Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  I said, “I’m scared, I want to go home.”

  Daddy said, “That whale smells like Korea.”

  Mama said, “Hush up, both of you. Are both of you boys trying to spoil my one and only second honeymoon?”

  Daddy looked at me like: duh.

  The little coastal village where Mama and Daddy rented the house was a ghost town. Everything was full of sand from the hurricane, even the trees, the ones that were left standing. And you couldn’t go barefoot on account of broken glass, you might step on a piece and cut the living daylights out of yourself. It’s hard to clean up after a hurricane. Buzzards flew up out of the whale like bats out of a cave.

  THE SHOPS were all closed, of course, and so were most of the restaurants. One restaurant still had a palm tree, roots and all, sticking through the busted-out front window. There was a coffee shop where we tried to have breakfast one morning, but the woman behind the counter slammed cups and saucers around like she was mad at us. Daddy whispered to Mama, “I hope she ain’t expecting the full ten percent tip.”

  Even the parking meters had been stripped from their posts and stored away somewhere. Bicycle rental was out of the question, of course. And at night the house we were staying in, which was olive green with muscular mildew and alive with one million crickets in the kitchen cabinets and in the furniture and bathroom and light fixtures, foreign crickets blown in from Tahiti or Cuba on the hurricane, and fungi possibly from other planets, had buzzards roosting on the chimney like a gang of sea gulls gone bad, and it was the only place along the beach with any lights on. We were a lonely lighthouse, we were a ship lost at sea, we were an outpost in Indian Territory. We were one of the few places with a roof.

  Mama said, “It’s so quiet.”

  Daddy said, “Yeah.” His voice was soft and a little frightened sounding. He said, “It’s definitely a quiet little place.”

  Mock it down: My parents were not falling in love all over again.

  It’s not that they weren’t trying to fall in love. They were trying until they turned blue in the face. It was embarrassing to watch them, Daddy was right about that too.

  They said soft things (I just stayed out of their way, I just watched, I just slunk around and spied on them), they brought iced tea to bed with flowers on a tray, they ate dinner by candlelight on the front porch. Picture my daddy, with thirty-five years of housepaint under his fingernails and housepaint on the freckled, veined lids of his eyes, varnish permanent in the pigmentation of his skin, his hair, the color of his eyes, my daddy, with webbed toes on his feet and not one white tooth in his mouth, lighting candles for dinner for the first time in his entire life! It would break your heart to watch him, he was trying so hard to be in love, so desperate now that he knew he was not.

  Daddy said, “Listen to the deep voice of the sea tonight.” He actually said this, this man who scarcely said hello on all the other days of the year, and the sound of his own voice speaking language near to poetry, near to passion, scared my daddy so bad that he actually leaped straight up off the floor in fear and ran out of the room and flung himself on the bed and cried for a full minute at the shock of it.

  Whenever I long for the return of my own innocence, I imagine becoming the person that my strange daddy was in that sixty seconds of his life, and then I have to admit that I was never so innocent, even as a child, no one on this earth ever was so innocent except him. My parents walked on the beach in the moonlight, stepping over strange things they could not see, they agreed on many things, including autumn as their favorite season of the year, and the smell of salt in the sea air. My mother was even beginning to be convinced that this might work, this second honeymoon in search of love.

  But then love is cruel, I mean why lie about it.

  The second honeymoon was not romantic. It was not working. It had nothing to do with the dead whale, or the other bodies that were beginning to wash up.

  So they tried harder.

  They played a couple of fantasy games. Daddy had read about sexual fantasies in a magazine called Connections. Connections was a magazine for people who wanted to put the zip back in their marriage. I had read the fantasies too. I found the magazine in Daddy’s room before we ever left home, in the drawer of his bedside table, while I was stealing rubbers to lend to a child who could stretch a condom over his head. I read them while sitting with my pants down around my ankles on the hardwood floor of my room, beating away. It’s one of my special childhood memories, sitting bare-assed on wood and holding my life in my hands.

