Complete Short Fiction, page 134
His boat hit ours and pushed us back against a rock that lay just under the water. “Hey!”
He put muscle into it. Our boat stuck on the rock, tipped, and suddenly went over.
Hitting the water was a shock. It was cold. It took me a couple of seconds to fight my way back up to the surface.
“Melinda?” I reached out for her.
“Never mind.” Somehow, this had become my fault. “Just, never mind.”
Melinda proved to be a strong swimmer. She made it across the pool and over to the safety catwalk on the far side before I could think of anything to say to stop her. She climbed out, tossed her wet hair out of her face with real fury, and clattered down the catwalk and out.
“Myron!” Pete yelled. “Come on. No!”
But Myron was now completely out of hand. Having knocked me and my girlfriend into the drink, he reversed direction and drove directly at Pete’s carefully constructed lighting set up. He hit the main control for the lights, and the entire room went dark.
“Everyone stay calm,” I said. “Don’t splash around. Get to the access walk. It’s okay, just move slowly.”
Myron was laughing. “Yeah. Don’t splash around. That makes you seem wounded. It just attracts Black Murray!”
“Stop it, Myron.” Polly’s voice was low and savage. In the years since, I’ve only heard that a couple of times, and I remember each one.
“Ah, come on,” he said. “Things have been so boring, you know that? So damn boring.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m sure sorry about that.”
Before Myron could come back with another wiseass remark, there was a sound Eke a door slamming. I couldn’t see it, so I’ll never be sure. But I think their boat rose up out of the water. Then there was a loud crack and the boat broke right in half.
“So that’s it?” Myron peered down into the hole past Pete’s shoulder. “That’s the thing that got my foot and almost killed me?”
“You mean the thing you shoved your foot into to stop it from working?”
“Whatever happened, the damn thing did really screw me up. Have some sympathy. What was it actually supposed to do?”
“Brush across the bottom of the boat, like something really coming up from below, then move across the water, leaving a V, and pop up, eyes glowing.”
Their shoulders blocked my view of whatever Pete had dug out. I sat on a rock and sipped my beer. It was one of those pumpkin-spice-filled things they now marketed around the holidays. I just had to stay optimistic that there was a beer flavor under there somewhere.
“Come on,” Myron said. “If we pull together . . .”
He and Pete grunted, and I heard something come loose from the wet dirt below. They laid it down.
It was a spare-parts creature, pipes and joints topped by a stainless-steel mixing bowl Pete had hammered into a more skull-like shape, with red marbles placed along its edge as its eyes.
Right under the skull, where I expected to see Polly’s giant saddlebag of a purse, given what I remembered, there was, instead, a gym shoe, surprisingly white given its long burial.
“Ha!” Myron grabbed at it. “I was wondering where I left that.”
As Myron pulled his shoe out, a lever moved, and the head extended itself toward us. For an instant, it was a real thing there, a revived swamp serpent, come alive in the modern world to wreak vengeance on those who had destroyed its world. Then it was, again, just a mess of old plumbing. It was hard to believe it had done all it had actually done. Like Pete, I had expected there to be more to it.
“You did that on purpose,” Pete said quietly. “Kept it from working. Kept it from being . . . interesting.”
“I was trying to keep from drowning!” Myron was outraged. “That thing caught my foot and dragged me under. I was trying to breathe, not mess up your little show.”
He held the gym shoe in his hand. It was a left shoe.
I remembered him at the end of that night, soaked, whimpering, holding his damaged foot, blood coming through the shoe.
His right foot, the one he still limped on. His other foot, the left, had been bare, and undamaged.
I know how people see things. As a cop I’d taken enough depositions, listened to enough witnesses in trials, gotten enough anguished late-night phone calls from people whose cases had come out a way they were absolutely positive they shouldn’t have.
So I knew that Myron could hold that left shoe, the one he had jammed into Pete’s device, feel a twinge of pain in his right foot, and never ever realize that there might be some problem with that.
Of course, I did know more of the story than they did.
Myron wasn’t a great swimmer. I could hear his nervous breath as he came back up. It was surprising how heavy even summer clothes feel when you get wet without planning for it.
He snapped back pretty quickly. “I can feel it! It’s nibbling my toes. That second jaw, Pete. Ow!”
He was good enough that none of us could tell if that was a fake yell or a real one. Since it was Myron, of course, we assumed it was fake.
I was swimming, not to him, or to the walkway, but to find Polly. Where had she gone?
Then there was a slight splash, and he was silent.
“The idiot.” Polly’s breath was hot on my ear. “He’s gone under.”
Then there was light. Pete had climbed out and managed to set up one of his lamps so that it cast a light up at the damp ceiling and reflected back down at the pool. Aline huddled on the catwalk. She seemed even tinier wet, with her short hair plastered to her head. Her large dark eyes stared off at nothing.
“Can you see him?” Pete’s voice was surprisingly calm.
I scanned across the water. There was Polly, staying afloat without much effort. Ripples still ran back and forth, and the broken boat turned slowly. Of Myron there was no sign.
