Clam! by Jason Arias

Clam! | Jason Arias

It’s early morning. The sun hasn’t reached the base of the mountains to the east yet. It is the darkness before daybreak. Harrison stands at the side of his son’s bed. Josh’s body is silhouetted by the bundle of warm blankets stacked on him. His father watches the boy’s blankets rise and fall. Hears the whistle of Josh’s breath leaving his body, the mold hidden in the walls of the early-century house devouring him. Harrison has no proof if it is the house, the coast, or his own superstitions devouring Josh.

They’d purchased the home from an old man named Sioux years ago. Over ten years now, before everything went wrong, while Leah was still pregnant with Josh. Back then, Leah had warned Harrison that the house would be “a money pit.” 

“A Honey Pit?” Harrison said, feigning misunderstanding. “That sounds sssaawweeeet!”

Leah hadn’t even smiled at this. “I’m serious. You know we don’t have money for repairs.” She was usually more pleasant about enduring his attempts at humor. “Is this really the best choice?” She grimaced at the dust mites filling the air. “I know we’re close to the ocean. I know we’ve talked about wanting this. But this…the work we’ll need to put in…” She held her giant, tear-shaped belly like a gourd she loved dearly. “I don’t know.”

“I do,” Harrison said, taking one of Leah’s small, strong hands in his large, chapped fingers. “I do know, Lay. Trust me.” He winked sideways at his wife. Back then, so many years ago.  

The bundle of Josh’s ten-year-old body under the blankets pauses its expansion at the top of the inhale. Harrison matches his own breath to his son’s breath. He holds the air in, only exhaling when he hears the whispering, like the ghosts of a dirty HVAC system, escaping his son’s lungs and sees the slow descent of blankets. They both become still for a moment. The father and son. The vertical and horizontal. Harrison puts his hand out over the bed, allowing Josh’s next inhale to elevate his son’s shoulder to fit perfectly into his heavy palm. He squeezes gently on the boy. “Josh?” With every passing day, Harrison’s voice sounds less like his own and more like the guttural gravel of his long-deceased father. “Son? Son, it’s time.”

Together Harrison and his boy put the clam guns, clam shovels, headlamps, and the nets that Harrison hangs from his belt loop for their haul, into the bed of the pickup. They climb into either side of the truck’s cab. The father puts his thermos between them on the cloth bench seat, atop all the brown stains there, and hopes this thermos won’t leak like the last two had. His coffee and the thermos that holds it are both black. The son cradles a red thermos of hot chocolate between his legs, his hands on either side of its metal warmth. 

Harrison knows Josh doesn’t enjoy this kind of father-son time much anymore. They’d clammed together since before Josh could even remember it. The boy strapped to Leah, wrapped in a bundle at her chest. Leah stomping around the darkened sand to get the razor clams to start digging and betray their location. Back when they were beginner bicuspid hunters. Way before Josh could walk around on his own and point to the dime-sized divots in the sands of the low tide and say, “Here.” Before Josh got his own narrow-tipped shovel meant to dig deep and pinch the clam in place to stop its descent. Before he was big enough to get his hands and arms sandy and salty wet all the way up to his armpit (being cautious not to grasp too blindly into the unknown lest he cut himself on the shell’s razor-sharp edges). Before Harrison had shown the boy how to cut the adductor muscles with a knife to pry the clam open and use a pair of scissors to cut off the discolored tip of the clam’s siphon, then run the scissors down bisecting the two ducts of the clam’s neck. How to split the digger. How to cut out the stomach. Years before Leah had gone down to the beach by herself, driven there by a need for silent reflection after a fight with Harrison, the contents of which Harrison can’t even recall. Before the sneaker wave had come in. Before Leah had seen the wave. Before she’d seen the small dog that would have never made it anyway. The dog’s owner up in the dunes letting his Pomeranian play next to a too-angry ocean. 

A Pomeranian killed my wife, Harrison couldn’t stop thinking. 

“Your wife tried to save my best friend in the whole wide world,” the Pomeranian’s wet-eyed owner said to Harrison, after it all. After everything. And Harrison had realized that the Pomeranian hadn’t killed his wife, but the Pomeranian’s owner had. Not the Pomeranian’s owner, but the Pomeranian’s owner’s naivete. The naivete of a stranger had killed his empathetic wife. The argument they’d had before she walked off, that he (Harrison) couldn’t even remember any details of, had killed his wife. The ocean had killed his wife. The move to the house that she’d always questioned the purchase of but never fully refused to buy, had killed his wife. He had killed his wife. Harrison had killed his wife. This is the way the unwelcome truth wriggles in.

