Red Clocks (13 page)

“Sir, get down from
there immediately.”

“Were they poisoned by the seaweed?”

“Move aside, move aside.”

A woman with gloves and a long knife—a scientist?—squats by the first whale in the row. Will she carve off a slice of blubber to test for disease? A madness, maybe, has infected their spines and driven them onto land, all twelve fevered with death wish. Maybe the infection can pass to humans. Newville will be
quarantined.

“You need to leave, girls,” says a cop not much older than they are. “We’re clearing the beach. And put out that cigarette.”

“Why isn’t anyone putting them back in the water?” says the daughter.

The cop peers at her. “A, they’re dead. B, you realize how much these goddamn things weigh?”

“But one of them
isn’t
dead!”

“Go home, okay?”

She and Ash walk past the enormous bodies—one
spray-painted with an orange question mark, another sprayed with
OUR FAULT!
—to the last breathing whale. Its flukes lie still. Blood pools on the sand by its head. The mouth is open, drenched red. The beaky lower jaw, illogically small for such a huge skull, is sown with teeth. The daughter touches one: a banana of bone.

Has moved amid this world’s foundations
.

“Now your hand is infected,” says
Ash.

She wipes it on her jeans.

The whale’s eye, wedged between wrinkled lips of skin, is open and black and quivering.
Hast seen enough to split the planets
. She kneels down. Leans her cheek against the gray body. Dry, scarred leather.

“It’ll be okay,” she says.

Can’t hear any clicking sounds.

Where are the machines? The cables, the levers?

A whale is a house in the ocean.

A womb for a
person.

Whale song is heard from sea floor to star, from Icy Strait Point to Península Valdés.

“Ash, give me your hoodie.”

“I’m cold.”

“
Give
it.” The daughter runs down to the waves and douses Ash’s hoodie and her own. Runs back to throw them, dripping, onto the whale’s head. The only song she can think of is “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” She’s in the midst of chanting “Someone’s in
the kitchen with Dinah” when she hears a gunshot.

Then screams.

Everyone is clustering around something up the beach.

It wasn’t a gun; it was a whale. Exploding. The gray belly, split wide, leaks slimy bundles of pink intestine and purple organ meat. Fat shreds of flesh flap in the wind. “Get it off! Get it off!” yells a boy, pawing at ropes of innards stuck to his chest.

And the stink—God!—rancid
blast of farts, fish rot, and sewage. The daughter pulls her shirt up over her mouth.

Black-red liquid foams at her feet.

The scientist is explaining to the cop that she’d been trying to collect samples of subcutaneous adipose tissue and visceral adipose tissue. When she sank her knife into the whale, it burst.

“Methane gas builds up in the carcass,” she says. “This one must have been the first
to die, possibly days ago. If he was their leader and died at sea, and his body floated to shore, the other whales would have followed. They’re loyal to a fault.”

“Ma’am, you can’t just go around chopping up corpses,” says the cop.

“This magnificent creature isn’t anyone’s property,” says the scientist. “I intend to analyze the tissue and figure out how they ended up here.”

“What lab are you
with, ma’am? My captain said the OIMB guys weren’t going to be here until—”

“I’m an independent researcher. But
this
”—she holds up two clear plastic bags of red flesh—“I know what to do with.”

The daughter heads back to her whale.

His eye is no longer moving.

Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck.

She presses the eye with her fingertip.

It is clammy
and springy, like a hard-cooked egg.

Cotter reports that Lola fell down the stairs. Was in a little coma. Better now.

New clients are supposed to leave a note at the P.O., but Lola just showed up one day, drenched. “I heard of you from my friend.” The mender brought her inside, gave her a towel, inspected the red smear on her forearm.

“Is it going to scar?”

“Yes,” said the mender. She pressed fresh-bruised leaves of
houseleek to the damaged skin, waited, blinked at Lola’s breasts, those plump puddings, then wrapped the arm with a poultice of leek juice and lard. “How did this happen?”

