Sean Craven

It was a little after two in the morning, and I was lying in bed morbidly contemplating the fact that I’d have to be up for work in about three hours when I heard someone open the door to my room. There wasn’t a knock so I figured it must be Ray. "Hey, Ray," I said, and turned on the light.

"I got this crab," said Ray.

It was a good-sized crab all right, maybe eight inches across the shell. It waved its legs and claws with a sort of feeble mechanical relentlessness. I wondered why crustaceans could grow so much larger than insects could, and figured that it had something to do with their respiration. Did crustaceans have book lungs? Ray had obviously gotten the crab the hard way. He looked and smelled as though he had been wallowing in the tide pools. "That’s some crab, Ray," I said.

Ray squatted in the middle of the rug, and set the crab down on its back in front of him. He had long black hair held back by a beaded headband, and his face looked as though it had been folded out of leather, smooth greasy planes separated by deep creases. In between his cheekbones and eyebrows were little slits like coin slots. I figured there were some eyes in there. Ray hardly ever walked into anything.

Ray reached over and grabbed the plastic cup from Seven Eleven that I used for water, smearing it with dark fingerprints that I figured would taste of sea salt and fish shit. Capping the straw with his forefinger, he started to patiently drag the end of the straw over the crab, letting water trickle out in a controlled stream. He concentrated on its mouth, where the nasty complex of plates and mandibles never stopped moving. Every once in a while a tiny bubble would slowly emerge from a pinhole orifice and pop almost inaudibly. Then he’d carefully trail the water over all the seams in the crab’s underbelly and then the joints of the waving legs. Periodically he’d set the straw back in the cup and take a quick sip, sucking the grime off the end of the straw.

"I learned how to do this when I was a kid, back on the reservation in Montana," said Ray. "We used to catch a bunch of ‘em and keep ‘em in the bathtub. You treat them right, do this to them? You can keep ‘em alive for months." I watched the wet patch on the floor spread. There was a sort of mystic, ancient quality to the scene, as though junkies had been crouching in my bedroom torturing crabs for tens of thousands of years. "You know, the winters get hard out there. Sometimes we didn’t have nothing to eat but them crabs."

We sat there in a silence broken only by the soft little pops of the bubbles that the crab was blowing, and I thought about those hard Montana winters and little Ray. I pictured him snowed in, snow halfway up the windows, cold drafts making the fire flicker, coyotes howling outside, thin scratchy blankets and not enough of them. The sheep were probably sick. Nothing to eat but seafood, and you couldn’t even take a bath because of those damn crabs. So did Ray think I was an idiot or was he totally insane? Since I liked Ray and thought he liked me, I was kind of hoping for the latter.

Ray grinned and didn’t quite look at me. "Hey," he said, "You wanna give me twenty bucks for this crab? Good eating."

"No thanks, Ray," I said. "I don’t eat any kind of fish or anything like that."

Ray’s grin collapsed, but he didn’t seem disappointed. It was like he wasn’t really expecting the money from me, but figured that he may as well give it a shot while he was in the neighborhood. "Oh, okay then," he said, and went back to work with the straw. The crab didn’t seem that upset either, which seemed strange since that tap water had to feel like battery acid to a saltwater animal. "Just waving my legs here," the crab seemed to be saying. "Blowing some bubbles. Hey, you mind if I open and shut my claws a few times?"

After a while, Ray got up. "Maybe I could try a restaurant," he said.

I shrugged. "Ray, I don’t know anything about selling crabs."

"Okay then," he said. "Can I borrow this cup? I don’t want my crab to dry out."

"Consider it yours," I said. Ray nodded, and said, "Okay, then," and just before he shut the door behind him, "Goodnight."

"‘Night, Ray," I said, and looked at the water spot on the rug and the faint dirty outline of the crab’s shell. I turned out the light and thought about how soon I had to be at work, and about Ray. I wondered how it must have felt, finding that crab and suddenly having it sprout like a seed and put roots down backwards through the years, a chance tide pool encounter turning into something you knew about since you were a kid, something that had always been there, a new memory growing thick and lush until hundreds of miles away from the ocean the crabs were crawling in every bathtub in the bone-dry mountains of Montana.

Sean Craven specializes in squeam-inducing fiction in which the taut fast-paced minimalism of James Joyce, the lushly baroque exoticism of John Updike, the warm humanism of Franz Kafka, the relentless savagery of A. A. Milne, and the good old fashioned slam-bang storytelling of Thomas Pynchon mingle in a rather disconcerting fashion. Whiskey straight, beer chaser.