Sacculina

  Sacculina

  By

  Philip Fracassi

  JournalStone

  Copyright © 2017 Philip Fracassi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting: JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-68-8 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-945373-69-5 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937089

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: May 12, 2017

  Cover Art & Design: Chuck Killorin

  A derivative of "Human skull 1.JPG" by Maxim Bilovitskiy. CC BY-SA 4.0

  Edited by: Aaron J. French

  Thanks to Daniel Lytle (Veteran) U.S. Coast Guard, for his support and advice.

  This one is for my Dad.

  Sacculina

  The boat was too small.

  That was Jim’s first thought as he stepped from the truck. His legs broke out in goosebumps, and his eyes throbbed from lack of sleep. The two cups of gasoline station coffee made his groin ache and tingle with the need to piss. When he saw their boat way at the end of the dock, he could only think how very tiny it looked. Other boats loomed around it, white and shiny and unsinkable. Beyond them, the pink dawn was beginning to weave itself into the gray edge of the Pacific. The air was fishy, cold and damp. The soft rocking and creaking of the boats emanated from the docks and seagulls flapped their wings somewhere nearby, cries distant and wary. One of the men farted and sighed, someone else hocked and spit, as they started toward the water.

  Jim followed his brother Jack across the concrete pier and onto the chipped-wood of the wide dock. He glanced down, past his shoes, through the soaked slats, to the hem of the ocean below. Even at a couple feet of depth the water looked alive; suds and trash felt up the thin shoreline like a thousand lapping tongues, each as hungry as the last. He shuddered and brought his eyes up to follow Jack’s shoulder-blades, which protruded sharply from beneath his frayed Mello-Yello T-shirt, the same damned one he’d had when they were kids. But as he’d been wearing an orange jumpsuit the last six years, Jim figured he probably didn’t mind, likely found the old clothes comforting. Like going back and starting over from a certain point, rewinding to when you were nineteen and still harbored thoughts of a brilliant future.

  Jack wasn’t that kid, not anymore. He’d grown older, harder. In the weeks since he’d been home the changes, physical and psychological, were more evident. Jim didn’t like how skinny his big brother had become, for one. His face had hollows it didn’t have before, and his arms were sinewy, his elbows knobby. He wore his old jeans but they hung low, even with his broad leather belt pulled to the last set of bolt holes. His hair was short now, choppy, sticking from his skull in matted black clumps.

  Up ahead, their father Henry led the way. He was wearing khakis, a Polo pullover and a cheap ice-blue windbreaker. His thin graying hair played with the breeze, his shoulders slightly hunched. He was young, having just turned sixty, but life had taken a toll on him, and Jim knew he was physically old for his age. Sadness and loss did that to a man—took from him. Took from the inside out, so that by the time you saw the results it was too late to do anything about it. What was done was done. Life was a merciless thief with a black heart, and you hoped it passed you by when scouting for its next victim. Jim knew life had visited their home more than once and didn’t think the old man could take another calling.

  “Mind the seagull shit, little brother,” Jack said as he kept pace behind their father, stuttering his stride to make sure he didn’t pass him. He turned his head, gave Jim a look. His brown eyes twinkled and Jim saw the curl of his lips. He was loving this. How could he not be? Fishing with his old man, ready to cut through the waves, deeper and deeper into the blue Pacific, the salt spray on his face... Jim didn’t doubt this was one of many dreams Jack played in his mind on cold nights while lying on a ratty cot, staring at the ceiling of his tiny cell out in Lancaster, the local branch of the California State Prison for those boys and girls who live in the “who gives a shit” part of the Golden State.

  Bringing up the rear behind Jim, humping a full-size red metal cooler, was Jack’s best friend, Chris Hanson, who looked every bit like a 280-pound kid, wearing a filthy Dodgers cap, thick plaid shirt and heavy brown cargo shorts, his wide calves emptying into loosely-tied Jordan high-tops. Chris had been Jack’s best friend since they were, well, since forever. Jim couldn’t think of a time when Chris wasn’t around, and he’d watched the two of them get into so much trouble, time and time again, that it seemed by the time they were teenagers the old man had finally given up trying to keep them in any sort of check and focused his efforts on Jim—his last-ditch effort of raising a good son—instead of his eldest. Their mother’s untimely death hadn’t helped.

  Jack hadn’t been able to deal with the year-long horror show that was their mother’s slow demise. The three surgeries all but bankrupted their father and left them all emotionally cleaned-out, their feelings of love and support so scrubbed from inside their heads, their hearts, that nothing remained at the end but cold finality. Inside the pale room at the community hospice where they’d taken her to die, Jim watched her last breath with dry eyes. His father had crumpled to the floor and lain there. While the nurses struggled to get him to his feet, Jim stood rooted to the bleached linoleum of the hospice floor.

  Jack walked out.

  They had been kids at the time. Jack only eighteen, a senior at East Bakersfield High, a run-down school backed up to an Amtrak station, the inconsistent running of the trains a background hum that made the classroom windows vibrate. Jim a sophomore, not even driving.

