Gianmaria Franchini

Beasts

He drives up the coast in fits, stopping at abandoned cars to search for gasoline. Before dawn, as it is now, he usually prepares to dive for abalone, a vague soul surveying the water, sliding on a wetsuit, and bellowing cries of love to the creatures beneath the sea. But today, before turning onto the beach, he drives farther than usual. It’s hard to say why, exactly. He would like, more than anything, to escape the black road hugging the coast from Point Arena to Mendocino, where imploded cabins hide behind half-dead trees and mad fog spells, and where sea cliffs hover, ready to fall, it seems, at the pull of a speargun, into the relentless, darkening waves pounding the break.   

But he can never find a way out.

Toward the pallid ocean, wind turbines on sea platforms shine in the starlight. The blades are motionless in the wind.

Up the road, there’s a motel he’s never seen before. The sign flickers on. In the back, a blue light burns. Later, they’ll probably serve breakfast to lone hunters. But they can’t take lodgers as the county breeds bandits, vigilantes, violent wanderers. Hosting strangers for the night is unthinkable, even for a fixed rate, even for the innocent. If he returns for coffee after the dive, he must watch for the Wilderness, Fish, and Game gang members, who sometimes take fingers from unlicensed foragers, and entire hands from poachers. Turning his old truck around, hearing the first faint abalone calls, he thinks about his meagre existence. In his life, everything is a mystery, as if he were creating the world anew, from the beginning all over again.

At the beach, the sea is shimmering and flat. The hushed waves lap the shore with their rain-stick caress. An old rowboat he doesn’t use bobs near a crumbling pier. Near dim tide pools, he kisses his suit, mask, fins, and gloves, and slips them on. As he squares his shoulders to scan the horizon, a cold saltwater film passes over his eyes. The abalone sing: “We offer our ear-like-shells, our jaw-locked mouths, our lathering tongues; take our mother-of-pearl, harvest our flesh, and feed your children.” Dancing lights, like the glint of knives, the mercurial iridescence of tiny fish, appear where the water darkens. He shrills a gull’s call, a curt battle cry, and walks toward the lights. When the water is shoulder-deep, he tests the mask, fingers the shell bag,  and goes under with lungs full of air, feeling the tide pool’s edge toward colder, deeper water. Every time he counts to sixty he rises to spot the shore and track the lights: There they are, oil-slick scales refracting moonlight. When he reaches them, they disappear. He checks the shore once more and dives down, counting first to ninety, then higher. Near the bottom, the calls echo, then diminish. Dark, fertile, and familiar, the abalone wait like children at the foot of a small reef. Their infantile, muted murmurs are sweeter than the purest harmony. His heart, so rarely moved, floats toward the surface. 

For many years, he hasn’t needed a knife for the harvest; the abalone come willingly. 

He repeats the dive, each time filling the bag with a few shells, which grow silent on the journey to the surface. Working through the dawn, he collects several dozen large, healthy specimens, and names each of them as a shepherd calls a beloved flock to slaughter. 

Later, near the truck, he runs waterlogged hands over the rose-colored shells, the rough outer growths, the living barnacles. They hum in his hands. When he sees Kairi, his daughter,  he will tell her he can feel them breathe, and sense their probing tongues from the outside. Entire worlds are contained in each shell. Such a pity, it always is, to pry them dead for meat and pearls. The market in Mendocino takes nothing else as the half-shells are out of fashion, and food and luxury go a long way.       

Driving toward Mendocino, he eases onto Elysian Road, turns inland, and passes isolated, improvised settlements, which, lying under thick tree cover, never see the full light of day. After the deserted school and blown-out post office, he crests a hill, cuts the engine, and rolls in silence to the house he knows so well. Wind chimes flutter in the garden. Kairi’s fish kites jump in the breeze. A dog yelps, greets him, and settles in the truck’s shadow. Everything is as he remembers, except there are two trucks in the driveway where last week there was one. His ex-wife split after the flood. He was aimless, could never provide enough, and felt guilty. She resented losing her freedom, couldn’t fill the void, and felt guilty. When she left, he had little to give except his grandmother’s old house, where she lives with Kairi now. Perhaps she has one of her hateful surviving cousins over to help with Kairi, or she’s sleeping with one hunter or another. 