“It was stupid,” said Lola. “I was making dinner and I caught my arm on a hot pan.”

Her husband also snapped her finger bone. Left a six-colored bruise on her jaw.

Two more warts on Clementine’s fig.

Clementine says, “This
is kind of extremely humiliating?”

“Just a body doing what it does.”

“But they’re so
nasty
.”

“Lots of people get them,” says the mender, and she holds a compress of crushed, wet lupine seeds against the vulva. White lupine is also good for bringing down blood—a missed period, a uterus unhappily full—and for calling worms to the surface of the skin. Summers, the mender burns its seeds in stone
cups to fend off gnats.

“Stick out your tongue.”

Scalloped at the edges, as usual.

“Still eating pizza?”

Clementine cutely scrunches her mouth. “Not
that
much.”

“Stop all dairy. Too much dampness in you.”

“Hey, would you ever consider waxing your eyebrows?”

“Why?”

“I mean, not that you
need
to, because big brows are making a comeback, but a friend of mine at Snippity Doo Dah does great
sugar waxes, if you ever—”

“No,” says the mender. If she has such a friend, why not deal with the two-inch hair dangling from that mole? It is a misfit hair, discordant with her bleached curls and fake nails.

The mender spoons a mash of mugwort and ginger into Clementine’s belly button; lays a fresh slice of ginger across the mash; holds a burning moxa stick over the ginger until she complains
of the heat; and tapes the belly button with two Band-Aids to keep the mash in place for a day at least, better two.

Clementine pulls her shirt down. “Thanks for all your help, Gin.” Takes small white boxes from her backpack. “Hope you like fried rice and garlic shrimp. Don’t worry, it’s not customer leftovers—”

“I’m not worried,” says the mender.

Or hungry enough for Chinese food. Once Clementine
is gone she drizzles half a slice of brown bread with sesame oil. Every Thursday Cotter leaves a loaf he baked himself, wrapped in a towel, on her cabin step.

Some supermarket breads are made with human hair dissolved in acid, part of a dough conditioner that accelerates industrial processing. The mender does not eat bread from the supermarket, and she has her own supply of hair, which instead
of dissolving in acid she grinds into her mixtures. She keeps head hair in a separate box from pubic, as they’re good for different things—pubic has more iron, head more magnesium and selenium. The mender’s supply came from one person and is dwindling.

Long red head hairs can be used in mixtures. Brown pubic hairs can be used. But there are some hairs that can’t be. The stray whiskers under the
arms; the little breath of brown on the upper lip. Those hairs are iced onto the skin of the body in the freezer.

What does the girl’s hair taste like, her shining flat dark hair? The girl doesn’t slick or shellac it. Long enough to get caught in her satchel strap, the mender noticed when she saw her come through the blue school doors, the girl had to tug and rearrange, she was annoyed for a
second, a flip of heat on her cheeks, then she forgot her hair, the mender saw, because she was looking for someone, but the someone wasn’t among the burst of kids. The girl kept walking, alone, and the mender almost followed.

The brown bread is dry, because today is Tuesday.

Aunt Temple died on a Tuesday, eight winters ago.

Before Temple, when her mother forgot to buy food, the mender cooked
ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise into a hot crust.

Before Temple, she put herself to bed.

Before Temple, she took a lot of aspirin, because regular doctors were too expensive and the ER staff knew the mender’s mother only too well.

Before Temple, she had never been to the movies.

She had those wild red braids and wore billowy purple pants and wasn’t married. She laughed in a shrieky way. Her
shop was named after a witch who lived in Massachusetts three centuries ago. The people of Newville called Temple a witch too, but they didn’t mean it the same way they mean it about the mender.

When she was young, Goody Hallett loved a pirate who forsook her. Legend has it she killed their baby on the night of its birth, suffocated the thing in a barn, then was imprisoned and lost her mind and
lured ships to crash on the Cape Cod rocks. In truth, said Temple, she gave the child in secret to a farmer’s wife. The wife kept a diary, which preserved the fact.

