The Exposition of Songs
Edward Bok was dead.
He had been dead for several years, but he lingered—wandering his wonderful garden grounds, slipping past the cattails in the moat, and watching the alligators in the far pond snap lazily at waterbirds. He remembered little, and he was disinclined to communicate, so no one noticed his presence except for the bell player’s daughter.
Her name was Ann and she was four years old, going on five. She followed Edward from place to place, across the water and into the trees, past the swans and down the woodchip trails between the tidily trimmed stretches of bright green grass.
She couldn’t see him very well, and sometimes she couldn’t see him at all; but she heard him when he sang and she found it more interesting than the bells above her. The bells rang every day twice, sometimes three times. The ghost who walked the woodchip trails sang only once a month, when there was no moon.
She gradually learned his song. She came to know it better than she knew the lever pressings that rang the big bells in the tower at the top of the Iron Mountain.
Underneath the flesh of the earth
Below the skin of the sky
Deeper than death the Leviathan sleeps
All children must let the king lie
He shifts his back and the mountains fall
He shakes his head and the oceans cry
Give him no dream and don’t bid him wake
All creatures must let the king lie
Thousands before and thousands more
The centuries pile themselves high
We bury and bind him with quiet hands
All gods must let their king lie
She did not know what it meant any more than Edward did. But she repeated it for the same reason as the ghost. She liked the lifting and dipping of the minor keys and the stomping, heavy feel of the stanzas. It sounded like a very sad birthday song, or a very old carnival tune. It was the voice of a music box with bent and broken tines.
Her father wondered where she heard these things, and he told her to stop repeating them.
So she left the words aside, and contented herself to hum.
Of Sharks and Pirates
Four years after the murder in the courtyard, Bernice quivered unsteadily against José’s supportive arm. He led her to a low stone wall that separated the sand from the street. She sat down and he sat beside her.
She was wearing blue silk and a white sweater that came to her elbows; she’d picked out the dress because she believed the shade matched her eyes—and it did, when they peeked out from beneath a deliberate fringe of coy yellow bangs.
Her companion was a slender man in a wheat-colored suit. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but that was not the only thing that separated him from most of the other men on the street that night. His wavy, blue-black hair hung down past his shoulders, and it was tied behind his neck in a ponytail like a woman might wear. Once or twice, as the evening progressed and scores of inebriated revelers walked past the low stone wall, a young partygoer began to tease the strange-looking fellow with the beautiful young blonde. But the jests rarely survived contact with José’s mild, passive stare.
He made no threatening moves, and he made no countercalls to defend himself. He didn’t need to. The teasing was good-natured and celebratory, inspired by a city in the midst of a festival dedicated to piracy and folktales; and besides: even the drunkest passerby could detect some intense otherness in the man who sat on the wall.
This otherness, which most people nervously read as simple foreignness, went deeper than his hair or the smooth, lazy way he silenced the friendly taunts from reveling passersby.
There was oldness around him, too, a strange kind of gravity that went deeper than the lines on his face—the telling tracks of age that marked him as a man perhaps in his sixties. Even sitting there almost perfectly still, next to the water, he wore a weight that was heavier than years, and he wore it as if he’d been born to it.
He sighed when a round of impotent cannon volleys finished over the ocean behind him, and he placed one long musician-slim hand at Bernice’s waist. She shifted her legs and crowded closer into his loose embrace. If they hadn’t placed themselves so snugly against one another, and in such a deliberate way, they might have been mistaken for father and daughter.
But if no one could guess anything else true or accurate about José Gaspar, they could guess that he was wealthy—and if wealthy, then that explained why he was able to keep company with a mate so far his junior.
Tampa was warm and the Gulf winds made the air thick with currents that smelled like salt, roasted peanuts, and the too-sweet stink of funnel cakes. That night, the world was a buccaneer’s carnival of pretend-coins, cheap beads, and dressed-up boats that were painted to look like an artist’s memory of a fairy-tale ship.
José took Bernice’s hand and felt along her wrist, smoothing the skin he found there and pressing it gently.
“All of this—it’s all for you, isn’t it?” she asked him.
“Why do you do that?” he asked back. His consonants were sharpened against an accent that might have been mistaken for Cuban. He purred the rest of his words to her, because he knew how nice it sounded. “You know the answer already.”
“I don’t understand it, though.”
“You understand enough.” He did not care to explain further. It was a gentle lie, anyway. She knew some of what had happened, but there was more to know, and he kept it from her.
He resented the sting of the festival’s mocking familiarity, and he disliked leaving any legend to the meddling pens of wealthy Anglos. In one hundred years, he had gone from holy terror to unlikely folk figure. Arahab had kept her promise and his legacy lived, but his history was mangled and appropriated, and he was left with a ludicrous party that remembered little, insulted everything, and meant nothing.
But he was forced to admit: it was a grand party.
“When I was a kid, my mom took me out here to Gasparilla once or twice. They have it pretty much every year.”
