Undertow
It is almost midnight, but the buzz of dinner service hasn’t quite worn off: that high, that deep submersion in what his hands are doing, in how the sea bass smells, in the hiss of the scallops as they sear, in the colors as he plates a crisp brown crab cake against the red pepper puree and cilantro garnish. Even the fresh burn from when he reached into the oven for the roasted trout hadn’t hurt in the moment, didn’t begin to throb until the kitchen closed and he was standing in the walk-in taking inventory for tomorrow’s menus. Now, sitting in the closet-sized office wallpapered with schedules, menus, and supplier lists, every joint in Mitchell’s thirty-year-old body aches.
He is the last one left in the restaurant. Cassie finished prepping the tables for tomorrow’s lunch service an hour ago and headed home. By now she’ll be in bed. The baby swimming inside her lulls her into a sleep so heavy that she no longer wakes when Mitchell slides in beside her. Still, he can’t stop sifting through the endless stream of emails that come with serving lunch and dinner every day of the week during the Naples, Florida, high season. The blue glow emanating from the laptop’s screen tethers him there, clicking and clicking again. The email from his mother contains nothing but a subject line: “Thought you’d want to know” and a link to an article: “No wolves left on Michigan’s Isle Royale.” He never really cared about the fate of the wolves or the moose or the predator-prey study that had been the heart of his father’s life as a biologist, but the news that the wolves are gone, extinguished from the island through isolation and inbreeding, caught him with a guilt-tipped hook.
The summer Mitchell turned sixteen, he got a job bussing tables in a tourist lodge half an hour from town, on a bluff overlooking Lake Superior. He had his eye on a blue 1979 Chevy Camaro with a hundred thousand miles on the odometer sitting on the county impound lot and half what he needed to buy it saved up from setting pins all winter at the bowling alley. Mitchell hadn’t told his father about the new job or the car. He’d been going out to the island as part of the survey team since he was ten, and he knew his father was counting on him to go again this year.
To collect the data that informed the predator-prey study, Mitchell’s father led a group of students and biologists on a six-week survey of the island every summer. For the winter surveys in February, he hired a bush pilot to fly over the island so he could photograph moose kills and track pack movement through the snow and out onto the lake ice. Annual grants funded the plane and the pilot in the winter and a handful of graduate and undergraduate biology majors to serve as lackeys for the more extensive study in summer. Over the years, as the grant funds ebbed, he began rounding out the numbers with half a dozen eco-tourists who paid good money to collect wolf scat, count moose bones, camp rough, and bury their own shit on an uninhabited island.
“You could take my place,” Mitchell said to his mother, looking for a bailout. It was the week after school let out for the summer. She’d turned in final grades the day before and was sipping her morning coffee, wrapped in a blanket on the back deck, determined to sit in the sun even if the temperature hadn’t yet crept above fifty. “I bet the island has changed a lot since the last time you were out.”
“Nice try, bud. I spent the first six summers of my marriage out there with him. I fell in enough bogs and donated blood to enough mosquitoes to last a lifetime.” She pinned him with a look over the rim of her reading glasses. “It’s not for everyone. He’ll understand.”
Understanding wasn’t the same as not being disappointed. The night before the survey team was scheduled to meet at the boat dock, one of the cooks at the lodge gave Mitchell a ride home from work. As he walked up the driveway, he saw the lights on in the pole barn behind the house and found his father sorting gear. Jingo, silent as a shadow, uncurled from a pile of old towels under the workbench. The dog was a black Lab mix his father found scavenging in a dumpster behind the university dining hall one winter. Only six months old then, by the look of his teeth, he was soft-eared with a low-hipped way of walking that implicated some German shepherd in his gene pool. The leech, Mitchell and his mother called him, the term less an endearment than a rebuke for Jingo’s singular devotion. He would trot away from a bowl of kibble to greet Mitchell’s father as if it had been weeks rather than hours since he’d left home. Once, they had tested him with a meal of raw hamburger. Two gulps in, Jingo heard the truck pull up the gravel drive and bolted for the door with only one quick glance over his shoulder at the beef. But the times Jingo was home without Mitchell’s father were rare. He slept under a desk during lectures and on a dog bed in the corner during office hours. He became the biology department’s mascot, a snoring presence during staff meetings and dissertation reviews. The island was one of the few places Jingo couldn’t follow Mitchell’s father – dogs were banned because of the canine diseases they might bring to the unvaccinated wolves – but he was the only one left in the family who still wanted to go.
