Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  The husky voice said, “When the orange trees are in bloom. Orange blossom time.” Michael opened his eyes to his love’s old face. Wrinkled. Weary-eyed. The hair that was piled on her head was gray. “I’m with you, love,” she said. “I’ve been away many times, but I’ve always come back.”

  She lay beside him on the bed and he felt as light and as pale as the dawn light that filtered through the window.

  “Take me there,” he said, knowing that he would never change the world—not the past, not the future. He felt her thin arms around him and felt soft grass beneath him and with his last breath he tasted orange blossoms on the breeze.

  In the Islands

  THOUGH THE SUN was nearly set, Morris wore dark glasses when he met Nick at the tiny dirt runway that served as the Bay Islands’ only airport. Nick was flying in from Los Angeles by way of San Pedro Sula in Honduras He peered through the cracked window of the old DC-3 as the plane bumped to a stop.

  Morris stood with adolescent awkwardness by the one room wooden building that housed customs for the islands.

  Morris: dark, curly hair; red baseball cap pulled low over mirrored sunglasses; long-sleeved shirt with torn-out elbows; jeans with ragged cuffs.

  A laughing horde of young boys ran out to the plane and grabbed dive bags and suitcases to carry to customs. With the exception of Nick, the passengers were scuba-divers, bound for Anthony’s Cay resort on the far side of Roatan, the main island in the group.

  Nick met Morris halfway to the customs building, handed him a magazine, and said only, “Take a look at age fifty.”

  The article was titled “The Physiology and Ecology of a New Species of Flashlight Fish,” by Nicholas C. Rand and Morris Morgan.

  Morris studied the article for a moment, flipping through the pages and ignoring the young boys who swarmed past, carrying suitcases almost too large for them to handle.

  Morris looked up at Nick and grinned—a flash of white teeth in a thin, tanned face. “Looks good,” he said. His voice was a little hoarser than Nick had remembered.

  “For your first publication, it’s remarkable.” Nick patted Morris’s shoulder awkwardly. Nick looked and acted older than his thirty-five years. At the university, he treated his colleagues with distant courtesy and had no real friends.

  He was more comfortable with Morris than with anyone else he knew.

  “Come on,” Morris said. “We got to get your gear and go.” He tried to sound matter-of-fact, but he betrayed his excitement by slipping into the dialect of the islands—an archaic English spoken with a strange lilt and governed by rules all its own.

  Nick tipped the youngster who had hauled his bags to customs and waited behind the crowd of divers. The inspector looked at Nick, stamped his passport, and said, “Go on. Have a good stay.” Customs inspections on the islands tended to be perfunctory. Though the Bay Islands were governed by Honduras, the Islanders tended to follow their own rules. The Bay Islands lay off the coast of Honduras in the area of the Caribbean that had once been called the Spanish Main. The population was an odd mix: native Indians, relocated slaves called Caribs, and descendants of the English pirates who had used the islands as home base.

  The airport’s runway stretched along the shore and the narrow, sandy beach formed one of its edges. Morris had beached his skiff at one end of the landing strip.

  “I got a new skiff, a better one,” Morris said. “If the currents be with us, we’ll be in East Harbor in two hours, I bet.”

  They loaded Nick’s gear and pushed off. Morris piloted the small boat. He pulled his cap low over his eyes to keep the wind from catching it and leaned a little into the wind.

  Nick noticed Morris’s hand on the tiller; webbing stretched between the fingers. It seemed to Nick that the webbing extended further up each finger than it had when Nick had left the islands four months before.

  Dolphins came from nowhere to follow the boat, riding the bow wave and leaping and splashing alongside. Nick sat in the bow and watched Morris. The boy was intent on piloting the skiff. Behind him, dolphins played and the wake traced a white line through the silvery water. The dolphins darted away, back to the open sea, as the skiff approached East Harbor.

  The town stretched along the shore for about a mile: a collection of brightly painted houses on stilts, a grocery store, a few shops. The house that Nick had rented was on the edge of town.

