Nightmare Country (11 page)

“Can't keep my wits straight long enough to remember how many we were to begin with. But if I'm counting right, we only lost four,” he said with disbelief.

“We're missing Bo, Abrams, Terry, and Martha's husband.” Don pulled in a life preserver by its line, as if expecting to find a survivor.

Eliseo tugged open a trapdoor in the deck and crawled into the pit to bail out the water around the engine with a face mask that had hung around his neck through it all. His brother watched dumbly, crossed himself, muttered under his breath.

“Quiet! Listen.” Martha looked up, dropping her hands. Everyone else froze. A far-off cry. It could have been a bird. And it could have been human. She stood. “Greg!”

Another faint cry. An answer? Coincidence?

“Could be a sea gull. Don't get your hopes up too high.” Harry put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Over here!”

The answer came back right away, and Thad thought he could even detect the direction.

“That's a man.” Don jumped into the pit to help Eliseo. “Sounded like either ‘help' or ‘here.'”

“So does a gull, if that's what you want it to sound like. Coulda been an echo of my voice.”

They called, fiddled with the engine. There were no boats on the horizon; the call must be from a survivor. Martha knelt on the bench seat and gripped the gunwales, staring in the direction of the cries, her body unnaturally stiff but shuddering in spasms paced at about one every thirty seconds.

Thad was surprised there wasn't more evidence of shock. Perhaps there was, and he was too far gone to recognize it. Those not trying to help with the engine sat drooping, staring inward, leaving an outward impression of blankness. Then one would shift or start at Harry's repeated calls and remember to blink strained eyes. The movement would startle the next man into doing the same, and then the next.

Everyone perked up when the engine coughed to life, began to strain with Aulalio's effort to budge a stuck rudder, literally swayed with relief when it moved. But then no one could agree on the direction from which the cries had come. Aulalio headed them in the direction of Martha's pointed finger and let the men argue. They could no longer hear the calls of the probable survivor over the engine, which seemed to be missing on about every other cylinder, but soon saw something bobbing in the water to the port side and eventually made out a man clinging to the lid of an ice chest.

It was the man named Abrams.

Martha's body relaxed, and a certain expression in her eyes died.

The wooden ladders, used by the divers to get back on board, had been lost at sea, and Abrams was too injured to help himself up on the end of a life preserver. So two men jumped in the water and helped him on board with a life preserver ringing his chest and another his legs. He groaned only once. Thad ran his hands gently down Abrams' torso.

“Got a drink of water, Doc?”

“Sorry, we don't have anything.”

“Great,” Abrams whispered, and passed out.

Thad calculated that almost every rib in the man's body was broken. He bent close to Aulalio's ear. “We've got some serious injuries here.” He saw broken toes and fingers, ribs, at least one broken arm, and some head cuts he didn't like. “You've got to get us back fast.”

“Can't.” Aulalio burst into a mixture of Spanish and creole, from which Thad thought he extracted the information that the guide didn't know the way.

“But how did you know how to get us here?” Now Thad remembered that neither Paz had referred to chart or compass. There was no land in sight from which to sight a course. No stars. These men went out to sea almost every day during the high tourist season and always came back.

Aulalio shouted something to his brother, and Eliseo scanned the horizon, making a complete circle, shielded his eyes to take direction from the sun. He looked confused, shrugged, and then raised a tentative finger. Aulalio shrugged an answer and headed the boat that way. The Pazes were scraped and bumped and bruised too. And uneasy.

“How
do
you know how to get around on the open ocean without something to guide you?”

“I jus' know. Metnál's big but very shallow some places. I can see coral or wrecks, and I know—but now I'm switched around.”

Not that the guide's confusion mattered greatly, because the engine stalled, sputtered, spit, and quit. Eliseo was unable to restart it.

Carl Abrams died as they watched. He opened his eyes with a surprised expression and then just stayed that way.

Someone suggested they try to resuscitate him. Thad vetoed the plan. “He's all broken up inside. Must be lots of internal bleeding.”

“The rest of us'll probably die too,” Martha said indifferently.