Jingo’s low growl ceased when Mitchell stepped into the light. After an apologetic wave of his tail and cursory scent inspection, the dog returned to the towels and lay down again.
Mitchell shoved his hands deep in the front pockets of his jeans and held on. “I’ve been bussing table at the lodge,” he said.
His father shook out a tangle of mesh collecting sacks and began to count them. “I heard.”
Mitchell watched Jingo watch his father. “Pays decent. And there’s this Camaro. I put a down payment on it.”
Mitchell’s father picked up a desiccated owl pellet that had fallen from one of the sacks. “I’d pay you if I could.” He broke the pellet open. Nothing but dust inside.
Last year there’d been some talk of a stipend for Mitchell, the same as the undergrads got, but then the grant had been reduced again and that talk petered out. With pack numbers shrinking, the predator-prey study itself was endangered.
“Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” Mitchell picked up an empty water bladder lying next to Jingo, added it to a crate of them waiting to be filled.
“Everyone will miss your s’mores,” his father said.
Hershey bars, marshmallows, and graham crackers were the one food indulgence allowed. The rest of the food packed in on the survey consisted of oatmeal, MREs, and trail mix.
“You have a way with a marshmallow, a stick, and a flame.” There was a lift in his father’s voice, a lightness, maybe even a joke. But he’d moved on to counting isobutane canisters, so Mitchell couldn’t be sure.
“How about giving me a ride to Copper Harbor in the morning?” his father said, recording his count on a clipboard. “Let your mother sleep in?”
The next morning Mitchell woke in the dark, stepped into jeans that still reeked of fried fish and onions, and felt nothing but relief that he wasn’t going out to the island. The last couple of years he’d dreaded it. Swarms of black flies and biting midges, beaver dams mined with holes that could break a leg, sheer-faced rock ridges with toe holds an inch deep, endless bags of trail mix and freeze-dried beef stew. At night the group clustered around Mitchell’s father to listen as he reviewed the day’s finds, pointing out the depth of the teeth marks on a moose femur or the presence of mouse bones in winter wolf scat. The group leaned in, asked questions, talked about the tagged wolves by name. Mitchell had watched all this from the edges, from the outside. It wasn’t that the others excluded him, but the older he got, the less he cared about finding clues in old bones and dried shit. His friends at school had laughed when he unleashed that line on them.
When the gear was loaded in the truck, Mitchell’s father tossed him the keys and climbed into the shotgun seat. The way his rough-knuckled hands lay passive in his lap as he waited for Mitchell to start the engine sunk a weight through Mitchell’s stomach. His father rolled down the window and whistled for Jingo. The dog vaulted into the back of the truck and found space to stand among all the equipment. As Mitchell drove through the neighborhood and out onto the main road, he could see Jingo through the rear-view mirror, bracing for the turns.
Gravel snapped and popped under the truck tires at the marina parking lot. Jingo leaped over the side as soon as Mitchell cut the engine. His nose quivered, taking in the combined assault of diesel fuel, fish guts, and mud, but still he shadowed Mitchell’s father as they transferred gear from the truck to the pile growing beside the charter boat tied up at the dock.
“Mitchell can’t make it after all,” Mitchell heard his father tell someone. “But we’ll have enough hands without him.”
