St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  “Geez,” he coughs. “Pretty filthy down here.” He doesn’t tell the child that he, Barnaby, is the reason that these ancient shells resemble waste receptacles. Sponging baby oil and bleach onto Giant Conchs all day—this is not his vocation. When Barnaby was a boy, about Big Red’s age, he wanted to be a real forest ranger. He wanted to be the steward of eternal landscapes, gashed rock and petrified woods. He would protect the cud-chewing noblesse of the buffalo; he would wear a badge and a hat. Now here he is, scraping expletives off Possicle for minimum wage. One thing never led to another. Mr. Uribe would have fired him long ago, if he hadn’t made himself indispensable by hiding all the cleaning supplies.

  Barnaby tries not to think about this too much. He looks at Big Red, her eyes welling with some dopey-kid sentiment, and he gets a sudden image of a jack-in-the-box with its crank broken off. A child’s box with no handle. That’s how Barnaby feels when he thinks about his own kid ambitions. This cold, coiled music in the pit of his stomach and no hope of release.

  “Yup. Pre-tty filthy…”

  Keyhole light spills through the minuscule cracks in the conch. The kid is moon-spattered and covered with dust. She just sits there, staring and staring at him.

  “Say, you know what we’re sitting in, kid?” Barnaby does his nasally tour guide impression. “A megalithic exoskeleton. Why, we can only conjecture about what used to live here—” He breaks off abruptly. Hearing his own voice echo in the dark, he has accidentally terrified himself. All of a sudden, the shiny penumbral walls seem oddly malleable.

  “Say, kid?” Barnaby coughs. “You haven’t, uh, heard any strange noises out here, have you?”

  Her ears turn bright pink. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he says with a whistling nonchalance. “My, er, colleague says he hears funny noises sometimes. Coming from inside the shell.”

  “Oh.” Big Red says flatly. “That.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “That’s just Laramie.” She scrunches up her nose. “You know. Doing it.”

  “Laramie Uribe? Doing…it?” Now Barnaby blushes, too. He is going to give Raffy some major shit about this in the morning. Leave it to Raffy to mistake that terrestrial yowling for a ghost song. Unless Raffy was just messing with him all along—Raffy has a bad reputation around the City for pranks that are more cruel than funny. And Laramie! She can’t be older than twelve. He almost preferred the ghost explanation.

  “So the boss’s kid sneaks into the conchs.” He shakes his head. “What about you? What’s your story? Were you going to meet a boyfriend, too?” Barnaby elbows her in the side, perhaps a little harder than is strictly necessary. “Playing hide-and-seek? Pretending to be a sea slug?”

  Big Red sniffles once. Her eyes get that melty watercolor glaze. Jesus, Barnaby thinks. Here come the waterworks. He pats her shoulder uncomfortably. “There, there.” She nuzzles into his shoulder, tentatively at first, and then with a purring abandon. “There, there.” He watches a single louse walking a white path through her frizzy red thickets of hair. He reaches over, tender as he can manage, and flicks it off her. And out of nowhere, Barnaby feels a rush of love for his pudgy shell mate. He’s full of wild fantasies: I’ll adopt her, I’ll raise her as my sister-daughter. We’ll go to magic shows on the Mainland. It’s unexpected, and deeply reassuring, this feeling. I’m a good person, Barnaby thinks wonderingly, stroking her hair. I’m an okay person.

  “Don’t worry, kid.” He burps, patting her damp back. A drop of water plashes onto the grimy shell floor. “You’re safe.”

  Big Red smiles like she believes him. She doesn’t know how to answer the man’s question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there’s something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside her, that seems to get unspun and exploded with each passing year. Big Red curls up in a cold recess of the conch. That’s the way to do it, the grown-up voices whisper. Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.

  Outside, the wind has died down; the water is tinged with a firefly light. In the illusory calm that precedes the storm, everything has quieted. Blue moths make rococo loops in the watery glow of the City. The moon glints like a clock face with no hands. A quick, ticklish thrill monkeys up Big Red’s spine. Something’s going to happen, Big Red thinks, heart pounding. It feels like an invisible hand has turned up the volume inside the Giant Conch. She hears the humming with her bones. If Big Red closes her eyes and really listens, she can hear a boxed-in roar beneath the ocean. The shell air crackles. The grown-up voices inside Big Red have vanished. Please God, let something happen, she prays. She stares at the black, gnawed-on nails of Barnaby’s hand. She isn’t even sure what to hope for. Something.

