The Pier(Jeremy McCool) The sky is a blinking mass of Christmas lights on a stark black-smeared canvas. The pier angles, impossibly forgetful, eternal, out into the blackness of the ocean. The concrete rise, up from the beach, leads to a telescope. Through its lens, everything looks natural. The lazy, hazy lines of the shore and the houses systematically disappear into the canvas. Far below, sandpipers run along the waterline, playing games with the incoming waves and feeding off their prosperity. They are dark formless forms with long sharp beaks, pecking at the freshly wetted sand at high tide. The breeze carries with it the smells of the sea, laughing and mourning simultaneously. The barnacles flail their tentacles when the water covers them. Otherwise they are an immovable part of the tall wooden pillars, resilient against the thrashing waves.

The angles begin to come together as the sushi restaurant nears. It is closed, of course. But the pier is not. Fishermen are silent and noisy. The descending fog and evening dew turn their loudest expressions into reverberating whispers, haunting and comforting, compressed by the thickness of the air. The loudest sound is the death struggle of the fish that they have caught, twitching and convulsing on the wet cement, expending their energy desperately. Fish don’t have any feelings. They are all mackerel, aside from the two stingray that were thrown back.

The water is a carbon copy of the sky. Black and smeared with helicopter light and waves. The helicopter is close but its sound is muffled by the incoming fog. The lights from the beach houses filter through the haze and sparkle off smooth crests of the small windswept waves. The water is speckled with the fluorescent glow sticks tied to the leaders of the fishing lines. They give an eerie but peaceful tone to the swells that incessantly rise and fall like the lines on an electrocardiograph.
The fishing lines, like spider webs, glimmer from one side of the pier to the other. A gull makes its cautious approach as struggling fish are pulled out of the water and ascend the thirty feet separating them from their nonjudgmental fate. It plucks them off the lines when it can. It glides low over the reflective water with dull grey eyes, probing the glow sticks for even the slightest movement. The fishermen wave their arms to scatter the birds. They are mostly Mexican. They keep to themselves and their eyes never leave the haunting glow of the luminescent leaders of their lines. Their dry hands never leave their poles. Their clothes are not those of the traditional fisherman. They wear jeans and big hooded sweatshirts. The breeze ruffles their loose clothing but they take no notice. They are serious hunters, and they expect to be rewarded by the sea.

The buckets are everywhere. They are all white, clothed in manifest-destiny innocence. The sloshing and thumping emanating from their hard plastic walls are so commonplace they can be ignored. They are placed by the fisherman’s feet, or sometimes under the noisy flickering lights of the sushi restaurant. Their contents are easily visible to anyone who would care to look. The thrashing and twitching fish are powerless to escape, but they cannot be denied their valiant fight for survival. It’s instinctual.

“Some of the bigger ones will go all night,” a man says to his son, staring unabashedly into the round hole at the struggling fish. He takes a live worm out of a Campbell’s soup can and thrusts the pointed end of the hook through its middle. The worm squirms and writhes, making no sound.

The boy looks on, desensitized and impressed.

“Go ahead. Just like I showed you. ”

The boy reaches hesitantly for the can. He picks it up and draws it to himself, bending over slightly to let the overhead fluorescent light shine inside. He sees black moist earth. It moves. A brown object emerges from the black earth. The boy holds his breath, reaches in and grasps the worm with his thumb and forefinger. The worm explodes, it’s dark unidentifiable insides squirt against the side of the can. Its movement ceases. The boy retracts his soiled hand from the can and looks at his father questioningly.

“Don’t squeeze. Just pull. Nightcrawlers’ll pop if you squeeze. ”

The sound of a splash reaches the pier. It is a big splash. The boy’s head turns. A four and a half foot sand tiger is hauled up the height of the pier and let fall on the hard, cold cement. It thrashes its tail non-systematically and snaps its harmless teeth, slowly drowning. The boy, and other children, are drawn to the noises and stand in awe of the beautiful, pitiful creature. It flails violently at the feet of its captor. Its dorsal fin is large for its size. Some of the men nearby nod their heads or utter a stifled congratulatory utterance toward shark’s captor. The man grabs the tiger by the tail and drags it backward, away from the rail, leaving a wet water and mucous trail before it, and lets the tail end flop down against the back wall of the sushi shack. The boy stares. The fisherman that hooked it tears the oversized hook from its mouth, leaving blood and saliva and water to run from the hole, and once again casts his glowing leader into the water. The shark rests there, its eyes moving slowly back and forth, its nictitating membrane closing to keep out the harsh air, its mouth, bleeding, powerless to open in the weighty air. Its gills shudder, opening and closing on the cool night, searching for moisture, gasping for liquid oxygen, finding nothing. The sound emanating from the beast is the sound of a slow strangulation.

The boy looks around at the silent hunters. One of them zips up his sweater to shield himself from the cold updraft that originates as a wind on the beach gets caught beneath the pier and runs along its underside until it fans cold ocean air around the edges of the protective railing at the end. The boy zips up his own sweater. The gulls circle overhead and dive for the white buckets but the men wave them off. The boy walks back to where his father is fishing and again thrusts his hand into the Campbell’s soup can. This time he pulls and does not squeeze. The worm wriggles between his fingers and he jabs his new shiny hook through its middle. There is no blood. He wipes his hands on his pants, attaches a green stick to his leader and snaps its back, watches as the soft, dead glow runs from the phosphorescent wound and bubbles to either end, picks up his pole and walks over to the edge of the pier where his father stands, waiting and watching the ambient glowing swells. He extends his pole out over the plywood guardrail and with an inexperienced flick of the wrist his flywheel whirs as the hook and leader soar away from him, out over the dark water, and fall as if through empty, starless space. Making a small splash, but no sound, it joins the others and lays still.

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