by Sara Taylor
“If you see a roach coach you can get something, otherwise we’re on a mission.”
Even that sounded good, though I didn’t know what a roach coach was until she wandered over to a white truck parked on the side of the road, paid with a crumpled wad of bills and coins, and handed me something greasy in a football of bread. It filled a longing that was probably just my stomach but felt like it dipped into my soul, and by the time we made the car again I was licking oil off my fingers.
“Looks like you weren’t hungry after all,” Ma observed. “Get on in, we have to go somewhere before we go to see Mr. Panagopoulos again.”
“That’s the old man’s name?” I asked.
“Don’t make fun. His mother was Puerto Rican and he married a Puerto Rican and if you ask him he says he’s Puerto Rican, but his dad was Greek. Anthony still swears that one day he’s going to change his name. Hand me the map.”
She drove slowly with it open in her lap, circling round the same piece of block several times, twice almost making wrong turns down one-way streets. I was starting to feel sick when she slammed on the brakes in front of a bunker-shaped building, the peeling sign on its front lawn declaring it to be an official United States Post Office, for all it looked like the headquarters of Doctor Doom and his army of world-dominating robots.
“Go get me what’s in postbox one eighty-three.” She unclipped a heavy brass key from her keyring and tossed it into my lap.
“What?”
“Just get it, Alex, we’re in a bit of a hurry.”
So up I marched to Doctor Doom’s inner sanctum, tugged on the door hoping it would be locked but found that it was not only unlocked but recently oiled; the door might have hit me in the face.
There was a metal mesh pulled down in front of the teller’s counter, but the mailboxes were unguarded, ranks and ranks of them. I plodded to 183, jiggled the key in the lock, and was showered with an explosion of paper. The box was clotted with envelopes, fliers, coupon books, and I took off my overshirt and bundled the pages into it in creased handfuls, then tied the sleeves together and hauled it out to Ma.
“You didn’t need to bring out all the junk—all we needed was the white package.”
“You could have told me that. It’s in here somewhere.”
“Did you relock the postbox?”
“. . . Maybe.”
When I got back to the car for the second time she had the bundle open on the passenger’s seat and was stuffing leaflets for community yard sales and Al Anon meetings into a plastic grocery bag. A white cardboard box was propped on the dashboard over the speedometer, where she was also stacking the bills and hand-addressed envelopes. I shuffled the mess into my lap so I could sit down and helped her sort junk mail until my shirt was empty, then as I put it back on and buttoned it over my undershirt she shoved the envelopes and box from the dash into my lap and pulled away.
“Why are we in such an all-fire hurry?” I asked.
“I don’t want him to change his mind.”
“Is it likely he will?”
“I don’t think so. Color me excited. I made this promise a while ago—didn’t think I’d be asked to keep it.”
“What promise?”
“Tell you later.”
“It’s later. What promise?”
She sighed.
“Anthony and his family don’t talk to each other anymore. Or see each other. I know them, though, and they liked me, when I was around here. So Mr. P doesn’t mind too much helping me do something that isn’t really legal.”
“Are we going to kill someone?”
“No. We’re going to put someone to rest.”
“That means kill someone, doesn’t it? We’re going to shoot some guy and the old man is going to help us dump him into the Gulf of Mexico, isn’t he?”
“Good guess, Alex, that is exactly what we’re going to do. Then we’re all going to get matching gang tattoos done by a blind excommunicated priest using nothing but a sharpened crucifix and the ashes of a holy book moistened with the blood of our enemies. And then go into hiding in the Bermuda Triangle until it all blows over.” She was quiet for a moment, then, “I’m in a hurry because we have to beat the sun. I promised that I’d do it at sunset.”
“We’re doing black magic then, aren’t we?”
“Just shut up. You’ll find out in a bit.”
CHAPTER XII
We wove back through town to the quay, left the car illegally parked half on the grass beneath the U.S. and Mississippi flags. She plucked the box off my lap, tore it open and pulled out two little canisters. They looked like the kind of thing expensive tea came in, both covered in nubby paper decorated with gilt fans, one red and one black. She put them on the dash carefully and pulled out a sheaf of lined paper written over in slightly smudged pencil, skimmed each page, then grabbed the canisters and hopped out of the car, leaving me to follow or stay as I chose. I followed.
