“Where are we going?” I ask, but he’s already gone and I already know. My bed, fast as we both can get there. Thank god.
There’s a rainbow in a puddle on deck. Oil or gas. Pink and blue and green shining in the pier lights. I stamp my foot in the puddle. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Half an hour? Unlikely. It’ll take him longer than that to finish. I decide to acquaint myself with the galley.
Belowdecks I unlatch cabinets, poke around. I find a sailor’s small photo album. Pictures of siblings, some children on a green, green yard. I find a letter from home about painting pinecones with peanut butter and birdseed. I find some chocolate and English muffins. I turn to toast the muffins, and when I turn round again, a coastie, dripping wet and barefoot, is standing in the open hatchway. His stubble has some red in it, but he’s not tall, not threatening. He’s the sort of man a girl will look at and think, That’s cute, that’s some mother’s son. A good kid. His eyes are open wide, as if he’s been listening to ghost stories.
“You scared me. I thought everyone was gone,” I say. He’s drenched. “You need a towel?”
“Thank you.” He comes into the kitchen.
I find a stack of clean dish towels in a small hutch. “What were you doing? Swimming?”
“I fell in.”
“Tonight? In the dark?”
He nods.
“Holy cow. That’s scary.”
He buries his face in a dry towel.
“You need some tea? Something to warm you up?”
“No thank you, ma’am.” He drapes the towel over one shoulder, stares at something, not me. “I was under the ship.”
“What a nightmare. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Yeah.” He looks at his pruned hands as if they might bite him.
“Have some tea. Or water.”
He looks up. “All right,” he says. “Okay, water.”
I fill a glass. “How long were you under there?”
“I don’t know. A long time.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I felt where her belly curves. Followed the curve up. Found the pilot’s ladder on her side.”
“I think you need a doctor.” The man must be in shock. “I’ll call an ambulance.” I pull out a chair for him to sit on. “What’s your name?”
He reaches his hands into the pockets of his uniform as if he might find his name there. He pulls out a wad of bills, money, soaking wet. “I’m Coast Guard. SIO,” he says. “Do you work here?”
I’m still wearing my pumps and skirt suit. No doubt there’s some maritime law restricting girlfriend access on a twenty-thousand-deadweight tanker that’s taking on a load of gasoline. And I’m not really even a girlfriend. “No. I work at the high school.”
The coastie tenses up, an electric current entering his wet body. He nods. He looks at me and I understand: I am breaking some Homeland Security law. I try to explain. “I was just bringing my guy dinner, just dropping it off. I’m leaving now. Right now.”
“The high school?”
“Yeah.”
“Where all the girls are pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
He stuffs the bills back in his pocket. “How are those girls doing?”
My voice is flat and annoyed. I shake my head. “They’re great. Yeah. Sure. Healthy.”
“Sounds like you’re mad at them.”
“They’re a lot of extra work for me.” I’m not mad. I’m just tired of trying to figure out what the girls mean.
“Must be something, standing in the same room as them.”
“They were in my office today.”
He pales. “That right? What’d they say?”
“Not much.”
“Thirteen of them?”
I shrug. “It happens.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not really.”
I fill his water glass again. “No. I guess not.”
“So. Why’d they do it?” Like he’s running an inspection. Like he somehow thinks I’ll know the answer.
When I was a girl I pretended my pillow was a different man each night. And the pillow men would take me here, or there, out into life, to a Bee Gees concert maybe. That seemed like an adult thing to do. Men made the weather and I loved them for it. Then I got pregnant, then the real men disappeared, and I made my own weather. Storms. Sunshine. Storms. I blow air up my face, faking exasperation. “I couldn’t say.”
There’s a pool of water beneath his chair.
“You were under the ship?”
He nods.
“Let me call an ambulance.”
“No, thanks. XO’s gonna kill me as it is.”
“You’ve got no shoes.”
“I’ll be all right.” He returns the towel he used and backs his way out of the galley.
I follow him up to the deck. From the gangway he throws one arm into the air, a goodbye. His hand makes a bird in the night. He’d be a nice one, I think. Make some girl happy. “What’s your name?” I shout, but he has already crossed back over to the wharf, leaving nothing but the damp stains of his footfalls.
* * *
My guy takes way longer than half an hour. Black ripples obscure the view, but that doesn’t stop me from staring into the water. It’s thick as oil, dark as glass, and I’ve got time to wonder how long that coastie was under, to wonder what’s down there.
One by one, round lights dot the surface of the sea like fireflies or lampposts just coming on, or something else maybe, colonies, mothers, boats heading to far-off places. I don’t know what the lights are. I can’t say if they’re coming from above the water or underneath. Golden circles float across the ocean surface as if the full moon rose while I was belowdecks. Only there isn’t one moon. There’s a grand chandelier, ten moons, then thirteen, ten more, thirty-two, one hundred and eight, seven thousand and six moons—an entire language made up of moons floating over the surface of the sea.
Can the coastie see this phosphorescence? Does he understand what the girls mean or does he, like me, at least understand that he doesn’t understand? We don’t know the alphabets they use, but we can read a curve. We see a girl’s reflection. We tilt our faces toward their glow, warmed by their light, their meaning bubbling up from a dark sea.
