33: On my first clamming trip . . .
33: On my first clamming trip . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapters 14 and 15
14
ON MY FIRST CLAMMING TRIP with Grandfather, I had watched him go through this routine, filling the front of his bathing suit, then waddling to Rambunctious, his suit distended and lumpy, dumping his catch on the deck and going right back to the hunt, and I developed a deep admiration for Grandfather’s sangfroid that has never left me. I had seen at once that popping clams into one’s bathing suit was the manly way of carrying the clams one had caught, but, I thought, “If the little devils bite, then doing the manly thing may be the cause of my being unmanned.” I didn’t think exactly that, but I thought along those lines. I wanted to ask Grandfather then, “Do clams bite?” but I knew that if I asked, he would look at me with his smart gray eyes and know at once why I was asking, so I did not ask, and instead I began a halfhearted imitation of his shuffle, worrying all the while about what to do with the clams I found, if I found any. Should I take the awful risk? “I’ll be unmanned if I do, unmanly if I don’t,” I thought.
Almost at once, my toes struck something hard, something that could only be one of the tasty bivalves.
Slowly, resignedly, I took a breath, dipped beneath the water, and dug it out of the sand. I stood up slowly.
“You got one,” called Grandfather. He beamed at me. “I think maybe you’ve really got the knack. Now your father—”
“Yah! Woo! Hey!” I shouted.
Grandfather’s mouth fell open. He watched me thrashing in the water, rolling around, holding the clam with both hands, twisting, turning. Soon enough, a hefty chowder clam flew from my hands and fell into the water, baloomp, some distance away.
“Damn!” I cried, smacking the water with my open hand. “It got away!”
Grandfather looked at me for a little while, and I thought he was going to say something. He opened his mouth, then closed it without a word.
“It’s harder than I thought,” I said. “I’ll get the next one.”
I went through the rest of the afternoon without, apparently, finding another clam. Now Grandfather was a very savvy clammer, and when he stood in the bow of Rambunctious while we glided across the flats looking for a likely spot, he must have been able to see the clams through the sand, for he invariably picked a spot so loaded with them that I couldn’t take a step without feeling a couple, but I rarely admitted finding any that day, and by the end of the day I was committed to another fiction, harder to maintain than the hard-candy one. I was passing myself off as hopelessly inept at clamming. Whenever I did call out that I had found one—just often enough, I thought, for verisimilitude—the wily bivalve got away.
15
SINCE MY FATHER WAS CLAMMING TOO, I thought that it would be a good idea to find a clam early and have it get away, put on a good display of disappointment, throw in a little self-denigration, and see if I could coast on that for the rest of the day, not finding another. My father and I were shuffling along side by side, and I had already felt several clams, though my father showed no signs of having found a single one. Then, suddenly, and with greater glee than I’d seen from him before, he sang out, “Hey, Dad, I got one!” He was smiling like an idiot, I thought. He threw himself beneath the surface and almost at once seemed to be locked in a life-or-death struggle with something huge and frightening. His legs shot into the air, his feet flailing. Spray shot out from the place where he fought so desperately. Twice he lifted his head above the surface and gasped for breath. At last he stood upright, with his hands still beneath the surface, as if he were throttling something. Then, as if propelled, his hands shot out of the water, and from them flew a clam. It sailed through the air and landed, baloomp, in the water about ten feet away.
“Son of a bitch!” he shouted. He smacked the water with his fist. “It got away. I guess I’m no better at this than I ever was.”
I had seen the clam in the air, followed it in its arc. It was a very young one, probably not legal size.
My father and I shuffled around for the rest of the afternoon, but my father apparently never found another of the elusive little devils, and I ignored all the ones that I felt, though the spot seemed to be paved with them. Grandfather brought up a mess of them; he was a master. He snorted quite a bit and rarely looked our way.
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