“Cliff.” I think that was the first time Polly ever spoke my name. “You go down over there. I’ll try here.”
We instantly worked together as a team. I opened my eyes wide and dove.
For a few seconds there was nothing but swirls of light and dark.
Then I saw him. Myron was a few feet down. For a second I thought he was still playing, throwing his hands up at me in mock panic.
Then I saw that he was stuck down there. He was jerking, but he couldn’t free himself. I was seeing real panic.
I reached out and he grabbed tight on my wrists. No matter how much I pulled, I couldn’t get him to move. I had to pry myself free from him.
Polly and I surfaced at the same moment. “His foot is stuck in something,” I said. “Let’s go down together. You pull on his hands. I’ll go lower, figure out what’s holding it.”
She nodded. “Let me know when you have enough oxygen.”
I took a couple more deep breaths. “Now.”
“Go.”
We both went back under. As Polly turned and yanked on Myron’s outstretched hands, I dove deeper, hoping to find the crack in the rock that held his foot.
Only there was no rock. The bottom of the cave was still a long way down, invisible in the dark. Myron seemed to hang suspended in the water.
I swung around and kicked as hard as I could at what held his foot. Underwater it was impossible to get any momentum at all. I tried again, and my foot slipped off without making much of an impact.
I had to go deeper. There wasn’t time for me to go back up for more air. He’d been down here too long already. So I pulled myself down along Myron, down to a big lump under his foot.
When I touched it, it shuddered, nothing like a tree root, or some drowned old lumber, or an assemblage of pipes. I grabbed and tried to find somewhere that would make that shudder stronger.
I felt something soft under my fingers, so I dug them in.
I was rewarded by a stronger jerk. Then I was being whipped back and forth in the water. Myron was gone, tugged upward by Polly.
I didn’t have much air left. I swam desperately after them.
Polly tugged the semiconscious Myron under his armpits. She had him well in hand. When she got to the wrecked boat, though, she let go with one hand, reached in, and tossed something to me.
“Use it how you see fit,” she said.
It was her gigantic purse. But what inside of it was supposed to be useful?
I didn’t have time to think. I spun back, put my face under the water and saw something looming out at me from the darkness. With the best will in the world, I can’t remember what I thought it was.
Reacting without thinking, I shoved the purse at it. The purse was sucked from my hands, even though whatever it was seemed too far away to do that. Then it was gone.
When I came back to the surface I had to float there and breathe for a minute. It might be coming right back after me, but I couldn’t do anything else.
Pete, Myron, and Polly were all on the maintenance catwalk. Aline had gone for help.
She never came back. I later pieced it together. She flagged down the first car she saw on County 11. The driver, a middle-aged guy coming home from closing the stationery store where he worked, had no interest in going anywhere but home. Aline must have sparked up after leaving us, because she persuaded him to drive her to Indianapolis. He came home eventually, though ended up divorced. She stayed in the Crossroads of America.
I mentioned that she’d sent me a Christmas card, but I didn’t say when: late August, maybe even the anniversary of that night. It looked like it had been recovered from a flooded house, all swollen and bent. But she had written neatly on it after it was dried out: “Still drowning. Still alive. Take care.”
Myron was conscious, sitting up, and holding his right foot. Blood welled between his fingers. Not a lot, but enough to freak all of us out. We had to get him out of there and to help. Pete and I slung his arms over our shoulders and hauled him down the catwalk.
“What happened to my purse?” Polly asked me.
“Gone. Eaten. Something.”
“Oh, well.” She laughed. “There goes my fun for the evening.”
We took Myron to the ER with a story about a misused pitchfork, and got him stitched up without a lot of extra questions.
Despite being a star of the Mt. Zion Township football team, I got cut from the State team after a semester, and lost my scholarship. I drove home in a Gremlin with busted shocks, found an apartment near the stamping plant, and looked for work. Eventually, I applied to the police department and found a career.
Polly had gone out east for school. Three or four years later I stopped by the Kwik Pik for a half gallon of milk and found her filling her car with gas. She was in town, not for too long she said, to help out with a sick aunt. She stuck around for longer than she planned, because of some job that fell through, and then she ended up sticking around for good, with me.
Two good kids, two careers, a decent place to live, some fun vacations, even to exotic places. Something you should be satisfied with, right?
Yeah, me neither. Polly had been unhappy with it all for quite a while, maybe from the beginning, to tell the truth. But what was I supposed to do about it?
I looked through the dirt for other reminders of what had happened there. Rains had come through here periodically, mixing everything up. Still, it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before I found one.
I toed it up. It was a curved piece of plastic. Or baleen.
Had Polly even gotten out of here with her corset intact? I couldn’t remember. I’d certainly never seen it hanging in her closet, in later years. Maybe she’d pulled it off while swimming, to let herself breathe and keep from drowning. It would definitely have sunk.
Or maybe these actually were ribs. Black Murray’s ribs. If this was the tail section, then the head should be more down this way. I followed the track of bone down into the deeper and wetter part of the cave. Behind me, Myron and Pete were talking, now friendly, about their work, about what they still wanted to accomplish. I could hear the partnership that had once led to those things that had helped make my teenage years interesting.
