My anger at her, I’ll freely admit, was misguided, as was Millie’s impromptu bid to achieve our cost-saving measure. She loomed over the unblinking matriarch and went to grab the necklace chain, announcing, “Grandma Fiona, I think you’re right. That whoozis isn’t doing you any good. Let’s not waste money on it.”
Fiona came to alarming life, clutching at the plastic pendant with animal ferocity. “This is my birthright!” she bawled, glaring white heat at us, the most engaged with anybody she’d been all summer. “This goes home with me!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I exploded, as if at a willfully oppositional child. Millie lurched back from the both of us, unprepared for the fireworks she’d sparked. “Yes or no, are you really out of it or would you be able to use your damn whoozis if you had to?”
“You’re not one of us! You’re not entitled! Get out of my purview, you and your lousy groundling wife!” Huh? To what exactly, besides my vitriol, was Fiona responding? What words had she hallucinated issuing from my mouth?
“Come on,” my wife urged, “if Fiona wants quiet time, we can accommodate her.” Millie reached out to take my arm till something in my face stopped her. I was pissed off, yes, but I don’t remember feeling as formidable as all that. And I did oblige her.
“Ugly little tadpoles!” Fiona snarled at us. “Begone!” Those few steps to the doorway lowered my blood pressure appreciably, and I sighed in resignation at Fiona sitting up straight, supercharged with indignation, a queenly degree of resolve suffusing her ruddy countenance. How sad that derangement alone had the power to revitalize her.
At noon she hadn’t budged, marble-statue focus intact, ignoring cold oatmeal and coffee and me. Incredibly, the pathetic Party Shop tiara designating Fiona a “Birthday Babe” didn’t undercut her regality. After lunch, from the study where I wrote checks for utilities, I overheard arrivals of a nurse’s aide and of a lesion-care specialist. They didn’t seek me out, so Millie must have fielded their complaints about Fiona’s noncompliance. The wife, in any event, was hurling fed-up invective, muffled by the intervening walls, at 1:40 p.m.; Grandma made no audible reply.
Mid-afternoon, Millie barged into the walk-in closet where I was stuffing Fiona’s more mildewy vintage gowns into garbage bags, and history repeated itself, i.e., the shock in store wasn’t the one we’d expected. Fiona hadn’t simply died at the table while sticking to her inscrutable guns, no, she’d disappeared from the house altogether.
How literal a disappearance was this? The walker was still beside the breakfast-nook chair. The emergency necklace was bunched up on the walker’s plastic shelf. The tiara she’d kept. For her to surrender her fiercely defended “birthright” was perplexing; clinging to the chintzy cardboard headgear was poignant. I was also more heartsick about her than anticipated, considering our decayed relations, but not heartsick enough to stall the wheels spinning between my ears, buzzing that if Fiona wasn’t indoors, she had to be outside, absurd, yes, but true.
I lit out back and toward the ocean as if no other direction existed, Millie at my heels. I overlooked her insolence in shouting, “What makes you so sure she went this way?” Nor did I ponder why that was insolent, or why my certainty grew at beholding at daytime a full moon, low above the seaward horizon, whitish gold like a medallion. Both of us had plainly suspended disbelief in Fiona covering this much distance, even if on all fours.
We scrambled across hard-packed sand rootbound by coarse, shin-high grass, down the zigzag path among compact dunes, and onto broad pungent flats, soon after ebbtide. Millie wisely forbore harping on the absence of evidence Fiona had preceded us. Maybe the geriatric husk was airborne on westerly gusts? Ahead, the berm became piebald with smooth, flat outcrops of bluish stone. A tidal pool in one of these was minutes from inundation by advancing wavelets.
At first I presumed its surface mirrored the 14-karat moon, but no, genuine gold shone below, entangled by a clump of ultrafine seaweed, which was actually gray bouffant. And embedded within, sodden shiny cardboard established that Fiona had indeed been here and had sported a hefty wig, night and day, for years. “What the hell,” muttered Millie, gawking into the pool. I bet she too was mystified that we’d never caught the scent of an unwashed hairpiece. Or had Fiona shed a portion of her tadpole phase, in favor of new flesh incompatible with a scalp?
