“Oh, dear. If you could,” he says.
I edge up to him slowly. I don’t want to alarm him any further. I am surprised that someone as powerful as King Neptune could be hung up by something as shifting and dirty as a beach. “What happened?” I ask, while trying to lift his back.
“It’s embarrassing,” he says.
“You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. You are the king of the ocean.” He is a tremendous creature, like a whale. So large I could be crushed if a wave rolled him onto me. I am getting quite wet in my efforts to assist the King.
“No. It’s all right. I’ll tell you,” he says. “Broken heart.” King Neptune uses his arms to push toward the water. “There was a young girl,” he says. “Here, on the beach. I wanted to get closer to her. But as soon as I came in to the shallow water she stood up and ran away.”
“I’m sorry. That’s sad.” I don’t really think it is that sad. I wonder what an old man was doing chasing a young girl but I don’t say anything. “Do you know my father?” I ask him.
“What? A sailor?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry,” he says.
“No. It’s not your fault.”
King Neptune smiles like God. Like ninety-seven percent of the world’s water is in ocean. Like seventy-five percent of the world is covered with ocean. Like everything is his fault.
“What about Jude? Do you know him? He’s down here a lot,” I say.
“Yeah. I think so. He’s friends with that girl who has lost her mind? The one who thinks she’s a mermaid?”
I stop helping King Neptune get back into the water. I stand back from him while he continues talking. “What I can’t figure out,” he says, “is why she’d want to be a mermaid. All mermaids do is swim around and kill sailors. It’s not a great job.”
I stop helping him and when I start again I push hard. “I’m going to be a different kind of mermaid,” I tell the King.
He turns and looks at me. His eyes are just as pale as mine. “You don’t get a choice,” he says. “There’s only one kind of mermaid,” he says, and then, “Don’t forget that the ocean is full of everything except mercy.”
I shove his back so that he’ll awkwardly be forced to bend at the hips. He is an old man and I am certain that he won’t have the flexibility in his bones, that it will hurt him. I push so hard that the vertebrae in his back cut me.
Fuck King Neptune, I think, because growing up as a mermaid was a hard way to grow. When I was younger, other children would not befriend me, but instead they would say loud enough for me to hear, “That house, that house is rotten in and out. That girl, that girl’s got bugs in her hair.” I’d fake to pick a bug from my scalp and eat it. Delicious. When I was younger I’d go down to the water and each wave would ask in a thug accent, “You want I should take care of those kids? You want I should tell your father?”
But I’d let the children live. See, I have mercy.
I push and push King Neptune and then I give up. And then I can see clearly. King Neptune isn’t, and underneath my cut hands is a rock shaped like a king, a rock deposited on this beach when the ice age flowed home, beaten, in retreat.
FOR REFERENCE
The beach where the sea channel opens into the salt marsh is usually less crowded because the smell of sulfur can be strong when there is no wind. The mouth of the channel expands in a tongue so that it is uncrossable and children have drowned trying.
Jude has brought three blankets, and at the edge of the dune he uses one and a few pieces of driftwood to make us a tent. Jude has forgiven me. He didn’t have much choice. Neither one of us really has any other friends.
I fold my pants and sit cross-legged back down on the sand with a deep curve in my shoulders. I watch him unfurl the blanket. I am worn out by desire for him like a girl in some book.
He removes his shirt but sits directly in front of me tucking his arms across his chest because of his weird scars there, scars that look like someone once tried to write Jude a message on his torso with a razor blade, but then changed his or her mind and scribbled the letters out instead. They don’t look like gills. Jude resembles a very unhealthy version of Snow White, with black hair and red lips, like a Snow White after years spent drinking in bars. I put my toes on his back, right where his jeans end and walk each toe, one by one, up his vertebrae, as if he were a bony fish. No one else is on the beach. No one is here to see that he is with me. He could take full advantage of me if he only wanted to. When I sit up, I sit around him, one leg on either side of Jude’s. I touch his back with my stomach. I lift my hips until they touch him like I am a barnacle on his back. But after he exhales three times, I can feel it, he stands up and says, “Let’s go down to the water.” Maybe, I think, he is still angry about Neil.
Even if I added up all the things Jude’s name rhymes with and all the words I could spell with the letters of his name it would not measure up to him. A phrase like, “Calm as the bottom of the sea” comes closer. I would be a sloppy typesetter using the more economical “Jude” in lieu of, “Smooth night with stars for navigation.”
When I first met Jude he told me my skin was so pale that he thought he could see through it. “You’re like the acetate pages of an anatomy book,” he said. One page holds blood with oxygen, one page is blood without. “I can see what you had for lunch,” he said, and then poked me in the stomach, which made me feel awkward because he is fourteen years older than me and fourteen years younger than my mother, like he is a ball tossed between us. Sometimes he’ll be on my side, but sometimes one of them will remind the other of, And the red bird sings, I’ll be blue because you don’t want my love. I’ve never even heard of that song. But Jude has heard of everything. There is nothing he doesn’t have some knowledge of or thoughts on. Having Jude is like having a dictionary the size of a man beside me. I open him up and ask him all sorts of questions.