Could a partnership, once dead, come back to life? Maybe if there was something interesting to work on. Something that takes both of you. There was always that hope.
I found a couple more of them, first bigger, then smaller again. Did a moray eel have a neck? I presume it did, if you define that as the place where something changes from bitten to swallowed, from potential to inevitable, like a jump out of an airplane or a marriage ceremony.
And there was a lump there, amid the tumbled ribs. I dug into the loose dirt.
It was hard to tell what the rotted and dirt-caked thing was. But I was pretty sure this was the purse Polly had been carrying that night.
That pharyngeal jaw had glommed on to Polly’s purse, sucked it in and discovered that it had taken on more than it could handle. Was that really it? Black Murray had choked to death on a handbag?
That purse looked even larger to me now than it had then. More than anyone else I know, Polly needs to be prepared. Her purse is really her bug-out bag. I have a real BOB in the car, ballistic nylon stuffed with survival gear, food, weapons, a shelter, and everything else we would need if we needed to survive somewhere for three days.
She has a stain remover, a tube of sunscreen, Band Aids, some chocolate, and even a small bottle of Makers Mark for comfort. We use her BOB every other day or so. We’ve never opened mine, though I do inspect and refresh it every quarter.
What would a seventeen-year-old girl out for the evening with her friends have thought was essential survival gear a quarter of a century ago?
Even though, after all these years, she would still regard it as prying, I picked it up, turned it over, and let the contents spill out.
There was a lot of mud. In it I found a couple of cartridge-shell tubes of lipstick, a tortoiseshell comb, a compact with a still-gleaming fragment of mirror, a ballpoint pen, a small spiral-bound notebook, ink all gone from the wrinkled pages, a set of house keys, and—
“It just doesn’t look right.” Pete was still trying to understand why what he could now see of his device didn’t match what it had done. He’d come here trying to find something he thought had come out of his own mind, rather than from the depths of the caverns.
“You should have let me . . .” Myron began.
“Let you what?” Pete sounded ready to get offended.
“Stage it.”
“You mean, set up the scene? With Black Murray.”
“Right.” Myron was tired and matter-of-fact. “It’s not in the technology, Pete. It’s in the staging.”
“I don’t think you should talk like the two are something separate. . . .”
And they were off. It was an old discussion, and I’d have figured that they would have gotten tired of it by now. But no matter how much you think you know about something, or someone, you don’t know it all.
There was one thing that was shiny but certainly not usable out of the collection of stuff in the purse: a foil condom packet, with the squiggled portrait of the Sheikh on it. Myron’s favorite brand, I remember him telling me more than once.
What had Polly said, there at the end? “There goes my fun for the evening.” The girl had just fought off a primordial moray eel and almost drowned . . . and the thing she regretted was not being able to have sex with her boyfriend.
Is youth just water on a river rock, making us seem more gleaming and colorful than we turn out to be, chalky and indistinguishable, when we dry out?
Or was Polly really that corset-wearing strumpet with the big feather in her hat? We do have a choice of who we actually are. We just need to make that choice every goddamn day.
I came back without the purse and sat down next to my two friends. Pete handed me the last beer.
So, I was talking about a midlife career change. And Polly and I made one, not too long after the rediscovery of Black Murray. Afterward, I was no longer the owner of a security company. I sold out to my employees. Terena, now married and with two kids of her own, is the CEO. We keep in touch, but she seldom asks for advice.
And Polly and I are partners in our own business. You could call it monster hunting, you could call it spiritual pest control, you could call it cryptid removal. Believe me, the branding is difficult to manage. And we have never really come up with a logo, though my former ops chief Paul sent us some roughs from Boca, as a second wedding present. One or two weren’t half bad, but we’ve been too busy to make a decision.
What with the chupacabra infestations, the black mold with thought control capability (for six months, that was a subdivision you really didn’t want to live in), and the mole creatures appearing deep in excavations in Hong Kong, we’ve had as much work as we want to take on.
Pete and Myron never got a movie deal together, but they have a successful online series, with rumors of getting picked up by one of the big cable channels. They’ve even done one of our stories, the one about . . . well, we’d better wait until they roll that out.
Someday, they might do the story of Black Murray. I think that would be a nice episode.
The Forgotten Taste of Honey
The author tells us, “One rainy afternoon I was reading Haldor Laxness’s novel. The Fish Can Sing, and among the eccentric lodgers at a house the main character lives in there is an older woman obsessed with how her body will get back to her home when she dies. I thought, ‘what if getting your body back to where you were born was something that was not just desired, but required? And why would that be?’ The story grew from there, and, I have to admit, has continued growing beyond the present tale.”
Tromvi trudged up the hill from the harbor, where she had just packed the last of her trade goods into the hull of a ship heading to the cast. What she had received in return already weighed on her horses’ backs. She smiled to herself as she remembered the sea captain, caught between a reluctance to say goodbye and the need to be ready for the receding tide, being uncharacteristically sharp with his crew. In the end, it had been she who turned away. She had her own affairs to settle before she could leave this place.
