Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

My head was swimming a little.

The old man had come up beside me from somewhere, silently. He had a handful of shrimp heads, and he was tossing them one by one to the fish.

"You ain't dreaming," he said, without taking his eyes off them. "You saw it."

"Would you do it again?" I asked.

"No."

"Haven't you ever thought," I said, trying not to disturb him with my excitement, "you could be one of the wonders of the world. You could break every swimming record that's ever been set. They'd pay you thousands of dollars to put on exhibitions. You could revolutionize the whole sport of swimming. Athletic coaches would pay you a fortune for your secrets—"

"I don't aim to make a spectacle of myself," he said. "And the only person I ever wanted to teach how to swim, just wouldn't learn."

"I heard about that," I said gently. "But somebody else might learn, and it might save his life."

"Anybody who wants to learn bad enough, can learn," he said with the stubbornness of his years. " You could learn, if you wanted to, and if you didn't think you knew it all already. All you have to do is forget everything they taught you, and just watch the fish. Try to feel like a fish, an' move like a fish, 'stead of kickin' about like a drownin' cockroach, an' one day it'll just come to you, sudden an' quiet like. But I wouldn't tell nobody. Next thing you know, everybody'd be out with them gol-darned spears, swimmin' like fish an' seein' how many they could kill."

He tossed in the last shrimp head, wiped his hands on his jeans, and stood there just looking at the bonefish cruising back and forth. I wished in vain that some inspiration would tell me how to penetrate his quiet obduracy.

"You know," he said, "folks don't give fish enough credit. What do they call somebody they're contemptuous of? A poor fish. Poor fish, my eye. Fish are a lot better off than most people. They've always got something to eat, even if it's each other, an' they don't need no money or clothes or machinery. They don't even have to worry about the weather. Down there just a few feet under it's always calm even in the worst storm, it doesn't rain or blow, it doesn't get hotter or colder. Sometimes I wonder why any creatures ever wanted to crawl up out of the water an' live on land, like evolution says they did. Sometimes I think we'd a been a lot better off improvin' our race by stavin' down under the sea. An' one o' these days, maybe some of us'll go back to it."

"We're hardly fitted for that now," I said, to keep him talking, "unless we could get our gills back."

"What about whales an' porpoises?" he said. "They breathe air, just like we do, but they spend all their lives in the sea an' never come up on land. How do they do it? Well, they don't try to stay on the top all the time, an' wear theirselves out, like human bein's do when they're scared of drownin'. They just relax an' let 'emselves go down, an' just push 'emselves up when they want to get a breath. A lot o' folks wouldn't get drowned if they only did that. They could stay in the water all day and night if they wouldn't fight it. I know. I spent two whole summers up at Marineland, that big aquarium they got near St. Augustine, just watchin' the porpoises through the glass windows. I just about got the feel of it myself. Any day now, maybe, I'll be sure I can do it like they do. An' then I'll go out an' be with them all the time—like some other folks have, I reckon."

It was absurd, but he was so utterly earnest that a little chill riffled through my hair.

"Other folks?" I repeated.

"That's right," he said, almost belligerently. "You ever hear of mermaids?"

"I never heard of one being caught."

"You ain't likely to. They're too smart. But they been seen."

"Manatees," I said. "That's what the old-time sailors saw, perhaps with a bottle of rum to help them. They just thought they looked human, and took it from there."

"I'm talkin' about mermaids," he said. "Not things with fish tails, but people who learned how to be like fish or porpoises. Like I aim to do; an' it won't be so long from now."

Then I knew that his poor old brain was really adrift, even if he had discovered some strange new trick about swimming; and I was almost relieved to see Audrey coming across towards us.

"Good morning," she said to him cheerfully. "Are you giving my husband some good advice?"

"I been tryin' to, ma'am," he said gravely. "But I don't think he believes me. Maybe you'll both find out, one o' these days. You're young, but you got the right things in your hearts. That's why I talked more to him than I ever talked to nobody yet. An' you"—he looked at me again—"bein' a writin' feller, perhaps one day you'll tell folks that old Andrew wasn't quite as crazy as they thought."

He tipped his cap and slouched unhurriedly away.

"What is the bee in his bonnet?" Audrey asked.

"It isn't a bee," I said. "It's a minnow."

And I told her all about it.

"Poor old guy," she said. "Losing his wife like that must have really done it to him.... But of course he couldn't actually have swam as fast as you thought he did. You must have lost count, or something."

"I must have," I said, and was glad to drop it there.

It was a dead-calm day, so we took a boat out to the ocean reef and went snorkeling there. I had never found fish so fascinating to watch.

We didn't see the old man again, but other people did, they said later. He was in every bar in town, making no trouble, just drinking steadily and not talking to anyone, but he could still walk straight when they last saw him. In the morning, they found his clothes and shoes and cap and an empty pint bottle on Bill Thompson's dock, and that was all. It seemed as if he must have gone swimming in the night, and then the liquor had overpowered him and he hadn't come back. The tide didn't bring him in, and the fishing boats kept a lookout for his body for days, but it was never found. Finally they figured that the barracuda or the morays had probably finished it.

Audrey and I missed him around the dock, and felt strangely depressed about the manner of his going. It seemed as if he should have had a happier ending, somehow. But how could that have been possible?

It was several days later, sunning ourselves beside the pool, that we both looked at each other suddenly with the same complete telepathic agreement. Audrey jumped up and pulled on her bathing cap.

"Come on," she said. "I'll race you the length of the pool."

Audrey is slim and utterly feminine, but she can go through the water in a way that, to my chagrin, always takes my best efforts to keep up with. I still didn't have all my heart in the race at first, and about halfway she was a length ahead of me. I put my head down and started to work.

And then, somehow, I was still thinking about the old man, and thinking about the fish I'd looked at, and I could see in my mind the funny sort of wiggle the old man had made when I watched him, and I seemed suddenly to feel it with all my body, and I was just silly enough to try it....

After a moment I looked up to catch a breath and see how I was doing. This just saved me from banging my head on a rock at the end of the pool. Audrey, going like a young torpedo, was about fifteen yards behind.

When she joined me on the beach her eyes were big and round.

"Why, you old so-and-so," she sputtered. "So you've been holding out on me ever since I've known you!"

"Never," I said.

"Making believe I could almost beat you," she fumed, "when all the time you could swim like—"

"A fish," I said, and put a finger on her lips.

Sometimes we hardly seem to need to say a word to each other. It's a way two perfectly normal people can get when they've found complete harmony with each other. But she had to finalize it.