Goliath
/K.P. Taylor
It was almost midnight when the night crew shuffled in like a horde of caffeinated zombies. Some headed straight for the lockers to stow their pre-dawn lunches; others punched in at the time clock and immediately disappeared on smoke breaks. Lenny ambled over to the bulletin board to scrutinize the new schedule. He began tallying up his hours by counting on his fingers. Then he lowered each finger as he calculated debts and expenses until he was left holding two fists in the air. It was then that he noticed a new name on the roster–Eric. How long will this one last? Lenny wondered as he punched in. He felt exhausted already.
Two hours later, Eric set his “U-boat” cart at the end of Aisle 7. “Now what?” he asked Lenny, as though actually stocking the shelves was the furthest thing from his mind.
Now, Lenny didn’t have the greatest work ethic either, but he generally attempted to create the illusion of work, especially on a Cat Night. Cat Night was Lenny’s name for the first night you worked with a new hire. You’d act like a cat, stalking around with your back arched, giving the new cat the side-eye, hissing and spluttering, and all the while wondering which of you would fold first and scurry off to the litter box. Eric hadn’t fallen for any of that posturing, though. He had just come right out and said what Lenny was thinking: Now what? Lenny laughed–this kid was going to fit in just fine.
Lenny explained to Eric how things worked at Goal. The night shift ran from midnight to 8 a.m. The first two and last two hours were when they would “get the lead out.” The four-hour stretch in the middle? “That’s our leisure time,” Lenny explained. “Always keep a U-boat on the floor, though, in case the overnight manager swings by. That way it looks like you were just in the middle of doin’ something.”
Eric nodded.
Lenny showed Eric the break room with its broken coffee machine and microwave speckled with ancient grease. Then he took him to the staff toilet, which was littered with cigarette butts and obscene writing. Finally, he led him to the back of the deli and pointed out the tub of offcuts from the day’s orders. “Fine eatin’,” Lenny enthused, offering Eric the tub, “if you ain’t too particular.”
*
“You’ve been holding out on me!”
Lenny was perched on the edge of his U-boat cleaning his nails. “What are you on about, Eric?”
“The big lobster tank in the seafood department!”
“What about it?”
“It has lobsters in it!”
Lenny stopped picking at his nails and raised his head. “Well, yeah. You were expecting somethin’ different? A couple of goldfish maybe, or some of them neon tetras?”
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think a store like Goal would even have lobsters. But since we do, I figured you would have pointed it out–since we’re tight and all.”
Lenny shrugged. “I just never really think about it. Besides, you must’ve walked past there a hundred times yourself. You didn’t see the tank?”
“Come on,” Eric said, all smiles, “let’s go look at the lobsters. It’ll give us an excuse to rile up that crabby old English guy.”
“That won’t take much.”
The pair traipsed over to the seafood department. It was almost 5 a.m., and the meat-and-seafood manager was just setting up his case.
“Bloody hell.” Joe sighed wearily as he slapped down a fillet of haddock. “You two coming up here means nothing but trouble.”
“No trouble.” Eric grinned. “We just came to see the lobsters.”
“You don’t strike me as someone in the market for lobster,” Joe said, wiping his brow with the crook of his elbow. “Unless you found yourself some young slapper and want to treat her to a lobster dinner?”
“We just want to have a look.”
Joe scowled at them for a bit before standing aside. “Go on then.”
The tank was about 300 gallons, but all the lobsters were hunkered down in one corner as if they were trying to keep warm.
Eric tapped on the glass. “Aren’t they something?”
“Looks like they’re in the middle of a union meeting,” Lenny said.
“I wouldn’t thank you for one. Now, I could go for a good prime rib, maybe even a T-bone, but lobster…” Joe grimaced. “Not my cup of tea.”
“They’re awfully scrawny,” Eric said. “Hey, Joe, what are you feeding them?”
“Nothing,” Joe replied flatly, wheeling past Eric with a cartload of salmon fillets.
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“We don’t feed them anything. Otherwise, they’ll crap in the tank–and that just makes the tank dirty.”
Eric wrinkled his nose. “Looks dirty enough without them crapping in it.”
Joe wiped his brow with the crook of his elbow again. “Listen, they’re not paying me enough to be cleaning up after some free-loading sea roaches, okay?”
“Why’re ya always wiping your forehead like that?” Lenny asked.
