EXCAVATION by Rose Whitmore
As if it weren’t enough, in the sun-drenched landscape of rural Baja with her blistering skin and disintegrating thesis and evasive graduate advisor, Callie was only finding dead clams. They came up whole or split at their base, lips parted, revealing softly luminescent, greying flesh. In the mornings, barefoot and armed to dig, she found them splayed, something delicate and irretrievable in their unhinged joints, their meat picked over by the kingfishers and gulls.
She bent down to examine one of the many clamshells that littered the beach. It was half an inch at its thickest point, and just like all the others, bore a small black hole at its base. She could never find any evidence of what created the hole, the perpetrator always gone, and with it two months of clamming in search of data for her graduate thesis, half-concocted by Jude, a man they called the ocean cowboy, who had delivered her many disappointments. She scraped at the hole in the shell. It gave way under her fingernail, soft and gummy. Callie couldn’t pinpoint exactly when she realized all the clams were dead or dying, or that her period was late. It had been a slow reckoning, a truth that rifled through her day by day.
Her period. It was a thing now, something that began to occupy her thoughts alongside the clams; a thing she needed to check up on, a thing he had to know. She had to call the ocean cowboy again. The thought of his distant sandpaper voice filled the space within her where there was an anxious, gnawing emptiness.
She gripped her clamming fork and plunged the long, thin, rusted prongs into the shallow waters, pressed down on the handle, and unearthed a pile of wet sand. She combed through the prongs and found one large, dead clam. She drove the fork down and down again, finding nothing. She wanted to blame the fork, which was really Jude’s fork, left in his shack along with a host of items she had loved in her first days in Santa Rosalita with a desperate nostalgia because they were his. Every book and piece of driftwood and trinket carried some of his magic. Now, they simply made her feel foolish, and everything around her amplified her frustration: the encroaching fog bank, the algae blooms, the stink and rot and decay of this place, the way silence invaded the lull between waves lapping in the harbor.
An oversized pickup rocked back and forth like an ocean liner as it pulled itself over the rocks and dunes beyond town. It came from the uninhabited lands north of the cannery, where a small construction crew was building what Callie could only guess was a new harbor. She watched them during the day as she moved along the shore, two tractors that coughed fumes and strange machinery that moved like limbs. For ten hours a day, one dug and scraped at the beach while the other placed perfectly square granite blocks in a straight line that reached into the ocean.
Every once in a while, the workers would load into the same pickup, rip through the small streets of Santa Rosalita and vanish over the bluffs for the weekend, leaving the town to the rhythms of the ocean. Callie understood the desire to escape. Before she knew anything, she had, basking in Jude’s arms, mistakenly imagined this obscure Baja town as tropical – palapas and coconut drinks, the air fresh with the dried-out simplicity of retreat and science. But none of it was what he’d promised it would be. Even the town was a different place than he’d painted, with its grating noises and diesel fumes and feral dogs.
The pickup slowed beside her. The low whine of country music slipped out of the tinted windows as they rolled down, revealing two heavy-set Americans.
What was she doing, the two men asked her, little girl, with that fork, barefoot at low tide?
“I’m clamming,” she said.
The man in the passenger seat laughed.
“What do you do with them once you find them? Boil ’em?” the driver asked with a husk of mockery in his voice.
“I study them. You work there?” she said and nodded toward the hulking machines and the sparkling granite up the shore.
“Contracted with the government.”
“What is it?”
“A place for people with yachts to anchor on their way down to the Cabos,” the passenger said.
Callie looked skeptical.
“No, I know. Nothing here now, but you come down in three years and this place will be paved over. You won’t even recognize it.” He pulled a bottle of beer from the center console and offered it to Callie, who declined. “You stay here all year round?” he asked.
“No, just three more months of research.”
“Lucky you,” he said. “We live at Palomas del Mar, over on the Gulf. If you ever want to get out of this stinkhole, we could show you a good time.”
She thought briefly about the air conditioning in the truck, but she was held by the invisible fingers of a strange fidelity. “There’s a fiesta tomorrow. The patron saint of this town.” All week people had been preparing for the festival, unspooling brightly colored streamers and setting up folding tables and chairs in the small main square.
The passenger laughed. “Who is it, the saint of shitty fishing?”
