Kingfisher

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I’m Tye Fisher,” he said. “My brother Hal owns this place. He and your mother are related in a roundabout fashion; they know each other in the way that big families do. You need a place to stay, we can open one of the rooms for you.” Pierce felt his expression change, lock into place. Tye added quickly, “Stay the night, I mean. The old hotel hasn’t been officially open for decades.”

  “Hotel.” He swiveled on the stool, trying to find it. Remnants surfaced in the shadows: a huge stone fireplace at the far end of the room, what might be stairs inset to one side of it, the kind that fanned out over the floor, then did a slow curve upward and out of sight.

  “We’re trying to get at least part of it back in business. We’ve been trying for years. Soon as you get one leak fixed, another starts, then the wind picks up, slats go flying into the bay, and the windows cloud up. You know how it goes.” He nodded toward the chandelier. “This used to be the old reception hall. Through those doors there along the inner wall was the sitting room, even bigger than this one. The restaurant’s in there now. Kingfisher Grill.”

  Pierce glanced behind him, then turned back to his beer, not wanting to know, wanting to make himself clear from the start. “I’m just passing through,” he said. “On my way south. I want to find a job cooking in Severluna.”

  “You any good?”

  Pierce smiled. “I don’t know. My mother taught me a few things. I’m hoping to learn on the job in a restaurant on the beach. Someplace like my mother’s, simple, fresh, and local, only down where it’s warm, and nobody has to wear socks.”

  Tye grunted. He pulled a square of wood and a knife from under the bar, then, as if he had a little orchard down there as well, an orange and a couple of limes. He began to slice them. “We could use a cook. Ella—that’s our mother—she’s been running the kitchen since the Grill opened, and she needs to slow down a little. If you meet anyone down there who wants a job up here. Or if you don’t find the right beach.”

  Pierce took another swallow. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He put his glass down, met Tye’s easy expression, whatever was in his eyes hidden behind a blur of light over his lenses. “I could use a room, thanks. Just for the night. I have my stuff in the car. It steered itself into your parking lot when I saw the sign.”

  “Fine.” Tye scraped wedges of orange and lime into their condiment dishes, then plucked a lemon from the mysterious garden under the bar. “Fine, then. We’ll see what we can do for you.”

  The front door opened, banged shut. The wolf man beside Pierce breathed a sudden exclamation into his glass, then huddled around it, head bowed, shoulders hunched. Brisk footsteps across the floorboards came to an abrupt halt.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Amazing,” the man murmured, “how much weight those two innocent words can carry.”

  There was a swift, indrawn breath, held for a moment in which nobody, not even the placid bartender, moved. Then came a gusty, exasperated sigh, and the footsteps marched on, to Pierce’s ears sharp with pointed recrimination. He risked a glance, saw a slight, straight-backed young woman, her dark hair in an impeccable French braid, disappear through the swinging doors between rooms.

  The bartender cocked his glasses at the wolf man, who said glumly, “I was supposed to take her mother to lunch. She was in town visiting friends. It was all too much for me. Name’s Teague, by the way,” he added to Pierce. “Merle Teague. That dark wind that just blew through is my beloved offspring Carrie.”

  Pierce frowned. “I know your name. I don’t know why.”

  “Do I owe you money?”

  Pierce shook his head puzzledly. The front door rattled and smacked open, in the same moment that the double doors flew open, and Carrie Teague reappeared, under Pierce’s fascinated gaze, a bit like a bird popping out of a cuckoo clock.

  “Ella says Hal’s at the dock,” she announced tersely, and waited in strained, forbearing abeyance, for a response.

  The two men who had just entered nodded to Tye and tacked away from the bar. One was young, the other not so, both comely, with gold beards and hair neatly trimmed, lean, lanky bodies that wore their jeans and work shirts with casual elegance. Father and son, Pierce guessed, and felt a sharp, unexpected pang of envy.

  “We’ll help him,” the older said, and they followed Carrie back through the swinging doors. Pierce found himself watching their empty flapping, waiting for what would happen next. He turned quickly, picked up his glass again.