The baby is the mender’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

The innermost chamber of her left ear notices powderpost beetles scratching in the roof joists, laying their eggs in the seams of the wood.

“Never forget,”
said Temple, “that you descend from Black Sam Bellamy and Maria Hallett.”

But the mender would never tie a lantern to a whale. Like sailors and fishermen, she hates to swim.

Screaming screaming screaming. No stop no stop no stop.

“TURN!”

John wants her to play the record again; she will not do it. The whole morning has been records: yell scream yell scream, throw self on floor, starfish arms and legs “TURN!” no stop no.

“Mommy turn it Mommy turn it Mommy turn it Mommy …”

She has reasoned, she has implored, she has ignored, she has worried her eardrums
will be actually damaged; and now she says, “Shut the
fuck
up,” which makes no difference to John, still screaming and starfishing, but Didier yells from the dining room, “Don’t say that to him!”

“Either come and deal with him yourself,” calls the wife, “or fuck off.”

Her husband stomps in, lifts the dustcover, sets the needle on the record, unleashes a bouncy guitar.

John goes quiet, wetly
heaving.

“
We are the dinosaurs, marching, marching
.

“We are the dinosaurs. Whaddaya think of that?”

“The lesson he just learned,” says the wife, “is that if he screams long enough, he’ll get what he wants.”

“Well, good. It’s a hard world.”

“We are the dinosaurs, marching, marching.

“We are the dinosaurs. We make the earth flat!”

“Could you take him for a walk?” says the wife.

“It’s raining,”
says Didier.

“His raincoat’s on the banister.”

“He doesn’t look like he wants to go for a walk.”

“Please do this one tiny thing,” she says.

“I really don’t feel like it.”

“I’m never alone.”

“Well, me neither. I’m with those
trous du cul
all day, five days a week.”

“Didier”—slowly, carefully—“will you please take him out. Bex will be back in an hour, and I’ll make lunch, but until then,
I would like to be alone.”

“I’d like to be alone too,” he says, but heads for the banister. “Come on,
Jean-voyage
.”

Herd crumbs into palm.

Spray table.

Wipe down table.

Rinse cups and bowls.

Put cups and bowls in dishwasher.

Soak quinoa in bowl of water.

Rinse and chop red bell peppers.

Put strips in fridge.

Rinse quinoa in sieve.

Put clean, uncooked quinoa in fridge.

Pour water from
quinoa soaking into pot of ficus tree.

Spray mist onto snake-like arms of Medusa’s head plant.

Pull clothes out of dryer in basement.

Fold clothes.

Stack clothes in hamper.

Leave hamper at bottom of stairs to second floor.

Write
laundry detergent
on list in wallet.

Plip, plip, plip,
says the kitchen tap.

Nobody on this hill even likes quinoa.

She pulls the kids’ plastic pumpkins down
off the high shelf.

Over a month since Halloween. She told them the candy ran out.

In the empty kitchen or the sewing room, she eats sugar nobody knows about.

She allows herself, now, three coconut crunches. And one almond smushie. And one packet of candy corn.

This is what you’re missing, Ro! Ramming stale candy stolen from your own children down your throat.

How can the wife hope that Ro
doesn’t get pregnant? Doesn’t publish her book on the ice scientist?

Plip, plip, plip.

As if Ro’s not having a kid or a book would make the wife’s life any better.

As if the wife’s having a job would make Ro’s any worse.

The rivalry is so shameful she can’t look at it.

It flickers and hangs.

It waits.

So cold in this house.

She takes off her sweater and pushes it between the back door
and the kitchen floor, which is, she notices, sandy with crumbs.

She goes for the broom but ends up with her phone.

Saturday morning: her mother will be puttering, cleaning, paging through magazines.