  Morris docked neatly at the pier near the house, and helped Nick carry his dive bag and luggage to the house.

  “There’s beer in the icebox,” Morris said. “Cold.”

  Nick got two beers. He returned to the front porch.

  Morris was sitting on the railing, staring out into the street. Though the sun was down and twilight was fading fast, Morris wore his sunglasses still. Nick sat on the rail beside the teenager. “So what have you been doing since I left?”

  Morris grinned. He took off his sunglasses and tipped back his cap. Nick could see his eyes—wide and dark and filled with repressed excitement. “I’m going,” Morris said.

  “I’m going to sea.”

  Nick took a long drink from his beer and wiped his mouth. He had known this was coming, known it for a long time.

  “My dad, he came to the harbor; and we swam together. I’ll be going with him soon. Look.” Morris held up one hand. The webbing between his fingers stretched from the base almost to the tip of each finger. The light from the overhead bulb shone through the thin skin. “I’m changing, Nick. It’s almost time.”

  “What does your mother say of this?”

  “My mum? Nothing.” His excitement was spilling over.

  He laid a hand on Nick’s arm, and his touch was cold. “I’m going, Nick.”

  Ten years ago, Nick had been diving at night off Middle Cay, a small coral island not far from East Harbor. He had been diving alone to study the nighttime ecology of the reef. Even at twenty-five, Nick had possessed a curiosity stronger than his sense of self-preservation.

  The reef changed with the dying of the light. Different fish came out of hiding; different invertebrates prowled the surface of the coral. Nick was particularly interested in the flashlight fish, a small fish that glowed in the dark.

  Beneath each eye, the flashlight fish had an organ filled with bioluminescent bacteria, which gave off a cold green light. They were elusive fish, living in deep waters and rising up to the reef only when the moon was new and the night was dark.

  At night, sharks came in from the open sea to prowl the reef. Nick did not care to study them, but sometimes they came to study him. He carried a flashlight in one hand, a shark billy in the other. Usually, the sharks were only curious. Usually, they circled once, then swam away.

  On that night ten years before, the gray reef shark that circled him twice did not seem to understand this. Nick could see the flat black eye, dispassionately watching him.

  The shark turned to circle again, turning with a grace that made its movement seem leisurely. It came closer; and Nick thought, even as he swam for the surface, about what an elegant machine it was. He had dissected sharks and admired the way their muscles worked so tirelessly and their teeth were arranged so efficiently.

  He met the shark with a blow of the billy, a solid blow, but the explosive charge in the tip of the club failed. The charges did fail, as often as not. But worse: the shark twisted back. As he struck at it again, the billy slipped from his hand, caught in an eddy of water. He snatched at it and watched it tumble away, with the maddening slowness of objects underwater.

  The shark circled wide, then came again: elegant, efficient, deadly.

  The shadow that intercepted the shark was neither elegant nor efficient. In the beam of the flashlight, Nick could see him clearly: a small boy dressed in ragged shorts and armed with a shark billy. This one exploded when he struck the shark, and the animal turned with grace and speed to cruise away, heading for the far side of the reef.

  The boy grinned at Nick and glided away into the darkness.

>   Nick saw five lines on each side of the boy’s body—five gill slits that opened and closed and opened and closed.

  Nick hauled himself into the boat. He lay on his back and looked at the stars. At night, the world underwater often seemed unreal. He looked at the stars and told himself that over and over.

  When Nick was in the Islands, Morris usually slept on the porch of whatever house Nick had rented. Nick slept on a bed inside.

  Nick was tired from a long day of travel. He slept and he came on the forbidden dreams with startling urgency and a kind of relief. It was only a dream, he told himself.

  Darkness covered his sins.

  He dreamed that Morris lay on a dissecting table, asleep, his webbed hands quiet at his sides. Morris’s eyes had no lashes; his nose was flat and broad; his face was thin and triangular—too small for his eyes. He’s not human, Nick thought, not human at all.

