Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  “He give you a sermon about the mermaids?” Darlene asked, staring out across the bay.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “He’s crazy for mermaids.”

  “They aren’t mermaids,” Sutter said, and he seemed on the verge of getting up and belting her. She met his gaze, as if daring him to, and I got the sense that there was some secret message, some shared history, that passed between them in that exchange of looks. Sutter smiled grimly and dropped his gaze to the bowl of soup.

  “Why don’t you explain it yourself,” she said. “And don’t give him no crap about fishing for sharks. That story almost makes you sound sane.” She gave me a wink that didn’t change any of the hard-luck expression south of her smeared mascara, and then she left.

  “Mermaids?” I asked.

  Sutter blinked as if coming out of a fugue. “Ah, hell,” he said and shook his head. “She’s not talking about those mariner’s fairy tales, mind you. The real ones look more like sharks.”

  “So, they got all the usual womanly charms from the waist up?” I asked, playing it straight.

  “Yeah, plus a shark’s dorsal fin. And teeth sharp as razors. Before you go and have a proper laugh, you ever hear about the Fountain of Youth?”

  I admitted that I had no knowledge of that scholarly topic.

  Sutter wasn’t a big speech sort of guy, so it was very much the abbreviated story of the Spanish conquistador Ponce de Leon and his quest for the mythical fountain in what is now Florida.

  “It’s out there,” Sutter said, nodding with severity toward the mouth of Tampa Bay. “Sandwiched between the thermals and the sandbars and the tidal currents is a rill of hard-core junk that Ponce de Leon would have given his left nut for.”

  His left nut. Poetic.

  “You got any proof of that?” I asked.

  “Just the mermaids.”

  “And where are they?”

  Sutter nodded his head at his ride, a Ford 150 with a taut blue tarp pulled over the rear tray. Figuring this might be funny, I walked over to it. As I got closer I saw blood, old and new, scabbing the metal sides of the tray, and I heard the buzzing of flies trapped under the tarp. I loosened the tie-down cords from their eyelets and lifted one corner. The sun shone through the tarp with a murky blue light. Between the hazy light and the stench it took me a moment to focus on what I was seeing: shark tails. At least six, the smallest a two-footer with tiger-stripe markings.

  “I slice the fins off, where the fountain’s elixir concentrates, and throw the torso back. Let the tide and the crabs have them. There’s places around here that'll pay for the tails. They’ll grind ‘em up and sell it as scallop. Keeps Darlene in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed.”

  I stared hard at the severed shark tails and wondered how batshit crazy Sutter was. Just as I was set to release the tarp, I saw a hank of pale red hair lying on the grooved tray bed. Looking closer, I saw it was blonde and had been dyed by the blood collecting in the grooves. I let the tarp flap shut.

  “The passage from youth to age is a journey of metamorphosis,” Sutter said with grim assurance. “So the fountain must both renew and transform.” He started cutting the grouper to fit the hook. “Those fancy words, I stole them out of a book. Smarter men than me, or you for that matter, have failed where I’ve succeeded. I’ve found that rich vein out there in the Gulf of Mexico. Damned if I haven’t. And only three people in the world know about it.”

  Me, him and Darlene.

  Sutter looked like the kind of guy who kept his loose ends tied off. I thought about the Colt Python .357 I had stashed under my pillow in the Airstream.

  “Why are you telling me?” I asked.

  “Because you remind me of myself when I was twenty-one or so.” I worked hard at not taking that as an insult. “And I want to ask you whether you think I’m crazy.”

  I would have preferred the conversation take place without him holding a knife, but my preferences never had held much sway with the world. “Insane crazy?” I asked.

  He nodded, biting his lip, the boisterous version of him gone. “Some days…none of this seems quite real, you know? It’s like I’m waking up after a weeklong bender and the world still has that blurry, slick feel to it.”

  Casting an eye at his shitty camper, I wondered why Sutter would want to live forever. That alone ought to have tipped him off that his head wasn’t right, but I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. “No more crazy than a whole lot of people I’ve met,” I said, which was close enough to the truth.

