And then it occurred to me it was the first time I had ever seen her smile or laugh—offstage. Mind you, she cried easily enough, like the time in class she realized from something the teacher had said that Anton Chekhov—you know, the great Russian playwright—was dead. I heard her telling Alan later that she didn’t believe it. There were lots of little crazy things like that.
Well, I picked her up Sunday in what was probably the oldest car in the world, even then—not a museum piece, Milty, it’d still be a mess—frankly I was lucky to get it started at all—and when I got to the bus station near Cissie’s house in Brooklyn, there she was in her faded, hand-me-down, pleated skirt and that same blouse. I guess little elves named Cecilia Jackson came out of the woodwork every night and washed and ironed it. Funny, she and Al really did make a pair—you know, he was like the Woody Allen of Central High and I think he went in for his crazy books—sure, Milt, very crazy in 1952—because otherwise what could a little Italian punk do who was five foot three and so brilliant no other kid could understand half the time what he was talking about? I don’t know why I was friends with him; I think it made me feel big, you know, generous and good, like being friends with Cissie. They were almost the same size, waiting there by the bus stop, and I think their heads were in the same place. I know it now. I guess he was just a couple of decades ahead of himself, like his books. And maybe if the civil rights movement had started a few years earlier—
Anyway, we drove out to Silverhampton and it was a nice drive, lots of country, though all flat—in those days there were still truck farms on the Island—and found the marina, which was nothing more than a big old quay, but sound enough; and I parked the car and Al took out a shopping bag Cissie’d been carrying. “Lunch,” he said.
My Boat was there, all right, halfway down the dock. Somehow I hadn’t expected it would exist, even. It was an old leaky wooden row-boat with only one oar, and there were three inches of bilge in the bottom. On the bow somebody had painted the name “My Boat” shakily in orange paint. My Boat was tied to the mooring by a rope about as sturdy as a piece of string. Still, it didn’t look like it would sink right away; after all, it’d been sitting there for months, getting rained on, maybe even snowed on, and it was still floating. So I stepped down into it, wishing I’d had the sense to take off my shoes, and started bailing with a tin can I’d brought from the car. Alan and Cissie were taking things out of the bag in the middle of the boat. I guess they were setting out lunch. It was pretty clear that My Boat spent most of its time sitting at the dock while Cissie and Gloriette ate lunch and maybe pretended they were on the Queen Mary, because neither Alan nor Cissie seemed to notice the missing oar. It was a nice day but in-and-outish, you know, clouds one minute, sun the next, but little fluffy clouds, no sign of rain. I bailed a lot of the gunk out and then moved up into the bow, and as the sun came out I saw that I’d been wrong about the orange paint. It was yellow.
Then I looked closer: it wasn’t paint but something set into the side of My Boat like the names on people’s office doors; I guess I must’ve not looked too closely the first time. It was a nice, flowing script, a real professional job. Brass, I guess. Not a plate, Milt, kind of—what do they call it, parquet? Intaglio? Each letter was put in separately. Must’ve been Alan; he had a talent for stuff like that, used to make weird illustrations for his crazy books. I turned around to find Al and Cissie taking a big piece of cheesecloth out of the shopping bag and draping it over high poles that were built into the sides of the boat. They were making a kind of awning. I said:
“Hey, I bet you took that from the theater shop!”
She just smiled.
Al said, “Would you get us some fresh water, Jim?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where, up the dock?”
“No, from the bucket. Back in the stern. Cissie says it’s marked.”
Oh, sure, I thought, sure. Out in the middle of the Pacific we set out our bucket and pray for rain. There was a pail there all right, and somebody had laboriously stenciled “Fresh Water” on it in green paint, sort of smudgy, but that pail was never going to hold anything ever again. It was bone-dry, empty, and so badly rusted that when you held it up to the light, you could see through the bottom in a couple of places. I said, “Cissie, it’s empty.”
She said, “Look again, Jim.”
I said, “But look, Cissie—” and turned the bucket upside-down.
Cold water drenched me from my knees to the soles of my shoes.