It still bothered Harrison that the Pomeranian’s body had been discovered (washed up twenty-five miles down the coastline) but Leah’s body was never found. But, to be fair, everything since Leah was taken now bothered him. 

Josh’s head nods along with the bumps as they drive the mile of gravel road to the beach. The boy hasn’t touched his hot chocolate yet. The mug is still warming his hands. He won’t sip it until the brief period after they stop and before they dig. Harrison eases the pickup onto the beach access and maneuvers the Ford over the packed sand, the tide rolling in and out ahead of them. More beach than normal. The low tide revealing the recently submerged.

Only after moving to the old house did Harrison and Leah realize that automobiles were allowed on this continuous four-mile stretch of beach. At first, it had seemed trashy, imagining all the 4×4-made cookies that would be spun out by teenagers in “Got Sand?” bumper-stickered trucks. But they quickly realized that there were very few of the cookie makers on the beach, and the ability to drive perfectly parallel to the waves allowed them to get further away from other beachgoers and find those quiet moments for themselves, the ocean roaring in front of their parked pickup as they gazed at the horizon. The random shell or sand dollar that Leah would make him stop for, to put in her pocket. The walks and handholding and rocks later tumbled. All the things she kept in her pockets and washed off at home. All the things Harrison should have said, but thought she’d somehow already known. He still remembered the faraway look in Leah’s eyes when she was pondering something she didn’t yet know how to share. Eventually, she would. She always said what was on her mind after figuring it for herself first. He’d figured his thoughts out on his own and left it at that.

Harrison pushes the thought of his wife, and the ways he’d let her down, out of his head. 

He drives the truck parallel to the water through a lingering, thickening fog. It’s as if the ocean to their left doesn’t even exist. The kind of fog a person could get lost in for a long time. Maybe forever. They drive slowly. The truck’s headlights do little to penetrate the white. Objects on the sand in front of the pickup aren’t wholly themselves until the vehicle is already upon them. The log laying like a forward slash between the water and where the slow-moving Ford passes could be any anachronistic canoe of the Clatsop tribe. The dulled yellow hard hat (once lost at sea from who knows where, now laying abandoned) squirming with gooseneck barnacles opening and closing their shell mouths in hope of grasping something. All of this is not there until it suddenly is, and just as suddenly gone again. Harrison and Josh feel like the only ones out here. The only people existing within an automobile within this fog. Though, from time-to-time Harrison hears songs in the wind through the gap in the top of his driver’s side window. Bits of harmonies and forgotten riffs. The sweet serenades of sirens and lost sailors. Sometimes he hears voices as the tides crash. Aural hallucinations and sanities unraveling unbearably slowly. Nothing really. Nothing he can’t logicize into something more palatable as he pushes on the gas pedal to find just the right location.

The sky is becoming the low amber of a giant far-off fire, all the ambiance and shadow-play of an elongated cave wall. The sun, creeping up from over the mountains to their right, and teasing color across the entire sky. The fog over the sea. The smell of the sea. The tricks of light and heart and slight of sand. The beginning of another day. Later, the sun will sink into the ocean. Be extinguished by the tide, the ocean swallowing all the light. All things will eventually be swept from here, to somewhere not here. The way Leah was taken. The way the Pomeranian was taken and returned, eternally different, back again. 

Yet even though he knows the ocean is the taker of all, Harrison still brings his son down. And doesn’t quite know why. No, he knows why. This was the one place the three of them always meshed best. The water is rougher than it should be for clamming conditions, but the negative low tide is all they need. And their headlamps. And their shovels. And their belt nets. And a little luck. And each other. Maybe that’s also why he keeps bringing Josh down with him: to prove to the ocean that it won’t win. That it won’t break him.

Harrison eases the pickup towards the dunes after spotting the post with the yellow sign bearing a black number 2 and loops the Ford back around to face the ocean. He places the vehicle in park. He knows the ocean is out there somewhere. Even if he can’t see it through the fog, he can hear it. Its wails. Its hum. It’s calling. He hopes the fog lifts a little before they begin. 

