A Hard Outer Shell

A Hard Outer Shell

by Robert Aquino Dollesin

robertdollesin@comcast.net

A couple hours back my baby sister, Gail, telephoned, waking me from a restless sleep. She gave me the bad news about the old man. She begged me over the telephone to drive up quick as I could.

I ain't seen Gail in years. Not since she let the old man have the spare bedroom in her Sacramento apartment. According to Gail, he wasn't gonna make it this time. Truth is, that's okay by me. He was a hard man, anyway. Someone more concerned with his own happiness than anything else.

“You there, Ronnie?”

“I'm here.”

“Please, hurry.”

The skies opened up earlier that night, and I stood at the window and watched the rain strike the glass, listened to it sizzle in the trees. In this weather the drive from San Francisco would take a couple hours. I told her that.

I sat bent forward over the steering wheel and peered out the windshield past the slapping wipers. My mind played.

Gail claimed, still does claim, the old man wasn't always bad. He just gave up on trying to be decent after what happened to Gail the day the he brought them Dungenese crabs home from work.

Me and Gail was outside, sitting on the lawn I'd just cut. She had her legs curled beneath her, and was chewing on the ends of her hair.

The crabs was still alive. Four of them skittering in shallow water at the bottom of a metal pail. While the old man was in the house, me and Gail squatted down and poked the crabs with sticks. We got them to open and close their claws. When one of the crabs clamped down so hard on Gail's stick that it broke, my baby sister began to cry.

The old man came out the house. Mad, thinking I'd done something to hurt Gail, he glared at me like he was ready to put a fist to me. But when he seen what happened, he laughed and said, “Don't you two hurt them crabs. They's good eating.”

He picked the bucket up by the handle. Me and Gail followed him into the house.

In the kitchen a pot of salted water was going on the stove. The coiled burner on top of the stove glowing red. . The old man raised the pail, tipped it a little, and the crabs slid into the pot.

“When the shells on them crabs go orange,” the old man said, “then they're ready for eating.”

I went over to the stove and looked in the pot. Gail, she took a pinch of my shirt sleeve and said, “I can't see nothing, Ronnie.” So I dragged a chair from the dining table and scooted it up against the range. Gail climbed onto it. She leaned over the pot. “Are they ouchy, Ronnie? Are the crabs ouchy?”

I stared at my baby sister. Did she already understand that there was things in life that wasn't fair?

The old man said, “Course not. Animals got no brains. They can't feel nothing.”

We watched the water simmer. After a few minutes the crabs began working their big claws like a kid works scissors. They moved sideways, fast, hugging the inside of the pot, their hard outer shells scraping the steel like shovels scrape pavement.

Gail stood on the chair, bent over the stove, chewing her knuckles. When the water started foaming up, she cried out, “Turn off the stove, Daddy. Turn it off. You're making them die.”

The old man came over, poked at the crabs with a big metal ladle. “Stop acting up, Gail. I told you animals don't feel nothing.”

But I could tell the crabs was dying. Bubbles rose from their tiny mouths. Their big claws opened faster and faster beneath the foamy water. Their little feet got to quivering.

Then all the sudden Gail plunged her right hand straight into the boiling water to try and get the crabs out.

When I get to the hospital I find Gail on the third floor, sitting in a chair next to the old man's bed. She gets up, face crinkling, and wraps her arms around me, lays her head on my chest. Through the thin fabric of my t-shirt, I feel the hard, raised seams of her scarred right hand against my back.

She's changed a lot. The beauty beaten out of her by time and worry.

“I told them, Ronnie, that I couldn't make the decision. Told them you'd have to do it.”

I stare at the old man lying motionless in the bed. In the dim room, the pulsing lights of the monitoring machines reflect off his hard outer shell. We stayed like that awhile, watching out dad, listening to the rain scratch the windows.

After a couple minutes Gail asks me what I think we should do.

“We gotta do it,” I say.

The old man's fingertips twitch, his eyelids flutter.

Gail gasps, then takes hold my arm, tight.

We both sit down and I hold her hand. Her face falls against my chest and she starts crying.

“It's all right, Gail,” I say. “He won't feel nothing. He don't feel nothing now.”