Joe arranged a couple of salmon fillets in his case. “It’s hot back here, alright? You’d get heated too if you ever did an honest day’s work.”
“It ain’t the sweatin’ that gets to me,” Lenny countered. “It’s the elbow. Is that some British thing? Why don’t you use your hand, like a normal person?”
“I can’t do that when I’m setting my case. The minute I touch my face, it’ll start reeking of fish. Same reason I wear these gloves.” Joe’s eyes were bulging, and his face was turning the same shade of pink as the fillets he was laying out. “I’d love to see you muppets do this job. It gets really old, stinking to high heaven and getting followed home by all the alley cats like you’re some damn Dick Whittington.”
“Dick who?” Eric giggled.
“Would you two just sod off?!” Joe hollered. “Can’t you see I’ve got work to do?”
“Sure thing, old chap,” Lenny mocked, tipping his cap as Joe walked by.
“Sorry. We don’t want to cause you any trouble,” Eric added.
“Good,” Joe hissed between his teeth–as if a valve on a pressure cooker had been released and now his ire could return to a slow boil just below the surface. “Don’t try to wind me up. Just don’t.”
Eric nodded, but he had stolen a tiny piece of salmon from the cart, and as soon as Joe’s back was turned, he slipped it into the top of the lobster tank. Down it sailed, drifting one way and then another before settling on the bottom. Eric had imagined the lobsters would all pounce on it, but they just stayed put like football players in a huddle. Huh, Eric said to himself, as if this were the most curious thing in the world.
*
Eric lifted the top of the waxed cardboard container. “Why do they stuff it full of newspapers?”
“Lobsters are awful smart, ain’t they, kid?” Lenny whispered. “You…you don’t suppose they put it in for them to read, do ya?”
Eric blinked back at Lenny for a beat or two before Lenny broke into a crooked smile. “Whatever,” Eric muttered.
“Nah, it’s to keep ’em cool and comfy,” Lenny said. “Used to be, they put kelp and seaweed in there. I guess that got to be too expensive or maybe just too much trouble, so they switched to newspaper.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I worked in Receiving when I started out. Back then we’d get a shipment of lobster every day. Back then…folks had money.”
“Christ, look at the size of this monster!” Eric hauled a massive lobster out of the container.
Most of the lobsters came in looking beaten up–missing legs or with their antennae chewed down to stumps–but this one still had its full complement of legs, and its feelers were as long and lively as an orchestra conductor’s baton.
“Don’t be messing with it,” Lenny cautioned. “If Joe finds out we were in his delivery again, he’ll be mad as hell.”
“Just look at it.” Eric held the lobster up. “It’s the Cadillac of lobsters.”
“Just like a Cadillac,” Lenny said dismissively, “big and slow.”
“Faster than any of the others, I bet.”
“You bet?” Lenny raised an eyebrow.
“Sure do. I’ll wager five bucks that Goliath here is quicker than any other lobster.”
“Goliath?” Lenny chuckled. “Hell, you’re on.”
So began the inaugural race of the Lobster Games. They decided on a distance of approximately 12 feet, measured out using the floor tiles. Lenny selected a rust-colored lobster about half the size of Goliath and twice as peppy. Goliath held his claws in front of him like a pair of crutches. He had advanced all of four feet by the time Lenny’s lobster reached the finish line.
Lenny pumped the air with his fist. “Hot damn! Told ya so.”
Eric placed Goliath at the starting line. “Double or nothing?”
“Sure.”
Over the course of the next half hour, Lenny won back all the money he had lost to Eric playing cards in the break room.
“Better pack it in,” Lenny said, glancing at his watch. “Joe’ll be in soon.”
Eric eased Goliath back into the container. He didn’t seem at all upset that the beast had cost him half a day’s wages.
*
“First thing I do,” Joe said, laying a bloody slab of beef on his cutting board, “is I check that they’re still alive. Sometimes they’ll ship in sleepers–lobsters that are already dead. I only have until 8 a.m. to let the supplier know. Otherwise, we have to eat the cost. Then we purge the bastards and stick them in the tank.”
“Purge them?” Eric asked.
“Yeah, purge ’em. I guess the lobsters are a little like us–they aren’t prepared to do their business until they’re nice and comfortable.”