She trotted down the quay, the wood rattling under her boots, stopped at the battered boat that she’d spotted when we’d come by earlier that day, the one that had led her to Mr. P. It looked to me like a toy, the general shape of a rowboat, but larger. There was a tall, narrow pilothouse in the front end with a hard, flat canopy coming back from its roof to shelter most of the deck. She called out a greeting, and the old man called back and stepped out of the pilothouse, hatted and jacketed in spite of the heat, moving slowly and just a bit reluctantly. She hopped down onto the deck without hesitation, then looked back to see if I was following. I stepped onto the boat with hands tight on her arm for balance, and immediately felt the rising tide of panic as the deck moved under me.
“Sit here, don’t move,” she said, and pushed me onto what looked like an upside-down wooden box in the middle of the deck, which I guessed was the covering to the hold, or the engine, though given what I knew about boats it was just as likely to be a handy gateway to hell. I was facing backwards, but I didn’t care; I had no inclination to shift around.
Ma unwound the mooring rope and the old man started the engine, and we pulled slowly away from the quay, the wood beneath me rumbling with the motor. The boat was of a simple design—if it hadn’t been for the thick metal crane that rose like an arm from the deck about halfway between the pilothouse and the stern and its worn but efficient-looking block and tackle I’d think that the thing was just a pleasure boat, a little toy that someone had built in their backyard to tootle about the bay on a lazy weekend.
Ma and Mr. P continued to talk, in short, edged sentences that sounded like directions, or like they were making and dismissing suggestions back and forth. The way they stood and moved and spoke made it seem as though they had done this together a hundred times before. As we slipped past the moored boats and out into the bay the buzz of the motor intensified, throbbing up through the wood and into my bones. I clung to the edge of the box and tried not to think of the dark, crushing void below us, the finned and toothed things moving through it. I loved the ocean, but only in that moment did I realize that I was terrified of deep water.
We moved into the Gulf with what felt like excessive speed to me, but which seemed like no speed at all when I considered how little the coast changed minute by minute as I watched it recede. Once away from the protection of the bay the wind picked up; I could feel it in my thighs and chest, on my face like a thick mask, and I didn’t know how Ma stayed upright when she stepped out of the pilothouse, strode to the very back, and looked out at the land and buildings we were leaving behind. She stayed there as they slowly disappeared, stiller than I had ever seen her before. Every moment I thought we would stop, that we must have come far enough, but we continued on with the sun falling down into the ocean on our right-hand side—and I realized that I’d never seen the sun set into the ocean before.
The land behind us was a caramel-peanut-butter smudge when we cut the motor, hazed by water vapor. Ma dropped what was probably an anchor though it looked nothing like one into the water, then stood aga
in and stared out at the horizon. For a few moments we stayed as we were: the old man in the pilothouse with his hands still on the wheel, Ma with her feet planted wide, arms folded, bare skin goose bumped but ignoring the wind, me hunched and confused. Then the man said something to her; she called back, “I know,” but still stood by me. The sun had floundered and half sunk into the water, poured itself out in a long, snaky stream towards us. This was what we were waiting for, but why?
She went forward to the pilothouse, brought back with her the two little canisters, one in each hand, and stood at the side. She faced into the setting sun, and now I could see there were tears on her cheeks. The old man came out also, leaned against the metal crane, and watched her.
“Well.” She seemed to be talking to the sun, or to someone in her own head. “I never thought I’d have to make good on this, you wonderful nutcase. I guess we’re as close to sunset as we’re going to get.” She sucked her finger and held it up to check the wind, then put one of the canisters down on the ledge and held the other, the red one, in her hands like an offering. “I guess I should say something, but I never did know what to say. We loved you, and you loved here. Don’t forget us, wherever you are. We’re going to come find you one day.” She paused for a moment as if she were looking for more to say, then gave a little that’s-all-I’ve-got shrug, and carefully unscrewed the lid of the canister. She held it still for a moment at arm’s length, and then let the lip dip down, and the breeze carried the pearly grey powder like a comet’s tail over the water, towards the dying sun. She didn’t turn it out entirely, though, but kept a bit back in the bottom that I saw when she put it down and picked up the second container.
