Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “The eel?” He nodded. Beside us, Marse’s little boat rocked on the waves, its lines tautening and slackening. “Yes,” I said.

  Dennis jumped up and stepped onto the big boat—this was his father’s boat, a twenty-one-foot Chris Craft Cavalier with a lapstrake hull—then returned with fins and masks and snorkels. “Marse?” he said, holding out the gear.

  She sat up on her elbows and propped her sunglasses on her head. Dennis’s eyes slid over her long body. She shook her head. “Fish freak me out.”

  Dennis handed me the mask and snorkel. “Try these,” he said. I pulled the mask over my dry hair, and Dennis came forward to adjust the fit. I watched him through the binocular lenses, and when he was finished, he tugged it off. “All set,” he said. “Get wet before you put it on.” He laid his hands on my shoulders for a brief moment, then withdrew them. I looked down at the water, at the flash of porcelain beneath the surface. I curled my toes over the lip of the dock, then pushed off.

  The water felt like soft warm fabric. Dennis crouched and I swam until I was underneath him, several feet from the toilet bowl. He handed me the mask and snorkel and I pulled them on and tested the suction. Water beaded on the lenses and slid off. I fitted the snorkel to my mouth and blew out, then let it dangle from its loop in the mask. Dennis slid onto his stomach, his face over the water. His shoulders, spotted with watery freckles, flexed as he gestured below. “It’s pretty harmless, don’t be afraid,” he said. “Don’t get too close, though, and don’t—do not—put your hand inside the bowl.”

  I swallowed a mouthful of seawater and coughed. “Why would I put my hand inside the bowl?”

  “Just swim on by, like you’re minding your own business.” There was the question of the eel’s intelligence. I watched the bowl through the water, keeping my arms and legs clear. I would learn, months later, that electric eels can discharge as much as six hundred volts of electricity—enough to kill a horse. “Do you want me to get in?” said Dennis.

  “Stay there,” I said. I backed away from the dock, kicking, then turned and dove. Under the dock, the world was dim and calm. My body swayed with the current. I could see, but I couldn’t see far. I did not know, then, that there was a difference between the tidal current that tugged at my legs and the surface current, wind-driven, that lifted my hair from my neck and dropped it again. The sandy seafloor sloped toward the house, textured with a thousand vulnerable peaks, the way dunes texture a beach. By nighttime the seafloor would be wholly rearranged, each peak erased and re-formed in mirror image.

  A school of needlefish, bright as new nickels, flashed by. I’d traveled several yards from the dock. Dennis stared down at me, his arms across his chest. I dove deep enough to fill my snorkel with water and kicked toward the toilet bowl. By the time it entered my range of vision, I could have reached out and touched it, and the eel did not uncoil or snap or even blink—it just nosed its bald head beyond the rim of its home, and watched as I kicked by.

  I knifed one knee between my body and the dock, and levered myself up. “Well?” said Dennis.

  “I saw it,” I said, breathing hard.

  From his towel, Kyle raised his head. “Dangerous son of a bitch,” he said.

  “I think you should leave it alone,” I said.

  Dennis seemed pleased. He nodded and handed me a towel. “From now on, no more swimming near the toilet bowl.”

  “Amen,” said Marse.

  In July in South Florida, the sunlight fusses and adjusts a hundred times over the course of the day. By mid-afternoon, hours from sunset, the blue of the sky was rich and dense, as if a dusting of powder had been wiped from its surface. Marse and I chatted on the porch for a while, but the conversation grew sluggish and she started filing her fingernails, so I took myself on a tour of the upstairs. Every so often, male voices filtered up through the floorboards: the boys were underneath the house, gathering lobsters from traps for dinner.

