On the first day of the season Oscar Gross went down to the cove early. He limped like an old pirate, favoring the leg that had stiffened in the night. It was a clear, chilly dawn, the first week in April. The tide was all the way gone, as low as it ever gets, and far out at sea on the horizon was a thin line of haze scaling north toward Nova Scotia. Overhead a solitary cloud, barely the size of a man's hand, lingered inside the land. There was a slight breeze baffling in and out of the cove, and his boat, which he and George had piled high with traps the night before, tipped precariously from side to side on her mooring.

When George arrived, still half asleep as usual, they said something about the weather, then set to work loading the ballast stones heaped at their feet. Oscar went below and waded through the muck to bring in the skiff and secure it to one of the pilings. George watched sleepily from the wharf, his hands snuggled inside his sweatshirt, until he was aroused by an unhappy voice from below:

"Don't hurry on account of me," came the voice. "I've been looking forward all winter to standing in cold water up to my ass."

George moved reluctantly to the edge, not bothering to hide the smile in the corner of his mouth. From the height his friend looked small and crumpled.

"All right, all right," he said wearily. "How should we do this?"

Oscar sighed, impatient. "The same way we did it last year and the time before that. What'd you think? Drop them here away from these other rock so they won't break, and I'll load the skiff." He paused. "Or maybe you better aim for the rocks -- then you can be sure you won't hit them."

George began to drop the heavy stones over the edge, two at a time. Within minutes they had established a rhythm: two stones falling as Oscar loaded two. George dropping as Oscar turned aside. The work warmed them, and they both welcomed the familiar confidence that grew as they leaned and rose in perfect time, without wasted motion.

Oscar grumbled as he sloshed back and forth between the skiff and the wharf. It was impossible to hear him clearly from above, but George knew what he was saying by pieces of sentences that rose from the water below. From simple habit he responded with a grunt of agreement every minute or so. He was quietly pleased to hear the complaining, as it meant they were at work again. He once told his sister that the two of them worked to the cadence of Oscar's grumbling like galley slaves worked to the beat of a drum.

But this time Oscar broke stride. He stopped on the shore and stood with his legs apart in the mud, and with one bent finger aloft toward the wharf, he scolded: "You can blame it on these new fellas -- that come down here from Rockland in boats owned by some bank. They put out six hundred traps, half of them in pairs, and then they turn around and wonder why there aren't any more lobsters. They...."

"It's a good thing I looked over first." George stood at the edge with a big flat stone arrested in mid-swing. "I almost dropped this on your damned head. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should just keep dropping them on your head until I drive you into the mud like some clam. Then I couldn't hear your grouching."

"We don't need any more rocks, you fool. The skiff's loaded. If you'd look at what you're doing, you'd know that much. What do you think I'm standing here for?"

"Here, then, here's one more." He placed the last stone perfectly: it plopped flat in the mire at the old man's feet, making a sucking noise like a boot being pulled free from slime and splattering Oscar from his boots to his new cap with blobs of rank bottom mud.

"Oh Jesus, Oscar!" cried George swinging a guilty fist, "I am sorry!" But he couldn't hold the laughter in, and went down with it, on his hands and knees, watching over the edge, laughing and apologizing at once.

Oscar stood without breathing, his hands held limp and spread away from his body as if avoiding contamination. A piece of glop loosened and dropped from his shirt as he stared at his front in speechless surprise. When he did look up, his arms still held outward, he had to blink to focus through the brown spots on his glasses, and shout to be heard above George.

"You goddamned jerk!" he finally managed. "You son of a bitch!"

But George swore it was an accident.

"Oh sure," said Oscar sputtering. "I ought to make you clean this shirt, or give it to your sister to do, you damn prune." He looked once more down to his clothes, then up again, releasing a round exhale of disgust that sounded like a blowing whale and almost rolled the laughing partner off the wharf.

When George settled down, they brought the boat out of the cove and turned south toward Oscar's fishing grounds. George sat on an upturned trap while Oscar stood quietly at the wheel dipping a fishy rag into a bucket at his feet and wiping fussily at his shirt. "You could at least have waited until I had my apron on, you clumsy bastard."