“Eliseo, just what was that thing that came up out of the water?” Don Bodecker asked.

“I never see anything like that before, mon.” His right hand came up to his chest for the pack of cigarettes he always kept in a shirt pocket there. They were gone. So was the pocket.

“How often do you come out here?”

“This place, only second time. You see wrecks better when they're not all covered by coral. More and more hear about Metnál and ask to go here, so we look for new wrecks. But this never happens before.”

“You know, I miss Bo already?” Harry Rothnel said, as if it fit right into the pattern of the conversation. “He'd have us all cracking jokes about dyin'.” The long hairs that were supposed to be trying to cover his bald spot were wisping down in his face instead.

Thad looked past him to where a shadow spread across the water. It was huge and moving rapidly toward the dive boat.

11

Jerusha Fistler returned to Iron Mountain. The mystery to Tamara was how she'd managed to leave it.

It was the morning after they'd received her mother's letter, and Tamara looked out to see a tall stick of a woman leaning on Vinnie Hope as they descended the wooden stairs of Jerusha's utility porch and slowly made their way to Alice's pen. The excited goat went through his entire repertoire of antics. The woman stretched her arms to the sun, and Tamara thought she could see the very bone and tendon under the taut skin. She hurried out to get a better look at this creature and to offer help. Her neighbor appeared frail enough to fall.

“Here's the new teacher.” Vinnie patted Jerusha's bottom in warning.

Jerusha wore a cheap nylon robe of yellow, her hair a bush of black matted curls. She turned with one hand on the girl's shoulder and the other on a fence post.

“I'm Tamara Whelan. My daughter and I …” Tamara almost felt an impact at the intense interest Jerusha Fistler directed toward her, and was stunned at the youthfulness of the ravaged face. Jerusha's stiff movements had led her to expect an aging person. The bony body and sunken eyes reminded Tamara of pictures she'd seen of walking skeletons at Auschwitz.

“Are you ill?” she said stupidly, knowing she was too late to hide her shock.

Jerusha smiled, and her teeth were enormous in the skeletal face. “Oh, I'm going to be fine.” Her voice was surprisingly strong, low and melodic. “Just stayed a little too long, didn't I, Vinnie? Should have knowed better, ummmm?”

“Vinnie said you were on a research trip.”

“It got so interesting I forgot to eat and everything.” There was an unfamiliar lilt to her speech that turned up the edges of words so each one seemed to ask a question. It wasn't Southern, but similar.

“Where did you go to do your research, and what is it you study?” Tamara didn't believe a word of this.

“Alice, you've grown so, baby.” Jerusha turned awkwardly to the goat. “You know, he wasn't
this
high when I left?”

“When did you get back?”

“Vinnie, I believe I'd like some more eggs. Have you had your breakfast yet, Mrs. Whelan?”

“Tamara.”

“Why don't we get to know each other while we eat, Tamara?”

Tamara would have eaten twice for a chance to see what lay on the other side of the stained partition. She suspected this woman's “trip” was related more to drug or alcohol abuse than to scientific research.

Jerusha's living-room/kitchen was stuffy with damp and meager light. Tamara stood blinded after the sunshine. The whooshing sounded louder here, and as soon as her eyes adjusted, they rested on the largest vaporizer she'd ever seen. Plastic ribbed hoses sprouted from it, aimed in different directions and hanging from strings nailed to the ceiling. Mist puffed from the end of each hose with every “whoosh.” Water burbled in a giant glass jar.

The dimness was caused by the covering of waxy-leaved plants at the windows. But it proved to be one plant—a vine growing up a pole out of a floor pot and then along the ceiling, where it was tied by thread to nails. It formed a leafy cornice all around the room and dropped down to catch the light and bunch up at every window. There were corners cut out of the bedroom doors so it could grow into these rooms without being affected by the position of the door.

“… nosy,” Vinnie whispered to Jerusha, who was breaking eggs with shaky hands. “Just like Miss Kopecky.”

Jerusha's grin full of teeth was even more grotesque in the dim light. “That plant is my very first experiment, Tamara. It's called the night-blooming cereus. It won't grow in such a dry place, so I keep wetness in the air for it.”

