Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You keep saying his name.”

  She rapped the spoon on the edge of the pan: maybe a comment, maybe just getting cabbage off the spoon. “What do you want me to call him?”

  “Bill. Joe. I don’t want you saying his name, this blond god from L.A. I want you to say my name.”

  Her eyes were still blank, cool, but her lips quirked suddenly. “He liked my washes.”

  “He would. He’s from the land that invented mango garbage-can liners. Apricot bomber jackets. They don’t even eat things that aren’t pastel.”

  She rapped the spoon again, but the corners of her mouth were still crooked. “He’s not from L.A. He’s from the east. I mean west.”

  “What?”

  “West. Like Hawaii. Or Fiji. Tokyo.”

  “That’s the Far East.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why he got confused.”

  “So am I. You’re still talking about him.”

  She sighed, put the spoon down. “Jonah. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I know,” he said penitently. “I’m sorry. Let’s go out. I’ve got cabin fever. Turn off the cabbage. Let’s go for a walk. Please?”

  They went out the back door, walked until dark, picking up shells, agates, looking for glass floats. The beach was adrift with Velella, tiny purple sailboats as delicate as butterfly wings that caught the wind and sailed the surface of the sea. Some storm had tumbled them ashore; dried, light as leaves, they blew across the sand, minute ghost ships lost on land. Megan, digging in piles of kelp, kept mistaking kelp bladders for floats; Jonah walked head down, scrutinizing the tide line for jade, pearls, ambergris. They kissed finally, blown together by random currents, barely recognizing each other in the dark, the kiss cold as wind, salty from the sea.

  They drifted home, ate sausage and cabbage, then went down the street to the Ancient Mariner, where a band from up north called Hellbent tried to prove it. Megan gave up on them early, blasted out the door by the harmonica player. But she held Jonah’s hand until then, and she kissed him before she left. Jonah ordered another beer, wanting mindless noise, movement, wanting, suddenly, to be hellbent himself, as long as he could find his way home safely afterwards.

  A woman appeared on the stage among the stocky, wild, bearded men. Jonah got a confused impression of her in the smoky light. A guest singer, he heard, from where-did-you-say-you-were-from? Her answer was lost in rowdy cheers. She wore something black, glittering, skintight. The sound system was poor; Jonah couldn’t understand her words. Her voice was clear, strong; it moved up and down an impossible range. Her black hair hung to her hips; her face appeared and vanished behind it. She pulled it straight back from her brow with one hand, revealing earrings of onyx and ivory, a fall of overlapping circles, each half-black, half-white, separated by a yin-yang curve of gold that continued around the circle. Jonah, gazing at them, tasted a cool, rich wafer on his tongue. I’m possessed, he thought. I want to eat jewels. Then the woman’s eyes caught his, glittering, sea green, and something snapped through him as if the air were charged.

  Odd things were happening inside the sound system. Tide flowed through her voice, drowned the music, dragged back into the system on a long, slow sigh. For an instant, before it built again, he heard her voice, high, sweet, elusive. And then he heard water again, gathering, gathering, pulling treasures out of the deep as it shaped and coiled and finally broke with a hollow, powerful moan against land, spilling stone, shell, pearl, spume across the sand. And then her voice came, low now, murmuring through the ebb.

  He swallowed dryly, and realized that he heard no other sounds in the world but the singer and the sea. He turned his head to see if the mysterious tide had entranced everyone; the movement brought the bar noises crashing around him: arguments, laughter, the drummer taking a final run down the drums, a cymbal, applause. The singer, her face half-lit, half-hidden under the dark wave of hair, gave them half a smile. Her single eye found Jonah again; she pulled her hair back with her hand and let him see her face, pale as foam, as finely sculpted as any shell shaped through the ages by water and danger and necessity. For a moment, as he stared back at her, he heard, beneath the human voices, the secret gathering of the tide.

  Then she stepped out of the light. He stood up, looking for her, not knowing what he was looking for. The bar was crowded; heads were every color but black. He reached the stage finally, saw only rowdy, bearded faces. There was an absence of her in the smoke-laced shadows, the flickering candlelit tables. He veered to the bar finally, ordered another beer, thinking if he waited a little, she might sing again. He downed the beer quickly, ordered another, trying to ignore the feeling that the night had suddenly split itself between the moment when he had not known of her existence and the moment when all he knew was her absence.

