Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He said, “What was that old tale about a ship? A flying ship?” He was sorting through rocks and fossils he had pulled from the cliffs that day: bits and pieces of sandstone, half a clam, a worm tube. They were scattered over the dining table; he was not particularly tidy. She tugged at her lip, studying something.

  “The USS Enterprise?”

  “No—you know. An old sailing ship. A ghost ship, wanders around scaring sailors on foggy nights.”

  “Oh. Flying Dutchman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it’s at the door.”

  Her eyes lifted, regarded him vaguely behind her glasses. Had he, they wondered, said what he had said? They lost interest, dropped again, to what looked like a floating candy store. Tropical fish: he had a tank when he was a kid. The thermostat broke one day; the temperature plummeted and fish went belly up, floating like petals on top of the water.

  “One of those?” he asked, bored. She got obsessed, sometimes, working. She disappeared on him, the way an anemone did, drawing in tighter and tighter the more you prodded. But she heard him; she shook her head.

  “No. It’s not a fish. But look at those colors—lemon, turquoise, indigo—”

  “Pepto-Bismol.”

  “Orange sherbet.”

  “Pickled ginger.”

  “Puce.”

  “Lime,” he shot back, but weakly; she had disarmed him with the puce. She had already submerged herself in the coral reef. He leaned over his collection: a tall, wiry man with long red-brown rippling hair, cobalt eyes, glasses in round black frames he aimed at customers like cannon muzzles if they annoyed him. He had hired Jenny Elwood to work the register for him, at Megan’s suggestion; he looked, she said, too pained when someone wanted him to handle money. Megan herself looked incredulous behind the register. She picked at it dubiously as if she didn’t trust it to do the same thing twice; she could barely find her mouth to answer a question.

  She found her mouth now. “Nudibranch.”

  “Nudiwho?”

  “Or worm, maybe. Or a mollusk without a shell.”

  “Banana slug.”

  She ignored his suggestion, but became suddenly articulate. “It’s so strange. I don’t remember drawing it at all, it just appeared, the way things kept popping up after I cleared the water, like the champagne cork and the beer bottle. I never even noticed the beer bottle.”

  “Beer,” he said, and went around her to the ancient refrigerator. “Want one?”

  “I don’t suppose the champagne bottle is in there.”

  “Dream on. This thing is making slime again.”

  “What thing?”

  “The refrigerator. It’s bleeding black slime out of this little pipe.”

  “Uh.”

  “The truck sounds like a motorcycle, the refrigerator’s falling apart, the rent on the store is going up next month, and you’re sitting there reading about naked slugs.”

  She lifted her head. One eye regarded him thoughtfully between strands of her hair. He saw her lips part, the beginning of her smile. He put the beer down. Her lips tasted of salt; her hair smelled of the sea; her ear was a pale, whorled thing that could only be understood by his tongue. Grazing, he loosened the jewel at her earlobe, swallowed it, and found out much later, as he lay in bed contemplating her other ear, that he had dined on opal and drunk gold.

  She was reading again, naked on her stomach, her chin on one hand, absently fingering the remaining earring. She made a sudden sound, a little hiccup of discovery.

  “They’re not horns.”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”

  “They’re ears.”

  “A worm with ears.”

  “A shell-less snail. Not real ears. Rabbit ears.”

  “A snail with rabbit ears.”

  “Little protrusions that look like ears. It’s called a sea hare.” She paused, reading, frowning. She changed hands under her chin, fingered the other ear. “It shoots purple ink when it’s disturbed, it can lay twenty million eggs, and it’s both male and female.”

  “Wow.”

  “Where’s my earring?”

  “I ate it.”

  “No, really,” she said, feeling around the sheets. He moved closer, pulled by some strange inner tide.

  “You’re obsessed by ears,” he breathed, feeling the cool drop of gold on his tongue. Then she turned under him, her arms around his back, her head on the open book. He saw the sea hare floating in and out of her hair before he closed his eyes and she pulled him with her long white arms down beneath the waves.