As he carried the last of the gear to the dock, Mitchell thought about how fast the Camaro would go down that long, straight stretch of U.S. 41 heading south. The engine ran rough now – he’d work on that – but it needed new tires and pretty soon a new muffler. He’d have to ask his boss for double shifts to pay for those.
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Trapped in the confines of the restaurant office, he wishes what he always wishes when he thinks about that summer, that he’d gone one more time. Cassie says he second-guesses himself too much. Like tonight, after Marco stomped out of the kitchen at the peak of dinner service and Mitchell stepped into the fish line, he told Cassie he never should have accepted a management role.
She laid a cool hand on the back of his neck. “You’re chef now,” she said. “They have to follow your lead.”
“Not Marco.” The cook had exploded the third time Mitchell stopped his Chilean sea bass entree from leaving the kitchen, each one overcooked.
“He’s just stressed out,” Cassie said. “He’ll be back. His wife will make him. She’s pregnant again.”
“Why didn’t he tell me? I’d have gone easier on him.”
Cassie shrugged. “I’m the sympathetic shoulder they cry on. You’re the tough-guy boss.”
Cassie’s hand left his neck, and he felt its absence.
“We make a good team,” he said, turning to face her, hoping for more, for her to tell him what to do next, the way she’d told him the bartender was skimming product, and what to get his mother for Christmas.
She removed her purse from the bottom desk drawer and kissed him. He followed her to the back door, watched her walk to her car.
The owners of this place, the one Mitchell runs now, have offered him the chance to open a restaurant in a hotel they’re renovating in Miami Beach. The proposal has his gut tied in knots. They want him to choose the cuisine – Asian fusion, gastropub. They say they trust his instincts. More decisions. His stomach boils. Some nights, Mitchell lays his head in Cassie’s lap, and she rakes her fingernails over his scalp, a collision of pain and pleasure.
This lack of direction, this way he has of balking at choices, means he has landed in his current position thanks mostly to a dozen years drifting in the riptides and undertow of the restaurant business, picking up skills along the way. When the burger joint he worked at in Sarasota during his senior year of high school closed, a friend told him about a job at a raw bar in a hotel restaurant on the beach. From there, he followed a girl to Orlando, where a waitress at the Chili’s where he prepped vegetables told him about a seafood restaurant opening at a Disney hotel. He hired on there for a couple of seasons, stayed even after the girl moved on. At a cooks’ bar late one night, he met a guy who was a partner in a restaurant group. They hired him to work the line in their California-style bistro in Winter Haven, and then two years ago moved him up to sous-chef here in Naples. When they fired the chef for conspiring with the house manager to siphon off bar proceeds, they promoted Mitchell and brought in Cassie to revamp the front of the house.
Cassie can stop the heart of any male between the ages of ten and a hundred, and knows how to perform CPR to revive them. She is slender but solid; she played on the beach volleyball circuit until a shoulder injury forced her to retire. Chestnut hair that gleams copper in the sun hangs sleek to her shoulder blades. She can calm a frazzled waiter with a gentle squeeze just above the elbow and freeze a pushy diner by the way she tilts her head and holds him in a steady gaze. After a tropical storm trashed the mobile home park where Mitchell rented a trailer, Cassie let him move what was left of his possessions into her condo. Then he walked into the bathroom one morning to see Cassie sitting on the closed toilet lid. She smiled up at him, waved a little white wand, and told him she was pregnant. Acting more on momentum than conscious decision, Mitchell knelt in front of her and asked her to marry him. She says she’s considering it, but he knows she is waiting to see if he will step out of the current or let it carry him to Miami.
The walls of the office press in. Mitchell pushes away from the desk, closes the laptop, flips off the light. The air in the kitchen tastes like bleach. Out the back door, he shoots the bolt home; it makes a comforting thwack. The stench of the dumpster in the alley holds the undertones of every grilled swordfish, every broiled lobster tail, every roasted trout they served that day. In his truck, he rolls the windows down and lights a cigarette, a vice he hides from Cassie. Moisture hangs in air that carries the weight of summer. Insect vibrations rise, feverish, from the Cocohatchee River behind the restaurant, which is tucked down a side street off U.S. 41, his old friend.
