The Blue Crab

The end of swim season was the end. There were no digital fibers in the fabric of our lives to keep us connected. Gone was the shock of the early morning water and the honey combed sunlight quivering beneath the surface of the pool. Gone were the Lycra suited lords and ladies of summer cheering from the edge. There would be no more frozen snickers, wafting scents of crinkled French fries frying or coconut scented mothers glistening. And most all, it was the end of congratulatory pats on the rear end from coach Hal with the blonde wavy hair and muscled legs like tree trunks. I was a moonchild born in July. The end of swim season was the end of me.

But after the end, my mother piled brown paper grocery bags filled with a week’s worth of food into the back of our wood paneled station wagon and so we began the four hour trek to Topsail Island on the outer banks of North Carolina. As the landscape flattened out and the green stalks of corn flickered by the window, we hit a bump in the road and my lungs deflated with a hissing sigh.

“What’s wrong with you?” my older brother Chuck asked.

“Shut-up,” I replied. Because how could I explain what was wrong with me, when what was wrong 

with me was so terribly wrong?

When the shoulders of the roads became sandy and the dunes dotted with nodding sea oats came into view, we rolled down the windows and inhaled the warm salty air, each attempting to spot the blue of the ocean first. It was an elixir that brought me back from the brink of death caused by teenage summer crush.

Towards the end of the week, my three brothers and I bolted through the screen door with the rusted spring hinge of the faded blue cottage, whack! Chuck with the fish heads, John with the string, Matt with the Styrofoam cooler and me with the net. We navigated our way across the street and through the reeds, side stepping the fiddler crabs retreating backwards.

We tied a string in a loop through the mouth of a fish head, our faces screwed up as if we had just bitten into a lemon and tossed the head into the shallow water of the sound. Within a minute or two there was a tug on the line and Chuck slowly pulled the string towards us as I dropped the net and scooped up a blue crab. I inverted the net over the cooler and shook it, releasing the clamoring crustacean.

After we deposited about ten crabs, Chuck pulled up another and when I captured it in the net and shook it, I discovered that it was hopelessly tangled.

“Reach in and pull it out,” Chuck commanded, but I could not.

“Come on you fag, just do it.”

I’m certain now that he used the term loosely, more as an insult and less as an accusation, but I felt ensnared in the word. And so I whacked the net against a barnacled wooden pole over and over again, tears streaming down my face as the crab’s body cracked and my brothers looked on with wide eyes and gaping mouths. The sun dipped below the horizon smearing orange streaks in the sky and I was left alone to pick the dismantled pieces of the crab out of the net.

It was the end of the season and it was the end of me.