“That’s a lie!” It was weird, how nobody here would ever tell you to keep your voice down. Uncle Tab was deaf, and Meg was deaf and mute, and you could never tell about Grandma.
“That’s why he had to leave.”
Joe could think of a thousand good reasons why someone would want to leave here, but he held his tongue. Nobody ever talked to him about his father.
“He wanted to marry Winnie Rowbottom, but her father said he wasn’t good enough. He left, and when he came back—Ow!”
Grandma Amelia made a “sorry” gesture and wiped Lorna’s blood off her knife with a dishrag.
It wasn’t so bad here, really, except for meals, which were the same every day. Steelcut oatmeal for breakfast, tuna sandwiches for lunch and every night, the chowder.
A pot of it was always simmering on the stove, making the house smell like a dirty aquarium. Chowder, they called it, but it wasn’t like any chowder he’d ever heard of. It was red and thick and loaded with herbs and onions to hide the oily, rancid stock loaded with rubbery, spherical beads that popped between his teeth. It tasted like blood, but nobody else at the table seemed to mind.
Joe often thought that if only someone knocked over the big black cauldron, they would have to eat something else, but he knew there was nothing but canned tuna and oatmeal in the pantry, nothing in the fridge but tubs of cold chowder stock. The store shelves at the market were mostly empty, and everyone paid with food stamps for what little there was. The pretty redheaded girl who ran the store in the afternoons never paid attention, but there was no candy to steal. Domino’s didn’t deliver to Quiet Island.
Once, he asked if it was fish eggs and blood. Nobody answered, but Aunt Meg cried and left the table. Uncle Tab sent him to bed hungry. He didn’t ask about the chowder after that.
Grandma Amelia’s hands shook worse than usual as she ladled out the chowder, tonight. Her fingers jumped and crabbed up with a will of their own. Her tongue jutted out of her mouth and she dropped the ladle into Joe’s bowl.
Splattered with chowder, Joe jumped back from his chair and shouted, “What the fuck,” but nobody was watching him.
Grandma’s hands jerked and shredded an invisible bag that seemed to fall over her face. Aunt Meg held her down and pulled her tongue out of her throat. Lorna picked up the ladle and resumed serving the chowder.
You could walk the length of the island in less than ten minutes, from the harbor and the general store at the south end to the lighthouse on the rocks at the northern tip, but the broken land offered hollows and meandering canyons, where the ruins of generations of treehouses and forts had collapsed or been engulfed by the pickleweed and blood-red ice plant. He would sneak into them to puff a smoke or a bowl from his tiny stash of weed, and goof on the graffiti kids had etched into the wood with charcoal. It seemed like every generation of kids had evolved their own written language from scratch; some were pictographs a Neanderthal would have sneered at, while others had more symbols than Chinese, and were as complex as they were indecipherable. A few words or names were in plain English, but hardly legible.
Miss Bly, the mule-faced spinster who kept the school in the Smoody house’s parlor, would have caned them for their atrocious penmanship, to say nothing of the vaguely obscene images of naïve yet inventive acts of sexual congress. The boys were absurdly well-endowed stick and balloon figures, but their partners were fancifully and fully rendered, with voluptuous details and lovingly rendered expressions that only made it more obscene, since they were all fish.
Other days, he went down to the tidepools, but there wasn’t much to see. The waves gushed over the black basalt and flushed out the seemingly bottomless pits in the rocky bluffs at the foot of the cliffs all around the island. The flitting white shapes in the pools were condoms and bits of bleached plastic shopping bags, and the colorful jewels on the walls were bits of glass. At low tide, the still water in the pools glittered with a varicolored sheen that was prettier than any fish, anyway.
It was depressing, but it beat looking out at the ocean. The rolling waves were like moving walls between Joe and everything good in the world. Uncle Tab told him the island was a lone peak on an abyssal plain almost two miles deep, but when he looked out at the sea, it was like a hateful huge living thing, shoving the island further away from the mainland, every day.