  He narrowed his eyes at me, weighed my answer and grinned. “What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I don’t care about living forever. That’s a fool’s game, believe me. I plan on getting rich. How much you reckon some of the wealthy chumps on Snell Isle would pay to be able to enjoy their views for all eternity?”

  It wasn’t really a question. I wondered if Sutter knew which camper was mine and made a mental note to make sure he never did know. Even visions of Darlene’s sweet behind weren’t enough to tie me down to the vicinity of this lunatic. Might be I wouldn’t wait for the Skyway’s grand opening, would make south for Manatee County the long way around, and sooner rather than later.

  “The trick is distilling the elixir, bottling it.” Sutter lay the hooked grouper down and picked up the soup. He ladled a steaming serve into his mouth. “But I reckon I’ve got that figured out.” Something grey bobbed up and down in the soup.

  “Shark fin soup,” Sutter said. He held the bowl out. “Try some.”

  I declined.

  “Your loss. It’s a powerful aphrodisiac.” He winked and laughed. While his jaws snapped open and shut, I saw a strand of blonde hair hanging out the gap between his front teeth.

  “What would you pay to live forever?” Sutter asked when he’d reined in his good humor.

  “Doesn’t interest me.”

  “Yeah, because you’re still young. You already think you’ll live forever.”

  No. Pretty early on in my deployment I’d learned the hard facts about mortality and death. I knew I wasn’t living forever, and maybe it was just me being a gloomy putz, but I sort of liked the idea that one day I’d have to account for my sins.

  Changing tacks, Sutter asked, “Don’t you wish you had the time to make right the things you screwed up?” For some reason he wanted my agreement, as if by agreeing with him I’d somehow validate his crazy pursuit. “Don’t you have a regret that you could put right if you had the time?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” I didn’t tell him that all I’d put right would be to put a bullet through the head of a man named Lieutenant Chalvers Monroe, and that the time for that had come and gone. The conversation had well and truly soured for me by then, and so I took my leave and walked a long, circuitous and secretive route back to my camper.

  * * *

  Three days later my Airstream was still chocked on the fresh-laid concrete of the southern approach, and given that thieves had stolen the wheels off my Chevy, those chocks weren’t coming out anytime soon. I’d found a bar and grill a short way off the approach that sold moonshine under the counter, and I spent most nights sloshed midway to comatose, staring out at the Gulf or up at the dark steel fingers of the two Skyway spans as they strained to touch. Occasionally I heard the report of Sutter’s rifle and saw a flash of light, knew that somewhere, out in the Gulf, about six pounds of raw meat and a wicked hook was falling into the lightless abyss.

  Hunting for mermaids. Christ almighty. It was just like they said: every sort of transient weirdo got down to Florida in the end.

  I caught Darlene, now and then, in the shadow of Sutter’s camper, huddled around a joint and so doused in perfume that if she ever dropped that lit roll-up into her lap she’d explode like a Roman candle. She gave me a wave one time—if you can call a flick of the fingers a wave—and then went back to brooding on the miserably bright sun. I waved too because I was twenty-one and horny and because I’d just come back from Vietnam and didn’t know
how to be scared of jealous boyfriends. It used to be that I’d known and I’d accepted the boundaries of the civilized world. Thou shalt not kill—that whole laundry list of tawdry sins a decent man avoided. But since coming back, the civilized world seemed off its axis. I couldn’t find my feet in it, couldn’t get my balance.

  I walked over to Darlene.

  “Can’t spare any weed,” she said. “I can hook you up with the guy I buy off, though.”

  I told her I wasn’t interested. She asked me what I was interested in.

  “Nice tattoo,” I said, pointing at the angel tattooed down her right thigh. It wasn’t nice, but girls expect you to lie about those things. The ink had faded to the watery blue you’d expect to find on a grizzled ex-con’s forearms. She must have gotten it when she was twelve.

  The name Michael was scripted above the angel’s wings.

  “My son’s name,” she said.

  “You got a kid?”

