Crab Traps

I am young with muscles. There is a tattoo of a bull skull across my chest. I slick my hair back. I wear a suit and cowboy boots.

I bounce at Temptations. The club over the bridge on 17. The one that backs up to the rice canals. When it’s slow, I walk onto the dock out back and catch crabs. I always have my traps set. Sometimes I sit in my boss’s Boston Whaler and play pretend. For when a storm comes, I can get everyone home.

It’s illegal what we do. If you pay enough, I turn a blind eye, and you can take them into your truck. I split the money with the girls. I’m close to buying that boat. The one parked out front of Boat World. The ‘96 Aquasport 245. The one with twin 150 Yamahas. A live well. 24 feet of fiberglass. It’s all I've ever wanted. To catch big fish. To drive a big boat. To escape far out into the big blue.

Eight thousand dollars. Eight thousand dollars was all I needed.

An old man got wrapped up with one of our girls. Followed her around. Peeked into her windows. Showed up to her kids’ daycare. The police are too busy. Violence everywhere. They don’t care about a girl feeding a baby. My boss told me she makes us the most money. She can't quit.

My boss pulled me into her office.

Fronted me four thousand and put a bottle of chloroform and a pistol on her desk.

“Use the boat. Tie him up. Go out to Wassaw and drop him in the sound. Use the pistol if need be. But bring back a finger. Then you’ll get the next four.”

The old man lived in a little house. A house on cinder blocks. He had an old dog. He’d walk him in the woods after work. From a distance I sat in my truck and smoked. I watched him grill chicken. I saw the live oak shade his back. I watched him feed the dog. I watched the old man laugh in the country.

On Thursdays, when the girl is on, that’s when he’d come in. He never caused problems. He’d usually sit in the back with a bucket of cold beer.

I got him drunk on the house. He told me about the war in Korea. I watched him cry in the back where the posters are of the girls. Cry about the kid he killed over there on a dare. How he left the kid in the woods for the animals and bugs. He told me the kid lives in the walls of his brain. I pushed him into the office. I put a rag of chloroform over his mouth. I watched his eyes roll back and what little hair he had fall over my forearms. I saw the dandruff on his bald spot. I saw him as a sick baby in my big arms.

I went out to the mouth. The waves howled. The world rolled out the creeks. The sky was falling past the beyond. The clouds, dark mirrors. I anchored and tied cinderblocks around his ankles. I tied his hands together. I watched him sleep and cradle with the waves. I felt the weight of the pistol in my lap. I watch the moon rise through the polished steel.

He woke and saw the two blocks and his hands tied. He laughed and tilted his head toward the soils of heaven.

“Let me get one.”

I let him smoke.

“I always knew I’d die where I was born.”

And he threw his tied hands out into the distance where the Talmadge Bridge shined like a tear.

“My daddy jumped off that.”

And he just smiled at me.

I told him about the finger. How my boss needed proof. How I needed the other four grand for the boat. I raised up the bolt cutters and told him it’ll snap off. Quick. Fast. Easy.

“Just take a finger. Kill me if I come back. We will both win.”

I looked into his grey eyes and tried to find the child he once was. A child who played in the woods and counted sheep at night. A child who trapped lightning bugs in jars and used it as a flashlight to find his brothers.

It was his middle one. The lower knuckle was tattooed with a faded clover. His big teeth bit into his t-shirt. His face grew red and with a cry of thunder overhead the finger hit the deck. He wrapped his hand in his shirt and smiled in the wind.

And we ran out the sound.

Toward the marsh.

Where the creeks held the world.

_____
Ben Clarence Tjaden lived in the low country.