“I’m not following…”
“Shit, Eric. The lobsters won’t shit until they’re in water. So, we fill up a tub for them so they can do their business before we put them in the tank. Now, make sure you use water from the tank–seawater. It must have been my second or third shift. I filled up the tub with regular tap water. Had to have a quiet word with my manager about an hour later. ‘Good news, bad news,’ I told him. ‘Good news–the lobsters all shat themselves. Bad news–they’re all dead.’ Cost the store over a hundred dollars. I was sure I was going to get canned. But I wasn’t. And look at me now, managing two departments.”
“It’s very…impressive.”
“Innit?” Joe picked up a meat cleaver. “I know why you’re back here, why you’ve suddenly developed a fascination with the seafood department.”
“You do?”
“I’m not daft. You’ve seen the ‘Help Wanted’ sign up by the time clock. The seafood assistant position? I don’t blame you, trying to get off the graveyard shift with Lenny Layabout.” Joe waved the cleaver at Eric. “But it’s hard graft back here. No playing anymore. AND…you’d better treat me with some damn respect since I have the final say-so about who they put back here.”
“That lobster there–” Eric said casually, “he’s one impressive specimen.”
“Damn fool’s lobster,” Joe sneered. “The hell are they thinking sending me a thing that size? Folks in this town are too skint to buy a lobster that big. Just taking up valuable real estate.”
Eric nodded. Goliath had muscled his way to the most coveted spot in the tank, the rear corner where a delicate stream of bubbles emerged from the aerator. “What’ll you do with him?”
Joe shrugged. “Play the waiting game, I guess. They rarely live more than a couple weeks here, and once it’s dead, I’ll steam it up. Most of it will end up in the bin, but the claws and tail I’ll sell off separately. You know how it is at Goal–we have to make lemonade out of lemons, even if it means throwing out half the lemons.”
“Is that even legal? I heard that if a lobster died before you cooked it, it could make you really sick.”
“You just have to be quick about it. And I think it’s only illegal in Massachusetts.”
“When…when do you think he’ll be done? Dead, I mean.”
“End of the week, probably. Hell, if it isn’t dead by then”–Joe’s face lit up, bright and toxic as a radium dial, as he slammed the cleaver into the slab of beef–“I’ll damn well kill it myself.”
*
The lobster was flat on its back at the bottom of the tank with its bound claws extended above its head. It would sway occasionally as Goliath stepped over it and used his walking legs to tear the pale flesh from its abdomen and deliver it to his mandibles.
“Looks just like Sonny Liston when Ali knocked him out,” Lenny mused. “Course, Ali didn’t start eatin’ him.”
“That’s your lobster, Lenny,” Eric said. “The one that raced against Goliath.”
“So it is. Big fella’s a sore loser, huh? No Lobster Games tonight, I guess. Joe’s gonna hit the roof when he sees this mess.”
“He must be starving.”
“It’s a monster–eatin’ its kin like that.”
“Monster?” Eric winced. “I don’t know. I heard about this plane that crashed in the Andes. The survivors were in a real jam, stuck up in the mountains and nobody around for hundreds of miles. Pretty soon the food ran out, and it wasn’t long before they started eating each other. You’d do the same as Goliath if you were in his shoes.”
“It ain’t wearing shoes,” Lenny snapped back, “on account of it being a damned lobster.” Lenny rolled his eyes. “Screw this. I’m gonna get back to work,” he said, which they both knew was a lie.
*
Lenny was in the break room shuffling cards. Eric strolled in, feigning nonchalance, but Lenny could tell that he was buzzing with nervous energy.
“I wonder…” Eric began.
Lenny frowned. “You wonder?”
“Well, I was wondering. The nearest ocean–Delaware, right?”
“Nope. Jersey.”
“New Jersey. Right. Be nice to go sometime…”
“You develop a sudden hankerin’ for salt water taffy?” Lenny fanned his cards out on the table. “Or is there somethin’ else you’d like to discuss?”
“It’s Goliath.”
“Course it is.” Lenny narrowed his eyes. “Now what?”
“I can’t bear it. The thought of him being killed.” Eric cringed as he pictured Goliath coming out of the steamer as red as a maple in the fall.
“Nothin’ you can do for that lobster.”
“I could get him to New Jersey,” Eric suggested hopefully.
“That so? I doubt you’ll make it to Jersey in that beater of yours. Or maybe you were thinking of buyin’ one of them Mylar balloons they sell at the front end and fixin’ it to that. Yessir, a ‘Happy Birthday’ or a big ol’ ‘Congratulations!’ and a fair westerly wind, and that lobster’ll be back home in no time.”
