“You better quit chumming up my water before the girl gets here,” Sawtooth bristles, “or I’m calling Gherkin.”
Sawtooth gives her a final scathing glance and swings himself back inside his cabin. He doesn’t have time to fool around with her. He has to get ready for the girl.
First he sheds his pajamas and worms his way into faded dress pants. He pins his empty left trouser leg into a dapper crease. He scatters tiny flecks of orange rind around the boat—a trick he’s learned to cover up his sickly sweet old-man smell, to mask the black stench of seaweed curling in the sun. There’s not much left to tidy in Sawtooth’s cramped houseboat.
There is a mustard-yellow kitchenette and a windowless commode. A gator skull hangs on the bathroom wall, a smirking memento of Sawtooth’s able-bodied youth on the swamp. In the main cabin there is a lint-furred sofa, a gimp table, a captain’s chair that doubles as a geyser of yellow stuffing. Wavy ribbons of light fall across the carpet. In the far corner, hidden in the shadows, sits a cardboard box full of Sawtooth’s useless left shoes.
Sawtooth scans the room for something he thinks the girl might like, something she could fit easily in her pocket. His gator skull? His egg timer? There’s not much left. He drapes a grimy pair of overalls over the chair and stuffs a ten-dollar bill so that it hangs half in, half out of the pocket. Then he takes his Demerol off the high bathroom shelf and counts out his remaining pills—twenty-two. He puts them in the center of the table. Too obvious, he thinks. He slides them over next to the lamp, hoping that she’ll see them. He positions the money and the medicine with painstaking care, the way he used to bait fishing hooks in the swamp.
The girl has been stealing from Sawtooth for some time.
When things first started to go missing around the cabin, Sawtooth chalked it up to the onslaught of dementia. He was relieved when he realized that it was just Augie. He does little experiments to test her. He’ll leave something small on the table, a pack of Sir Puffsters or a withered red starfish, and go crouch in the bathroom. When he comes back, the table is always empty, the girl smiling with her hands folded neatly in her lap.
Sawtooth likes it best when she takes sentimental things, objects with no resale value whatsoever. She steals his left socks, his grocery lists; she pries the little hand off the wall clock. Once he watched her surreptitiously sweep his gray whisker clippings into a plastic bag. Probably for hoodoo love spells, he flatters himself. Probably for a locket.
On her last visit, the girl stole one of his family photographs right out of the frame. He thinks this means she is starting to care about him, too. Now whenever he looks at the empty frame, Sawtooth is moved to tears. He has to stare straight up at the ceiling, a loophole that prevents fluid from falling out of the eyes, thus saving a man the embarrassment of crying like a damn fool infant.
And then, a little over a month ago, Sawtooth noticed that his pain pills were disappearing in small increments, two or three pills at a time. Even before Augie, Sawtooth was reluctant to take the Demerol. “Highly addictive stuff, Mr. Bigtree,” the doctor had cautioned. “For emergency use only.” Once he realized that the girl was stealing his meds, he stopped taking them altogether. Now he’s begun hoarding the pills for her. He tells himself that this isn’t so different from those old women who set out dishes of candy to bribe their grandchildren.
Sawtooth is lucky. The other residents willingly endure far worse indignities at the hands of their buddies. Mr. Kaufman has been paired with a junior arsonist, a boy with sinister ears and a face like a waffle iron. He keeps setting kitchen fires. Mr. Kaufman recently confessed to Sawtooth that he’s started stocking up on lighter fluid. “Keeps him interested.” He’d shrugged.
Zenaida had a buddy, but she kicked him out after his frank appraisal of Undersea Mary’s erect nipples. Some buddies! Sawtooth harrumphs. Fat boys with slitty eyes like razor blades. Skinny girls with hyena laughs and spotted faces. Burly girls who break into the liquor cabinet after being invited to make themselves at home. Old ladies smile their sweet, terrified smiles while the buddies ransack their pantries and rock their boats.
The program, overall, has been hailed as a huge success.
After he finishes shoving his dirty dishes in drawers, Sawtooth settles in to wait. And wait.