  He got home late; Megan was asleep. She had left a light on for him, over the table. He stood groggily, blinking at fossils, at the box on the table. Everything looked strange: He could barely remember why the table was littered with stones, what significance the box held. He flipped it open absently, still looking for something, for a meaning in what he felt.

  The box full of treasure dazzled his eyes. It must have come out of the sea, he thought crazily, and then saw, lying among the brilliant stones and crystals and metals, the onyx-and-ivory earrings.

  Two

  Megan woke at sunrise. A line of gold ran around the curtains. In the distance she could hear the low, lazy tide stirring the sea mosses, sorting shells. She sat up. Beside her, Jonah lay so still he might have been some ship’s figurehead the sea had washed into her bed. He was breathing, though so evenly and quietly she had to untangle his breath from the sea. His skin smelled of beer and smoke. She reached for her glasses, slid out of bed; he didn’t stir. She pulled some clothes on, wandered with her drawing pad into spring.

  She walked a long way, in and out of dispersing mists, half dreaming, looking for a still life along the tide line. But her eye glossed over seaweed, Velella, broken mussels, and sand dollars; they seemed an incoherent jumble. I need a bone, she thought. The moon. Something pure and simple. A seal surfaced in the waves to look at her, but did not stay to be drawn. She saw what she wanted then: a line, thin as spiderweb, cutting through a tendril of mist. She stopped. The line stretched into the tide, pulled earth and water together. A figure, shapeless in fishing boots and windbreaker, held the pole. Against the mist, the figure was a few bunchy lines, male or female, bulky, nearly colorless. Megan opened her drawing pad, pulled a pen out of her pocket. She rarely drew people; this was not a person, this was a sea species, a tide dweller, like the sandpipers and hermit crabs, sending a tentacle into the waves to see what there was to eat. Megan caught the angle of the body and the pole before the fisher reeled in to cast again. She looked seaward then, sketched a quick, feathery breaker. Something small and hard struck her shoulder, and she felt a claw in her hair.

  She shook her head wildly; it scratched her scalp. Then she stilled, thinking more calmly: the fishhook. The weight had hit her shoulder; it dangled in front of her, pulling at the hook tangled in her hair. She groped for it. The fisher was walking toward her, reeling in methodically. Megan felt the hook scrape behind her ear; she caught it finally, a clump of hook and hair in her fingers as the fisher reached her.

  It was a woman; Megan didn’t recognize her. She had long curly iron gray hair flying out from a knitted cap; her eyes were the same oyster gray as the water. She had a lined, rugged, weathered face, about as graceless as a rockfish. Shorter than Megan, she looked hefty, shapeless under her jacket. She seemed annoyed, as if Megan’s hair had crossed her line on purpose.

  “Hold still,” she said brusquely, and put her pole down. She picked through Megan’s hair with stubby fingers. Her voice was a deep growl. “Lost the bait on that cast. At least you don’t have a worm in your hair.”

  “Thanks,” Megan muttered. Profuse apologies not being forthcoming, she added, aggrieved, “I think I’m bleeding. You could have cr
acked my glasses with that weight.”

  “I could have,” the woman agreed with daunting calmness.

  “Well, you should learn to cast. The ocean’s that way; if you look, you can’t miss it.”

  “I wasn’t looking at the ocean. I was looking at you. Why not? You were looking at me. You were putting me down on your paper.”

  “You could have asked me not to, if it bothered you. You didn’t have to throw things at me.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” the woman said, shrugging. “Draw me or not. You caught my attention, and so my hook followed. It happens. Hold still; it’s a triple hook.”

  “Great.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Megan. More to the point, what’s yours?”

  The woman gave the kind of fat, raspy chuckle Megan associated with chronic smoking. “You going to sue me? Over a scratch? Humans are so delicate. Who do the manatees sue when the speedboat propellers scar their backs for life?”

  “What?”