The modest armada of boats drifted at anchor in the still black waters in the crook of the harbor, and the men sat or kicked the ground in front of the harbormaster’s shack from before dawn to breakfast and the harbormaster’s horn, breaking up in surly groups to work on other projects, or skulk in someone’s barnyard to drink. It was not yet the season, Aunt Meg said when he asked why nobody went out to sea.
The fishing had dwindled to nothing long before anyone on the island was born, except for the quilting circle and old Ichabod Smoody, the harbormaster. The waters around Quiet Island were dead for fifty miles, and outside that, they couldn’t compete with the big commercial boats, with their sonar tracking and their nets. They used the old ways, and trusted in the sea, and the sea still kept its promise to the first settlers. It gave them what they needed, and more than most folks on the mainland could expect, but one had to be patient.
Not that Joe gave two shits for fishing, but all the kids his age, boys and girls, worked the boats, and huddled in their own clique at the edge of the fishermen. When the dark began to dissolve into cold green fire on the eastern horizon, the fishermen gathered and waited as Ichabod settled into his rowboat with a box across his lap, and was rowed out beyond the breakwater by his sullen great grandson, a hulking, hunchbacked brute with a harelip that split his nose like a bat’s snout.
Joe hung out just within earshot of the other teenagers. Lorna seemed to be the hub of the group, but she never introduced him around. The other kids clearly asked about him in whispers or signs, but she shrugged as if she didn’t know him, he wasn’t worth knowing, or he didn’t really exist.
When Ichabod returned, he hobbled up the pier to the porch of his shack before he ceremoniously signed that the tide was wrong, and the catch was not coming. The fishermen expelled a collective grunt and dispersed. The kids idled and smoked a while before breaking up. One day, Joe said, “fuck it,” and went over.
He tucked the earbuds of his iPod into his breast pocket and edged closer with a wistful smile on his face. “Hi, I’m—”
A big redheaded boy with a pug’s face wheeled on him and socked him in the eye without any warning, without saying a word, and turned back to finish telling a joke with his hands.
Joe got up and tried to muster the rage to call him out, but there was no opening in the group, and he didn’t feel anger. He just felt shock and fear and a dull ache as his eye closed over, and he felt nine years old.
Aunt Meg wrote him he should stay away from the fishermen, especially after they’d gotten bad news. “When their blood is up, they need someone to punch. If you hadn’t come along, they would have started up with each other, sure enough.”
When she came home for supper, Lorna smirked at him as she hurried upstairs to wash up. “Sorry about your eye, cousin. My mates thought you were queer.”
Did she mean gay? He could never tell for sure, with the way they talked. . . the few of them who could or did. He followed her up the stairs and down the hall, past all those doors with dust piling up against the thresholds. “Nobody gave me a chance. I was just trying to talk to them. And I’m not. . . I’m straight.”
“They won’t ever believe that, now.”
“What did I do? I didn’t hit on him, I was just trying to—”
“You didn’t fight him.” She closed the door in his face.
Dinner was late.
Grandma Amelia didn’t come down from her room. Aunt Meg loomed over the stove. Uncle Tab sat at the dinner table with a bunch of nautical maps and notes spread everywhere. The smell of the chowder on the stove turned Joe’s stomach with renewed vigor, as if the stock had begun to turn.
They were the only family he had left, the only ones who would take him in.
The aroma of the chowder on the stove grew more briny and bitter, and shortly the kitchen filled with smoke. Aunt Meg had dozed off on her feet in front of the stove, but they served it anyway. The burst eggs in the black soup tasted like licking a weak, leaking battery.
“Soup’s off,” Uncle Tab muttered, but he dutifully slurped the last scorched dregs from his chipped china bowl. “But soon the catch’ll be in. Tomorrow, if the tides are right. Boy here ought to learn to work.”
“How much does it pay?” Joe said in a deep voice.
“I’ll take it out of your room and board,” Tab chuckled.
Aunt Meg signed something too fast for Joe to catch anything, but it included several emphatic No’s.
“If the boy’s going to stay here, he’ll have to make himself useful. He starts tomorrow.” Rapping his arthritic fist on the table like a gavel, Tab rose and left the room.
