Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 30

Odd Variations on the Species

Sarah Kokernot

I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t help myself. The night before I had been kept up by an unseasonably violent storm that had blown a meringue of sea foam onto Mimi’s porch and bent the palm tree into the roof. Back in Ohio I had six condos to rent. Penny had brought along the ovulation thermometer which meant high-pressure lovemaking sessions on the springy bed in the guest room. And Mimi was turning eighty that night—the hill that she did not want to see over, unless someone in our family produced great-grandchildren. She was the only octogenarian at her bridge club without great-grandchildren.

I was on my daily jog. All the birds were out that morning—the sandpipers and the gulls and even the herons which normally kept to the swamp—feasting on the wash of tiny shellfish and young crab marooned high up on the beach during the storm. I recognized it in front of Mrs. McCullen’s place—the extinct species of large crustacean that looked just like the Audubon print tacked to the cork board in my cubicle. This was the legendary creature of my childhood, which Mimi had warned would pull me under the water if I swam out past the buoys. For a minute, I just watched. The giant chatter crab tried to squeeze its enormous body underneath the wooden stairs leading to Mrs. McCullen’s sandy front yard. It had broken off a rotting floor board, which now balanced on its back.

I had only seen photographs of the crab in books, and they were always black and white or sepia-toned—the chatter crab having disappeared before color film was widely used. I saw now that its color was nothing like the reddish brown of its smaller cousins, but dark and opalescent, the color of a puddle in a parking lot. I could tell that the crab had molted its hard outer shell by the way it smacked its gummy claws at me. Its pinchers were the size and diameter of two large sauce pans, and, had they been encased with a hard shell, could have easily cut off my hand at the wrist bone.

Mimi had warned my brother and me that if we ever happened upon a chatter crab, the first thing we should do was cover our ears, and the second thing we should do was run. I searched inside for my pockets for something to cover my ears with, but found nothing except my cell phone, which I discovered earlier that morning in the freezer under a bag of peas (I had asked Penny the night before to hide it so I wouldn’t be tempted to call work). But the crab looked harmless, so I picked it up. He or she weighed as much as a lap dog, which I knew meant that it was very young. There was a stuffed giant chatter crab in a London museum which had weighed seventy pounds, the size of an obese Labrador. It was estimated to be fifteen years old when it was caught in a fishing net in the Irish Sea. This one’s carapace was just beginning to harden after molting, and had the firmness of a crisp apple. Before I could even think about what I was doing, I began to trot back down the beach in the direction of Mimi’s house, carrying the crab out in front of me like a priceless porcelain vase. It continued to smack its fleshy claws in protest, but finally gave up, and resorted to its namesake defense:

Don’t think I have any alcohol in the house! it screeched, in a voice that mimicked Mrs. McCullen’s smoky alto with such accuracy that I nearly dropped it.

The giant chatter crab, much like the macaw or parrot, imitates human speech by a way of a complex vocal chamber, but unlike its avian counterparts, the chatter crab also is also able to replicate the exact tone and cadence of a human voice. Mimi was old enough to remember the days when giant chatter crabs populated the South Carolina coast, so numerous that her father would trap them and her mother would serve them each Sunday after church. Before checking the traps, crab hunters would plug their ears in order to avoid the disturbing experience of listening to their prey protest in a voice that mimicked the voice of their wife’s or friend. Mimi herself never heard the chatter crab utter a word. Her parents were always careful that their children be spared that unappetizing and frankly dangerous experience. The crab was a trickster, Mimi said. As a soon as it won your pity it would lunge and sever an appendage with such razor-like swiftness that its victim would barely feel the loss. For this reason, it was strictly taboo to keep a chatter crab alive for any longer than absolutely necessary.

I’m about to visit my nephew! I can’t offer you a drink! the crab shouted.

The crab had apparently lived close enough to Mrs. McCullen to pick up her ear-splitting timbre. Mrs. McCullen wasn’t naturally loud and shrill, but only sounded so when she forgot to put in her hearing aid, which was often. We sometimes passed her on our evening walks. She steered her scooter with one hand while the other held a vodka soda, which she waved at Mimi, screaming an invitation for cocktails. If the crab continued talking in Mrs. McCullen’s booming voice, it would certainly draw people to look out their windows.

