Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [61]
I tried to divide them into a pile for my family—three or four—and a pile for his family—all the rest.
“I never eat them,” he explained succinctly. “Kids and wife don’t like them either.”
They were all for us.
I could just see the cop who might stop us doing a double take before opening the cooler. “Any relation to Kurt? Aren’t you a pediatrician? Didn’t you do some ads for Blue Cross?”
Maybe there was a fine of a thousand dollars apiece for possessing lobsters this small, maybe there wasn’t. I didn’t know for sure but would have supported such a law. What possible excuse could there be for riding around with a cooler nearly full of cod and bluefish topped off with twenty-plus tiny lobsters?
I’d bake some of the cod for dinner. Whatever cod we didn’t eat that night could be frozen. The bluefish I could smoke. Nikolai had put little rubber bands on each of the lobsters’ claws so they wouldn’t tear one another apart in the close quarters of the cooler.
We had gone on the trip expecting a two- or three-hour deal that had turned into seven. Our three-year-old had held up well. It would be good to get home. We said our goodbyes. With the cooler in the back of the pickup truck, I readjusted my mirrors and drove very carefully, not too fast, not too slow, no U-turns. Our son fell asleep instantly. The truck was very quiet.
A few minutes into our trip home I looked over at my wife. “We’ve got to try to let the lobsters go.”
“Do you think they can live?” They’d been on ice but out of water a couple of hours.
“They’re alive now. We have to give them a chance.”
The only place I could think of with deep-enough water was a popular fishing dock. Lugging a cooler down the dock and liberating baby lobsters might attract attention. I’d have to get all those rubber bands off—a chance at life with banded claws wasn’t much of a chance. We’d stick out like a whole hand of sore thumbs throwing lobsters out of a cooler on a fishing dock. Sure there’s a Russian fisherman….
If there had been one or even two or three of them, it wouldn’t have been so bad. The large number spoke to callous indifference and criminal intent.
I don’t stick out. I’m exactly average height, an average amount overweight, with brown hair and brown eyes. I worry about being in the wrong place at the wrong time or not having the right identification. The thought of being caught with these lobsters was almost worse than death itself.
“I think there’s some pretty deep water off a breakwater down behind a car dealership in Weymouth.”
We found the parking lot and watched in silence for a few minutes to see if anyone was around. I climbed halfway down the breakwater dragging the cooler, slightly twisting an ankle before I could find a place to steady it and myself. One by one I took off the bands and threw the lobsters into the water. I could see them lying there, not moving, for a while, but then they jerked around and seemed to recover.
I knew from having found lobsters in marsh pools while quahogging that they don’t need a lot of water. They were less than a hundred yards from Quincy Bay, where there were lots of other lobsters, but if this was the end of the line, at least they had one another. We were out of there.
“I think that they’re okay, but maybe I should have given them one of the bluefish,” I told my wife as I got into the truck. Our three-year-old was dead to the world, asleep, strapped into his car seat. “I’m going to tell Nikolai that they were the best lobsters we ever ate.”
The world that went forward from that moment was a world where we, at some small—but not zero—risk to ourselves, set free twenty-three small lobsters somewhere off a parking lot in Weymouth rather than eating them, which would have been the easier thing to do.
We are saltwater ocean people.
(Photo by M. Oliver Vonnegut)
Never lie down with your children to get them to sleep.