A pulse of anger zippered through her. Callie didn’t know what to say, but she wished she had a reply. Any reply.
“You sure you don’t want to come?”
She nodded. The man in the driver’s seat, who reminded her of Jude with his air of affable superiority, said nothing, but saluted and winked at her as he pulled away.
Callie watched them weave down the beach, narrowly missing her small friend Hugo, who was hunched over a dead fish carcass. He had appeared on Callie’s first day of clamming, jettisoned upon the shore like a wayward piece of beach detritus, trailing a rope of seaweed. That morning, she had trudged down the road to the village while all the kids trudged up to the schoolhouse that sat not far from Jude’s beach shack on the bluffs. Thinking of the children learning their way through the world from the safety of their classroom overlooking the ocean made Callie miss the ease and structure of school. But as difficult as grad school seemed, nothing had prepared her for the terrifying expanse of ocean before her, her lonely research, the grit and hardship of life in rural Baja. When she arrived on the shore with her bucket and gear – fork, notepad, water bottle, raincoat against the fog, and boots – she felt ridiculous, watched. And she was.
She was tentatively poking the sand with her fork when Hugo stopped at her bucket and peered in. He had a round face with eyes that crammed against each other in a pleasant way and a ring of dirt around his mouth. He looked about six years old.
She hesitated. She lacked the easy way with children most people had. “Why aren’t you at school today?” she said and pointed to the bluff. When he looked at her blankly, she paused, and said, “Escuela?”
He studied her, then wordlessly pulled his lower eyelids down and his upper lip up. He produced a string of nonsensical noises and waggled his tongue at her from between sharp little teeth.
She looked around. Fog shrouded the bluffs in a haze. The town was still, the harbor emptied of boats. Every morning, the men left in dinghies, their muted silhouettes trailed by the whine of outboard motors and the slow undulations of their wake. During the day, this was a town of women and children. Men were ghosts.
Hugo began to laugh maniacally, so she pulled the tide chart Jude had given her out of her pocket and studied it, even though she had no idea how to read it. She looked long enough for Hugo to leave, but he stayed.
He followed her the rest of the day, talking to himself, dragging a stick across the shallow water, watching her with stealthy interest. As he grew more comfortable, he touched everything Callie touched with a curiosity she found exhausting. At noon the fog burned off. Callie, unprepared to work in the sun, rolled up her sleeves and tossed her rubber boots aside, which, to his hysterical delight, he wore on his arms for the rest of the afternoon.
Hugo, the name she eventually gave him, had been with her every day since then, as sure as the tides. She did not like it at first, but she grew used to his company, and chatted idly with him as she moved into a rhythm of not finding any live clams. As she moved up the shore methodically day by day, she told him stories of Jude, of her life back home in the safe folds of student housing and her roommate Lizel’s nightly gin and tonics. She told him about the clams and how she’d have to rethink her thesis. She’d have to rethink everything. She’d probably lose her funding, and with it the only semblance of structure she currently had in her life. And Jude.
When she spoke of Jude, Hugo repeated his name back in song, drawing it out like a long question. Who was he? What was he? She called him her boyfriend. Her advisor. Lizel would have called them lovers, which had a nice European ring to it. Jude would have said they were something beyond naming.
She watched Hugo now, as he dug in the sand at the edge of the water, still simmering from her exchange with the workers. Hugo’s world was still a wild little place where the naming of things didn’t interfere with their meaning, and she envied him. Jude would have been nothing but enthusiastic for someone so curious. “True science lies in relentless excavation,” he’d once told her. It was a line he urged her to use in her research proposal, which had been cobbled together under his infectious enthusiasm, and presented, with his highest endorsement, to a national committee. A man on the board of the Aspen Institute, whom Callie had never met, wrote a recommendation letter for her (a favor for Jude) calling her the “pulse of American marine biology and steward of the future.”
The thought of that letter merged with the constricting path she suddenly saw for herself. And hopelessness flattened her.
“What should I do?” she said, out loud.
Hugo looked up. Sand flecked his checks. The sun blistered down. A wave of nausea rippled through her body. “I don’t know what to do.”
