Free Sea of Tranquility by Lesley Choyce Page B

Could fall in. Chilly still, ya know. Too early to swim. Gots to be careful.” Alistair Swinnemar was missing three teeth where they had been punched out of his right jaw. He still had a hand on Todd’s shoulder.
    Alistair lived on the island and often got into trouble, but he was kind and good-natured as a general rule. He feared the littletourist kid might go overboard and he’d have to go in after him. Not much of a swimmer, like most islanders, but what could you do if a kid went splash?
    Alistair let go of Todd and laughed at the look on the kid’s face. Todd was wondering how this galumph got away with touching him. If this had been New Jersey, and a stranger grabbed a kid like that, he would have been arrested. Alistair saw the goofball look on the kid’s face and shrugged, looked at the kid’s sister and she shrugged too. Angeline liked the funny-looking islander who had maybe just saved her brother’s life. She wondered if they all talked like that on the island where they were going.
    â€œGoing to have to hire an interpreter if we want to understand them,” Todd said to Angeline after Alistair had walked away.
    Angeline saw trees on the island now — tall, dark green evergreens like in the picture books her mother read to her at bed time. She saw a few houses that seemed as if they had come out of the pages of books as well. All brightly coloured, the ones along the shore. It was like watching a Disney movie with a really slow but nice beginning. Arriving at a new place, far from home. Diatoms in the water, gulls making noises like “cronk, cronk, cronk” in the air. The sound of the big engine. A sky big like a huge blue bowl turned upside down over your head. She couldn’t help but giggle.
    â€œI’ve never seen a place like this before,” her brother grudgingly admitted. The island slowly grew larger and this reminded Todd of the shots of Jurassic Park in the movie, the helicopter coming in from the sea. If he was lucky, he conjectured, there would be raptors.
    Bruce smelled fish as they approached the government wharf on the island. It reminded him of walking past the kitchen atTomile’s Spanish Seafood Restaurant in Greenwich Village. On the way to the washroom you had to walk past the kitchen and the smell of seafood was not always that pleasant there. Dead fish is still dead fish.
    Crates of lobster in seaweed were waiting on the island dock for a trip to the markets on the mainland. Several hundred confused lobsters, kidnapped from their deep private lives and hoisted aloft into an alien world. Lobster intelligence, brain evolution asleep at the wheel for a thousand years. Exoskeletons did not always protect. Some sort of evolutionary trade coming on here: a family arriving from the greater New York area, just getting off the boat as bug-eyed crustaceans from the local sea floor head south to feed the fat faces of businessmen from the same locale. An exchange of hostages. The lobsters getting the raw end of the deal. Nutcrackers, claw crackers, who knows what awaiting them. Pliers maybe, electric cutting tools, vice grips to help get at their meat. Destiny awaiting.
    â€œThis place reeks with authenticity,” Elise said. Colourful old lobster pot floats hung from a big poplar tree. Cars without mufflers idled on the concrete wharf and greeted returning husbands, wives. Alistair Swinnemar lollygagged, talking to the hangashores, and then threw one leg over his Yamaha dirt bike and started it up, spit broken clam shells under the tires, and roared off, the engine sounding like a bumblebee amplified through an old Marshall amp with a really big stack of concert speakers.
    The Sangers disembarked and clung together like they had just gone back in time. Bruce surveyed the shoreline; saw a square white building with particle board walls and a sign: “The Aetna Canteen”; saw people driving big, old, rusty cars slowly up a gravel road. No