  Big Red has felt like this only once before. It was her first evening in the new house with Mr. Pappadakis. Mr. Pappadakis was watching TV, and she’d skirted his chair on her way to the kitchen. Without warning, he did a pincerlike crab-grab and pulled her onto his lap. Big Red was too surprised to resist. His liver-spotted hands went limp on her thighs. That had been the worst part of it, his palsied, noncommittal grip. And Big Red just sat there awkwardly, staring straight ahead, all the way through two commercial breaks. Who Loves You More? was on the TV, and she remembers laughing crazily at a joke that wasn’t even very funny. Very slowly, Mr. Pappadakis craned his neck to look at her. He stared at her in a blank, idle way. Then he pushed her away, his lips curling with faint disgust. It was identical to the expression that he wore when he looked inside the fridge for a long moment, sniffed at something sour, and then shut the door.

  For the next few weeks, Big Red walked around full of wonderment and confusion. A damp furry rage like a rag in her mouth. She took to parading by Mr. Pappadakis’s recliner, her watermelon skorts hiked high, half daring him to grab at her again.

  That unshucked, unsafe feeling. It was with her all the time, now.

  “Um, kid?” Barnaby asks. “Everything okay? Do you have allergies, or something?” There is something wrong with her face, he thinks. Her eyes are shut, her cheeks are swollen, she’s pursing out her tiny lips. She looks like a rhesus monkey miming human passion. And then suddenly she comes hurtling towards him in the dark. She smells like a white mix of things, soap and clean hair and grass and apples, so much like a kid that it makes his heart lurch. Her baby teeth click against Barnaby’s crowns, a porcelain, tea-party clink.

  “Kid?” he says, pushing her off him. “Lillith? What did you do that for?” Outside, the City reverberates with a low growl of thunder. The wind picks up. Their labored breathing echoes up the walls.

  Barnaby never gets an answer. Big Red goes sliding away from him, cringing like a kicked dog. The wind swells into an apocalyptic howl, as if the world can’t keep its secrets any longer. Some celestial artery opens up, and rain bursts from the sky. The whole conch rings like a tuning fork. And then the sound that Barnaby had forgotten he was waiting for trumpets in the dark.

  The Giant Conchs start to rumble in tandem. Big Red has heard her mother say, “That struck a chord with me” and it is one of the many phrases that she only thought she understood. Because now her bones really do ache and snap as if her body is a tendon-strung instrument. Her spinal column feels like a xylophone, each vertebra trembling in a mute vibrato. Cornuta quivers with columns of air. Big Red discovers that if she slides forward or backwards, she can alter the pitch of the long canal, using her body like a fist in a brass instrument. All of the Giant Conchs blast the same low note. It throbs through the City of Shells like an ancient alarum, bouncing around the circular monoliths. The music moves in a logarithmic spiral, spooling around Cornuta. And below it, Big Red can hear the other song. Ghostly tones, a minor key that goes silking through the membrane of her skin. It sounds like seagulls and cymbals and rainfall flashing into dark water. It comes whorling out from deep within the shell, and it would be terrifying if it wasn’t so familiar.

  “Do you hear that?” Big Red
yells over the din, her eyes round and horsey white. Barnaby is shouting something and waving his hands, and Big Red thinks of Houdini again, conducting a magical escape. The sound is getting louder all the time. Cornuta throbs like the fisted pumping of a heart, amplified to unbearable volumes. Barnaby holds his skull as if it is about to split apart.

  “C’mon, kid,” he hollers. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Already, the floor of the shell is filling with cold water. Bits of sand and ashes float up to the surface. Barnaby starts to drag his busted leg through the rising tide of rain.

  “Kid? What are you doing? Get back here!”