The fork sweated under her grip as she thought of Jude’s cracked and sun-spotted hands pushing into these very sands. Anger pulsed through her. Where was he? Why had he trusted her with this? She wondered when he had been down here last, if he had seen the wash of dead clams on the shore. She wondered if he knew anything, if he meant any of the things he’d said to her, and, feeling reduced to nothing, a surge of resentment exploded through her hands. She looked off at the horizon and drove the fork down. It was swift and accidental – the way the prong skewered the soft flesh between her fourth and fifth toes.
Callie froze in place. Cold water lapped gently across her feet.
Hugo stopped and stared at her.
“Come here!” She waved at him furiously. Breath escaped her. Should she take the fork out? Leave it in? She took a small step forward and cried out in pain.
Hugo was wide-eyed when he arrived. She sized him up for the first time. Could he run for help? Would he understand? Was it really that bad? Her mind raced. It would take her three hours to get to the closest town, but was there even a clinic in Guerrero Negro? When was her last tetanus shot? She thought of the foremen, their air-conditioned truck, the ease of seventy-miles-per-hour in the right direction, but they were gone.
Adrenaline amplified her clarity. She spoke to Hugo as though he understood: “I am going to take this fork out. I am going to be quick and it will be okay.” She clutched his small shoulder and he nodded. She repeated herself one more time so he would know, and in one swift motion, dislodged the fork from her foot.
”The nudibranch, also known as the blue-green sea cucumber, pulses – throbs really – with the tender and regulated rhythm of the human heart. This pulse can be deconstructed in both scientific and mathematical terms, but when it comes to the currents of the sea and all its inhabitants, I believe there is some magic that lies beyond definition. For example, when holding our sea cucumber, it is unimpressive. It’s a fetid, foul, (forgive me) limp-dicked creature without a spine, or central nervous system of any note. But to hold one is, abstractly, to hold the very element that makes us human. This parsing of aliveness makes us aware of the fragility that both separates and unites us with the greater tide (excuse the pun) of humanity. Born from the same delirious commingling of elements, pulsing along the same communal breath of whatever it is we call life, with or without consciousness (that’s a very different seminar), perhaps this blue-green slug is the very essence of how we can attempt to begin to understand the strange film through which we see ourselves. Perhaps it is the key to understanding everything.”
This is how Jude opened his seminar, “The Future of Intertidal Confluences,” fifty minutes late, on a sweltering September afternoon. Sweat pooled in Callie’s armpits and her crotch throbbed. As he spoke, disheveled but ardent, he looked each one of his ten new graduate students in the eye, as if they were waltzing. Callie decided to devote herself then and there to study whatever this man was talking about.
Jude went on to describe the plight of the Pismo clam on the Baja Peninsula. As he spoke, Callie suddenly felt cloistered inland air pressing upon them. She wanted to be in Santa Rosalita, stationed in the good work of science, sliding the long prongs of a clamming fork in and out of sand grains, uncovering the thick-shelled bivalves, elucidating the effects of rising ocean temperatures on their reproductive patterns. She wanted to be immersed in his Pacific, limitless, uncontained, and buttressed only by bluffs and sea and sky. She wanted to know and participate in that ever-evolving symphony between the ocean and its creatures – the discovery of which was the task of the true scientist, Jude explained to them – the nonnegotiable demand that, if they loved true things, they had to figure out. “It is up to us,” he had said that day, looking at Callie through the heart of her corneas, “to discover the why of the world.”
On clamming, Jude, the world-renowned expert in bivalve habits and rehabilitation in damaged communities, had only given Callie this advice: Don’t clam on Easter, children are good luck, and work your way north along the low tide. When he dropped her off at the airport, as a parting gift, he gave her a half-used jar of Vaseline, a six-pack of DD batteries, and a tidal chart, all wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. She’d smirked at the Vaseline but he said, not unkindly, “You’ll need that for your hands. Take meticulous notes. Be precise.”
When they got out of the car, he kissed her softly and then, as one might describe a well-stitched saddle or reliable power tool, added, “The ocean will not let you down.”
She thought of that now, as she watched the fog roll in from the terrace of the only store in town. The owner, whom she considered the closest thing she had to an adult friend, had bandaged her up and promised to find her a ride to the nearest town after the celebration. She had at least two days to wallow in the stink of low tide and watch the fishermen return in their skiffs. Now, sipping beer, peeling herself out of shock and into slow throbs of pain, she nursed a new, thinly veiled contempt for the fishermen. They had clear purpose and obtainable results. There were still fish in the ocean to catch and that was what they did; some were more successful than others and some years were worse than others, as evidenced by the abandoned cannery that sat hulking and abandoned at the edge of town. But wasn’t that human nature, to use something up until it was depleted and move on?