  I didn’t see my parents play these games, of course, but I know it happened. Daddy tied Mama to the bed posts with four silk ties he had brought along, just for the purpose. Yikes. I found the ties still dangling there like dogs with their tongues hanging out, one morning. One of them had a hand-painted horse’s head on it.

  Well, I mean, you know. Suicide was one of the thoughts I had.

  Mama said all the right things, I suppose, all the words that Connections magazine recommended. “Fuck me, master, I’m your slave,” and like that. It’s embarrassing to think of your mama saying she’s a sex slave, you know, but it’s not the end of the world. That’s the way I thought of it at the time.

  Connections had some other good ideas, too. Connections said that the concerned couple could pretend to be a young boy and his stern high school science teacher. They could use an electric vibrator as a part of the boy’s high school science project.

  Maybe they did this, maybe not. I looked for something that might be a vibrator, but I’m not sure. I found a device in the back of one of my daddy’s dresser drawers, along with a bottle of Four Roses whiskey and a bag of peppermint candy. It might have been a vibrator, or it might have been a curling iron. Who knows? Some things about your parents you can never be sure of.

  The thing is, sex was not the only area that Connections magazine had suggestions for. It had suggestions in areas far more fantastic than mere sexual playfulness, though that must have been foreign enough to my father.

  Connections magazine had recommendations for metaphor and romance. It said, “Find a metaphor for romance, and pursue it with all your heart. If your first choice of metaphor fails, keep trying others until you hit upon just the right one for you and your partner.”

  I actually saw my father sitting on the side of his bed in his room at home reading this particular article. He had no shoes on, he was just home from a long day on an extension ladder, and so he worked his webbed toes against the floor as he read. I stood in the doorway and watched.

  He finished the article and shook his head and sighed. He read the article a second time.

  At last he looked up from the magazine and saw me. I had already read the article and understood it as little as my daddy did.

  I heard a voice say, “What’s a queer?”

  It was my own voice, of course. What did I mean by asking such a question? It was a question I had often wanted the answer to, but why now, suddenly?

  My daddy looked at me with a blank face.

  Neither of us said anything for a long time.

  Finally he said, “What? What did you say, Sugar?”

  I said, “What’s a queer?”

  Daddy looked back down at Connections magazine and read again a part of the article he had just read. He looked back up at me.

  I said, “Roy Dale Conroy is such a queer.” Roy Dale, the white-trash child, my best friend, the one whose youngest brother could stretch condoms over his head.

  Daddy said, “So you are asking me what’s a queer, is that it, is that what you are asking?”

  I said, “Right.”

  He sighed and looked down at the article and then back up at me. He said, “Don’t say queer, Sugar. Queer is dirty. Roy Dale’s not a queer just because his brother can do that trick with the condoms. And a very dangerous trick at that, I might add.”

  He looked back down at Connections magazine and read some more, the same paragraph, over and over.

 
I said, “Queer is dirty?”

  Daddy didn’t answer.

  I said, “I thought queer meant odd. I thought queer meant Roy Dale is a jerk.”

  He looked up. He said, “What do you suppose this word means?” He held out the magazine to me and pointed to the page. I walked over to the bed and looked. He was pointing to the word metaphor. He said, “It must mean like a sign, a signal of some kind.”

  I said, “Like from outer space?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  I said, “Like from God?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  We looked at the word metaphor for a long time. Neither of us dared to try to pronounce it. It lay there on the white page being itself, like a signal from outer space.

  Daddy tested the word now, mostly to himself. “A mumpty-mump for romance,” he mumbled over the word. “A sign from God of romance.” He looked up at me, relieved. “Yeah, that’s what it means! A sign from God. Right!”

  He was very happy. His face was bright. He squinched his webbed toes joyfully on the wood floor.

  I didn’t know what to say. I said, “What’s a queer?”

  He said, “Do you know anything about cocksuckers?”

  I said, “Some.”

  He said, “It’s the same deal.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  He said, “No problem, don’t sweat it, glad to be of help.”