Until my grandfather finishes his dictionary, which probably won’t ever happen, the biggest dictionary in the world will still be the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s enormous. We don’t have one. It’s too expensive. Instead we have a condensed OED. The cover is as navy as a bruise. I looked up the word navy in it and found that this word shares a history with nausea and navel from the Sanskrit na or sna or snu, which means to bathe, as in the word snake. Unwound language can look like the white cord of unwound brain. It can be dangerous to unwind some words. Jude wasn’t in the Navy. He was in the Army and army comes from ar—to fit, to join, see art, see inertia, the dictionary says.
When Jude joined the Army he was twenty-six years old. He and two other new recruits spent their first nights away from home in a motel. Their assignment there was indefinite. On the first night Jude climbed up to the roof to see if the ocean was anywhere in sight and to get away from the other new recruits. The other recruits were both bodybuilders. They had a caliper to measure body fat and they seemed anxious to try it out on Jude. They called each other “privates” and laughed.
From the roof Jude saw the two soldiers leave the motel. In the next hour and a half they worked the eastern and the western street corners trying to find a girl who would let them buy her a drink. Jude heard them. He had a good bird’s-eye view to watch them after each woman walked away saying, “No, thank you,” or saying nothing. The privates would shoot at her, pretending their arms were machine gun arms.
On the roof, Jude said, before bed, he spread his wings and looked toward the edge.
Jude returned to the room not long after the soldiers had gotten in bed. “Where were you all night, man?” they asked.
“Upstairs,” he answered.
“Oh yeah?” said one.
“Cause you missed out. We met three squaws and brought them back here.”
“Yeah, we waited for you but after awhile we had to plow all three.”
“That’s right. Here. Here and once on the bed you are now sleeping in, señor.”
Jude did not tell them that he knew they were liar
s but hid it in his chest like a white light that kept him awake through the night. He felt, that very first night, that he had a made a mistake enlisting. He tried to sleep but remembered a bird, a crow he’d found when he was a kid. The bone that kept the crow’s wing attached to the crow’s body had been popped, and Jude couldn’t stand to kill the bird so he left it there. Eventually other animals ate it.
Then, Jude said when he told me about the other new recruits, “I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.” After the soldiers had fallen asleep Jude stood at the end of their beds, raised his arms like machine gun arms, and fired. See art. See inertia.
AT JUDE’S HOUSE
Scientists came to where we live to study us because we have the highest rate of alcoholism in the country. Higher, they said, than even the Indian reservations in the West, higher than Florida or Texas or Louisiana or all the other flat states.
The people who lived in Jude’s house before Jude did were alcoholics. They used to pour their bacon fat on the carpet in the kitchen just like it was a dirt floor, and where there is not bacon grease from some ancient and filthy breakfast there is the aroma of old cat urinations. Despite these odds Jude tries to make his house pleasant, or he tried to once, and the evidence of this effort is still visible, if barely. For example, he has spread a colorful serape across the back of his couch and tied back the kitchen curtain with a bandanna. He buys a new bath mat whenever the old one gets too dirty. And on the refrigerator he has taped a picture of me from a long time ago, when we first met. You can’t tell it’s me but it is. You can’t tell it’s me because I have my back to the camera, bending over the railing of a roadway bridge looking down into the water.
I pass the harbor on the way to Jude’s house and see that the boat he has been skippering has come in. It is starting to get dark. That means he is probably home drinking a beer. I scuff the salt and sand on the road while I walk. It makes the rubber soles of my shoes vibrate in a way that runs a tickle up the inside of my leg. I like to go to Jude’s house in the afternoon, because when Jude drinks his beer he will usually pat the sofa beside him so I’ll come sit down, and he’ll say something like, “I’ve been thinking about the volcanoes on the Pacific Rim,” or, “Once I met a man who was a professional card counter in Reno,” or, “One night, in a storm so beautiful, I considered jumping overboard,” and those are all stories I like to hear. He tells them and he makes the world seem enormous. The stories are a torch he is shoving into the dark corners, pushing the perimeters back farther and farther. It was Jude who told me about the great polar explorer. It was Jude who tore his photo from a magazine and pinned it to my wall so I’d know how big the world is.
A gray sedan filled with three boys and one girl I have known all my life drives past. One boy in the back rolls down his window and screams out to me, “Re, re, re, re, retard!” His stutter is so awful he was held back two grades in elementary school. The car slams on its brakes. I keep walking. It is my habit to ignore the people I have to share this town with. When I arrive at their rear tire, the girl, the driver, her name is Mary, peels out, spitting up road dust all over me so that grains of grit flood my mouth and teeth.
Jude is my only friend here apart from my mother and my grandfather. But Jude is my best friend and no one ever bothers me when I am with him. Still, I must be careful because Jude is two people. He is a tender sailor whose hands seem too rough and large for the delicate way he makes me feel watched over. But he keeps this version of himself locked behind his ribcage until he sees me. The rest of the time he is somebody else. He is a man who lives here and so fills his mouth with all the cheap and garbled words in this town.
