Fathom (28 page)

“Make sure of what?”

“That we got away clean. He said that something was coming. He wanted to see that it didn’t come after
us
.”

“Selfless,” Sam muttered.

“I don’t think so,” she answered, even though it hadn’t been a question and Sam had said it only to himself. “Wait. I smell something.”

“You . . . you
smell
something?”

“A campsite or something. Don’t you smell it?”

“No.”

“Well,
I
do. Stay close and follow me,” she said.

They crept up through the trees and found a semicircle of cabins. Nia sat Sam down at the foot of a wide palmetto patch and told him to stay there while she looked around. She didn’t hear anything, and she didn’t see any signs of recent habitation, but the smell of the campfires felt fresh in her nose. Then again, everything felt fresh in her nose. The wet green scent of the pines, the crisp nutty smell of oaks, and the crunchy, fuzzy tang of the dangling moss tickled her nostrils and teased the back of her tongue.

So maybe it was only the newness. Perhaps she was unaccustomed to the richness of it all, and none of the signals were more recent than a week or two.

“What time of year is this?” she asked Sam, who had not stayed where she’d left him, but walked along behind her, trailing in her wake and believing that he’d been sneaky about it.

It startled him that she’d spoken so softly, that she’d known how close he was following. “It’s, um, it’s March. End of March.”

“Not exactly high tourist season, then.”

“What?”

“These cabins, it’s part of a campground or a park. I don’t
think there’s anyone in any of them. It doesn’t smell like it, anyway, and I don’t hear anything.” She went up to the nearest window and held her face against it, buffered by her hands. “This one looks empty.”

“You said they all looked empty.”

“No, I said they smelled and sounded empty. This one looks empty, too.” Around the front of the cabin was a thin door made of something light and fragile like balsa wood. A secondary screen door overlaid it. Nia pulled it open; then she fiddled with the knob.

“Is it locked?” Sam asked.

She began to say yes, but when she gave it a firm twist, it came loose from the wood and splintered the area around itself. “No.”

“You broke it!”

“I didn’t mean to.” Using her elbow and part of her shoulder, she pushed the door inward. “It’s old. And look: the wood is, there were termites.” There weren’t any termites, but it was dark and Sam wouldn’t know the difference.

She’d startled herself with the knob. She hadn’t given it any effort, but it had broken without any resistance. The knowledge of her new strength made her nervous; it made her want to tiptoe and not touch anything.

“Termites, yeah,” Sam said. If he disbelieved her, he was disinclined to argue with her now, so he followed her inside.

The cabin was only one room, with no privy and no sink, and it was dusty from disuse or neglect. Thin gauze curtains hung on either side of both windows. They weren’t closed, though, so for what little protection they might provide, Nia shut them. The material was scratchy and fine; she thought it might be mosquito netting.

“I need . . .” She scanned the room, and her eyes settled on Sam. “I need to find a pump. I need to wash off; I can’t stand this.”

“But we’re supposed to stay away from the water.”

“We’re supposed to stay away from
bodies of water
,” she clarified, having absolutely no idea if she was telling the truth.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” When she moved, the edges of the remaining flakes dug into her skin and scraped it, scratched it, and attempted to pierce it. “There’ll be an outhouse somewhere around here, and there ought to be a pump, too. They have to get fresh water to the campgrounds somehow.”

Sam was on the verge of offering to help her look, but she headed him off at the pass.

“Stay here. It’s dark, and you don’t see as well as I do. Stay here so I’ll know where to find you when the . . . when, you know. When he catches up to us.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But as you’ve already said, you don’t know where we are and you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t even know if you’re necessary, so if I were you, I’d hold my horses and clam up. If you really want to help”—and she knew that he
did
—“you can look around and see if you can find me some shoes. Or even some pants.”

“Shoes?”

“And pants. Or just pants. I don’t know what the odds are that you’ll turn anything up, but I’d appreciate it if you’d see what you can find.”

“I’ll look around. And you’re not going very far?” It came out sounding afraid, which Sam didn’t like very much. He hated feeling like a small child whose mother was threatening to leave.

“Not far, no. It can’t be far.” She held her nose up and sniffed, first left, then right. “The outhouse is back that way, I think. No one’s used it for a while, but it’s back over there. The pump will probably be near it.”

“If you’re such a bloodhound, keep your nose open for the sulfur.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Sam pushed his glasses back up his nose and sat down on the edge of a squeaky cot. “Your nose is pretty good, and the fresh water here smells like rotten eggs. The water pump will reek of it.”

Nia went back out the front door and drew it shut behind her, even though it didn’t lock and it provided only the barest, most limited protection from any element, real or imagined. She pushed the screen door shut as well. It squealed on a rusty metal hinge and slapped against the frame.

She held still and listened hard, but heard no response from the night.

Wet Away from the Water

C
rickets sang and small nocturnal things scampered to and fro beneath the canopy. A light breeze puffed intermittently from the ocean, bringing air that was sharp with salt and a few degrees cooler than the warm, heavy layer of atmosphere that clung close to the ground.

And yes, there was a faint yellow pall around the edge of the air currents.

Nia smelled the brown, bitter taste of eggs and fire, and she knew that the water pump was nearby. She found the pump with her nose, and then her hands. She felt her way down the corroded metal lever and, remembering not to move with too much force, she pried it up and pushed it back down.

A whooshing gasp of damp, smelly air squeezed out.

Again, she cranked the handle, and a third and fourth time before anything but old gases flowed.

