Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

She was listening, looking right at me. From over at his table Ed Bigbee and his boys let up some laughs. I figured they might be laughing at me for picking up a woman they didn't know and walking in here bold as coolers. I didn't care about that.

I lifted a saltshaker and laid it on its side like it was a man lying down. "Ten men in the last month of summer," I said. "Every one done in by the water. Jack Meliorot was the first." I nodded out to the bleaching dory. "Flat calm, but the dory came in without him. He wasn't a steady drunk. Just some tanking on weekends." I picked up the shaker and laid it down on its flank again. "All like that. Island people and people with God-sense about the water." I looked up. "So you can see what could happen to a one-woman swimmer without even a boat. Going way beyond the limit and finding whales."

Her eyes stayed so blue they hurt on mine.

"They come up dark as glory and then beside you," she said. "Their eyes looking at you and their power shared with you. They smile in their bellies and roll like churches in a storm. They make me full of wonder and charged with joy."

She reached and touched my hand. It was like touching cool fire. 'There were fishermen, trying to harpoon them. But they go deep, when they feel that. They speak in the deep. They sing about the narrowness of the land and the tininess of men. About what'll happen when the world changes and they walk on land again."

I kept her hand firm in mine. "Sure," I said. "The only trouble is they don't have thumbs. If they had thumbs like monkeys and could learn to walk they'd be pretty big beans. Nothing wrong with their brains. But it won't work if they're planning a takeover. Don't you know in the Writ where it says, "There shall be no more sea?' "

She saw then I was laughing a little inside me without showing it. She pulled her hand out of mine like a fin going small and slipping the bight.

She stared at me with the eyes afire in the middle of the blue and then started to get up.

I said, "Sit down. I'm sorry. I won't talk so again. When you look like that I'd swear you can see in the dark."

She settled back. I took out my pipe and lit it. While I got it going she reached in a pocket of that wadded do-nothing dress and pulled out a shell. Not the kind you see washed in by the thousands, but gold-tipped with the whorls in it creamy and a perfect nacre moonlight on the outside. I figured it for one of those I'd seen in the necklace when she'd come swimming in. It caught the light and sent back a kind of light itself.

I said, "That's a different animal."

"From the floor of the sea," she said.

"Well, how?" I said. I blew a cloud. "You can't go that far down, you wouldn't be here. A suited diver can't make it five miles out. I'll show you cartographic soundings sometime, if you want."

She said, "The whales bring them for me."

I had sense enough to keep my lips tight.

"I sell them to a shop, a store in Boston. They sell to museums, collectors."

"That makes sense," I said.

After a time her hand came back. I held it like it was a quiet child I'd saved from a beating.

Molly came with our orders. I'd been wondering if hunger for this woman meant hunger in the way of appetite for food. I needn't have worried about that. She ate with her head low and nothing before her but the eating. It should have been something you wanted to look away from, but it wasn't. Just like an animal with health in it, and that fierceness. It excited me some. She didn't need any of Molly's bibs. It all went down without a scrap left but the peeled cod bones.

When we got outside again in the dark, Bigbee's truck was just leaving with his boys and some bottles waving back, and the rest of the cars were gone. She'd put the valuable shell back in her tote bag. I put an arm around her and felt her lean into it. I said, "If you don't want to show me your place inside, you don't have to. No obligation. But give me a general idea which way it lies."

She'd put up a hand and she rubbed the hair at the nape of my neck. "It's past your shack, to leeward. Under the dune there, beside the inlet. It's not a house. It's a cave."

I said, "I know the place. I haven't been there in a time. Some of us island kids used to root around there summers, before we had to make ourselves a living. It will get cold as Billy B. Hell when the snows come."

She said, "I won't be there then. I'm moving in with you."

"So be it," I said. Her hand stayed in my nape hair while we walked on. We passed my shack, black clapboard with salt caked on the seaward boards and my own dory upended on tubs in the yard and my toolshed unlocked in case anybody wanted to borrow—whoever did would leave a note—and went right on to the dune. The inshore breeze was pestering the sea oats, making them lean like stiff wheat. The dune shoulder loomed up high and the tide was in and the surf starting to make. She let go of me and cut a little ahead. I followed her over the dune and down to where the cave is: an old granite deposit with walls like carved fleece. She hunkered down to go in, and for a minute it was dark, then she found a match and struck it to the binnacle lamp set on the cave floor. The wick widened with fire.

While she gathered shells, a good many of them, all strange and different, and stuffed them in a gunnysack on top of dried seaweed, I kept looking at the lamp. It was old as whaling days. Had worm holes in the elm strapping, thick wavy glass. I said, "Pete Chalorous had a lamp like this. Got it from his father, carried it in his dory. When Pete and his son washed up, the dory came in a day later. Nobody ever found the lamp."

His back was turned. Her hair was dry as moss now. Shining like something fed by the half dark. Falling deep to her shoulders when she faced me. "I found the dory afloat before it came in. I thought it had gone adrift. I took the lamp for my own."

"Nobody needs it," I said. "Pete's wife's gone to live with relatives at Bangor."

I helped her carry the lamp and the sack full of weed-cradled shells and her little bag. That was about all she seemed to have. Travel light and stay clam pure; it didn't seem to be a bad life, if lonesome. Maybe she knew what I was thinking. Because when we mounted the dune again, breeze at our backs and the surf talking, she said over hair floating from her shoulders, "I send the money from the shells to a wildlife group. They're trying to save the whales."

"Yes," I said. "Everybody's trying to save something."

At the shack I went in first to light the stove and lay some wood in the fireplace. That was all I usually needed to see by at night. She put her shells out where they could catch the light around the sill beams. When I had the pine and birch logs drawing I stood up and wheeled around and then just stood. She'd stripped her dress. She lifted her arms as if she might be going to dance or make a dive.

When I took her she arched back as if she didn't have any bones, making a singing noise in the back of her throat that seemed to get in my head and stay there. It stayed even after the first time, while we were just lying in the firelight. I had her head across my chest, her hair like a fine seine I could just see shadows through. It smelled of kelp and clean salt. The song kept on. I thought it must be coming from the whole body, not just the throat. The way a cat does from the inside out. With one hand I spread the hair back from her ears, and ran a finger down an earlobe and along in back of the cord of the throat there, but she rolled over and crouched and spread herself above me, and I forgot about anything else.

By morning the half-easterly had blown itself out, and while I made coffee and fried bacon and dipped bread in egg batter I said, "I'll be at Molly's about till noon. Then I've got to go to Abel Masterson's, he needs some plastering. His store's next to the P.O. If you've got some shells to ship you could do them up now and I'll post them."