  Nick took the scalpel in his hand and drew it through the top layers of skin and muscle alongside the five gill slits on Morris’s right side. There was little blood. Later, he would use the bone shears to cut through the ribs to examine the internal organs. Now, he just laid back the skin and muscle to expose the intricate structure of the gills.

  Morris did not move. Nick looked at the teenager’s face and realized suddenly that Morris was not asleep. He was dead. For a moment, Nick felt a tremendous sense of loss; but he pushed the feeling away. He felt hollow, but he fingered the feathery tissue of the gills and planned the rest of the dissection.

  He woke to the palm fronds rattling outside his window and the warm morning breeze drying the sweat on his face. The light of dawn—already bright and strong—shone in the window.

  Morris was not on the porch. His baseball cap hung from a nail beside the hammock.

  Nick made breakfast from the provisions that Morris had left him: fried eggs, bread, milk. In midmorning, he strolled to town.

  Morris’s mother, Margarite, ran a small shop in the living room of her home, selling black-coral jewelry to tourists. The black coral came from deep waters; Morris brought it to her.

  Two women off one of the sailing yachts anchored in the harbor were bargaining with Margarite for black coral earrings. Nick waited for them to settle on a price and leave. They paid for the jewelry and stepped back out into the street, glancing curiously at Nick.

  “Where’s Morris?” he said to Margarite. He leaned on the counter and looked into her dark eyes. She was a stocky woman with skin the color of coffee with a little cream. She wore a flowered dress, hemmed modestly just below her knees.

  He had wondered at times what this dark-eyed woman thought of her son. She did not speak much, and he had sometimes suspected that she was slow-witted. He wondered how it had happened that this stocky woman had found an alien lover on a beach, had made love with such a stranger, had given birth to a son who fit nowhere at all.

  “Morris—he has gone to sea,” she said. “He goes to sea these days.” She began rearranging the jewelry that had been jumbled by the tourists.

  “When will he be back?” Nick asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe never.”

  “Why do you say that?” His voice was sharp, sharper than he intended. She did not look up from the tray. He reached across the counter and took her hand in a savage grip. “Look at me. Why do you say that?”

  “He will be going to sea,” she said softly. “He must. He belongs there.”

  “He will come to say good-bye,” Nick said.

  She twisted her hand in his grip, but he held her tightly. “His dad never said good-bye,” she said softly.

  Nick let her hand go. He rarely lost his temper and he knew he was not really angry with this woman, but with himself. He turned away.

  He strolled down the dirt lane that served as East Harbor’s main street. He nodded to an old man who sat on his front porch, greeted a woman who was hanging clothes on a line. The day was hot and still.

  He was a stranger here; he would always be a stranger here. He did not know what the Islanders thought of him, what they thought of Morris and Margarite. Morris had told him that they knew of the water dwellers and kept their secret. “They live by the sea,” Morris had said.

  “If they talk too much, their nets will rip and their boats sink. They don’t tell.”

  Nick stopped by the grocery store on the far edge of town. A ramshackle pier jutted into the sea right beside the store.

  Ten years before, the pier had been in better repair.

  Nick had been in town to pick up supplies. For a month, he was renting a skiff and a house on Middle Cay and studying the reef.

  The sun had reached the horizon, and its light made a silver path on the water. Somewhere far off, he could hear the laughter and shouting of small boys. At the far end of the pier, a kid in a red baseball cap was staring out to sea.

  Nick bought two Cokes from the grocery, cold from the icebox behind the counter. He carried them out to the pier. The old boards creaked beneath his feet, but the boy did not look up.

  “Have a Coke,” Nick said.

  The boy’s face was dirty. His dark eyes were too large for his face. He wore a red kerchief around his neck, ragged shorts, and a shirt that gaped open where the second button should have been. He accepted the Coke and took his first swig without saying anything.