  Megan went back the next day to the tide pool. She recognized not so much the pool itself as the bare place among the barnacles where she had sat. The starfish had moved an inch or two; the anemones were closed. There was no sign of a sea hare.

  She stood after a while, her arms folded, gazing out past the great rocks strewn along the tide line, where the waves churned and broke, to the vast gray plane of water. She had been looking into tide pools all her life, having grown up in the northernmost coastal town in the state. Drawing the sea, she had slowly drifted south, through small fishing ports and smaller towns where travelers could buy a tank of gas, a hamburger, a coffee cup with the name of the town on it, a motel room that overlooked the sea. Fishers, loggers, retired people lived in those tiny towns; or like Jonah, people looking for a quiet spot to read or dig up fossils for the rest of their lives. Such people clung, barnacle-like, to the cliffs, in houses facing seaward. Others, like the sea hare, traveled through, vanished, having no real business in a tide pool. Some freaky wave had flipped it that far ashore, she guessed, even while a cold, clear voice in the back of her mind said: There was no sea hare in the tide pool. The sea hare crawled into the drawing.

  She didn’t draw that day; she walked back into town. Though it was still barely spring, the license plates on cars were already migratory: California, Nevada, Idaho, even an Arizona on a Winnebago parked near Jonah’s shop. They were wanderers, following the paths of birds and whales, wanting to bring home visions, landscapes, the echo of barking seals, the endless siren song of the waves at the edge of the world. Browsing along the street, they would buy strands of abalone beads, driftwood vases, shells for ashtrays. They would buy canned Chinook salmon at Ernie’s Fish and Bait. They would get lost, scowl over maps, throw caramel corn at seagulls, snap at one another and their children. They would eat clam fritters, oyster sandwiches, crab cocktail at Lindy’s Café. Then they would lean over the sea walls at lookout points, their faces wistful, slightly perplexed, as if they were trying to understand some lost language that they once knew, in a distant time when seals walked ashore like men, before all the mermaids changed to manatees.

  What, their faces would ask, do these barking seals, this smell of brine and guano, this vastness no Winnebago can cross, have to do with me? Then they would get back into their cars so they could reach the next star on the map before dark. A wanderer herself, Megan knew the lure of the road, the peculiar quest for freedom that had the safe lights of home at the end. The journey was more important than the place; most important was to return home, with crumpled maps, salt and pepper shakers shaped like clam shells, a sweatshirt with whales on it, and to be able to say: I have been there, I have gone on a journey, I have come safely home. The world was a dangerous place for mollusks without their shells, and yet they ventured into it, restless, curious, or maybe following some ancient migratory instinct to return to the place where souls were spawned.

  Megan herself wandered into Mike’s Twice-Sold Tales, where she browsed among the marine-life books, hoping for some new insight into sea hares. But those she encountered led, it seemed, a life scarcely worth mentioning, tagged onto a paragraph or decorating an illustration of chains of species. Mike, a huge man with a nicotine-stained mustache, as chatty as a sea urchin, glanced up from his antique Moby Dick and lifted a thumb. Translated, it was a greeting, discussion of health, the weather, business, a
nd a general recognition of the species Resident - Who - Has - Shared - Winter - Storms - Love - Loneliness - Stir - Craziness - General - Inbred - Insanity - that - Comes - Before - the - First - Tourist. He was back in his book, dissecting whales, before-she could respond.

  She went back to Jonah’s shop, where he was in much the same position, reading some antique geology book on a stool in a corner, while Jenny gave change and smiled at the customers. He grunted at her, a conversational gambit that said less than Mike’s thumb: I’m - Okay - You’re - Okay - I’m - Busy - You’ll - Be - Busy - Store’s - Okay - Okay? He turned a page; she went into the back room to put a pale wash of red across the starfish, and a wash of lavender so diluted it was barely visible across the sea hare.

  “God, you’ve ruined it,” Jonah commented later, on his way to the bathroom. She whirled at him, indignant.

  “Jonah!”

  “How about some tangerine while you’re at it?”