  Afterwards, their father went through the motions of burying his wife, and himself with her in a way. Both boys knew he was lost to them. They could see it in his eyes. Could feel it. Love had run out of stock in the Lowell home, and only a great emptiness remained.

  Jim filled that emptiness with his hobbies—his books, his computer, his game console. He was a serious gamer, and when he wasn’t reading dog-eared philosophy texts or his favorite science titles—Hawking, Kaku and Sagan, may his soul rest in peace—he spent his nights writing juvenile code for games he created in his mind, then committed to paper before attempting to create the thing in one of his developer programs. After a couple years taking tech classes at the community college, he’d been confident enough to send a few of his more developed samples off to different companies, the code and the links to his lame beta levels, but none of them ever replied. He started a YouTube channel, spent countless hours reviewing games, posting video of fixes and cheats, slyly promoting his own early visions. It passed the time, got him through high school, those four dull-eyed years of being a Bakersfield College Renegade.

  Got him through the loss of his mother, the emotional loss of his father, and, shortly thereafter, the loss of his only brother to a first-degree burglary charge.

  Turned out Jack had been breaking into houses around the neighborhood, stealing whatever he could easily sell t
o a couple guys down in L.A. who moved the stuff. Laptops mainly. But any tech would do. Smartphones, tablets—those were a thief’s modern-day treasure, replacing the outdated silver flatware or the proverbial pearl necklace.

  When Jack was sentenced, their father fell even further into his spiraling depression. Within two years he had lost a wife and his oldest son. He tried with Jim, tried to be a father, but when Jack was sent away for six years, it broke him completely. Whatever was left of him to give sputtered and went out like a dying flame, leaving Jim to his solitude. Each of them became a ghost the other shared a house with—and quiet ghosts at that.

  Now Jack was out. And maybe, Jim hoped, maybe things would begin to go right again. To make sense. To be whole. Jim wanted a family, a life that wasn’t filled with heated-up dinners and silent, solitary nights. Wanted his big brother back, wanted his father to laugh again. He hoped that day would come. And hell, he thought, a guy could hope, couldn’t he?

  Jim and Chris had driven out to Lancaster to pick Jack up the day of his release. Jim brought Jack’s old leather jacket, his favorite baseball hat and the pair of dusty black Ray-Ban’s that hadn’t moved from the top of his dresser in the six years he’d been gone.

  Chris had stopped at a liquor store and bought a Styrofoam cooler, a bag of ice, a 12-pack of Budweiser and a fifth of Jack Daniels. “Essentials,” he’d said over his shoulder, as the old man behind plexiglass rang them up.

  Fully stocked with booze and memories, they waited together in a broad, empty sunbaked parking lot, the two of them staring at a twenty-foot high barbed-wire fence and the stoic, blocky red-bricked building beyond with equal amounts disdain and fear. They didn’t speak. They weren’t friends. They were parts of Jack, disassembled and left to wait patiently for his return.

  Jim often wondered if Chris had been with his brother on those break-ins, with him on the night he was chased through a neighborhood—like the criminal he was—by angry policemen, dogs and the all-seeing spotlight of the chopper following him through yards and over fences. Jim wondered if Chris had been the lucky one that night, and he wondered if it was Chris’s stupid idea in the first place.

  He never broached the subject, not out of fear, although there was certainly an intimidation factor. Chris was a big guy. Six-feet and a lot of change, arms coiled and bulging, barrel-chested and topped with a shaggy mop of long brown hair, his face and neck covered with it like fungus. He had deep-set blue eyes and a famously broken nose. He worked construction with his father, so his fingers were coarse and strong, thick and bent as stubby tree branches. He never bothered Jim when they were growing up, barely ever paid him any mind at all. Didn’t tease him, didn’t protect him. Jim meant nothing to him. No, Chris was Jack’s through-and-through. He was his shadow during their early years, a wraith that always hovered just over his smiling brother’s shoulder, arms folded, waiting and impatient for whatever the two of them were going to do next, double-daring anyone to lay a finger on his skinny, jackal-eyed best buddy. And while Jack may have been the smarter of the two, Chris was more thoughtful. Where Jack was mischievous, Chris was dark, brooding, and prone to sudden violence. Jim never knew what Jack saw in him, but we don’t always pick our friends, don’t always choose the companions we share our lives with. And maybe, Jim wondered, it wasn’t about Jack picking Chris. Perhaps it was Chris, all along, who had settled himself on Jack.

  When Jack walked out from the prison that day, Jim didn’t give Chris a chance to one-up him. He ran to his brother and embraced him. Jack laughed, pulled Jim away so he could look at him, smiling and crying. Jim was startled at how much older his brother looked, skinnier now, with a moustache that was too big for his thin face. But his eyes still sparkled, and his grip was strong as weeds.

  “Look at you,” Jack said, tears running into the teeth of his broad smile. “Little brother,” he said, and they hugged again.

  “I brought your jacket, and a hat,” Jim said stupidly, giddily. “Dad’s waiting at home.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” Jack said, still smiling. They made it back to the car and Chris. The two grown boys, now men with history, embraced, and Chris patted Jack heavily.