The water first slipped out in a trickle, then a stream. And then, if she kept one arm moving, it came out in a steadier gush. The contents of the well pooled around her ankles, soaking and sinking them. There wasn’t any soap, but Nia was willing to take what she could get—and if that meant she had nothing to wash with, then she’d make do. Now that she knew the well wasn’t dry, she could afford to get muddy.

She pulled off the too-big man’s shirt and sat down, in the dark and on the ground, in the pond of stinking water.

It didn’t fill up too swiftly, because the ground was more sand than dirt and it drained liquid away almost as soon as it could collect; but the longer Nia pumped, the more the water gathered and the deeper her improvised tub became—until there were inches enough to soak all the hair between her legs and all the stretches of untouched, shell-covered skin along her thighs. The added damp didn’t dissolve the remaining debris, but it helped to loosen it. When she picked at it, she noticed that some of her fingernails were impossibly long; they had grown until they were almost as long as her fingers, but they’d curled inside the stone cocoon and molded themselves to the curve of her hands.

She bit them at the corners until they broke, and while she pumped with one hand, she filed the other’s claws against the rust-speckled pump until the edges were no longer so sharp that they could gut a fish. She alternated hands, continued to pump, and the puddle held steady enough to dip her. The rhythmic splash of the sputtering crank added its melody to the insects, the frogs, and the night birds.

Her hair was beyond hope. She’d never had the nerve to cut it
off before, but now the time might be nigh. Was such a style still popular? Did women still crop their hair tightly against their heads and wear it like men sometimes?

As she slipped the scarf off her head and held the rocky, tangled locks under the stream, the bits and pieces of binding gunk washed free. Much like her nails, her hair had been growing all the while. And with nowhere to go, it had folded back upon itself.

It was thick between her fingers, and knotty. She couldn’t comb her way through it with her hands, because it had become too dense. Even while wet, its texture made her think of the black men who came from the islands. Sometimes her grandmother had hired them to work the orchards, and she’d seen them there—climbing up ladders in their thin cotton pants, their exposed skin dark and shiny with sweat. Some of them shaved their heads until nothing remained but a shadow; and some let it grow long and kinked, rolled into natty tendrils that looked like the roots of a tree, or like cords of braided rope.

That’s what it felt like, when she crushed a fistful of hair in her palm. It felt springy and strong, and the color was strange too—redder, golder, and even whiter, in strips and streaks, than it had been before.

She rinsed all the hair she could, and when the worst of the dust had been cleaned away, she did her best to braid her mane back out of her face. The braid sat heavy and too thick down her back. Its ends dangled in the water around her hips.

A bright spark of white and warmth flicked to life at the edge of her vision. She turned to see what it was and saw that Sam had found a lantern. The small room with the squeaky cot and the dingy curtains leaked light from its windows, but it was a pleasant, unobtrusive light.

She heard the cot springs groan again, and she listened to the
scraping patter of Sam’s feet as he moved about the cabin, opening drawers and pushing boxes.

She leaned forward, pressing into the arm that was still mechanically moving up and down, her elbow mimicking the joint of the pump. With her free hand, she began to pick and pull stray pieces of shell and strips of rock out of the curled bush of hair that sagged heavily against her inner, upper thigh.

It hurt, but not so badly that she stopped. She only wished for a pair of scissors or a razor to make the cleanup faster. It would have been wonderful to shave the last of the peeling mineral veneer off her skin, out of her hair. She would have done almost anything for a bar of soap or a rag, but all she had was an unreliable, ill-smelling stream of forcibly pumped groundwater.

At last she felt like she’d done everything she could possibly do. She gave the lever another series of insistent jerks and built up enough water pressure to rinse herself off, then stood up. Her toes wormed into the milk-white puddle bottom, and she thought that maybe she didn’t need shoes so badly after all.

The longer her skin was exposed, the firmer it grew and the less easily marred it became. When she noticed this, she felt a pang of fear that maybe she was returning to her statue-stiff state. But the skin still flexed when she commanded it. Her arms and legs and neck and waist twisted and bent smoothly without resistance or discomfort.

She undid the loose braid that restrained her hair and let it fall in a wild spray, springy and ropy and wet. She shook her head and splattered the area around herself with drizzle, then stood up and retrieved her shirt. Rinsing and wringing, she squeezed out the worst of the damp and dusty dirt.

With a flip of her arms, she billowed the shirt open and crawled back into it, even though it was wet enough to cling immodestly. It would dry. And there wasn’t anything else to wear, anyway.

It was hard to decide that she didn’t care, because from leftover mortal habit she certainly
did
care. But caring and feeling the need to act were not the same thing.

An idle, amused thought slipped quickly through her head.
My mother would be embarrassed to death if she saw me like this
. And then she went on to involuntarily wonder about her mother. She also thought about Aunt Marjorie, who had supposedly gone to live there with her mother, at the edge of the old grove outside Tallahassee.

How long had it been since she’d seen them?

Had they given her up for dead?

Perhaps not. Perhaps up north in the shade and scent of the pretty white blossoms that sprouted on the knobby-limbed trees, her mother and aunt had held out hope on her grandmother’s farm. They might have been waiting all this time.

Or they might not have.

People who live their lives near water are often forced to come to terms with it—that sad fact that there aren’t always bodies to bury, and there aren’t always traces left to commemorate. Even if they never knew that Nia had rushed out into the tide . . .

And she could feel it again, in terrible memory, the bath-warm water of the Gulf foaming up around her ankles as she ran headlong into the surf, into the water where Bernice didn’t know how to move herself
.