Third Place: On the Flats

On the Flats

by Stephen O'Connor

Third Place

Eric Fallon was doing well that summer of 2004 on Ricky Anderson’s gill netter, the Lucky Lucy, until Lucy’s luck ran out and the usually reliable 42 Series Volvo 220 hp inboard shit the bed. The skipper told him she’d have to be dry docked while a rebuilt transmission was located and installed. There was a time when Eric was skipper of his own boat, the Bobby Sands, but that, and just about everything else, disappeared in the bad days of the divorce. For now, the other crews were set, and to keep some money coming in Eric decided to take his bucket and his 4-tined rake, don his boots and dig some clams. Anyway, he thought he might as well make it worth the 100 dollars he’d paid for his license.

The first day was disappointing. He threw his haul on the scale at the Clam Basket, and Bernie, the cook and proprietor counted out thirty-two dollars. A lot of sweat for thirty-two bucks. Eric drove over to the Bait Shack Bar thinking he’d murder a couple of beers. As he pulled into the parking lot, he spotted Gus Gibbs’ white Ford pickup parked outside. Eric sat in his own pickup for a minute while the engine ran. He really didn’t feel like seeing Gus because he had heard that Gus, a local commercial clammer and odd jobs marine carpenter, was badmouthing him, and Eric knew why. He also knew that if it came to blows, Gus would probably win. He was bigger and stronger than Eric and had more experience as a brawler. He was meaner, too. After a minute, he turned the engine off. Que sera, sera. I can’t hide from the guy. Fuck it.

It was pleasantly cool inside the bar. The Bait Shack appealed more to the fishermen, the lobstermen, the clammers and hardy locals than it did to family vacationers. The walls were festooned with nets, buoys, amateur paintings of local trawlers and some photos of fishermen from the harbor who had gone to “Fiddler’s Green.”

Eric took a seat at the bar a few stools down from Gus and ordered a 22-ounce draft from the bartender, a new girl with a look a bit too fresh and bright for the Bait Shack. Probably a college girl. Cute, but he kind of missed the usual bartender, an older gal with the apt name of Grace, who was fond of quoting the Bible and mentioning heaven and angels to the patrons. There was a statue of the Virgin on the shelf above the register, hands outspread over a model of a trawler at her feet.

He could already feel Gus staring at him, so he turned casually and called, “Hey, Gus.” The other man rose and approached. Eric had heard women call Gus handsome, but the broad chest, flat face and shaggy hair always made Eric think of a Norman baron, the kind who had probably crushed his ancestors. Like his ancestors, he was ready for a fight, but not optimistic about the outcome.

Gus wasted no time. He stood a bit too close and began in that voice of his, slow and menacing. “Your sister says she won’t go out with me because I’m a drinker and a troublemaker. I wonder who coulda told her that?”

“I told her that.”

He was quiet for a beat or two, his eyes boring into Eric. “I thought we were friends, asshole. Why are you badmouthing me?”

“Because Emma’s my sister. Look, Gus. I don’t dislike you. We got along fine when you filled in for Blackie aboard the Bridgett Lee. You’re a not a bad guy to work with. To go drinking with. To watch a game with. But do I want my sister going out with you? No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I’ve seen you in action too many times, Gus. When the shots go around, and the war drums start beating, it’s a Jekyll Hyde situation with you. I’ve seen it, here, at Saunders’, the Star-Lite down in Portsmouth where I believe you met her. You know it’s true. You can have at me if you want, but that’s my sister. I’m gonna tell her the truth.”

The bigger man was quiet again, and Eric figured he was deciding whether to hit him. He didn’t seem able to make up his mind. The bartender brought his beer, and Eric found some comfort in her friendly smile. She was wearing a ‘Nantucket’ tee shirt, which always made him think of the opening line of so many limericks: “There was a young man from Nantucket.” He was going to joke with her about it, but his mind was preoccupied, and she looked too innocent, anyway.

He turned again toward the big man. “Listen, Gus. Honestly, I wouldn’t want my sister going out with a guy like me, either. Just another gear-haulin’ deck hand from a dry-docked boat, lost his own boat, and a clam-digger like yourself for the moment.”

“Sometimes…” Gus was brooding over the words he might choose, but Eric noticed that he had backed up a step. He went back to where he’d been sitting, picked up his beer mug and moved back. That was a good sign, Eric thought, unless he slams me with the mug. “Sometimes,” Gus said, “you know, a good woman makes a man change, Eric.”

