The North Jetty

In its entirety as it appeared in Sterncastle Publishing’s 2024 Anthology Fog and Shadows:

The North Jetty

I’m NOT telling my mom where I went. When I finally got home it was dusky-dark, and when she got so mad she shook me, the rings flew out of my hand and I saw the diamonded one land in the big rose bush, and she yelled, “Chet, just you wait ‘til your father gets home!”

All my dad said was, “Ne-ever tell a woman the truth.”

Daniel Blatt at school told me the watch I found out fishing isn’t any good. He stared at it with a magnifying glass he had in his pocket and he told me my watch had a scratch in the crystal and how Westclox isn’t made any more and how he’d take it off my hands for a dollar, even though it ran fine. I thought I knew the meaning of his two strikes and so I did. I took the dollar.

Daniel lives alone with just his mom in a house big as an aircraft carrier hanger deck. His bedroom’s twenty feet longer than mine. I guess my mom coulda kept my new sister in a shoe box in her desk at work, but she decided to quit and make our home. My dad says the fish I catch helps “make ends meet.” Daniel Blatt says fishing is stupid, that his mom just buys fish cheap at the store.

My mom gets mad alla the time. She says I wouldn’t be a mouth breather if I’d just blow my nose. She makes me carry toilet paper everywhere. She hopes I’ll change my ways, but I don’t. She oughtn’t love me. I’m disobedient. I vagabond alone to long-walk, forbidden places – like the north jetty. North jetty fish don’t get bothered like they do across the ship channel on the south jetty where people just set out their poles and then sit in their cars and swig.

Besides, the south jetty is haunted.

When I finally got home with those rings in that grey-dark, my mom yelled and shook me and where did I find what she called, “wedding rings worth a fortune!” 

But now, mom can find ‘em in the rose bush. I don’t care that much. The Lady sure didn’t either.

If I told the truth, mom’d know where I went. My dad says men drowned building the Newport jetties more than a hundred years ago – outta boulders prackley big as houses, with little dump-truck-sized rocks plugging in between – the drowned men’s forlorn bodies never ever found.

 During the big blow last winter, our lights went out so mom and me and dad huddled by the fireplace. The wind talking down our chimney – my dad said it’s the voices of the suffering world. My mom said she read that back centuries, when the jetties weren’t even finished, a girl named Lucy Blue lived in a little, stone-chimneyed house exactly where Newport’s red-roof Coast Guard station sits right now. She said, from building the south jetty, Lucy’s dad always rowed alone home through the dark. On a night of destruction, Lucy heard her father’s strong voice from out in the ship channel, calling out to be saved. But never again.

 My dad poked at the fire and said sometimes in a screamer of a night, when nobody with sense is out, but they’re crabbing a flood tide way out on the lonely end of the public fishing pier - when there’s only the wind, no other sound, no traffic up on highway 101, maybe just the clank of a loose halyard in the marina – the crabbers hear a man’s distant voice hailing across the wind in distress – always from the same direction – the south jetty. No question what they hear. My mom wanted to know why the crabbers don’t call 911.

Dad told mom, “Hon’, the saying on the docks is ‘The voice is the sound of a drowned soul, not a man.’” Mom scolded, “Oh, Hollis! You’re scaring our son.” I claimed it wasn’t so, but I stay off the south jetty.

 I don’t no more want to know the north jetty’s dangers either. Lotta black-hole space down in amongst the north jetty’s giant boulders – where I dropped my new tackle box – down a shaft fulla dead-dog stink. I was way out past the big bulge where the wild ocean jumps and roars at you. The Summer Trades were blowing outta the north like sixty. Where I was, way out near the tip of the jetty, the bar boiled waves like mountains. Right up close, I got to see one of the new, grey Coast Guard cutters leap the wild, bounding bar. I did. I saw her wet deck stand straight up, glistening in the sun like beauty.

But I was hurrying, jumping, boulder-to-boulder, to catch maybe even a Ling. And when I got into the bird poop part, I didn’t slow down like I knew better and I took a header. My box flew out of my hand. I saw the little white handle on my red box top bounce once, then dive down into what-do-you-call Pellucidar. I heard all my new gear slide, then tumble and rattle and swallow a long time before my box hit bottom. It was a shock!

 My birthday tackle box gone was worse than awful, but then I got ahold of myself and reasoned the north jetty is just heaped rocks, so I scrounged a long piece of washed-ashore crab line. I tied hand-hold knots along my worn-out line maybe every three feet with a foot-loop at the bottom. I lashed the top end of my tether to a big, barnacled timber laying up there. I sat down on the edge of the hole. If I got killed, it would be bad. I did everything I could think. To try to stop the rotten stink, I stuffed toilet-paper up my nose. With a yank, I tested my line. I crossed myself, too.  