  The main room of the stilt house was paneled with wood and stocked with old appliances and a shabby wicker sofa with turquoise vinyl cushions—it occurred to me that the cushions would likely float, if called upon. The kitchen and living area shared one open space, with two doors that opened onto the west and north porches. This design gave the house an inside-out quality, like the interior of a cabana or, I imagined, a yacht. A counter separated the kitchen from the rest of the living area, and trimming the edge of the countertop was a dingy decorative rope that sagged down an inch here and there. The windows had thick jalousie panes that operated on turn-screw cranks. On the coffee table was a stack of fishing and boating magazines, and above the sofa was a black-and-white photograph of a man—Dennis’s father, I assumed—wearing white canvas pants and a captain’s hat and holding a swordfish on a line. Beside the photograph was a hurricane tracking map, its tiny magnets (blue for watch, red for warning) huddled in one corner. Above the sink in the kitchen hung an enormous marlin with sparkling blue flanks and gray-green eyes. A short hallway off the living room led to a small bathroom and two dark bedrooms, one with two beds and a ratty dresser and the other with two bunk beds. All the beds were neatly made with a thin white blanket folded at the foot of each. I wondered how all the furnishings had come to be here, how the house itself had come to be.

  There was a shower in the small upstairs bathroom, and a window that faced south, away from shore. There was a two-story rainwater tank just outside the back window, and beyond, the lumpy green bundle of an island a mile away: this was Soldier’s Key. A toothbrush lay bristles-up on the window ledge. The mirror over the sink was tarnished and nicked, and in it my cheeks were raw with sunburn and my eyes were bright. Studying my reflection, I felt the queasy thrill of recognizing something unfamiliar in my own face.

  I left the bathroom and went downstairs. Marse looked up when I passed but didn’t say anything. The bottom story of the house was open on all sides, existing only to elevate the second floor away from the water—except for one corner where there was a tiny bathroom and a storage shed with a generator inside. I opened the door to the generator room and inhaled the briny air. Beside the machine, which was quiet, there were ceiling-high shelves piled with tools and old shoes and fishing gear. I closed the door and walked to the dock, then crouched and looked through the slats of the steps that led from the dock to the first floor. From there, I could see beneath the house to the space underneath, where Dennis and Kyle stood in knee-high water. Sea urchins and sand dollars dotted the beige seafloor. Stripes of sunlight streaked through cracks between the floorboards. Dennis held a net and water inked the hems of his shorts. He noticed me and gave a wave. He pointed at a dark creature crawling across the seafloor. “Dinner,” he said. “You like lobster?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We’re going to feast.” Droplets of sweat or seawater fell from his hair. He glanced at the scuttling lobster, then back at me. “We’re almost done.”

  “Take your time,” I said, then stepped up from the dock to the first floor. The water tower stood flush with the back of the house. I knocked on it to gauge the water level and it returned a booming, hollow sound. From below the house, Kyle called, “Come in!” and Dennis laughed. I looked around: the bottom story of the house was as bare as a picnic shelter at a park. The dock made a T with the first floor of the house, and alongside it the two boats rocked calmly on their lines, facing east, toward the Becks’ stilt house and the wide ocean beyond. The second story was aproned on three sides by a veranda with a white wood railing, but there was no railing on the first floor. One could simply step off into the water.

  There was, however, a shallow wooden ledge affixed to the exterior wall of the downstairs bathroom. It looked like the scaffolding used by painters working on high buildings—and I guessed that this was more or less what it was, used originally when the house was being built, then left behind. The ledge was about eighteen inches deep. To get to where I could stand on it, I had to take a wide step over a triangle of empty air between the botto
m floor of the house and the ledge itself. It didn’t occur to me until I put my foot down that the ledge might not hold. It did. Once I was standing on the ledge, though, I couldn’t manage to turn around. I slid down the exterior wall until I was sitting on the ledge, then crossed my legs so Dennis and Kyle wouldn’t see them dangling.

  From seaward, the human eye can distinguish prominent shapes—the lighthouse or Freedom Tower or Turkey Point—at eight miles. To a person of my height standing above the waterline, the horizon is two and a half miles away: a stone’s throw. Considering the blue expanse of ocean in my vision and the thousands of glassy wavelets and the fathoms of veiled blond seafloor, I would have thought I could see to Cuba. I felt tremendously calm. I felt caught in a swell of well-being. Maybe I was lulled by the waves and the sunlight, or maybe I believed that there were no stakes on vacation, and had abandoned my usual anxieties regarding the future, that unnavigable ocean. When I returned home, I knew, I would spend evenings on the front porch of my apartment house in Atlanta, where I’d lived and worked since graduating from college, chatting with my neighbors and slapping at mosquitoes. Soon the sunlight would weaken and blanch, and I would add a quilt to my bedspread and unpack the space heater. A smattering of my still-single college friends would get engaged or married, and I would swim through fits of loneliness like cold undercurrents. But that afternoon, on that clandestine ledge, I felt like a stowaway whose trip had begun. All I had to do was wait.