It’s March, one of only two months known for the waves that sneak in and take away loving people and Pomeranians. November is the other month notorious for the disappearing of loved things. November was the month of Leah’s wave. Harrison and Josh never come down in November. At least, Josh doesn’t come down. Harrison won’t allow it. 

With the engine off, parking brake on, and accessory lights of the cab still glowing, Harrison watches Josh unscrew the lid of his red thermos and tip the hot chocolate towards his lips. The boy still holds onto the sides with both hands. Harrison wonders if his son is too old to drink from a red thermos like this. He wonders what they are doing down here, again, in March. Did he want the ocean to take everything? Is that what this was? A subconscious’ Russian roulette? A madman’s attempt at resolution with an angry Earth? No. That was foolish. Only his stupid superstitions whispering to him again. Old remnants of his father’s viewpoint of the world: a hungry orb ruled by ghosts and happenstance and creatures waiting for you in the deep. Harrison knows better. He knows the ocean, the reality of things, that there are no real mysteries left on this earth. He knows the only creatures waiting to pull you down are the ones in your head. And maybe it isn’t the smartest thing to be out here, just to spit in superstition’s stupid face. But they’d clammed every low tide, every day, every month—except November—even after Leah’s disappearance two years ago, and they were going to goddamn clam today. To show Josh that there is nothing to fear out here. Nothing to fear anywhere. He wonders how much longer he should let his son continue to hold his red thermos with two hands before saying enough already. He has to prepare Josh for the world before the world comes for him as one never-ending wave.     

  “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m so tired.”

“Me too, son. Me too. Drink up,” Harrison says, nodding his thermos sideways in a long-distance toast.

They sit and listen to the wind and the waves and drink their hot drinks. After a short while, they slowly step out.

Outside of the pickup it’s windier than Harrison has realized. They walk down to the receding water with their hoods tightened around their faces. It smells like the ocean, like only the ocean can smell: slightly like life, slightly like death, slightly like something else. The fog hangs like droplets waiting to be freed from mid-air and carried away on their clothing. Droplets waiting to cling and roll down hooded jackets and waterproof pants and boots and join the ocean again. 

The father and son look for divots in the sand. For the syphons of clams feeding in the surf. They hit the butt end of their shovel handles against the wet and wait for the bottom to drop out of the divots. When the bottom drops out, they stomp the shovel down and leverage the handle. They slide a hand in as they pull the shovel out and feel for the shell, the creature fighting to descend, and then dig with their hands in tactile pursuit while pausing the clam’s escape. They give chase vertically, while facing the ocean, never turning their backs to the rushing water. Never fearing, but also never trusting. At least, Harrison hopes this is the lesson here.

Harvesting Pacific razor clams is different from collecting cockle clams. Cockles lay around waiting to be raked. Every species has its cockle equivalents, humans too. But you can’t rake razor clams. Razors need to be dug because they have a strong survivors’ instinct and a digger appendage. Razors fight like hell to stay alive. Once you start digging down, they start digging down. It’s a race through sand and silt for both the hunter and hunted. Harrison has thought a lot about why he is out here every low tide, hunting. Part of it is for the cheap protein, the same reason an elk is bled out in the garage every fall. The clams clean easily, make a filling chowder, fry up quickly. But there is another reason for Harrison that lies somewhere between catharsis and neurosis. It’s the reason he uses his shovel more than the suction gun. The clam gun brings the mollusks up out of the sand, sometimes without ever having to go in after them, without ever getting yourself dirty. There’s something about getting sand on your hands, under your nails, sometimes all the way up to your armpits. A feeling. A finesse and an understanding of your place in all of this. The clams place in all of this. The vague sense that there is more, somewhere you can’t see, that you are earning.

“Got one,” Josh says, holding up his oblong catch.

“Nice, Son,” Harrison says, taking the clam and letting it slide from the rim of the plastic hoop at the right side of his belt loop into the tapered netting. 

A stream of water shoots up in front of Harrison. It’s a sign. Not a supernatural sign, just the sign that a clam is spitting. He finds the divot. Pushes the shovel into the sand beside the indent. Chases the prey with his seeking fingers. Feels its struggle. Gives into this primal race. Becomes the captor. Retracts his catch from the under. Deposits his catch in the net on his opposite hip.

