She gave no coy smiles, made no sound, no gesture to beckon him closer or send him away. He might not be there at all, or he might be wrapped all around her, a maddening taste in the air of something that used them both. With her slender hands, she caressed her full breasts and the modest mound of her belly, the cello-shaped swells of her hips, and down her thighs. At the limit of their reach, she began to gather up the folds of her flannel nightgown. Lorna’s face contorted as if she were lowering herself into a scalding hot bath, but still her hands worked an inch at a time to unveil her feet, her long, coltish calves, her knees, her thighs—
Joe quivered. He dare not move. If he took a step, it would resound like a shotgun blast and wake the whole house, at least the ones who could hear. His heart pounded like a fist on every door in the hall. She wanted him, didn’t she? She was in some kind of ecstasy, possessed to taunt him, but not enough to just steal into his bed. It was wrong; it was still incest, north of the Mason-Dixon line. He was getting sick of telling himself that.
Bereft of any script to follow, Joe just watched as she held the nightgown up around her waist. The unknown territory below was steeped in shadow, but her pale skin cast a soft light of its own, highlighting the sparse spray of hair on her pubic mound, little thicker than a teenager’s moustache. With her other hand, she stroked the gleaming flesh of her inner thighs and roamed hungrily around the cleft of her sex like it was too hot to touch. Her legs spread wider and her hips slowly gyrated, offering him a better view of herself. Lorna let out a rasping sigh of torment and forced her hands to creep over her burning sex and splay her nether lips wide open.
The shiny visceral pink of it promised him everything a man dreamed of, death and resurrection and revelation. It stared at him, dared him, and denied him. Her agile fingers kneaded the layers of pouting lips and darted in and out of her fundamental hole, slathering her juices up and down the canal of her vagina, then trapping the pearl in the prow of her slit with her fingers and rolling it between them, her pouting lips clamped shut on a howl of ecstasy.
Joe’s cock popped out at full mast through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Without a thought, he took hold of it and slid his hand up and down the shaft, squeezing it until the head burned purple and a droplet of semen oozed out his urethra.
Lorna’s moans grew louder and higher. Her hand massaged the folds of her sex in a panic. Her hips jerked and bucked as if she were fucking him, urging him to redouble his stroking. Another second of this, and he would explode. He stalked down the hall with his cock in his hands like a dagger, stepping lightly but almost running headlong into her arms.
When he came close enough to touch her, it was like he’d broken a bubble, awakened her from sleepwalking. Her eyes went wide and she shrieked, “No, it’s wrong, to touch!” and jumped back and slammed her door.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Joe shouted at the door. “What kind of game is this, anyway?”
Only then did he remember that some of the sleepers all around him could still hear, and he turned and tiptoed back to his room.
Sitting in the middle of the doorway where he must have stepped over it before, was a small, queer porcelain bowl on a saucer, like for soup, except it was empty, and instead of a spoon, there was a glass eyedropper. He knelt and picked them up, and almost dropped them. They glowed with her heat and reeked of her crazymaking scent. She’d rubbed her juice all over them, and put on a show for him, and approved when he put on a show for her, but then he’d broken the rules. The bowl was shaped sort of like a miniature bedpan, with a contoured mouth that curled over the prevent anything from spilling out.
He realized, with a twitch of shock, that he was meant to jack off into it. He looked at her door again as if he could see through it and into her. He noticed a door down the hall hung ajar, and the too-white face of his grandmother watching him.
“Go ahead, boy,” she said, “do your duty,” and closed the door.
“But, we’re family. It’s not right.”
They were on the boat, waiting for Uncle Tab to bring the nets down in the truck. Aunt Meg was waiting for the doctor to come see Aunt Amelia. The sun was still an hour away from rising, and most of the other boats had already gone out.
“It’s not for my pleasure, stupid.” Her stormy eyes overflowed. “I want a baby. If I don’t, I’ll have to wet-nurse next season, and most of the boys on the island are so inbred, they can’t even make—” She stopped, furious with herself and with him, then hauled off and hit him.
“Is he bothering you, Lorna?”