  Splashing sounds came from beneath the house. “Where did it go?” said Kyle.

  “I’ve got it,” Dennis said.

  With some effort, I swung my legs to one side and eased my stomach onto the bare, warm wood. I peered over the ledge until I could see beneath the house. Dennis was lowering a squirming lobster into a crate filled with other lobsters; their antennae lashed through the slats. Fish darted around the boys’ legs. “Join your family,” said Dennis to the lobster, and I pushed myself back into a sitting position.

  The boys splashed through deeper water and hauled themselves onto the dock. “They’re angry,” said Dennis, and Kyle said, “Sweetens the meat.” Their steps on the stairs were noisy and quick. I knew I should join them, but I felt fastened to that ledge, partly from inertia and partly from reluctance to try to stand in so tight a space. Below me, seven feet down, the sandy seafloor was covered by only a few feet of water: it would hurt if I fell, might even break a bone. Dennis called my name. I thought it would confuse him if I answered—where would it seem like my voice was coming from?—so I stood, carefully. Then I heard his steps on the stairs. “Frances!” His voice was gruff and resolute. It grew quieter as he moved down the dock, away from the house, then louder as he returned. “Frances!”

  I closed my eyes. It was his concern, the throaty pitch of it, that moved me to answer, even before I could manage to get myself off the ledge. “Here,” I said. Then louder, “I’m here.”

  He appeared beside the water tower, leaning out beyond the back of the house. His mouth was tight. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Looking around.”

  He glanced south, toward Soldier’s Key, then down at the water. “We wouldn’t want to lose track of you out here.”

  “I wouldn’t want that either.”

  The irritation slipped from his face. He looked around again, then stepped onto the ledge beside me. I edged over to give him room, and we stood with our backs to the wall, our arms at our sides. “Are you contemplating fate and the universe?” he said, not unkindly.

  I smiled. I didn’t want to seem overly serious. “I like it here.”

  “You’re welcome anytime.”

  I wanted to say something about having felt like a different person all day, but I didn’t know what I meant or how he would respond, so I stayed quiet. He said, “My father was boating back from Bimini once, and he ran out of gas right out there.” He pointed. “He radioed the Coast Guard and told them he was ten miles northwest of the lighthouse, then his radio gave out. They didn’t find him for hours. By the time they did, it was night. He asked what had taken them so long and they said they’d been searching for him on the north side of Miami Beach. Then they’d realized he’d given his position wrong—the lighthouse was ten miles northwest of him, not the other way around. I look out there and I think, how could he make that mistake?”

  I followed his stare into the thick blue distance, bare of markers or guides. It would take an enormous act of faith, I thought, to trust the jittery needle of a compass. “I can see how a person might get confused,” I said.

  I don’t think Dennis meant to kiss me. He was leaning in to hear me, and when I turned our noses and cheeks met and—this amazes me still—neither of us backed away. Our mouths were uncertain. We kissed without embracing. We kept our eyes open. We could feel even then that we were at the beginning of something, I think—something that might go on and on before it ended. After, we faced each other.

  “We could go skiing, if you want, before dinner,” he said. He reached toward my face. His fingers found my earlobe.

  “I haven’t skied since college, and then it was in a lake.”

  “It’ll come back to you.”

  I could feel the warmth from his body and I could smell his clean, sun-soaked smell.

  “If we’re going to go we should go,” he said, “or we’ll miss the daylight.”

  I nodded. He stepped from the ledge onto the bottom floor of the house, then reached for my hand and pulled me over the gap. I walked ahead of him up the stairs, and as we went he kept one hand on the small of my back, the gentlest suggestion of a rudder.