Melancholy washes over him, a stinging, pleasing shower of regret. 

Soon, the sunrise stalks the treetops. Inside the house, someone turns on a light. He tiptoes across the driveway and leaves a basket of abalone on the porch. Back in the truck, he waits, then starts the engine and drives up the hill, to the coast, and south toward the motel. Before arriving, he sleeps in the truck for a haunted hour, dreaming of cities under the sea, with people chained to the bottom, anchoring strands of seaweed tall as redwood trees.

At the motel, a graying, wiry woman is serving coffee, thinking aloud, then to herself. “Burned as hell,” she says while pouring a cup. Her voice seems to surprise her: “If the burner goes this place will blow.” The sweet smell of propane wafts over the window seat, where he sits, pleased with the small change he’s made to his routine, and wonders if he should make another go with his ex. No. She hates him half the time and he isn’t much for forgiveness. Which is to say, he still loves her and Kairi very much. If he could spend the rest of his life diving for abalone and driving between their house and Mendocino he’d be alright. But this love presents a fundamental problem, an obstacle to losing himself like he wants. Nothing keeps him from driving farther north or south, to what remains of San Francisco or the no-man’s-land past Arcata. Instead, he drives in circles, stays low, and dives once or twice a week.

He hasn’t tried the coffee but the woman shuffles to his table and offers more. She lingers, pouts with her wrinkled mouth, and nods toward a pantry behind the counter. It’s obscured by busted shelves and kitchen supplies from the motel’s former life. Perhaps she needs help reaching something. He moves to rise from his seat, but she lowers her eyes and says, “No. No.” A moment later, she points the coffee pitcher, which has never left her hand, toward the pantry, and says, “See something?” Only shadow and morning light. Turning to face him, she says, “No one there.” It’s not quite a question. She cradles the pitcher in both hands. He strides over and flips on the light—just an empty pantry. “Oh,” she says. “The propane came yesterday.” Then, as if to explain, “An extra set of hands would help.” 

The front door opens, and a bell rings. The jingle is absurd, a relic from another time, when a cafe full of diners didn’t seem like a distant miracle. A man stops in the doorway. He wears a coat emblazoned with a giant white “W,” the Wilderness, Fish, and Game gang’s emblem. The “W,” as the gang is called, protects farms and wild food sources with mafia tactics: they force payouts, sell seized animals, and set vicious examples of whoever runs afoul of their laws, codes of honor opaque as the omertà. He’s seen crying farmers plead with them for their last remaining animals, and castrated corpses of permit-less hunters staked to empty cabins. Over many weeks, the birds tear them to shreds.

The man drags his feet to the center of the room. He glares at a table and angles it to face the window seat. The woman glides over and pours him coffee. He orders eggs and asks, in a hard, unyielding voice, if they’re fresh. “From my own brood,” she says, “Same as every week.” He neither speaks nor moves, and she says, “Must keep the pot warm or we’ll turn up in flames.” She scurries to the kitchen, clangs pots together, and sings while cooking. 

After pockets of silence pass between them, the man turns up his nose and says, “You have the smell of a scavenger.” 

“I’m a diver,” he says, his voice shaky.  

“And what do you dive for, coins?” The man’s hat covers his face in shadow.

“Abalone,” he says.

“You pry those clams apart but there’s hardly any meat in that business.”

“It’s all permitted.” 

“By the book,”  he says, with obvious irony.

A short while later, the woman returns with the eggs. Pleased with herself, she slings the plate onto the man’s table and blinks toward the window seat. Does she mean something? Perhaps she knows this man or has heard of his reputation from the  hunters who strive, without success, to conduct their business steps ahead of the W, their mortal antagonists. Perhaps he’s in the thrall of this morning’s dive, and she didn’t blink in his direction at all. In any case, the man could be after a poaching violation. The W typically punishes only the most reckless divers. An unspoken rule holds that the sea has natural laws distinct from the land, and out of deference to what they can’t control, the W leaves most divers alone. He doesn’t have permits, and keeps his yields small to avoid attention.