When Sawtooth first arrived at the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, the silence seeped into his lungs like water. Whole days whispered by, a stillness broken only by the ticking of Sawtooth’s clock, the intermittent cries of the sooty gulls, the asthmatic gasping of the sea. But today, the silence is made bearable by the knowledge that a sound is coming.
The sound comes sooner than expected. A low moan of pain causes Sawtooth to jump in his chair. He grabs his cane and goes outside to investigate. Two boats down, Ned Kaufman is sprawled on his deck in staged agony, mispronouncing the names of various organs. Sawtooth shakes his head and looks away. Damn fool Ned. Everybody knows that Ned is a shameless faker. He just wants someone from the Medic Ship to row over and take note of his vital signs.
Sawtooth won’t admit it, even to himself, but he has come to look forward to his own visits to the Medic Ship. It’s one of the few pleasures left to him, the pressure of a gloved finger on his pulse.
“Mr. Ned,” comes a woman’s quavery voice. “Que te sanes! I will light a candle for you!”
Sawtooth groans. His neighbor to the right, Zenaida Zapata, has started praying to Undersea Mary on the prow of her boat.
In her previous incarnation, Undersea Mary was La Rumba’s plaster figurehead. Her pert breasts used to greet Sawtooth every morning, until she fell into the water after a tropical storm. For months, she lay sideways on the ocean floor. Needlefish nibbled the paint off her lemon meringue bikini. Then Zenaida moved in. She fished the statue out and installed her on a pedestal made out of floral Kleenex boxes and the cushion of a rusty Exercycle.
Now Zenaida courts Mary’s attentions like a lover. She has robed her in sateen bedsheets, celestial blue. She leaves Undersea Mary bouquets of napkin roses in nightmare shades of red and ocher. Today she is lighting waxy votive candles that she stole from the Hurricane Supply Kit. Sawtooth tries to hobble back inside his cabin without acknowledging her.
“You buddy coming today, Mr. Sawtooth?” she calls.
None of your goddamn business, Sawtooth thinks. He glowers at her.
Zenaida nods smugly. “I don’t need no buddy,” she tells him. “The Virgin visits me. I see her in the morning and in the afternoon. I see her during the news shows and during the commercial breaks. Everywhere,” she says, gloating like a child, “I see her everywhere. She is always with me. I am never alone.”
Zenaida turns around and lights another candle. Sawtooth watches as tiny plumes of smoke go curling up to join the gray clouds. What could she possibly have to pray for, at her age? he fumes. Whose lungs does she think she’s filling up there with all her damn fool prayers?
Sawtooth hurries back inside his cabin. He doesn’t understand how he came to be adrift in this sea of crackpots.
Around three-thirty, Sawtooth’s heart starts pounding at a rate that poses a serious health risk at his age. The girl is scheduled to arrive any minute now. He hops around the room like an agitated stork, making imperceptible adjustments in the placement of the lone sofa cushion, the crumpled bill, his pain pills.
He wonders what the girl does with the pills, if she takes them or sells them. He wonders if there’s a chance that she might get addicted, too.
Finally, at a quarter past four, Sawtooth can hear the squeal of tires pulling into the boatyard, followed by a chorus of multilingual obscenities and the chaperone’s cries for order. From his porthole, he can see the buddies come streaming down the dock, in ones and twos at first, then the whole raucous flock of them.
“Permission to board?” the girl chirrups. She is right at the edge of his boat slip.
Sawtooth swallows his chewing tobacco. He licks his fingertips and fluffs his hair into a wispy, silver
crown—“the rooster gawk comb-back,” somebody used to call it. An uncle or a brother, possibly a wife. A wife. Sawtooth takes a deep breath and reaches for the door.
“Hiya, Pops.” She grins, pushing past him. She laughs her wind-chime laugh and plops onto the sofa.
“Hello, girl,” he grunts happily.
Today Augie is wearing a potato-colored T-shirt that says DAPPER CADAVER and a baseball cap pulled down over her blue eyes. Sawtooth doesn’t understand why she always dresses like a boy, in slouchy black pants that billow around her legs like garbage bags. Sawtooth’s even tried to give the girl shopping money himself on several occasions—although she never accepts money if it’s offered to her.
