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the roll of duct tape he kept it balanced in. The radio was mounted overhead and it was covered in specks of fish grease. He thumbed the button and said, Guess ain’t nobody with a brain would be enduring this for a buck fifty a pound.
    Bill laughed into the microphone and Jonah heard the background rumble of Bill’s boat
Gale Warnings
. I guess that’s so, by Jesus. But I’m thinking this is the first time I ever did see the Highliner’s mooring empty. Here it’s December and you’re geared up to hang down.
    Guess I couldn’t sleep is all, Jonah said. Or might be that Erma Lee’s got you sleeping late.
    That might be, Bill said. That just might be.
    â€¢ • •
    As the sun rose the sky and seawater turned blue. The quarter moon arced across the southwest sky. It took Jonah twenty minutes to reach his first traps and by then the moon had stepped and the sky had clouded with a dark bank that faded into the horizon. His boat lifted on its wake and settled. The buoys in front of him were all Styrofoam and the traps below the buoys were vinyl-coated wire but Jonah could remember a time when he and his brother had sat beside the wood stove in his father’s trap shop and watched Nicolas paint his wooden buoys with an old brush and build his wooden traps with a hammer and nails. Those had been days of family and the smell of wood chips and fresh paint permeated his memories making them feel somehow gentle but all of those gentle memories ended with the end of his mother.
    That was twenty years ago.
    Twenty years since Nicolas threw Jonah overboard and hollered,
Goddamned poison aboard here is what you are
. Then pulled him aboard and hugged the boy to his chest while the boat circled and pounded upon its own wake. Nicolas shook and cried and that was the only time Jonah had ever seen his father cry despite a newly dead mother. His father’s breaths came heavy and begrudging as if each one were a separate piece of gut that had to be grabbed and jerked from his throat. Jonah clutched the quaking back and stared at the gray water that danced against the hull and this final hug was a goodbye but Jonah understood the opposite.
    Nicolas had set Jonah down and put a jacket over him. He hugged Bill briefly and put a jacket over him too. Then Nicolas pointed his boat
Jennifer
north to the harbor and piloted a straight line with the bow pounding an easterly chop. Jonah spent the entire hour forgiving his father but when they hit the harbor Nicolas was gone. He’d sealed himself away and Jonah saw this instantly. Just a kid and with a single glance he understood that his father had gathered himself into a coil that could never be unwound.
    â€¢ • •
    Now the
Jennifer
drifted on the smooth sea surface. Jonah lifted the cover from the bait box and peered in at eight bushels of salted herring. Some of the fish were stiff and some were mashed and all of the dead eyes stared red and loose at him. He breathed the bait air and tasted it like a wave of rot starting in his stomach and cresting within his eyes. He set the cover down and pulled a bucket of nylon mesh bait bags out and stuffed them with fistfuls of baitfish.
    Thirty fathoms below lay an undersea badland that was nothing more than the foothills of an ancient mountain range gone to flood and erosion. The
Jennifer
idled and as he worked Jonah pictured the kelp forests and sand canyons below. He pictured his traps on bottom with lobsters and sculpin and wolffish all swarming like flies and so too did he picture his father’s dead body down there. He carried a bait bag to the washrail and leaned his weight over the side and stared into the water. He caught himself again feeling that his father’s soul was within that of the sea and now after so many years he felt the sudden urge to join him. He looked up at the flights of clouds and tried to laugh at himself and wondered what was happening within his heart to rally such