  SUNRISES. That was the metaphor my daddy chose. Sunrises and romance, he said—that was it, that was just the ticket, sunrises. Now he had looked up the word metaphor in the dictionary and was pronouncing it all over the place. Metaphor this, metaphor that, even metaphorical a couple of times. “Sunrises all right with you, honey?” he said to my mother many times. “For a metaphor, I mean? I hope the sunrise metaphor for romance is all right with you. As a metaphor, it’s the first metaphor that popped into my head. I mean, what could be more metaphorical than a sunrise, honey, I mean tell the truth? Sunrises are meta-fucking-phorical!”

  Mama said, “Don’t get carried away, Gilbert.”

  He said, “Scuse my French!”

  Possibly this was one of the happiest days of my daddy’s life.

  Well, the thing is, sunrises didn’t work. My daddy still wasn’t falling in love all over again with my mother. And besides, he was always too sleepy and cranky at that time of the morning for anything to have worked.

  And then maybe this is where things started to change. My daddy got it into his head that if he could spot a porpoise, then the love that he and Mama had once shared and now had lost would have swum back to them, alive and renewed in its gentleness.

  To be fair to my daddy, the porpoise notion was not as arbitrary as it might sound. Once, a long time ago, before I was ever born, Daddy and some woman—maybe Mama, maybe not, depending on how drunk Daddy was when he told the story—took the ferry to Ship Island one night and stood on the deck with the Gulf breeze in their faces and watched a pair of dolphins follow the ship.

  Sometimes when he was very drunk, he would tell me about the lights along that channel, the kerosene smell of the ship’s engine, the salt sea air and the porpoises playful in the wake.

  So my daddy started to look for porpoises in the dangerous, hurricane-ruined Gulf of Mexico, with blown-out hotels and littered mud beaches and roving gangs of violent teenagers in the abandoned shopping centers and ospreys and oyster-beds and Cajun knife-throwers and swamp-elves in the dark saltwater marshes at his back. He dedicated himself to seeing a porpoise, a metaphor for romance.

  I said, “I want to go home. I cut my foot on a piece of glass. They’s dead things on the beach. They’s a dead man on the beach, washed up there. I don’t want to be on a second honeymoon.”

  He said, “This is the world we live in, Sugar-man. This is the only second honeymoon we’ll ever have as a family.”

  So every morning now Daddy was standing beside the blue Gulf of Mexico in the ruins of southern Mississippi, scanning the horizon and all the breaking waves for some sign of a porpoise.

  Always I was awake first, and always I was either with my daddy or behind him, nearby, watching in fear of what all, or any, of this meant.

  At times there were other people on the beach. Once there was an old guy surf fishing, and daddy talked to him about porpoises for a while. The old guy baited his dangerous-looking hooks with something slimy from a plastic bucket.

  Daddy said, “Do you ever see porpoises out here?”

  The old guy said, “I’m thinking about writing a book.”

  Daddy said, “I read mostly magazines. I’m reading one right now about how to put the zip back in your marriage.”

  The old guy’s pants legs were rolled up and he was barefoot, despite the danger. The tip of his rod bent slightly toward the pull of the waves.

  The old guy said, “I’ve already got a title for it. For this book I’m thinking about writing.”

  Daddy said, “This magazine, it’s called Connections. It tells you all about metaphors.”

  The old guy said, “I’m going to call it Fun Sex Facts about Animals.”

  Daddy said, “Porpoises is my metaphor right now. I’m pursuing porpoises with all my heart, like the magazine says.”

  The old guy said, “You’re actually talking about dolphins. Dolphins are what you see around here. They’re bigger than porpoises. The dorsal fin is a little different. And of course they have the beak.”

  Daddy said, “I haven’t had a drink of whiskey since me and my wife and boy left the Delta. No d.t.’s, no hallucinations, nothing.”

  The old guy said, “The calf is born tail first. That’s the fun sex fact about dolphins. That’s what I would say about dolphins if I was to write this book I’m telling you about.”