Oscar's fishing grounds lay a mile off the island on which he had been born. He had inherited the area through his great-grandfather who had claimed it years and years ago. It was a small area running north to south on the weather side of the island about three miles long and one wide. His fishing grounds included a place called the Turnip Yard: a deep bowl-shaped sea area whose eastern boundary is marked by a pair of bald islands called the Two Horsemen. At its southern end, the Turnip Yard is exposed to open sea. It has always been a coveted fishing area because of the ledges and rocky bottom so loved by lobsters, but even though they often wished aloud that they could fish there too, none of the other island fishermen ever asked because only Oscar knew the dangerous and unpredictable grounds well enough to fish them successfully, without loss of equipment in the ledges and queer currents.

He didn't need a depth recorder because he knew the bottom in his own area as well as he knew the warps in his own kitchen floor. He had fished the Turnip Yard one way or another since he was fifteen, so it was no wonder he knew it like he did. First he fished it with his father, hauling traps by hand in an old one-lunger, then with Dunreath, his uncle, in Dunreath's boat; then he fished alone until he took on George twelve years ago. He had hated fishing alone because of the things that can happen to a man alone out there on the water, so, although he was skeptical of George at first, he took him on to have company, and it had worked out well enough.

Before George, Oscar had never had a close friend unless you counted his uncle Dunreath, who'd been dead for twenty years. Dunreath was old enough to be his father when Oscar fished with him, and people on the island used to joke about them, the way they went around together all the time, an old man and a boy. Dunreath was too shut-mouthed and suspicious to have any friends left alive, and Oscar at thirty was already a grouch and some said a prude. Now they joked about him and George for the same reasons, and though he acted like he wasn't paying attention to what they said, Oscar was secretly pleased to have people put them together and talk about them like that. At first he thought George was over-confident when they were aboard the boat: he thought he took too many foolish chances. But after a few years some of that confidence began to influence even Oscar, so that he worried less when he was out on the water, and didn't hate it so much. Still, he wished George would be more careful when they were out on the water.

They worked most of the morning in the Turnip Yard in a growing sea. Oscar said there was probably a good-sized squall out to the southwest where the haze ended in clouds, and it would be the squall that was sending the low, rocking swells in toward them. George paid no attention but continued to work among the traps and tangle at his feet, walking uphill and downhill on the deck, pausing occasionally to sprinkle a handful of salt on the slippery boards beneath him.

When they had finished putting out the first string of traps, Oscar turned the bow into the gathering sea, and George came forward to stand under the house and pour a cup of coffee from his thermos. He braced himself against the side and unpacked the fresh doughnuts his sister had sent with him. Oscar held the wheel to his chest with his forearm, and unwrapped a thick sandwich with his free hand. He said something to George through the chewing mush.

"If you had your head underwater, it would be easier to understand you," said George in exaggerated disgust. "Didn't your mother ever teach you not to talk with your mouth full?"

Oscar swallowed angrily: "I said I can hardly get my food down, you stink of bait so."

"If you chewed it instead of talking into it, you might have a better chance. Besides," George added, looking into his tilting coffee, "it isn't me that stinks, it's that nasty bottom mud all over you that makes it hard to eat."

"And whose fault is that, you son of a bitch! This shirt was clean when I started out this morning." He took another mouthful of the sandwich and swallowed it with a gulp of tea. While they talked the wind nosed the boat broadside into the swells and one low wave slapped against the side, spraying Oscar and his raised sandwich. George chuckled saying they ought to let her float against the swells awhile longer: then maybe he wouldn't have to worry about washing any shirt when he got home.

"I don't like the looks of it," Oscar said after watching the sea. "One of those swells could turn us right over if it hit us right, with the boat loaded the way it is. The tide's still coming; it'll be high in an hour. It's going to get rougher before we're done."

George hated the thought of going back in, of failing to finish the first day out. He had been waiting for the old man to worry about the waves, and had prepared an argument.

"We've fished in weather worse than this," he said reasonably. "There isn't any wind to speak of."

