Bycatch

Short Stories

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-- a Teddy story

Ned Sheen could not get warm.  Even in the 103 degree temperature on the street outside the Bellagio hotel he shivered.  “I want to be warm,” he said, to no one in particular.  Just another faceless body on the crowded Las Vegas Strip, Ned leaned on the railing around the resort’s massive fountain lake.  He looked at the color brochure that had been shoved into his hand by a young Hispanic boy, maybe ten or twelve.  The women all looked to be nineteen or twenty years old, scantily clad or wearing nothing at all, each photograph tagged with a single word:

HOT!

They indeed looked hot, but not by the definition of the thousands of male tourists who took time for a glance before tossing the tacky brochures to the sidewalk.  Ned envied the sweat that glistened on their skin.  He envied the warmth of the blood that coursed through their veins.

“Fisherman!”  The voice came from the water, an odd and quavering timbre.

Ned ignored the sound and focused on the girl’s picture in front of him -- a twenty-ish redhead with hand drawn stars serving as pasties on her thirty-eight-ish endowments.  He stroked the photo with his index finger and imagined that he felt the warmth of her smooth, glossy skin.

“Fisherman!  Breathing water is hard. It hurts.”

Ned Sheen ignored the voice.  It didn’t speak to him.  He was not a fisherman.  At least he didn’t remember being a fisherman.  He looked into the girl’s eyes, and something felt odd.  He didn’t remember anything before the boy pressed the brochure into his hand.

“Fisherman!”

Ned tore his eyes from the brochure, it took two hard double-takes to finally break the gaze, and looked into the water below.  Two black eyes stared at him from below a spotted brow that tapered to the overbite of a sharp beak.  The Loggerhead turtle opened it’s mouth.

“Finally.  What are you, deaf?”

Ned’s mouth fell open.  “Uh, I…”

He realized that he was about to talk to a frigging reptile, and furtively glanced at the people on the sidewalk as he closed his mouth with an audible pop.  Ned didn’t remember much, but he knew he wasn’t crazy.  No way a sea turtle just yelled at him from the middle of a concrete lake in the middle of the desert.  He looked back to the water.

“You’re looking cold, fisherman.  What?  A hundred-three isn’t hot enough for you?  You want maybe the Sahara?  How about the Nefud?  I understand it’s still toasty this time of year.”

Huh? Time of year? Somehow, Ned knew it was Las Vegas, but little else.  Winter?  Maybe that’s why he shivered?  Nah, even Vegas isn’t 103 in winter.  Ignoring the thoughts the people around him, Ned spoke toward the water.

“Yeah, I suppose the summer is pretty hot in... what did you call it?  Neefood?”

“Nefud, dummy.  It’s in Arabia.  Look at your watch, idiot.”

Ned lifted his left wrist and looked at the Timex Expedition wristwatch.  The lettering on the dial read ‘Water Resistant 100M’.  Nothing else about the watch caught his eye.  A hundred meters, what… 300 feet?  Why would a guy living in the desert need an underwater watch?

“Yeah, so what?”

The turtle spit water--a long hard stream that struck Ned below the eye.

“Look at the date, dummy.”

Ned looked.  OCT 31.  Hallow-friggin-ween.  Now it all made sense, a stinking, unfunny joke.  Ned smelled sweat and stale beer over his right shoulder.  He turned to look and bumped into a scraggly looking skinny guy wearing an Excalibur t-shirt and sporting three or four days worth of white bristle on his cheeks and chin.  Ned’s eyes were level with the man’s jawbone as his nose sucked in the stink.  Halloween all right.  Ned coughed and stepped back, one finger stretched under his nostrils.

“How ya doing Ned?”

Ned did a double-take on the geezer's weird blue eyes, more cat than human.

“You know who I am?” Ned said.

“Geez Laweeze, Ned.  I’ve been standin’ here for the past hour.  You ready to go back?”

“Back where?  Who the hell are you?”

“You gotta remember me, Ned.  I’m T-shirt Teddy, the guy that brought you here.  You were bitching about the cold like a country singer without a pickup truck.  I thought I’d help you out a little.  But it’s time we were heading back.  We have to make a couple of stops along the way.”

Before Ned could take it all in, this Teddy guy snapped his fingers.

#

The pungent sea air assaulted Ned’s nose as he stepped over a wire basket on the twisting dock.  Across the slip, the crew of a forty-foot lobsterman named Jenny Anne emptied her cargo into the cooler at Rockport Lobster.  A brief memory wafted through his brain.  Sitting at the bar in the Gloucester Inn, watching a tourist couple digging into a couple of pound-and-a-half lobsters.  The woman, a pretty redhead, grabbed a claw and jerked.  When it broke loose, juice and water sprayed on everyone within ten feet of her.  The wind changed and a whiff of Teddy broke the spell.  Ned turned, the scarecrow, yeah that’s what Teddy looked like, was wearing a blue gray Cape Pond Ice t-shirt.  Ratty at the edges, and punctured a couple of times in front.

“Who the hell are you, old man?  And what’s with the t-shirt thing?”

“I got hundreds of ‘em.  That’s where the nickname came from.  I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

“Is this some kind of Halloween joke?”

The old man stroked his cheek whiskers with scrawny, yellow-nailed fingers.  “Joke?  Look around you a-hole.  Feel the cold of that Easterly on your face.  This isn’t Vegas any more.”

“So, you’re a frigging angel or something?”

“Or something.”

