by Grace Draven
He managed to paddle himself into a stupor that dulled some of the pain in his muscles and dry throat. It was a runner’s high, pain signals blocked by endorphins, but he’d take it gladly. Perhaps a tenth of a mile ahead, the vegetation was changing again, loosening its jungle hold on the land. The water was saltier the closer he got to the bay, and fewer plants tolerated brackish water. Every few seconds he twisted to keep an eye on his surroundings, and so it was that he saw the vee forming on the water, a deadly arrowhead aimed right at him, fifty feet away. His heart leaped into his throat. With a sweep of the paddle he brought the canoe around so the bow pointed upstream towards whatever was coming. The boat continued to drift stern-first with the current.
The current distorted the vee, masking whatever movement might betray the nature of what traveled swiftly toward him. He stole a glance upward but Jenny’s buzzard was not in view. Why should it be, when Jenny herself was likely coming after him? She had sent her ivory-bills to lure him one last time, but he’d rejected them. The gator had tried to capture him, Napier thought now, waiting with the paddle blade aimed forward, ready to thrust away whatever rose from the water. It hadn’t planned to eat him at all. Disable him, perhaps, or tow him half drowned and senseless to where Jenny waited.
Jenny and whatever the two of them had made together in her nest.
A cold shudder rippled over him despite the fever heat of his body and the sun that baked his skin.
Six feet from the canoe, the vee vanished. Napier peered wildly down into the water without leaning over the sides of the boat. He didn’t want to be pulled under or walloped by a gator tail. He smacked the flat of the paddle on the surface, walloping hard first to the right, then the left, hoping to startle away whatever it was. He separated his knees on the canoe bottom, lowering his center of gravity.
To his right, a small whirlpool sucked down a leaf. Napier swung his paddle, blade edge-on, at its center. An instant later the whirlpool formed on the other side of the canoe. He squinted at the sunglare on the water, but waited, rather than react. The whirlpool firmed, keeping pace with his slow drift westward. Napier told himself to look away, but too late. In the tea-colored water below, he saw her, only a few feet beneath the surface, looking up at him with her strange eyes. She didn’t blink. The whirlpool rotated directly over her face. Her long yellow hair streamed in the current like waterweed, masking everything but her eyes. She reached up with one hand—rough, clawed like a gator’s—and pulled the hair away from her mouth. Her lips moved, and Napier thought he read his own name there. You ain’t got to go, Charles Napier.
Jenny came slowly to the surface, an eldritch mermaid, a thing of scales and fins and snake-pupil eyes. When the water parted over her pale face, she opened her mouth and spoke, and though he heard her words, he was transfixed by the terrible catfish teeth inside and knew where the marks on his body had come from. Those round, scraped-raw places. She had kissed him with her catfish mouth.
“Come on home with me,” she said, beautiful clear water streaming out of her mouth. He wanted that water—was desperate for it, so thirsty he was nearly sick with longing. The blue of Jenny’s spring seemed to shimmer in his brain. “I’ll love you. You’ll love me.”
Napier shook his head. Jenny reached out a pale hand, fingertips wrinkled like those of a child too long in the bath, and curled her fingers over the gunwale of the canoe. At his hip, the brittle iron poniard began to hum. Jenny let go of the boat with a hiss. A flurry of scales rushed over her skin and vanished just as swiftly. She glanced downstream, blinking in the lowering sunlight. More water flowed from her mouth. With a tiny cough, she begged again. “You so hot an’ thirsty, Charles Napier, and it’s so lonesome here. Come on home with me, an’ I’ll feed you sweet crabmeat an’ you can have all you need to drink.” She licked her lips, more of that sweet clear water pouring out. She glanced once more downstream.
Her hand emerged again, pale one moment, then dark and clawed the next, as if she were caught in a nightmare where no shape held. He could see her breasts beneath the water, gleaming whitely and yet with the glitter of fish scales coming and going.
He wanted to say yes. He was so tired, but above all he was parched into near-madness.