"We never fished in this kind of water with the stern tipsy from traps piled up, and the whole damn boat canted to starboard with a load of stones."

"Maybe it will get too rough in an hour, but by then we'll have most of the traps overboard and half the rocks with them, unless we have to sit here and listen to you worry all morning."

To show that he meant it, George flung the rest of his coffee overboard and stuffed his mouth full of doughnut.

"All right," said Oscar, "but I tell you I don't like it. I've seen storms like this that could send in swells twice the size of a boat."

George bent to roll up his boots and stood behind, holding onto the low roof. The swells, running in from the open sea in irregular groups, were deep and well spaced, but they weren't cresting and they didn't seem to be getting any bigger. As he turned, Oscar warned him to keep an eye on the top row of traps.

"You let me worry about the traps. You just watch those swells and hold us into them while I'm setting one. You wouldn't worry so if you knew how to swim."

"When are you going to understand that knowing how to swim doesn't make any difference?" Oscar shook his head at a history of stupidity.

"If I fell overboard," George said, "all I'd have to do was tread water until you came back around; or I could swim to the boat and get back aboard. Even if she was turned over, I could hang on, or maybe swim ashore."

"Sure," said the old man sarcastically. "You could hang on until you froze to death or drifted in and got squashed and smashed to bits on the rocks. A lot of good swimming would do you then."

"I wouldn't freeze to death because I'd keep moving. At least I'd have a chance: you'd never get back to the boat. You'd probably faint dead before you hit the water anyway, out of fear of it."

Oscar wanted to put the second string of traps in deeper water, but to stay out of the swells he headed closer to the lee of a long protruding ledge inside the Turnip Yard. George pointed to another fisherman farther out: "It doesn't look like he's spilling traps and equipment overboard, or breaking up on the rocks. It doesn't look like he's having any trouble at all."

"He doesn't have a talking monkey climbing all over his stern deck," said Oscar.

He took the boat in as close to the ledge as he dared, and George pushed the traps over into deep water at its foot. On the windward side of the ledge the swells, which had increased in size and regularity, were pounding against the rocks but making huge sullen thumping sounds as they slid into the rock wall and flattened against it. George thought the pushing swells sounded like snow sliding off a roof and landing in a quiet pile; Oscar thought they sounded like heavy swells striking a ledge, and he didn't like it one bit.

They came out from behind the ledge and into open water again. It was all the old man could do to hold the bow into the rising sea, and he almost got sick every time they heaved over one swell and slid helplessly down into the valley between it and the next. He swore and held the wheel, shouting over his shoulder that this was the last goddamned trap, he was going in while he had the chance. George told him to stop griping and watch what he was doing; he said it'd calm down some in a few minutes, there were only six traps left anyway.

If Oscar hadn't turned around to look nervously at George, he might have seen the solitary, monstrous swell that rolled toward his port bow. It came on alone, as if several swells had grouped and were seeking the shore in a single swollen mass that strained to keep from cresting before it struck. Before he could shout or even turn into it, the old boat rose broadside to meet it, drifting up the wall of moving water until the deck was almost vertical. The traps went first, tumbling off the stern, then George slid down the deck grabbing for something to hold before he went over backwards, followed by an avalanche of stones. Oscar managed to hold on for another second until he too dropped off and fell into the trough below. He struck the surface and sank, his body limp with surrender, and would have let out his breath and gone down with the familiar gear that drifted past him had he not seen George five yards away under water, a vague shape in the murky plankton, and thought that George could see him too as they danced there in the shifting green light. As he watched, George rolled over and began to climb toward the air, but he was struck by a sinking trap and pushed it aside only to meet the rest of the ballast stones that fell down on him like a slow rain of boulders, bumping his back and head. He flailed at the rocks, trying to climb at the same time, but one and then another struck him in the face and he rolled once, released a cloud of bubbles, and began to sink with the stones, following them down in a slow fall.

