Fathom (9 page)

They fell by the thousands; Aunt Marjorie swears by it.

I’ve never seen a star fall since.

For a long time, she watched the leaves and moss and animals encroach on the courtyard with interest, since there was nothing else present to entertain her. She gave the small things names and placed them in the plots of penny dreadfuls, or concocted fantastic impossibilities of romance between the frogs and the mice.

But in time she gave up. She quit those ramblings and left herself alone in silence, unable or unwilling to keep herself company
anymore. The boredom numbed her mind, and she came to something like peace with her unchanging surroundings.

The scenery didn’t change much.

Winter and fall meant it was cooler sometimes, and for maybe a week or two it actually got cold. Nia would have shivered if she could, but at least it never snowed.

She’d only seen snow once before, back in Tallahassee, when it floated down in sparse waves of small flakes that died as soon as they hit the ground. It was unbelievable even that far north, but her grandmother said there’d been a terrible freeze a few years before, and all the world must be turning colder. Soon they wouldn’t be able to grow oranges there at all.

Times were changing and the world was changing, and farms were dying. An orchard could die, too, just as easy.

Summer and spring meant bombastic thunderstorms every afternoon for ten minutes, a wet break that took the edge off the stifling heat.

Nia’s spot was surrounded and shaded by several large trees—a banyan, a magnolia, and a mimosa. The sun never beat her directly, and the rain was deflected as well.

Eventually the island’s population grew.

Two mad boys with paint sometimes assaulted the back porch, splashing obscenities in red and white. Nia hated them deeply; the sour smell of the paint overwhelmed the flowers, and she, of course, could not escape the stench.

Indeed, her senses were uncomfortably heightened despite the immobility. Strictly regimented carpenter ants tickled her ribs until she would’ve sold her soul to scratch them away, and she could almost count each raindrop that pelted her body during a storm. Even the slight shifting in the concrete beneath her caught her attention, the way the bricks adjusted as grass grew into the cracks
and forced them apart with knotty tangles. During the spring while the vandals were away, the huge, leathery magnolia leaves held soft white flowers, so sweet and close in her nostrils that she could tell which individual trees had produced the drifting petals. Her ears became so sharp that she could hear termites across the yard, slowly turning the vineyard frame into pulp. Their grinding jaws worked day and night until the wood dropped to the grass and rotted where it lay.

In time, the porch fell in as well, and cracks formed in the boards that covered the windows. Curious island residents came in the afternoons to peek inside, marveling at the cool emptiness within.

Most of them avoided Nia, looking over their shoulders as they left, fearful that she might hop off the ledge and follow them.

The Exposition of Songs

E
dward Bok was dead.

He had been dead for several years, but he lingered—wandering his wonderful garden grounds, slipping past the cattails in the moat, and watching the alligators in the far pond snap lazily at waterbirds. He remembered little, and he was disinclined to communicate, so no one noticed his presence except for the bell player’s daughter.

Her name was Ann and she was four years old, going on five. She followed Edward from place to place, across the water and into the trees, past the swans and down the woodchip trails between the tidily trimmed stretches of bright green grass.

She couldn’t see him very well, and sometimes she couldn’t see
him at all; but she heard him when he sang and she found it more interesting than the bells above her. The bells rang every day twice, sometimes three times. The ghost who walked the woodchip trails sang only once a month, when there was no moon.

She gradually learned his song. She came to know it better than she knew the lever pressings that rang the big bells in the tower at the top of the Iron Mountain.

Underneath the flesh of the earth
Below the skin of the sky
Deeper than death the Leviathan sleeps
All children must let the king lie

 

He shifts his back and the mountains fall
He shakes his head and the oceans cry
Give him no dream and don’t bid him wake
All creatures must let the king lie

 

Thousands before and thousands more
The centuries pile themselves high
We bury and bind him with quiet hands
All gods must let their king lie

She did not know what it meant any more than Edward did. But she repeated it for the same reason as the ghost. She liked the lifting and dipping of the minor keys and the stomping, heavy feel of the stanzas. It sounded like a very sad birthday song, or a very old carnival tune. It was the voice of a music box with bent and broken tines.

Her father wondered where she heard these things, and he told her to stop repeating them.

So she left the words aside, and contented herself to hum.

Of Sharks and Pirates

F
our years after the murder in the courtyard, Bernice quivered unsteadily against José’s supportive arm. He led her to a low stone wall that separated the sand from the street. She sat down and he sat beside her.

She was wearing blue silk and a white sweater that came to her elbows; she’d picked out the dress because she believed the shade matched her eyes—and it did, when they peeked out from beneath a deliberate fringe of coy yellow bangs.

