by Michael Shea
And Vera, in the weeds near where she stood, found a shoe, its laces still tied but the whole shoe ruptured, a bouquet of tatters attached to a sole. Dazed, she unwillingly returned to the bench. There was no sign of the man. In a cluster of bushes not too distant, she heard a muffled thrashing. “I thought it over, but then I headed home. No way was I messin’ around in them bushes.”
Vera glared at Maxie, awaiting her response.
“Well,” said Maxie. “I can only say that’s strange. And I have to add that last night was obviously one of those occasional nights when you get a little drunker than you think you are.”
Vera looked at her gloomily. She didn’t seem to want to challenge this, but didn’t seem able to believe it either.
Maxie cruised down the pleasant asphalted lanes of Golden Gate Park, trending down seawards. The sun, while still an hour high, sank into a rising layer of mist, and dimmed to a Martian wafer, brick-red. A sharp wind came up and started driving the mist inland through the park, draping streamers of fog through the towering cypresses, and tangling it in the eucalypti’s blown cascades of gray-black foliage. Shreds of mist licked her face and she tucked Ramses more warmly in his box. The weather-shift stirred her. In the white-out of driving mist, the great trees rippled like coral reefs in a streaming sea of air.
Wind always excited Maxie, though it bit her harder in her lean old age. Ramses seemed stirred too, looked livelier up at her from his thick swaddling, relishing the silver rush of the air. “Put you to sleep?” she scoffed. “Crazy bitch! Isn’t this an amazing evening?” She crossed the Great Highway, and walked along the seaside promenade, pushing their cart’s rattling prow into the wind. A surprisingly thick foam churned on the surf, the caked yellow froth of hard-lashed seas. Copious fragments of it came tumbling and winging across the broad beach. They climbed the embankment, to fly in chunks and tatters across the promenade, scud out into the Great Highway, and plaster the passing traffic here and there with rags of dirty bubbles.
The cold spray licking Maxie’s cheekbones felt dense and glutinous. And, through all this wind and the sharp sea-smell, there was a haunting swamp scent, a fetor that belonged to dark murk and deep jungle, not at all to windblown coasts. Yet here it was, eddying inside the cowl of Maxie’s parka, probing her nostrils with the smell of putrefaction.
She trudged up past the Cliff House, past the guano-bleached crags just offshore in the surfs crash. Even this high above the sea the dirty blizzard still blew past her, crossing the pavements. Tonight she’d go into those trees again, up beyond the pits of the old Sutro Baths.
Soon it was falling dark, but by that time they were snug in the lee of two close-growing trees, lying back half-propped on a mattress of dry needles and fern fronds, she and Ramses snug in their waterproof fiber-filled mountain bag. Plenty of hot-burning cypress twigs lay broken and stockpiled, while the tiny trail stove housed a hot little blaze at their side, and heated her cocoa in an enameled tin cup. They lay back looking through the gaps in the trees down on the narrowing waters of the Golden Gate, the Bridge ankle deep in the steel-gray sea. The vista grew dimmer, as the headlights rivering atop the Bridge grew brighter. Beyond the Bridge, mist filled the Bay, and muted the glints of the city lights along its eastern shore.
Maxie lit her fourth cigarette of the day—two more still to come!—and congratulated herself, not for the first time, on her long-ago inspiration to take to the streets, to spend two thirds of her days and nights outdoors. How much better the night sky was than any ceiling! And how much better to be moving around! Where in the world was there a more beautiful city than San Francisco? Why lie in any box in the time you’ve got left, eh old girl?
Her shopping cart had been an inspired idea—a declaration of poverty, a protection against thieves. She’d found the perfect way to go abroad in the world. She took a deep drag, and streamed it up towards the first shyly appearing stars. Sipped her cocoa. It would be sweet to have Jack beside her now. They could describe to each other how grand and impossible the Bridge looked, bestriding the sea.
“I miss you, my love,” she said quietly. It always hurt her to say it aloud, and always had a sweetness too, as if Jack just might hear it.
Within the murmur of the wind in the trees, within that restless commotion, she felt wrapped in the conversation, the hum of the forest’s green life was that a trickling sound she heard?