Mitchell taps the accelerator, giving his father’s aging truck fair warning. Pulling out onto the highway feels like driving from night into day, the streetlights are that bright. He heads south, the smoke and the breeze rinse the last of the kitchen smells from his sinuses. He passes the turnoff to Cassie’s condo complex, accelerates. The temperature cools through the lush, sprawling darkness of Pelican Bay, then concrete parking lots and strip malls pop up again. Past the Publix, he turns into a neighborhood of single-family homes. Two blocks in on the left is the pale-yellow ranch the realtor showed him that morning. In the front yard, a banyan tree grips the sand with tentacled roots; in the back, a screened lanai runs the length of the house; inside, there are three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a combination living room and dining room. The fans that spin in the vaulted ceiling have palm-leaf blades. An eat-in kitchen looks onto the front yard. The color scheme is beige, bland. Cassie would fix that. Mitchell parks in the carport as if the house was already his and kills the engine. The place is empty; the elderly woman who lived here has moved on to a nursing home. He thinks of his own mother, still teaching in Sarasota, brushing off suggestions of retirement, tuning into the world on her laptop at night, sending him messages from the past.
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Down at the marina with the summer survey team, Mitchell’s father glad-handed the eco-tourists as the sun lifted above the pole pines on the ridge and the first lukewarm rays took the bite out of the morning chill. Jingo panted, weaving between people to stay close to Mitchell’s father. A graduate assistant called out for everyone to board. Mitchell’s father clapped Mitchell on the shoulder and let go too soon.
Mitchell found Jingo, took hold of his collar. Someone cast off the ropes. Jingo whined and fidgeted, lunged hard against his collar, his front paws swiping at air. Mitchell held on with both hands, dragging Jingo toward the truck while the dog twisted and arched, a seventy-pound hooked fish. When Mitchell let go with one hand to dig the keys out of his pocket, Jingo broke loose and bolted for the dock. The boat was a good twenty yards out, but Jingo leaped after it. Mitchell jumped in and swam after him, choking on diesel fumes. With the entire survey team cheering from the boat, he caught up with Jingo, hauled him out of the frigid lake, half carried him up the rocky beach. He locked the dog in the truck’s cab while he stripped off his waterlogged clothes; then he climbed in and drove them home, in his underwear, teeth chattering. His payback for not going.
“There’s no way you could’ve known,” his mother has said a thousand times.
When Mitchell’s father returned from the island that summer, his mood was lightened by evidence of a new den in the West Pack’s territory. It would be the last uptick before the wolf population entered the final decline. At the end of August, Mitchell bought the blue Camaro. On a night his mother had to stay late at school for conferences, he took his father for a ride, opened it up on the highway, saw his father grin out of the corner of his eye. They drove out to the lodge for the walleye special.
“Mitchell is our favorite busboy,” the hostess – a member of the extended family that owned the lodge – said as she led them to a table overlooking the lake. “We keep a tally of the dishes our bussers break, and Mitchell has the lowest number in recorded history.”
Their waitress was a stacked blond from the university who called him Mitchie, which he hated, but she was decent about sharing her tips with the busboys who cleared her tables. She brought out an order of fried calamari, “on the house,” and winked at Mitchell.
“Not a bad gig,” his father said. “You could move up to waiter next summer.”
Mitchell squeezed the lemon garnish over the calamari. “I’d rather be in the kitchen. That’s where the action is. Chef said if I get some experience this winter, he might find a spot for me on the line.”
Mitchell flipped a glance in his father’s direction. He was looking out the window at the scud of clouds lowering over the lake, eyes narrowed as if he could see all the way to the island. He came back, though, shook off the spell of the wolves, of his work, and said, “A man who can cook will never go hungry.”
