Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

You see, I have not told you the half of Loll—what kind of creature she really was.

Look at Loll for yourself.

Pretend that it is about ten o'clock in the morning. Wisps of fog still hover like memories above the polished, slow, dark water out in the government channel. Loll creeps ... mumbling about the little pantry, fixed breakfast for me and Darly—cornbread and ramps with home fries and catfish.

Mmmmmmm, good. But look at Loll. Her face is like an old dried apple. A little laurel-root pipe is stuck in her withered, toothless gums. Her eyes wind out of dark, leathery wrinkles like mice in an old shoe bag. Look at the hump on her back and her clawlike hands and the long shapeless dotted Swiss of her only dress. This is her—this is Darly Pogue's wife Loll.

So what keeps him with her?

Why does he stay with this old harridan on the river he so disdains? You are on board the wharfboat, in the pantry, looking at this ancient creature. Glance there on the table at the Ingersoll dollar watch with the braided rawhide cord and the watchfob whittled out of a peach pit by a man on Death Row up in Glory prison.

I said about ten o'clock.

Actually, it's five after.

In the morning.

Now turn that nickel-plated watch's hands around to twelve twice—to midnight, that is. Instantly the scene changes, alters magically. The moon appears, imprisoned in the fringes of the violet willow tree up above the brick landing. The stars foxtrot and dip in the glittering river. A sweet, faint wind stirs from the sparkling stream. Breathe in now.

What is that lovely odor?

Laburnum maybe.

Lilac mixed with spicebush and azalea.

With a pinch of cinnamon and musk.

Who is that who stands behind the bedroom door in the small, narrow companionway?

She moves out now into the light—silvered by ardent, panting moonshine—seeming almost like an origin of light rather than someone lit by it. You know you are looking at the same human being you saw at ten—and you know it cannot be but that it is: that, with the coming of nightfall, this is become the most beautiful woman you have ever seen or shall ever look upon again.

Ever.

In your lifetime.

She is naked, save for a little, shimmery see-through skirt and sandals and no brassiere, no chemise, no teddy bear, nor anything else.

And she comes slipping, a little flamewoman, down the companionway, seeming to catch and drag all the moonlight and shadows along with her, and knocks shyly, lovingly, on the stateroom door of Darly Pogue.

Darly has been drinking.

At the first rumor of a flood he panicked.

Loll knocks again.

Y-yes?

It's me, lovey. I have what you've been waiting for. Open up-

Cant you tell me through the door?

But, lovey! I want your arms around me! cried Loll, the starlight seeming to catch and glitter in the lightly tinseled aureole of her nipples. I want to make love! I want to make whoopee!

You know I caint get it up whilst I'm skeert bad, sweetie!

Oh, do let me in!

Aw, shucks, I got a headache, see?

All right, pouted the beautiful girl.

Well? squeaked poor Darly in a teeth-chattering voice.

Well, what, lovey?

The crest! The crest of thirty-six! cried Darly. What's it going to be? Not as bad as twenty-eight or nineteen and thirteen surely or back in awful eighteen and eighty-four. Is it? O, dont spare me. I can take it. Tell me it haint going to rise that high!

What was the crest of 1913? asked Loll, her pretty face furrowed as she thumbed through her memory. Yes, the crest of 1913 at Glory was sixty-two feet measured on the wall of the Mercantile Bank.

I think so, grunted poor Darly. Yes. That's right.

And the crest of thirty-six—it cant be any higher than that. The crest of thirty-six, Loll said quietly, lighting a reefer, will be exactly one hundred and fifteen feet.

Darly was quiet except for an asthmatic squeak.

What? I'm losing my hearing. It sounded exactly like you said, one hundred and fifteen feet!

I did, said Loll, blowing fragrant smoke out of her slender, sensitive nostrils.

Whoooeee! screamed poor Darly, flailing out now through the open stateroom door and galloping toward the gangplank. He was wearing a gaudy pair of underwear which he had sent away for to Ballyhoo magazine. He disappeared somewhere under the elms up on Water Street.

That left me alone with her on the wharfboat, peering out through a crack in my own stateroom door at this vision of beauty and light and sweet-smelling womanhood. By damn, it was like standing downwind from an orchard!

She didnt look more than eighteen—about a year older than I, who hadnt ever seen a naked lady except on the backs of well-thumbed and boy-sticky cards that used to get passed around our home room in school.

Nothing at all.

There were lights on the river: boys out gigging for frogs or gathering fish in from trotlines. The gleam of the lanterns flashed on the waters and seemed to stream up through the blowing curtains and glimmer darkling on that girl.

She was so pretty.

She sensed my stare.

She turned and—to my mingled ecstasy and terror—came down the threadbare carpet of the companionway toward my door.

She came in.

A second later we were into the bunk with her wet-lipped and coughing with passion and me not much better.

Afterward she kindly sewed the tear in my shirt and the two ripped-off buttons from our getting me undressed.

Whew!

All the time we were making love I could hear poor Darly Pogue—somewhere up on Water Street reciting the story of the Flood from Genesis, at the top of his voice.

And I haint by God no Noah neither! he'd announce every few minutes, like a candidate declining to run for office. So I haint not your wharfmaster as of this by God hereby date!

Well, I groped and blundered my way into manhood amidst the beautiful limbs of that girl.

The moon fairly blushed to see the things we did.

And with her doing all the teaching.

All through it you could hear the crackle and whisper of static from the old battery Stromberg Carlson—that and the voice of poor Darly Pogue—high atop an old Water Street elm, announcing that the Bible Flood was about to come again.

Who are you? I asked the woman.

I am Loll.

I know that, I said. But I see you in the morning—while you're fixing me and him breakfast and you're old —

I am a prisoner of the moon, she said. My beauty waxes and wanes with her phases.

I dont care, I said. I love you. Marry me. I'll borrow for you. I'll even steal for you.

I pondered.

I wont kill for you—but I will steal . Will you?

No.

Do you love me at all? I asked then in a ten-year-old's voice.

I am fond of you, she said, giving me a peck of a kiss: her great fog-gray eyes misty from our loving. You are full of lovely aptitudes and you make love marvelously.

She pouted a little and shrugged.

But I do not love you, she said.

I see.

I love him , she said. That ridiculous little man who refuses to go with me.

Go? Go where, Loll? You're not leaving Glory are you?

I'm not leaving the river, if that's what you mean. As for Darly Pogue—I adored him in that Other. Before he went away. And now he wont go forward with me again.

Before when, Loll? Forward where?

I got no answer. Her gray eyes were fixed on a circle of streetlamp that illuminated the verdant foliage of the big river elm—and among it the bare legs of poor Darly Pogue.

And now, she said. He must be punished, of course. He has gone too far. He has resisted me long enough. This final insult has done it!

I was getting dressed and in a hurry. I could tell she was talking in other Dimensions about Things and Powers that scared me about as bad as the river did Darly Pogue. Yet I could see what her hold on him was—how she kept him living in that floating casket on top of the moving, living surface of the waters: that great river of pools and shallows, that moving cluster of little lakes, that beloved Ohio. It was her night beauty.