THE FATTED CALF

I’d forgotten how much darker it is on this side of the river, the night sky blocked out by the pines behind the houses. I lose my footing and drop to one knee on the wet clay between my dad’s old place and our neighbor, Big Jay. I get steady by keeping one hand on Big Jay’s fishing boat as I walk. I trace over the boat’s registration numbers: VA-666-AF. We had always gotten a kick out of that. I laugh to myself about my supposed summer as Big Jay’s junior boatman. I was so bad at it. Big Jay pulling the crab traps in, and me trying to sort. I’d just finished high school. Big Jay had offered me forty dollars a day. I convinced him to give me a two-week advance, which I never earned, having left town after my third day out.

On his porch, I lean my head on the screen-door. I can see the TV on, Fox News probably. In the kitchen, Big Jay is getting the coffee going, same as he always did, looking like a laboratory scientist, leveling out each scoop of grounds with a pinky finger before turning on the percolator. It isn’t any kind of gourmet stuff, just store-bought and an old Coffee-mate machine. But I feel a homesickness for it all the same. Something about the way he moves, this big, thoughtful beast.

I take my satchel from under my arm and softly tap it against the handrail. There’s four hundred dollars inside, just about how much I took for the crabbing that I hadn’t done. I tuck the satchel into the back of my pants, and then knock. Big Jay does not seem at all alarmed to hear knocking at his door at three in the morning. He just says, “Hold up,” as he finishes putting the grounds back into the fridge. When he gets to the door, almost before he could possibly have seen who it is, he says, “Well, if it isn’t Princeton Moss.”

I don’t respond right away. The two of us stand at the open door for a second, looking each other over. Big Jay this large, white, middle-aged man, and me, this skinny Asian kid. Then, he says, “Been a while,” and the two of us hug a hearty and hardy hug. When we’re done, he holds me by the shoulders and looks me over again, “Look at you. I was just talking to Wilkes and them about how that Korean guy in Walking Dead’s the spitting image of little Princeton. And here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“Well, shit. Here you are.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now that I’m looking at you, you don’t look anything like that guy.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I hear it all the time. You all aren’t the first.”

Big Jay just nods and then, as if he’s suddenly regained all sense of himself, says, “Well, shit. Don’t just stand there. Come on in.”

“I know you’re about to head out,” I say. “I don’t want to hold you up.”

“It’s no trouble,” he says. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet. And I’m guessing, you neither.”

I drag my feet against the doormat, trying to scrape the mud. Big Jay says, “Don’t worry about that. The place is a mess.” But it’s not a mess at all, so I kick off my shoes before I come in.

Big Jay pats me on the shoulder and directs me to the kitchen table. I take a chair, pulling the satchel out from my pants and laying it on my lap, not hiding it, but not making it obvious either. At the cupboard, Big Jay gets a second mug and pulls the half-brewed pot from the percolator, pouring a cup for me and one for himself, before putting the pot back on to finish.

“You still take cream, no sugar?”

“Black’ll be fine.”

“Well, all right then.”

He sets the coffees down and picks up the remote and turns the TV off. Then he just sits and looks at me again, shaking his head as if he cannot believe his eyes.

I say, “You’re creeping me out, man.”

“Come on. Give an old man a break. I haven’t seen you since, God, how long?”

“It’s just been the two years. Not any time at all.”

“Still, seems long to me.”

“Yeah,” I admit. “I guess same here.”

Big Jay nods his head toward the kitchen and says, “You hungry? I can make some breakfast real quick. It’d be no trouble.”

“No thank you, sir. I’m fine with coffee.”

The two of us proceed to catch up a little bit. I ask Big Jay how the crabbing’s been. He says it’s been good, really good actually. He’s even thinking of getting a new boat, a bigger one. That little dinghy’d almost capsized twice this last season, one time seven bushels went over. Seven! He’d been so mad over that, for days he couldn’t stop talking about it, to the point that the guys at the pool hall made him start buying a round every time he brought it up. But things were good. Lots of jimmies. I chuckle at that, the jimmies part. “Jimmies” are what boatmen call the ones you keep; the big, hard, grade-A, male blue crab.

“I always wondered,” I say. “Is that why they call you Big Jay?”

“Why who calls me Big Jay?”

“Why people call you Big Jay, because of the crabs. The jimmies.”

“You mean as in I catch the most jimmies or I’m the king of the jimmies or some such?”

Big Jay shrugs and so I shrug too. I’d never asked before, but I’d always assumed, not just because Big Jay is big, which he is, but also because he’s a good one, grade-A, the kind that you want to keep.

“You’re a good one, Big Jay.”

“Now, what are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Just thinking about crabbing and jimmies and whatnot.”

