Her face had taken on a ghastly sheen, as though he’d outlined his plan to sodomize the bogeyman with a sharp stick up the anus. It was that same look on an older face that he saw now, the scrunched brow and cadaverously pallid skin, the twitchy corner of her mouth, as she dozed next to him on the plane.
Inevitably, his gaze was drawn to the amulet around her neck. The rawness of the tiny pictograph, the gleam of the bone, even the promise of protection, all held a kind of primitive allure. Knowing how much it meant to her, for a moment he almost coveted it himself.
In Emerald Key, they spent the first week at the island’s posh resort—luxurious cottages and doting staff who knew when to be invisible, a helicopter ferrying guests to and from the airports in Nassau and Freeport. He made a point of spoiling her, praising her wit, her charm, her not inconsiderable talent for debauchery. Decadence was cultivated as an art, fine wine and Kama Sutra sex and rutting in the full moonlight, a cocaine-laced tryst with a unicorn from Melbourne whose cell number he obtained discreetly and tucked away for future use. The spell he’d cast when they first met was rewoven with strands of tenderness and cruelty and passion, and she gorged on it, grew bovine and louche feasting on the poison of his tainted adoration.
By week’s end, she was sufficiently compliant to let him rent a thirty-five-foot Viking motor yacht complete with lavish master cabin and well-appointed bar, lacking nothing except the convenience of a swim platform. But after all, he told her, neither of them was going in the water.
At first they only explored the coastline near the shore, but later he motored far out into the sea and anchored in deep water. Here, with Shakespearean aplomb, he professed remorse for his sometimes less than chivalrous behavior, a bravura performance that drew tears and promises of lifelong fidelity from them both. In fact, so real was the performance and delivered with emotion so apparently heartfelt, that later, when they tangled in a sweaty heap upon the deck, he experienced a moment of what might have been real love, as intimate and potentially lethal as the onset of an aneurysm. But love, he reminded himself, though sometimes as intense as lust, was also just as fleeting, and he regained his good sense in short order.
Now, while she showered, he leaned on the rail, dazzled by the sunlight on gleaming green swells. A wind was coming up, the water becoming choppy. Below he noticed something odd, a few pebbled, undulating patches, jellyfish perhaps or some detritus dumped into the sea by those indifferent to ecology. They clotted near the stern, slapping the hull with a sound like liver flipped into a pan. He found a mini-bottle in the pocket of his trunks, uncapped it, drained the contents, and flung the empty. Havoc ensued. What he’d thought to be a few distinct animals turned out to be an enormous school of tiny fish that, when the projectile struck, exploded into a chaos of seething, agitated life.
Repulsed, he turned away as Lillian came up from the galley, freshly dressed in cut-offs and a wisp of a red tee, the amulet starkly white against her sun-burnt cleavage. As she tottered across the deck, drink in hand, he noted that the severe lines in her face had softened noticeably—Bacardi, he thought, better than Botox.
She gazed toward the horizon, a blurred seam where sea and sky merged into a single chalky band. In the west, a band of clouds impersonated snow-clad peaks.
“Sip?” she said, lifting the paper cup toward his mouth.
“No thanks.”
“Aren’t you drinking today?”
He feigned dismay. “You make it sound like a moral failing. Don’t worry I’ll catch up. It’s our last night. I intend to drink my share tonight and more.”
She let her free hand rove down his chest. “Actually, it may be better if the captain’s sober, so he can navigate.”
“Right now all I want to navigate is you.”
She threw her head back, her smooth bare throat like something from a nature show, gazelle giving itself to a lion. A stimulating image—as if on cue, he hardened.
“My love,” he said and swept her up into his arms—she, laughing with delight at this show of male prowess, her gaze enamored, lips parted in expectation of a kiss—and in a move intended to be seamless, an action choreographed to perfection in the dungeons of his mind, he pivoted and tried to heave her violently out over the rail—her face a parody of passion, now gone rubbery with horror—as he opened up his arms. Instead of falling, she clamped her arms around his chest, so that, far from the graceful uncoupling he’d foreseen, they seesawed as a single off-kilter beast whose lower half pedaled air, piteously screeching, while its upper half engaged in a frenetic jig of thrusts and grunts intended to jettison the part unwanted.