A huge hand like a catcher’s mitt fell on his shoulder. Joe threw his elbow into the big boy’s gut. He turned and blindly swung his fists out and upward.
The boy was a head taller than him. The punch aimed at his jaw connected with his Adam’s apple. The boy folded and dropped to his knees, clutching his throat. A sickly wheezing came from his mouth, like a broken machine. His face turned purple, then blue.
“How was that? Who’s queer now, bitch?” Joe screamed.
“Get off him, he’s choking!” Lorna jumped on Joe’s back. Joe shoved the bigger boy off the boat. Still choking, the boy fell over the gunwale into the water.
A big fishing boat came barging up the harbor lane out of the hatchery’s landing. Its wake sent the boat heaving and rolling under their feet. “Angus, get him, help him!”
Joe leaned over the gunwale and reached down for Angus’s arm, which stuck out of the narrow channel between the rocking boat and the dock. The boat rose up on a swell and closed the gap like the blades of scissors on Angus’s arm.
Joe was holding the hand when the boat crushed Angus’s upper arm bone like a stale breadstick. The strong, callused fingers clasped his so hard that the nails broke the skin of his palm, then it was like he was holding an empty glove.
Together, they pulled Angus out of the water. He vomited and started breathing, but his arm was crushed, and flopped backwards on his body when he tried to kick Joe. “Jonah!” he gasped, again and again. The other workers jumped down from their boats and came running.
“Go,” Lorna, said. “They’ll kill you!”
Joe ran down the dock and up the hill just as the rest of the village converged on the Myrick boat. Uncle Tab’s truck pulled up. He waved at Joe as the boy ran past, up the hill and off the road across the overgrown yard of the empty Kinchloe place, and into one of the winding canyons that carved the island.
He hid in a treehouse. He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he woke up in a cold sweat, still seeing the hooded man in the hatchery, staring up at him from a boiling pot filled with unborn children. His grim lantern jaw and button nose should have comforted him, for his father was alive and he was here. But when Joe looked into his wide staring eyes, like burnt-out headlights, he realized that he was utterly alone.
A flashlght beam pinned him to the spot. “Don’t move!” said a low voice, but he unclenched when he realized it was Lorna.
While he ate the tunafish sandwich, she tried to tell him why. “When a farmer grows corn, he must labor and give it his blood and sweat, and in the end it feeds his family, and he’ll plant more corn. He serves the corn. It’s no different, here.
“When all the fish died, the island went hungry. But we were born here, and weren’t meant to leave. They came up from the depths some years ago, and they were something new, out of something very old. Doc Kinchloe called them isopods—living fossils. We called them a miracle.”
Their cycle was broken, too, for while they fed on all sorts of deep sea life down there in the dark, they turned into cannibals when they came to the surface to spawn, and devoured their own eggs, if they were not separated and farmed. So the island learned to live off the new bounty from the sea, but they had other troubles.
Generations of inbreeding had led to nervous conditions and defects, like the deafness and palsies and seizures. The isopods were scavengers that ate, among other things, tons of medical and industrial waste dumped in their bent
hic feeding grounds. But something they ate, or something they always were, or the divine hand of the Creator, had made them just a little bit human.
“That’s right,” said Aunt Meg. Her kerchief-bound head peeked over the wall of the treehouse. “I thought I’d find you kids out here.”
“You can talk!” Joe said. “You were faking it!”
“No, dear,” she said, “I’m healed.” She lifted her hair and showed him a fresh incision just behind her ear. Something inside it squirmed. She flinched in pain, but her smile at hearing and speaking again more than made up for it. “That’s the miracle. If God meant for us to live somewhere else, we would’ve been born there. He provided for us. The catch doesn’t just feed us, Joe. If we look after them and give them a soft harbor, they can heal us all.”
Joe looked to Lorna, who lifted her shirt. He’d seen more of her than anyone already, but the sight of her breasts was not what he’d hoped. A livid pink bump on her collarbone, the size of a baby’s fist, trembled when she touched it. “I was born with a bad heart. They put them in me. . . or I would’ve died a long time ago.” With her slender body between Joe and her mother, she slipped something into his hands and flared her nostrils at him until he put it away.
