Estimated reading time — 11 minutes

As soon as Paul Anderson walked into Bennett’s Bait and Tackle, I immediately thought of the homemade missing persons sign stapled on the corkboard by the bathroom, constructed with the hope of it aiding in finding his missing son. Then my mind drifted to an image of the poorly written words someone had added in a red Sharpie marker under Paul’s name and contact information: what a goddamn butthole.

And now the butthole was here. And a butthole he was.

The dirty American flag on his shirt matched the red and white sunburn stripe on his forehead from wearing a baseball cap a little too long in the summer sun. I’m pretty sure he’s had that exact tan for a couple of weeks now, too. I remember getting my oil changed at his shop, and it was after he kept staring at my chest and asking for more than I ought to have paid him that I pointed out to him this great product called sunscreen and how old white people like him should really be using it. He cussed me out and spat on my tire. He wasn’t wearing a hat then and he ain’t now. It’s a shame ‘cause now that he’s here, I’ll be forced to look at his bald spot, albeit a much better sight than his snaggle-tooth and red face.

Begrudgingly, I gave him a tight-lipped smile before hiding my face in the fishing charter pamphlet I was reading. Judging by the stupid, half-pleased smirk on his face, I could tell he was happy with me finally giving him some attention, or at least that’s what I assumed that was.

Being new to town for the summer, I didn’t know a whole lot about Paul Anderson until a short while after that oil change, around the time he reported his son Ritchie went missing. He decided to put up a flier in every establishment and on every telephone pole in town, and it was at that point that the town began to talk, so I listened. My grandfather was especially one to talk, though it was mostly in grumbles and creative curses meant for wiser ears than my own. I’ve been told his son had been missing for a few months before Paul figured that was long enough and decided to care. I’ve been told Paul was a veteran of some war that left him with demons he took out on the people around him, one of them being his twenty-year-old son. I’ve been told his son most likely ditched town in his Frankenstein-of-a-car he loved working on (with a mighty bad muffler problem, might I add) and was glad to be away from his father. It appeared that the story of what happened to Ritchie Anderson spoke for itself.

But then there was the hand.

A week ago, a wary fisherman from a local fishing charter had brought his net up to the store and asked for Will. Turns out, his catch of the day was the swollen, mostly eaten, mushy remains of a human hand. Thankfully, he was fishing alone that day–not chartering and traumatizing a bunch of tourists with unexpected finds.

My grandfather took the net, and the fisherman simply left, so I assumed Will decided to take care of it for the poor man.

As interested as I was, I only took one glance at the hand. It was a hand, alright, mostly eaten, missing all but the middle finger.

But that was last week. As strange a coincidence it was, nothing ever came out of the hand. I’m not sure where the hand went, but William Bennett was a man of his word and “took care of it,” whatever that meant. I almost asked him why he didn’t bring the hand to the police, but before any words could escape my mouth, he said that Bennetts take care of things themselves, and it’s what they do best.

“You have a lot to learn,” he told me.

Shit, apparently I did because I didn’t understand any of it. Just like how I don’t understand why my grandfather made me a goddamn cashier instead of a dock worker. I hate people and I ain’t good with them.

Today, there were no customers inside Bennett’s Bait and Tackle, no customers outside, meaning it was one of those good days. No customers had come at all, in fact. I was at the register reading a copy of a local fishing charter brochure while my grandfather was stationed in the back storage room doing what I assumed was inventory. The morning rain had died off a little over an hour ago, leaving the sky partially cloudy and the outside air cool and misty. A part of me was glad no one had driven up with their boat asking for a refill on their gas or something. After working here for two months, I still didn’t know how to work a gas pump and didn’t have any ambition to learn. I was also still unaccustomed to the cold northern weather that my old home in Missouri didn’t have, so the inside heat made me feel a lot more content when doing my daily duties.

Two months of my summer living here in Alaska with my grandfather. Two months of my summer vacation dealing with gun-toting, monster truck-driving, gapped-tooth type of small-town folk when I didn’t even like people in the first place. Mom apparently thought I needed some time with my grandfather before his time ran out and he bit the dust, I guess. Not that I was the greatest company to be around in the first place. Then again, neither was he.

I should be in the back taking inventory, not him. He knows these people. They’re his people. Not mine.

That being said, I tried not to pay much attention to Paul meandering his way about the store until I heard him sniffing through his stuffy nose right in front of my register.

He grunted, a long pause, then, “Theo.”

The way he said my name made it sound like he’s never said it out loud before and figured he’d give it a shot. And apparently, that was his greeting.

“Hi.” I continued to stare down at the words and pictures on the page, ignoring him, hoping he’d just go away. And that wasn’t because I am a terrible cashier, no, Paul didn’t have anything in his hands. At least nothing I could see through the lashes of my downward-pointed eyes. Or smell. It’s pretty clear when someone walks up to the counter with bait of some sort, plopping the bucket or package right in front of me, sometimes a sickening splash making contact with my skin. The fishy and earthy scent will get stuck to the counter all afternoon until I take some Clorox wipes and get rid of at least half of it. Never all.