“We could take your car. I’d pay for gas…” Eric thumbed three twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and slid them in front of Lenny.
“Hell no! That lobster’s caused me enough headaches,” Lenny said, massaging his temples. “And we can’t just…leave. That’s job abandonment!”
“Is it job abandonment if no one knows we left?” Eric asked. “It’ll look like we were here the whole time as long as we clock out at the end of our shift.”
Lenny laughed. “We’d have to drive like Mario Andretti to get to the shore and be back here in time to clock out. Besides, when they see the lobster gone, they’ll put two and two together and have both our balls in a sling.”
“So? You hate it here.”
Lenny reached for the cash on the table. “No damn lobster’s worth all this trouble.”
*
Lenny filled his gas tank and waited outside Goal with the car idling. After ten minutes, he shut off the engine and went inside. Eric was kneeling in front of the lobster tank.
“It’s Goliath. I came in to get him and…he was gone. I thought someone must have taken him, maybe Joe pulling a prank, but then I found him floating at the top of the tank.”
“Jesus, Eric.”
“Why was he floating?” Eric brushed his hand over the lobster. “When the other lobster died, he sank to the bottom. But Goliath…he was floating. What happened? I thought we had more time.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, kid. I can…I’ll pay you back for the gas. No point in driving all the way to Jersey now. It’s not like we’re gonna give him a burial at sea.”
Eric’s face brightened a little. “That’s what we’ll do. That’s the least we can do for Goliath. And those last two…” He gestured toward the listless pair. “We’ll take them as well.”
Eric put Goliath and the two smaller lobsters in a shipping box he had lined with wet newspaper. He climbed into Lenny’s SUV and held the box on his lap as if he were bringing a kitten home from the pound. “Almost there, buddy,” he told the dead lobster when they crossed the state line.
*
Lenny parked on a street crowded with weather-beaten seaside cottages, and they followed the sound of churning waves and the keening of gulls until they reached the water.
“Let’s get the little ones out first,” Eric said, and he laid the pair of lobsters at the tideline. He had scarcely set them down before they bounded off like puppies.
“Look at ’em go!” Lenny clapped his hands.
“Shit! Fuck!” Eric yelled suddenly before hurtling into the rolling surf. “Their claws!” He had forgotten to remove the rubber bands. He came out of the waves drenched and sputtering. “I got–I got one. The other…” He shook his head.
“The bands will get worn off by the saltwater. Probably,” Lenny said. “If not...better to die in the ocean than in the steamer at Goal.”
Eric nodded. “Now for Goliath.” He set Goliath down at the water’s edge and waited for the tide to slurp him up. He silently hoped Goliath would get that first lick of saltwater and spring back to life like Lazarus. But the tide just carried him away like an old shoe and spat him back a moment later in precisely the same spot.
“No good,” Lenny shouted. “It’s caught in the swell.”
Eric waded back into the ocean and laid Goliath down on the surface as gently as a child setting a model sailboat on a lake.
Once or twice, a wave threatened to crash Goliath back onto the shore, but gradually he drifted away until he finally disappeared.
“We got a calico once,” Lenny said, “when I was working receiving.”
“Calico?”
“Lobster. Super rare. Kinda like hittin’ the lotto. Didn’t get any money, but I did get my picture in the paper, and the lobster got to live out its days at a sanctuary in Virginia. They decided that lobster was somethin’ special, somethin’ worth saving. I couldn’t see it–there was nothin’ special about it to me, just a scraggly little thing looking like it had chickenpox. I guess that’s how it was with you and Goliath, though. You saw somethin’ special in him, huh?”
They stood in silence and watched the waves crash and the gulls circle and the sun inch above the horizon. Lenny knew there was no way they could get back to Goal by the end of their shift. He knew the morning crew would be there soon, wondering where he and his sidekick had gone.
Eric closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “Now what?” he asked, just as he had on his Cat Night.
Lenny didn’t laugh this time, because he knew the only thing ahead of them now was a long drive with nothing but a mess of problems at the end of it.
Born and raised in South Africa, K.P. Taylor came to the US at 29 to work at an amusement park for the summer and never left (the US, not the amusement park). His work has appeared in Hobart, Gargoyle, Dark Moon Digest, Soliloquies Anthology, and others. He currently lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, their son, and two rescued cats.