“Whadda you think, Pops?” Augie pulls off her baseball cap and shakes out her hair. Augie has short, auburn hair, but Sawtooth sees that the damn fool girl has gone and streaked it through with flamingo pink. Sawtooth doesn’t want to like it, but he does. It sparks like copper wire, like the fiery ball of sunset over the swamp.
“You look like a damn fool Easter egg,” Sawtooth snorts.
He’s pleased to see that she’s in one of her penny-bright moods. Some days she just sits on his couch, prickly as a sea urchin, while Sawtooth reaches feverishly for something to say. Some days she arrives seething with a formless rage, a heat that Sawtooth can feel radiating from her pale skin. Once she didn’t come at all. On that day, Sawtooth watched the ebb and flow of the artificial tides and felt like he was evaporating.
The girl pouts and puts her cap back on. She settles back on the couch, and they spend the next few minutes playing a round of This Object Is Older Than You Are. It’s Sawtooth’s favorite game.
“How old are you today, girl? Fifteen? Ha!” He chuckles, his eyes thin and steely as dimes. “You see that flounder thermometer? It’s older than you are. You see this carpet stain? It’s older than—”
“Say, let’s cut to the chase, Pops,” Augie interrupts. “Are you going to show it to me today, or what?”
Sawtooth grins with a childlike pleasure. “Sure it don’t make you squeamish, girl?” Then he starts fumbling with the pin to his trousers.
Ever since Sawtooth mentioned his phantom-limb syndrome, the girl has been fascinated with his scarred left stump. He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he’s still whole.
Sawtooth rolls up his pant leg coyly, with the practiced languor of a showgirl. They both stare down at the white nub of his thigh.
“So you can still feel it?”
The girl’s fingers hover gingerly over the place where his left leg used to be, shaping it in the air.
“I mean, you’ll be looking at it, you can see it’s not there, and you feel it?”
Sawtooth nods. “You think I’m pulling your leg?”
The girl smiles wanly.
Then she gets down on her knees. Sawtooth holds his breath. He will never grow accustomed to this, but now his uneasiness is spiked with a hot, wincing thrill. It makes him feel like a much younger man, this sort of attention. He learned early on that he could use his own mangled body as a kind of bait, something the girl would keep coming back to nibble at. The girl flicks her pink tongue at the very tip of his stump. She circles around it, once, twice.
“You feel it,” Augie repeats. She smiles up at him, her eyes glinting with a dull satisfaction.
Sawtooth grunts. She is tracing the outline of his ghost leg with her tongue, and he feels it, by God he feels it. If Sawtooth could verbalize the hitching in his chest, he would tell her exactly what he feels. He would thank the girl, for making his pain meaningful. Before he started saving his pills for her, his phantom limb used to infuriate him. It was a senseless aching, a bad neural joke. Now the pain reminds him that the girl has been here.
“Your body is haunted,” she intones, with an adolescent portentousness. “Like a house.”
“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.” Sawtooth frowns. The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
“So, how much time you got left to serve, girl?” He feels grateful that at his age, the tremors in his voice pass unnoticed.
“Oh, I was meaning to tell you,” Augie says. She stands, smoothing her hair. “Miss Levy got them to lessen my sentence. I’ll be out of your hair soon.” The girl keeps her voice casual, but she still won’t meet his eyes. “Which reminds me, look at the time! I guess I’d better get going. Sign my form?”
Sawtooth stares dumbly at the form that she’s waving in front of him. He tenses, half expecting his ghost leg to cramp up, but there is nothing.
If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don’t go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It’s stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.
“Do you want an egg?” he asks instead. He grabs her hand desperately. “Do girls still eat eggs? I could fry you up an egg.”
“No thanks,” she says, withdrawing her hand. “No, I really should get going, the bus will leave without me….” Her smile darkens. She taps at the blank space on the bottom of her form.