Yet this man has unsettling determination in his voice. In such cases, he’s learned it’s better to retreat into a shell of meekness and wait until danger passes, as storms batter the sea surface over a reef still as heaven. 

The woman clears her throat twice, then speaks: “As you are a chief of the Wilderness, Fish, and Game officials," she says. “I must report a sighting.” 

“I’ve seen the bottom feeder,”  the chief says,  staring at his breakfast. 

“Not the bottom feeder,” she says, “A beast.”

“What beast?” the chief says. His voice suddenly booming.

“A monster, they say, eating farm animals all around.” She clears her throat a third time.

“A goat-sucker,” he says, “a chupacabra!” He chuckles, then purs. “Hide your children!” 

“Sir, it is your duty to protect my business.”

“Children, not kitchens, are our most precious resource.”

“I feed half the coast from here to Oregon,” the woman insists.

“Hunters, mostly,” he says, smiling, toying with her. 

“It lurked in the pool all night," she says, “Couldn’t get a wink in.” 

The Chief turns errant thoughts in his head, and slides from the table. “Is it there now?”

“No, there’s something else.”

“Let’s take a look,” he says, “Slopsucker, your presence is required.”

The woman leads them to an animal pen in the back. He smells something like smoking rubber and rancid geraniums. She swings the pen door open and waits for them to look inside. There, the carcass of a half-eaten goat lies on a bed of hay. A mangled incision runs along the animal’s underside from the throat to the tail. On the still face, the white lips recede above black gums, revealing strangely human teeth. 

“Poor Philip,” she giggles. “Not a drop of blood.”

“Goats give meat and milk,” the Chief says, his voice gentle. “To lose one without offering suitable protection is a serious offense.”

“It was the beast, not me, sniffing, crouching in the pool—cross my heart and hope to die,” she says, as if explaining what she’ll serve for breakfast tomorrow. 

Earlier, the woman seemed half-mad but honest. She’s calmer now, but he wonders if she’s lost her mind completely. Coyotes do eat farm animals, but the incision looks oddly precise, and a coyote would strip the meat or drag the carcass out. Hunters sometimes use carcasses to mark their territory. And yet, why would a hunter take the blood? Perhaps it was a beast as the woman says. Or, after years of diving alone, he has lost his mind, and it’s starting to show. 

He examines the animal while the chief stands behind him. The scent of damp, rotting fur, like a rodent’s nest, makes him gag. They could bury the carcass, but the smell would draw attention. He could toss it into the sea, but it could wash up on shore. Before he suggests either option, the woman looks toward the kitchen and says, “Have to keep the burner on.” After a moment, they look at each other, at the carcass, and at each other again. “Burn it,” the Chief says, “and forget this horror.” Then, perfectly reasonable, “We don’t want the beast to return.” The woman agrees as if it were her idea. 

 The Chief gathers firewood while they dig a fire pit. He asks what the beast looked like. “Hard to tell,” she says. “Eyesight’s flying with the birds.” Then, after a few shovels of dirt, she stops digging and says, “Like a small kangaroo with bloodshot eyes and the limbs of a bat.”

When the pyre is ready the woman complains they have no kindling to keep the fire hot. He has extra gasoline he found this morning, and volunteers to siphon some from his truck to help. When he returns with it, the Chief says, “The honor is yours,” and hands him a match to light. 

Philip the goat burns quickly, and they watch the smoke disappear into the fog.

Back inside, the Chief stares at his plate between surgical bites. A careful animal, he rises slowly, drops a fistful of coins on the table, and counts them with short nods. Satisfied, he grunts, rises, returns the table to its original position, and drags his feet to the exit. With a hand on the door, he says, “You scared her this morning.” Then, “Break the five-pound limit,” he shows his teeth, “or dive with your permits in disorder,” he pauses again, “I’ll have your balls.” 

The bell rings and the woman startles off her feet as if she hadn’t noticed anyone come in.