Oscar did not look down, but thrashed toward the dark keel above. He broke surface at the stern and reached for the splashboard where he took hold and breathed through a rounded mouth, his legs tucked up underneath him. He must have taken the boat out of gear before he went under, though he couldn't remember doing it. Before he could get his breath back, the cold and shock came over him at once, and he had to rest his chin on the splashboard to gather strength. With a terrible effort he hauled himself up over the stern and slid onto the deck where he lay wet and sucking for air with his eyes shut. If only he could lie there safe and wait until George, who must have been joking somehow, came up alongside and made remarks about him looking like a codfish just landed.

When he lifted himself dripping to his feet he saw that the boat was yet two hundred yards from shore and hardly drifting at all. The surface was almost calm, as if the giant wave had rolled it flat as it passed over in its run for the shore. He stood and squinted, trying to see without his glasses. Only one buoy had come up (it was bright red) and he could tell the other shape was the wooden bait barrel the way it rolled and ducked.

"George!" he cried. "George!" At first his voice was cautious and questioning, for fear he had been tricked, but as he called out his cries became strained and angry, and he screamed his friend's name at the quiet surface.

He set the boat in gear and started in a slow hopeless circle around the floating tangle of rope and debris. After two luckless turns through the area, he took the CB mike and fumbled for a channel with voices.

The first boat came alongside in ten minutes. It was Jerden Hutchinson and his tall son. Jerden wanted him to come aboard his boat, and get a change of clothes, but Oscar didn't answer, so Jerden stepped over bringing dry clothes with him. At a signal from his father, the boy took the other boat and started in a larger circle, talking excitedly into the CB as he turned out. Jerden had the sense not to speak: he stood holding the clothes until Oscar changed his shirt, wrapped up in a blanket and took a cup of whiskey colored by Coca Cola. As if there was hope, Jerden took the wheel and started her out in another circle behind his son. Oscar stood in the middle of the deck, almost hidden beneath the blanket over his head and shoulders. He held the cup in two hands before him and kept his motionless face toward the water.

Within a half hour, four other boats had joined them. Before each one started the search, it came alongside so the men could show that they had come. No one hailed Oscar or asked him any questions: they sailed by him with their faces set to match his, then turned outward into the search without a word. The younger men rode high on the bows of their boats, legs spread for balance and gaffs held ready before them. Though they knew before they came that they could find nothing and could say nothing, they continued in their slow circling ritual until early evening when they began to peel off one at a time, sliding by Oscar's boat and shaking their heads "No" once before they left.

When he got home he found a note from his wife leaning against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. She said, as he had hoped she would, that she had gone to sit with George's sister. He changed his clothes and made some coffee and a sandwich and carried them into the back room, turning out any lights that might be seen from the road. He lay back on the sofa with his coffee balanced in his lap and shut his eyes.

It would be more than twenty-four hours before he floated to the surface, if he came up at all. The others would look for him to wash up on the shore during the day, carried by the tide. What the didn't know was that the tide, when it was going out, struck the point of land south of where he went down, so it curled and turned, and would carry him right back into the Turnip Yard. What they had in mind too was to bring George in and present him to his sister so she could bury him. As if they didn't know that the crabs would already be working on him, eating out his eyes and feasting on his fingers. What would that be like for her, and for anyone who knew George and how he could laugh at himself and encourage others to do the same? And the damned Coast Guard would be in on it too, young fools driving around on the water all night like George was just another carcass to be hauled out and bagged and numbered.

No, it was up to him to do it. He'd have to find him before he washed ashore and see to it that she'd never have to look at a ghoul for a brother, and maybe remember him that way. It would want luck to have him float to the surface at the right time, rather than stay under and come ashore that much later and that much worse to look at. When Dunreath's father drowned, they had to burn the crabs off him to keep from pulling away the soft flesh. The sight of him drove his wife half mad, as if she ever needed an excuse.

That night he listened to his wife console him, and answered her questions. He took a drink before he went to bed, but could not lie still in the room, so went back downstairs where he paced and napped half awake until mid-morning. During the day she kept visitors at the door, though she disagreed. That evening she went to see George's sister, saying as she left that she'd hoped he'd come too.