The clam is a good size. An old soul. “Sorry, Old Boy,” Harrison whispers to his catch, patting the netting at his hip. He doesn’t know why he whispers to the air for the clams he catches, calling them Old Boy or Princess or You Old Devil, You. But he supposes it has something to do with acknowledging a good fight coming to its end. That he doesn’t hate them. That this is just the cycle of a good game. He will apologize to each clam before cleaning it. Thank it. He has his ways. He knows they are odd.

While Harrison is distracted with his thoughts, Josh migrates further into the fog searching for more divots. Harrison can just see the boy’s outline in the vapor slurry. He wonders again if Josh is too small for his age. Harrison and Leah (now just Harrison) always home-schooled their son. There are no other children in their neighborhood. No other children to compare Josh to. No other children for Josh to sharpen his wit and grit against. But does a person really require adversity to that degree? It was something Harrison was still figuring out for himself.

Josh’s fog silhouette is still visible, but just barely. His silhouette is more ghost than corporeal as Harrison watches him in the near distance. Then suddenly, like the slight of the ocean’s hand, the boy is not there. 

Harrison quickly walks to the place his son last stood. The blurry outline of the boy appears again, slightly further down the coastline. 

“Not too far,” Harrison yells towards the image. “Stay close, Josh.”

“I am close,” Josh yells back. 

Harrison hears the irritation creeping around the edges of the boy’s reply. Was Josh starting to hate him? When had Harrison started becoming irked with his own father? Was it inevitable? Was it every son’s fate to outgrow their father? Was it every father’s fate to wonder and worry and inevitably be let down by himself? Harrison should have let his son sleep this morning. Or, at least, left Josh in the pickup when he said he was tired. Why couldn’t he have done that? Clamming had lost most of the allure for the boy. Was he only tired, tired of clamming, or tired of Harrison? 

Maybe Josh didn’t hate this time, maybe he endured for now, but how long before he despised everything about this? And why was it so important to Harrison to have him here with him? 

What if the house caught fire while I was gone? he found himself thinking. There was nothing he could do that would permanently protect the boy. No lesson that would act as an armored sheath around him. 

And now he’s lost sight of him. Josh has disappeared, again. 

Harrison glances seaward. The tide is still going out. Not too far out, not enough to signal the possibility of a sneaker or a tidal or the end of all endings. Just the right amount of out. But still… 

“Josh!” Harrison yells. Is he too rattled for the situation? He can feel the un-rightness, the unrighteousness here. Around him. Within him.

“What, Dad?” Josh’s voice comes from close by. Unseen, but close.

The fog is thick. Thicker than he can remember it ever being. They shouldn’t be down here. He can feel it. Knows it more than anything. 

“Josh! Josh, where are you?”

“Dad, I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Just over here.”

Harrison runs in the direction of his son’s voice but doesn’t find him. 

“Josh!”

“This way, Dad!”

Harrison runs this way, but Josh is not there.  

“I’m just over,” Josh calls, “heeerrre!” A sucking sound. The sound of Hell’s vacuum. “Aaahhhh!” his son screams. “Dad, help!”

Harrison follows the voice of his son, carried on the wind, combated by the ocean waves, filtering through his fears. His booted feet land heavy in the surf. He sees nothing but the tide becoming and receding, the fog churning like a soupy carousel. 

Harrison gets below the fog, on his hands and knees, and scans in one direction, then the other. Suddenly, there! What is that? There is something. Movement. 

In the near distance, a gush of water explodes from the sand, as thick as the streams from a Las Vegas hotel fountain. The hotel Harrison and Leah had kissed in front of. The gushing stream from the surf stops erupting, arches unseen into the white of the fog above, and splashes back to the wet sand. Harrison pauses for a second. 

It can’t be; by any imagination of God, one can’t be that big. But every piece of Harrison’s mind yells, “CLAM!”

“Daaaad!” Josh’s voice calls from the spot that the stream of water had gushed from. And, yes, insanely, there’s his son’s head protruding from the middle of a sinkhole of quicksand. Harrison is running towards him. Josh’s head is disappearing below, his fingers grasping before fully going down. Is this the quicksand that Harrison had always been warned of as a child, by other children, that has finally proved its existence to come and swallow his son; or has the Devil taken Josh as further collateral for Harrison’s past? Harrison knows better than to believe in devils. Or gods. Has no desire to be anyone’s tortured soul or Abraham. But if his son dies out here, how has he not become both?