“I know.”
“It’s a lot of fun,” she said. “Crazy food, crazy boats, and all the pirates all over the place! I’m surprised you’re not more excited about it.”
“It’s delightful,” he answered in a tone that told her nothing.
The invading boat was preposterous and the pretense weak, but beads were flung and the alcohol flowed—and the sidewalks were packed with people shouting the corruption of his name. Night had freshly fallen and everyone was drunk, everyone was happy.
How willingly the city suspended its disbelief; how happily it put its faith in a whitewashed past and a clean-cut felon.
Let them, he decided. Just give me another drink, and give me her body again, and they can take what they want from my corpse.
“Happy Gasparilla!” a man shouted. He was dressed as he imagined a pirate must have dressed, and he was so deeply, thoroughly wrong that José laughed.
“That’s a very nice sword.” He grinned.
The drunkard beamed a blinding smile from a mouth with perfect teeth. “S’not real,” he said. He jerked it out of a makeshift sheath and waggled it happily.
José nodded. “I know. But if it were . . .”
“But if it were!” the man thought he agreed. He staggered off toward the loudest part of the festival, back to the street with the parade—back to the automobiles that puttered along in rickety lines.
Bernice heard the subtext, even if she didn’t grasp it herself. So she asked, “If it were real, then what?”
“Then he’d be dead in under an hour. The thing he carries is too heavy to swing and too broad to slice. It’s a bad copy of an old design, one that went out of fashion before I was born.”
“You never swung a sword?”
“Not unless I was desperate, and I was never that desperate. Who brings a sword to a firefight?”
“Not you.” She squeezed his arm. “You were smarter than that.”
&nbs
p; “If I weren’t, I would never have survived as long as I did. How are you feeling?” he asked, suddenly shifting the subject. “It’s a change at first, I know. Even though you spent your whole life before on the land, it’s as if you never stood before, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I never thought feeling dry would feel so odd.”
“We can sit here as long as you like.”
“No, we can’t. Mother said—”
“I know what she said.” José stopped her. “And obviously, we’ll do as she wishes—but there’s time. She won’t miss us for days, if she misses us at all.”
“She’ll miss us. We belong to her,” Bernice added.
There was something chilly underlying the words. They sounded perfunctory and strange. She was not altogether insincere, but she was thinking about the things she said, and if she meant them.
“We owe her,” José corrected her.
“She’ll notice if we’re not back—that’s all I mean.”
“My love, this is only a reintroduction; it isn’t a mission. There’s no need to rush or push. We have all the time in the world. More than that, even.”
Bernice shook her head. “That’s not what she said.”
“It’s what she meant.”
“You talk for her now, when she’s not here?”
“No.” He fondled her hand some more. “I know my boundaries. I know the rules, and she wants me to teach you. And I will. But I will undertake your instruction on terms of my own. So long as I succeed, she’ll hold no grudge against me.”
“I’d rather have a mission. I don’t want you to lead me around like a little kid, I want to get started.”
“There’s nothing to start. She’s still gathering information from below; and when she knows what she needs from us, she’ll send us up here to get it. This is time for you.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she smiled. “For us?”
“If you like. The festival carries on, there is plenty to drink, and you and I will live forever if our mistress sees fit to keep us. There’s plenty to celebrate.”
Behind them, the tide rushed and retreated, creeping onshore and splashing brine and spray against the low stone wall where they sat. The moon was rising by slow, smooth degrees, and lights were burning brightly in the restaurants and bars along the strip.
Bernice rose to her feet, steadier. Her eyes were glittering and cruel, and it was almost more than José could bear, so much did he admire her.
“We’ll need some money,” she said.
“We have some money,” he told her.
“I want more. And I’ll take it, because that’s what pirates do, isn’t it?”
He grinned at her, aroused by her aggression as much as the sleek lines of her body shifting beneath the snug fabric of a dress that stopped at her knees. “And you’re a pirate now, is that it?”
“Would you keep any other company?”
“I might, but not for long—and I’ve known the very best of the very worst. Do you think you can impress me?”
“Do you think I can’t?”
He knew that he’d dared her, and he was pleased to see her take the bait. She called herself his siren, and it was truer than she knew.
Out in the water, a number of boats bobbed on the swells. Lanterns were strung Chinese-style along their prows, and between the craft hung anchors that dropped into sandbars. Seabirds prowled the sky and peered downward, hunting leftovers.
“Which one is the Mystic Krewe’s ship, the main one?” she asked José.
He nodded his head at the largest and most brightly lit craft. It was painted to look old, bright, and vicious. The effect was less violent than toylike. “That’s it. The Gasparilla, if ever a more awful name was assigned to a vessel.”
“It’s your name.”
“No. You only think it sounds that way. If you knew any Spanish, you’d hear it for the insult it is.”
She shrugged. “They don’t mean it like that.”
“It doesn’t matter how they mean it.”
