by Al
Davy turned to see a look of abhorrence on his father’s face. In one hand he still held the tip of Davy’s fishing pole; in the other, his long fillet knife.
“‘Twas nothing,” his father said, before turning away. “Just an eel.”
The fog closed in on them then, and, without another word, his father weighed anchor, and rowed for the island.
~ * ~
Davy’s mother waited for them at the pier’s end, at the base of the jutting finger of rock, near the small second boat, a dinghy. Wrapped in a shawl, her worried look made her a specter in the early evening.
“I was worried you—” she said, putting a hand on Davy’s father’s shoulder as the old man brushed by her. “Bah,” the old man said, continuing on, arms laden with fishing tackle as he went up to the house.
In the unseen distance, the foghorn cried out again. Davy’s mother opened her shawl to enclose Davy within it, within herself. He felt her warmth through his clothes, through the damp, salt wetness.
“Come to the house and sit by the fire,” she whispered into his ear, stroking his hair.
He nodded and, soothed by her words and warmth, followed her to the open doorway, a dim rectangle of orange light against the chill and dropping night. In a while he sat in his chair in the warm corner while his mother prepared supper, and his father smoked his pipe and drank his rye in silence, staring out through the open doorway at the storm that grew and battered the island.
~ * ~
Later, Davy lay in bed and listened to them argue. Outside, the night wind had picked up. A spray of cold, salt-scented rain hit periodically against the side of the house, washing the single window in Davy’s dark room.
A thin line of firelight flickered beneath the closed door. Beneath his pile of quilts Davy felt cold and damp. His body felt leaden, empty, numb. A dull chill went through him remembering the cold supper that had been eaten in silence, his mother’s barely-disguised, frantic fear as she hovered around him shielding him from his father’s arctic mounting rage.
“It’s not like I ever wanted ‘im,” his father said now, out in the main room beyond the door. His voice was gruff, tentative. He sounded like he was treading careful waters, knew it, but had decided to proceed anyhow. “And it’s not like he’ll ever be a help to me.”
“But he’s mine!” his mother answered, her voice a choked cry.
His father grunted, and a few moments, in which Davy could almost feel his mother’s fear through the door, passed.
“He’s no help to me at all. And no comfort,” he father continued.
“I wanted him! You agreed!”
Again his father grunted.
“‘Twas a mistake, then.”
“No!”
Now anger was creeping up into his father’s voice, mingled with frustration.
“You should have seen him out there today, Ellie! Useless! Sat unhelpful the entire time. Like a pile of wet stones. Couldn’t bait his own hook, or carry his weight. He’s little better around the house, here. Nothing more than a burden to me.”
His mother was weeping now, and suddenly his father’s tone softened.
“Now, Ellie, don’t be like that. You know our bargain was a fair one. For your sake I met it. And now it’s time…”
“I won’t let you! I won’t! He’s all I have!”
“What of me?” his father shot back. “Do you forget that it was I who took you to myself? The boy should never have come in the bargain.” Again his voice softened. “It’s my own fault for not doing better by you from the beginning. In the future, I promise I will. I know now how lonely you must have been. Nearly as lonely as I was here before I had you. I promise that when things are like they were in the beginning—”
“I won’t hear of it!”
“My mind is set, woman.”
“No!”
There was a sharp, quick sound, hand against face, and then Davy’s mother began to weep.
His father said, his voice strained: “You’ll see it clearer when it’s over.” He tried to soften his voice again, but it only sounded harder. “When it’s over.”
~ * ~
After an hour of silence from the outer room, the door to Davy’s bedroom opened. He tried to hide within the quilts and covers.
“Get up, boy,” his father said sharply. “We have business to attend to.”
Through an opening in the folds of material, Davy watched his father, outlined by orange light, approach the bed.
“I said rise, boy.”
The quilts were pulled back. Davy looked up into the pained but hard face of his father. He smelled sweet alcohol, a warmth of the breath.
His father’s rough hand poked at him. “Rise up and get your slicker on.”
Without another word, his father turned and walked out.
As Davy dressed, he watched his father, stoney-eyed, shrug on his own oilcloth coat, and take a final drink, emptying the bottle which sat on the dinner table.
~ * ~
Salt and rain lashed the island, the night.
The storm had risen high, driving sheets of water across the rock path to the pier. Overhead, angry banks of low, spitting clouds drove one another on. Out on the water, walls of water seemed to have risen out of the chopping waves, forming a bridge between cloud and ocean.
The rowboat rocked furiously against its mooring, roughly tapping at the dinghy beside it. His father battled with the rope, undid its knot, then fought to keep the boat steady while Davy climbed in. Davy thought he felt his father shudder when they were thrown together for a moment in passing.
His father climbed in after Davy, and cast off. He rowed furiously from the outset. Davy sat in the bow seat, ahead of the oarlocks, staring unspeaking back at his father, who concentrated on fighting the waves. Behind them, the dock pulled away into the finger of rocks and then, abruptly, the ocean surrounded them.