You’re never gonna change. That was what Eric was thinking, but he said, “You’re right, there, Gus. Sometimes they do. But I don’t have a crystal ball. My sister asked me what kind of guy you are, not what kind you might become, and I told her a good guy to go drinking with, like I said, but not a guy I’d tell her to go out with. I got nothing personal against you. That’s just the way I see it. She’s blood. I’m not gonna bullshit her so I don’t offend you.”

Gus looked away, nodding, perhaps resignedly, and Eric began to relax. “Are we good?” he asked.

Gus shrugged but ignored his outstretched hand. “I don’t like it. I think you’re wrong about me, but, whatever. You said you’re clamming now?”

“Yeah, till the Lucy is swimming again. I was out on Cutter’s Sands today. No great shakes.”

Gus drank some beer and said, “You’re no clammer, Erik. Cutter’s is all dug out.” He leaned closer and said, “I know every inch of low tide in the Northeast. I can tell you a spot where…well, first I need your word that you won’t tell no one else.”

“Sure. You got it, Gus.”

The big man nodded. “I trust you. After all, you didn’t bullshit me about Emma.”

“I don’t do bullshit,” Eric said, but he wanted to steer the conversation away from his sister. “So as the clam oracle, tell me the spot, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

Gus’s voice was low and conspiratorial. “Well then listen, I’ll tell you my best spot; it’s in the tidewaters of the Saco. You go down the old Cable Road on the Biddeford side. There’s an abandoned volunteer fire station at the end. You can park in behind there. Go down through the marshes…”

Eric interrupted. “Isn’t it all marshy island in the channels out there?” he asked skeptically.

“But between them, shimmering flats, chock full of clams. Closer you get to the tidewater, the bigger they are.”

Eric said he thought it would be a bit messy in there. But Gus said, “That’s what everyone thinks, but it ain’t bad, and it’s clam heaven.”

Eric nodded, imagining the scene, and told him it was very decent of him. As he ordered him another mug of draft, he thought, “He’s not an asshole all the time.”

The following morning, Eric parked at the old fire station at 5:45; low tide was at 7:09. A few hours before and a few hours after low tide was the time to go, but of course you couldn’t go in the dark. He finished his coffee and rummaged in the pickup bed for his gear. It was a gray day; a shroud of ghostly fog, heavy with salt and tide reek, hung in the air. He pulled on his old Deck Boss boots and rubber gloves and set off across the marsh grasses with his clam rake and a bucket, in which were his trowel and clam gauge. As he approached the wetter sands, the sound of the retreating waves was barely audible somewhere well beyond the mists at the distant edges of the estuary. Invisible gulls cried, and closer, sandpipers darted on quick wings over the flats.

He scanned the expanse before him; islands of cordgrass and spike rush rose above the empty channels left by the outgoing tide. He began to move along them like a hound on a scent until he spotted the U-shaped holes beneath which the clams could be found. The mud was too soft for the rake; he dug quickly with the trowel and reaching about eight inches into the hole pulled up his first. There was no need to use the gauge; it was, as Gus had promised, a “big one.” He filled in the hole, as the state required, and moved on. By 10:30, he had thirteen clams, and was getting tired of slogging through the thick mud. He stopped and pulled a bottle of water from the bucket and drank. He was sweating now and was thankful the fog had not burned off.

He looked over the flats and noticed a squirt of water shoot up from a clam hole near the spot where a channel opened up to what was the wider channel of the Saco itself, though he could barely make it out through the haze. Must be a monster clam. He tossed the bottle in his bucket and headed toward the spot. After a short time, the mud became softer, thicker. Not an easy way to make a living, he thought. I’ll be damned glad to stand back on the hard deck of Lucky Lucy. He was near the channel’s edge when he began to sink in a dark oily muck, that was soon over his boots. He leaned left to pull his right foot up; his left side plunged deeper into the mud. Every move mired his body deeper. He was aware that his right foot was out of his boot, but there was no way to pull it free. The sweat came more heavily now. His struggling only sank him deeper. He was nearly up to his waist and held fast.

Don’t panic. Think. He could just reach the bucket with an outstretched hand. He pulled it near and took out the clam rake. Leaning forward, he dug the rake into the mud and tried to kedge himself free, but the rake had no purchase; the watery muck flowed between the tines. No more fucking around. His flip phone was in his pocket if it hadn’t gotten too full of salt water. He reached through the mud and managed to get it out. Flipping it open in his dripping hands, he saw the screen light up and allowed himself to hope. He dialed 911. Nothing. He tried again. He attempted to text someone. The salt water must have gotten into the phone.

