Fiction

Crabmeat

When the end comes, I figure that I have two, maybe two and a half minutes before it’s all over. I held my breath that long once.

I think this entire predicament is my father’s fault.

One day — I think I was nine — he suggested that we all go to the beach. I remember feeling really excited. It was warm, everybody had fun, and no one got sunburned. I found a crab scurrying across the rocks in the afternoon. It was black and white and had an interesting mottled pattern on its back. I liked the way all of its legs moved and how its eyes, on the ends of long stalks, seemed to be staring at me. Judging me maybe. I wonder what kind of arthropodite conclusions it drew about me.

We took the crab back to my grandparents’ house in an old rusty cookie tin we found in the parking lot. The next day before breakfast I heard a scream and the sound of a plate crashing to the floor. The damn crab had escaped from its tin, and my grandmother, thinking it was a cockroach, crushed it with the heel of her boot. It made a crunching noise. Geez, what kind of cockroaches had she seen in her lifetime? My grandfather was a retired chef. He took the broken crab and tossed it into some soup he was making. When we had the soup for lunch later that day, I wondered whether he would have done the same with a crushed cockroach. I got two of the legs. They didn’t taste bad.

There were other summers, other trips to the beach. Once, when I was getting ready to go snorkelling with my uncle, I mentioned to him that I was hungry. He held up one finger and told me to wait while he fished around in a bunch of seaweed that he had pulled in from the water’s edge. He plucked out some tiny crabs — they couldn’t have been larger than a quarter — and popped a couple in his mouth. Crunch. He ate them alive!

As an 11 year old, I found this cool and disgusting all at once. My uncle handed me one to try. The tiny crab scurried across my tongue before I clamped down. Its little body exploded in my mouth like a zit. Very salty. I couldn’t stop eating them all afternoon.

Oh God, I almost forgot about that science fair experiment in Grade 11, the one where I tested the tensile strength of King Crab legs. I laughed every time a leg cracked when I added too much weight to the hook on the pulley. But those damn crab legs cost a fortune; they were the only kind big enough to be accommodated by my clumsy hands. Had to work extra hours at the 7-11 to pay for them. Selling Big Gulps to endless lineups of morons in my neighbourhood who were always so puzzled as to the source of their flatulence.

I got my supply of legs from a stinky fish shop near my house. The Portuguese owner with the wiry hair always smelled like uncooked squid. Why just squid? Why not scallops? Or mackerel? Or farm-raised, black-pepper-lemon-marinated Florida catfish (on sale for just $2.99 for 100 grams … today, just for you). Occupational hazard, I guess. I wonder how his wife was able to stand it. Who knows, maybe she liked it. Never did find a woman who enjoyed the smell of crabs on my breath.

Our projects had to sit in the gym over the weekend before final judging on Monday. Come on. I could have told them that crab legs stink like your dead aunt in the hot tub when they’re left unrefrigerated. But no one asked me. Leave your projects in the gym they said; those were the rules.

It was sometime after that that I committed myself to an actual crab career. An inevitability, I guess. As an undergraduate in university I took a bunch of summer courses on the East coast where I did a lot of crab collecting at low tide on rocky shores. I especially liked the ones that lived in tide pools — the way they scurried around scavenging bits of detritus. Their little claws picking, picking, picking away at dead fish. I could watch them for hours. And sometimes, when no one was looking, I’d munch on the really small ones. Every tide pool seemed to impart a different flavour to my little crustacean appetizers. My first marine biology professor told me never to turn my back on a rising tide because you can lose track of time and the damn thing will swallow you whole. I’ve always kept that in mind.

Part of my graduate work involved comparing the morphology of different populations of blue crabs endemic to the East coast of North America. Two years lost in a blur of dissections and crab cakes. I wasn’t very good at dissecting. Cutting through those brittle exoskeletons was a pain. One wrong move and crunch! Another shell lost to clumsy fingers. To compensate for my lack of dexterity, I devised a small contraption that held the crabs in place while I gently sawed through them. Kind of like a mitre box for the crustaceally challenged. I found out that the other students called me the Marquis de Crab. Screw them. I’m the one that got the post-doc at Johns Hopkins.

Baltimore. I lived in a cramped third-floor open concept flat in Canton. Stiflingly hot in the summer. Not the best part of town, either. It was all I could afford on my stipend. It was nice though. Quaint. Well, kind of a hole really, but it was close to what must have been the oldest, greasiest diner on the Atlantic seaboard. The painted letters under the long defunct neon tubing read Sip and Bite, but everyone referred to it as the Sip and Die. Mostly true, except they served the most incredible soft-shelled crab sandwiches.

The first time I visited the place someone asked me whether I had ever eaten a soft-shelled crab. Most people don’t even know what they are. When crabs need to grow, they have to molt their skeletons, which grow on the outside of their bodies. When the new one is secreted, it takes a while before it hardens. If you catch them at the right time, you end up with a non-crunchy crab that you can eat whole. At the Sip and Die they deep fried their soft-shelled crabs in grease whose age could probably be measured in geologic time, which made them crunchy again. Slap those suckers between two pieces of tartar-sauce-smeared bread and you had an oral delight that was almost pornographic. I liked the way their little legs stuck out over the edges of the bread.

Now, I teach invertebrate zoology to whiny, Big Gulp–consuming undergraduates. All I really wanted was a little bit of a beach holiday.

I came out here today to fish around in a few tide pools and to see whether there were any little crabs worth eating. Surprised the hell out of me when I slipped on that patch of blue-green algae and wedged my ankle between two rocks. I can’t even stand up. And that cracking sound my ankle made was pretty sickening. Damn rocks won’t budge.

I don’t know whether I ever properly thanked my dad for taking us to the beach.

The tide here tonight should rise about, well just let me check the tide table that I have in my pocket — you can never be too prepared for these things you know — 1.5 metres. That’s about 30 centimetres higher than where the top of my head’s situated right now. At least I don’t have my back turned and I can watch that magnificent tide come surging in.

I don’t think I’ll even bother to try holding my breath. What’s the point? This beach is pretty remote. No one will miss me until at least Monday afternoon. I don’t suspect anyone will find me until Wednesday at the earliest. There shouldn’t be too much left of me by then.

I guess the crabs will have a feast.

Anton Holland was once a scientist who discovered that he would much rather write about science than actually do the research himself. It’s been 12 years since he last ate a soft-shelled crab sandwich.