The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

Author:Hannah Tinti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Net

MARSHALL HICKS CAME IN FOR Loo’s breakfast shift at the Sawtooth at eight in the morning and ordered hash browns and the meat lover’s special without meat: cornbread and stuffing and mashed potatoes. He also ordered a banana split.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said when Loo brought him his cornbread.

“Waiting for what?”

“For whatever it takes.”

It had been two weeks since they were arrested in the Firebird. She had thought of Marshall every day but she had not called him, even after she’d found his mother’s petition in the back of the car, the pages wrinkled and smudged with dirt. Now the clipboard was underneath Loo’s mattress—hundreds of signatures making no difference in the world at all.

“I need to talk to you,” said Marshall. “Can you take a break or something?”

The boy looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was wearing his shirt and tie but the legs of his pants were splashed with mud. He reached for her hand and Loo wanted to take it but instead she shoved both fists into her apron pocket. She felt the bills there, all of her tips, folded over, and in her head she heard Hawley’s voice. He would have walked and you would have gone to jail. The cook hit the bell for pickup. A group of fishing widows called for refills. Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk were eating breakfast with their sons, and now they waved Loo down for their check. She turned her back on Marshall and his meal. She was grateful for a reason to walk away. Folks at the counter were already whispering, and the rest were glaring at him over newspaper headlines: NOAA SETS NEW CATCH LIMITS and CAPTAIN TITUS STRIKES AGAIN.

The New England episode of Whale Heroes had finally aired. Loo had tuned in, hoping to see Marshall on television, but all she got was his stepfather, the wiry, ex-hippie captain of the Athena, who cursed a salty mean streak that was bleeped for audiences, and maintained a beard that reached the middle of his chest. Flanked by a crew of large-chested coeds, Captain Titus discussed the decline of the codfish next to the carcass of a beached whale. He then conducted a dissection of the whale, pulling out the contents of the stomach and matching them to a chart demonstrating the collapse of the local ecosystem. A marine sanctuary, he said, would not only reinvigorate the North Atlantic cod population. It would also provide a vital feeding ground for migrating humpback whales. He called three senators on a satellite phone to demand an investigation into overfishing near the Bitter Banks, then he chased down a trawler that was dragging for cod and dove into the water to cut their net with a bowie knife, sending a mountain of skates and flounder and seaweed and crabs spilling back into the ocean. The episode ended with the captain and his team being pelted with water cannons by a flotilla of local fishermen. Loo had recognized many of the same ruddy faces that morning at the Sawtooth, eating bacon and eggs.

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