Her strength was unexpected, terrifying. He raised a fist to batter her away, but doing so required him to take his free arm off the rail and lean far forward. He felt the fulcrum shift. His bare feet lift off the deck, a high-wire act gone hideously wrong. She lost her grip and dropped, but took with her the tipping point, so that he flipped and plunged headfirst. The water, already churning from her entry, gulped him down.
When he surfaced, she had made it to the anchor line, where she held on for dear life, screaming, “What did you do? What the fuck have you done?” until something even greater than his betrayal took precedence. She looked around frantically. “Where’s the ladder?”
He jerked his head in cold disdain. “Up there. You happy now? If you hadn’t pulled me over with your stupid stunt, I’d be up on deck and I could lower it down to you. This is all your fault.”
“What are you talking about? You did it! You threw me off the boat on purpose! You tried to kill me!”
“Prove it,” he said, “it’s my word against yours.” Then, out of habit, he added, “Anyway we both know it’s only your imagination,” and almost laughed, so ill-timed was the oft-used line, so absurd and awful their predicament. Without a swim platform or a ladder within reach, there was no way back onto the boat.
When he explained their only hope was for him to swim to shore, she wept and begged him not to go. “Don’t leave me here! You can’t! Who knows what’s in this water? What if there’re sharks?”
“Give them a swift kick in the snout and try not to lose a leg.”
“Oh God!”
The boat lifted on a swell. The anchor line grew taut, forcing her to reposition her hands, which he could tell were already slipping. She looked above her helplessly. “What if the rope breaks? What if it can’t hold me?”
“It holds a fucking five-ton boat. I expect it can hold you.”
She risked taking one hand off the rope to finger the medallion and, with that small gesture, he realized there was one thing left to do. He swam toward her. She cringed as though he were a monster, as though he meant to drown her here and now.
“I want this.” He grabbed the leather cord around her neck. “I’m the one who has to swim for miles. I need this this more than you do.” He expected her to fight him, felt disappointed when she bent her head so he could more easily remove it. “You’ve already taken everything,” she said, “my pride, my self-respect. You might as well have that, too.”
He slid the cord over his head, and the medallion dropped onto his chest, the skeleton and ghastly eye now nestled in his chest hair.
Lillian wiped brine and tears from her eyes. “You threw me off the boat, Martin. Why?”
For once he had the luxury of total honesty. “Because you’re rich. Because I could.”
Many miles into what seemed an endless swim, he wondered if this was why the swarms of sleek, incessant fish pursued him—because it was their nature, because they could. Or perhaps the current was merely sweeping them in the same direction and, like him, they obeyed the sea’s imperative. There were hundreds, thousands of the tiny things, glistening anchovies and spike-nosed ballyhoos. When, he dived below, they massed above his head in an inky, undulating carpet. Within their ranks, he occasionally glimpsed massive creatures, too, monsters cumbersome and massive whose shadows darkened the sea floor.
Yet nothing that he saw
or thought he did was as terrifying as the changes to his breathing. The inhalations seemed sporadic and ill-timed. He barely needed to surface, but stayed below for far too long. When he came up, it was more to try to orient himself to land than to satisfy the urge to breathe.
As afternoon turned into dusk, he swam with grim determination, battling rising swells and hordes of hovering fish, until his feet brushed bottom and the water heaved him up onto a broad stretch of sand and coral. Before him stretched just what he’d hoped for—a beach deserted save for flocks of restless gulls and hillsides thick with vegetation. He’d come ashore on the lee side of Emerald Key, a few miles south of the resort. He flopped onto his back, content, as a pleasurable lassitude invaded him.
He decided to shelter among the trees that night and make his way at leisure to the resort tomorrow, where he’d report the tragic accident and help organize a rescue party for his wife that surely would arrive too late. He would be understandably vague about the location of the boat and was already rehearsing in his head the circumstances of their calamity. Love-making that led to some contorted pose he’d be too much the gentleman to describe in any detail, a tragic lunge or ill-timed thrust and both ending up in the drink.