I was of two minds about this notion, which struck me equally as fair interpretation and obtrusive lunacy. My wife, the diehard pragmatist, was kneeling poolside and gingerly teasing submerged gold from the sopping hair with one stalwart finger. She sprang up with the moray pendant on its gleaming chain, wagging it dry between her thumb and forefinger, her grin an unflattering cross of triumph and avarice. Fiona, in confusion, haste, or excitement, must have accidentally forsaken the necklace along with the coiffure that had ingeniously concealed it.
I was glad to have the artifact safe, but more compelling was the jumble of Fiona’s flannel housedress and sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, some yards farther out, where the tide had risen so that each incoming ripple floated them for a second. The sea, from which she’d never strayed beyond earshot, had beckoned irresistibly, might well have dissolved her save for these nonbodily vestiges.
I soaked my loafers sloshing over for a closer look, though I shied from touching her clothes, even with my foot. “Jesus,” Millie murmured, slipping her free hand in mine. “Fiona wanted to die pretty badly, didn’t she?” Her other hand, I noted, was in her blouse pocket, firmly gripping the necklace.
These grasping petty groundlings, I found myself brooding, and then no less enigmatically I blurted, “Or she wanted so badly to live, and she’s gone to be rejuvenated.”
Millie had the gall to lean in and sniff my breath. I couldn’t decide if she were joking, and maybe she couldn’t either. I did know I was almost irritated enough to say something regrettable. Often nowadays, I can only stare askance at her and debate whether she and I aren’t breeds apart.
It was just as well our cell phones were in the house. To babble at 911 while contemplating the earthly last of Fiona would have felt irreverent, disrespectful. Millie trotted off to summon the authorities and left me on guard duty. They pulled in a minute after I dragged the garments to the lip of the tidal pool to prevent them washing away. They formed a dam protecting the wig, which I still refused to handle.
Luckily for Millie and me, an exercise therapist had parked by the saltbox at the right moment to witness us dashing toward the beach, supporting our story of Fiona’s incredible “death march,” helping to eliminate us as “persons of interest.” The cops could have been nicer searching the property for signs of foul play; to this day, Fiona’s body remains MIA.
The brooch and bracelet remain missing, too, and we’ve offered Mr. Crocker first-refusal privileges on them via voicemail invitations to come ransack the place. We suspect the ambiguity of her parting spooks him out of returning our calls.
The everyday side of me is sorry for poor, batty Fiona, expending a super-human effort to drown herself. That side of me is reconciled to a marriage that could be worse, and waits with patient optimism for the probate court to award us the house and assets. That side is despondent solely because it looked forward to a glorious head of nonagenarian hair, but Fiona’s wig bodes otherwise.
Another nascent side of me relishes pernicious fantasies that Fiona waded to freedom and transformation, envies whatever she’s become, has coined the trope “she’s gone to Doggerland.” We were fools to dream that we knew Fiona due to photos and ephemera that definitely couldn’t begin to reconstruct her total self. And what might it portend, when that nascent side of me can’t go bald soon enough? The house and assets may prove the least of my inheritance.
Though Jonathan Thomas is not intimately familiar with Cape Ann and environs, his folks did rent a cottage one week every summer in Chatham on Cape Cod, where he early acquired a wariness, if not paranoia, about the mysteries of the deep, based partly on an unfortunate taste fo
r monster movies (Attack of the Crab Monsters, Giant Behemoth, etc.). Nowadays, of course, he can easily laugh off the likelihood of giant crab claws skewering the motorboat as he and his dad fished for flounder in the bay. Dreams of Ys and Other Invisible Worlds (Hippocampus Press, 2015) is his latest.
THE SCENT OF THE HAMMER AND THE FEATHER
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
The Sea is full of legends, and wounds, and lies…
and errors.
And so are men.
The cadences of the cold blue deeps are energized by vigorous powers, and the labors and secrets of ancient consciousness. As they sail over them, having crawled from the dust of their ruin-scented harbors in their small wild boats, men hold reels in their hands, and often, fear in their hearts.