  Daddy said, “Well, good luck,” and started to walk up the filthy beach.

  The old guy called after Daddy. He said, “Whale penises are twenty feet long.” This is what the old guy shouted to my daddy in the ruins. He shouted, “And bent in the middle.”

  Daddy waved back in his direction and shrugged as if he could not hear. I was running along trying to catch up now, but I had to be careful of glass in the muddy sand.

  The old guy was not finished calling out. He hollered, “Whale vaginas are on the side. That’s why the penises are bent, so they can reach around.” Ospreys carried silvery fish to their nests in the cypress trees, bodies washed ashore, teenagers drank warm wine in the shopping centers, and God knows what dangerous creatures with scales lay beneath the Gulf waters.

  THE NEXT day the ocean seemed paved with silver cobblestones. If love cannot be summoned by magic or a power of personal will, then at least love’s metaphors can be. My mama and my daddy and I were there, wearing our leather shoes and swimsuits on the terrible beach. The pavement of silver in the Gulf was an enormous school of bluefish. There must have been a million of them, literally a million fish, directly on the surface of the water.

  And then the porpoises themselves. The sweet hooked fins, the sleek backs and oily humps. My daddy had summoned a school of dolphins. My parents held hands and looked at each other with awe and astonishment.

  The dolphins blew like whales. They rolled like wheels. Daddy counted them, but there were too many to count. They bounded, they arched, one of them left the water altogether, and the belly was so white in the sunshine that I wanted to say it was blue.

  My daddy looked at my mama with gratitude that amounted to reverence, to religion itself. Porpoises were a perfect metaphor after all. Connections magazine did not lie.

  The porpoises were close to the shore. The explosive exhalations of their breath! The squeaking and clicking of their voices! Mama and Daddy left me behind and ran together down the corpse-strewn beach, holding hands like movie-star lovers.

  It was a porpoise infestation. The incredible school of bluefish had attracted a hundred or more dolphins, two hundred maybe. There were too many to count. They were crazed. Maybe still psychotic from the effects of the hurr
icane. I picked my way down the beach, and I could see what my parents saw.

  The carnage was spectacular. There were dead fish everywhere. Large fish, small fish, parts of fish, fish heads and fish tails and fish guts, fish shit no doubt, washing up onto the beach on every incoming wave.

  The porpoises were frightening, there were so many of them, they were so fierce, so large, so mechanical and maniacal in their feeding. They were strong and swift and ruthless and intelligent. The bluefish were hysterical with fear. They were stupid. They were cattle. They were too frightened to dive. They could not get away. They cluttered the surface of the sea.

  Now the porpoises could be seen in all their enormity. They were huge. They were eight feet long, nine feet, some of them. They broke the surface, they leaped, they blew spray in spumes from their blowholes. They had a jillion teeth, sharp and dangerous. Their eyes were as hard and as tiny as the eyes of grizzly bears. That is what this was like. Like seeing a hundred, two hundred hungry bears tearing into some frightened frantic grouping of small stupid trapped animals.

  Mama said, “What does it mean? What does it mean?”

  Daddy said, “Don’t look. Let’s don’t look.”

  She turned and he held her in his arms.

  She said, “I love you.”

  He said, “I love you.”

  She said, “Really?”

  Now he looked at her.

  She had a new red plastic barrette in her hair, and she was sunburned, and she looked like a child.

  She said, “Don’t tell me you love me if you don’t really love me.”

  I knew I should leave but I did not. I picked up pieces of broken window glass and Coke bottles and sidearmed them at huge dead sea turtles in the sand.

  Daddy looked back out at the porpoises.

  He said, “Do you love me?”

  She said, “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don’t know. Don’t make me answer this.” She said, “I can’t do this any more. Second honeymoons are just too hard on a girl.”

  She turned and walked away, up towards the beach house.

  Daddy called out to her, angry, hopeless. “Look at this beach!” he said. “Look at it! Porpoises was the best I could do! Porpoises was the best metaphor I could think of!”