There was a moon well up in the misty night, and when Maxie peered into the trees for the sound’s source, her eye caught a glinting something in the ferns a few yards to her left.
A little seepage from the loam? Maybe something a little more profuse than seepage—she saw a silvery little braid of movement there. It was months since any rain.
She finished her cocoa and got out her second-to-last smog. Snapped it alight, and blew the satin smoke from her nostrils. The sound of the night had changed around her. The hillside seemed restive in a new way, not just with the wind’s passage, but stirred by little secretive movements everywhere, a host of small half-hidden lives all working in the earth and in the leaf mold and among the roots of the trees, the roots right under her.
She consumed the cigarette, cupping the coal between drags so the wind wouldn’t accelerate its burn-down. And by the time she’d finished it, had decided that, when she’d gathered ferns and needles for her mattress, there had been no seepage over there, where now she saw it. She weighed her comfort against her curiosity.
In the end, the restlessness in the earth goaded her to action. She extracted herself carefully from the bag, resettling it closely around Ramses. Stepped into her jeans and her Nikes.
Only a glow of embers came from the square mouth of her tin-can stove. She stepped across springy earth into deepening shadow.
Here was a shallow cleft in the sloping soil, and a leakage, not of water, but of a loose viscous fluid, bubbly with strong curdlike bubbles that put her in mind, somehow, of the suds dripping from that open washer door this afternoon.
“You oughta watch out for that stuff.”
The voice was calm but so unexpectedly nearby that Maxie had a neural meltdown.
“You sonofabitch! Don’t you have the manners to greet someone? What’re you doing, sneaking up to me?”
“I been standing here ten minutes. I thought you saw me.” But there was a sour humor in the old man’s eyes that confessed he’d enjoyed making her jump. He was small and lean in dark sweatshirt and jeans, helmeted in a black wool cap with a tiny brim and earflaps, his face all gaunt. But he had a major handlebar mustache that was remarkably thick for a man this old. The mustache made Maxie think of a ragged white alley cat draped over a fence.
“So why are you standing here! There’s plenty of room on this hill. We want our goddamn privacy!”
“You shouldn’t be lyin’ here! That’s what I’m tellin’ ya! You gotta watch out for this stuff, for anything comes from the water table.”
“For anything that comes from the water table?”
“You speak English, doncha?”
“Better than you.”
This made the handlebar man mad. “Maybe so, but you don’t know shit. Just do yourself and everyone else a favor and don’t step in it, if that’s not too complicated for ya.”
And he walked off into the trees—pretty quiet and quick in his movements too, and soon gone from sight and hearing.
Maxie crouched down over the seepage, stirred around in it a little with a twig. It was clotted, with little shadows in the clots. She’d grown up in the Central Valley. “Frogspawn,” she said. Or toadspawn, up on these moist hillsides. That’s all it was. The mustache man was an urban whack, freaked out by unfamiliar Nature. She sighed, and went back to her sleeping bag.
Snuggling down and cradling Ramses, she told him, “That guy seemed almost sane at first, didn’t he?”
But, deeper in the night, Ramses’ movement woke her. He had climbed her shoulder, and stayed there with his muzzle aimed at the seepage. And remained so,
after she had fallen back into sleep.
Maureen had fallen asleep in her Barcalounger, snug in quilts with the clicker at hand and Muffin curled on her lap. It was Muffin’s sleeping there that had put Maureen under, and now it was his gentle movements in her lap that awakened her. She had a vague sensation of small, light forms dispersing across her thighs.
Her wakening was hazy and slow, for she’d had one of her nice pills before she and Muffin settled down. She raised her head, so comfy and heavy. Yes, there he was in her lap, his adorable little muzzle thrust up inquiringly towards Maureen’s face, and his little fawn-colored flanks so fluffy. But.
Maureen hoisted herself a little higher. Muffin blinked calmly back at her. But Muffy had no legs. No legs at all. Muffin was only his head, his fat fluffy little torso, and his tail. He looked perfectly sleek, like he’d never had legs!