“Oh, Jesus,” says Big Jay, shaking his head and heaving an exaggerated exhale. “Speaking of. You wouldn’t believe what I’d pulled out of the bay.”

I laugh, “I don’t care to hear any fishing stories.”

“Shit, you’ve never heard one like this.”

Then Big Jay looks like he’s hesitating, like he’s maybe changed his mind about telling the story after all.

“Come on,” I say. “What, is this not an ordinary fishing story? This is something particularly unusual? I want to hear it.”

Big Jay says, “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Why?”

“It’s disturbing.”

“Oh shit,” I say. “Was it a body? Oh my God, you found a body.”

He waves both hands across his face.

“I’m telling you,” says Big Jay. “It’ll ruin you for crab.”

“What?” I say.

“It’ll ruin your appetite for crab.”

I lean back, thinking about how blue crab, like all crab, will eat literally anything: plant, animal, living, dead. They eat shit even. They’re even known to cannibalistically eat their own. But still, a human corpse, I’d never heard of that before.

I shake my head and say, “Oh, jeez.”

Big Jay just says, “Yup.”

I say, “Must’ve been pretty rotted out.”

He again says, “Yup.”

“Where were they at?”

“The crabs? Face, mostly. Some other spots.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

I point down to my crotch. Big Jay nods. Then he waves his hand in a big circle from his head down to his knees and back up again.

“All over.”

“Dang,” I say. “What do you do in that situation?”

“I was in the middle of my day. I still had a couple lines to run.”

“Oh no. You didn’t just, like, leave the body on your deck, did you?”

“No, no,” says Big Jay. “Come on. What kind of person you think I am?”

I shrug. “You never know. I mean, there wasn’t any helping him from that point on.”

“Her,” says Big Jay. “It was a girl.”

“Oh.”

“She was just a kid. I mean, though I couldn’t tell exactly how old. Even the cops said it’d take the coroner to really know.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“It reminds me of that story.”

“That what now?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Just this old story about these guys on a fishing trip. They find a body of a girl floating in the river. They don’t want to quit early on their trip though, so they anchor her to a tree so she won’t float away. That way they can finish their fishing trip and then tell the cops about it when they’re done. You know what I mean? After they’re done with all the fishing and whatnot.”

Big Jay shakes his head. “What kind of story is that?”

I say, “It’s famous, man.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“There’s that movie of it. It’s got Huey Lewis as the guy who finds the body.”

“Well, anyway. That’s not realistic. Believe me. If you found a dead girl floating in the water, you wouldn’t be able to go on fishing. No way.”

“You think?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

The two of us sip our coffees and settle back into our chairs. I stop talking about the dead girl. Big Jay doesn’t say anything more either, and that seems like maybe what the guys in the story did, just stopped talking about it, even though they might not have been able to stop thinking about it. They might’ve just silently agreed to pretend that the body wasn’t there, all of them colluding in the abdication.

Big Jay lets out a sigh like to indicate that that’s enough about that, and he goes on and asks how I’m doing, how’s Janet, how’s everything. I tell him that we’ve been all right. The two of us, we’re still together. I don’t tell him that we’re struggling a little with money. I also don’t say anything yet about moving to California. Then Big Jay mentions that he’d seen Janet playing guitar with her dad’s band, Funkyard Dog, over at The Mag. I laugh and ask what the fuck Big Jay’s doing at The Mag, which is not a trendy people’s place, but still too trendy for Big Jay. Big Jay puffs up his chest and says how he’s not too old to cut a rug. I laugh at the cut-a-rug part.

Big Jay says, “Even an old boatman’s gotta get loose now and again.”

He does a little dance move with his shoulders. I say that’s enough of that. And then I ask him what he thought of the band. He makes a fuss about how come I don’t know myself how good my girl’s band is. Some boyfriend!

I say, “It’s her dad’s band, not Janet’s.”

Big Jay says, “Anyway, they were great. Great.”

“Janet doesn’t even like funk music. She’s just playing as a favor.”

“Well, all the better. That’s her father. He’s her people. Isn’t helping him a good enough reason? Even if she hates it, isn’t family a good enough reason to go ahead and do it anyway, if you’re able?”

Big Jay says this like he’s trying to make a larger point.

I don’t want to argue, but still, I say, “That’s naïve, man. Her dad’s taking advantage of her. He knows she’s not into it. He’s using her.”

I shift in my chair. The satchel slips a little off my lap. I catch it before it falls and then prop it in-between my knees. Big Jay doesn’t seem to notice. He shakes his head and then says something about how Janet’s really good on the guitar, and then changes the subject all together and starts asking me about school. I realize that he doesn’t know I graduated.