Joe jumped as he felt something brush against his leg, teasingly like a cat. Lorna smirked at him as she got up to clear the dishes.
He went out on the porch after dinner, and he chanced to see the women of the island going to work. A line of twelve of them, all pregnant, stooped over gravid bellies, some hobbling along with canes. Most of them were not much older than Lorna, but some were Aunt Meg’s age. He watched them pass out of sight before he followed them, lighting a cigarette and popping in his earbuds.
They went into the little warehouse at the edge of the harbor. He’d heard Lorna call it the hatchery, but he figured it was abandoned like most of the buildings on the island. The big barn doors were chained, and the windows were boarded up, but a deadfall of discarded crab cages piled against the leeward wall nearly reached the roof, and he managed to climb it and perch uneasily before a slot between white, warped shingles, and peek inside.
Beneath him, a young girl lay on a cot with her legs in stirrups, just like at the doctor’s office. Joe recognized her from the store. She was a few years older than him, and watched the counter for her father.
The doctor was there, and an old woman with glazed eggs for eyes, stroking the pretty girl’s lovely burnished red hair. She wasn’t pregnant, that Joe could see, and hadn’t been with the others.
The cot was enclosed in black rubber curtains, and a big rubber pouch hung on a hook over the doctor’s head. A hose from it trailed on the floor and the doctor stuck it under the girl’s skirt.
Joe gasped at the sight, and wondered what it meant. He knew most of what men and women did to each other from ugly experience walking in on Mom with her boyfriends, and he knew babies didn’t come from the stork. But if men put babies into women, it had to be better than this. The redheaded girl cried out when the doctor unplugged the pouch and something redder than blood sluiced down the hose, stiffening it as it flowed into the girl’s bottom.
“It’s cold,” she whimpered.
The doctor clucked and chucked her under the chin. “Well, you’ll warm it up, won’t you?” He got up off his stool and slipped out through a part in the rubber curtains. Joe crawled like a ninja along the roof, peering in at any crack that leaked light, until he saw something else.
Below lay a cavernous room with big tanks of water. The floor was deeper than the water level, and waves rolled into channels cut in the floor, flooding the tanks through a Byzantine system of rusty pipes. The room was hot and dank, lit only by hooded crimson lamps.
A plank was laid across the tank directly beneath Joe’s vantage point, and a pregnant woman sat on a funny stool with a hole in the seat with her skirts hiked up around her waist. She strained and pushed like on the toilet. A huge man wearing hip waders and no shirt and a hooded fisherman’s hat waded in the tank below her, but nobody else seemed to be concerned with her birthing her baby into the water.
The woman gave a piercing shriek and bent to clamp her head between her knees as she loudly expelled something from her girl-parts. The tank water was coffee-cloudy and simmering with tiny pink things like shrimp rolling around in it.
Other pregnant women sat in similar stools over other tanks, or lay on cots beside them, sweaty and spent from their labors.
Joe tried to move crabwise on the roof to see what was coming out of them, but the shingles gave way under his hand and he was falling through the roof. He threw his legs wide and caught a rafter, stopping his fall.
The hooded man in the tank looked up at him and grabbed a net on a long pole to drag him down. His torso and arms were carved up with deep scars like fissures in dry mud, and all over his body, weird lumps and knobby lesions pulsed among his rippling, rangy muscles.
Joe swung his arms wildly, trying to lift himself up out of the hole in the roof. The boards trapping his knees groaned. The woman on the birthing stool howled and forced out something that splashed in the water. A turgid, translucent sac dangled out from between her legs, then ruptured like a soap bubble. Hundreds of finger-sized pink bugs spilled out.
Joe screamed, “Let me go!“
The man with the net swiped at Joe and banged his head, trying to drag him off-balance. The rafter beam under his left foot cracked and gave way. Joe squealed as he fell a whole foot, but something caught the waistband of his jeans and held him suspended over the tank. Around the big man’s legs, newborn pink, spiny things darted and churned the water to a foamy stew.