  “Who do the canned dolphins sue? Who do the little violet snails sue when, floating upside down on their bubble rafts on the surface of the sea, they run into an oil slick?”

  Brother, Megan thought. She said, “All right, all right, just get the damn hook out of my hair.”

  “Might have to cut it out. I have my fish knife.”

  “Oh, no. No knives. Just snap the line and I’ll cut it out at home.”

  The woman chuckled again. “Don’t be afraid. Anyway, I want my hook back. It’s mine, after all. And I want to see what I reeled in. Megan. What do you do with your drawings?”

  “I sell them. Ouch.”

  “One more prong. What else do you draw?”

  “Tide pools,” she muttered. “Birds. Kelp. Sea things.”

  “Then why me?”

  “I wasn’t drawing you. I was drawing a piece of sea life. Something attached to the sea, getting breakfast like an otter or a gull.”

  The woman gave a short seal’s bark. It might have been anger or amusement; there seemed both in her expression. The hook came free in her hand. She looked into Megan’s eyes then, her eyes wide, unblinking. “You must look closer,” she said. “You must look closer. You don’t see anything at all.”

  “People like my drawings,” Megan protested.

  “Of course they do. You show them what they expect to see. But you don’t see what’s really there. You couldn’t even see me.” She untangled the rest of the line from Megan’s hair, caught the weight before it dropped. Megan, irritated by the portentousness, answered, “Of course I see you. You’ve been in my hair for five minutes. You’re in my drawing.”

  The woman gave her raspy chuckle. She picked up her pole. A toad-woman, Megan thought darkly. Toadfish. And lunatic besides. “Look at your drawing. My name is Doris. Dory, you can call me next time.”

  “Next time what?”

  “Next time you want me.” She turned, wandered back along the tide line, pole over her shoulder. Megan watched her, at once cross and curious. She wasn’t local, she wasn’t a tourist. She was someone’s aging, eccentric sea wife, widow, maybe, living along the cliffs, her mind full of scars and barnacles, like an old whale’s back, from being too long in the sea. Someone else—husband, son, sister—kept her just human enough. She went behind one of the huge rocks scattered along the beach; she didn’t reappear. She must have stopped there to fish, well away from Megan’s hair. Megan stooped finally, picked up her drawing.

  She gave it a cursory glance. The wave had gotten smudged, but the simple essential lines were unchanged. What she had wanted to say… She gazed at it, pleased, despite the memory of the hook in her hair. The fisher, the line into the sea, the wave…

  She looked more closely at the wave. She was aware of her heartbeat suddenly, a little private sound louder than the break and drag of tide. It wasn’t a smudge in the wave where the line broke the water and the fishhook disappeared. It was a graceful tangle of tide-tossed hair.

  Jonah, rapt, drowning at the bottom of a dream, down full fathom five among the dead men, the rotting spars and spilled treasure of sunken ships, was mildly annoyed when the white arm of a sea goddess reached endlessly and insistently down to pull him up into light. He hid in the coral where the butterfly-fish slept, tried to burrow into the parrotfish’s nightly cocoon; the hand pursued him.

  “Jonah.”

  He tried to make himself invisible, one of the little ghoulish creatures living in the sea’s eternal night. The hand plunged after him, scattering schools of luminous fish.

  “Jonah! Wake up. You slept through the alarm.”

  No, I haven’t, he thought, hearing the alarm all around him in the sea. Then he opened one eye, found himself in bed, with Megan, dressed and smelling of tide, sitting beside him.

  He moved after a moment, dropped a hand over his eyes. “God,” he breathed. “I had the strangest dream. What time is it?”

  “Ten after eight. What did you dream?”

  “I dreamed I was searching for fossils on the bottom of the ocean. There was a great cliff; I could swim up and down it, picking fossils out. But they weren’t bivalves and trilobites—I was picking whales out of the cliff, walruses, seals, manatees, dolphins, sea turtles. Only they weren’t big; they were tiny, shrunken things, and in my dream I thought: They’ve been forgotten; that’s why they’re so tiny. I’m in the future, and they’re in the forgotten past.”