As if to answer this question, Hugo deposited a shell onto her lap. A gift. It was curved, well-worn, and iridescent. Abalone. It must have come from deeper waters, where the pulse of everything was as clear as it was cold. As she turned it over, she tried not to think of Jude, or the parasite, or her period, or all the clams, hundreds on this small beach alone, that she had dug up, and the hundreds more she would never find, buried in the depths.
She tried to imagine what Jude would say about the abalone, but all she could see was his nature. He was breathy and urgent – constantly girding some impulse toward an expression of beauty or torment, except the last time they spoke, when he told her to relax, get to know the people, the town. At the time she had only been in Santa Rosalita three weeks, still clean under her fingernails. He’d been surprised to hear from her.
“How did you get to a phone?” he asked.
It was not the greeting she’d hoped for, and she searched desperately for a soft place in his voice, an opening that said here, here is where I love you.
“I caught a ride.” She had sat in the back of a pickup for the three-hour journey across the desert, wedged between two fifty-gallon water drums, the wind whipping sand into her eyes. When she arrived at the pay phone outside the main grocery store, she was jittery, washed over. The sun was setting. Dust eddied in the corners of the town. The volume could not be adjusted. His voice was just a faint echo.
“What’s the clam status?” Jude asked, when he had recovered from hearing her voice.
“Mostly dead, from the looks of it.”
“Have you tried north of the cannery?”
“I’ve tried everywhere.”
“What about the jetty? Have you gone beyond the jetty?”
Her breath was heavy. Dirt blew into her eyes. “Everywhere.”
“When I was down there last, they were pulling them up by the crateful.”
“I am too, they’re just all dead.”
“Maybe you need to look harder. Dig deeper,” he said.
The line was silent, a stone sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
“Babe. I am totally feeling for you,” he said. “But there is a crap ton of money that’s going to disappear if we don’t find anything. I can’t manifest data from dead clams. I don’t have another project for you. And with this Chilean earthquake, there’s so much disruption. It’s so hot. It’s virtually blowing the top off everything else.”
“Chile.” She hadn’t known about the earthquake.
“They’re assembling an emergency team. I meant to tell you that I’d be offline for a while. They want me to look into some deep sea tectonics, underwater shifts that are possibly affecting the intertidals.”
She hadn’t called him again.
She hobbled up the hill to the shack and stood in the door in the darkness, covered with sweat and shivering from the fog. She cursed everything. When she had first arrived, desperate with the smell of Jude still on her, gripped by a fear she could not admit, she had catalogued the pictures tapped to the walls. In her favorite one, sepia tones warped the edges of a younger Jude on an unnamed fishing boat with nothing behind him but sea, holding a gargantuan fish by its tail with a grin she had only seen once, in the dean’s closet at the end-of‑the-year party, drunk, as she fumbled with his cock and looked up apologetically only to find him flashing a loving, bountiful smile.
She studied his face in the photo, younger, more exuberant, handsome in a blunt way – dark features that were stiff and deep and haggard with a rough sort of beauty. But it was the gentle way he had, the hubris, coupled with the poetic license he took when he described the actions of the sea creatures in his seminar, that made the life of the intertidal zones a flowing, seductive, operatic world that had hooked itself to a pulse in her heart and sent tendrils of pleasure through the crevices of her body. “Bravery is the solution to fear,” he once said in class, when describing the slow sloughing action that the nudibranch employed to propel itself across an ocean floor ripe with predators. Callie had come home the day of the nudibranch, electrified.
“He said it was brave? I don’t understand,” her roommate, Lizel, had said that night, full of disdain, with the halting grammar and thick accent of northern Spain. She studied animal cognition in the basement of the psychology building for an eccentric professor who was world renowned for her work on squirrels. Lizel worked with ravens, teaching them rote tasks to decipher their memory capacities. She often came home covered in peck marks with birdshit under her fingernails.
“He’s saying that there is an autonomic tic to everything, but there’s also some strange consciousness too,” Callie said.
