by CJ Brightley
“I wish it would stick, but it never does,” Tammy murmured, sprinkling a few drops on her T-shirt. Of course they just made wet blotches.
“You looking for Small Bill?” It was Lindie Ovey, at the window of the Oveys’ kitchen. She’s between Small Bill and Jenya in age, but she always fishes and swims with her big sister and the other older kids.
“Is he up?” I asked.
“I’m here!” he said, sticking his head into the window next to Lindie. Then he clambered onto the sill and slipped down onto the veranda.
“There’s a door, you know!” Lindie said.
“But this is faster!” he called back, splashing into the water.
“Don’t you have any books or papers to bring to school today?” Tammy asked him, her hands on her hips and her voice scoldy, a mini-version of Ma. “And what about a lunch? You better get it, or you’ll be hungry.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Small Bill, grinning. He’s such a good sport. He always goes along with Tammy’s bossing. He’d make a good big brother.
“Here you go, showoff,” said Lindie, dropping Small Bill his backpack out the window. He caught it.
“You want to walk with us too?” I asked Lindie, afraid that maybe this one time she might say yes, but she shook her head.
“Nuh-uh, y’all are gonna get there way too early,” she said. “I’m waiting for Daisy and Fairchance.”
“Why did you come so early?” Small Bill asked me, after we’d put a little distance between us and his house.
I told him about the letter from the prison. His grin faded.
“I took the envelope it came in,” I said. “It has the address of the prison on it.” I pulled it out of my pocket to show him. “After school I’m going to the library and find out how to get there. You can do it on the computer. Tell it where you are and where you want to go, and it’ll give you directions. Want to come?”
Small Bill doesn’t know about all the stuff you can do in the library. I don’t think he’s been there since we went with our school class to get library cards, back when we were Tammy’s age, but he said yes. Just dry-land luck that it was the mean librarian at the checkout desk today instead of the nice one. She frowned when me and him and Tammy came in and frowned even harder when I signed up for the computer.
“You sure you know how to use that?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. The other librarian showed me,” I said.
“Game sites and chat sites are blocked, you know,” she said.
“I’m going to make a map,” I said.
She followed us to the computer work station and stood by, watching. There was no way I was going to take out that prison envelope with her hovering there, so I typed in Aunt Brenda’s address instead, and the address of our school, and a blue line appeared on the screen—a route between those two places. Still she wouldn’t leave. I tried to think of another dry-land place I could ask the computer to find. While I was still thinking, the phone rang at the checkout desk, and the librarian had to go answer it—though she kept looking at us over her shoulder, like she was afraid we might break the computer if she didn’t keep her eye on us.
I put in the prison’s address, and a long, long line appeared, from Sandy Neck west and north, across two state lines and over to where the prison is. I copied the route onto the back of the letter, along with the name of each town the blue line went through. The librarian made us show her our backpacks before she let us leave. It’s a good thing our pens and pencils didn’t match the library’s ones, or she’d probably of said we swiped them.
“I hate that place,” said Small Bill.
“The other librarian’s different,” I said. “She helped me find Kaya’s country on a map, and she showed me how to find pictures of it.”
Outside, the hot, damp air pressed against our arms and legs as close as the sea does, when we’re swimming. Up here, we’re air fish. I swung my arms a little, to make a bit of breeze.
“Can we get a Coke?” Tammy asked as we passed the gas station, where a guy was unloading a pallet of Coke from a giant Coca-Cola trailer truck.
I told her I didn’t have no money, but she opened up her butterfly change purse to show me two dollar bills.
“Aunt Brenda gave me money, last time we visited,” she said.
Aunt Brenda gave her the change purse too, last Christmas. Aunt Brenda and Uncle Lew always fuss over Tammy, what with her being sickly and also looking a lot like Ma’s side of the family. Me and Jiminy take after Dad and Gran, but Tammy’s practically as pale as Mr. Winterhull.
“Well okay, then, if that’s what you want to spend it on,” I said. “Want me to buy it for you?”
She shook her head.