Hence the stain on the other side of the wall
.

“Still, it blooms only once a year here. Pour us coffee, please?”

They ate scrambled eggs seasoned with onion, tomato, and herbs off thin plastic plates—discolored with use. Vinnie watched the older women suspiciously, and Tamara sensed her irritation at having to share Jerusha.

“What do you do for a living, Jerusha?” Tamara asked, aware of how rude it sounded.

“Oh, there is some widow's pension from Abner's company, and some welfare. I do not need much.”

Especially with your own little unpaid slave
. Tamara watched Vinnie pour soap into the dishpan. But she had to admit the furnishings here were spare enough, and Jerusha's biggest bill was probably electricity to run the vaporizer.

“And is your husban' dead too, Tamara?”

That question, asked with the cheerful lilt, brought back the night before, the letter, and the signs of a nocturnal eating binge still on the table. She'd managed to block it all out for a while.

“No, I'm divorced.” And Gilbert Whelan remarried a woman with two children.
That's how he goes about finding himself?

“I am sorry if my question upset you, Tamara,” the skeleton face said. Even Jerusha Fistler's laughter was low and melodic—almost tuneful. It mixed with Vinnie's higher giggle as Tamara hurried across the backyard to the door of her own utility porch.

Vague terrors added up from all her mother's warnings, plus all the things the world told Adrian and refused to tell her, had seemed like a big black block sneaking closer with every day.

News of her father's remarriage had pushed the block into sight and dropped it on her. The weight made it difficult for her to fill her lungs deeply. And if her breathing sounded like sighing, it was only a fight for oxygen. The block enveloped her and extended for miles around. Every movement, every gesture, seemed to be slower yet take extra effort, as if she lived underwater.

“My problem is with your mother, not with you,” her daddy had said. “You'll always be my little girl.”

Now he had two new kids, and Adrian's body had not stayed little. She'd grown too big and fat to love, to be worth even a letter of explanation. An end to all the daydreams of a reconciliation.

Adrian slipped out the front door at the sound of her mother's approach to the back. Her sandals flapped under her heels, the white grit worked its way between her damp skin and the sole. Adrian walked up the chalk road until she came abreast of the burned-out foundation, where insects clicked to each other in the weeds and the world smelled hot already.

She roamed the ghost rooms, wishing some of the dangers her mother warned were lurking here would make themselves known—prove fatal. She hated herself as much as her father did. It would be a relief not to have to live with Adrian Louise Whelan anymore.

Her mother came out to check on her and then went back into the house. Adrian picked up a wedge of glass, roughly triangular. It wasn't blackened like much of the glass around and had taken on a tinge of that lavender color glass assumes when exposed long to the sun.

The little brat, Vinnie Hope, unfolded a webbed lawn chair on the porch of the Fistler apartment and led out the thinnest woman Adrian had ever seen. Her legs looked like sticks, and Adrian was amazed to see them bend as the woman settled in the chair and turned her face to the sun.

“Aye, woman-child, come please and talk to me,” the stick woman called.

Vinnie crawled up on the stone-and-brick parapet rimming the porch and looked at Adrian. “She means you, stupid.”

“Now, Vinnie, you must not speak in that way to my new neighbor,” the woman said as Adrian shuffled reluctantly over to the porch and stopped on the steps. “Please, come on up and sit. I am Jerusha, and the girl-child here tells me you are Adrian.”

Adrian thought the woman must be dying, the way the bones and teeth stuck out of her face. That thought gave Jerusha more authority than the average stranger, and Adrian obediently walked up onto the porch and leaned against the shady side of the parapet.

“Oh, such lovely eyes.” Jerusha's eyes hid in the shadows of their sockets. “And so sad. It makes me want to cry.” She didn't sound like she wanted to cry. Her voice moved along as if she were singing. “What makes such beautiful eyes so sad, I wonder.”

Adrian felt tears coming, and looked down at the glass in her hand. She scraped the sharp edge lightly across the inside of her wrist and left a white line on her skin. She looked up to see Jerusha staring at the glass and then at Adrian's face.