"Shell Castle"

     "About ready?" Oscar asks quietly still looking across the water.

     "Yessir, about."

     "Watch northeast and southwest up there. If anything builds it will come from one or the other. If it comes and the wind stays one or the other, fine, just another storm. But if it comes then the wind starts to back around counter clockwise, Keith, you haul ass in somewhere fast. Because it’s about to get sure enough bad, and it’ll be around for awhile."

     So I say, yessir I will, and I look at his stomped on looking hard old fisherman’s hands and at his ever squinting leatherly old fisherman’s face, and I know what I already have begun to look like.

     Then he says even more quietly, "it’s true you know she really doesn’t care up there." But he says this matter of factly, like an experienced traveler advising an inexperienced traveler of a potentially rough stretch of road ahead. Wormshoes’s warning came from a scare from a situation that he didn’t take the time to understand, that happened up there. And Larry has never been up there, though he has been on the edges of similar waters, so his warning was just the customary one that fishermen give each other before a trip. But Oscar goes back to when they still haul seined mullet in rowed surf boats from the beach at Bear Island then salted them in wood barrels. Oscar damn well knows.

     So I say that I’m watching the forecasts carefully, but so far nothing unusual is coming. But he brings his face from looking across the water and looks at me real sternly and says for me to forget about forecasts. That they won’t tell me nature’s signs that say when not to leave the dock at all, and when to stop fishing and come in fast before something sure enough bad happens.

     That those signs are what the fishermen up there know that I don’t know. That down here there are plenty of places to hide after something happens, that they don’t have up there. That this is the next thing I have to learn if I am to be the fisherman that they are up there. But I am stunned, because I didn’t know that we down here aren’t the fishermen that they are up there. But Oscar wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t so. Then he looks back across the water and says quietly again, "I had to learn the signs the hard way, and that’s how you need to learn them so you won’t forget them." And I can tell by his eyes that he is gone fishing again on some trip that happened years before when a storm begins to build usual enough. But this time it just keeps building and worsening and worsening until the Pamlico Sound becomes a truly terrible place to be in a boat. Until just finding the channel between all the blunt raw shoals is impossible, much less running to a somewhere safe harbor. With solid foamy spray bursting from the bow and smashing against the windshield until the glass groans. Until the propeller screams its spinning and cannot catch. Until the below engine thunders its helplessness. Until the boat scuds wildly across the swells and wallows heavily through the troughs, and visibility becomes zero and the compass swings crazily. And the just thrown anchor to keep her bow to only bumps along the bottom uselessly. And the just thrown sea anchor to keep her bow to only barely slows her backward racing toward the every where around blunt raw shoals. Until Oscar Schneider learns something the hard way.

     Then his eyes slowly stop looking across the water, and his hands on the cane stop the twitching that they had started.

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