“I want to do it myself!” And she marched into the gas station store like Sabelle Morning off to face the revenue agents.
The man who’s normally behind the counter was out front chatting with the Coke delivery man. First they talked about car racing, and then about fixing up cars, and then about road conditions, and where the delivery guy was going next.
“Creole Creek,” he said, “then Antioch, ‘n after that—”
“Hey, ain’t those places on your map?” asked Small Bill. “He must be taking the same road.”
He was right. Those were the names of the first two towns on my list.
The delivery guy wheeled his handcart into the gas station store, leaving the half-empty pallet beside the open rear of the trailer. I peeked in. Along one wall were pallets loaded with crates of Coke, and along the other were stacks of empty pallets and crates. It would be so easy to hide in there.
I could feel my heartbeat speeding up. Calm down, heart. I took a couple of deep breaths.
Sabelle Morning would do it. She’d do it in an instant, to rescue one of her crew. She’s practically made of bravery. And Vaillant too. His name means brave, and there wasn’t a monster on sea or land he wouldn’t face down. And what about Kaya. She don’t even have a choice about being brave. She has to be, whether she likes it or not.
I can be brave too. I clenched my teeth, to keep the bravery in, and climbed into the trailer.
“Em! What’re you doing?” Small Bill shot a glance at the door of the gas station store, but the delivery man was still inside.
“I’m gonna ride to see Jiminy. I’ll go as far as Antioch and get out there, and then I’ll … I’ll find another ride.” I was trying to shove one of the loaded pallets a little ways away from the wall of the trailer, to make a hiding spot, but it was too heavy.
“Help me?”
Small Bill grimaced, but he followed me into the trailer. “You don’t want to do this,” Small Bill said, even as he helped me with my pushing. “You’ll end up stranded in deep dry land.
“I ain’t afraid of dry land,” I said, rubbing the palms of my hands from my eyebrows to my scalp to push the sweat away from my eyes.
The door of the gas station store clanged shut after Tammy, who emerged holding a can of Coke.
“Tammy!” I whisper-shouted.
Her eyes got wide when she realized where I was calling from, and she shook her head, but I beckoned hard, and Small Bill leaned out of the end of the truck to give her a hand up.
“I don’t like it in here,” she said in a quavering voice, eyes on the stacked pallets and dark walls of the trailer. “Why are we in here?”
“I’m going to see Jiminy. You heard what Dad said yesterday. He got beat up. He needs us. Want to come?”
“No! And I don’t want you to go either. You’ll get in trouble! Please can we get down and go home?” She was silhouetted against the bright square of afternoon light at the open end of the trailer, standing between the full pallets on our side and the empty ones on the far wall, when somebody called.
“Tammy! What’re you doing in there? Where’s your sister? Come out of there!”
It was Cody, in the Mermaid’s Hands truck—Mr. Tiptoe’s truck—that we all use. He’d just pulled in at the pumps.
Of course it would be right then that the delivery man came out, and of course he saw Tammy.
“What the? Get out of there!”
His language got a lot more colorful as he strode over.
Me and Small Bill slid out from behind the pallet, and the three of us climbed down. The delivery man was pointing his finger at us, jab jab, like a stick, and saying things like theft and vandalism and police, and I felt panic rising up in me, because it looked like Tammy was right, and my bright idea was going to get us all in big trouble. Big unfair trouble! We weren’t stealing nothing or breaking nothing!
“Whoa, slow down,” Cody said, shutting the door of Mr. Tiptoe’s truck and walking over as loose and easy as could be, his whole body saying, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, there’s no problem here. The delivery man looked like he was getting ready to give Cody an earful, but Cody spoke first—to Tammy.
“You making mischief again?” he said, smiling, like the two of them had a secret joke. Tammy looked confused. She never makes mischief. Her lips were trembling: I could tell she was about to say No it wasn’t me, but—Cody’s smile. It was begging a return smile from her.
“I apologize for all this, sir,” said Cody, “but I’m sure my little neighbor here just got some wild idea in her head about exploring, and then the bigger two went along with it. Nobody can say no to that face!”