Davy felt his lately eaten supper began to churn in his stomach.
Far distant, the foghorn bleated, hidden and muffled by the roar of rain and wind. Water pelted them in sheets. Off, in the direction of the foghorn, a single bolt of silver-yellow lightning struck at the wet horizon.
“Bail, boy!” his father shouted, pausing in his rowing to indicate the bottom of the boat filling with water. His father pointed a sharp finger at the bailing bucket next to Davy, who made no move toward it. “Bah!” his father cried, suddenly stopping his rowing and moving in a crab’s crouch to lean over Davy and pick up the anchor.
Their eyes met for a moment, and Davy saw the fear in his father’s face. Then his father looked away and dropped the anchor over the side.
It made a splash, dropped, and the line played out nearly to its length before it found purchase.
“It’s done, then!” his father said, seemingly to himself.
Behind them, off through the sheeted rain, the slapping waves and roar of the storm, came a sound from the finger of rocks: the wailing cry of his mother calling to them.
Davy’s father stood, squinting back into the storm.
Now Davy could see the tiny yet growing image of the dinghy, his mother’s tiny form huddled within, rowing.
“Damn her,” his father spat, then turned to look down at Davy.
“I said ‘twas done.” His father loomed over him, lashed by rain. He seemed diminished as a man. He seemed to have shrunk into his oil cloth, hands dropped limply at his side. Davy looked into his face. There was anger and fury and determination in his eyes, but defeat, shame, and, that bolt of fear, too.
“Go ahead, father,” Davy said. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
“This should never have happened to begin with,” the old man said, his words leaden, and then he grasped Davy in his two hands, tightening his grip, and lifted him up unresisting and threw him into the water.
At that moment, off through the rain, Davy heard his mother call out to him.
The ice-cold hands of the sea enclosed Davy for a moment before he rose. As his head bro
ke the surface, he saw his father straining at the oarlocks, turning the boat around toward shore. His father’s eyes stared down into the boat, then up quickly at the dinghy, which approached through the lashing rain and rising waves.
“What have you done!” Davy’s mother demanded.
Davy cried out once before the sea took him down again.
The world became as seen through green glass. His body, head to toe, was cold and wet.
He looked down; below him, long slow shapes moved deep in the water, blacker against cold darkness, moving one over another, making and unmaking shapes. Davy’s numb hands felt suddenly oiled. And now, beneath his clothes, he felt his body bump and squirm, as if alive in its parts. His bones moved painfully against their sockets; it was as if his arms would yank free from his shoulders, legs from his thighs. His neck felt slick and alive.
The squirming shapes pulled up closer.
With a sudden kick and spasm of unmouthed protest, Davy fought against his sinking, and began to claw and drive his way back up to the surface.
“No!”
He broke free into the roiling waves. The rain felt oddly warm against his face.
He gulped, spit water, focused his moist eyes on the twin boats twenty yards away, bobbing together as if wedded. His struggling father was trying to climb from the rowboat into the dinghy.
His mother’s defiant form stood straight in the smaller boat, her eyes blazing with hatred.
“Then you’ll lose me, too!”
“Ellie! No!” his father beseeched, his hand seeking to reach Davy’s mother.
Davy tried to call out. He raised his hand but it went unseen as the sea began to weight him down. His limbs became cold lead, his mouth filled with water, his grasping hands now found only water.
He sank. He went inexorably down. Off through the darkening cold, he saw the roped straight line of the anchor on his father’s boat. It made a line linking heaven and earth, disappearing into the depths below.
Davy looked down. The roiling black shapes were growing closer.
Beneath his clothes, he slowly began to break free.
His arms became black oily things, squirming like wet thick ropes. Up under his armpits the pulp of their live flesh thumped against his arm sockets in little pulses, even as his torso lengthened, pulling his head and face into a thick, snakelike shape.
His legs and arms broke away, swimming from his clothing, which floated off.
The boiling, excited, living, vast plateau of eels was just below him.
He dropped into their midst.
Flat welcoming eyes turned to look at him.
And, somewhere far above, he heard a splash, then heard his mother’s voice assuring him that she would soon be there.
LETTERS FROM CAMP
By Al Sarrantonio
Dear Mom and Dad,
I still don’t know why you made me come to this dump for the summer. It looks like all the other summer camps I’ve been to, even if it is “super modern and computerized,” and I don’t see why I couldn’t go back to the one I went to last year instead of this “new” one. I had a lot of fun last summer, even if you did have to pay for all that stuff I smashed up and even if I did make the head counselor break his leg.
The head counselor here is a jerk, just like the other one was. As soon as we got off the hovercraft that brought us here, we had to go to the Big Tent for a “pep talk.” They made us sit through a slide show about all the things we’re going to do (yawn), and that wouldn’t have been so bad except that the head counselor, who’s a robot, kept scratching his metal head through the whole thing. I haven’t made any friends, and the place looks like it’s full of jerks. Tonight we didn’t have any hot water and the TV in my tent didn’t work.