  Big Red ignores the man’s cries. She doesn’t try to worm her way out of the shell, but deeper, until the pain in her head pulses like song. She pushes her soft body as far back into the shell as it will go. Back, back, through a curtain of stinging salt water. She can hear the man clambering after her. Wind and rain come piping through the cracks, peeling her lips away from her face, lifting her wet hair. She reaches blindly along Cornuta’s rain-slicked sides, searching for the origins of the music. Her knuckles rap up against the seahorse coil of Cornuta’s apex. But Big Red finds only angled walls and blistered pearls, the small bumps where the shell plates have puckered and fused together, like vestigial knobs to vanished doors.

  Out to Sea

  At first, Sawtooth thought it was a damn fool program. All of the residents at the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community got letters about it in their mail buckets:

  Dear Mr./Ms. SAWTOOTH BIGTREE,

  We are pleased to announce that you have been selected to participate in the No Elder Person Is an Island Volunteer Program! You will be paired with one at-risk youth from the Mainland who is completing his/her court-ordered community service. All aboard the “Friend Ship” to intergenerational rapport! Your Volunteer Buddy is AUGIE RODDENBERRY.

  Sincerely,

  Out-to-Sea Management

  “Volunteers!” he’d grumbled. It didn’t sound to Sawtooth like there was anything voluntary about it. And the last thing Sawtooth had wanted was some juvenile scoundrel barging onto his barge. Sawtooth stuffed the Suggestions Buoy with complaints about the program. He bottled threats and floated them towards the Administration Ship. He flat-out refused to participate—until the day the girl showed up at his cabin door.

  “Augie’s a damn fool name for a pretty girl” was all he could think to say when he found her standing on his deck. Sawtooth still refuses to call her Augie—that ugly, braying sound. He thinks of her as, simply, “the girl.”

  The girl has a child’s face, round and guileless, and eyelashes so long that Sawtooth thinks that he could fish with them. She reminds Sawtooth of someone from his past, a wife or a mother, possibly one of his own granddaughters. Someone whose name he can no longer remember, but whom he feels certain that he loved very much.

  “Are you the amputee?” she’d asked that first afternoon on his deck. “I told Miss Levy that I wanted the amputee.”

  “Are you blind?” he’d glowered, shaking his left crutch at her. “See any other one-legged mariners around here?”

  But he’d smoothed his empty pant leg and smiled as she came aboard.

  The girl is an apple-cheeked high-school junior and a convicted felon. She won’t tell Sawtooth what crime she committed, and he doesn’t ask. All he knows is that the Loomis County Court System has sentenced Augie to fifty hours of visiting him. In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he needs the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn’t forget her own face.

  Increasingly, Sawtooth’s own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl’s hands, her slack mouth.

  The girl is coming today, and Sawtooth wants everything to be perfect. So when he looks outside his porthole and sees Miss Markopoulos strewing a bucket of fish entrails across his property, he gets understandably irate.

  “I seen you!” Sawtooth wheezes. “I seen you feeding them!”

  Sawtooth uses his aluminum crutches to carefully swing himself over to the starboard side of his houseboat, to where she can’t ignore him. His amputation gives Sawtooth a flamingular majesty. He rears up before her on his one remaining leg, feather-ruffled and pink with rage.

  The neighbor woman, Miss Markopoulos, fills her days with a steady diet of black olives and soap operas and, most recently, the maternal nurture of stingrays. Like most of the residents of the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, Miss Markopoulos has spent decades hoarding a secret cache of love, shelved and putrefying in a quiet cupboard within her; and now, at the end of a life, she has no one to share it with. No one but the rays, Sawtooth grunts, a bunch of wall-eyed invertebrates. He would pity her, if she wasn’t such a damn fool.

  Today she is grinning over the railing of her deck. Her teeth are as yellow and uneven as calliope pipes. Her hands are clasped to her heaving bosom. Tiny fish scales and bright spots of blood glint along the webbing of her thick fingers.

  “You better cut it out, you hear me?” Sawtooth narrows his eyes and swings his free arm like a cudgel. His height gives him an impish quality that’s become only more pronounced with old age and his amputation. Lately, Sawtooth has the uneasy sensation that he’s shrinking—even as, perversely, parts of him have started to grow at a delirious pace. His hairy ears boomerang out from the sides of his head. His eyebrows have overtaken his face like milky weeds. When he confronts Miss Markopoulos, he furrows them into a single white line and draws himself up on his one remaining leg.

