Monterey Bay by Lindsay Hatton Page B

drawn inevitably to the street at its base. It was why people climbed mountains, she realized, or at least why they should: the clarifying loneliness of altitude, the resulting shift in perspective, the question of her father’s work suddenly paling in comparison with the question of Ricketts’s lab. As if in answer, a familiar cannery whistle: short, long, short. And the impulse that followed was one she was eager to indulge: jumping from the porch to join her neighbors on their downhill sprint, the cannery workers rushing headlong toward the sea as the sardines rushed headlong out of it.
    At the Del Mar cannery, she stopped, caught her breath, and let the crowd move ahead. If Arthur had come here from the lab, which was most likely, he would already be inside, which meant she would have to wait. So she waited. She waited beneath the white sky, the air cold and foul. She counted the rats as they zipped between the buildings. She heard more whistles, she watched more cannery workers run. And what would happen, she wondered at some point when the crowds became unmanageable, if they didn’t stop? What would happen if they simply ignored the canneries and just kept running down the full length of the Row, past the Coast Valleys tanks, past Lake El Estero, past the Hotel Del Monte, until they collapsed from exhaustion among the dunes, the sand reluctantly conformingto their bodies? She remembered something her father had once told her about her mother’s death—about how even after the fire had finally consumed her flesh, the bones remained aloft in the mud like leaves on a pond—and this, she cautioned herself, was how it would end if she didn’t start being more deliberate, more clever. Mud and bones and collapse: all of it in service to ambitions that might not even be hers.
    â€œCigarette?”
    She wheeled around. When their eyes met, she expected him to smile, but he just stared at her with a dishonestly straight face, as if he were physically suppressing something. The first few times she had seen him, she hadn’t really noticed his appearance; the magnetism of Ricketts’s presence had made such lesser observations impossible. Now, however, she was able to take stock. Seventeen years old, she guessed, possibly eighteen, short for his age yet solidly built, as if, had it not been for the stunting effects of poverty, he might have been taller than she and a good deal heavier. His clothes were old and colorless and almost insolently ill fitting, and his bearing was humble and nondescript. It was only his hair—wild and orange—that had any hint of extravagance to it, the curls sprouting from his skull like mutant carrots.
    â€œI don’t smoke,” she replied.
    â€œMe neither. I just tell the foreman I do so I can take a break when everyone else does.”
    He jerked his head toward a cluster of women standingbehind him in the cannery’s shadow. They were studying Arthur and her with an exhausted superiority, cigarettes pinched between thumbs and forefingers.
    â€œDon’t mind them,” he whispered. “They think Sicily is the center of the universe.”
    â€œThen they probably should have stayed there.”
    Arthur winced, stepped forward, and drew her aside.
    â€œPlease,” he said. “They’ve only just stopped hiding my boots in the steam cookers. I don’t want to start anything.”
    At first, his hand on her elbow felt menacing. It reminded her of that moment in Ricketts’s lab: her father holding her shoulders and shaking them.
Say it. Say it in words.
Arthur’s grip, however, was neither strong nor coercive. If anything, it had a gentleness to it that almost seemed grateful, as if the threat of the steam cookers had been little more than an excuse to touch her. To confirm, she looked in his eyes and there it was. A dopey, irrepressible gladness. A crush. Unrequited, naturally, and more than a little sickening. But