Fire and the death of a parent. Yes. She knew.
“But there are plenty of good people left,” he continued. “That’s what I try to remind myself every day, especially when things seem dark. John, Wormy, Joe, Ritchie, Tal, George, Xenia: they understand and that’s what matters. Even if the boat sinks, I’m still out there doing good work, and that’s something even a failure can be proud of.”
She watched him shut his eyes and then reopen them.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“Where?”
“On the trip to Mexico.”
“What?” He laughed. “No!”
“Why not?”
“Oh Christ.” He leaned across her and peered mournfully inside the picnic basket. “And to think I forgot to pack the beer.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Tell me what I’m up against.”
At this, the net gave a twitch, but not one big enough to warrant attention.
“You’re not up against anything, that’s the point.” If he was annoyed with her now, he was doing a decent job hiding it, his eyes fixed on the net’s false alarms. “You’ve made yourself completely essential and I’m not sure if I like it or not.”
“Of course you like it.”
He looked insulted. But then his mouth broke open, the day’s first genuine smile lighting up his face.
“I need to pee.”
“You’re in the presence of a lady. You said so yourself.”
“I know. I always use the word pee around ladies because it’s so much more elegant than piss. Everyone knows that only horses piss.”
“I’ll wait here and pretend I’m not listening.”
He groaned and scratched his beard. “If John doesn’t write a book about you, he’s a goddamned idiot.”
He stood, climbed the slick dunes, and half disappeared behind them. She heard the intimate, expected sounds—the unzipping of a fly, the splashdown of an elevated stream—and then there was a tremor of the net that made her jump. She sprinted to the water’s edge. In the net, only a few steps from shore, was a bat ray nearly four feet long and equally as wide, thrashing and brown and cat-eyed.
“Ed!”
For the first time ever, she had called him by his given name, and the sound of it was like a gunshot. The commotion in the net mirrored the commotion at her back—the tucking, the zipping, the scrambling—and before she knew it, he was at her side, lunging for the captive, bringing it out of the water and into his arms, not in the competent way he handled most things, but with an almost vengeful, disorganized force. He looked desperately around him at the mud and the weeds, and then at her.
“The knife in the picnic basket,” he grunted. “Get it.”
She bent down and snatched up the implement. In her hand, it felt insubstantial and weightless, unlikely to survive a passage through a stick of butter, much less through living flesh. So she tossed it into the mud and withdrew her father’s penknife from the satchel. She flicked it open.
“From gills to gills, right below the jaw,” Ricketts said, unaware of the blade’s substitution. “And then stand back.”
“I’ll ruin it.”
“No, you won’t. Manuel just needs the wings.”
As if in response, the animal sucked Ricketts’s hand into its throat, its tooth plates grinding down, its mouth curled permanently upward as if smiling. Ricketts yelped and tore his fingers free. She stepped forward and paused for a second, waiting for the right opportunity, and when it arrived, there was no hesitation. It was just like the flatworms and the microscope slide: total precision, total inevitability. The flapping of the wings made it more difficult than expected, as did the puppylike softness of the ray’s skin, as did the puppylike roundness of its skull. She proceeded, however, cutting right where he had instructed, right below the jaw as if she were making a second mouth. There was a gush from the arteries, her fingers suddenly hot and wet and red. Stunned, she stepped away and let him manage the death throes on his own, the ray flapping against his chest like a big, featherless bird.
When it was all over, she wiped the blade against the eelgrass and washed her hands in the water. He lowered the ray into a patch of mud that had turned mauve with blood.
“When I die,” he said quietly, watching the animal make its final twitch, “I’m nearly certain they’ll all be waiting for me. Everything I’ve ever killed, waiting for me in one big room.”
That’s crazy, she wanted to say.
“That’s beautiful,” she said.
He picked up the dead ray as if it were a sleeping child, wrapped it in the tarp, and then placed it inside the canoe.
“Normally I use a rock,” he said, still looking at the animal. “Just a quick smack to the head. But I couldn’t find one.”
She retrieved her paddle and the picnic basket. His eyes shot over in her direction.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Packing up and going home.”
“No, you’re not.”