  “Shouldn’t be long now,” Tye told him, whittling thin curls of lemon peel off the pith. “Ella and Carrie will have those crabs boiled up in no time. Ella makes the sweetest crab cakes you ever ate, and Carrie does a mixed pepper aioli that’s just this side of heaven and that side of everlasting fire.”

  Pierce felt his stomach roil again and whine. “Can’t wait,” he breathed, and Tye grinned. He put his knife down, made a few indiscernible passes under the bar, and came up with a bowl of hot, salted popcorn.

  More people came in while Pierce ate it. Some disappeared into the restaurant; others lingered at the bar or carried their drinks to the couches and chairs. Tye poured another beer for Pierce without asking; Pierce drank it without caring. The road was untwisting behind him, the gray sky becoming less desolate. Some kind of young minister or priest with a backward collar came in; he and Merle started an amiable argument about what sounded like cannibalism. Smells melted between the swinging doors, floated through the room, disrupting conversations, making people forget what they were saying to stare mutely, expectantly at the doors.

  They opened finally. Pierce, hoping for supper at last, turned eagerly. It was Carrie again, dodging swiftly through the crowd toward the bar.

  Merle seemed to sense her; this time he looked toward her, waiting. The priest watched silently as well. She said nothing to Merle, just handed him an old-fashioned brass key that looked big enough to open a cemetery gate. Perhaps feeling Pierce’s curious gaze on her, she gave him a brief, wide-eyed stare back, revealing pale eyes like her father’s. A fairy tale impression of her stern, graceful face—skin as white, lips as red as—clung to memory as she whisked herself away.

  Merle rose, too, nodding to Pierce. “Just another minute or two. You’re that close.”

  He followed his daughter; the man with the backward collar followed him. Pierce turned to try for Tye’s beleaguered attention and found the cold, foaming beer already in front of him.

  After what seemed the slow march of time toward forever, both swinging doors opened wide and stayed open, held by the gold-haired father and son, standing like sentinels flanking the man who entered.

  People rose, murmuring, greeting him, raising their mugs and wineglasses in salute. He was very tall, broad-boned, lean, and muscular, a warrior in frayed jeans and a faded flannel shirt. His white-gold hair hung thick and wild to his shoulders; an ivory mustache like a pair of ram’s horns curled down the sides of his mouth. He held a gnarled staff in one hand, a carved, polished hiker’s stick he used as a cane. He needed it, Pierce saw. Though he smiled broadly as he entered, the lines on his face tightened slightly at every other step as pain bled through him and into the shifting, halting staff.

  The young man whose collar announced he was holy followed, carrying a gaff the length of a spear. The metal pirate’s hook at the end of it glistened oddly with a sheen of red, as though it had tangled with something closer to human than fish. Merle came after him, holding a huge oval platter with the biggest salmon on it Pierce had ever seen. The platter, an ornate, old-fashioned piece with bumps and ruffles and flutings all over it, looked as though it were made of pure gold. The knife laid across the edge of the platter beside the fish riveted his attention. The blade was crafted of hand-hammered metal with a sandwich of polished ash fitted along the length of the metal handle. Long, broad, and sweetly curved to its point, the blade would rock with a satisfying heft in the hand, finely mincin
g anything it was fed with its thin, wicked edge: elephant garlic, delicate chives, hazelnuts, words.

  I want that, he thought, and found Merle’s eyes on him across the room as though he had heard.

  Carrie, oven mitts on both hands, followed her father, carrying a cauldron etched all over with an endless, dreamlike tangle of circles and knots. The cauldron filled the room with the smell of seafood seasoned in brine and aged sherry and mysterious spices from some land so exotic it hadn’t yet appeared on a map. Even she was smiling a little, her ivory skin flushed in the steam.

  Under the chandelier, which was still all cold stars and no visible light, Hal stopped. Everyone stopped. No one spoke. Candles burning on the bar tables, small lamps along the walls shed a misty, golden glow over Hal’s white-gold head, the oak in his hand, the bleeding gaff, the salmon and the blade, the silver cauldron. Pierce watched, wondering. Then time flickered; past and present seamed together in the moment; what was old became new, and new became more ancient than he could imagine.