  “Well,” she said comfortingly after a moment, “they’re not all gone yet. I saw a seal in the tide watching me watch it.”

  “Did you go out drawing?” She nodded. “I didn’t even know you were gone.” He trailed a finger down her arm sleepily. “Did you draw?”

  “I did one.” Her eyes seemed opaque behind her glasses; they got that way sometimes when she didn’t like her work.

  “What?”

  “Just something. I’m not sure if I like it.”

  “Let me see.”

  She shook her head. “Later, maybe. Let me think about it. Do you want me to bring you some coffee?”

  “Coffee,” he said, as if he couldn’t remember what it was he drank a pot of every day. But a bit of his mind had darted off into deeper water, in pursuit of something.

  “You know. Black stuff, comes in a cup.”

  “Uh.” He sat up suddenly. “No, I’ll get up. I remember now.”

  “What?”

  “Where my dream came from.” He swung around, found the floor, and padded out to the dining room, where the box sat on the table among his rocks. He opened it.

  “There they are,” he said, and there they were: all the great sea animals, tiny carvings of jade, turquoise, malachite, silver, gold. “That’s what made me dream.” He was silent again, touching moons of black and white, rimmed with gold.

  “Do you like his work?” Megan asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he sighed. “Yes.”

  Reading on his stool behind the cash register later, while Jenny worked, he kept avoiding sea green eyes. He studied the antique Compend of Geology stubbornly; thoughts crystallized between the lines. All I have to do is sit here until the jewelry maker comes in… “Fossils…of extreme interest to geologists, because they reveal the nature of the former inhabitants of the earth.” Then I can ask him about the woman who bought the earrings. The woman who sings. “…may be defined as any evidence of the former existence of a living thing.” He would remember her.

  But how well do I remember her? “In some cases…even the organic matter…is preserved…” Black, black hair, her hand pulling it back. Her voice like smoke, like fire, bright and dark. What she wore, night black, yet sparking light. “…more commonly…only the shells…and of these…sometimes both the form and structure and sometimes only the form.” Her face, pure and mysterious as a moon shell, turning and turning inward, outward…the color of her eyes. The blur of color coming at me across the room, into my eyes, into my blood…

  “Jonah, do we have any little cards explaining this o
ne?” Jenny asked, holding up an ammonite. He rocked a little on the stool, jarred by the force of his imaginings, the boundary to another world buckling against the insistence of the real. Jenny’s voice, the customer’s hopeful face, the preserved form and structure…

  “Oh.” Both women looked strange, Jenny and the customer; there was only one face his eyes expected. He leaned forward, pulled at a drawer in the counter. “In here, somewhere. It’s an ammonite. Mesozoic Period.” He pulled out one of the cards, handwritten in Megan’s calligraphy. “Here.” Holding it across the counter, he looked up into sea green eyes.

  The world stopped. Stopped moving, stopped making noise, twenty-seven billion forms of life stopped breathing air, drinking light. Then it started up again, with a lurch of sound like ground gears.

  “Are you Jonah? I’m Adam Fin.”

  He held out his hand. After a moment, Jonah shook it, wondering how he could have found any similarities at all between the darkly glittering singer and this fallen angel. The green eyes narrowed faintly, a smile glinting through them, contradicting the bland innocence in his face. Jonah half expected the clamshells to clatter together in horror, the Compend to disintegrate into a pile of ash, the name to etch itself into the plate-glass window. Then he thought: This is ridiculous, I’m having a bad case of spring fever, I’m hallucinating.

  “Fin?”

  “One n. Like a fish.” He smiled again, this time with teeth. There seemed a lot of them, white as fishbone and predatory. That, Jonah remembered, was the fashion in places where people paid attention to fashion. “So you like my work.” His voice seemed deceptively gentle, silky. Jonah expected to see brine running out of his smile, as if he had just taken a shark bite of something.

  “Yes.” He dared not ask, he decided, which of three women had told him that. Then, abruptly, frowning, he did ask. “Did Megan tell you that? When? I only looked at it last—this morning.”

  “No.”

  “No.” He drew breath, his eyes sliding away from the chilly, smiling eyes. “Not Megan.”