  “My buddy is coming today,” he repeats, “and I don’t want those goddamned strays in my backyard when she gets here.” Miss Markopoulos feigns deafness in whatever ear is facing Sawtooth to avoid confrontation. She smiles blankly up at Sawtooth. She continues to strew bloody fistfuls of krill like wedding rice.

  Between their two boats, the water is alive with stingrays.

  At the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, all of the elderly residents live in individual houseboats. Like their occupants, the boats themselves are retired. They are battered cargo ships and naval jalopies; boats whose iron hulls are liver-spotted with rust; boats with mud-clogged pipes, with barnacled rudders, with unhinged portholes that hang like broken eyeglasses—all of which have been refurbished and converted into “independent living units.” Sawtooth is living in a Biscayne star-fishing barge. Zenaida Zapata, Sawtooth’s neighbor to the right, is living in La Rumba, a former Venezuelan party rental. She complains that the smell of limeade and fornication has saturated the wooden walls. These are boats that fought in foreign wars, that survived wild hurricanes, that carried young lovers along moonlit currents. Now they sit on short tethers in shallow water, permanently at anchor. After two of the residents tried to elope, they sent Gherkin from maintenance around to remove all the engines.

  Man-made waves lap gently against the sides of the boats, controlled by a machine that hums like the rise and fall of a giant respirator. But the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community has been sealed off from the real ocean. A stone seawall extends under the water and wraps around the marina like a giant gray honeycomb. Spidery crabs scuttle down the sides and disappear through the cracks.

  The perfect balance, the brochure advertises, of privacy and community! Most residents spend their afternoons peering into one another’s houseboats with prescription binoculars. On weekend afternoons, Sawtooth can sometimes hear the siren song of children playing farther down the beach. The sound lures even the saltiest old codgers out of their cabins, pale and vulnerable as shucked clams. They all turn their deck chairs to face the seawall, even though there’s nothing to see.

  Thanks to the wall, there’s no danger of the residents setting out on the open sea anymore, but things occasionally drift in
: golden coils of kelp, an old bowling pin, a colorful potpourri of jellyfish and used condoms, and, most recently, the stingrays. There’s a nearby cove where they congregate, dozens of them swooping around submerged stalagmites like aquatic bats. Their flat bodies glide easily through the narrow openings in the seawall.

  Sawtooth doesn’t mind the stingrays, personally. He grew up on the swamp, and he has a gator wrestler’s respect for wild things. But the girl is coming today, and the stingrays terrify her. “They look like monsters,” she’d squealed the first time she saw them. “They’re horrible.” She’d clutched at Sawtooth’s moist palm reflexively, watching them sponge the clotted fish chum into their smooth white bellies. “They’re like one giant mouth.”

  At the time, he’d just blinked at the girl with a glassy-eyed incomprehension. But watching the stingrays now, Sawtooth decides that there is something unsettling about the way they feed. Their bodies reinvent themselves below him, a boneless dance of empty appetite. They’ve eaten all the shrimp, but they continue to noiselessly storm around imagined food.

  “Listen, woman—”

  “They are my angels.” Miss Markopoulos sniffs. “You go away now, please.” Miss Markopoulos feeds the stingrays with the same fanatic devotion that other elderly women lavish on pigeons or cats. Chumming the water, it’s called, and it’s strictly prohibited by the Out-to-Sea Code. Sawtooth keeps leaving copies of the code in her mail bucket, with “Policy 12: Zero Tolerance for Chummers” circled so many times that the paper’s torn through. Miss Markopoulos feigns an ignorance of written English. She continues to spend her entire Social Security check down at Don Barato’s bait shack. Sawtooth watches as even more stingrays come flying their way. First there are only two or three, ink-blotting towards them; then they coagulate into a dense black mass, like a fast-moving cloud under the water. They flap their pectoral fins like yellow wings. Whenever the clouds part, spasms of light go rippling over their spotted backs.