“Oh shit,” I say. “I graduated, Big Jay. I’m done.”

“Oh shit,” he says. “Well, damn it, Princeton. Congratulations. Wow, you’re a college graduate. My God. Congratulations.”

I try to apologize for not telling him sooner. I say it’s just junior college. He says he’d have liked to come to the ceremony. I tell him that there wasn’t even a ceremony, even though there was. Then he asks what I’m doing now. I don’t want to get into my leaving town, so I just say that I’m going to work on my book.

“That’s good,” he says. “That one about the spaceman?”

“Astronaut. But yeah, that one.”

“That’s good. I always liked that story. Reminded me of a Twilight Zone and whatnot.”

This is true. I got the idea from a Twilight Zone, the one where astronauts land on a planet where everyone is frozen like statues. It turns out the planet is actually some kind of heaven, where everyone spends eternity in their favorite memory, whatever that memory is: the day they won a beauty pageant, the day they became mayor, the day they fished their limit, or what have you. The only catch is, they’re all still dead and the whole scene is frozen like some kind of diorama, like a taxidermy display, like one of those caveman scenes at a human history museum.

“You gonna make a movie of it?”

“No, man. They wouldn’t make a movie of it.”

“Well, I’m sure you could.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m not gonna show up in Hollywood and try to sell them an old Twilight Zone, even if it is all rewritten.”

“Hollywood?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to Hollywood.”

“Yeah.”

Big Jay frowns a little. He takes a sip of his coffee. I do too. It’s cold. He gestures to the coffeemaker, and I push my cup over to him. He gets up and warms up both. He takes a sip of the warmed-up coffee as he’s sitting back down.

“That’s better.”

I sip mine too.

Big Jay says, “So, Hollywood. When you taking off?”

“Tomorrow,” I say. “Janet made the decision, so I’m going too.”

This isn’t completely true. It is true she mentioned it first. But I’m the one who applied to schools out there. I’m the one who found a place to live. It’s as much me as her.

I say, “You know Virginia’s never been particularly good to me, present company excluded, of course.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says, and then, “I mean, I do understand. I know you never really took to this life.”

He waves a hand around.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, LA will be like a homecoming.” He says, referring to how I was born in California, a ways outside of Los Angeles, but we’d always just said I was from LA.

“Yeah, sort of,” I say. “You know, I’ve lived here now twice as long as I’d lived there.”

Big Jay says, “Hmm, true.”

“Virginia always stayed kinda foreign to me. Or I guess, I’m the foreign one, like a visitor, like the astronaut from my story. Like I landed on this alien planet and it looks like home, but it’s not.” I look at Big Jay to make sure I haven’t offended him. I can’t tell. I go on, “It just never quite felt right. I don’t know. It’s stupid things like the warm ocean water, the winter snow, thunderstorms, all those trees, the Confederate stuff, even if it’s supposed to be just heritage and decoration, which I guess it mostly is.”

“It doesn’t suit everyone.”

“Yeah, no, I guess not.”

“Well, but, Hollywood,” Big Jay says, “I can see that, for you both. Show business.”

I say, “Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.”

Then I try to explain why I’m here, even though Big Jay isn’t asking. I apologize for coming so late and unannounced. I tell him how I’d been out late, a kind of a goodbye party. Then I apologize for not inviting him to the party. Then I apologize again for coming over so late.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You’re always welcome here, kid. I ain’t got nowhere to be.”

“Yeah,” I say. “We’d just been out late. I couldn’t sleep so I was just driving around. I just thought I’d stop by since it’s been a while.”

Big Jay listens, letting me keep talking about where else I’d been that night, until he says, “You need cash?”

“No, no,” I say. “No, sir. I do not.”

“For your trip?”

“No, sir,” I say, and then, “It’s the opposite, Big Jay. I want to pay you back, for that money I took for the crabbing I didn’t do.”

He says, “Shit, kid. I don’t need your money.”

“It’s your money. It was a loan. I’m just here to pay it back.”

I finish the coffee in my mug. Big Jay then gets up and goes over to his secretary desk. He pulls down the trap and takes out a billfold. He counts out six hundred dollars, all in hundred-dollar bills, and brings it over.

He says, “This is for you and Janet. Consider it an advance on your wedding gift.”

I push the money back to him and say, “What’re you doing?”

I take out the satchel. I tell him I’m the one here to give him money. I take out the four hundred, a stack of twenties. I put it on the table and push it toward him, so that all the money now is in one pile. Big Jay looks away and makes a show like he’s pretending like he’s trying not to laugh.

“I appreciate you,” he says. “But you don’t need to worry about this. I never expected this money back. And where I’m going, I’m not gonna need it.”