“Nudibranch, what is that again?” Lizel asked as she finished mixing their second round of gin and tonics. She handed Callie a drink.
“Technically it’s a sea slug.”
Lizel grimaced as she lit a cigarette and inhaled. “This the way you should be talking – saying what actually is, as opposed to fluff. A is A and B is B. You should be more factual when talking about science,” she said.
“But what if the sea slugs are brave? What if there is some third element – an unknown connection between function and existence that we can’t name?” Callie said.
Lizel snorted. “Certain animals have no feelings – and if they did, bravery is not what they would emote,” she said.
“It could be called bravery, what they do,” Callie said.
Lizel looked disgusted. “Anthropomorphism repels me. We’re animals enough.” She pointed at Callie with her cigarette. “Your professor boy-man has wound too much poetry around the basic principles of science. Only a fool lends emotions to animals. Things live and things die, and sometimes they don’t know even know that they do.” She sighed and shook her head. “I think all of this is very . . .” she searched for the word, but either didn’t know it or didn’t know what to name it, the affair, Jude, so she shrugged.
“He makes me feel drunk,” Callie said.
“You are drunk. And he is married.”
Technically. Technically, Jude was married. Separated, she, the wife somewhere in the desert, welding alarmingly phallic metal art with a mastiff named Chuck and 90% custody of the twins, Amos and Elise, who had come to the class right before spring break and spoke with the same strange but endearing lisp. Jude went down to play house for three weeks every summer, whatever that meant.
“Married men never know the limits of their own foolishness,” said Lizel. “And technicalities are the weird cousin of truth, glitches in the system. If you want truth, leaning on technicalities is no way to live.”
Callie fumbled for the right reply. She searched but only found the thrill that Jude left on her, coating her like an oil slick. She snagged the cigarette from Lizel’s lips. “Maybe technicalities make the world go round.”
Now, sick of the hope she had been dragging through Baja like a shield, she realized she didn’t know why she had been so electrified. She had fallen in love with Jude because that was what people did. It was not conscious, but a fact, and she had never once questioned why he loved her. She was not the best student or the best scientist. She had no instincts for research. She felt like a foreigner in her own body, but yet here she was, a victim of technicalities.
The next day, Callie waited out the hours until the festival in her shack drinking tequila and dissecting a bucket of clams with her foot elevated, hot and throbbing. It was getting worse, but there was nothing she could do. She thought that if she could find the worm, or the parasite, she could ship it back to Jude. An answer. Here in this small vial is a plague that will affect a chain of ocean animals for the next lifetime, but every time she cut into a clam, it reminded her of pulling the fork out her foot; how the blood came out black, flowing in veils through the water.
Hugo kept her company. He touched every object in the shack, wanting an explanation, even if he did not understand the one she gave him. An arrowhead. Feathers and bird nests, old shells. Usually she was good at inventing histories for the things Hugo brought her throughout the day, either as gifts or items of curiosity. She would hold the items up to the light and make fantastical stories about them. A piece of beach glass was the earring of an undersea queen; a piece of driftwood that resembled an elephant tusk had come from the beaches of Africa.
But the things in the shack reminded her that it was all a slow-winding catastrophe, unspooling itself in terrifyingly slow increments. She tried not to think about other slow deaths, inevitable in their end, their process held hostage by small wells of cauterized hope: her parents’ divorce; her belief that graduate work would be clear, delineated, successful; that she was special – she was a scientist. But here she was left with only the crash of waves that echoed against the bluffs and the heavy silences in between.
Her foot ached. She could hear music down below. She was about to leave for the festival when Hugo tugged at her shirt, his face pulled into a question. He held up a splayed clam in his palm as though he had just noticed the parasite for the first time. She wondered if he understood the problem at all, if he had any idea of what they had been dealing with. She hoped not. She looked at his face, torn with a curious pain. He needed an answer.
A blight. That is what Lizel would call it. A parasite.
Jude would call it a metaphor for man’s interference in the natural world; a cascade of cause and effect that signaled a time for mourning. Senescence. Moral decay. Callie wanted to give it a story, a feeling, an emotion to soften the edges, but she shook her head at Hugo. This time, she didn’t have an answer.