She was probably already dead.
Although he wanted desperately to sleep right where he lay, the tide was coming in, the waves already lapping at his legs. He forced himself to his feet and staggered toward a group of palms, but only made it a few yards before collapsing to his knees. He realized the long swim amid the teeming fish had quite undone him. His breath was ragged, limbs quivering and cramping. Worse, several of the tiny fish, trapped in the lining of his trunks, were making frenzied efforts to escape and choosing exits not intended for that purpose. Maddening as it was, he couldn’t find the energy to remove them.
He lay half-conscious in the fading light, until the sound of a vehicle approaching jolted him alert. A jeep roared up the beach, passed him by at a rapid clip, then slammed to a halt, reversed. He recognized the resort’s gold diamond logo on the doors. The driver, a dark-skinned woman with sleek coils of braided hair, jumped out and ran to him. Behind her came an Asian speaking into a walkie-talkie.
The woman knelt and gazed into his eyes, her face maternal, oozing empathy. “Sir? Mr. Wallace? Are you Martin Wallace?”
Her voice was an exotic lullaby, reminding him how desperately he longed to sleep. He would have done so, too, except that suddenly, without warning, she slapped him hard.
“Stay with me, Mr. Wallace. We’ve called an ambulance.”
He tried to think what he must do, but he felt muddled, drugged, as though in the pristine ocean air wafted strange hallucinogens.
The man and woman got on either side of him and helped him to his feet.
“You’re a hero, Mr. Wallace,” said the man and moved as if to clap him on the back, then felt him trembling and thought better of it.
He tried to ask how they knew to look for him, but his best attempt produced only coughing and the wet rasp of a clogged gutter.
They leaned him up against the Jeep, then Lullaby, with the vicious right, was crooning in his ear, “We’ve great news, Mr. Wallace.” Her smile gut-punched him; it was too ebullient, a nightmare mouth full of teeth and tongue.
Her partner chimed in. “Your wife’s alive! She made it,” and caught Martin when his knees buckled.
He tried to speak, produced a gurgling wheeze. “What happened? How?”
“Your wife said after you two jumped in to take a dip— ” here Safari Hat looked away, embarrassed—“Hey, you forgot the ladder wasn’t down, you’d be surprised, it happens. But no swim platform on the boat, that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, take my word. You swam for help, that took some guts, but you know what she did? Climbed the anchor line with her hands and feet. Said she fell back into the water a dozen times, her hands are cut to hell, but she got onboard and radioed for help.” He paused to draw a deep breath that Martin would have killed for. “Your wife has grit, Mr. Wallace. She told the guys who rescued her you were what kept her going, the reason she didn’t give up. She said you took something important from her, but now she has it back.”
He fought to breathe. A whistle warbled in his throat like the prelude to a death rattle.
“Sir, you’d best lie down.”
“Help. Me.” He wanted her to help him remove the amulet, but the leather cord had shrunken during his immersion and refused to stretch or break.
You will come to no harm in water (but you will suffocate in the air.)
The woman took his arm. “Sir, I know this is a shock. If you’ll just sit— ”
He shook her off. Only a few yards away, waves glossy as obsidian unfurled along the shore. He took off in a stumbling shamble toward the water. As he threw himself face-first, the sea rushed out to meet him, sucked him in with its long carnivorous tongue and mercifully dragged him under.
Where his starving lungs felt saturated, not with air or water, but the absence of requiring either, so his descent felt less like a languid dive than a violent spiral through the innards of an angry god.
Nor was he alone in his debasement, for swarms of fish accompanied his fall, darting so close he could feel the whisper of their gills and knife-like scales, the kisses of their red and puckered mouths. They fought over the tattered chum that swirled behind him, competing with each other for the soft organic morsels, racing to devour the juiciest nuggets: a crimson pinch of stubbled throat, a nipple or a lip (he couldn’t tell), eyelashes drooping from a toothy overbite like a surreal mustache.