Bernice glared out over the inky water and squinted into the whitely dotted lanterns. She wanted to surprise him, and she did—but only a little. He could have predicted that she’d jump up and run, but the leap and the splash took him off guard in a way that charmed him.
With a stumble and a hop, she lunged into the surf. She swept her arms like she was making a snow angel, and drew her body under until she was scarcely more than a fish-gray streak just below the surface.
He watched her briefly, for a flickering jerk of a second. Then he followed her over the low stone wall and into water that was as black as the sky.
On the one hand, he was disappointed. This was supposed to be walking time, feet-on-earth time. Mother wanted her new child to remember what it’s like to move with the land beneath her, because enough time had passed that Bernice was close to forgetting. The mind remembers, but when the body’s been cradled long enough, it loses the sensation of standing upright and lifting itself forward.
On the other hand, it was a joy to watch her swim. Neither mermaid nor dolphin, not fish or ray, she tore through the water as if she were a shark freed quickly from a net. There was terror and power there, in the tight, squeezing kicks that started at her hips and the fierce tearing of her arms, shredding the sparkling wave tops into frothy nothing.
The water was warm to him; it was bathwater and brine: tepid and tasting of sea rot.
For one shattered second, he remembered falling into it before, and feeling rust and iron, and the weight of a chain around his neck. It was almost too much, the fear and the eyes that watched him underwater, and the grasp that took him by the throat, by the waist, and by the pelvis to pull him deeper, down into the arms of a creature strange and strong beyond time, beyond belief.
He shook the reminiscence away and swam after her, the siren skimming faster than a skipped stone toward a ship with a name he would never have chosen himself.
When he got closer, he could see it more clearly, and it was brushed with carnival colors too bright to be masculine and too pretty to intimidate. This was a party craft, made to shuttle rich people from event to event, from extravaganza to private soiree.
He saw the corruption of his name painted clearly on the side in a script like a woman would write.
Bernice reached the craft’s edge first. She grasped a decorative net and twisted it in her hands; she pulled herself out of the water, and the moonlight broke itself against her back.
She took his breath away, even though he could see through her glamour now, when she was wet and illuminated. Under the glorious cover of the soaked dress, her skin was translucent and tinted with the runny blue and green in which she had marinated all this time. Her limbs were too slick to be human. Her hands were too finned for gloves, and her hair tangled into seaweed locks like the island Africans used to wear.
The once-woman climbed up the ship’s side and slipped onto the deck.
The once-pirate came, too, up and over. He stood up straight beside her. Some leftover habit, some fragment of a survivalist tick made him reach to his chest. But there were no guns slung there to grab, no triggers to squeeze. No one-or two-shot pistols strung together like fireworks.
His fingers grazed his shirt and found nothing. He did not notice the gesture; he could not even remember what he reached for in the first place.
But Bernice was already moving. He would watch her move, then, on planks if that was as close as he could bring her to solid ground. He was pleased to note that here, too, she crashed like a shark.
There was a woman hanging over the rail. She was throwing up, or thinking about it.
Bernice grabbed the woman’s ankle and threw it into the air, and the woman went over the side with a splash that no one noticed except for a man in an expensive suit. He was stunned, and slow with liquor. Bernice seized him, and he looked confused.
She shoved him down, throat-first, across the rail the woman had unwillingly vaulted a mo
ment before. She clutched the back of his neck and held it like a handle, using it to beat his head into the wood again, and again, and once more before he coughed blood and gave up his struggles.
The blood delighted her.
She stood back and gave the man a kick that sent him through the side rail, splintering it. A second kick finished the job, and the suited man splashed into the ocean, but did not try to swim.
He sank, and Gaspar thought bitterly that Arahab had better leave her new visitor alone.
Charged, svelte, and eager, Bernice followed a drifting tune through a set of double doors that led into the ship’s interior.
Someone with terrible timing opened the left door right as Bernice reached it. Her hand was on his throat before he could remove his grip from the lever. She pulled him into the open night and opened her mouth, which stretched to reveal lines of teeth in needlepoint rows.
The man was wearing a costume; he had a black patch over one eye, so he was spared the full view of her bite when it came at his face. Regardless, he squealed and screamed when her teeth punctured his cheek.
She slashed again with her mouth. She wielded it like a scissoring set of daggers, cutting through the soft dips in his neck and scraping against the bones inside it. The connection made a dragging crunch, but it sounded to Gaspar like the clinking of wineglasses.
Inside the boat’s belly, the music was still jingling forth in bells and violins.
Bernice followed the music, and José followed her.
The song pinged up out of the boat in a minor key that was made of metal and broken wires. He couldn’t place the tune, but it sounded wrong for a festival like this. It was more ancient than vintage, and too old-fashioned for a rich soiree.
As he ran behind Bernice he could feel the old tug of the ocean, even though the boat was a preposterous farce, covered with fittings and fashions that didn’t remotely match the era they were meant to evoke. He felt like a cat chasing a ribbon; it was mindless and happy, and purely instinctive.
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