  She studied the drawing. It did need another color, something neutral. “I’m not one of your customers,” she said coldly. “Go crab at them.”

  “I’m sorry. It hurts my eyes.”

  “Thanks.” She lifted a shoulder as he kissed her ear. “And stay away from my ears.”

  “A trifle sensitive, aren’t we?”

  “I spent hours in the cold working on this sketch, and you just walk in and tell me I ruined it.”

  “It was a beautiful sketch. And the n you put those Popsicle colors on it. It’s just a matter of taste, that’s all. I’m not trying to tell you how to paint.”

  “You are, too,” she said between her teeth. “You have no more sensitivity than a three-year-old.”

  “Well, maybe you should try some primary colors while you’re at it. If that’s what’s in the sea.”

  “Maybe you should go look for my earring.”

  “Excuse me,” Jenny said, parting the back curtains. “There’s someone here who makes jewelry.” She closed the curtains again briskly, leaving an impression on the eye of silver rinse, glittering glasses, pink lipstick, two rhinestone cats on a chain holding her sweater together, a fashion statement that Megan associated with foxheads dangling from your shoulders and circle skirts with poodles on them. Jenny, Jonah said once, was the kind of person who would crochet a Kleenex box holder. But he needed her: She was competent, she liked people, even Jonah, she was unflappable through all his moods, even when she stumbled into a squall.

  “That’s all I need,” Jonah said sourly. “More jewelry.” He disappeared into the bathroom and called, peremptorily, “You talk to him. Her. I can’t.”

  Megan stared icily at the curtain, wanting to toss the red wash over the top of it. A coffee wash, she thought suddenly, between the red and the lavender. Café au lait. A diagonal line down the rock, spilling into the sand.

  She parted the curtains. The jewelry maker stood at the counter, studying what Jonah had beneath the glass. She paused half a step, blinking. There was too much of him for the shop. Too much of him for the town, she thought. He didn’t belong in this tide pool. He was quite tall, dressed in black denim and leather; his short hair was whiter than Jenny’s. He wore an earring in one ear. He turned at her step and smiled. He smiles, she thought. His eyes were pale green, the misty color the sea got sometimes when the sun broke behind the clouds. She was too amazed to smile back.

  “This is Megan,” said Jenny the unflappable. “She’ll help you. Megan, this is Adam I-didn’t-catch your—”

  He held out his hand, the one without the box in it. “Fin.” His hand was broad, strong, gentle. “I’ve just come into town. I’ve been showing samples of my work at other shops. They all said I should talk to Jonah. You have some very nice pieces already. Are they local?”

  “Mostly,” Megan said. She had to clear her throat. “Jonah gets some things inland, when he goes fossil swapping. Where are you from?” In God’s name, she wanted to add, and what are you doing here?

  He waved a hand in the general direction of Hawaii. “East.” He smiled again, showing white teeth, and she laughed a little, because it was so rare, after a long winter, to see a face that wasn’t dour.

  “That’s west.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m a little turned around on land. The mainland.” He opened his box, a simple rosewood case, beautifully mitered and polished.

  He used opal and onyx, all colors of jade, aventurine with gold, amethyst with malachite, pearl and garnet and peridot. Some of the settings looked antique; others were richly barbaric, or as simple and elegant as his box. She lifted her eyes to his face after a while, astonished, and saw in the simple, elegant lines of it something that might, under a wash of gold light, or a subtle change of expression, turn as wild and exotic as his work could turn. She swallowed. “It’s beautiful.” His face changed slightly; she blinked. “Your work. Do you do your own carving?”

  He nodded. She noticed his earring then: an onyx rabbit sprinting, legs outstretched, back arched, a silver quarter moon curved over it, the moon’s horns rising out of the rabbit’s feet. “I see my own designs like dreams in my head,” he said. “I like to make them visible.”

  “So do I,” she said, surprised, and he looked at her. He was oddly pale for an islander, she thought suddenly. Maybe he had come even farther than she guessed: from some ancient, foreign seaport where every language in the world was spoken at once.

  “You’re an artist?”