  The sun was easing toward the horizon by the time we headed off. We took Dennis’s father’s boat because it was more powerful and because, Dennis said, the hull of Marse’s boat was painted blue, which was bad luck. This was mariner lore: the sea might confuse the boat with itself and drag it down. I stood by while Marse affixed a towline and Dennis started the engine and Kyle handled the lines. The channel was dark and choppy and wide. Marse handed me a lumpy orange life vest and I tightened it at the chest and waist, but Dennis loosened it again. His knuckles brushed my stomach through the swimsuit. “It won’t come off,” he said, “but you don’t want it too tight.”

  Our kiss rose in my gut. “I’m ready,” I said, and because the lie was so obvious, we both laughed. He went to the console and put the boat in gear. I stumbled when the boat moved. When I regained my balance, I noticed Marse watching me.

  We agreed that Kyle would ski first, then I would ski, then Marse. Kyle rose on skis as if from land, as if the baton were a sturdy hand. I recollected all I knew about waterskiing: Treat the water like a chair. Bend your knees. Let the towline pull you up. Lean back. Relax. Kyle skipped over the waves, and the boat rounded the mouth of the channel and returned, passing the stilt house, before he fell. I don’t think he fell, actually—he threw his skis to the side and skidded, sending up white spray, then let go of the line. When we reached him, Marse asked if he wanted to go again, but he said he was wiped out. He climbed into the boat and took a beer from the cooler.

  Dennis gathered the skis from the water—they were wooden, with a yellow stripe painted down the center of each. “Kyle will be your lookout,” he said to me. “He won’t take his eyes off you.”

  “I’m an ace lookout,” said Kyle. He’d wrapped himself in a towel.

  “Just don’t leave me there,” I said to Dennis. “When I fall, come right back.”

  “I will,” Dennis said.

  I slid into the water, avoiding the stilled propellers. I struggled with each ski, then stretched my legs in front of me, drifting from the boat. The water cupped and jostled me; I tipped and righted. Dennis gave me a thumbs-up and I returned it awkwardly, and then the line spun out and I started to rise. Halfway up, I shifted and wobbled, and then I was hunched with my elbows over my knees. I straightened as much as I could without losing my balance. Kyle stood at the stern, watching me. Beneath my skis, the
water whitened with friction and speed. The boat’s wake, like the crease of an open book, stretched between the engine and my skis. We sped by one stilt house, then another. Kyle clapped for me and pumped a fist in the air. I tried to turn my grimace into a smile. Marse moved to stand beside Dennis, leaning toward him to be heard over the engine.

  The sky was working up to dusk, the light so clear that I could make out the shoreline along Key Biscayne. Dennis’s back was a landscape of swells and shadows. Marse had a hand on his arm. She was talking and he was nodding. I took one hand from the baton and sliced it through the air in front of my neck: I quit. Kyle turned to tell Dennis, and I let go. I skidded and started to sink. Dennis waited a few seconds before turning—maybe the channel was too narrow, or there was another boat—and as I waited, I closed my eyes and tasted the salt on my lips. There were dune-shaped ripples on every wave: ripples on waves on tidal swells. I felt like a very small piece of a very large puzzle.

  The sound of the engine grew louder, then shifted as Dennis put the boat into neutral. I opened my eyes. Dennis leaned over the gunwale. He pulled my skis out of the water and reached for me. Marse was suited up by the time I was back in the boat. She dove in, and Dennis fed a ski into the water. I went to hand her the other one, but he stopped me. “She’s going to slalom,” he said.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “You were good.”

  “I almost fell getting up.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Let’s go,” said Marse. “Start out faster this time.”

  “You’re her lookout,” said Dennis to me.

  She skied beautifully. The way her body responded to each wave, her rubbery maneuvers, reminded me of a child on a trampoline. Her body held no resistance, no fear. We neared a stilt house and I alerted Dennis, but he just nodded and stayed the course. He was so intent that his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. I watched him for a moment, and when I looked back at Marse, she wasn’t there. “Stop!” I said.