“Theo,” he said, trying it out again. “Isn’t that a boy’s name?”

I should have told the man to get lost. Instead, I just muttered, “I don’t know. It’s my name.”

“I’m sure it’s a boy’s name. Short for Theodore, like the president. Or the chipmunk.”

This time, I pulled my eyes from the pages, raked them up from the counter height to his face, and muttered, “Okay.”

“So, uh,” Paul looked around the store slowly. “Where’s the old man?”

I looked back down at my book and shrugged.

“Your granddaddy? The man who owns this store?” He said, this time a little louder, voice dripping with disdain.

I kept my eyes down as I spoke again. “He’s busy at the moment.”

“Can you get him?”

Half a second, then, “Hmm. Nope, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Busy.”

“Doin’ what?”

I shrugged. “Work, probably.”

At this point, Paul started to let out a low growl, which was a signifier that he was either getting ready to yell at me or turn into a werewolf, so I quickly said, “He doesn’t wanna be interrupted.”

My grandfather had told me very clearly when I first started working here this summer not to bother him when he’s in the back room. He also told me to tell anyone who asks if he’s here that he “passed.” I told him that was stupid and that I wasn’t going to do that. So here I am now, Paul staring me down to the point I had to divert my eyes, which is when I became vaguely aware of a bulge in his pants that definitely wasn’t from a candy bar he’d decided to steal. I didn’t know whether to be happy or not that it wasn’t a boner either.

“You lyin’ to me? You a liar?”

“What? No.” I continued staring at the bulge with a slight scowl on my face. “He really doesn’t wanna be bothered right now.” It was the truth. Taking inventory was my grandfather’s special time of the day, the one time when he got to be completely alone and leave the shop responsibilities up to me. He even locks the door while doing it as his way of saying “do not disturb.”

Then Paul took out the source of the bulge.

Not gonna lie, I actually let out a sigh when he revealed a handgun. A hostage situation was not something I was expecting on this brisk but beautiful Wednesday morning at Bennett’s Bait and Tackle, but it was also something I wouldn’t pretend to be surprised by. “Why,” was all I said, gulping once. It wasn’t even really a question.

“Go get him.”

The tight and shaky grip on his gun was a stark contrast to the venom in his voice, but I didn’t think too much about it. My concerns were elsewhere because, to be frank, I didn’t really want to deal with this, and by that, I meant getting shot, so I stood up and did as he said.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a shaky hand. “Lock the front door first. Put the closed sign in front as well.”

I narrowed my eyes on him. “We don’t have a closed sign.”

“Just lock the door!”

I did as he said before I walked back to the storage room where my grandfather was. The door was locked, of course, so I knocked.

“What?” He yelled in response.

“I think you need to come out. It’s kind of an emergency.”

“Cops here?”

“No.”

“Farmer Harold?”

“Who? No.”

“Girl Scouts?”

“No. Probably worse. That Paul guy is holdin’ us hostage, I think. He’s got a gun.”

My grandfather groaned quietly from behind the door. I heard some shuffling for a minute before he opened it, the putrid smell of dead meat filling my nostrils as he did so. He gave me a once-over, probably to see if Paul had manhandled his sixteen-year-old granddaughter in some sort of perverted way, then looked beyond to our friend waiting up front. “Alright. Let’s get this over with.”

At least he had the same attitude as I did about all of this. I suppose he expected this–it wasn’t too long ago that the only other Anderson in town (that is, before he disappeared, of course) tried to steal from us. I was on one of my few-but-blessed days off, and my grandfather told me Ritchie came in high out of his mind, holding a pack of M&Ms, and was getting mouthy towards my grandfather when asked to leave. Even swung at my grandfather and gave him a bloody nose.

“Back in the day, they used to chop off hands for stealin’,” I remember my grandfather saying to me later that night, tending to his crusted-over bloody nose in the kitchen. “Damn Andersons. Soon as I see an Anderson in here, I know it’s gonna be trouble.” Trouble. That’s what the Andersons were. I remember coming into work the next day and seeing large red marks on the stones by the dock and wondering if that was from my poor grandfather’s nose. I never asked.

We both walked back to the front of the store where Paul was, still pointing his gun at us.
“The hell, Paul?” My grandfather spat, white eyebrows and mustache furrowed and all. “You forget to take some medication or somethin’? It’s ten in the goddamn mornin’ sir. Ain’t no time for a robbery.”

“Shut up!”

“You are not gonna shoot us in my shop. Theo just mopped the floors,” my grandfather added, like that would be the deterring factor for this predicament. I didn’t want to clarify out loud that by “just washed” he meant “washed three weeks ago.” Around here, though, that was pretty damn clean.

“Oh yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it? Call the police?”

“Worse,” was all he said, and the word alone made me gulp.

Now might be a good time to mention that we live in a town where the pizza man would get to you faster than the police, so it’s no surprise that nobody called them around here and instead flew by the seat of their pants when it came to problem-solving. I didn’t know what “worse” meant, but coming from a seventy-one-year-old man, it couldn’t have been anything but talk. I was sure of it.