“You got some in there, I know you does. Some of my water. All it takes is a little. One sip.”
Napier looked at the bottle, stilled on the bottom of the canoe. One sip wasn’t much, but he looked at the thing in the water next to him, and whispered, “You’re not human.”
The snake pupils slitted in fury and she lunged at the boat with both hands, pushing, shoving, then gripping the gunwales and trying to overturn it.
Napier got the paddle in his hands and set the bright yellow blade of it at her throat, just beneath her chin, and pushed. Her mouth widened, lips thickening, fish scales gathering at the side. Now that her face had been out of the water, a thread of red blood oozed down her cheek from a wound high on her cheekbone, just beneath her swollen left eye.
It was where he’d struck the alligator with the old man’s knife.
Jenny let go of the boat and sent a gout of river water—salty, more salt than brackish now—over the side of the canoe with a thrash of gator tail. “You got to come with me now, Charles Napier! Come now, ‘fore it’s too far!” Her form shuddered from one thing to the next, her skin a confused mélange of snake and gator and catfish, her mouth a horror one moment, sweetly pink the next.
“It’s the salt, isn’t it?” he said aloud. “You can’t take the salt in the water. You keep changing because you can’t hold your shape with the salt in the water.”
She sent another furious splash into the boat, and this time as she twisted away, she grabbed hold of the painter her splash dislodged. She took the knotted end deep. The rope tautened, the canoe’s drift slowed, stopped, and then reversed as she—she had to be in the form of the gator or the catfish, either would be strong enough—towed him slowly upstream against the current.
“Jenny! Stop it! Let go of the rope!” Napier paddled against her, but he was exhausted, and she was strong. He scrambled forward, heedless of the stern of the boat rising out of the water, and yanked on the rope as if he were trying to pull up an anchor. But this anchor fought him every inch of the way, and he gained only about a foot before a tremendous tug ripped the rope through his palms, leaving a burn behind.
“Shit!” yelled Napier. He groped at his belt for his knife, nearly spilling into the water—and scrambled back toward the center of the boat in a panic. If he went into the water again, even if he meant to swim to shore, she would have him. Whatever she was. He would be hers forever.
I’ll love you. You’ll love me.
It was appealing, in a dreadful way. He could just give in. She’d take him back to her spring. He could have all the water he could drink. He could partake of the oblivion of her body, the coupling that left him a husk empty of every thought except pleasure. Maybe even find out what happened when the tadpole emerged from its gleaming watery jelly.
Napier’s thirst screamed. He fumbled the belt knife free of its sheath, crawled forward into the bow and set its blade to the taut nylon. He sawed. A few sun-dried strands parted, then the rope jumped in his hand and flipped the knife from his raw, aching palm. Napier made a frantic grab for it, rocking the peapod perilously. The belt knife slipped into the dark river as sweetly as a needlefish, not even a splash. As it sank, it twisted once and he saw its bright blade give back a flash of sunlight, then it, too, was gone.
“No, Jenny,” Napier whispered hoarsely. “Please.”
He sat back on his heels and the canoe settled, moving steadily now. Something prodded into his right side and out of habit he reached back to resettle the sheath at his belt
the knife, the old man’s knife I still have the old man’s knife
and as his fingers touched it, it sang once more. Its voice was a brittle ringing vibration, a noise somewhere between the tone of a struck tuning fork and the shrilling of
a thousand frogs. Once again it slipped into his hand as if it were made for Napier alone. He brought it up and one stroke of it severed the painter. Instantly the canoe began to drift again, and the rope disappeared beneath the surface.
He knew it would not be long before Jenny realized what had happened, and indeed, as Napier was reaching for the paddle again, the vee returned, heading toward the boat in a speeding fury. Jenny’s hands, mostly human again, caught the boat’s bow before he could turn the canoe, and rocked it back and forth.
He slashed blindly at those fingers, seeing the scarlet line emerge across all the knuckles, the knife singing so loudly he could hear nothing else until she cried out, “Why cain’t you just come with me, why cain’t you just love us for a little while—”
He overrode her with his own bellow. “Go away, Jenny, let me be!” He held the knife up beside his head as if to stab her with it.
