. Cut that crap off your trap and let’s go.”
Rhys began pulling more net onto the rocks. “Hey Quinn, fishermen make more than crabbers, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
Rhys turned and grinned with the satisfaction that justifies stubbornness through unexpected success. “Well, you catch crabs and I’ll just sell big fresh Chinook.”
As a pile of net accumulated between the rocks, Quinn saw the dark silhouette of a heavy fish rise on the swell and fall as it passed, dragging his brother to the edge of his perch. “Jesus, Rhys, that fish is going to pull you in. Stop fighting it; just hold on. Wait till I get down there.”
Rhys sat down and braced his feet. “My fish.”
Quinn scrambled down to the ledge. “Fine, your fish. Stay down and hold on. You don’t want to try swimming with that mess wrapped around you.”
Together they dragged the salmon onto the boulder. The net had drowned it, but it was fresh from a recent death. A few yards off the rocks, they could see smaller fish suspended in barely visible filaments that rocked back and forth with the surge. Quinn inspected the salmon and calculated the extent of the treasure they had discovered. “That fish is as big as you Rhys. What do you weigh? Fifty, fifty-five? You just got like a hundred bucks. Let’s keep pulling and from now on, just so it’s fair, we share what comes up.” Rhys nodded. His treasure already exceeded anything he had imagined.
A knot of rockfish and herring came up easily, but what had been a thin streamer of net gradually thickened into a conglomeration of several nets in graduated sizes and progress stopped as more and more fine mesh tangled in the barnacles and mussels. Five yards off the rocks, the first of the floats appeared. It was ten inches wide, five inches high and black with a thin red line just above the water. It looked like a plastic bowl floating upside down.
Erratic pulses of wind whispered from the bay toward deep water, and Quinn imagined the offshore breeze arriving, building, and perfecting the waves for whoever had the guts to face them. He looked up to check the truck’s progress on the north jetty, but before his gaze had crossed the channel, hundreds of floats, extending across its entire width, diverted his attention. They receded from the rock where he and his brother sat beside their salmon, to the tip of the north jetty, now visible three hundred yards away beneath the lifting mist, like helmets of a submerged infantry. The north jetty terminus stalled and condensed one end of the column as the tide slowly rotated the expanding remainder into the channel. The erratic dotted line that marked the advancing edge led directly from Quinn’s hand past a hollow eight-foot wave that rolled like a cavernous barrel along the north jetty. Occasional puffs feathered the wave’s lip into fine white mist that trailed behind the dark green wall before it collapsed. He saw two silhouetted figures standing above the rocks waiting for a massive set to pass before they paddled out. He tried yelling and waving. Then both he and Rhys shouted together as loud as they could, but the break was two hundred yards away. Quinn knew that not much sound could penetrate a wetsuit hood. Together, they dragged the salmon and the small fish up to the path and tried yelling again. One of the surfers dove from the jetty and began to paddle.
Quinn dropped his pack. He demanded that Rhys promise not to drag anymore net alone and wait on the path with the fish until he returned. He offered his knife to cut the