A frigid blast of wind crawled inside Ned’s shirt, puffing it out, before whooshing up his naked back.  He shivered hard and wrapped his arms around his torso.

“No, I don’t think an angel.”

“Used to be.  Once.  Screwed up… but that’s not anything you need to know.  I’m going to the Nest for a cold one.  You might as well come along.”

Ned noticed that Teddy didn’t offer to buy.

A bar in Gloucester Massachusetts, the real one – not the one from the movie – is a dank, dark hole in the wall.  A dozen grizzled locals sat at the bar, maybe another half dozen at the pool tables.  The kind of place that when the door opens everybody turns to see who's .  Since that damned book came out, the one about the longliners going down in that big storm in ‘91, the Nest has been a stopping spot for tourists.  When the door opens, and somebody from Colorado or Missouri or one of those places sticks a head in, the locals return cold stares.

The kind of what-the-hell-are-you-doing-in-my-life looks that say, “You need to earn the right to walk in that door.  So far you ain’t done it.”

Not so for Teddy. When he swung open the door a scythe of light cut into the room for a few seconds before he blocked it with his tall frame.  The smoky, heavy air filled with “Yo, Teddy” and “How ya doing, T-shirts?”  The scowls turned to smiles and a few arms lifted glasses toward the filthy acoustic tile ceiling.  Nobody seemed to see Ned.  He waved and smiled, but got no acknowledgement.

Teddy ordered a stout, then looked around the room.

“Where’s Scratch?”

“Working.”  A heavy-set woman at the bar answered.  “The Emily Swift came in minus one soul.”

Ned felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach, but he didn’t know why.  Something about the Emily Swift was very familiar, but he just couldn’t place it.  He raised his arm at the bartender, a woman looking like she’d been rode hard and put away wet, trying to get her attention.  No luck.  He felt for his wallet and the back pocket of his jeans was empty.  Guess I’ll be thirsty for a while.

“With any luck it was her skipper, or maybe that scum-bag of a first mate.” The voice came from a long haired man in a Budweiser tank top at the nearest pool table.  “That boat’s been skirting the turtle ban on longliners in the Grand Banks for three years now.  Don’t know how many she’s killed.  Hell, all of us tangle one up as bycatch now and again, but I heard rumors that the Emily’s mate takes their heads for trophy.  They’ve sure got some brass ones, just ignoring the ban.  Maybe we don’t all like it, but it’s still a good law.  Hell there’s still Georges Bank and the Flemish Cap.  A good crew can still make a living without taking out a couple hundred Loggerheads every year.”

Ned grabbed Teddy by the arm. “They can’t see me.”

Teddy shrugged his skinny shoulder. "Can't hear ya, neither."

Then Teddy downed his pint and nudged Ned toward the door.  They stepped into the sunlight, blinding Ned for a few seconds as the town seemed to race under his feet.  When the light dimmed, he found himself standing next to Teddy in the stairwell of the brick bell tower of the Gloucester City Hall.  Two immense arched windows were surrounded by painted names.  Thousands of them, in different paint, done in a hundred different hands, against the yellowing plaster background.  At the end of the list, a man whose hips nearly doubled the width of his shoulders crouched, a paintbrush clenched between the cigar sized fingers of his hand.

“Hiya Scratch,” Teddy said.

The painter stood and shook Teddy’s hand with a massive paw.  “Hi to you, Teddy.  Seen this yet?”

Teddy smiled and gave Scratch’s arm a slight punch.  “Of course I haven’t seen it yet.  You just put it up.”

Scratch jerked a thumb toward the wall.  “First mate of the Emily Swift.  Took a number ten hook in the thick part of his palm, and the line pulled him under.  The a-hole was slitting the throat of a young Loggerhead when it happened.  Turtle got hung up in the line and drowned.  Guess this guy finally got what was coming to him… you think?  First of the year.  I hope it’s the last.”

Teddy studied the still-wet paint and Ned looked over his shoulder.  The lettering was crisp, firm and instantly legible.  An inch below the year, the name Ned Sheen.  The bright light coming through the windows suddenly faded to a deep indigo.

#

As the line in hooked to his palm pulled Ned into the icy current, he saw the dead eyes of a drowned Albatross, it’s beak snagged on a stainless steel J-hook.  The bird’s eyes seemed to follow his descent.  The turtle in Vegas was right.  Breathing water hurts.  Hurts real bad.  The freezing cold excruciating pain brought back his memory.  When he was ten, he caught the tail of a swordfish in the solar plexus.  Didn’t hurt this bad.  He compressed his diaphragm trying to force the water from his lungs, but the water pushed back, and won.  He wanted to puke but the bucking of the muscles as he wretched just siphoned in more saltwater.

The sea floor below him opened with an explosion of bubbles.  Hot bubbles.  Red light flooded from the fissure, causing Ned’s outstretched hands to emanate an iridescent glow.  A loggerhead turtle, larger than he had ever seen, floated in front of him and fixed its cold eyes on Ned’s.  The turtle smiled.  The smile widened to a grin then twisted into a grimace.  Its dark eyes began to glow red, matching the color of the inferno raging under the sea bed.  No longer a turtle, the creature in from of him had metamorphosed… Ned remembered images of the Gargoyles atop Notre Dame cathedral.  Teddy Leadville floated at the creature’s side as it spoke.

“Welcome, Ned.  Sorry to keep you waiting.  We wanted to make sure it was warm enough for you.”

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