  “Just pen and ink,” she said, suddenly shy, unused to discussing her work with strangers. She made a brief gesture at the far wall. “Just seascapes.”

  He walked through the shop to see them. People glanced twice at him, recognizing him, and then trying to figure out who they imagined he was. He seemed oblivious of the attention. He studied an anemone attached to a barnacle-covered rock. Its tendrils, open and flowing with the tide, were flushed with a faint green wash. Below it, a pale pink wash spilled out of a starfish’s arms, colored some algae, and drained into pearl-pale sand.

  “I like the colors,” he said, returning. He studied her again, as intently as he had studied the anemone. “Do you do only seascapes?”

  She nodded, forgetting her shyness then, under his calm gaze. “Always. I always have. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to draw. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s a world I can’t enter. I can’t belong in it, the way I can belong on land. This is the closest I can get—the only way I have of belonging. Of understanding.” She flushed a little. “I can’t explain. I can only draw it.”

  “Yes,” he said softly. His eyes held her a moment longer; she became aware, in the brief silence, of the tide gathering and breaking and spilling across the sand, regathering itself, breaking again. She heard his breath gathering. Then she moved, touching her glasses straight, and his face turned from her as he closed his box.

  “I love your work.” Her voice sounded odd. “But you’ll have to talk to Jonah. It’s his shop.”

  “I see. Then I’ll leave this here for Jonah.”

  “You don’t want to take it with you?” she asked, amazed. He put the box into her hands and smiled again, lightly.

  “I’m sure it will be safe with you. Jonah has a good reputation. I’ll come back tomorrow; maybe he’ll see me then.”

  She watched him through the window as he crossed the street, turned a corner; the smooth satiny wood in her hands seemed still warm from his touch. Jenny, ever efficient, suggested briskly, “You’ll want to take that upstairs before someone buys it.”

  Megan turned her head, stared at Jenny. “What’s he doing here? He belongs south. Where everyone looks like that.”

  Jenny shrugged. “He washed ashore here. You did. Jonah did. Seemed nice, didn’t he? More like one of us than one of them.”

  Megan nodded, her face easing at the familiar division of Jenny’s world. “I’m just not used to one of us being one of them.”

  “Bet,” Jenny said, springing the cash register open for a customer, “he was born here. Right here on these cliffs.
There you are, Mandy. Enjoy.”

  Jonah, annoyed by Megan’s insistence that he go upstairs and look at jewelry when the last thing the store needed was more, kept to his stool behind the register, answering questions about the fossils now and then when people interrupted his reading. He concluded, from Jenny’s sporadic comments, that Megan had been persuaded by some blond in tight black jeans; she had probably not noticed much beyond that. He avoided the back room, not wanting to pick another fight while she laid New Age colors on her perfect drawings. Going upstairs finally, after he closed the shop, he found the rosewood box on the table in the middle of his rocks.

  He ignored it, going to the stove where Megan was stirring dill seed into cabbage. The smell reminded him of low tide in mud flats. She wore long glittering strands of jet beads in her ears; he considered them, found them too formidable. His hands were closing in on her hips when she spoke.

  “Have you looked at Adam’s jewelry?”

  His hands curved on air, dropped. “Adam.” He wandered away, ate a piece of cabbage. “Jenny says he looks like a refugee from Beverly Hills.”

  “Jenny did not say that; you did.” She added kielbasa to the cabbage. “He can still make jewelry. Go look at it.”

  “Later.” He rummaged in the fridge: no beer. Lifting his head, he saw her New Age washes staining the horizon: pale crimson shading into lilac, where the sun was going down. The close smell of cabbage, the soft spring colors, made him suddenly restless. “Let’s go out.”

  “Now?”

  “After supper. There’s music at the Ancient Mariner.”

  “I was going to finish framing the drawings.”

  “Do it tomorrow.”

  “Adam’s coming back to talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Funny,” he said, munching more raw cabbage, “how irritating some names are. Adam. Nobody’s named Adam, except Batman.”

  She turned slowly, gave him that blank, blue-gray stare. “What are you talking about?”