Blue Crab Soup

Touch them and they will die. 

A gust of French tarragon graced his nose, breaking his otherwise all-consuming lavender entombment. 

Such fussy roots. 

But they are worth it. 

The knob, textured like a Baroque fixture, caressed his fingers like a hollow Gorgon's head, encrusted his palm with an ancient residue—the kind that accumulates in bathrooms shared by brothers. 

Streams of formless heat, like a sauce that still smells only of steamed milk, encircled his temples as he groped in the dark for another wash promising irresistibility. 

When its lye-like fumes hit him, an invisible cue ball struck him between the eyes: it was Saturday. No American lit or precalc, just work—no need to scrape off the peach fuzz or pour an apothecary on himself. 

Again he gripped the shower knob. Its indentations, so vast next to the backs of the roly-polies he and Belle spent so many long afternoons lording over, made him think of a winding river he’d only seen in dreams. 

Dawn had yet to arrive, and the beach had not yet released the remnants and nameless profoundities of the night. 

With the power switched off and no candles nearby, he thumbed through the worn, rough, cheap, and tattered bits of cloth in his closet until silk met his fingertips: his chef’s jacket, the most expensive item in the room, leapt into his chest like a lost puppy. 

For now it was less endearing than a letterman’s jacket but, he hoped, more lucrative in the long run. 

The sun’s first steps are beautiful; when you’re alone you feel like you can see anything there, maybe even everything at once. 

The worst part is that maybe something is looking back at you. 

Rough and short, the shore seemed to smooth with the ambling of a boy looking for sweet sook meat. 

Still stirring from the last storm, the rocks waited for the reddish tides, now blotting his frenzied footprints, to put them back. 

The waves sift and sort with a measured sureness casual beachcombers can only envy. 

Beau (Bo for short) smacked his toes against the kitchen’s grease spattered floorboards as he prayed for bubbles to form in the old boiler before again turning his gaze to the hooting, hollering, arm-swinging child scampering towards him with two two gallon buckets emblazoned with The Claw’s gaudy logo.

His bowling pin skull cast an unmistakable silhouette on the rustic wooden wall beside the stove. Rushing past the kitchen and rounding the corner, almost every day a muck-covered Clay would bring his haul through the front door. 

Grinning, he’d shout how many he’d caught. 

Beau’s newest cheese amalgam was engulfing the grits on the back burner, mercilessly strangulating the faint stench of his hot prawn water.

Clay plopped his bounty at Mr. Turner’s feet, mumbled a few clashing consonants, and sprinted to school. The broad-shouldered but tragically freckled man examined its contents. 

“Jimmies! That idiot boy got us all jimmies, and not many. More than I thought he would, but no sooks. We’re gonna have five graduation parties here tonight, Bo. Five. We need the sweetest meat we can get.”

Ed gulped his bourbon. The first sip always made him flinch. 

“No one is finding crabs, not even jimmies. Besides, the folks here don’t know or care about whether it’s a sook or a jimmy. You have to hand it to him, Mr. Turner. I can’t figure out how he’s finding anything.” 

“I don’t care about who else is finding what. That simpleton has to pull his weight.” 

Beau winced and nodded as Clay dropped some pebbles in the parking lot before petting a stray cat (who always got a few of The Claw’s scraps). 

Blue crab soup was meant for such an occasion and, yes, it needed sooks. There were already grumblings about the shrinking crab chunks. Gracie, a waitress with hair the color of tree bark from a pastoral, told them the storms had scared the sooks. 

Again, they didn’t care about the meat’s gender, just how much they were getting. Maybe her apologizing for what was, to them, a non sequitur, made them forget why they were mad in the first place. 

The men, as they were wont to do, would laugh and leave her a fat tip. 

Why Gracie’s assurances meant so much to them was a mystery to Beau.

She swung her hips with a forceful fluidity as she picked up a plate of chicken dumplings, licking her lips and telling Beaux (she insisted on the French pronunciation) that his tarragon cream sauce, which she’d liberally sampled before (and maybe after) serving the customer, was “divine.” 

Well, it wasn’t a total mystery.  

There’d be enough sweet sook meat to overflow every pot, pan, and dish, but Gracie’s prophecies were still lying fallow. Butter, fillers, and hair flipping couldn’t keep The Claw afloat forever. 

A slowdown isn’t all bad; closing early has its perks. Sitting at dusk in a maple rocker with whatever strange melange he could make from the leftovers was serene. 

Beau held up his perfect pour, surreptitiously as highschool seniors could not (in theory) imbibe, to impose its white Belgian head upon the foam blanketing the golden horizon now enshrouding  a limping shadow. 