I scanned the beach for something to bludgeon the crab with, but what the hell was I thinking? I had never bludgeoned anything—I had barely even killed with my own hands. The fish I sometimes caught spared me from having to kill them directly, their bodies already stiff in the bucket by the time I drove back from the pier. It was only then then it occurred to me that what I was about to do was illegal. Not only would I be committing a felony by killing what was certainly an endangered species, but I would be destroying an important link in a complicated ecosystem. Although, as far as I knew, no chatter crabs had been spotted off this part of the coast since my grandmother was eight years old. Aside from a few unconfirmed sightings in the far-off Indian Ocean, they had been officially extinct throughout the world for over seventy years.

Don’t put your glass down without a coaster! the crab said. And where’s Conrad? Conrad! If I could not offer Mimi great-grand-children for her eightieth birthday, I figured a giant chatter crab might make a good substitute. The ocean seemed to be getting along just fine without them.

I had run halfway up the beach and was now sweating profusely with worry and also because I was carrying a fifteen pound object. It had not stopped talking. Who would have thought Mrs. McCullen was such a temperamental old lady? Or that she suffered from such a long list of ailments, from rheumatoid arthritis to vaginal dryness? Her neuropathy! Conrad’s rash! The convenience store aisles too narrow for her scooter! The spurs on her heels! The tourists and their loud car stereos! I hummed tunelessly and loudly over the crab’s voice. La la la la la! I thought about covering the crab’s mouth with my hand but I was worried that it might bite it off. If someone saw me, I could only hope that they would not be able to believe their eyes—that the legendary crab had returned to this shabby little town where most of the most beaches carried a summer-long film of suntan oil on the water.

I was four houses down from ours when I saw a woman sitting on her deck, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Bloody Mary as dark red as her short hair.

This is a beach, god damnit, not an ashtray! it screamed so loudly that the woman on the deck stood up and took her sunglasses off. I lunged behind a sand dune.

Is that you, Mrs. McCullen? the lady said. I knew that the woman’s eyes were scanning my hiding place. The crab wiggled. It was surprisingly strong for only being fifteen pounds, but I suppose it had an adrenal rush of fear on its side. I clutched it to my bare chest, its smell like pure brine and faintly rotten, although I thought I could sniff an aroma of a delicate spice—saffron? Cardamom? I suddenly remembered something my wife had shared with me from a cookbook: if you stroked a crab on its head, it would fall asleep, allowing you to slip it into pot of boiling water without a fight. I began to stroke the crab gently on its carapace, and it began to wave its right claw around the way a dog will when you scratch its belly. A contented gurgle bubbled from its mouth.

I peered around the dune. The red-haired woman was still out there, but I saw that if I ran low through a patch of sea grass I could reach her porch undetected, and from there, dart under the remaining three porches unseen. I wedged the crab in my arm like a football and bolted to the dark shade of the deck, where I waited, still stroking the crab, until I heard a glass door slide open and the woman’s footsteps disappeared. A plastic tarp lay over a motorless john boat. I took the tarp and wrapped it around the crab. There were no to lids to fall over its black bead eyes, but I suspected that it was now fast asleep.

Before we met, Penny had dined on blowfish in Japan, sampled jerkied mealworms and grasshoppers in a Oaxacan market, and chewed on roasted iguana in the Turks and Cacos. She once brought home durian fruit from the Asian supermarket with a spiky rind. It looked like a cantaloupe had contracted a horrible venereal disease. The mesh wire around its melon shape could barely contain the simmering sulfuric gases that leached out of cracks from its skin. The heavy odor of the durian fruit permeated the hallway of our apartment building for a week and the maintenance man came to our door, assuming that some sewer backage backup was the origin of the smell. We almost got evicted. Our neighbors never invited us to potlucks afterward, and the green carpet in the hallway still smells faintly of a decomposing rodent. Penny had no regrets—this was all done in the name of culinary adventure.

Penny, I imagined, would be just as pleased as Mimi to savor this rarest of delicacies. I hurried up the staircase to Mimi’s house—a double-wide trailer that stood upon ten-foot flood poles—anticipating the look of delight on my wife’s face.

As soon as I’d opened the door, the chatter crab punched its way out of the tarp, screaming for a vodka soda.