The fog had rolled in, but Santa Rosalita was bubbling, alive with music and the sharp smell of roasting animal. Half-drunk, she loved this small town, and said as such as she limped through the streets with Hugo, admiring the way women kept their yards bright against the fog with blooming flowers.
When they got to the party, Hugo made a beeline for the band and began to dance alone. Watching him rock slowly back and forth like a small tuft of sea grass reminded Callie of how drunk she was the first time she kissed Jude, blitzed on port and the cheap red wine they’d served at the end-of‑the-year reception. She’d just been awarded the scholarship, and was flushed, already tingling and slightly out of her body when Jude appeared, leaning against the smooth marble countertop of the dean’s kitchen as magnetic as the eye of the sun. He was wearing a cowboy hat, in deference to, or mockery of, his nickname. Callie wasn’t sure who, exactly, called him the ocean cowboy. At first she thought it was a joke. Later she found out the hat had been a gift from a small town in Ecuador after he tried to save a colony of bivalves off its coast. On any other man she would have found the hat ridiculous, but on him, the soft worn leather and wide brim moved past cliché. To her, he was the real thing.
She couldn’t remember how they got into the extra coat closet, a bottle of warm champagne between them, but she did remember the way he smelled: exactly as she thought he might, like the sea and desert, of brine and sweet, hot earth. As she ran her hands through his hair, she found a quarter-sized bald spot on the back of his head, tender, smooth as a ball-peen. In the moment, she had gasped. It felt like an electrifying discovery, a soft spot, an opening.
The fiesta was a blur of music and Christmas lights and dancing. People she’d never met gave her drinks. Children she did not know brought her plates of food. She was welcome, easing at last into the shadows of normalcy, away from a thing of curiosity. She forgot about the clams. She forgot about her foot. She became very drunk. But just as she was about to dance with Hugo, the music stopped for a break and the crash of waves at high tide jolted her back. The party swayed and laughter echoed against the bluffs, but she could not ignore the breakers.
She wandered down to the shore and hugged herself. Hugo waded out into the water up to his knees, held his arms high and proclaimed something to the ocean, as if he were Triton. She could not decipher the meaning of what he said, but she loved it, this announcement – this secret decree, whatever it was – so loud, so triumphant. She laughed.
In the distance, she could see the tractors of the construction site, dormant, their teeth gleaming in the moonlight, otherworldly against the party. The granite blocks piled against each other then disappeared into the sea. And then, in the shadows, she noticed something she had not seen before: a low-slung wire that emerged from the back of the construction trailer, connected to a pole, and then vanished into the bluffs. A phone line.
She started down the beach and Hugo trailed behind. As she walked toward the construction trailer, giddy with the appearance of something in plain sight, she imagined a conversation with Lizel, who would tell her that she was not the first person to fall in love with their advisor, or have an affair, or fuck things up. Science was full of changes. Science was performed by humans and therefore ultimately performed in a continuous error. Of course you speared your foot, she would say. Of course there are no clams. Of course you bear the scar of this ridiculous man. Or, perhaps she would be gentle, and allow the truth to float namelessly on the surface.
Hugo wandered down to the construction site while Callie traced the phone line to the back of the trailer. The door was locked. She wrapped her hand in the gauze from her foot, grabbed a rock, and punched the window.
Inside the trailer she found a landline, atop what must have been the foreman’s desk. She sat in his chair and dialed. While she waited for the connection, she admired her foot: A dark mound of crusted blood and soft red flesh sat below her toes. She tried to ignore the faint smell of rot along with the pitiful seed of hope that welled in her chest; a thing she knew was not scientific, but soft and painfully human.
For a brief second, her foot and the ocean and her heart pounded in sync with the ringing of Jude’s phone.
“Hello?” He sounded half asleep.
“Jude.”
“Yes?”
“It’s possible that I’m pregnant.”
A pause on the line. “Who is this?”
She placed the receiver gently to her chest and thought of all the things she wanted to say and all the things she wanted to ask him. But instead, she watched Hugo as he climbed across the granite slabs that sparkled like tombstones in the moonlight. Just behind him in the distance, a giant trawler moved slowly across the horizon. Its lights winked on and off as it trailed its wide, deep net, scraping the ocean floor clean of everything that followed in its path.
Rose Whitmore’s stories have appeared in The Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and Mid-American Review.