I shoulda prayed besides. In the instant I dropped and my bare hands skidded on the rough line and burned me and I lost hold, I saw Daniel Blatt’s face laugh at me. In that falling instant, the hard crab line stinging my hands, I knew I was a fool. On my side, I smacked hard onto a big, slanted rock and slid. Grabbing at the air crazy, skidding in stink, I caught the line back. When I yanked stopped, the side of my face got licked by the half-gone dog’s tongue. All over my left hip, I felt rotten-wet dead-dog jizz ooze right though my levis. All along my left arm – my wrist alla the way to my arm pit - I was slathered in stink. I couldn’t stop it. I tried to hold back, but puke gushed out my nose. It was cruel. Daniel Blatt was right.

My problem was a lot worse though than I told you before. I remembered what if I couldn’t get my knife back? My sheath knife, my one my dad got me with the five-inch blade when I was eight. Since it scared my teacher, it lived in my tackle box now. Now, to get my birthday knife and my birthday tackle box, I had to drop straight down into kingdom come, but the only way I had was a stupid rope that laid rotting in the surf years. Lucy Blue’s dad – and me – same thing.

I gripped so hard onto that crab line it stung. My arms ached and quivered. Below me all I saw was nothing. Just silent, waiting black - like if you drug a sheet of plywood over a fresh-dug grave at the cemetery and climbed in there. It’d be black down there with the smell of being buried and you could just sit down there and think-out what must be beyond the Veil of Tears. I used to figure, doing that, I’d experience death because, I reasoned, my size, I couldn’t climb back out.

Dangling over that north jetty black was worse than a grave. I wanted to give-up. I almost chickened. I did. I thought to shin back up my rope and go home and confess.  

But I hated Daniel Blatt more. I hated he swindled me my watch. I hated when he laughed at me. If I faced death, I would know what Daniel Blatt never could. So I just spidered straight down into darkness. I did. Naked-necked, bare but a t-shirt, my foot loop probley miles down yet, I dropped off the dead-dog slope into black space. I couldn’t see anything at all. It was so empty quiet, I figured I’d at least in-advance hear whatever came for me. Careful, one knot at a time, I descended, felt like down a giant throat. From far-off somewhere – a hollow drip, drip, dripping echoed lonely. I swear it was dead men’s breath that washed over me then, chilled me shiver-cold as the ocean.

It was a shock to run out of knots. At the bitter end, standing stuck in my foot loop, I still couldn’t see the bottom. I couldn’t even see my hands. Somewhere, the slosh of hidden-far water echoed and ba-looped mournful like the great, huge north jetty was digesting. I felt so puny – like nothing but a bug. I heard before how fast shipwrecked men die floating in the ocean. I knew right then it was that same ocean-cold that slid up my own pant legs and grabbed me by my gonats.  

That’s when, below me in the dark, I heard their legs scuttle - lot of them. I knew what they were. Crabs. I knew they were hungry. They always are. They eat what’s dead. My dad says nobody in the Coast Guard ever eats crab. He says the Coast Guard looks for people’s dead bodies when they drown – and finds them, too – but usually after the crabs do.   

Right after my eyes got used to the dim, I wished I didn’t see I wasn’t alone. I stopped breathing.  Cold as I was, I could see her looking up at me, her dead arms spread wide to hug me. I could just make out my tackle box was landed smack in the Lady’s lap. That’s how I first spotted her long white dress splayed out soggy on the black, weedy rocks. I say she looked up at me, but in her white face, there weren’t eyes. My right foot crumped and painful like it was in my last chance loop, we were personal close. We were alone, the Lady and I. She was what-do-you-call - giving audience. And as my eyes got more used, I could see her reception parlor all awash, ocean water just bathing her feet. Like from the crack under a shut closet door, there was a pale fringe of green light glowing up outta the water right through her dress and proving her legs were just bones. In the ghosty light, I saw the silent forms of crabs reaching and nibbling at her toes. Her eye brows and lips gone, her blade nose was like the bendy, white part of chicken bones. That didn’t scare me though. What freaked me to shaking was her smile – fulla teeth long as fingers. 

But I wanted my tackle box!

So I did. Desperate bold, shaking from cold and fright, I dropped down outta my loop. My leg, the one crumped in the loop so long, buckled and I fell and tore the hem of her dress with my right knee, and tipped and I tried, but I couldn’t pull back short, so my lips touched her dead forehead.

 But she liked it. I couldn’t stop it and I’m not ashamed to tell, when I snatched my tackle box right off her lap and clutched it tight to my chest, I felt my hot whizz leak down my left leg and into my brogan.

She just smiled her bare, bride smile and reached out her left hand to me like a queen would, expecting me to kiss it.

I still see her alla the time nights, her fang smile shining me awake by the bright of the moon. I see her skinless left hand, the way I first spotted it – with her rings. I still feel it – her thumb with one long red finger nail left, that flopped and clung cold to the bare back of my hand when she gave me her wedding rings.

I want to tell my mom about her, but that’d be the truth.