Joe looked from one to the other, his mind reeling. It took him a little while to form a coherent question. “But if this is all so normal and natural, where’s my Dad? Why is he hiding in the hatchery?”
Aunt Meg looked shamefaced for the first time. “I’m sorry about that, but you couldn’t know about him, if we didn’t know about you. Your father has a very important job. After all, he was the one who showed us how to use them.”
Aunt Meg stepped aside and someone else came out of the dark behind the flashlight. Long, rangy arms reached in and grabbed Joe by the lapels of his jacket and jerked him out of the treehouse.
“We didn’t want to keep him a secret from you, Joe, but you have to understand. He never really cared about family, or about having a home. He hurt people here and tried to leave, but he had an accident, and everything turned out for the best. He’s. . . different, now. Don’t expect too much. . .”
Joe kicked and screamed in his father’s arms as the big man carried him out of the canyon. He knocked the hat off his head and all the fight went out of him. Joe’s Dad was still Joe’s dad up to his eyebrows, but his skull was a yawning, broken dome, filled to overflowing with something else.
An articulated shell, purple black with mottled pink spots, squeezed into the gap. It looked like a cross between a giant woodlouse and one of those prehistoric crab-creatures, a trilobite. Jointed legs with vicious claws scuttled and twitched against its underbelly, and its stubby lobster tail coiled and uncoiled out of the gaping wound, but its head was tucked in behind the mask of Sam Myrick’s face.
Like a hermit crab in a deluxe human shell, the thing looked out of Dad’s eyes at Joe as it carried him down to the docks, but was it really making his father’s lips mouth his son’s name and say, I’m sorry?
They went down to the cove, where the whole village waited. The women were out on the water in three long rowboats. They had dragged an enormous net across the width of the cove, and now they sat at their oars and drummed on big tubs, a slow, pulsing dirge that reverberated through the water and the shore. The large fishing boat lay anchored in the center of the cove, with all its engines and motors shut off, a white island in the blackness.
The three dozen fit men and boys of the island raised a cheer and ran to their own rowboats when Joe’s father came down onto the dock bearing his son like a trophy. The Clijsters, Rowbottoms, Blys, Smoodys and Myricks stood aside as Sam Myrick passed among them. Uncle Tab punched Joe in the arm and dropped a crusty lifejacket around his neck, but looked away and shook off his clutching arm.
The full moon peered over the headland, paving the black wasteland of ocean with a road of liquid fairy gold. No motors churned the water. The wavelets that slapped the sides of the rowboats were hushed and drained of force. The swollen tide was like an upwelling of infected, toxic effluvia from the depths, like the last, sour breath from diseased lungs: stifling and sickeningly warm, spiced with the narcotic reek of benthic decay.
Joe’s father set him down in the prow of the first boat. None of the other eight young men in the boat looked glad to see him, except for Angus Smoody, who sat amidships and grinned at Joe. His arm looked no worse for having been crushed this morning, but for a jerking and twitching of each finger on his hand, one at a time, as if something were testing them. Bandages under his faded Blue Oyster Cult T-shirt wrapped his arm and chest, and covered a ring of squirming bulges around his shoulder and down his trembling arm.
He pointed at Joe once, then took up his oar. Joe had no oar. He turned around to look down into the water.
The cove rolled and sloshed in long slow movements, like a bathtub stirred by a vast, submerged body. Out beyond the point, the ocean was rent by frenzied slashing waves. The women raised a cheer, and increased the tempo of their drumming.
The water was redder than blood, clotted with clumps of eggs like unripe grapes, and chopped by sleek lilac shapes. Broad, armored backs broke the surface and grated the keels of the rowboats. The smallest of them was over three feet long, and their jointed shells were crowned with spines like harpoons. Their blunt heads were fused with their thoraxes, with two pairs of segmented antennae and four dull gray, sightless eyes. Jutting mandibles with sawtoothed ridges snapped out of mouths like garbage disposals. Recalling how few of the local fishermen had all their fingers, Joe drew back from the water.