BEAST
I read the newspaper in bed at night, propping it open on my belly. My boobs fall off to either side as if they are already asleep. They care little for the news of the world after the day is done. Still, I read the paper as a refreshment, like a breath mint or a catalog filled with clothes I would never buy.
On page eighteen of the National Report there’s an article, “Good Guy Gets the Chicks.” It’s the story of a brother who works at a chicken rendering plant by day and at a security firm by night in order to send his sister to college. He sells his plasma to make ends meet.
He must be Japanese or Amish. I flip ahead to the jump page to see his picture. He’s just some white guy from Minnesota, and I guess I find that hard to believe. He’s like an artifact from the nineteenth century, back when people still took turns churning the butter or tending fires at night. In the photo he’s wearing sneakers and a plastic apron stained with blood. He’s positioned along a conveyor belt that is dotted with the dead bodies of chickens. He’s from right now.
“Archibald Lepore never finished high school,” the article says, “yet every month he sends the Student Loan Corporation a check for $578. Mr. Lepore has been working since he was sixteen years old to support his twin sister. He found a second job when they turned eighteen and she was admitted to Northwestern University without a scholarship. Mr. Lepore, from the refrigerated storeroom of PoulTech, says—”
But then it moves. Just slightly. “A tick,” I tell my husband. A tiny black dot with legs. A period, escaped from the newspaper, is making a slow-motion dash across my stomach.
“Another one?” My husband rolls onto his side. “Let me see.”
“Right here.”
He moves in for a closer look. �
�That’s a pimple you picked.”
“I wasn’t picking anything. I was just reading. It’s a tick. Do you see it?”
He spreads the skin of my stomach. “There’s a spot of blood.”
“Any legs?”
“I don’t see anything really.”
“Deer ticks are very small.”
“I know.” It’s my third tick this week. “But I don’t see anything.” He pauses over the spot, exhales. “Wait. All right. Wait. I see something.”
“What?”
“Squirming a little bit. Black.”
I knew it. “Pull it out.”
“You’re not supposed to pull them out. Then the head stays inside.”
We had received an illustrated mailer from the county. “Lyme Tick Awareness.” The sickness is carried in their saliva, it said. Get the head out.
“What am I supposed to do?”
He disappears into the bathroom for some tweezers and a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.
The cottage we live in is only one story and a bit run-down. It’s what’s called a carriage house. It’s on someone else’s property. We are caretakers. We mow the lawn, handle the trash, look out for robbers and all that. That’s how we manage to live here, a place crawling with deer and mice and ticks, instead of in an apartment in town. At this hour, from our bedroom, the rest of the house feels dark and dangerous. Things might be creeping, rotting, plotting revenge out there and I wouldn’t even know because I can’t see the living room, and beyond that I can’t see the small kitchen with two windows that look out onto a screen porch that looks out even farther onto the road and the mailboxes. I can’t see any of that right now.
“Have you been rolling around in the grass?” He dabs at the spot and I can smell the astringent. He clamps down with the tweezers. “Ready?” He yanks once, taking a bit of skin with it. “That ought to do it.” He applies the alcohol.
I don’t know if he pulled the head out. His mouth is twisted, worried.
“Is it gone?”
“Yeah. You’re fine.”
“Sure?”
“I’ll look again in the morning.”
“What if the morning is too late?”
“You’re fine.” He takes the tweezers and whatever he’s tweezed back to the bathroom. I hear the toilet flush and see him walk through the living room. He has on a pair of boxers and a ribbed undershirt. When we were teenagers my husband worked in Akron’s rubber plants. Now most of those plants are gone and he found a job running the heavy machinery for, oddly enough, a heavy machinery manufacturing center. He’s still very strong. He still has the figure of a man who grew up lugging around one-hundred-pound tires all day. We went to high school together and married a few years after we graduated. I am lucky. I made a good decision by accident. In high school we chose boyfriends blindly, pin the tail on the donkey. I thought he was handsome and that was about all I thought. So I was surprised to find, after we’d been married a few years, that my husband was someone I really love. There are things about him he’d kept hidden in school, secrets that made him precious—kindness and wonder and a beautiful singing voice—qualities that took a couple of years of life chipping away before they were revealed.
“Can you take off your clothes?” I ask when he returns.
“I like my pajamas.”
“Those aren’t pajamas. They’re underwear.”
“Not necessarily.”
He takes off his clothes anyway and looks at me once as if I were a brand-new flashlight whose bulb, for some reason, has already dimmed and malfunctioned. But I’m not brand-new. We’ve been married for almost eleven years now.