Maureen was utterly, albeit groggily, astonished.
And just then she felt a delicate movement across the slipper on her right foot.
The shock of it gave her the hydraulic lift to sit all the way up. A slender little jointed shape jackknifed off her slipper, and vanished.
Scooping up Muffin, Maureen surged to her feet in astonished terror. Here was her dog! As smooth as a little guinea pig, but without even a guinea pig’s tiny legs! He was just a plump, furry tube! His tail wagged in response to Maureen’s hands, but lackadaisically. His jaws were slightly parted, and he seemed very lightly to pant.
Maureen set him on the couch, rushed, whimpering softly, to the phone, and punched out her vet’s number from memory. Soon she was in a frantic altercation with the vet’s answering service, Maureen crying banshee-like that an ambulance must come for Muffin and herself and that Dr. Groner had to come in to meet them at the pet hospital at once! Maureen encountered, within a suede glove of courtesy, an iron fist of refusal—and then was galvanized to discover, in her pacings, that Muffin had disappeared from his nest of cushions. But how could the poor dog move?
In a panic she dropped the phone, and searched under the sofa. Down the hall behind her, came the little clap of the backdoor pet-door. It was only Tasha, Maureen’s cranky old portly little Persian, waddling dourly toward her. Still in shock, Maureen responded by rote, went to the kitchen to be sure Tasha’s dish was full. The kitchen was dark but a slant of light from the Barcalounger lamp showed the shadow of food in the dish. Wasting no energy on greeting, Tasha padded a beeline to her supper.
Trembling with determination, Maureen took up the phone again. If it had to be 911, so be it.
A thump and a slithery scrabbling and the rattle of spilt kibble brought her head round. Tasha lay—half in shadow—thrashing mightily, and what looked like long tapery fish with froggy skin, three of them, were eating her legs! Three of her legs as the cat kicked and thrashed them in the air, and clawed at them with her one free paw, but the fish—muscular, powerful—swallowed her legs into their froggy tubes with great gulps, lurching closer to her torso, four of them now! For Tasha’s tail was also taken, by yet another of the little monsters that lurched suddenly from the darkness! Oh dear God in Heaven what was Happening?
A commotion rose from the back of the couch and she whirled. Around from the back and over the top poured another one of these toad-skinned fish, much bigger than the other four. Maureen screamed and leaped backwards, stumbled and fell back into her Barcalounger. And saw that atop this bigger monster’s toadlike skull, there were two little tufted peaks, and instantly recognized those dear little saliences: they were the tips of Muffin’s ears. But already they were no longer like ears. They were melting, sinking to a tarry substance that seemed to weave itself into the toad-skin hemisphere, melting to a dark resin that was already merging with the monster’s amphibious skin. This had been Muffin! This hideous fish! It launched itself, and the creature—big as a cat itself—seemed to have only Tasha in its sights. It launched to the floor and thrashed across it, pushing itself along by—Maureen saw them now—the thrusts of four little legs that looked almost like fins with little clawed feet.
A strange calm fell upon Maureen. All of this was so impossible that it was fascinating. Maureen’s religion had a dimension of true feeling in her heart. The world’s dazzling multiplicity often moved her deeply with reverence and awe. And often she inwardly exclaimed, Behold the wonders of God’s creation, for how can man conceive any end to their variety?
For look! The lesser fish had fled to the shadows already, and now Tasha had only one leg, and no tail. Gamely, Tasha hoisted her head to encounter the big toad-fish’s advance, its glossy parabolic jaws gaping wider, wider, as it thrashed its way across the floor, and leapt, and engulfed Tasha right up to her remaining leg. Then it reared up its toadlike gullet, and bolted Tasha’s leg down too.
Maureen watched in awe. And terror too, of course, but encompassing the fear was a bemused sense of privilege for being honored with a revelation. She was being shown a miracle. She was not the futile, undistinguished woman she had, unknown to herself, feared that she was! She was being shown a miracle, and it filled her with gratitude.
Or perhaps this terror simply had made her insane?
