Seals

Former hostages are not like former Presidents. They don't get special protection, or free limousine service. And when they want to see famous people they have to watch TV like everybody else.

After they let him go, Ben left the Navy and helped Clement on his lobster boat. Before dawn each day they would ride the water between Clem's buoys.

Lobsters thrive in cold water, and by November Ben's hands went numb each morning. He often remembered a National Geographic article he had read, about the Inuit, and how seal hunters would wait motionless for days on the ice without gloves. It never helped his hands feel better, though.

Clem's house looked over the harbor. It was snug, and Ben always admired the sweeping arc of the horizon - the sunrises like the beginnings of a new world. He thought the view was magnificent.

"Damn right." said Clem, "I can keep an eye on my boat and most of my traps from here."

Ben moved in after Clem's wife left him and took the kids. It was hard to blame her, really. She had really just gone looking for the man she had married. Clem and Ben chatted about politics, and debated the weather. Clem didn't believe in the Greenhouse Effect or melting polar ice caps.

"Don't matter anyway. Boats float fine in deep water too," was his position.

Lobsters are not red, Ben learned, they only turn that way when they boil. They come out of the ocean hard, black, and cold, waving their antennae like baroque swordsmen. He carefully strapped their claws in rubber bands so they would not tear each other's legs off, and dropped them in the tank. Every once it a while he stopped when he was about to slip a lobster into the dark with it's brothers. It might be something about the way the light hit it's beady black eyes, or the foam coming out of it's mouth. If Clem was busy, Ben would snap the bands off, and toss the creature back into the waves. Clem saw him more often than he guessed, but never said anything.

They sold the lobsters at the dock, or at the local fish market. There were always cats at the fish market, dingy gray things that slipped between the fish bins and rubber boots.

As a teenager, Ben's constant companion was his nervous cat, Nero. Nero twitched and stared, his eyes like two perfect yellow marbles, with two perfect fractures deep inside. Nero disappeared one spring soon after Ben's eighteenth birthday. It took him a few weeks to notice, since Nero stayed out for days at a time when the warm weather came. Also, Ben had been in love with Tina when Nero left, so some things didn't register with him right away. Tina married Clem. Ben enlisted. Nero stayed gone.

One day Ben saw on TV how there were PCB's in the seals and fish that the Inuit hunted for food. The spokesman for the Inuit asked the man from the government which animals were the worst to eat.

"All the animals we tested were contaminated," said the sad man from the government, "PCB's are in everything you eat."

Clem always sympathized with a fisherman, "Poor bastards. Got no use for 'em myself, but they got the shit end of the stick this time, eh?"

Ben began to look suspiciously at the lobsters, but they remained as belligerent and unresigned as ever. Banded, boxed, and sold, they kept Clem and Ben supplied with diesel fuel and frozen dinners. Soon afterward, Ben stopped eating fish. Clem hardly noticed, being partial to salisbury steak and french fries himself. Accumulated tuna and sardine tins went uneaten in the cabinets.

Ben went to church twice a year, Easter and Good Friday. Christmas did not interest him - anyone could get born. What he could not understand was why someone would spend a weekend in hell for a bunch of strangers. This year Ben packed half of the sardines in a bag and took the Friday bus to the big church in the city.

He did not return at all that night. Clem checked his traps alone on Saturday, and Sunday too. Ben returned on Monday with an empty bag and a scrawny black cat. Clem stopped eating his chicken pie when he walked in the door.

"Welcome home."

"This is for you." Ben put the cat on the floor. It hissed at the sofa.

"Are you crazy? We can't keep a cat here."

Ben blinked.

"You're right." He opened the door and the cat whisked out, pressing itself into the shadows.

"Great. Now we have a stray cat hanging around and eating our garbage. Have a beer."

"I think... no. No thanks."

They watched their garbage carefully for the next few days, but it stayed put. The cat came back, and moved in. Ben named him Romulus, and he ate sardines or tuna every day.

Tina called from time to time. Ben usually went out for a walk, to get some air, so she and Clem could talk. One day Clem was out, and Ben had to talk to her himself. She told him how lonely she was, how she could not stand another day by herself. He watched Romulus, bathing carefully in a patch of sun near the stairs. He gripped the receiver tightly, like a spear, knuckles turning white. The cat looked at him, blinked twice, and looked away. She said she felt empty. Tina explained how she didn't know what she would do with herself, how life had not turned out the way she had expected. Ben breathed carefully. He could almost see the moisture from his breath curling and freezing before his eyes.

"But who am I to complain, right Ben? All this probably just seems ridiculous whining to you, after what you've been through."

Ben thought of an Inuit hunter, kneeling in the icy wind, waiting like a stone. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

Romulus strolled toward the kitchen, twitching just the tip of his tail. The wooden clock from Germany hammered out the seconds in the still house. Somewhere, far to the north, in the chill waters far from the sun, a seal was gliding under the ice, searching for a way to the air.

Ben leaned forward, partly to still the shaking in his legs. "It is going to be Ok, Tina. Clem still loves you." As he said it, he knew it was true. His eyes followed the shadow of the cat, disappearing into the darkness of the kitchen, like a seal into the deep water under the ice.

Clem returned her call when he got home. Ben took a walk on the gray shoreline. He didn't let the cat out. Spring was lurking everywhere, beneath the purple stones, in the mud flats. It was unstoppable.

Clem went away for two days. Ben checked the traps - up early and into the sea. The air was warm, but winter was still sleeping in the water. He pulled in all the traps, carefully removed the lobsters, and dropped them back over the side. His hands were numb before he got to the third buoy. It was good not to feel his fingers.