  “Had a kid.”

  I took a moment to process that. I expected her expression to harden up, but it did the opposite, grew soft and thoughtful. I had a brief vision of her as a different person, smiling, laughing. It made me feel sad.

  “He was one of a kind. He used to love trains. He used to be terrified of ferns and spiky plants and masks. He used to lean over the edge of the bath with his pudgy feet swinging off the ground and try to turn the hot water tap on. I used to get so mad at him. One day there’s so much life there, and then there’s nothing. Just an empty crib and a quiet house and the lingering baby smell of him. I hope you never know what that’s like. A piece of me died with him, I think.” She sucked on the joint and closed her eyes.

  I thought of green jungle, smoke and ashes, a charred baby, a woman crying while cradling that smoked ruin of an infant in her burned arms. Put them out of their misery for Chrissakes, Lieutenant Monroe had said.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” I said to Darlene. “It truly is.”

  She looked at me and part of me fled from her gaze.

  “I think you know it is,” she said. “So many people have no idea.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the point of living if the people you love are dead? What’s the point?”

  I had no answers.

  “You take what you can get. Whatever passes for love, whatever substitute is on offer. That’s what you do.” She scratched at her neck, and for the first time I noticed the pale skin at her throat was scarred. The scars could have been ligature marks, or they might have been made with a blade. Self-inflicted? Hard to tell. Whatever had caused them, she knew all about death. From the looks of it, she’d come close enough herself. “It was a long time ago. A long time ago. Say, what’d you want again?” she asked, brow furrowed.

  I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I’d approached her in the first place. As I walked away, I glimpsed Sutter staring at me through the camper’s window. He grinned at me and tipped the bill of his baseball cap.

  * * *

  That night, at 2:00 a.m., I got a knock on the side of my camper. I rolled out of my cot to find Sutter standing in my open doorway. I froze, the late night consumption of a bottle of hospital-grade alcohol still fogging my thoughts.

  The Colt, idiot, said the part of my brain that had gotten me home from Vietnam in one piece. I fumbled for it, but Sutter was already inside my cramped quarters. He stunk of cigarettes and butchered fish.

  “I know you think I was lying the other day,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, reaching under the pillow for the Colt and feeling nothing but filler herniating out a rip in the pillow’s underside.

  “You thought I was spouting shit.”

  “I never said that,” I said, still groping. “Never thought it neither.”

  “Oh, hell. Unclench your sphincter. I’m not here to have it out with you. I just want to show you that I’m an honest man.” He hiked his baseball cap up high on his forehead, all the better to give me a meaningful look of measure, as if to say, are you man enough, boy?

  “Truth is, I need help with gaffing my catch.”

  “Catch?”

  “You were the one asking about mermaids the other day. You lost interest in seeing one, now, have you? Darlene’s coked out of her brain tonight. If I have to, I’ll take her rather than yourself, but I know she’ll fuck up, then she’ll blame me, then it’ll all get ugly.” He clenched his fist and I could guess what kind of ugly he meant.

  I didn’t want Darlene to get a beating just because I was too lazy to humor her lunatic boyfriend, and in any event, I figured I owed the world at least one good deed. “Give me a sec to get some pants on,” I muttered.

  Sutter backed out the door and stood in the rectangle of bluish gloom, smoking a cigarette while I dredged up my pants from the darkened floor. I had no intention of ruining my night vision by lighting up the oil lantern near my bed, and getting dressed in the dark was one good talent that had come out of my time in the service.

  I never did find the Colt Python that night. Turned out I must have been drunk enough to shove the gun under the mattress rather than the pillow. I don’t believe in fate, but maybe fate had plans for me that night that didn’t involve plugging Sutter with a heavy grain slug.

  We walked along the flat approach to the hump of the bridge proper, where there were scaffolds and the squat shapes of lifters and loaders and mixers. Sutter gestured to a big-game rod he had wedged against the seaside railing and fixed in place with what looked like enough rope and chain to hog-tie a rhino. “My catch knocked her head on the pylon as I reeled her in. I think she’s still dreaming, buddy boy. You want to go first?” He snatched up a big gaffing hook as he spoke to me.