Her companion was a slender man in a wheat-colored suit. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but that was not the only thing that separated him from most of the other men on the street that night. His wavy, blue-black hair hung down past his shoulders, and it was
tied behind his neck in a ponytail like a woman might wear. Once or twice, as the evening progressed and scores of inebriated revelers walked past the low stone wall, a young partygoer began to tease the strange-looking fellow with the beautiful young blonde. But the jests rarely survived contact with José’s mild, passive stare.

He made no threatening moves, and he made no countercalls to defend himself. He didn’t need to. The teasing was good-natured and celebratory, inspired by a city in the midst of a festival dedicated to piracy and folktales; and besides: even the drunkest passerby could detect some intense
otherness
in the man who sat on the wall.

This otherness, which most people nervously read as simple foreignness, went deeper than his hair or the smooth, lazy way he silenced the friendly taunts from reveling passersby.

There was oldness around him, too, a strange kind of gravity that went deeper than the lines on his face—the telling tracks of age that marked him as a man perhaps in his sixties. Even sitting there almost perfectly still, next to the water, he wore a weight that was heavier than years, and he wore it as if he’d been born to it.

He sighed when a round of impotent cannon volleys finished over the ocean behind him, and he placed one long musician-slim hand at Bernice’s waist. She shifted her legs and crowded closer into his loose embrace. If they hadn’t placed themselves so snugly against one another, and in such a deliberate way, they might have been mistaken for father and daughter.

But if no one could guess anything else true or accurate about José Gaspar, they could guess that he was wealthy—and if wealthy, then that explained why he was able to keep company with a mate so far his junior.

Tampa was warm and the Gulf winds made the air thick with currents that smelled like salt, roasted peanuts, and the too-sweet stink of funnel cakes. That night, the world was a buccaneer’s
carnival of pretend-coins, cheap beads, and dressed-up boats that were painted to look like an artist’s memory of a fairy-tale ship.

José took Bernice’s hand and felt along her wrist, smoothing the skin he found there and pressing it gently.

“All of this—it’s all for you, isn’t it?” she asked him.

“Why do you do that?” he asked back. His consonants were sharpened against an accent that might have been mistaken for Cuban. He purred the rest of his words to her, because he knew how nice it sounded. “You know the answer already.”

“I don’t understand it, though.”

“You understand enough.” He did not care to explain further. It was a gentle lie, anyway. She knew some of what had happened, but there was more to know, and he kept it from her.

He resented the sting of the festival’s mocking familiarity, and he disliked leaving any legend to the meddling pens of wealthy Anglos. In one hundred years, he had gone from holy terror to unlikely folk figure. Arahab had kept her promise and his legacy lived, but his history was mangled and appropriated, and he was left with a ludicrous party that remembered little, insulted everything, and meant nothing.

But he was forced to admit: it
was
a grand party.

“When I was a kid, my mom took me out here to Gasparilla once or twice. They have it pretty much every year.”

“I know.”

“It’s a lot of fun,” she said. “Crazy food, crazy boats, and all the pirates all over the place! I’m surprised you’re not more excited about it.”

“It’s delightful,” he answered in a tone that told her nothing.

The invading boat was preposterous and the pretense weak, but beads were flung and the alcohol flowed—and the sidewalks were packed with people shouting the corruption of his name. Night had freshly fallen and everyone was drunk, everyone was happy.

How willingly the city suspended its disbelief; how happily it put its faith in a whitewashed past and a clean-cut felon.

Let them,
he decided.
Just give me another drink, and give me her body again, and they can take what they want from my corpse.

“Happy Gasparilla!” a man shouted. He was dressed as he imagined a pirate must have dressed, and he was so deeply, thoroughly wrong that José laughed.

“That’s a very nice sword.” He grinned.

The drunkard beamed a blinding smile from a mouth with perfect teeth. “S’not real,” he said. He jerked it out of a makeshift sheath and waggled it happily.

José nodded. “I know. But if it
were
 . . .”

“But if it were!” the man thought he agreed. He staggered off toward the loudest part of the festival, back to the street with the parade—back to the automobiles that puttered along in rickety lines.

Bernice heard the subtext, even if she didn’t grasp it herself. So she asked, “If it were real, then what?”

“Then he’d be dead in under an hour. The thing he carries is too heavy to swing and too broad to slice. It’s a bad copy of an old design, one that went out of fashion before I was born.”

“You never swung a sword?”

“Not unless I was desperate, and I was never
that
desperate. Who brings a sword to a firefight?”