  Nick studied his face for a moment, comparing this face to the one that he remembered. A strange kind of calmness took hold of him. “You shouldn’t go diving at night,” he said. “You’re too young to risk your life with sharks.”

  The boy grinned and took another swig of Coke.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” Nick asked. He sat beside the kid on the dock, his legs dangling over the water. “That was you.” His voice was steady.

  “Aye.” The boy looked at Nick with dark, grave eyes. “That was me.”

  The part of Nick’s mind that examined information and accepted or rejected it took this in and accepted it. That part of him had never believed that the kid was a dream, never believed that the shark was imaginary.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Morris.”

  “I’m Nick.”

  They shook hands and Nick noticed the webbing between the boy’s fingers—from the base of the finger to the first joint.

  “You’re a marine biologist?” asked the kid. His voice was a little too deep for him, a little rough, as if he found speaking difficult.

  “Yes.”

  “What was you doing, diving out there at night?”

  “I was watching the fish. I want to know what happens on the reef at night.” He shrugged. “Sometimes I am too curious for my own good.”

  The boy watched him with dark, brooding eyes. “My dad, he says I should have let the shark have you. He says you will tell others.”

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone,” Nick protested.

  The boy took another swig of Coke, draining the bottle.

  He set the bottle carefully on the dock, one hand still gripping it. He studied Nick’s face. “You must promise you will never tell.” He tilted back his baseball cap and continued to study Nick’s face. “I will show you things you has got no chance of finding without me.” The boy spoke with quiet confidence and Nick found himself nodding.

  “You know those little fish you want to find—the ones that glow?” He grinned when Nick looked surprised and said, “The customs man said you were looking for them. I has been to a place where you can find them every new moon. And I has found a kind that aren’t in the books.”

  “What do you know about what’s in the books?”

  Morris shrugged, a smooth, fluid motion. “I read the books; I has got to know about these things.” He held out his hand for Nick to shake. “You promise?”

  Nick hesitated, then put his hand in the kid’s hand. “I promise.” He would have promised more than that to learn about this kid.

  “I has a skiff much better than that,” Morris said, jerking his head contemptuously
toward the skiff that Nick had been using. “I’ll be at Middle Cay tomorrow.”

  Morris showed up at Middle Cay and took Nick to places that he never would have found alone. Morris read all Nick’s reference books with great interest.

  And the webbing between his fingers kept growing.

  Nick bought a cold Coke in the grocery store and strolled back to his house. Morris was waiting on the porch, sitting on the rail and reading their article in the magazine.

  “I brought lobsters for dinner,” he said. Small scratching noises came from the covered wooden crate at his feet. He thumped on it with his heel, and the noises stopped for a moment, then began again.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out to the Hog Islands. Fishing mostly. I spend most of the days underwater now.” He looked at Nick but his eyes were concealed by the mirrored glasses. “When you left, I could only stay under for a few hours. Now, there doesn’t seem to be a limit. And the sun burns me if I’m out too much.”

  Nick caught himself studying the way Morris was holding the magazine. The webbing between his fingers tucked neatly out of the way. It should not work, he thought. This being that is shaped like a man and swims like a fish. But bumblebees can’t fly, by logical reasoning.

  “What do you think of the article?” Nick asked.

  “Good, as far as it goes. Could say more. I’ve been watching them and they seem to signal to each other. There’s different patterns for the males and females. I’ve got notes on it all. I’ll show you. The water temperature seems to affect them too.”

  Nick was thinking how painful this curiosity of his was.

  It had always been so. He wanted to know; he wanted to understand. He had taken Morris’s temperature; he had listened to Morris’s heartbeat and monitored its brachyoardia when Morris submerged. He had monitored the oxygen levels in the blood, observed Morris’s development. But there was so much more to learn. He had been hampered by his own lack of background—he was a biologist, not a doctor. There were tests he could not perform without harming Morris. And he had not wanted to hurt Morris.