On a warm summer night near Innsmouth, Massachusetts, it was not the swelled thumping of fear that rolled across the sea and thundered across the water from the deck of the yacht. It was the bass-heavy rhythms of today’s sexmusic creating waves of desire. It spoke of lovegames and vogue’s NOW. Meshed among the riffs of napalm and big fun, the technicolor laughter of youth stretching their desire was wide open.
One hundred yards from the floating party, something breached. Heard laughter. Turned and faced the simian zeal. The fire of things not tainted with salt and the icy depths below Devil Reef contacted the eyes of the aquatic onlooker.
A beer bottle, not-so-carelessly cast overboard, floated by, and with it came human odors.
Perfume. Sweat.
Cigarette smoke.
Silly and unashamed drifted from the 90-foot yacht with other scents and sights of the land creatures. Dormant things within Oth’rnya-l’yi were reanimated as Danny Eliot, the human-name he carried decades ago, stared and listened to the incestuous urges of humanity.
Human. His thoughts played with the word he had not clutched in decades. Sections and scraps of evicted horizons flickered; BBBRRROOOOM was the baptism of fire on the Huntley-Brinkley Report every night as the true cost of The Nam came home in body bags; the good vibrations of sunshine-gurus couldn’t avoid the strangulation of the Stones’ satanic meltdown; hotdogs and Coke at the Friday night football pep-rally; a girl, he knew, watched, liked, wanted to ask out, all in blue, exiting her father’s Fleetwood Brougham at a formal high school dance; EXIT Bobby and Dr. King.
College seniors. Fashionably pretty. Moneyed-upbringings appraised with social efficiency and the spiders of hidden-away and unlaced hungers, and what she might offer after the Gray Goose or what he could render if his Daddy hadn’t (temporarily) snatched the AMEX, that’s what the sunshine-and-sex weekenders on the boat brought. They had weed and wine, and beer, and Dad’s well-stocked bar below. Needing “something that’s going to tighten it up, something fueled by the devil’s tantrums” and the heft of spiced heat, they’d brought their emotionally-ornamented music of sex and drugs and lies-money-whim. Warm summer night far from skeletons and symbols and the cobwebs spun by noble bearing, they wore swimsuits and, without a thought for fair share, were ready for the weekend.
Dad’s boat was loaded for the party and the blisterless weren’t wasting time getting it started. Phil Reed bitched about the only-half-a-pie moon as he tossed another beer bottle overboard. Jonathan Randall Morris III told him the only moon he needed was attached to Ally, just pick top or bottom, back or “that frontage.” Ally shook the abundance her bikini top was trying to contain and didn’t quite harmonize with Lady Gaga’s “Lovegame” as she sang at Phil’s dose of spice.
The sounds of the festivities stretched out over the calm sea.
Mortal clay, bellies acclimated to expressions of street and concrete hive, he’d been there. Chunks of Then were rising. Yesterday and hopes of what might come. Thoughts of what to have for dinner and moments where you were ready to sail independently. All the oft-repeated expressions of self, I think/”I matter. I do”/I am. Human reverberations, slices and shadows and stairways, colors and cuts, glimmering, out of chances to bargain with forever, stained him.
Fools.
He was once human—pink and weak and small, afraid of the thing in his mirror, once a fool, friendless, searching for ease and access. He wanted to matter, wanted to matter to a girl with soft eyes and a warm smile.
In high school, Mallory’s locker was two to the right of his. She looked at him. Didn’t smile. Danny Eliot didn’t know if he was going to say something. He wanted to, if he could figure out what you were supposed to (or allowed to) say to a girl you liked, or how to. Didn’t know anything other than he had feelings for her. Liked her a lot.
Lady Gaga wanted to play another love game. Ally danced, purred, “I want it bad“.
Love. Games. Only fools.
He was uncomfortable with the memory of wanting it bad. Always was, but then when he was a creature of solid ground, a snail on the dung of grave, all the times before when her face appeared in his thoughts, they were about him and her, but this time was about having a human feeling.
Human.
It was the mirror of a madman he hadn’t looked in for a very long time. The eyes he saw in it—the bitter, frightened outsider, the expression—they were unnatural, foreign. They had a cannibal quality.
Interaction. With girls. With peers. That felt as foreign then, as what looking at the kids on the boat did now.
There but for fortune.