To Tammy he said, “You planning a stowaway adventure? Think how worried your parents would be! And Mr. Coca-Cola here would’ve had a heart attack next time he opened up the doors of his truck.”
Tammy looked at him in wonder. She’s used to being delicate Tammy, and Tammy-who-needs-to-rest, and remember-to-wait-for-Tammy, and sometimes Tammy-the-mermaid, but Cody was giving her a whole different kind of story. Small Bill’s mouth was quirking upward at the thought of Tammy the mastermind. Even the delivery man was smiling a little.
That Cody’s pretty smart. Once he got Mr. Coca-Cola looking at tiny, cute Tammy, with her good hair and big eyes and freckles, how could the man stay mad? Cody talked to him a few more minutes, asking him about where he was from and if he had any kids, and got him telling stories about his four-year-old son, and by the end him and Cody were practically best buddies.
Mr. Coca-Cola closed up the back of the trailer, and me and Small Bill and Tammy piled into the Mermaid’s Hands truck, which Cody drove to the Sandy Neck town parking lot, where it stays. Cody had been on a shopping run for Mermaid’s Hands, buying T-shirts for everyone. Mrs. Tiptoe and Mrs. Ovey will sort out who needs what and pass them round. They usually dye the ones for us kids, tan and pink, from Spanish moss and poke berries. It’s like we’re all part of the same club, the Mermaid’s Hands club.
“It’s handy I ran into you,” he said. “You can help me carry them back.” So we each took an armful of T-shirts.
“Why in the world were you up in that truck?” Cody asked presently, as we squelched across the mudflats. He frowned at me and Small Bill. “You two should know better.” Then, frowning deeper, “You weren’t trying to run away, were you?”
“Run away to dry land? Not ever!” Small Bill said, practically shuddering.
“I was thinking more of Em,” he said.
What the heck? Why me? Like I would run away from Mermaid’s Hands!
Is it because of Ma? Does he see her keeping to herself and clinging to some dry-land ways and maybe think I’m that way too? I’m the one who knows when the fish are coming, I wanted to shout. Just ask Snowy.
“No!” I said. “I was—”
I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t say I was trying to visit Jiminy, because what if Jiminy’s the reason he thinks I might want to run away? Some people think bad things are catching. Your brother steals stuff, so maybe you might could be a runaway.
“—just … wanting an adventure, I guess?” I finished. It was a weak story. “I wanted to see … I wanted …”
But I couldn’t say about wanting to be brave either.
“Didn’t you ever just want to see something new?” I asked. “It don’t have to be because you want to run away. You know what I mean? Like you coming to Mermaid’s Hands.”
“If I grew up in Mermaid’s Hands, I’d never look elsewhere,” he said with feeling. “You’ve got a thousand lifetimes of worlds to explore right here.” He nodded out at the horizon and the fringed edges of Foul Point over on our left. There was a whir of wings out that way as a handful of pelicans took flight.
Small Bill nodded emphatically. “That’s the truth.”
I ground my heels into the mud in irritation. I’m pretty sure I love Mermaid’s Hands as much as y’all do, even if I ain’t testifying to it, I thought. But at least Small Bill didn’t tell about Jiminy. That’s something.
“There’s some good things on dry land too,” Tammy remarked. I could practically see her remembering all our cousins’ old toys in Aunt Brenda’s house.
Visiting dry-land relatives. Maybe Cody thinks that makes us not quite real seachildren, too. Most folks who get sung into Mermaid’s Hands leave dry land behind them. In fact, I can’t think of any other kid in Mermaid’s Hands who spends much time on dry land, outside of school. Maybe we really aren’t quite real seachildren. The thought made me want to punch somebody.
But then Cody surprised me.
“You bet there are good things on dry land. Ice cream’s pretty good. And Coke’s pretty good,” said Cody. “Can I have a sip?”
Tammy grinned and nodded. She stayed grinning as he took a swig from the can, appreciated it loudly and dramatically, and gave it back to her.