Paul narrowed his eyes on him before he said, “I ain’t here to rob you. There’s nothin’ here that I want other than to talk.”

There was a brief moment of silence between all parties. I quickly caught on to why Paul was actually here, my grandfather most definitely already knew, and I think Paul was trying to sense that. I should have put the pieces together faster… maybe then I could have kept an eye out for him and then locked the store before he got inside.

“You know about my boy. You know.”

My grandfather was silent. His face remained blank, eyes never leaving Paul.

Paul’s eyes shifted between my grandfather and me before settling on him. “Rumor in town is that a boat pulled up a hand right out there,” he said to the two of us, voice breaking slightly as the gun in his hands trembled. He pointed it out to the bay. “Is it true?”

Silence. There was nothing but silence as Paul looked at my grandfather.

“Is it? True, I mean. Greg, the man who found it, tells me he threw it back in the bay. Tried to play it off like it might have been some sort of jellyfish or somethin’. But you know, he never met my eyes tellin’ me all that. And he’s worked on the water for years. He should know what jellyfish look like.”

“Go on,” my grandfather said, standing tall and firm as he looked Paul in the eyes. “Say what you want to say.”

He sniffled. “You saw the hand. You took the hand and told him not to worry about it. But you forgot that fishermen like to talk.”

“Fishermen are all talk.”

My grandfather wasn’t going to give him anything, and I couldn’t either. At this point, it was like I wasn’t even in the room. I probably could have snuck away and called for some sort of police intervention without being noticed. Not that they would have come in the first place.
“Right.” He sniffled again. “Where’s the hand, Will?”

Silence.

The gun in Paul’s hand trembled as he aimed at us. I knew right then and there that Paul didn’t have it in him to hurt us.

My grandfather simply stared at the man.

“No answer, huh?” He sniffled once again, and it was then that I realized he wasn’t sucking back up a dripping nose. He was sniffin’ the air.

This time he looked at me. “What in God’s name is that smell?”

I gulped, pushing a strand of long brown curls behind my ear, never breaking eye contact with Paul. I’d gotten real good at mastering the total bitch stare, which is one level up from my natural RBF.

“Fish,” I said, assuming what the most obvious cause for the fleshy, rotten scent. The door to the room in which my grandfather had been taking inventory was cracked open about a foot, yet the smell coming from inside was overpowering the already fishy aroma of the bait shop.

“Fish?” He let out a sarcastic, impatient chuckle. “That ain’t no fish, girly.”

I knew damn well why that might be, yet I could only stare. As a Bennett, it was my job to keep my mouth closed and let my grandfather handle things. Again, it was he who knew how to deal with these people–the Andersons specifically.

My grandfather cut the tension with almost a whisper as he said, “Why don’t you go on and have a look if you’re so curious?”

Something about the way my grandfather said it made my bones freeze up. How could it be that such an innocent question could make me feel so…wrong?

Paul lowered the gun halfway before reconsidering and raising it again. “What’s back there?”
Upon getting no response from either of us, Paul gulped down what I could only assume was dread and said to me, “What is it, girl?”

I shook my head at his plea.

“Come on,” he asked me, his voice on the edge of breaking. “Please.”

Unfortunately for me, my breath quickened. Guilt threatened its way up my body, up my throat, but I held it down. My intense stare, coupled with my breath, most definitely was making me look constipated. “I–I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about–”

“A hand don’t prove nothin’,” my grandfather chided. “Ain’t the first time body parts have been dragged up from this bay. Ocean washes up stuff from all over the place. And I got a business to run.”

Paul lowered the gun, the tremor in his arm subsiding. “You’ll pay for this. One way or another, I’ll find who did it.”

Then he walked out.

I watched my grandfather’s eyes follow the man until the door was closed. “Well, how ‘bout that?” He grumbled. “He ever say anythin’ like that to you before?”

“No. Why?”

“He’s been accusin’ everyone around town. I knew he’d make his way here soon enough. Probably figured he might as well knock two birds out with one stone. You and me being the birds, the hostage situation bein’ the—“

“I get it.”

“Well, back to it, I ‘spose,” he chuckled, walkin’ off. “I’ll be in the back.”

The sudden coolness of his attitude was off-putting. “How’s it lookin’ back there?” I asked, trying my best to match his attitude.

“Good.” He stopped and turned to me, thumbs finding their way to the belt loops in his pants. “Almost stocked up on the new fish bait. It’s gonna sell like crazy.”

“Nice.” I thought for a moment as he began walkin’ to the back room. “When’d we get new stuff?”

“Recently. I’m handlin’ it. You keep the customers at bay, now, ya hear?”

I did as he said. I was good at that–keepin’ people away. Nobody came in for the rest of the day. It gave my grandfather enough time to clean up the mess in the backroom and get rid of the smell of the bait, and it allowed me to avoid doing any real work. As long as I could make him proud. As long as I could fit in and be a Bennett.

Credit: M. Ocel