Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (26 page)

Nikolai is a good man with a good heart and was very much trying to do something nice for us by taking Barb and me and our son out on one of his charter boats. He knew that I loved boats and didn’t have one and loved to fish but didn’t get to go fishing often. He appreciated that I was honest and available and worked hard at being a good doctor to his kids. I didn’t give him a hard time about not wanting to immunize his children. I believe very much in immunization but don’t see it as a deal breaker. The less arguing I do about it, the more likely the kids will end up immunized.

“The children of irrational parents need good doctors too, Nikolai,” I said. He liked that.

After catching some cod, two bluefish, and an undersized striped bass that we threw back, Nickolai wanted to dive for some lobsters before calling it a day. We anchored a hundred yards off of a beautiful little island that’s been proposed as a liquefied natural gas terminal and watched Nikolai’s bubbles. He was down there a half hour and came up out of breath with three mesh bags full of lobsters.

Understanding favors in a second language isn’t always easy.

I’m sure he would have preferred that they were bigger. There were twenty-three very small lobsters. The biggest one was maybe six inches long. They were basically big crawfish. He wouldn’t have had to stay under so long if they’d been bigger. I was encouraged when he checked the undersides for eggs and threw one back.

We had talked earlier about declining fish stocks, and he had said, “Fishermen cannot catch so many fish to deplete. If are not enough fish, is chemicals and pollution from too many people.” I agreed.

Nikolai grew up in Siberia the son of some of the “fewer but better Russians” Stalin talked about when asked if he felt bad about the purges. He had big hands and was muscular but small and thin in a way that spoke of caloric deprivation either of his mother during her pregnancy or of him early in his infancy, maybe both. He was about five feet four inches tall. You could pour all the calories you liked into Nikolai, and they would never stick. Born in a different place and time, he would have been well over six feet tall. If they keep growing at their current percentiles, his son will tower over him and his daughter will be roughly his height.

Fishing charters was only one of the things Nikolai was up to. He was a mechanic and engineer working on a better way to start bio-diesel engines. It made sense to me. I’ve never known a Russian who was up to just one thing.

I asked a little nervously about measuring the lobsters.

“Are better this way. Only measure these lobsters need is on the fork in your mouth.”

Someone who had grown up starving in Siberia could be forgiven a different attitude toward what you should and shouldn’t eat, but I’d been arrested before for taking quahogs that were allegedly too small and knew how humorless and difficult resource-conservation officers could be. And the lobsters were really tiny. I wondered what my wife was making of all this. She seemed to be in endurance mode, unusually quiet.

I tried to divide them into a pile for my family—three or four—and a pile for his family—all the rest.

“I never eat them,” he explained succinctly. “Kids and wife don’t like them either.”

They were all for us.

I could just see the cop who might stop us doing a double take before opening the cooler. “Any relation to Kurt? Aren’t you a pediatrician? Didn’t you do some ads for Blue Cross?”

Maybe there was a fine of a thousand dollars apiece for possessing lobsters this small, maybe there wasn’t. I didn’t know for sure but would have supported such a law. What possible excuse could there be for riding around with a cooler nearly full of cod and bluefish topped off with twenty-plus tiny lobsters?

I’d bake some of the cod for dinner. Whatever cod we didn’t eat that night could be frozen. The bluefish I could smoke. Nikolai had put little rubber bands on each of the lobsters’ claws
so they wouldn’t tear one another apart in the close quarters of the cooler.

We had gone on the trip expecting a two- or three-hour deal that had turned into seven. Our three-year-old had held up well. It would be good to get home. We said our goodbyes. With the cooler in the back of the pickup truck, I readjusted my mirrors and drove very carefully, not too fast, not too slow, no U-turns. Our son fell asleep instantly. The truck was very quiet.

A few minutes into our trip home I looked over at my wife. “We’ve got to try to let the lobsters go.”

“Do you think they can live?” They’d been on ice but out of water a couple of hours.

“They’re alive now. We have to give them a chance.”

The only place I could think of with deep-enough water was a popular fishing dock. Lugging a cooler down the dock and liberating baby lobsters might attract attention. I’d have to get all those rubber bands off—a chance at life with banded claws wasn’t much of a chance. We’d stick out like a whole hand of sore thumbs throwing lobsters out of a cooler on a fishing dock.
Sure there’s a Russian fisherman…
.

If there had been one or even two or three of them, it wouldn’t have been so bad. The large number spoke to callous indifference and criminal intent.

I don’t stick out. I’m exactly average height, an average amount overweight, with brown hair and brown eyes. I worry about being in the wrong place at the wrong time or not having the right identification. The thought of being caught with these lobsters was almost worse than death itself.

“I think there’s some pretty deep water off a breakwater down behind a car dealership in Weymouth.”

We found the parking lot and watched in silence for a few minutes to see if anyone was around. I climbed halfway down the breakwater dragging the cooler, slightly twisting an ankle before I could find a place to steady it and myself. One by one I took off the bands and threw the lobsters into the water. I could see them lying there, not moving, for a while, but then they jerked around and seemed to recover.

I knew from having found lobsters in marsh pools while quahogging that they don’t need a lot of water. They were less than a hundred yards from Quincy Bay, where there were lots of other lobsters, but if this was the end of the line, at least they had one another. We were out of there.

“I think that they’re okay, but maybe I should have given them one of the bluefish,” I told my wife as I got into the truck. Our three-year-old was dead to the world, asleep, strapped into his car seat. “I’m going to tell Nikolai that they were the best lobsters we ever ate.”

The world that went forward from that moment was a world where we, at some small—but not zero—risk to ourselves, set free twenty-three small lobsters somewhere off a parking lot in Weymouth rather than eating them, which would have been the easier thing to do.

We are saltwater ocean people.

(Photo by M. Oliver Vonnegut)

Never lie down with your children to get them to sleep.

(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)

The grandfather of a thirteen-year-old boy I’d taken care of since he was a baby asked if he could talk to me before I saw his grandson.

“His mother hung herself last Friday.”

The grandfather was bringing up the boy because the mother, whom I had never met, couldn’t stop drinking.

“Was she ever able to get any sobriety? Was she ever able to take care of him?” I asked.

“Not really. It’s probably a blessing for her that it’s over.” He never mentioned that the mother his grandson had just lost was his daughter.

The boy was very small and said to be retarded because of fetal alcohol syndrome. As soon as I figure out what you should say to a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother has just hung herself, I’ll let you know.

“I’m sorry about your mom.”

“……………………………….”

“Alcoholism is a terrible disease.”

“………………………………….”

“It’s a terrible disease that killed your mother.”

“Yeah, Doc. That and the rope around her neck.”

Prescribing a pill is far and away the quickest way to bring closure to a patient encounter. No prescription hangs in the air begging. Often the patient says, “So, are we done?”

I had no pills for the boy with the hung mother.

I spent much of my childhood worried that Kurt would kill himself. Whether or not I’d be ready to lose my father was something I had started asking myself almost as soon as I knew there was such a thing as death. From time to time, in an almost conversational tone, he mentioned that he might commit suicide. There didn’t seem to be much anguish involved. My mother was understandably preoccupied with whether or not my father might kill himself. She believed more than he did that he would someday be a famous writer, and she promoted and clung to that belief as a way to make sure that he didn’t kill himself. His mother had allegedly killed herself. I say
allegedly
because not everyone thought so and I wanted that doubt to lessen the chances of my father doing the same.

My father had thick, dark, curly hair right up until the end. When gray started to creep in he was nearly eighty. I thought maybe he was having gray highlights put in so people would stop mentioning how thick and black his hair was.