“Delicious! Yep, ice cream and Coke. That’s two good things that dry land has.”
Tammy giggled, and I smiled a little too. That Cody! He really does know just the right thing to say.
September 4 (Em’s diary)
I am in big trouble. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, so I might as well just sit here and write this until they kick me out.
This morning, Gran was getting ready to go out with Auntie Chicoree and Granny Ikaho to cut cordgrass for repairing the thatch part of the roof.
“Everybody’s up on their roofs these days,” I said. “Clara said her ma and dad replaced all their thatch, and yesterday I saw Mr. Winterhull hammering down nails on their kitchen roof.”
“Next storm’s brewing out in the Caribbean,” Gran said. “What letter are we up to now? H? This one’s a dawdler, so it’s getting big. Seems likely to come our way, so we’re making sure we’re snug.”
“Can I help?”
“Course you can, once you get back from school. I’m not climbing up there.”
“Can I stay home and help?”
Gran put down the twine she was rolling and fixed me with a raised-eyebrow look.
“Whyever would you ask to do that? You like school, don’t you? Getting essays in books and things?”
She meant my essay in the Kids Speak book. Ma and Dad and Gran still think it’s a big deal.
“Everybody in class got their essay in that book,” I muttered.
“What’s that now?”
“You’d let Wade come along, if you were at Auntie Chicoree’s, and Wade asked,” I said, louder. Tropical Storm Unfair was gaining strength inside me.
“Auntie Chicoree’s not as fussy about school as your mama is.”
“School ain’t optional, contrary to what some folks seem to think,” Ma said, handing me and Tammy our lunches. “And not everything that’s useful to know can be learned on the water.”
Hurricane Unfair, with sustained winds of 110 miles a hour, just about knocked me down at that point. Thanks to Ma, someone like Cody takes me for a runaway, and thanks to Ma, I don’t even get the chance any other seachild would get to prove my loyalty to Mermaid’s Hands.
“Make sure you scrape those,” Ma added as I stacked Tammy’s unfinished bowl of fried jumblefish and pickleweed in mine. And there above the bait bin, peeking out from among the bills which Ma keeps propped between
the thyme and the jar of pennies on the windowsill, was the letter from the prison. I slid it free and read it.
“Ma, it says multiple fractures! It says clavicle, scapula, and ribs. What bones are clavicle and scapula? And it says lacerations and loss of blood. It sounds real bad! We should go see him!”
“That wasn’t addressed to you; you shouldn’t read other people’s mail!” Ma said, snatching the letter out of my hand.
“But are we going to go see him?”
Ma squinched her forehead between her two hands.
“Sometime, maybe, Em. Not today or tomorrow; we have other things to worry about just now. You get yourself on to school.”
I imagined Jiminy laid up in a hospital bed with broken bones. But just for a few days, the letter said. What then, back in a cell? Still hurting? And nothing but silence from the folks that are supposed to care about him.
Before the morning announcements came on at school, I went up to Ms. Tennant’s desk, because I know she keeps a dictionary on it, next to the attendance book, and I wanted to find out which bones Jiminy broke. There were a bunch of folders on top of it, though, and Ms. Tennant came into the classroom just as I was setting them to one side to get at the dictionary.
“What do you think you’re doing there! Get your hands away from my purse!”
I didn’t even see her stupid purse there, and I said so, which got me sent to the principal’s office. Mr. Barnes told me stealing is a crime and talking back is rude and I needed to return anything I took and apologize to Ms. Tennant.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Ms. Tennant, who was standing there with her arms crossed and her stingy lips shaved down to just an angry line. I fixed my eyes on her shoes because I was seething mad, and I was afraid I might burn holes in her face if I looked her in the eye. “I didn’t take nothing, though. I just wanted to check the dictionary.”
Mr. Dubois came into Mr. Barnes’s office just then. Mr. Dubois is the other seventh grade teacher. Jiminy had him, when Jiminy was my age.
“Checking the dictionary—I approve,” he said with a smile. “What were you looking up?”