  I know this, he thought, then: But what is it?

  “Welcome,” Hal said, “to the Kingfisher Bar and Grill. We have an inexhaustible feast of crab cakes, shrimp, scallops, halibut, salmon, oysters, clams, all you can eat and any way you like them. Come into the restaurant or stay here and eat as you please. Just let us know what we can do for you.”

  The odd procession broke apart; the gathering in the room and in the restaurant itself, visible now beyond the open doors, dissolved into jovial chaos. The restaurant tables, Formica-topped rounds with a single plastic flower in a bud vase on each, began to fill. A gray-haired woman, a skinny young man in black, a gum-chewing girl with purple hair, moved among them, taking orders. Pierce looked around for the gaff, the platter, the knife, Hal with his staff. They all seemed to have vanished.

  What was that? he wondered. What was that about?

  “Something you need?” Tye asked, unexpectedly in front of him despite the crowd around the bar. He lingered as Pierce gazed at him mutely, wondering at his attention amid the clamor. “Anything?”

  Pierce shook his head abruptly. He was on his way south. No mysteriously crippled fisher, no amount of goodwill and fellowship, no hints of lost glory would strand him there with the Formica tables and the chandelier that didn’t work anymore. “I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks.” He raised the beer with an appreciative smile, and Tye moved away.

  The girl with the purple hair came soon after to take his order. He sat there at the bar and ate the seafood stew, trying to identify its tantalizing backwashes of seasoning, then the crab cakes with their outrageous sweet-fiery sauce, and, when he could positively eat no more, a few bites of deep-fried salmon, which seemed a disgraceful end for such a noble fish until he tasted it.

  “God,” he said reverently, and Tye, rattling a martini shaker, smiled.

  “Nope. Carrie.”

  He found himself with yet another beer in his hand and smiling mistily at the memory of the meal. The room around him was quieting. Most of the diners had left; there were rumbles and clangs of cleanup from the invisible kitchen. The homely tables within the next room had been tidied, set for the next day. Through the swinging doors, propped open now, Pierce could see the ghost of the hotel in the high, shadowed ceiling too far above the modest restaurant area, and the hint, behind three makeshift walls around the tables, of the long, wide, empty husk of the older room enclosing them.

  Someone loomed into his dreamy stupor. He started, found the disquieting Carrie in front of him, holding sheets and a towel now instead of a cauldron.

  “My dad told Ella you’re staying the night,” she said briskly. “She asked me to take you upstairs.” She raised her chin slightly, catching Tye’s eye. “Number three okay?”

  “Far as I know, nothing leaks in there.”

  “How much do I owe—?”

  Tye shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll settle up in the morning.”

  “Thanks.” He drained his glass and stood up. Nothing fell over; the floor didn’t rise to meet him. He laughed a little. “I lost track of how long I’ve been sitting here.”

  “You’re not the first,” Tye answered. “Sweet dreams.”

  Carrie led him to the far side of the room, where the old reception desk with slots behind it for mail and keys emerged bulkily out of the shadows. She had begun to climb the stairs when he remembered his manners.

  “Here. Let me carry that stuff.”

  “I’ve got it, thanks.”

  He trailed after her around the elegant curve, trying not to gaze at the taut figure on the step above, sure she would read his mind and dump the linens on his head. He thought of food instead.

  “That salmon was unbelievable. How— What did you do to it?”

  “The salmon?” She sounded incredulous.

  “Yeah. I would never in a million years have let it anywhere near a deep fryer. My mother would have fired me. But you—”

  “You’re asking me about the salmon?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  She flashed him one of her wide-eyed glances, a bewildering mix of amazement and exasperation. She made a noise indicating something major wrong with his head, and opened the door at the top of the stairs.

  “Ella, Hal, and Tye all sleep on this floor; you won’t be alone up here.” She dropped her armload on a tapestry-covered chair and flicked on a lamp. “Bathroom’s in there. Don’t worry. It’s not a chamber pot, and there is hot water.”