Thirteen clams. Unless someone found him here before the tide turned, he would die for thirteen clams. He had fished in the great rolling seas out of Dutch Harbor, long lined for swordfish out of Halifax, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf, and crewed on a trawler out of his grandfather’s home of Kinsale Harbor. And he might well die here in the marshlands of the Saco River. He couldn’t see any way around it. The tide was turning, and he would be under water. Images flashed through his mind. His mother weeping, holding his picture in rosary-entwined hands. His ex-wife, one hand on her hip, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke, and saying, “Stuck in the mud? Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Now you can panic. He pulled the trowel from the basket and began to dig, but though his muscles burned, and his heart pounded, more wet mud continually poured in around him to nullify the progress he made. He was out of breath and his heart was in his throat.

He heard a dog bark, and voices, girls’ voices, far off, probably near the stony edge of the marshes. “Help! Help! I’m stuck! Help!”

He paused and nearly held his breath, listening. He heard a voice in reply. “We’re coming!”

“No! Don’t come out here! You… call 911!” He listened again; he could see that already as the sands were getting wetter with the incoming tide. “Call 911! Hurry! I’m going to drown!”

He thought he heard an “Okay.” He imagined them, ghostly figures in the fog retreating—two girls—three? The dog’s bark still reached his ears for a short while, and then silence but for the flowing rivulets of the implacable tide. Now, as he felt the cold water of the incoming sea beginning to roil against his waist, he accepted his fate. The hole in the mud, his grave, possibly, warmed as he pissed himself. His life was in the hands of girls, strangers to him. Either they would get him help or he would die. And for the first time, he forgot about the thirteen clams, the bad luck, the ignominy of dying stuck like a sand eel in a load of muck.

He saw the flat face of Gus Gibbs quietly confiding in him the valuable secret of his “best spot.” Gus had a reason to hate him, and no conscience. Eric believed the other man had accepted his frank admission and the reason behind it. No, the truth was, the prick nursed a grudge and wanted him dead, and it would be the perfect crime if it worked. “I need your word you won’t tell no one else.” Right. He sent me here to kill me.

Eric spent much of what he knew might be the last minutes of his life planning his revenge if somehow, he survived. There were many reasons to live. But right now, the one that was foremost in his mind was to humiliate Gus Gibs with a public beating. God, only give me life, and I will find the strength to do it. But he heard, beyond the gray, the water purling into marshy conduits and decided that God didn’t make such bargains. It had been a long time since St. Patrick’s School and the black-veiled nuns, but at a loss for any other idea, he said an Act of Contrition as the water rose slowly around him. Somewhere in the marshes nearby, he heard the chuckling call of a bittern; it had never sounded so like a human voice laughing, like Gus Gibbs laughing. God, let me live and put him in front of me.

And then he heard sirens.

Eric was holding court at the Bait Shack. The boys from Sea Hag and from Stella Maris and Lisa Bain, the Harbor Master, as well as some other salty patrons, crowded the bar. They were having a good laugh at Eric’s misadventure, which some of them had learned of on their emergency band radios. Tom O’Hagan, the skipper of the Stella Maris said, “This guy weathers the hard blows up in the Bearing Sea, had his survival suit on twice last winter on the Lucy, and damn near drowns in the Saco at low tide!”

“Ah, fuck you guys!” Eric said. “And I lost my only good deck boots. Cost me fifty bucks.”

Grace, the saintly bartender, was back. She said, “Someone was praying for you, Eric. I’ll bet it was the prayers of your dear mother that got you through.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“And they blew you out with a fuckin’ hose?” one of the guys asked.

“Yeah. Guys had these mud shoes, right? Like a boot with a big hard plastic turned down collar around the top that keeps them above the mud. Apparently once you’re stuck in that mud, waist deep, you’re goin’ nowhere unless you can break the suction. So, they ran a hose out from the truck and blew pressurized water down—liquifies the mud. Freed one leg, then the other. Brought me up to an ambulance to check me out. I said, ‘I’m fine,’ ‘cause I didn’t want to get a bill for five hundred bucks in the mail. The guy said, ‘There’ll be no charge,’ so they took me in the ambulance and checked the vitals. Anyway, thanks to those guys, and those two little girls, you guys don’t have to go to a wake and say what a great guy I was and how good I look.”