In October, the lodge closed for the season, and Mitchell went back to the bowling alley, flipping burgers and scooping fries at the snack bar instead of setting pins. He saved enough for a new muffler, but the heater quit, so he never got around to replacing the bald tires. He spun out on black ice on his way home one night in November. The back end of the Camaro slammed into a telephone pole; the rear axle bent beyond repair. The insurance company declared the car totaled and sent Mitchell a check for barely half what he paid.
That February, during the winter survey, a fast-moving storm caught the research plane out over the island. Whiteout conditions forced the pilot to fly low, looking for landmarks. The coast guard found the plane on the ice at the base of a cliff, the engine compressed into the cockpit by the force of the head-on crash. Mitchell’s father and the pilot had died on impact. In the new-fallen snow, a trail of wolf tracks made a wide berth around the wreckage and continued along the shoreline.
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Mitchell and his mother moved to Florida the following summer, drove U.S. 41 the whole way. The manufactured home his mother rented only had a four-foot fence that wouldn’t contain Jingo for long, so one of Mitchell’s daily chores was exercising the wanderlust out of him. Mitchell would leash Jingo to his waist, and they’d run through the neighborhood, across the highway, and out the public-access road to the beach. Mitchell let Jingo bolt for the water still trailing the leash, so he’d be easier to catch once he was back on land. Jingo would swim straight out into the gulf, and just as Mitchell was working himself up to go into the water, Jingo would turn back. Once, a pod of dolphins surrounded Jingo, and Mitchell lost track of which was Jingo’s wet black head and which was a surfacing dolphin. Soon enough, the arching black shapes moved south along the shore, leaving Jingo behind. He imagined Jingo pining after them, and his own chest felt scooped out. It was the only other time Mitchell had gone in after Jingo; at least then the water was warmer.
The walks got shorter and more intermittent once Mitchell started working at the burger joint after school. One night, he worked until closing, then let Jingo out into the yard. He fell asleep on the couch; when he woke hours later and remembered Jingo, the yard was empty.
He grabbed a flashlight and trotted up and down the rows of tidy manufactured homes. Then he drove out in the truck, followed every route he’d ever run to get to the public beach. He whistled up and down the shoreline until his lips ached and the sun was rising. He posted flyers around the neighborhood and in the hallways at school, handed them out at the burger joint, drove to the animal shelter and looked in every cage. They said they’d call if they picked up a dog that looked like Jingo. On nights when he helped the cooks and busboys empty a case of beer at the beach, he convinced himself that Jingo was out in the gulf swimming with the dolphins. Other nights, driving home late, he imagined Jingo trotting down the centerline of northbound U.S. 41, staring down the headlights of an oncoming semi.
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In the carport of the pale-yellow ranch, Mitchell drops the butt of his cigarette into a metal trashcan, then follows a concrete walkway that leads around back to the lanai. The screen door is still unlatched and so is the sliding glass door that opens into the living room. The realtor asked him to lock it as they were leaving that morning, but he knew he’d come back alone to feel the house at night, to imagine a family living here, his family. The moon casts long slant rectangles of pale light across the tile floor in the main room. Down the hall, the bedroom carpets hold impressions of the furniture that once stood here. Cassie would have it all ripped out, but for now it is proof of a history, of a life lived in one place, of an eddy in the current.
In the kitchen, as he straightens the pile of listing flyers stacked on the counter, the weight of the decision crushes him, bends him over until his forehead touches the cool tile. He feels the ache return to his bones, the throbbing pulse of the fresh burn on his forearm. When he straightens and looks out across the front yard, a dark shadow trots across the driveway, over the moonlit expanse of Bermuda grass, then vanishes into the shadows of the banyan tree. Logic says it is too small, a cat or a skinny raccoon, but his heart leaps anyway. He steps out the kitchen door into the carport, whistles low the way he used to. Waits. Walks toward the banyan tree. Whistles again. There is no answer.
They are both gone, but he is here, this pale-yellow house at his back an anchor against the undertow.
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