“Quit fighting me, stupid boy!” Lorna’s hissing whisper slapped Joe just as he was yanked backwards and rolled over the shingles to tumble off the drooping edge of the roof. He fell into an ancient shell-mound and rolled to his feet running. Lorna, with her long legs, was right behind him. Breathless, yet he kept screaming the same thing at her until she hissed, “Shut up, or they’ll come!”
“But that. . . that man. . . that was my dad!”
Joe rolled over and rubbed his eyes, but the dark got no lighter, and whatever had awakened him did nothing to announce itself, but he felt clasped by the certainty that someone had been in the room only a moment before.
Crooked rays of tarnished silver moonlight leaked in through the shutters. The walls of the tiny bedroom seemed to sag even closer together. The crack in the ceiling pursed like lips whispering a secret.
A peculiar scent laced the air; salty and pungent like heated seawater, but richer, spicy, arousing. Pinned down under the stifling weight of the dusty comforter, Joe inhaled greedily. The heady aroma made him feel drunk and tweaked at the same time. His cock stood painfully erect, struggling to lift the heavy blankets into a tent. Rolling the covers back, he turned to the door just as the twin shadows of feet flitted away, and something clunked on the warped floorboards just outside his door.
Cold hands probed his bowels. He hoped, and yet he dreaded, that it was Lorna. Playing her strange games. He couldn’t figure her out, but he wanted her. Until just now, he’d been torn. Her games had seemed like naïve courting one minute, and a teasing trap the next, snapping shut whenever he showed a flicker of interest. She was trying to draw him out because she was bored and he was an outsider, to make a clown of him. But he was bored, too, and he had to admit she was pretty, if a bit odd-looking, with her wideset violet eyes, moonstone complexion and blue-black hair. At home, he would have noticed her, but never approached her, worried what people would say, because on the mainland, she would surely be a social outcast. She vexed him with her weird mingling of exotic beauty and deformity. Her weird, withered arm that she always turned away from him only seemed a minor distraction, because she had tits like a cow, and Joe was a boy of thirteen.
But she was his cousin; it didn’t just feel wrong the way stealing or drinking or smoking felt wrong, which was just the fear of getting caught. She was the strangest girl he’d ever met, but she
was family. It felt unnatural, the way it felt when he caught himself staring at his mom when she passed out naked on the couch. And yet, the musky mist of her in the air still worked its magic on his brain and body, flatly showing him how very natural it was.
The fear of getting caught was no slouch in adding its voice to the argument, but Joe went to the door with no more hesitation. If this was another game, he’d play to win.
He eased the door open, careful not to let it bang into the bed, but this only drew the groan of the hinges out into a low bleat like a novelty cow-in-a-can. He jerked the door open and stepped around it, and peered out into the hall.
At the far end, a lantern cast a quavering orange glow from a niche beside Lorna’s door, which stood open. The dark beyond the threshold was a curtain of soot, but he could nearly see the trail of scent she left behind and follow it.
Stepping out, he tried to remember which floorboards creaked, and which of the several locked rooms lining the hall were occupied, but his feet wanted to carry him sprinting to the end. He took a step, planted it gently, was rewarded with a tiny squeak as if he’d crushed a mouse.
What did she want? What did he want, for that matter? He’d made out with a few girls from school and summer camp, had got as far as a quick furtive handful of bush twice, but this wasn’t seven drunken minutes in a closet.
Should he whisper her name, or just go in? The prospect of going back to bed never had a chance. Fantasies raced through his mind and tied his cock in knots. If this was a game, he was not a player, but a piece.
A stirring in the dark continent of her bedroom, and she appeared. In the somber light of the lantern, she looked like a woman, mature and ripe, though her eyes were hooded, her expression grave. She looked at the floor before him and parted her lips to run her tongue over them, slowly, savoring a taste on the air, and sucked in a hungry breath that tapered off in a shudder of nervous delight. She might have been sleepwalking until just then, and he figured he must look the same to her.
Strategies Against Nature Page 10