The tide was coming when he went down to the wharf in the dark. He had a gaff and a flashlight, and a full thermos. He loaded several of the flattest stones in the bow of the skiff, and slowly, not to get ahead of the tide, rowed out of the dark cove on his knees as if going out to the boat for yet another day of fishing. There was a light chop on the water, and a southerly breeze, but when he turned and sat down to row against it, he found little resistance, and staying close to shore, he headed down toward the Turnip Yard, watching now and again over his shoulder for the first signs of the moon. After a half hour of rowing he could make out the Two Horsemen waiting on the thin horizon. Using them as markers, he turned out into deeper water and slowed to watch the surface. The moon came up, its light diffused over the water, but it was little help because it was still low in the sky and the slanting sliver caused a deceptive pocket of darkness under each little wave.

When he felt sure the tide was beginning to go out, he turned the skiff into the middle of the Turnip Yard and rowed against the wind toward the open sea. At the southern end he stopped rowing and let the wind carry him back. He knelt on the seat and watched over the stern, straining to see something he could not dare to imagine, assured only that he would know it if he saw it. But what if he bumped it in the dark? The little white-capped waves, the only sign of life all around, slapped at his stern, soaking him with a cold spray that stiffened his fingers on the oars.

Before he had made three passes over the Turnip Yard, the moon was high and he felt as though he'd been out on the water all night. If he missed George this time, he would miss him altogether, and he began to hope in spite of himself that he would miss him, and not have to see him this way: his face wet and swollen in that awful grey light, the eyes emptied by what they'd already seen. If he had to say, he'd allow that the looking for him had been worse than watching him drown; at least under water it had happened and was done; here it was all waiting and the growing fear of what he'd come to find.

On the next pass he fanned the surface timidly with his light. He hadn't drifted a hundred yards when his beam passed over a dark rounded shape bobbing among the little waves. He must have passed him twice in the darkness. He knelt and watched, colder now and surprised at his own reluctance to move, as George's head drifted away from him. He brought the skiff around and circled the shape, shouting at it: "George! George!" until he could delay no longer and backed in toward it.

He was floating standing up, as if still climbing, or else walking in to shore on legs the length of shadows. Oscar came in behind him and tied one end of the line to the stern, looping the other end and letting it sink down over George's shoulders. He averted his eyes lest George turn and show him his face. When he had secured him, he sat down to row out toward open water. Once he slipped and looked against his will: he saw George's shoulders break the surface when he pulled on the oars, and his ears bend back when he sank again. "Almost," he said to encourage. "We're almost there." He had towed things before, a skiff with two men in it, but never anything this heavy, never anything that pulled against him like this.

He stopped when he was in the way of the outgoing current. From here he'd be carried out beyond the bay, and well into open sea before the tide turned and started coming in again; by then he'd be wedged on the bottom, or taken so far out it would be New Hampshire before he washed up on shore. With his teeth clamped shut, Oscar reached over his friend with the gaff and carefully lifted the line free of his shoulders. At first he thought to drop the rocks down the back of his shirt so he wouldn't have to turn his face around, but that might roll him belly up, eyes to the moon, so he reached gingerly around to his throat and slid the first ballast stone down into his undershirt. George's head tucked forward, as if looking beneath him to see where he'd settle.

He slipped three of the biggest stones into his shirt all at once, and George hesitated, then sank effortlessly like another weighted trap. Oscar rowed off a few yards to sit and watch in case he came back up. He stood up in the skiff, sculling to hold his place, and studied the surface of the water, mumbling at first, then talking loudly, angrily: "It's all right for you now, George Weed. You're not the one who has to go out alone tomorrow, and every day after that. I'm the one who has to start fishing alone all over again."

He rowed for a mile without looking around, then when he got inside the land, he centered his stern on the tip of the second Horseman, and started back in toward the cove. She'd be the only one he'd tell, and even she wouldn't understand. She'd fault him for not giving George's sister the chance to bury him and pay her respects. She'd never understand that George would have expected him to do it the way he did: like it was just more damn work, only this time far lonelier than it had ever been before.