And even then he felt that parts of his anatomy still belonged to him, and these he hoped to salvage from the slaughter, for where he was going wouldn’t he need something of himself? It was the smallest fish and their savage cohorts, the jellies, that foiled his feeble efforts. The tiny ones sucked out marrow, bile, and eyeballs and scoured the creased and furrowed niches where the body held itself aloof, those private crannies meant to be exempt from excavation, while the jellies were more devious and savage, they impersonated beating hearts and pulsed imperiously inside his gaping chest. Still others, hellish creatures not of any world he knew, gave off a ghastly inner luminescence, the better to display the contents of their bellies—cunning, decorative items like teeth and tiny gall stones, a waxy smidgeon from a ruptured ear. In one, he spied an entire cerebellum, barely masticated, that might well have been mistaken for crenellated brain coral if not for the blooms of dark, arterial blood that still spewed forth.
When a disk of vertebrae drifted past embedded in a patch of flesh and chest hair and carved to imitate some kind of grotesque charm, he recognized it as something that was once his own and tried to reach into the mass of fish to claim it, this remnant from a familiar part of Hell. Toyed with by the memory of what it meant to have hands, he grabbed for it and missed and missed again, seizing only emptiness. His descent slowed but didn’t stop, his consciousness a tiny moon orbiting an unseen monster, eternal in this hidden ocean, never to be harmed.
WALKING ON WATER
by Dona Fox
Growing up on a farm, you learn that animals die. It hardens you up and prepares you for people dying. Readies you for all the death you’re eventually going to face. It’s not hard to watch a chicken, running around the yard, fluffing its feathers, scratching the dirt like an idiot one minute, getting its cold-eyed head chopped off across a bit of stump the next. You’d laugh along with me to see its body running in a circle as if looking for its missing head, loose neck flopping, blood splashing.
It’s a bit harder when the butcher truck comes to kill the pigs. Right there by the barn. You try not to remember their soft brown eyes. Eyes just like mine, as if a human was trapped in a pig’s body. No amount of pillows over your head can block their frantic squeals—they know what’s coming.
Harder to bear still, a quick glimpse in the dark often revealed Daddy, whiskey drunk for courage, staggering to the lake with a wriggling gunnysack and a hammer. Fra
ntic, Annie would hunt for her pups for days. I never let myself know the litters so I could take it all in stride.
Old Blue had been my daddy’s dog, a collie. I learned to walk hanging on to his hair. Daddy said Old Blue deserved to go on his own terms. Blue chose his spot, in the shade under the holly trees beside the house, and watched us from there until he died. We buried him there.
Late the night we buried Blue, I heard Daddy stumbling down the stairs. He shut the door, as he did when he was drunk for courage, too hard for stealth, but there was no new batch of puppies to drown in the lake, no new batch of kittens to twist their little necks. I slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs barefoot meaning to follow him. Stepping carefully in the dark under the holly trees, I lost him.
I figured I’d go check the barn.
When I came out from under the trees that surrounded our house, moonlight lit the farm. Now I could see where I was stepping and I could see a line drawn in the dirt, a line that swayed from side to side as if a snake had passed there. I followed the curving path of the line and it led me to the barn.
Daddy hung from the pulley at the gable end. He was still swaying so he couldn’t have been there long.
I ran inside the barn and climbed up into the haymow. I reached out, pulled him in, and loosened the rope around his neck.
“Fuck off. Go to Hell.” It was the Daddy voice. The one I obeyed in fear, without question. The Daddy who killed.
He clawed his way to the edge of the open haymow door and slid back over the edge. I watched his body fall and jerk as the rope tightened around his neck again.
That was late Friday. He was still there when Jeffy and I went to school on Monday.
Mama was already gone by then so I told my favorite teacher, Miss Palmer.
The axe was under my mattress, ready for morning. I smelled fresh-brewed coffee as I crept down the stairwell. My uncle was pouring amber liquid into his thermos. His own blend of half-’n’-half as he had the job of raising us until Mama could be found.
Death by Water Page 3