  “What did I say?” he asked softly, genuinely wanting to know. To his surprise her expression became complex, bittersweet, and strangely sad. Should I ask you to stay? he wondered. She turned away quickly, whipped a sheet open across the bed.

  “Nothing. You said nothing.” She shifted around the bed, tugging the corners tight without looking at him. “There are so many things nobody will answer when I ask. I thought you might—they might answer you. If you had asked.”

  “Asked what?”

  Her lips pinched again; she only said, “Go down and get your things while I finish this.”

  When he came back, she was gone.

  He woke sometime in the dark of the night, chasing down a fading dream in which something he wanted very badly kept eluding him, no matter how fast he moved, how desperate his desire. He was covered with sweat, as though he truly had been running. It took him a few groggy moments to remember where he was. When he finally did, he fell back into sleep as into some soundless, bottomless nothing.

  He woke with a start in a pool of light from the unshaded window. He saw blue water, a paler blue sky, the sun burning away the last of a morning fog. He groped for his watch. The lovely room caught his attention first: the rich, dark wainscoting, the pale rose walls, the high ceiling and fine moldings of an earlier era. Light, airy, full of morning, it drew him upright to walk down the shaft of sunshine, peer at the bay and wonder, as he saw the fishers already out, how long the world had gone on without him as he slept.

  He showered, dressed, and packed quickly. He heard no sounds in any of the rooms around him. Everyone was up, he guessed, and he hoped the restaurant might still be serving breakfast. When he went downstairs, he found the bar empty. He dropped his bag on a velveteen couch and went to push at the swinging doors. They refused to budge. He found the sliding bolts holding them fast, pulled them out of the floor and looked into the restaurant.

  He heard nothing from the kitchen: not a voice, not a clatter of pot or plate, not a sizzle.

  He turned after a moment, slid the bolts back into place, and listened. Not a floorboard creaked; not a door opened or closed. Maybe they were outside on the water, or running errands, shopping. The bar had been cleaned, everything tidied, put away, shut up. He wandered aimlessly a moment, waiting for Tye to appear, present him with a bill.

  A gleam in the shadows near the reception desk caught his eye, drew
him over to look at it more closely, for something to do while he waited. A tall, wide glass cabinet stood between the desk and the massive fieldstone fireplace. Its curved door was made of intricate diamonds of beveled glass framed with thin brass rods; its latch and hinges were a bygone age’s fantasy of brass, curved, etched, scrolled. Inside the cabinet he saw the gaff, the gold platter, the cauldron.

  He gazed at them. Again they teased at him, eluded him when he tried to make sense of them. He turned finally, beginning to feel the oppressive weight of the silence, the emptiness around him. He wondered if he had partied with ghosts.

  He saw the knife then, lying on the desk, along with the brass key. He stopped, holding his breath. The knife hadn’t made it into the cabinet with the other oddities. He picked it up, weighed it in his hold, turned it in what light he could catch from the high windows to study the hammered silver, the blade and haft shaped of a single piece of metal. It fit his hold like a friend’s handclasp, its fine edge, under his thumb, keen, dangerous, and ready for anything.

  He felt his throat dry. He wanted it. He would take it. He set it down on the desk noiselessly, as though someone might hear the faint slide of metal and come to its rescue. He had never stolen anything in his life. He would not steal this, he told himself swiftly. He would pay for it. He pulled out his wallet, rummaged recklessly through his cash, wondering how much his room, all the beers he had drunk, the amazing supper he had eaten, and the knife would cost him. How much it had all been worth.

  He pulled out a credit card finally, tossed it on the desk. They would find it there beside the cabinet key, and know who had taken the knife. Let it cost whatever they wanted.

  He crossed the room swiftly, hid the knife in his bag under a shirt. Then he left as quickly, closing the bar door quietly behind him. There was no one in the parking lot, nothing but the little Metro, like the last boat left at the dock.

  As he pulled out, he thought he heard a shout. He sped up and out onto the highway. The place was empty, after all, no one left to call him back. Everyone who knew his name was gone.