He watches the chief’s truck head north. It’s the same truck that was in the driveway this morning. I’m a careless fool, he thinks. Jealousy rouses from deep regions of his viscera, leaving him hot and dazed. It would feel good to pass saltwater over the chief’s eyes, dazzle him with the abalone lights, and watch him drive blind into the ocean. “Everything has a price,” he mumbles, and considers how much this morning’s abalone haul will fetch at the market. Not much more than food and gas for another week. 

The woman clears the Chief’s table and continues her obscure duties, polishing rusty silverware, staring at cupboards, reaching behind shelves, and searching for something she has not yet found this morning. She seems to have forgotten about the goat, but while she lingers at the counter, the spark of memory lights her face, and she says, as if she has finally lost patience, “Closing up. Time to go.”

Every week he spends a few hours with Kairi after diving. He loves taking her to his diving site, and cherishes even the abrupt, disconnected conversations with his ex-wife. After leaving the motel, he returns to the house on Elysian Road to pick up Kairi. As he pulls up, the dog barks, struts to his truck, and waits for him to climb out of it. The Chief’s truck is nowhere in sight.

“I heard you this morning,” his ex-wife says from the porch. “You don’t scare me, you know.” She closes the door half-way behind her.

“There’s nothing to fear,” he says through the truck’s window.

“You couldn’t scare a seal pup if you tried. But you’re spooking my boyfriend.”  Her eyes drift to the driveway. 

“Are you cavorting with the forest service men again—the gangsters and hunters?”

“So many.” She laughs, though she seems determined not to. The flash of her teeth reminds him of all the days they spent at the beach together. The roar of the sea muted her laugh then. Today, her laugh bounces through the trees. She will forget him the moment he leaves. 

“The gangster will arrive in a few hours so have her back before then.”

“In one piece, as always.”

“Please, don’t get lost, and don’t wander,” she says. “Kairi, come on.” 

She runs out of the door and leaps into his truck. Her backpack has a picture of a whale on it.

On a decrepit picnic table near the beach, he lays out pens and paper he has collected from empty homes. Kairi draws everything she sees: seagulls, crabs, starfish, otters, sea lions. She draws her dog hovering over ocean waves with wings and fins. One day last year she returned from the beach with a backpack full of feathers, sticks, bones. At home, she hung them up and traced their outlines on the walls.

“Wings and fins, wow,” he says.

“He can go anywhere he wants.”

“Where does he want to go?”

“There are gills too.” She points to fleshy, pink twin blobs.

“You’re good.” 

“He wants to dive and chase abalone.” She pronounces the “b” like a “v.”

How wonderful she is, he thinks. The little animal, full of impetuous decisions, uncertainty, the ignorance and innocence of youth. Every day, she becomes more herself. She has an independent streak but would be helpless alone. 

“Soon, I’ll take you with me.” He says this because he feels that he should, but can foresee he will never take her diving, and doesn’t want to. He hopes her life will be better than his meager one. “Let me tell you a story before I have to take you home,” he says, changing the subject. “Do you know about the turtle that carries the world on its shell?”

“That’s a big turtle.”

“It’s so big we can’t even see it. Let me tell you: Once I was small like you and had a mom and dad, but I also had a grandfather and grandmother. Things were different in California. There was a city where we lived, San Francisco, but that city is now under the sea. My grandparents were from Japan, which doesn’t exist anymore because it’s also under the sea. My grandmother gave me the house you live in, and told stories she said were very old. She was a good storyteller and would use sounds and different voices. Her English wasn’t good, but she made the stories fun. The turtle was as big as the world, which floated on the sea, and it carried the world on its shell. Grandmother would pretend she was the turtle by craning her head into her body and snapping her teeth. While she was strong enough, she would take us onto her back and say, ‘You are the world. See? You are floating on the back of the turtle.’ She would tire and hurt her back but never stop laughing. Then she would fall and we would crawl over her and die laughing, though we could never understand her completely. Other times she could be strict and carried around a sadness that I did not see in other people’s grandmothers.”