“In a minute, girl,” he rasps, panic sealing off his throat. “In a minute…” Sawtooth gets up to go to the narrow bathroom. He leans his cane against the door and squats on the lidless commode, feeling the mechanized sway of the waves beneath him. One, two…he can hear the girl bumbling around outside. Sometimes he has to resist the urge to lecture her on the proper way to burgle your elders. Kids today don’t know the first thing about theft, he thinks. He hopes the girl doesn’t have trouble with the damn fool childproof lid on his Demerol. Three, he breathes, four…
On the other side of the marina, one of the stingrays slides dangerously close to the Wave Assuager. It struggles against the machine’s currents, its stinger pointed like an arrow towards the undertow. The ray gets sucked into the whirring underwater fan, silvering between the blades like a quarter into a slot. The accordion pump of the Wave Assuager lets out an elastic sigh. It sparks and groans. It vaporizes clouds of minnows with its electric death throes.
Then the Wave Assuager sends a final, renegade crest coursing up beneath the houseboats.
Ned Kaufman cracks skulls with his buddy and lets out a howl of real pain. Undersea Mary gets swept back overboard, her votive candles extinguished. When the wave hits, Sawtooth is squatting in the bathroom, his carbuncular ear pressed against the bathroom wall. If he had two legs to stand on, he might have been able to regain his balance. Instead, he spills out onto the living room floor.
“Fuck!” Augie falls backwards into the box of left shoes. The pain pills go flying out of her hands, raining down on Sawtooth’s prone body. Sawtooth grunts and struggles onto his knee. Augie is regarding him with a stricken expression, still holding the empty orange bottle.
“I didn’t see anything,” he wheezes. He sweeps the nearby pills into his clammy palm and holds them out to her. “I didn’t see a damn fool thing….”
“Oh, God…” She starts scrambling to grab her things.
“I know you been stealing from me, girl,” Sawtooth cries. “I know and I don’t care….”
Augie already has her hand on the doorknob before Sawtooth realizes that she’s leaving.
“Girl,” he sputters. “Girl…”
Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he’s become tightlipped as an oyster. But he can feel the words pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.
What comes out is: “I used to steal muskrats.”
Augie struggles with the handle. “Fuck.”
“During the Depression.”
The door swings open.
“Stole ’em right out of the bigger boys’ traps.”
; Sunlight spills into the dim cabin. Sawtooth takes a shuddery breath.
“Girl,” he says in a low, throaty voice, not unlike a bullfrog in heat. “I love you.”
Augie pauses, one foot out the door. She whirls around, slowly, and comes to stand over his prone form. Her eyes have narrowed into hard, bright kernels.
“You love me, Pops?” Her voice takes on a rib-kicking cadence. It elicits a moan from Sawtooth, like the lowing cry of a sea cow.
“You love me?” she keeps asking, her voice flat and pitiless. Sawtooth tries to speak, but can only make little strangled noises. A thin stream of spittle trickles down one side of his mouth.
“You love me?” Her voice tightens, and Sawtooth thinks of a hand squeezing some dumb animal’s udders.
“Yes!”
“No,” she says with a bitter little laugh. “No. I don’t think so, Pops. How could you?” She shakes her head angrily, as if Sawtooth is the one who has committed a stupid, indefensible crime. “How could you?” As if to echo her own question, she scoops a few yellow pills up from the crease in his flaccid trouser leg and pockets them. Then she strides onto the dock without a backwards glance.
Sawtooth flops back onto the floor. A small puddle seeps into the rug, his empty trouser leg dripping toilet water. He can feel the gravelly pills pressing into his back. He sees no reason to struggle, to get up.
Eventually, Sawtooth dozes off. He has a nightmare about the stingrays. He is lying on his back, naked and whole, on a velvety carpet of rays. There are dozens, hundreds of them, undulating beneath him. They do a cartilaginous dance through the warm salt water. The tips of their wings smooth against his wrinkled skin like bruising kisses. They brushstroke Sawtooth’s pebbly spine, his scrawny ass, the hollows of both knees: all the soft, forgotten places that haven’t been touched for decades. He can’t enjoy it. He lies there, holding his breath with a terrible anticipation. His spinal cord screams like a silver wire. His whole body tenses, waiting for the stinger. In the dream he can see Undersea Mary watching him from the opposite deck, her cheeks shining with painted-on compassion.
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