A stiff arm shoved him over the gunwale, and Angus’s hot, whiskey-laced breath washed down his neck. “They come up from a mile down to lay their eggs and eat each other, little boy. They’ll strip you to the bone faster than you can scream. And those are just the girls.”
“Get off me, fucker, or I’ll hit you again.” Joe looked from the redheaded boy’s ruddy pug-face to the slack, vacant mask of his Dad. Mayor Smoody sat in the stern of the second boat, passing around a jug.
Angus laughed. “He won’t save you.” His injured arm jerked and dug its fingers into Joe’s shoulder. “If somebody falls in, they come running and stay to feed, and the catch is fat enough to last all year, isn’t that so? What d’you say, boys?”
The men kept rowing, but they stared right through Angus at Joe. The moonlight made waxy masks of their faces, but none of them said a word.
On the crow’s nest of the hatchery ship, old Ichabod blew a bosun’s whistle. The mouth of the cove turned to foam. Sam Myrick stood up and silently pointed, and the boats turned into the thick of the foaming water.
“Row, boys, row!” Mayor Smoody croaked. The bow dipped and rose, then began to bump and jerk as if they rode over a bed of boulders.
Joe leaned back close to his father, but he fell off the bench with the rocking of the boat. Angus laughed. The floor of the boat was filled with harpoons and spearguns. Joe grabbed a heavy iron rod, but the barbs cut into his soft hand, and he dropped it.
The males were bigger. Hundreds of humped backs came pouring into the shallow cove. Their dorsal spines parted the water like shark fins. The red water turned to pink foam with clouds of creamy white discharge from the second wave of isopods. They raged and tore at each other as they fertilized the egg masses, then swept across the cove to attack the females trapped in the nets the women had set up across the harbor.
The nets were heavy gauge woven stainless steel. The smaller females streaked through its loose grip into the open sea, but the larger isopod cows were ensnared and easy prey for their mates.
The men towed the net across the mouth of the cove to trap the spawning isopods. Half dropped their oars and took up the drawstrings of the net, pulling it taut and closing the enormous mouth like a purse around the swarm.
Joe sat with his hands clamped to the bench, but he was ripped free with no effort at all by Angus’s broken arm. “Clumsy Myrick, just like your dumb dad,” Angus sa
id. “You’re gonna fall in.”
Joe grabbed a speargun and swung it at Angus, who trapped the shaft under his arm. Joe’s hand jerked it backwards, pulling the trigger. The spear whooshed out from under Angus’s arm and passed over the heads of the other boys.
In the next boat, Mayor Smoody reared backwards with one hand resting on the thin spear where it sprouted from his solar plexus, and fell overboard.
The red water closed over him and came alive with teeth. A lifesaver was tossed. A man reached down, but something pulled him overboard, and the lifesaver was shredded before anyone noticed that Angus had thrown Joe out of the boat.
The cold, viscous soup smothered him, like wet plaster or half-hardened gelatin. Joe kicked for the surface. Something in his jacket pocket fizzed and flooded his nose and mouth with noxious bubbles. The packet Lorna gave him reacted violently with the water. When his head broke the surface, he was stained a bright yellow. Heart pounding the back of his throat, he reached out for the boat, gagging, “Dad, save me!”
The boat had capsized.
Thrashing bodies all around him screamed for someone to save them. The other two rowboats came abreast and threw harpoons and lifesavers, but the second boat overturned from wounded men trying to climb into it all at once.
Hands shoved him under the water as someone tried to climb on top of him. He fought them, but the arm he grabbed came away in his hand.
The water in his ears roared with the sound of motors, but it was the chattering mandibles of the isopods feasting all around him. His hands slid without purchase on the slimy hull of the capsized rowboat.
Something under him lifted him up by the seat of his sodden jeans. He curled up into a ball, no fight left in him. He was shoved up out of the water and thrown over the keel of the rowboat, and there he lay, clinging to the cold wet hull like a newborn to its mother while all the men of Quiet Island were slaughtered.
Strategies Against Nature Page 11