“What do you mean, where you’re going?”

“It’s nothing,” he says. “Forget I said that.”

“Where are you going, Big Jay?”

Big Jay doesn’t answer. I ask again, and he just keeps shrugging as if he’d misspoke. I get up from my chair. I pick up both coffee mugs, now both empty, and go over to the coffeemaker.

Big Jay says, “It’s all drank, but you know where it’s at if I want to brew another pot.”

I go ahead and start another pot going. As I’m doing this, Big Jay stays seated, carefully putting the money on the table into one pile, the hundreds on the bottom and the twenties on top.

He says, “Princeton?”

I say, “Where are you going, Big Jay?”

“That debt really all you’re here for?”

“I’m serious,” I say. “What do you mean by, you’re not gonna need that money where you’re going?”

Big Jay folds his arms and says, “I’m selling the house. Wilkes been wanting to expand the compound, and I don’t need all this land anyway. I can live on the boat or just rent a place. It’s not a big deal. It’s not.”

“Fucking Wilkes,” I say.

“Wilkes’s not doing anything wrong.”

As Big Jay says this, he doesn’t look at me. I don’t know why, except maybe that he’s embarrassed. Then he goes on and says how he’s thinking of getting a regular job. The post office is hiring. It’s not the great job it used to be, no benefits anymore really, but it’s a steady paycheck. As he’s still going on about it, I put a hand on his shoulder and say, “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, I said I’m fine, kid. I’m good, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

We nod in a kind of unison, then he says, “Shoot. I swear to God, I thought you were gonna say something like you’d gotten Janet pregnant or something.”

I say, “Shit, I thought you were gonna say you had cancer or something.”

We chuckle over that a little bit. I shake my head and then look over at the money on the table. One thousand dollars. I know I need it, but despite what he said, I know Big Jay needs it too. I should leave it. I know I should do that. I should leave the money. It’s really his anyway, his six and then the four that I’d owed him. It’s really his money, all of it.

Big Jay says, “Hold up. I got something else. I almost forgot.”

He goes into his hall closet. He comes back not more than a minute later with a cardboard box. The shape and size of it is nothing special, but still, I know it right away. It’s my old toy box from when I was a kid. It’d gone missing years ago, tucked away and then lost. But I’d thought about it every once in a while. I’d wondered if it’d been thrown out or sold or, less likely, given away to some other kid.

Big Jay says, “Wilkes brought this over when they were doing the demo on your old house. I’d told him I’d hold on to it, in case you ever came around. And now, here you are. So, here it is.”

Big Jay puts the box on the table. I get up and open the box flaps. Most of it is stuff I forgot about, some GI Joes, Matchbox cars, a baseball, a sock full of marbles. But then there’s the one thing I’d been missing, my favorite thing from when I was a kid: a model of the Space Shuttle with an action figure of a NASA astronaut.

“Holy moly, Big Jay.”

“Yeah. I remember you toting that around everywhere. You took it out on my boat once when you were little, remember that?”

“I do remember that.”

“You leaning over the stern with that shuttle up into the wind.”

I can picture it as he says this. I can feel it, the cold morning air biting at my eyeballs, and that toy feeling like it was lifting off into outer space.

“That was a good day.”

“The best.”

I take a breath and say thank you. Big Jay looks like he’s going to say, it’s nothing. Before he does, I say, “I don’t know if I ever told you, but you were really good to me when no one else was.”

“Yeah,” says Big Jay, without really pausing much. “Well, you deserved better.”

The two of us then stand over the toys, not speaking for another good couple seconds, wanting this moment to hurry and be over with, but also hanging on to it too. Then I put my hand out to shake. Big Jay goes ahead and takes my hand, and the two of us shake. When that’s done, he says, “I’m gonna get going.”

I say, “Shit, sorry, Big Jay.”

“You need to go home and get some rest.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

I pick up the box and turn toward the front door. I don’t take the money.

I say. “You have a good one.”

Big Jay says, “Yeah, you too.”

At the door, I get my shoes on and think about postponing the trip, staying in town a little longer. I turn around and tell Big Jay, “We should all get together. We’ll do a crab boil. Go all out, oysters and clams too. Get Wilkes to smoke some big piece of meat. We can get the whole block, everybody together like old times. We’ll do that.”

Big Jay laughs and says, “Sounds good.”

He puts my satchel in the box. It’s zipped up, but I already know all one thousand is in it. I think to make a fuss, try to give it back to him, make a show of it. But I already know I’m going to take it, so all that show would be more disrespectful than anything. So, I don’t say anything more. I just nod and turn and then walk the short bit to Janet’s car, that old box under one arm as I go.