  Keeping Sutter in the corner of my eye, I peered over the railing, followed the silver thread of the line as it plunged down under the approach’s roadway. On this section of the approach, shy of the stratospheric bridge itself, the drop panned out to a mere ten feet, give or take. Still, whatever was snagged at the line’s other end was too far underneath the roadway for me to see it.

  It’s goddamn dark down there, I thought.

  “She’s caught under the pylons. Water’s shallow, though. Sandbar stretches out from here and curves back toward the Pasadena side of the bay. These pylons are sitting high in the water. Knee-deep is the worst it’ll get.” Sutter handed me the gaffing hook, straddled the railing, leaned over to look down into the dark water, and then dropped over the side.

  He had a hurricane lamp next to the fishing rod, but although the metal shell felt warm, I couldn’t see anything to light it with. The warm Gulf breeze whistled between the railings and sent a low chop spuming up the pylon legs. Sutter took his leisurely time dragging his catch out from under the bridge’s overhang.

  There was a little light shining across the water from a portable admin shack the construction workers used, and it was just enough to cut Sutter’s silhouette out from the black sheet of the sea. He was bent over a shape propped against the pylon, and he was buck-naked. I pulled one hand down my face as if I could tug the sight away. Spray burst up and over him. He looked amphibious, inhuman. Shirtless, his back had an odd kink about halfway up the vertebral column. A knot, a ridge? A vestigial fin?

  Take or leave his physical problems, I decided that man’s marbles had long ago been traded in for gumballs. I was gripping the gaffing hook so tight that it seemed to be humming like one of those bridge cables getting strung up further north. I should have dropped it and walked away, but Vietnam aside, at that age I never had known when to walk away. It’s a lesson many a young man has to learn the hard way, his older self looking back with equal parts envy and dismay.

  Sutter’s catch squirmed. Beneath the water, its lower body began thrashing. The upper body was a woman’s. I could make out just enough in the bad light to see that. I couldn’t have described her face to a police sketch artist, or even said whether I’d met her before, but I knew I wasn’t seeing a manatee or dolphin.

  Su
tter bent over her. He had an object clamped between his teeth—a knife. Her lower body flopped up and down, a rippling kick, like a worm under a boot heel, or like the throes of one of those shark-tailed mermaids Sutter craved.

  Sutter slid the knife into her neck, then turned up to face me and shouted, “Gaff her, kid.” His mouth yawned open too far. It looked as if it were crammed with serrated teeth.

  I was so damn terrified I pissed in my jeans. Even the Viet Cong couldn’t lay claim to that modest feat. I dropped the gaffing hook. The Tampa Bay chose that moment to drag the woman from her seat against the pylon. She keeled sideways, and then she was gone, vanished into the glassy black.

  I expected him to rail and shout, but Sutter only laughed. He threw the knife in after his mermaid. Then he turned around to face me, his nakedness both absurd and frightening. At first I thought the shadows were playing tricks with me, but the longer I stared at him, the more clearly resolved his freakish—how shall I put it—masculine equipment became. Hell with it. In plain speak, Sutter had two pricks. Both of them were as thick and long as a barracuda’s belly.

  “I’m twice the man you are, boy,” he said. “Sharks get all of nature’s perks, don’t they? Go on, take a good long gander, hombre. You should have tried the soup I offered. Freshly stewed out of primo mermaid cuts. A marvel, a tonic that is both a longevity elixir and a ferocious aphrodisiac.”

  “Did you have to kill her?”

  “You’d eat her alive, would you? I damn well hope not.”

  “Jesus, eat her?”

  Ocean spray exploded around him. “It’s like those heavy metals, working their way up the food chain. They…accumulate…that’s the word. They accumulate.”

  “What accumulates?”

  “The fruit of the fountain, the rich vein of the eternal that bleeds into the Gulf. It accumulates in those mermaids, and now that I’ve had my fill of them, it has accumulated in me.”