Davey chewed and sucked on abalone shells. He tucked the pieces of shell in his mouth the way others kept tobacco or sunflower seeds and spat sharp brackish wads at the ground throughout the day. Privately, some of his new neighbors in Fig Garden thought that what Davey was doing had to be a sin of some kind. Davey worked at the orchards and stayed with Murlin and Jean. They lived in Fig Garden all year long in a house that was once a shack with walls of fruit crates, but now had a permanent foundation and windows. And now their nephew Davey for the summer, lining his room with pearly abalone. Children from the camp next door crept inside to stick their fingers into the holes of the shells and admire the pearled green and blue scales cradled within the crusted barnacled chalky armor. There was nothing like that shimmer in the dusty orchards of Fig Garden. Murlin and Jean knew this as they let them in again and again. And Davey knew the neighbors thought he was spoiled and greedy and wrong. He nursed the shards to soothe his ache. There was nothing at mass he could do to ease his pain. There was no prayer fit for his condition.


Abalone diving was simple, Davey’s friends promised. Absolutely nothing to abs, they said, Monterey Bay begged for it. It was positively a buffet. Just be careful of the whites, motioned the watcher on top of the water. He was the one with a spear gun in the boat. The men cackled at the idea of fighting a shark. If they could be so lucky! they joked. Frilled barnacles covering the rocks sliced Davey’s toes and it stung as he took a stumbling dive into the water. The cold isn’t cold, he convinced himself, the cold isn’t cold. He admired his skin waxing over in protest at the icy plunge. After another breath of air and a wave to the spear gun at the surface, he disappeared into the dark. The slippery bull kelp pulled at his legs as he followed it down to the ocean floor. The rockfish hurried away. He spotted a neighborhood of shells clinging to rocks at the bottom. He pried at the foot of the largest abalone he could find with the special knife his friends thrust at him before they disappeared into the waves. As the animal gave way, Davey shoved his hand underneath to lift the shell from the rock and found himself stuck.


He inhaled the ocean in panic, imprisoned to the rock by this immovable shell. He wiggled underwater but the abalone stayed. It was committed to live. Who was Davey to the abalone? He accepted this wish as his lungs burned with water. Who am I to you, he agreed, as his eyes closed and body thrashed in instinct, except somebody to love and grow barnacles on. Somebody to grow over, he thought, as he dropped the knife and let it sink to the sand. If an abalone could envelop a man, if a man became as stolid as an abalone, could they suckle together until they expired and melt beyond flesh and kelp and living finned gilled shelled things and the pressure of ocean depths and void? Be sand together? These were Davey’s drowning thoughts. The rockfish shook their heads.


Davey’s friends noticed his fitful body, grabbed him by the hair, and hauled him back to the beach. When he awoke vomiting water and covered in sand, he ran raving back into the pummeling waves. My love! he cried, as his friends held him back in worry. Preening otters and a seal slick with salt eyed him in pity. They knew the truth about the abalone. His friends calmed him with cups of coffee, willing him to pull himself together, as Davey sobbed about his love lost in the ocean. We almost killed each other out of respect at first, he admitted to the crowd gathered on the windy beach. The people shuffled in boredom. They hoped for a shark attack or a drowning, not some lovelorn man lusting after a simple mollusk he never had.

Word spread through his town of Salinas that no one was to let Davey leave for the Bay. He would never come back from it, his mother mourned desperately. He will never be the same, he wants to live in the ocean, she confessed to wary neighbors. Friends left abalone shells on his doorstep, stripped of red meat and cleaned with ocean water. The meat got him too worked up, his mother cautioned, after the first delivery. She couldn’t stand to hear Davey howling all night again. His father watched Davey arrange and rearrange the shells in his room, worrying them over and over with his fingers. He noticed Davey fussing especially on the thick foggy mornings where you could chew on the salt air as they picked artichokes. Salinas was too close to the water, his father decided. Fig Garden in the summer with Murlin would be far enough for his son to dry out, remember himself, and stop suckling the damn shells.


Davey hated Fig Garden. The heat in the summer seared his eyes. He loathed the ugly salt lines along his work cap from dried sweat. His aunt and uncle minded him like a baby. He wasn’t allowed to drive. He was instructed to tolerate the neighbor children coveting his shells that he had cradled so carefully in his mother’s shoe box lined with tissue paper when his father took him away from Salinas. The neighbors talked too much, the dust was powdery and dry, they burned their trash in piles on Tuesdays. The only water around was brisk canals with rusted cars at the bottom. He didn’t trust the dizzying rows of orchards with bugs and sticking pesticides. Even if his eyes strained beyond the trees, he was faced with distant mountains cradling the Valley. Each morning before the sun arrived to welcome his new hell, Davey traced his fingers along the abalone shell resting next to him and remembered how he was once a free man in salty love, then he smashed it in pieces and shoved it in his mouth.

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