I see his house and I start to run. I will tell him about the gray sedan and if I am lucky he will say, “Who was it? I’ll fucking kill them,” and I will believe him, because once when we were waiting at a traffic light in town with the windows rolled down, some kid in the car next to ours beaned me with an ice cube. It hit me right in the eye and I started screaming. I thought a bird had flown into me. Jude blocked the car with his truck. He pulled the driver out by his jacket collar and then I stopped looking. I hid my face in my hands. Still I could hear it. It sounded like rotten fruit. When Jude got back in the truck his hands were covered with blood. He didn’t say anything and we drove away.
I open Jude’s kitchen’s screen door and knock on the glass. I can’t see all the kitchen, just part of the table and part of the fridge. I cup my hands around my eyes and peer in. It is getting dark and he hasn’t turned on his lights yet, but through the doorway I can just make out the kitchen table. There is something wrong with it. It is shaking like a wounded animal or a crippled person. I think Jude is having a heart attack. I walk in. I stand staring, almost excited by the damage we are doing to ourselves. Jude has a woman on his kitchen table. Her skirt is up around her waist and her hair is long and feathered down her bare back. I try to leave but my body is heavy. I stumble so they hear me, and she screams. “Who is she? Who is she?” the woman is yelling while straightening herself up, lowering her hideous skirt. She starts to yell and slap Jude on his arms. He doesn’t bother to straighten himself up. I look at Jude and Jude looks at me. That’s what’s wrong with my eyes.
I turn and run. The drinking-problem scientists are everywhere outside collecting data, leaning against the house, listening through special scientific instruments, jotting notes on clipboards, changing shifts, going on coffee breaks. My eyes are killing me. I have trouble seeing and stumble and scream, “Get your science off me!” but it is just a tree and just its branches. I lean against the tree. I throw up on its roots and rest my head on its bark. I could use something to drink. “I could use something to drink,” I scream at the scientists. But there are no scientists, actually.
Jude told me that the polar explorer on my bedroom wall had been stopped by encroaching winter. The expedition was crushed by pack ice. Still, all the sailors survived over three years until their rescue came. They encountered horrors certainly, but perhaps they did not encounter the worst. The worst never has an account because the worst means that you are dead. I am not dead yet, though I feel so bad I might be close. I imagine that even if a sailor lived through the worst storm and spoke to the papers, the sailor might report, “The sea said ‘I get you’ and did not mean ‘get’ as in ‘understand’ like I initially thought.” The newspapers would translate what the sailor had said into, “The first wave snapped the pilothouse in two.”
The sailor would say, “Yes, the sheer wall of the wave was blue water, but the wall held still for a minute and watched us, gathering strength.” And the paper would translate it into, “The first shock of capsizing is the loss of up and then down.”
Sailor, “Her skin was so soft I thought I could touch her cold insides.” Paper, “One survivor is being held at 18 Winds Sanitarium for rehabilitation and questioning.”
Still many people enjoy living by the ocean because it produces gruesome stories exaggerated by gossip, whispers about how in winter it takes 2.5 seconds for a fisherman who has gone overboard hauling a heavy net to die. The water is that cold. Or how four teenagers were bored in March and decided to row out to an island. They could not get back in and had to spend the night in the open boat. In the morning only one girl was still alive so she strangled herself with the towline. Or how a troublemaker was smuggling black powder in his father’s boat for money. He blew it up by accident. The skin on his face melted in liquid drips from the fire and froze that way when he gave up the boat and jumped into the water, swimming for the shore and prison. Or how a young woman started her car at the top of a hill. She picked up as much speed as she could and broke through an iron rope fence so she and the car flew out over the cliff and landed three hundred feet below on the rocks, missing the ocean with her bad aim. Or how a man stood beside the water at night and imagined he could walk across the ocean’s floor and make his way out to the horizon line. And then he was no longer imagining it but doing it.
Down at the ocean I stare out at the horizon also. I see my grandmother Marcella walking on the line that makes her name. Mare. Ciel. Seasky. She is the horizon line. She’s as big and bright as a setting sun. I stare at her long enough so that she looks blue in an afterimage on my eye. I burn the sight of her into my pupils, and that way, I can keep her with me for a few burnt hours. “Take these numbers,” she says, and passes me a drawerful of lead numbers, depth readings she’s stolen from a nautical map. They are mostly shallow numbers. “There,” she says. “I removed all warning from the maps. Someone’s bound to wreck on the rocks, a sailor, yours, Jude.”
JOB
A woman who lives next door asked me to teach her French so she could get a summer job in one of the shops for Canadian tourists. My French is not that good, as I learned it from my grandmother who, by the time I came along, had forgotten a lot of her mother tongue. Still I knew enough to help her a little bit. Oui! Nous parlons français!
I told her voler oddly enough means both to fly and to steal in French. Faites attention those who voler. I told her to say, Nous sommes ouvert demain. She said, Nous sommes ouvert deux mains. Like a dissection. She got the job and when I see her in there she usually comes out to tell me, “Mercy! Mercy!”
I was not baptized until I was eight. All those years, I guess I would have gone to hell if I’d died. Mercy. I considered this and at the ceremony I crossed myself over and over. Finally the quiet priest asked me to stop. He spilled holy water on my dress on purpose.
The Seas Page 5