“Clay, what happened to your head?” 

“They hit it. They hit twice at the creek. Two in a row at the creek.”

“What were you doing there? You know that’s where they go to make trouble…you know how they treat you.” 

“I went for my friends.”

“They aren’t your friends.” 

“But they are.” 

“Since when? Clay, you know they’re not!”  

He reached forward to pull the dirt from his hair, but was met with Clay expertly inserting something polished into his nostril. 

The mismatch, an unexpectedly joyful aroma carried by grimy little fingertips, floored Beau and Clay managed to vanish again.   

Wiping a booger from the fabric, Beau recognized Belle’s cobalt ribbon, but wasn’t sure if he should tell Gracie or Ed. 

It’d been two years and it seemed like things between them were finally settling. Belle’s body was never found. 

Snug in bed, Beau had been hearing a scratching noise for hours. 

It was soft, like fingernails on glass. It was not careless like the wind.   

He got out of bed and went to the window. His surroundings were starless and impenetrable.  

He listened, but the noise was coming from all directions. Beau was uneasy, as the air was calm.   

He opened the window and leaned out. The air was unusually cold and damp for September, so someone must be burning a fire.

It couldn’t be the wind. Yet even without a breeze, the smell of smoke and ashes were coming through his window. 

He had never heard anything like it.

Though it wasn’t that cold, not in any absolute sense. 

A claw-shaped branch hung from the tree outside his window. Draped in Spanish moss, he’d never noticed it. 

It was just a branch, he sighed and unburdened himself of the intolerable uncertainty. Though he repeated this conclusion like a mantra, he could not shake his dread. 

Yet he rose from bed unscathed and, to his dismay and chagrin, made it to work. 

“We’re not going to have any damn fish mousse!” Ed Turner lamely slammed his limp facsimiles of fists onto his hard oak desk. 

“We don’t have to call it fish mousse…” 

“Well, son…that’s the problem, you already did.” 

Unfazed by his drunken pithiness, Beau persisted.

“Would I steer you wrong, sir? The Claw goes down and I go with it.”

“Even that idiot Clay wouldn’t eat something called fish mousse.” 

Maybe he was right. 

It took will, and dissociation, to make it sound appealing. Chum, or one of its cousins, is fine when only an inch separates your pinchers from the sand. He let his mind become a scavenger for the task at hand. 

Remedial earth science had become more endurable but no less boring as he hoped some chemical secret would be revealed that could make his dishes dance. Today’s lesson, on entomology, didn’t show much promise. 

“You see this, class? It’s a roly-poly. Well, it turns out a roly-poly is a crustacean like a lobster or crawdad…” 

From the back of the class, a stout, curt, broad-faced boy was staring at Beau’s crimson curls. It kept up the whole hour, until he confronted him in the hall. 

“Judd, did you smack my brother?” 

His small coal-colored eyes briefly shut. 

“He’s worthless,” he smirked, shoving Beau aside. 

He clenched his fists, wondering if it was worth a suspension or if he had any chance of coming out on top. The answer to both of these questions was an emphatic no. 

How could anyone as worthless as Judd Miller throw out a word like that? 

Prawn is more insistent than shrimp; they are just a stage on which all the grits must act; the thick prawn slabs he’d hurriedly cut to avoid an ear-rotting lunch with Ed Turner had ruined the dish. 

The cheese medley didn’t coat the dots snuggly enough; they needed to cover them like a surgeon’s glove. 

No, that wasn’t it. 

Ed isn’t the cause of all the world’s woes.  

What he’d wanted was hard, maybe impossible: the flavors have to move alone and in synchrony, calling on one another when needed. 

Culinary choreography could be his ticket out of this dump. 

He wanted all the dots, all the countless dots to know how to act, to go forward or back with the responses of the tongue, to follow his vision more exactly than any inanimate (or animate) thing ever had in the history of humankind.

His gaze bored into the hidden topography of the cheddar-soldered particles, wondering how the countless gates could be opened and closed. 

Ed was in a magical mood, having made a fifth of exceptionally smoky scotch disappear. He and Beau were mingling at the Rotarian banquet, a high point for an otherwise stagnant month.  

“Alaskan King Crabs have spoiled this generation. No one wants to work for their meat. 

Like those video games. See that boy looking at that screen, tapping his fingers like there’s nothing in this whole world to look at? 

Not my nice signs, not all this finger-licking good food. No. Because the screen’s there and he never has to lift his head.

You go out into the city and that’s all you’re gonna find, Beau. You’re like a son to me. Your daddy is dumb as dirt, but at least you know what to do with your own dumb self. 