“See?” she said. “Never empty.” I thought: Hell, I didn’t look, that’s all. Maybe it rained yesterday. Still, a full pail of water is heavy and I had lifted that thing with one finger. I set it down—if it had been full before, it certainly wasn’t now—and looked again.
It was full, right to the brim. I dipped my hand into the stuff and drank a little of it: cold and clear as spring water and it smelled—I don’t know—of ferns warmed by the sun, of raspberries, of field flowers, of grass. I thought: my God, I’m becoming a filbert myself! And then I turned around and saw that Alan and Cissie had replaced the cheesecloth on the poles with a striped blue-and-white awning, the kind you see in movies about Cleopatra, you know? The stuff they put over her barge to keep the sun off. And Cissie had taken out of her shopping bag something patterned orange-and-green-and-blue and had wrapped it around her old clothes. She had on gold-colored earrings, big hoop things, and a black turban over that funny hair. And she must’ve put her loafers somewhere because she was barefoot. Then I saw that she had one shoulder bare, too, and I sat down on one of the marble benches of My Boat under the awning because I was probably having hallucinations. I mean she hadn’t had time—and where were her old clothes? I thought to myself that they must’ve lifted a whole bagful of stuff from the theater shop, like that big old wicked-looking knife she had stuck into her amber-studded leather belt, the hilt all covered with gold and stones: red ones, green ones, and blue ones with little crosses of light winking in them that you couldn’t really follow with your eyes. I didn’t know what the blue ones were then, but I know now. You don’t make star sapphires in a theater shop. Or a ten-inch crescent-shaped steel blade so sharp the sun dazzles you coming off its edge.
I said, “Cissie, you look like the Queen of Sheba.”
She smiled. She said to me, “Jim, iss not Shee-bah as in thee Bible, but Saba. Sah-bah. You mus’ remember when we meet her.”
I thought to myself: Yeah, this is where little old girl genius Cissie Jackson comes to freak out every Sunday. Lost weekend. I figured this was the perfect time to get away, make some excuse, you know, and call her mamma or her auntie, or maybe just the nearest hospital. I mean just for her own sake; Cissie wouldn’t hurt anybody because she wasn’t mean, not ever. And anyhow she was too little to hurt anyone. I stood up.
Her eyes were level with mine. And she was standing below me.
Al said, “Be careful, Jim. Look again. Always look again.” I went back to the stern. There was the bucket that said “Fresh Water,” but as I looked the sun came out and I saw I’d been mistaken; it wasn’t old rusty galvanized iron with splotchy, green-painted letters.
It was silver, pure silver. It was sitting in a sort of marble well built into the stern, and the letters were jade inlay. It was still full. It would always be full. I looked back at Cissie standing under the blue-and-white-striped silk awning with her star sapphires and emeralds and rubies in her dagger and her funny talk—I know it now, Milt, it was West Indian, but I didn’t then—and I knew as sure as if I’d seen it that if I looked at the letters “My Boat” in the sun, they wouldn’t be brass but pure gold. And the wood would be ebony. I wasn’t even surprised. Although everything had changed, you understand, I’d never seen it change; it was either that I hadn’t looked carefully the first time, or I’d made a mistake, or I hadn’t noticed something, or I’d just forgotten. Like what I thought had been an old crate in the middle of My Boat, which was really the roof of a cabin with little portholes in it, and l
ooking in I saw three bunk beds below, a closet, and a beautiful little galley with a refrigerator and a stove, and off to one side in the sink, where I couldn’t really see it clearly, a bottle with a napkin around its neck, sticking up from an ice bucket full of crushed ice, just like an old Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie. And the whole inside of the cabin was paneled in teakwood.
Cissie said, “No, Jim. Is not teak. Is cedar, from Lebanon. You see now why I cannot take seriously in this school this nonsense about places and where they are and what happen in them. Crude oil in Lebanon! It is cedar they have. And ivory. I have been there many, many time. I have talk’ with the wise Solomon. I have been at court of Queen of Saba and have made eternal treaty with the Knossos women, the people of the double ax which is waxing and waning moon together. I have visit Akhnaton and Nofretari, and have seen great kings at Benin and at Dar. I even go to Atlantis, where the Royal Couple teach me many things. The priest and priestess, they show me how to make My Boat go anywhere I like, even under the sea. Oh, we have many improvin’ chats upon roof of Pahlahss at dusk!”