But she did not feel insane. She felt tingly. Her thumb itched, and from it a kind of heat seemed to flow out and into all the rest of her body. She lay back watching Tasha’s devourer calmly. The creature seemed slightly to swell, to change—its tail a bit shorter, its legs a bit bigger and more clearly jointed. It waddled its way down the hall, out of her view. There was a clatter of the pet door. And Maureen felt herself alone in the house.
Her body was quite comfortable really. And this was just exactly what she should be doing. After such a revelation, she should be lying here comfortably, meditating upon the wonder of it, and raising hosannas in her heart to a beneficent God capable of such wonders, and loving her enough to share them with her.
At sunrise Maxie rose and broke camp. Went upslope to the cluster of trees where she’d hidden her cart, and then down to the coffee shop just above the Cliff House. Here they accepted her with Ramses in his sling. She had a couple eggs and a cup of coffee. Went to the restroom. One thing about walking around all day was, you were regular as clockwork.
She had a second cup (having laid out her money with a dollar tip—as always) and savored it as she looked from the window. Watched the waves rolling in below the bare foundations of the vanished Sutro Baths. There was still a lot of foam on the waters.
It drew her attention. No gale now to froth it up, but big yellowish mats and ridges of this lather mantled the waves. And still, on this morning’s milder breeze, it blew ashore, even way up here. Little rags of it tufted the dead water of the two square tarns that had been the Baths.
Outside, she got Ramses into his box-bed, and rolled him on down to the paths that networked the site.
When she was closer to the pools, she saw that the froth lay unmelting. Odd. Come to that, it was odd there was so much water in those pits. What was the norm for October, after months without rain?
She pushed to the path beyond the site, and out a ways around the shoulder of the bluffs. The foam lay in a shore-hugging band, not that wide, really, and seeming to narrow as it wrapped around the headland, towards the Golden Gate. Like a great decorative scarf flung round the cliffs’ base.
“It’s me. Over here.”
Again calmly spoken but this time the Handlebar Man stood fifteen feet up slope from her.
“That’s much better,” Maxie said. “I hate being snuck up on. So, you talk about the water table you know about water in general? Like all that foam down there? There’s no wind to whip it up . . . ”
“Ocean’s part of the water table. You don’t think it honeycombs the whole damn peninsula here?”
He let a silence follow.
“Okay,” she said. “So?”
“I’m not good at explaining. I hafta show you. You’ll hafta park the cart and bag the dog.”
“Have you been spying on me? How do you know I car
ry him in a sling?”
“Hey, I know every walker in this city. I get around. I keep my eyes open. So do you wanna believe, or do you wanna bury your head?”
“In the sand?”
“In the sand.”
“Lead on. I’ve got a knife,” [true] “and I’ve got a gun,” [untrue] “and I know how to use them both.” [untrue—neither one].
He led them back up into the trees. She parked her cart under cover, slung Ramses on her chest. Ramses looked alert and eager, as if today an added amperage coursed through him. The little whippet had always been her warning system, and he was telling her to follow this man.
“I’m Maxie.”
“I’m Leon.” He didn’t look back at her, leading them upslope through the trees, rounding the shoulder of the headland. As they advanced northeasterly, the northern pylon of the Golden Gate just peeked into view, until the woods got thicker and the ground got steeper and she had to give all her attention to the trail.
Leon’s route, scarcely a proper path itself, crossed many a clearer path descending steeply to the beach below. This crooked deer trail moved only gradually down the bluffs as it arced round them.
Now the bluff got quite steep, and the hillside in-folded deeply. And within this seam, a sharper, deeper gully lay. It was bare dirt, running perhaps a hundred yards down the bluff, heavily overgrown along its crests to either side, but in its depth just bare rock and the reddish clay of the cliffside’s flesh.
“Step here,” said Leon quietly, stopping, turning to her. “You up to it? We gotta go down to that outcrop by the lower angle—see it?”
“I’m up to it,” Maxie snapped.
Still, it was steep, and the earth had to be worked with the heel to furnish footholds, and the shrubs used for steadying handholds. Ramses stirred in his pouch, and his muzzle probed the cold blue morning air.