He gets back into bed. I wrap my body around the tick bite. I can see the picture of the chicken-rendering brother from Minnesota. He smiles up at me from the floor where I dropped him. I have a sister. She’d never work at a chicken plant for me. I also had a brother once. I don’t think he would have done it either. Not because he wasn’t kind, and not because he was busy with his own plans. He didn’t have any plans. My brother had trouble knowing what to make of his life. There were days he’d feel inspired by a Tony Robbins infomercial or something stupid and he’d think, Well, maybe I should get a job, as if that were something no one else had ever considered before. A job. But then my brother never could hold down any sort of position except for a few short stints at a dry cleaner in town. He reminded me of Abraham Lincoln, so tall he stooped his head, pockmarked, peach-fuzzed, and as quiet as jewelweed before it explodes. When he graduated from high school he froze, caught in the headlights, distracted by every leaf on every tree. He couldn’t move forward because he couldn’t see the point of it. “Don’t you know where forward is headed?” he asked one Thanksgiving. I didn’t have an answer. He scratched his ear. He stared out the window of our parents’ house as if there might be an answer in the drive. I don’t think he saw anything. He sat back down and stared at the carpeting. Maybe I should have said something. I know where forward is headed. I try not to think about it.
We didn’t find him for three days because we didn’t realize he was missing. That’s the saddest part of this story. He’d hanged himself from a tree, one of several that grew in a small sliver of land between my parents’ house and the neighbors’, out by a swing set untouched for years. He timbered over like a sapling when my father cut him down, his body gone stiff. Afterward, my mother, a stone-faced woman, a hard worker, kept repeating a phrase as if it were the motto of my brother’s suicide. “He was just too in love with the world.” She said it to everyone.
* * *
“You know The Pajama Game?” I ask my husband, my mouth close to the side of his chest. “The musical?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you do. It’s old. Has that song ‘Hernando’s Hideaway.’”
“No.”
“‘Just knock three times and whisper low that you and I were sent by Joe’?”
“Oh. Yeah. Yeah.”
“I never understood what they were doing inside Hernando’s Hideaway.”
“Hmm.” His eyes are closed.
“So what were they doing?” I ask.
“What?” He opens his eyes.
“Inside Hernando’s Hideaway?”
“What were they doing? I don’t know. Drinking, dancing, fooling around. Adult things.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Adult things. That’s why it was scary.”
“You were scared of a song?”
“That song. There was something going on inside that club, something criminal.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“Then what was it?”
“Like you said. Adult things.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, what’s the most adult thing?”
“Fucking?”
“No. Fucking’s for kids. Dying is adult.”
“Oh. Shhhh,” he says and turns to rub my face. He puts his hand on my cheek to stop my jaw from moving. He doesn’t want to hear about how people were dying inside that song’s nightclub. That that was the reason they kept the security so tight. My husband gets nervous if I say anything too bizarre. He thinks I might also end up swinging in the breeze one day. But I used to say bizarre things even before my brother died. And I don’t think suicide is contagious. “Shhh, baby,” he says one more time before shutting off the light.
* * *
I’ve been having a really strange week.
“Honey?” I ask once the lights are out. He mumbles, trying to sleep. I tuck the covers around my chin and close my eyes, thinking it won’t happen if I can just go to sleep fast enough. But this week I haven’t been able to fall asleep quickly. I know it’s coming, so I fret and listen while my husband’s breath deepens and slows. My chest gets tight and small. My eyes go dry. Once he is asleep the night changes. I hear every sound and every sound is scary. The furnace, the frogs, the cable wire scraping against the roof. The more alone I get, the louder the world becomes. There are wild an
imals outside, raccoons, squirrels, skunks, possums. I listen and then I try to brace myself, holding on to the sheets. I know it’s coming, a dream of a tidal wave. I get ready for it. I wait, and just when I think too much time has passed, that maybe it won’t happen tonight, it happens, so quickly I can’t scream. My hands and feet harden into small hooves, the fingers and toes swallowed up by bone, and then the most frightening part is over with, the part where I lose my opposable thumbs. Next the fur, brown speckled with some white. This sprouting feels like a stretch or like I’m itching each individual follicle from the inside as a wiry hair pokes through a pore. My arms and legs narrow, driving all their muscles up the flank. My neck thickens and grows. I feel my tail. I like my tail. Finally my face pulls into a tight, hard nose. My jaw extends, my tongue grows long and thick, my lips shrink before turning black and hard as leather. And then it’s done. And then I am a deer.
I still haven’t told my husband, but I practice telling him. “Lately,” I imagine saying, “when you turn out the light, something funny happens to me.”
“What?” I think he’ll ask, or just, “Funny? What do you mean?”
“I turn into a deer at night.” I plan on telling him clearly like that, no hemming, no mistaking what I mean.
“A deer?” He won’t believe it. I know he won’t.
“A deer,” I’ll confirm.
“What the fuck?” he’ll say, just like that. “What the fuck?” with a slowness that means he’s thinking hard about what I’m saying.
“Calm down,” I’ll tell him. Though he’ll probably be calm already.
“What are you talking about?” he’ll ask me, disappointed, as if he already knows deer don’t mate for life.
* * *
I am very careful, very quiet, planting my hooves on our bed. I stand over him, staring down at his body from up on my wobbly legs, straddling his belly. I sniff his neck, licking the hair of his armpit, cleaning him. Though I don’t want to wake him, I kind of can’t help it. I don’t know what would happen if he woke up now. He keeps a .22 and a shotgun in the hall closet.
The Dark Dark Page 4