It was real. It was all real. She was not fifteen, Milt. She sat in the bow at the controls of My Boat, and there were as many dials and toggles and buttons and switches and gauges on that thing as on a B-57. And she was at least ten years older. Al Coppolino, too, he looked like a picture I’d seen in a history book of Sir Francis Drake, and he had long hair and a little pointy beard. He was dressed like Drake, except for the ruff, with rubies in his ears and rings all over his fingers, and he, too, was no seventeen-year-old. He had a faint scar running from his left temple at the hairline down past his eye to his cheekbone. I could also see that under her turban Cissie’s hair was braided in some very fancy way. I’ve seen it since. Oh, long before everybody was doing “corn rows.” I saw it at the Metropolitan Museum, in silver face-mask sculptures from the city of Benin, in Africa. Old, Milt, centuries old.
Al said, “I know of other places, Princess. I can show them to you. Oh, let us go to Ooth-Nargai and Celephaïs the Fair, and Kadath in the Cold Waste—it’s a fearful place, Jim, but we need not be afraid—and then we will go to the city of Ulthar, where is the very fortunate and lovely law that no man or woman may kill or annoy a cat.”
“The Atlanteans,” said Cissie in a deep, sweet voice, “they promise’ that next time they show me not jus’ how to go undersea. They say if you think hard, if you fix much, if you believe, then can make My Boat go straight up. Into the stars, Jim!”
Al Coppolino was chanting names under his breath: Cathuria, Sona-Nyl, Thalarion, Zar, Baharna, Nir, Oriab. All out of those books of his.
Cissie said, “Before you come with us, you must do one last thing, Jim. Untie the rope.”
So I climbed down My Boat’s ladder onto the quay and undid the braided gold rope that was fastened to the slip. Gold and silk intertwined, Milt; it rippled through my hand as if it were alive; I know the hard, slippery feel of silk. I was thinking of Atlantis and Celephaïs and going up into the stars, and all of it was mixed up in my head with the senior prom and college, because I had been lucky enough to be accepted by The-College-Of-My-Choice, and what a future I’d have as a lawyer, a corporation lawyer, after being a big gridiron star, of course. Those were my plans in the old days. Dead certainties every one, right? Versus a thirty-five-foot yacht that would’ve made John D. Rockefeller turn green with envy and places in the world where nobody’d ever been and nobody’d ever go again. Cissie and Al stood on deck above me, the both of them looking like something out of a movie—beautiful and dangerous and very strange—and suddenly I knew I didn’t want to go. Part of it was the absolute certainty that if I ever offended Cissie in any way—I don’t mean just a quarrel or disagreement or something you’d get the sulks about, but a real bone-deep kind of offense—I’d suddenly find myself in a leaky rowboat with only one oar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Or maybe just tied up at the dock at Silverhampton; Cissie wasn’t mean. At least I hoped so. I just—I guess I didn’t feel good enough to go. And there was something about their faces, too, as if over both of them, but especially over Cissie’s, like clouds, like veils, there swam other faces, other expressions, other souls, other pasts and futures, and other kinds of knowledge, all of them shifting like a heat mirage over an asphalt road on a hot day.
I didn’t want that knowledge, Milt. I didn’t want to go that deep. It was the kind of thing most seventeen-year-olds don’t learn for years: Beauty. Despair. Mortality. Compassion. Pain.
And I was still looking up at them, watching the breeze fill out Al Coppolino’s plum-colored velvet cloak and shine on his silver-and-black doublet, when a big, heavy, hard, fat hand clamped down on my shoulder and a big, fat, nasty, heavy Southern voice said:
“Hey, boy, you got no permit for this slip! What’s that rowboat doin’ out there? And what’s yo’ name?”