“Baby doll, I never knew you, but if I had I know I would have loved you. Keep your mama safe. She don’t know how to be at peace—she hasn’t had your practice at it.”
This tip was more abrupt, and the dusty streamer had far less volume. She stood for a moment watching it drift away, then went back to the pilothouse and returned with a plastic bucket on a string. She threw it off the side, waited, then pulled it back up and very carefully poured a small amount of seawater into the two vessels. The old man queried her, briefly, and she answered, “He wanted it,” in a way that showed that it wasn’t exactly what she would have thought of.
We stayed watching the setting sun for some minutes, our silence thick, until the old man turned to go back to the pilothouse. So he did not see Ma empty her pockets onto the deck with quick scoops of her fingers, step out of her shoes and toe off her socks, and then one two onto the ledge and three, throw her arms back and then forward and then arc herself into the dark water with a great noise but hardly any splash.
And in the moment of my panic I was with her in the dark, the weight of the water above me nothing to the eternal, unseen depths below, and I felt the burning in my lungs and eyes from the salt and tasted it in my nose. And I knew we were going to drown. Then she shot to the surface in a fountain of spume, and I knew we would be all right. The old man shouted to her, and she waved and called back nonchalantly, but instead of coming close to be pulled aboard she lay back in the trail of the dying sun, its blood clotting in her clothing, arms and legs and hair all spread out like an anemone.
I wanted to be the sort of person that would dive in after her, the sort of person that welcomed the unfathomable depths without needing to understand them. I wanted to be my mother, in that moment. I knew that I was not.
She finally curled in on herself and disappeared beneath the swell, and I held my breath until she surfaced again, swam neatly over to the side, and carefully pulled herself back into the boat.
Her clothes were sodden, her shirt hanging off her oddly and her jeans clinging. Water beaded on her freckled collarbones and salt clotted her hair, but even though the old man did not sound happy in his words to her while he started his engine, the look on her face was one of pure peace, and I knew that I had never seen it there before.
Her first year of college she hadn’t known that they wouldn’t be allowed to board over the summer. She found this out only a few weeks before classes broke up.
“Why didn’t you just go home and live with your parents?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That wasn’t an option anymore. And I didn’t feel like I knew anyone well enough at that point to tag along home with them. I liked a lot of people, but I didn’t trust them yet.”
For five days she lived in her car, going around to all the shops and restaurants looking for summer work, considering moving on to look elsewhere but worried what cash she had wouldn’t last long enough for her to find something. Then she got the postcard that called her south.
She and Anthony had found each other again some years before, kept up by letter and occasional long-distance phone call. She had told him that she was being turfed out at the end of the school year; the postcard suggested in tiny pencil writing that she come down to Mississippi and run his grandpa’s crab lines with him. She hadn’t even phoned first to make sure that he wasn’t just joking but looked up the route in her road atlas and headed south the very same day.
“And then what happened?” I asked.
“And then we crabbed all summer for Tony’s grandpa and I went back to school in the fall with money in my pocket,” she said.
But there was more to the story than that.
She was nineteen, he was a year or so older, and when she got to Mississippi it was like they’d last seen each other the day before, that the years since they’d been face to face didn’t count. Except for one thing: Marisol.
Her name meant “bitter sun” and she lived with her mom and dad and older sister near to where Tony was staying with his grandparents—Tony and his grandparents were still speaking to each other then, even though at the time he wasn’t speaking to his parents, aunts or uncles, or most of his brothers and sisters, half-siblings and stepfathers.
Tony and Marisol met the week before Ma showed up, so when she got there late in the evening, found the house, bounced up the steps and into Tony’s arms, Marisol was just behind him. The women could have behaved like lions circling the kill, like leopards contesting territory, old friend against barely legal barely girlfriend, but Ma didn’t like Tony that way.