They're playing blackjack up north?”

“Yes, they are…” 

“Now, what were you saying about my boy?” Reverend Abbot said, walking towards the Rotarian table. 

“I’m saying he’s a fool and he isn’t going to be anything.”

“More than what you or Belle or Gracie ever were,” he retorted, grabbing his almost drooling child and storming out.  

Somehow business continued as usual and Beau went out to his chair when the doors closed, only to find it occupied by his employer. 

A man with two daughters has so much leftover fatherly advice. 

“What are you staring off into space for, Beau?” 

“I was just thinking about how many people have lost their life savings, like folks who had all their valuables on a ship that sunk or in a house that caught fire.”

“You think about the dumbest damned things. What do I care one bit about some dead man I don’t even know?” 

“Do you want Gracie?” 

Taken aback by his anachronistic bluntness, Beau only curved his neck and raised his brow. 

“I know you do…you can have her. I’ll tell you this: love is looking into the future without looking backwards, you feel it when you forget about what it really is and what, realistically, it’s going to be. 

You love when you’re looking too far ahead, chasing something you’re never going to catch.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take good care of her. By the way,” he said, tossing the ribbon at him, “Clay found this.” 

He left, but not before hearing Ed hurling invectives at the cat and throwing a bucket of chum in its vicinity, which happened to be the same as his windshield’s. 

As Beau walked away from the shore, the odor of ash followed him. It was coming from the forests, from the creeks, swamps, and estuaries tucked between the pine, oak, and cypress trees. He could hear the distant entrancements of an owl, and the occasional rustle of leaves.

The ground was muddy, so soft that it was almost lulling. At a clearing, a semicircle of sand enveloped by the stalwart roots of moss-covered cypress, there was a fire.

Beau stopped and watched for someone, yet there was no one there. There was nothing but the fire and the vague chatter, from where or what he could not tell.  

Dizziness overcame him. He turned around to run, but his ankles locked up. He couldn't just leave them; he had to know what was happening.

Beau blinked blankly at the splotches of crab claws jutting from the rock. A cyan glow accompanied the pleasing modulations of a low tenor. 

“She’s her sister; she’s just like Belle if you chopped her up, turned her into sludge, and poured her into a different mold…”

Panicked but amused, he opened his eyes to find himself on the beach with a crumpled ribbon straddling his thumb. A slight spasm in his neck brought his focus to a bruise on the side of his head. 

He wandered back to make breakfast, finding Clay, typically cheerful, in abnormally high spirits. 

“I have to go,” 

“To the bathroom?” 

“No.” 

“Yes, we have to go to school. I don’t like it any more than you.”

“I have to go. They will all go too.”

He stayed after school that day, waiting for Clay’s grade school checkers club to wrap up. Normally there was a teacher or two, maybe a couple stragglers from one of the sports teams, but today the hall was bare. 

Yet his back was burning. He spun around to confront whatever it was behind him, but there was nothing. Quickening his gait, he made it to a locked door. 

Sensing a presence, then hearing footsteps, he bolted into the cafeteria. Frantically searching for a light switch he was sure he heard another set of footsteps, heavier and faster than the last. Finding the emergency exit, he shoved the doors open and ran to The Claw. 

After a prayer for his patrons, their pancreases, and himself, lest they deem prunes a dig at their ages or regularity or masculinity, he poured the stock into the pot. 

Then, at last, the port and pork. 

He sat down in the kitchen with Gracie, telling her about the ribbon. 

“Beaux, there’s something you should know. Belle wasn’t who anyone thought she was…dad might have been the one who taught her wrong, but he didn’t make her cruel. That was in there from the start.”   

“I don’t understand…”

“You don’t need to,” she said, kissing his cheek.

Clay wasn’t in his bed. He never liked leaving him alone for long, but the sitter hadn’t been gone for more than ten minutes. He looked everywhere he might be, until all sensible options were exhausted. 

Against his better judgment, he returned to the forest. Amongst the high and deep roots of the mossy cypresses, there was Clay, lying alone with a startling repose, his life spilling from his ears, eyes, and nose. 

Beau rushed towards his body but was rebuffed by the crabs swarming the carcass sinking in soft mud. 

One of Clay’s rocks, deftly placed next to Ed’s Mercedes, tripped him. Falling flat on his face, he drowned in his own blood. 

Gracie stood in the doorway in a long antebellum gown pilfered from the local museum. Artfully posed between two Doric columns, she waited for Beau. 

The Claw was now his by her decree. 

Clay’s twilight scamperings continued. Nothing could stop them. 

He could, and surely would, walk through that door again—if he hadn’t already.