She let go of the boat, putting her fingers to her mouth, never taking her eyes off the blade. The blood smeared over her lips and cheeks. She was all human now, pale, blonde, green-eyed and weeping. Her sobs rose. Napier back-paddled as hard as he could, not turning the boat, not wanting her out of his sight, but she did not follow. Instead, it was her sobs that followed him, each one as barbed as a fish hook, setting deep and ripping free.
“You’ll come back, I know you will!” Jenny wept.
As he rounded the next bend of the river, her sobs faded until they sounded like the regretful calls of the ivory-bills.
When the knife ceased to sing, Napier sheathed it once more. He turned the boat at last, and only a hundred yards or so farther the channel opened out into Jolly Bay.
So near. He’d been so near. And so nearly seduced again.
He would have wept with relief, but he was nothing but thirst.
The old man came out of the office as Napier nudged the canoe against the dock. He took the paddle and the bottle of water Napier handed up to him, and bent down for the stern painter, which he looped over a piling. Napier, muscles trembling, dragged himself onto the dock and lay there on his belly for a long minute, looking east into the pines where the setting sun gilded their trunks and a lone buzzard circled over the channel. When the old man held out a hand to help him up, Napier took it.
“You were right about that second paddle.”
The old man’s grin appeared, toothy and black-spaced and strangely feral.
And eager.
“Gator git it?” he old man asked.
“Something like that. Got my gear, too. My binocs. My camera.”
“Sorry ‘bout that. Happens that way sometimes.” The old man led the way into the office. He went behind the register and stood the paddle in the barrel there.
Napier untied the thongs of the poniard’s sheath. Pulling it free of his belt, he laid it on the counter.
The old man did not reach for it. His eyes lifted to Napier’s, the question plain in them.
“I had to use it,” Napier said. “You were right about that, too.”
The old man nodded. “You was gone longer than you planned. Look like hell, too.”
Napier narrowed his eyes at the old man and swallowed, trying hard to wet his throat. The bottle of water sat on the counter near the old man, clear and beautiful. “You know more than you’re telling. I think you owe me an explanation.”
“Boy, I think it’s time to get on back in your car there and cut outta here.”
The old man slid the knife and sheath over the counter and bent to tuck it beneath. In the open, unbuttoned neck of his short-sleeved, thin cotton plaid shirt, Napier saw the pendant on a silver chain around his neck, the creaminess of old ivory, streaked with brown stains that looked like dried blood, a chisel tip peeping into view and then hidden by the shirt again as the man straightened.
“How many times have you used that knife—”
The old man shook his head. “Only when I had to.”
“What…what is she?”
“Hard to say. Anger. Desperation.” He shook his head again. The ivory-bill’s beak shifted under the shirt with his movement. “Love. Worst of all. Like I done told you, that river, it’s haunted.”
Napier nodded slowly. When the old man fished his car keys from the office’s safe, he was glad of the marina’s policy of holding the car keys, a cash deposit and driver’s license as security against the return of the marina’s rented boats. He was down to the clothes on his back, his own stolen ivory-bill skull, and the bottle of Jenny’s spring water for testing.
He reached for the bottle but the old man took hold of it first. “I’ll throw this away for you.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Ain’t no bother.” A frown creased the old man’s face. “I’ll just pour it out and chuck the—”
Napier stretched and got hold of the bottle. “I’m going to test this sample when I get it back to my workplace.” The old man was reluctant to let it go. Napier had to tug it free of his grip.
As he left the office, his sore hand tight around the keys so they, too, might not vanish in the brackish bay water beneath the dock, his other hand drifted into his right-hand pocket, and touched the beak that nestled inside.
Proof enough for Napier. But the Lord God Birds could go unmolested and unconfirmed for another hundred years, as far as he was concerned. He wouldn’t come back, not even to test the water when that time came around, as it certainly would. He’d fake the samples before he’d take a boat up that river ever again.