Phooey on Camp Ultima. Can’t you still get me back in the other place?
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
Maybe this place isn’t so bad after all. They just about let us do whatever we want, and the kids are pretty wild. Today they split us up into “Pow-wow Groups,” but there aren’t really any rules or anything, and my group looks like it might be a good one. One of the guys in it looks like he might be okay. His name’s Ramon, and he’s from Brazil. He told me a lot of neat stories about things he did at home, setting houses on fire and things like that. We spent all day today hiding from our stupid robot counselor. He thought for sure we had run away and nearly blew a circuit until we finally showed up just in time for dinner.
The food stinks, but they did have some animal-type thing that we got to roast over a fire, and that tasted pretty good.
Tomorrow we go on our first field trip.
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
We had a pretty good time today, all things considered. We got up at six o’clock to go on our first hike, and everybody was pretty excited. There’s a lot of wild places here, and they’ve got it set up to look just like a prehistoric swamp. One kid said we’d probably see a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but nobody believed him. The robot counselors kept us all together as we set out through the marsh, and we saw a lot of neat things like vines dripping green goop and all kinds of frogs and toads. Me and Ramon started pulling the legs off frogs, but our counselor made us stop and anyway the frogs were all robots. We walked for about two hours and then stopped for lunch. Then we marched back again.
The only weird thing that happened was that when we got back and the counselors counted heads, they found that one kid was missing. They went out to look for him but couldn’t find anything, and the only thing they think might have happened is that he got lost in the bog somewhere. One kid said he thought he saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it was the same kid who’d been talking about them before, so nobody listed to him. The head counselor went around patting everybody on the shoulder, telling us not to worry since something always happens to one kid every year. But they haven’t found him yet.
Tonight we had a big food fight, and nobody even made us clean the place up.
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
Today we went out on another field trip, and another stupid kid got himself lost. They still haven’t found the first one, and some of the kids are talking about Tyrannosaurus Rex again. But this time we went hill climbing and I think the dope must have fallen off a cliff, because the hills are almost like small mountains and there are a lot of ledges on them.
After dinner tonight, which almost nobody ate because nobody felt like it, we sat around a campfire and told ghost stories. Somebody said they thought a lot of kids were going to disappear from here, and that made everybody laugh, in a scary kind of way. I was a little scared myself. It must have been the creepy shadows around the fire. The robot counselors keep telling everyone not to worry, but some of the kids—the ones who can’t take it—are starting to say they want to go home.
I don’t want to go home, though; this place is fun.
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
Today we went on another trip, to the far side of the island where they have a lake, and we had a good time and all (we threw one of the robot counselors into the lake but he didn’t sink), but when we got off the boat and everybody was counted we found out that eight kids were gone. One kid said he even saw his friend Harvey get grabbed by something ropy and black and pulled over the side. I’m almost ready to believe him. I don’t know if I like this place so much anymore. One more field trip like the one today and I think I’ll want to come home.
It’s not even fun wrecking stuff around here anymore.
~ * ~
Dear Mom and Dad,
Come and get me right away, I’m scared. Today the robot counselors tried to make us go on another day trip, but nobody wanted to go, so we stayed around the tents. But at the chow meeting tonight only twelve kids showed up. That means twenty more kids disappeared today. Nobody had any idea what happened to them, though I do know that a whole bunch of guys were playing outside the perimeter of the camp, tearing things down, so th
at might have had something to do with it. At this point I don’t care.
Just get me out of here!
~ * ~
Mom and Dad,
I think I’m the only kid left, and I don’t know if I can hide much longer. The head counselor tricked us into leaving the camp today, saying that somebody had seen a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He told us all to run through the rain forest at the north end of the camp, but when we ran into it, something horrible happened. I was with about five other kids, and as soon as we ran into the forest we heard a high-pitched screeching and a swishing sound the trees above us started to lower their branches. I saw four of the kids I was with get covered by green plastic-looking leaves, and then there was a gulping sound and the branches lifted and separated and there was nothing there. Ramon and I just managed to dodge out of the way, and we ran through the forest in between the trees and out the other side. We would have been safe for a while but just then the robot counselors broke through the forest behind us, leading a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We ran, but Ramon slipped and fell and the Tyrannosaurus Rex was suddenly there, looming over him with its dripping jaws and rows of sharp white teeth. Ramon took out his box of matches, but the dinosaur was on him then and I didn’t wait to see any more.
I ran all the way back to the postal computer terminal in the camp to get this letter out to you. Call the police! Call the army! I can’t hide forever, and I’m afraid that any second the Tyrannosaurus Rex will break in here and
~ * ~
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jameson:
Camp Ultima is happy to inform you of the successful completion of your son’s stay here, and we are therefore billing you for the balance of your payment at this time.
Camp Ultima is proud of its record of service to parents of difficult boys, and will strive in the future to continue to provide the very best in camp facilities.
May we take this opportunity to inform you that, due to the success of our first camp, we are planning to open a new facility for girls next summer.