Did a poet write that? Eliot played with names of poets he liked in school. When Dylan popped into his head, he thought it might have been a line in a song? Maybe it was a feeling he latched on to after reading Essays on Alienation or Western Ideas That Shaped Our Minds? He remembered owning and reading the paperbacks, but little else. Human, not alien, what if he’d waited? What if the young steppenwolf he was had found a way to wear the skin, to deal with the froth and frenzy and get beyond the bouts of anxiety that left him sweating in disarray? Could chance or necessity have led him to discover magic in the human theater?
Does pain stop for a man? Are there escapes, roads where the laughter and the girls offering smiles are real, possible? Do the embarrassments fade? Could I have buried them?
The force of mental pictures—recollections, blurred bits and snippets, singing, yelling, took him. Like a thing completely formed of water, he moved in the pressure but could not find a handhold.
Ally bounced, shifted a tanned hip, pressed it to Phil’s crotch. “Little. Love. Games.”
Phil’s pleasure sprayed the stage. “Let’s play some!”
Two of the young women tittered, but did not back away as their beaus lapped at thoughts of feasting. “Yeah. Love—for everybody.”
Everybody. Was I ever part of that collective?
High school hallways, taunted, against the wall, pierced. Self-hip cafeteria cliques.
Football games.
Mallory was a cheerleader. The short white skirt, crisp against firm thighs. The red sweater, hugging her gentle curves, accenting his desires. She did cartwheels on the other side of the gymnasium—
Breathless. He’d stare
…covet, shiver, in pain, with pleasure, his darkness crying and screaming,
then run—
If he hadn’t run, found his way here with his ancestors, what then? If he’d found a way to climb over his inhibitions, and the damnation of his unworthiness, what elements of the life he was observing on the yacht would he have encountered?
Standing apart from the uncorked celebrants, the profile of a girl smoking a cigarette held him. Thick dark tresses and round breasts, uncovered legs— dancer’s or cheerleader’s legs, he strained to see the girl.
She had Mallory’s legs, and her face—those cheekbones—bore a slight familial resemblance; seen together on a street, they might be viewed as cousins. Her dark hair in the breeze…All of her standing there, standing apart. Were her thoughts bent by the currents of a sensual medicine?
Inching closer. Ingesting.
Could Danny have stood somewhere and looked across a room, in a bar or at a party
, maybe near the bandstand in Central Park, and seen Mallory standing there alone, waiting to dance, or for someone to talk to? Maybe waiting for him? Maybe Mallory’s face, the face with the soft dark eyes he believed could speak with a thousand voices, would have held a smile for him?
Waves.
Water.
Mallory. Deep in a name no longer buried, an ocean to drown in.
Memory becoming—
Danny moved closer to the boat. He needed to see this girl better. Need to touch the distinctiveness of things he’d given up.
How?
He’d left all of sixteen and the scene, and complications, even those he’d been unable to touch, behind. Bolted, hell-spawned bats couldn’t have kept pace. Traded inept for immortal, to serve Her Glory, to leave the dilemmas of man, flee the politics of being-in-the-world that bit and bit and chewed the bone and tissue of human.
Beyond it.
Altered.
Immortal.
I will not die.
But Danny Eliot did. Most of him. At sixteen, he traded the possibility he couldn’t wait for, couldn’t believe he could clutch, to be the hands of Ancient Glory for the salt, the life, and the towers of the city below Devil Reef.
The watery concerns of the elders below cared not for this or any other human-centric vortex, yet something in the freedom, in the stew of desire swaying on the deck of the boat, brushed Oth’rnya-l’yi when he breached. The bridgewords of youth touched his hidden scars. All he contained before wakening to Her Glory hurt. Hurt. Those steel-tipped struggles, each a riot.
Longing, old songs on the mind’s radio, the sour cream of desire, the routes of despair. Four decades free of confinement and its trembling arpeggios of stormy-questions found their way back, took center stage in this theater of calm water.
The extraordinary compass of Her Glory Mother Hydra’s countenance slipped away. The lessons he received and instantly accepted from Pht’thyal’yi, vanished, beyond recovery. Oth’rnya-l’yi, the eternity he’d become, was running.
Stumbling.
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