He was east of Jolly Bay, north of the Choctawhatchee River now too, headed east on a narrow back road in the gloaming. Somewhere he’d find a gas station. He would put what his solitary soggy ten-dollar bill would buy into his gas tank, except for a couple of bucks for a caffeinated soda and a packet of peanut butter crackers, then bomb for Tallahassee. He should have gone north on the highway and found the interstate. There’d have been fuel at the interchange. A wiser man would have done that.
Instead he’d turned onto the first blacktop road headed east. He rolled down the window to catch the wind from his own passage. At this rate he was likely to get lost despite his internal compass. Chalk his poor choices up to sunstroke and dehydration. He was so tired that blackness kept swimming into the periphery of his vision.
So thirsty. Why hadn’t he asked for water at the marina?
The road was aggregate asphalt, straight as a string between regimented longleaf pine paper-mill plantings and palmettos. It was an old clay logging road that had been hot-topped ages ago, never striped or crowned, and never given a decent shoulder. If he went off the road, he risked getting stuck in the sand unless he happened to find grass. His headlights lit nothing except the dim gray of crushed oyster shells mixed with the macadam. The woods were black. Not even the eyeshine from raccoons caught in his headlights glinted from the undergrowth as he swept past.
His inner compass had settled completely once he paddled into Jolly Bay, and now Napier pondered how far he’d penetrated into the Choctawhatchee drainage during his adventure. He ought to be roughly even, north to south, with Gallant’s Landing right about now. Another mile further on he eased his foot off the accelerator a notch. The speedometer needle dropped. Sixty, fifty, forty. Thirty. Thirty felt about right. He kept going, telling himself it only made sense to take it slow so as not to blow right past that gas station when he came upon it. Twenty-eight. Twenty-five.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Five.
He stopped, staying on the blacktop, though he eased to the side. He didn’t want to risk the shoulder, narrow as it was.
Jenny’s spring was due south of his location. He would have sworn to it on a stack of bibles. He licked his sunburned lips with his dry tongue. His lower lip had split in two places in its fleshiest part, his upper lip near the right corner. He could taste his own blood, but it did nothing for his thirst.
He put the car in park and turned off the engine, listening for the noise of crickets and cicadas, night birds,
the sound of the breeze in the long broomstraw needles of the pine trees. The night was black down here in the trees, though the sky above was still grayed with dusk, gradually darkening into full night while he sat there behind the wheel, listening. Feeling his compass tell him where he’d been for two days.
He had plenty of fuel to get him back to Tallahassee if he turned back now and took the highway north to the interstate. He didn’t really need this foolish jaunt into the Florida scrub. He couldn’t even tell himself he was doing it to see if he recognized any landmarks that had been near Jenny’s spring. It was too dark already.
Besides, Napier didn’t believe her spring existed, not really.
And yet his bump of direction told him it was just over there, not even particularly far as the ivory-bills flew. Napier got out of the car and walked around the hood. He leaned against the passenger door, arms crossed, staring into the darkness. Bobwhite quail called in the dusk, then were silent when a screech owl let out its irate yell. He could almost hear the high, thin noises of bats, black against the paler sky as his eyes adjusted to the darkness now that he’d turned off the car. Small rustles in the palmettos told him the rodents were out, snakes too.
He licked his dry lips again. He really should have asked the old man at the marina for water.
But he had water. It was there, waiting in the passenger seat, sweet and cool.
One sip wouldn’t hurt, just enough to wet his cracked lips, then he’d get back in the car and turn around. Never mind the gas; any fuel he found at a station this far out would cost an arm and a leg, if such a station was still open. He could even pour the water into his cupped palm and avoid tainting the sample with his lips on its neck. Rub his wet hand over his hot, sunburned face.
Yes.
Napier half turned, looking into the passenger seat through the open window. The bottle lay there, somehow reflecting what little light it had gathered from nowhere. Or maybe he was just used to the darkness now.
