“You’ll see.” One of the ropes started moving and that’s when I realized that whatever Preppy was catching, it wasn’t fish because the line didn’t just dart away like it was eaten by a fish, but rather looked like it was…walking away?
“Here,” Preppy moved me in front of him so that his chest was to my back. He held up the line in front of his body for me to take so I did, but he didn’t move away, just bent over so his chin was resting on my shoulder. “The trick is to pull it up slowly,” he said, his breath tickling my ear. I tried to concentrate but I could feel his body, his nearness. It was like a low vibration or whistle that no one else could pick up on but me and it was so close I had to bite my lip to keep myself from pushing back against him. “Slowly,” he repeated, dragging me back to the task at hand. I did as he said, crossing my hands over one another, pulling up the rope like Preppy had showed me. Preppy stepped back for a moment, appearing again by my side with the bucket. He crouched down just as a face appeared just below the surface of the water, staring back up at me.
The face of a crab.
“Now don’t move or you’ll scare him,” Preppy whispered out of the side of his mouth, still as a statue. “The second you get him above the water, that’s when you have to move him over to the bucket as fast as you can before he let’s go and drops back into the water.”
For the sake of staying still, I didn’t answer. “You can talk,” Preppy whispered, trying not to laugh.
“Oh, yeah. Got it,” I whispered. Even slower than before, I raised the rope until the crab was free of the water. I quickly whipped the rope over the bucket, but a little too eagerly because Preppy had to dodge getting hit by the crab, who released his hold on the hot dog just a tad earlier then I expected him to. Preppy set the bucket back onto the seawall and I glanced inside at the blue crab who was only a little larger than the palm of my hand. He circled the bottom of the bucket, snapping at the plastic walls with his claws.
“Wow, how did you learn to do that?” I asked, looking down at my achievement with wonderment as he snapped at the air with his claws. Preppy didn’t immediately answer, so when I looked up to the other side of the bucket I found him staring at me, his mouth partly open. “Preppy?” I asked, my voice sounding scratchy and rough.
“Oh,” he said, coming back from wherever he’d gone. “This guy King and I used to sell weed to when we were kids taught us. There was one summer we ate so much of these fuckers we had to stop when we realized we started to smell like them too,” he said with a laugh, recalling the memory.
“They’re so small,” I pointed out. “Hardly seems like enough for two growing boys.”
“It’s not. That’s why we need more,” Preppy said, yanking me by the hand back to the end of the dock. We caught seven of them before Preppy declared that was enough for our lunch. We drove to what looked like an abandoned shack in the middle of similar looking shacks in the middle of the causeway. The smell of freshly fried seafood wafted from the little building making my stomach growl. “Hungry?” Preppy asked, guiding us into the small space which only held a few mismatched tables and an old Pepsi cooler.
“Starving, you?” I asked, surprised when we didn’t take a seat. Preppy pushed passed the counter into an even tinier back room where a large man with silver hair was standing over a pot.
“Preppy, my good man, what do you have for me?” he asked, taking the bucket from Preppy’s arms.
“The gift of crabs,” Preppy announced.
The man chuckled and set the bucket on the ground next to the stove. “This might be the only time when crabs make a good gift,” he said. “You want them the usual way?”
“You got it,” Preppy said, tugging me by the hand out the back door. “Oh, and this is Dre,” he called back my last minute introduction. “That’s Billy.”
“Like Dr. Dre?” Billy asked.
“Yep, she has a sister named Snoop,” Preppy said, opening the creaking screen door. We sat on yellow chairs at the single rickety patio set that looked like it had been rotting in the sun for quite some time.
Preppy leaned in closer like he was studying me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, leaning back from his intense glare.
“Trying to figure you out.”
“Huh? Me? Why?”
Preppy pointed to my face. “You have these huge eyes and although they’re dark as hell, they’re still bright somehow. You’ve got seriously black hair, so black it’s almost blue, but your skin is only slightly tannish. What are you? Some flavor of Spanish? Oh! I got it, a little Asian? No, that’s not it. Caribbean islander, maybe? Barbados? Antigua? Narnia?”
I shook my head. “Narnia? That’s not even a real place. It’s fiction.”
“Have you ever been there?” Preppy challenged.
“No.”
“Then how can you be so sure?”
“I guess I can’t be.”
“I rest my case.”
I laughed. “Well, real or not, I’m not…Narnian. My mom’s background is English if you go way back and my dad’s side is French Canadian.”
Preppy slid his sunglasses down his nose. “So…you be a white chick then?”
“Like, I totally be a white chick.”
Preppy sighed. “Bummer. Here I thought we were all interracial and shit.”
“Disappointing, I know.”
“The struggle is real.”
After a few moments of comfortable silence, Preppy spoke first, “What are you thinking about over there, Doc? I can see your wheels turning.”
I shrugged. “You’re just always so comfortable. Around everyone. You know, when you’re not threatening me or trying to teach me a lesson or dragging me around somewhere.”
“And?” he asked, swallowing hard.
“And I was wondering how someone…in your line of work can be so relaxed all the time.”
“And what line of work is that?” Preppy asked, leaning in toward me and grinning like he was up to something.
“You know, dealing the drugs,” I said, wincing when my sentence came out as awkward as I felt.
“Well, Doc, I can tell you that, although I deal in the drugs, the reason I look so comfortable is because I am.”
“Don’t you have enemies? Business deals gone bad? I mean, you carry a gun so you have to be worried about something.”
“You’ve seen too many movies, Doc. Although sometimes I do have to use it for more than putting it to your head while I make you come,” Preppy said. I blushed. “It’s BECAUSE I carry a gun that I’m not worried.” He looked out over the water. A rusted shrimp boat was slowly pulling up to the dock. One man jumped off onto the dock, while another shouted instructions and tossed him a rope. The gentle breeze blew Preppy’s sandy-blond locks around the top of his head. He turned back to me “And you’re wrong you know.”
“About what?”