  “Don’t do that again, huh?” Chris said, then turned and got into the driver’s seat of the old Thunderbird he’d driven since the day he turned sixteen. Jack winked at Jim, who gave his brother shotgun, and they went on home.

  * * *

  They reached the end of the dock and the worn-out, depressed-looking, twenty-foot fishing boat. The words Not A Chance were written in looping cursive along its hull in shit-brown letters, faded by the sun and corroded by the salt of the sea. Jim’s mouth dropped open at the site of the thing, the stern sagging, nearly level with the low, lapping waves. The rear deck, where all four of them were supposed to fit, pulling in fish and relaxing in the sun, looked as cramped and cluttered as a trailer-trash living room.

  “Hope we don’t sink the little fucker,” Jack mumbled to Jim, giving Chris’s mammoth girth an exaggerated look before he turned with a flashing smile to greet the captain, who stood on deck waiting for them, hands on hips.

  The captain, who introduced himself as Captain Ron, was an old, white-bearded man with a gut that hung like a barrel. His paunchy face was a deep shade of beet-red and he wore a thin, stained, white button-down short-sleeve shirt, dark green suspenders attached to worn-out jeans with no knees, and grimy brown leather sandals on his broad, hairy feet. His wardrobe was topped by a weathered trucker’s cap that read LAS VEGAS across its wide front, two rolling dice with frayed stitching falling hopelessly between the barely legible LAS and VEGAS. Jim noticed that the captain had bits of food stuck in his dense beard, and his eyeglasses were so thick that Jim could easily count the red veins in each bloodshot eyeball.

  The captain stepped up to Jim’s father and stuck out a meaty hand. Henry looked to Jack questioningly, as if he hadn’t the damnedest idea how to respond.

  Jack stepped up and clasped the captain’s hand, pulled him up to the dock. The captain swayed a bit, rubbed at his forehead, and eyed each of the men respectively. “Ayuh,” he said, his voice breathless and wet, “I see there’s four of ya.”

  Jack glanced wide-eyed at Jim, just for a moment, a frantic look of are you serious, then back at the captain.

  “Yes sir,” he said, waving a hand at the others and talking in a condescending tone Jim figured the captain couldn’t catch. “There’s the four of us. That’s what we discussed.” Jack made introductions.

  The captain sighed and waved his fat hand, as if things like life or names didn’t really matter anymore. He turned his back on the men and looked at the boat, then out to the sea.

  “Well,” he said, sadly shaking his bowling ball of a head, “I’m sorry, lads. Not today.”

  The men on the dock shared quick exchanges. Chris stepped forward. “Not today what?” His deep voice rumbled like Neptune.

  The captain turned, eyes bulging behind the dense lenses. He brought a finger to his red, veined nose and scratched. He looked at each of the men who stood, waiting.

  “Can’t,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He pointed to the ocean, gave Henry his full attention, adult-to-adult. “Wind’s ripe wicked, sir. The waves, they’re rough. We’ll toss like salad out there. Not safe, not really. Not great for fishing, that’s for sure.”

  Henry turned toward the younger men, his thin fleshy face hanging from his skull, his eyes wide and curious. “He says weather’s no good,” as if they weren’t all standing a foot away when the captain had spoken.

  Jim bowed his head, groaned, and rubbed his eyes. This was so typical for them that he really wasn’t surprised. And he was tired, so very tired.

  They had driven into the hotel parking lot a little after nine p.m. the previous night. Driven three hours from Bakersfield to the marina, booked two rooms at a crappy hotel near the coast. But the Kings were in the playoffs. Game six had taken a total of fiv
e and-a-half periods to decide the outcome. Nearly three overtimes, with intermissions, had kept all of them up late, glued to the room’s tiny television, pulling on their quickly-depleting case of beers and cheering their team on. By the fifth period, Jim was fighting to keep his eyes open, Henry was snoring in an ugly lounge chair, but Jack and Chris were pulled right up to the screen, sitting side-by-side in cheap wooden table chairs, punching each other and howling with each near-score, drunkenly laughing. The room lights had long been turned off so that only the television’s one-eyed glow illuminated their mad, grinning faces.

  They roared and high-fived when the Kings finally put one in, waking Jim from his awkward place on the floor and making Henry beg them (for the hundredth time) to go watch it in the other room.

  From half-lidded eyes, Jim studied his brother, his poor, thin older brother; noticed how his face reflected the blues and whites from the television, his skin pale but his eyes wide and shining with life, with freedom.

  He groaned and crawled up onto his bed fully-clothed, hardly noticed when the two men slapped his ankles as they walked from the room, talking loud enough to wake the entire floor of the hotel. Jim smiled, happy that the Kings scored one for his brother, glad they were able to share the moment. Even if he was asleep on the floor when it happened, they had still been together.

  But Jim was feeling less gracious a mere three hours later, when the alarm went off at five a.m., waking them for their charter. Henry was up like a shot, making coffee, already dressed by the time Jim was able to roll out of bed, his head haunted with beer dreams and the dull throb from lack of sleep.

  “Morning, son,” his father said, handing him a coffee. There was a banging at the door, happy voices in the hall.