Driving north, the Chief gives himself a new name. “Angels in heaven hear me,” he yells. “Bless the land and the people, the fruits of their labor, their hopes and desires.” He traces devious prayers across his chest, bristling with emotion. “I am reborn: Call me the General.” His mouth stays open after the sound has left, and his tongue explores the new name, the new calling. He screams: “I curse Chaos, the enemy, with the voice of my ancestors, and declare vendetta against entropy, the falling, the falling!” 

After a bout of silence, he consoles himself: “Someone, no one else, must care to grow the young. The laws are sacred. Without them, nothing survives.” The wind whistles through the cracked window. “I must purge the trespassers, starting with the poacher who wants, it seems, to die. Poor soul, his old woman leads me to her bed. I will raise his daughter as my own.”

The injustice presses so hot in his chest that his eyes burn with pleasure.

After dropping off Kairi, he drives to Mendocino and stares at the brilliant, hypnotic sea for the rest of the afternoon. Later, at the market, he prepares the abalone for the sale. One by one, he plucks the shells from buckets of saltwater, cups them in his hands, whispers praise, hisses love, and kisses them top to bottom. “A worthy price for your children,” says the trader from the entrance of his tent. He's a short, mysterious man who speaks in familiar tones, as if he was once a diver. After each exchange, he imagines the trader inhaling the scent of abalone until night falls and the market closes. 

The trader plunges his hand into the saltwater and claws out a shell. “Beauty,” he says, “Which beach?” He tosses it in the air, then back into the bucket. He must know that abalone this size come only from a few beaches. 

“Gualala,” he replies, naming the nearest permitted site. 

“Never seen such marvels from Gualala,” says the trader. “This morning?” He lifts the buckets onto a scale the size of a small statue, and nods at each weighing. 

“I dove through the night,” he says, and slips, offering too much information, “And slept through the morning.”

“That’s funny, I made the morning permit sweep,” the trader says, “Didn’t see you.” 

He feels the sale, and perhaps more, slipping away. But, before he volunteers the name of the beach near the motel where he dove this morning, the trader throws him a lifeline: “Might have missed you.” Then, “These look good, let’s split them up.” The trader steps into his tent to file paperwork, perhaps, or to suck the sea slime on his hands.

He begins the dread work. Grateful, after all, that the abalone entrust him with their lives, he keeps the chain mail glove and stubby knife out of view until the last possible moment. In view of the foragers, hunters, and traders mingling about the market, he pries half the shells open, digs for pearls, and slices out the flesh. The shells are pliant in his hands, but their soft, resigned death cries, like the bleats of clucking hens, nearly make him cry. The other half he leaves for the trader to sell whole.

This week, he will dive once more, and see Kairi a second time. His life will continue on a drab path until it’s too cold to dive, the abalone die, and the sea swallows the coast forever. But it was a good dive this morning, and perhaps that is enough. He remembers the woman at the roadhouse, and wonders how she has stayed alive among the hunters, gang members, and beasts. He finds himself searching for the chief’s hat and inscrutable face among the faces in the crowds. Just as he thinks he spots the woman's white hair, the trader returns with a dark look on his face.

“Your permits,” the trader says, changing tone. 

“You’ve never asked about them before,” he says, trying to salvage the situation. 

“Look, your hauls are good,” the trader whispers, “but you’re over the limit and without permits.” He looks over the abalone and asks where they were harvested. 

“It’s a secret beach,” he says, not ready to admit to poaching.

“From one diver to another: poaching is a deadly offense.”

“I know,” he says, “I’ve been diving for years.”

 “The W is coming down hard on us,” the trader says with a firm, apologetic stare.

Then, as if carried on the back of an inland wind, the General’s god-like voice rises from the tent behind him. 

“HERE is the poacher,” he says, “And torturer of animals.” Indignant, self-serving, his voice herds attention with the power of music, or a soul-binding spell. “This villain stores poached food with his family, and burned a farm animal this morning.” A crowd forms in front of the General, Grand Inquisitor. “The life of his precious child lies on a knife's edge.” He steps aside to reveal Kairi from behind his great coat. She seems confused more than fearful. “When one of us is in danger, we are all in danger,” he says. “Can anyone argue with this?” The trader nods. The crowd murmurs agreement. Some farmers call their animals inside their pens and trailers. Traders put away their wares. 