She slept on the couch that would try to eat me a couple of decades later, surrounded by photos and Madonnas, was shaken awake long before dawn the next morning, wandered down to the water with Tony to find Marisol waiting for them, cast off into the Gulf of Mexico and learned the other way to catch crabs.
Tony’s grandfather owned five hundred and forty inkwell-style pots, and they let them out in strings of sixty, baited and marked with a buoy. Every morning the three of them were down at the boat before four, motored out into the bay and pulled up each string—this was where the metal crane came in—piled the crabs of keeping size in the ice hold and tossed the small ones, re-baited the traps and dropped them back into the water. It took them until six in the evening, sometimes later, to sort through every single trap, and even though they were all Catholic they went out on Sunday as well, went to Mass and took communion on Saturday evenings to gain absolution for spending the Lord’s day on the water.
It didn’t take them long to find that Marisol was crazy. Break-the-law-and-then-sweet-talk-her-way-out-of-being-arrested crazy. Try-and-kidnap-someone’s-dog-because-it-looked-lonely crazy. Strip-naked-for-no-reason-at-all-and-dive-into-the-ocean-miles-from-land crazy. Happy-one-day-and-down-the-next crazy. And she liked Ma, who was going through one of her stoic phases then, didn’t talk much but from time to time whipped out barbed observations that would have been cruel if they weren’t so funny. The Gulf rotted their clothes and locked their hair, and when they thought Ma wasn’t looking Tony and Marisol would pause for long, wet kisses on the far side of the pilothouse, and Ma would roll her eyes at the seagulls and pretend that she didn’t hear them.
Theirs was a very religious community, so Ma was also there the first time that Tony and Marisol had sex,
not there on purpose but because it was the only chance they’d gotten and they didn’t know that she was awake.
They’d taken sleeping bags and Thermoses out into the fields away from town to watch the Perseids, and it had been assumed by the adults that with my mother there everyone would stay out of everyone else’s drawers, but Ma fell asleep, and what woke her up was the sound of zippers being undone and she wasn’t sure what she should do but she knew she didn’t have it in her to jump up and put a stop to the festivities.
When the end of summer came they didn’t want Ma to leave. They made a pact that they’d come back to the Gulf one day, alive or dead, and if one of them died the other two would lay him or her to rest in the setting sun if it was the last thing they did; this last part was Marisol’s idea, but the other two agreed that it was probably as badass a funeral as any of them could manage. She kissed them both goodbye, the money she’d earned a fat roll in her pocket, and headed back north to start school again. She’d guessed that everything would go on as before, hoped that she’d be able to go back the next summer and work the water alongside them again.
But six weeks into term she got a phone call from Mr. Panagopoulos: had she seen his grandson? She was understandably confused, and the old man explained that Anthony and the neighbor girl had both disappeared a few days before, and everyone wanted to assume the best, that maybe they’d decided to come visit her and hadn’t bothered to mention to anyone that they were going. But Ma hadn’t had anything but a letter, two weeks before, with the usual news, nothing about leaving home or going anywhere.
Three weeks after the phone call from his grandfather Ma received a letter from Tony, and she was so relieved that she opened it while standing in the mailroom.
The first line asked her to keep all that followed to herself, that the parents and grandparents and etcetera had been told that the two of them were OK, and the rest would come out when it was the right time. They had gone to Canada, were working the water off Nova Scotia, and Marisol was pregnant. They’d been wanting to leave Harrison County for a while, but the baby was what had actually made them go: she couldn’t get rid of it, she couldn’t tell her parents, she wasn’t quite eighteen yet. They wanted Ma to come up and visit when it was born, when summer came around again and she could get free. She read their letters eagerly, pinned the photos of Marisol with her slowly growing belly to the cork board in her room, woke up at three a.m. when Tony called to tell her it was coming, and then at four a.m. the next week when he said that this was really it. He called again at a more reasonable time the same day: the baby really was coming this time, but the doctors were worried; something was wrong besides the fact that they were a few weeks early.