“The girls called 911?”

“Yeah. My phone got wet.”

O’Hagan said, “There’s usually no coverage out there anyway. Soon as you get past the marina you lose it at least up to the mouth every time.”

“Bad spot all around.”

Frank Duggan added, “And I wouldn’t be saying you look good, Eric. Not even at your wake.”

They laughed and Eric said, “Come on! You’d miss me ‘round the pier, for a couple of weeks anyway. You know you would.”

“Of course we would!” Lisa Bain said, and turning to the other men, “You guys are awful!” But she understood fishermen well enough to know this was how they expressed affection. She came from a fishing family and had grown up on rocking decks picking nets and hauling traps.

“They rescued your clams, too, I hope,” O’Hagan said.

“Betcher ass. They almost cost me my life. My rescuers carried me on a spine board ‘cause I didn’t have mud shoes, I didn’t have any shoes, but I had my clam bucket right on top of my chest like an old lady clinging to her purse. Gonna make a big clam chowder tomorrow.”

Upon this scene, Gus now entered, and Eric said, “Here he is, boys! Gus Gibbs. I’ve been waiting for you, Gus! Clam man extraordinaire! Gentlemen, and ladies, here’s the individual who gave me the hot tip—his secret spot where I could go and dig clams—and die! Yeah! Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, he says. Big secret. Well, I guess everyone knows now, Gus—two rescue crews and an ambulance, and it was all over the radios.”

“What are you talking about, asshole?”

“I’m talking about you! The guy who knows every inch of low tide in the Northeast. You sent me clamming in the thickest marsh muck known to man. You sent me to quicksand, Gus.”

“I told him it was muddy,” he said, looking around at the men from the harbor who were now listening quietly.

“No, you didn’t, Gus. Fireman told me all the real clammers know to stay away. People never go out there because even walking in muck like that up to your ankles isn’t too pleasant, and that’s well before you get far out in clam beds in the marsh. Yes, boys, but the tidal authority, Mr. Clam Man here, tells me that’s the spot! Go there! He was hoping I’d be sucked into a hole and drowned in that nice spring tide.”

“He’s gone completely crazy,” he told the men, and turning to Eric added, “and he’s starting to get on my nerves.”

But the crowd at the Bait Shack was interested. Duggan said, “Why’d you tell him to go out there, Gus?”

“I can tell you why,” Eric said loudly.

Gus took a step toward him, shoulders raised, and fists clenched. “You keep talking, Eric, you’re gonna be back in the ambulance.”

“How did you know he was in the ambulance, Gus?” O’Hagan asked. “He told us that before you came in.”

“I don’t know how I know. That’s what I heard.”

“Who told you?” Eric asked.

“I don’t remember. What difference does it make?”

Eric was struck with a realization that stoked the seething hatred he felt for Gus Gibbs. “You were watching the whole thing from a distance, weren’t you?”

An enormous trawlerman, Red McLaughlin, known locally as “Red Tide,” of the trawler Easy Does It, stood and said, “Eric, tell us why you think he sent you to the mud hole.”

“I’m warning you, Eric,” Gus said.

“Shut the fuck up, Gus,” Red Tide said.

“Jesus was I right about him,” Eric said, pointing at Gus. “I had him pegged. So last night he says to me ‘Why did you tell your sister not to go out with me?’ And I told him the truth. Which is basically, I don’t want my sister Emma going out with a guy who’s a hard drinker and a troublemaker. Simple, right? So, his response is hey that’s cool. Now you’re clamming, why don’t you take your bucket out to this great place I know. And then, I believe, he takes his binoculars over to the old fire station to watch me sink. Were you hoping you could comfort my sister at my funeral, Gus?”

A chorus of epithets rose from the circle of fishermen, and Eric heard Grace saying something about asking forgiveness, and Lisa Blain calling for calm, but he was focused on Gus’s face, his body language, his movements, and his voice, and he knew that he was right. He felt again the thick immovable grasp of the muck, of impending death, and the terror of drowning by slow degree, coughing and choking, a half-man jutting out of the mud like a ruined statue from some lost Atlantis gazing at nothing as the water flowed over the streaming hair of his submerged head.

“You wanna take this outside?” Gus roared, but something in his voice betrayed him. It was not righteous indignation; it was fake indignation.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Eric said.

They headed for the door, followed by the crowd. Red Tide said to Eric, “He’s dirty. He’ll try to nail you as you’re going out the door.”