Harrison is standing inside the giant divot in the sand that Josh has disappeared under. He’s left his shovel somewhere in the fog behind him in pursuit of his son. No time to find it. No worry. Doesn’t need it. Harrison tries to dig himself into the under with cupped hands, but the sand is no longer quick; it’s solidifying again. Was possibly never quicksand to begin with. Was only a gaping hole appearing to take his son. With every handful of beach, pieces of broken sand dollars and crab legs and pebbles wedge deeper under Harrison’s fingernails. With every inch of earth displaced, shrapnel of shells and wood and grit scrape against his forearms and elbow and biceps. Soon he has made a crater big enough to hide himself in. And his son is nowhere to be found. And the sides keep falling in spite of, or because of, his earnest digging. His hands are weapons. His hands are shovels. He makes a larger crater. The largest crater. 

Harrison digs until his fingers touch Josh’s fingers—has to be, must be Josh’s—and then he digs faster. He has him now. His son. His wrists. His forearms. 

“I’ve got you,” he shouts to the below, “I have you now, Son!”

And he does. He truly does.

And then his son has him. 

The fingers that Harrison feels from below are joined by another hand that tightens its grip around the father’s forearm and the ten fingers gently pull him in. Easing him arms-first down into the sand. A steady, but sure, retreat. Harrison hears the voice of his son, not below him, but far away. Josh’s voice coming from the direction Harrison was lured from further up the beach. Harrison looks up at the fog lowering around him as his body is slowly pulled under. He feels the way the normalcy of the hands pulling at him become something else further down. The hunter in him understands. There is nothing supernatural, nothing evil happening here. Only superior and final.  

Harrison yells in the direction of his real son, “Run! Run back to the truck, Josh, and stay there! Go! Run! Don’t look back. I’ll be there soon.” But he worries Josh won’t understand his sand-filled words. Still, he hopes. He hopes. But his son mustn’t try to save him. Mustn’t be as shortsighted as him.

Harrison thinks about every duck call he’d ever used with his father. The deer decoy and pheromones and saltlicks in every clearing from every blind. He grins grimly into the abyss at every application of PowerBait applied to a hook as the beach sand encompasses his chest. Every clam-gut-laced crab pot he’d cast. Harrison pulls his upper body back, feeling for the weak point in this faux son snare. This clever trap where the more you fight, the deeper you fall. He knows that whatever has tricked him here will fully devour him. There is that moment when you understand that you can’t win. That no matter how hard you thrash, you can’t dig yourself out of this. 

When a clam is pulled from its hole, it tucks its foot (its digger) into its shell as a last hope of protection. It hides inside its hard exterior. Harrison finds himself instinctively curling his body into a fetal position, a defensive position, as the wet sand becomes his new womb. A reverse womb. He doesn’t cry as the sand fills him. He doesn’t call for his mother or Leah or Josh. He doesn’t pray. He hopes it isn’t as painful as he’s always imagined; the suffocation and pulling apart of one’s pieces. He hopes if there’s another side, Leah can forgive him there for choosing the old house, for arguing that day about something that did not matter, for not leaving this beach far behind them.

And then, there is blackness. 

Afterward, for just a moment, there is a crater twice the size of Harrison left in the sand. The next grouping of waves transforms the crater into an imprint. The divot becomes the beach again. The fog lifts slightly. 

A son does as his father asks. A son locks both doors of a pickup, parked by the dunes, and stares through the windshield for a long time. A son hugs his thermos to his chest. A son awaits the return of the father. 

After a long while the boy hears his father calling again, “Josh! Josh, come on down. I’ve got a huge one!” And even though the voice is right, the inflection is not. So, he stays in the truck. 

The boy thinks he hears his mother calling to him from somewhere far out by the waterline. 

Then he sees his mother. And she’s alive. 

She’s spinning amongst the fog where the windblown seafoam clings to the ocean’s edge, her arms beckoning him. 

A son says, “Mom? Mom!” He drops his red thermos on the pickup’s floorboards.

His mother blows kisses. Somehow, she’s talking inside his head. Saying, “I’ve been waiting for you. Come. Come out to see.” Or maybe she’s saying, Come out to sea.

A son holds his breath. 

He unlocks the pickup door. 

He steps out onto the sand.

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