So I turned and found myself looking into the face of the great-granddaddy of all Southern red-neck sheriffs: face like a bulldog with jowls to match, and sunburnt red, and fat as a pig, and mountain-mean. I said, “Sir?”—every high-school kid could say that in his sleep in those days—and then we turned towards the bay, me saying, “What boat, sir?” and the cop saying just, “What the—”
Because there was nothing there. My Boat was gone. There was only a blue shimmering stretch of bay. They weren’t out farther and they weren’t around the other side of the dock—the cop and I both ran around—and by the time I had presence of mind enough to look up at the sky—
Nothing. A seagull. A cloud. A plane out of Idlewild. Besides, hadn’t Cissie said she didn’t yet know how to go straight up into the stars?
No, nobody ever saw My Boat again. Or Miss Cecilia Jackson, complete nut and girl genius, either. Her mamma came to school and I was called into the principal’s office. I told them a cooked-up story, the one I’d been going to tell the cop: that they’d said they were just going to row around the dock and come back, and I’d left to see if the car was okay in the parking lot, and when I came back, they were gone. For some crazy reason I still thought Cissie’s mamma would look like Aunt Jemima, but she was a thin little woman, very like her daughter, and as nervous and uptight as I ever saw: a tiny lady in a much-pressed, but very clean, gray business suit, like a teacher’s, you know, worn-out shoes, a blouse with a white frill at the neck, a straw hat with a white band, and proper white gloves. I think Cissie knew what I expected her mamma to be and what a damned fool I was, even considering your run-of-the-mill, seventeen-year-old white liberal racist, and that’s why she didn’t take me along.
The cop? He followed me to my car, and by the time I got there—I was sweating and crazy scared—
He was gone, too. Vanished.
I think Cissie created him. Just for a joke.
So Cissie never came back. And I couldn’t convince Mrs. Jackson that Alan Coppolino, boy rapist, hadn’t carried her daughter off to some lonely place and murdered her. I tried and tried, but Mrs. Jackson would never believe me.
It turned out there was no Cousin Gloriette.
Alan? Oh, he came back. But it took him a while. A long, long while. I saw him yesterday, Milt, on the Brooklyn subway. A skinny, short guy with ears that stuck out, still wearing the sport shirt and pants he’d started out in, that Sunday more than twenty years ago, and with the real 1950s haircut nobody would wear today. Quite a few people were staring at him, in fact.
The thing is, Milt, he was still seventeen.
No, I know it wasn’t some other kid. Because he was waving at me and smiling fit to beat the band. And when I got out with him at his old stop, he started asking after everybody in Central High just as if it had been a week later, or maybe only a day. Though when I asked him where the hell he’d been for twenty years, he wouldn’t tell me. He only said he’d forgotten something. So we went up five flights to his old apartment, the way we used to after school for a couple of hours before his mom and dad came home from work. He had the old key in his pocket. A
nd it was just the same, Milt: the gas refrigerator, the exposed pipes under the sink, the summer slipcovers nobody uses anymore, the winter drapes put away, the valance over the window muffled in a sheet, the bare parquet floors, and the old linoleum in the kitchen. Every time I’d ask him a question, he’d only smile. He knew me, though, because he called me by name a couple of times. I said, “How’d you recognize me?” and he said, “Recognize? You haven’t changed.” Haven’t changed, my God. Then I said, “Look, Alan, what did you come back for?” and with a grin just like Cissie’s, he said, “The Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, what else?” but I saw the book he took with him and it was a different one. He was careful to get just the right one, looked through every shelf in the bookcase in his bedroom. There were still college banners all over the walls of his room. I know the book now, by the way; it was the one you wanted to make into a quick script last year for the guy who does the Poe movies, only I told you it was all special effects and animation: exotic islands, strange worlds, and the monsters’ costumes alone—sure, H. P. Lovecraft. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. He didn’t say a word after that. Just walked down the five flights with me behind him and then along the old block to the nearest subway station, but of course by the time I reached the bottom of the subway steps, he wasn’t there.
His apartment? You’ll never find it. When I raced back up, even the house was gone. More than that, Milt, the street is gone; the address doesn’t exist anymore; it’s all part of the new expressway now.
Which is why I called you. My God, I had to tell somebody! By now those two psychiatric cases are voyaging around between the stars to Ulthar and Ooth-Nargai and Dylath-Leen—
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 52