Red was prescient. As Eric pushed the door, Gus threw a punch at his head. He ducked and rammed an elbow back into his belly, surprised at how soft it was. Gus gasped, and as the door was half open, Eric grabbed him by the shaggy locks and hurled him forward so that he flew down the stairs and landed hard on the gravel walk. Before he could pull himself up, Eric was on him. He didn’t want a protracted fight. He was a matador, and he had to put this bull down. He tagged him with three good lefts in a row, but still the bastard rose and came for him. He swung again, but Gus caught his arm and moved in. Now he took Eric by the hair and forced him down while his knee came up into his face. He understood what it meant to “see stars,” and knew that if this continued, he’d be out. Hearing the shouts of encouragement from the men, he grabbed Gus by the balls and squeezed for all he was worth.

He felt his head released and, in that instant, with all the love of the life he had nearly lost, and all the hatred of the muck that had bound him, all the rage that had been so impotent against the sea, but not against a man, he threw his fist up to where the head of his enemy still loomed and struck it solid and so hard his hand hurt. Gus let out a cry of pain and fell backward.

There was a cheer as the big man landed. “Call the ambulance for this bum,” O’Hagan said. “He’s got a busted jaw or I’m Popeye the sailor man.”

“I already called them,” Lisa said. “I figured one of them would need it.” She shook her head, and added, “Men.”

Grace had come out and, with hands on knees, bent over the fallen hulk of a man, “If you pray to the Virgin, Gus,” she said, “she will take that woman out of your heart.”

Gus groaned. Eric laughed, and said to no one in particular, “What goes around, comes around.”

The men began to move back into the bar. In the distance, the red lights of an ambulance were moving up the coast road. Red Tide paused over the recumbent figure and said, “This ain’t the first shit you’ve pulled, Gus. Do right by people and be honest. That’s how you get respect on the pier.”

The men from the boats drank their fill that night, and Eric couldn’t buy a drink. The consensus was that it had been “a hell of a shot.”

“It was a lucky shot,” Eric said. “A few seconds before, I thought I’d lose.”

Tom O’Hagan raised his glass, saying, “Fortune favors the brave. Anyway, you couldn’t lose, Eric. He lost before you two ever stepped outside. Even if he’d knocked you out, you still had your dignity, but he could never show his face in here or on the docks again. He can’t. He’s done.”

And Grace, overhearing him as she poured two beers, said, “That’s as true as there’s a God in heaven.”

Looking in the mirror the next day, Eric saw that he had taken some good shots, too. But Christ, it had been worth it. O’Hagan was right about Gus’s jaw. Red’s wife worked at Southern Maine Medical Center. She said it was wired shut and he would have to drink through a straw until it healed, but as the song says, “no more ’round the docks” was he seen. Nor in the Bait Shack. A man who’s lost all dignity is a pitiful sight. As O’Hagan had said, no one wanted to see Gus, nor did he want to be seen. In the fall, Petey the marine mechanic, saw Gus’s pickup all packed in front of the Atlantic Four Winds, where he’d had a room. He said he drove off up Route 1. Eric wasn’t sure if Emma had heard the story of the fight; she lived in Portsmouth; she never mentioned it, and he saw no reason to bring it up.

He’d had his fill of clamming and was glad when Ricky Anderson called him to say Lucky Lucy was back at her mooring. He thought long about what present he could get for the girls who had saved him, but he had no idea what young girls might like. Finally, he bought some gift coupons they could use at the Old Orchard Arcades, and gave them to the firemen, who said they would see that the girls got them. A simple gift for a life, but how can you repay anyone for saving your life? He tried to give the firemen a case of beer, but they wouldn’t take it. They said they were just doing their job and didn’t need any gifts. However, they did accept a pot of clam chowder. And as the Lucky Lucy slipped her lines and steamed out on a sheet of burnished gold toward where the sun was rising, he gave Ricky Anderson the conclusion he’d drawn from the whole episode: “For every rotten bastard in this world, Skip, there are ten good people.”

Winning pieces are published as received.

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Fiction Potluck

April 2025

Third Place Winner:

Stephen O'Connor

Stephen O'Connor is a writer from Lowell, Massachusetts; he lives on the street where Jack Kerouac once lived. 

His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aethlon, The Amsterdam Quarterly, and elsewhere. For more information on Stephen O'Connor's novels and short story collections, visit lowellwriter.com.