For the first time since the flood, and when his ex-wife left, fear consumes him. His blood leaves his body, which fights to stay standing. 

“What do you say, diver?” says the General. 

He gurgles, “They were a gift, for my ex-wife.”

“So you admit to poaching?”

“The goat was already dead,” he says with the conviction of a wounded animal.

“Truth guide us. I have witnesses to the foul deeds.”

The wiry woman’s white hair floats above the crowd as she comes forward. She looks past him, dazed by the shining sea. “Did this diver instruct you to burn a farm animal?” says the General. She makes a show of searching her mind and says, finally, “Yes, it was his idea.” 

“But the beast killed the goat,” he says. 

“What beast?” she says.

“How many children can a dead goat feed?” the General shouts, furious.  “And for how long?” 

Indignant at the thought of wasted food, someone cries “Justice! Burn him!”

“We have a second witness,” says the General. “Lovely, little Kairi, does your father leave you abalone?”

“Yes,” she says, proud of her father.

“And where does he dive?”

“Point Arena,” she says and smiles. She has passed the test and looks to her father for praise.

“Point Arena is a prohibited beach,” says the General, his voice mild. “We cannot keep food sources safe with poachers in our midst.”

“They’re our food sources too,” someone yells. 

“Justice hear us, we must not rely on a mere child,” says the General. 

The crowd parts and his ex-wife glides through the opening. She’ll save me, he thinks, but is frightened by her eyes, which hold the uncertain, calculating glance of a woman afraid of public shame, and, unable to summon the courage to oppose the rabid voices, joins in their savagery. 

“Thewretch stalks this long-suffering woman daily,” says the General. 

She looks at him as one pities a broken toy. She could feign ignorance to cast doubt on the General’s performance. But, she doesn’t know if that is what he wants. In truth, she has never known what he has wanted. But with him gone, she can bury her guilt forever.

She drops to her knees, clutches her head in both hands, and cries out in ecstatic pleasure, “Yes! He comes to watch us! He puts us in danger!” 

All eyes turn to him, who is strangely calm. “Cast him out!” the crowd yells.

“The law is the law,” says the General, grave as ever. 

“The law is the law,” repeats the crowd, though none know what it might be.

“Take your charge,” the General says. He pushes Kairi forward. “You have until sunset to escape with your blood. After that, we will hunt you. If you fail to keep her, she becomes our own.”

At the beach, the sun lies below the horizon across an anxious, alien sea. The rowboat is still moored to the concrete pier. After he rows to the sea platforms, they can hide overnight and continue along the coast to the ruins of San Francisco. He takes water, a tarp, and food from his truck, and wraps Kairi in a heavy blanket. “Aren’t you happy we’re together,” he says, hurried, but focused. Her eyes grow wide, then worried, and she says, “Can’t we dive in the daytime?” “The abalone prefer the dark,” he says, not convincing even himself. He lifts her into the boat and wraps the blanket tighter. Behind them, not far up the coast, headlights streak through the falling darkness: The W is on the hunt. He unties the boat, leaps in, and rows toward the wind turbines, which lie less than a mile from shore. The fog grows denser, the sea darker—and Kairi becomes quieter. 

Halfway to the turbines, he spots a boat with a powerful flood light slip past the shore. It must be the General. Kairi says she’s cold and whimpers.

Powering through the waves, the General quickly cuts the distance between them in half. His cries crack through the wind: “Scavenger,” he yells, “Your balls are mine!” When they reach the turbines, it begins to rain. Kairi cries, first in whimpers, then in sobs, and covers her eyes to escape the floodlight. But there’s another light in the water, a thousand little candles rising to the surface. He lets the boat drift toward the platform, watches the lights sparkle, and hears faint abalone calls. This far out, he’ll have to dive deeper than usual. He sees the General pacing in his boat, and hears his voice tear through the night: “She belongs to me!” The saltwater film passes over his eyes. “Stay here,” he says to Kairi, who is motionless in the blanket. For a moment, he’s unsure if he’ll jump. But soon, the dark, still water drowns out all noise and thought, and the abalone call him to the bottom of the sea.