Sunlight reached Martha through the backs of her eyelids.
She heard the familiar clatter of the seabirds, the lapping of water. She blinked her eyes, expecting to see the ocean of grass, the tidal creeks, but instead, there was only white. A thick nimbus of fog, silent and enveloping. She was a broken piece of driftwood, something washed up on the shore.
She was lying on her side, cheek pressed against a damp log, numb. The gray mud, potholed and oozing, stretched away along her line of sight until it disappeared into the mist. And pressing into it, just a few feet away, was something that didn’t belong, something that hadn’t been there the night before—a pair of black rubber boots.
The boots were wide and featureless, bent at the flex point, and beaded with water drops. Above them, a dark, hunched shape, lost in the fog. She wanted to be invisible, unnoticed by this thing, so she didn’t move. She didn’t turn her head to find out who, or what, might be attached to the boots.
“Hallo. Hallo?” A male voice, thick and spongy. Martha didn’t move.
Don’t answer, Lenny hissed at her, disembodied now. Don’t say anything.
“Hallo, can you hear me speakin’ over there?”
If you speak, they’ll know, Lenny said.
Martha saw the boots straighten out, then step closer, tentative, smacking in the sticky mud.
“I saw your eyes just open up, but can you hear my voice? My gosh, you look like you was washed up here by the tide. Maybe one of them manatees. What are you?”
A doughy face moved into her line of sight, hovered over her. The face reminded her of a cow. The nose was misshapen, like a piece of fungus, and one cheek contained a large wart. Two short hairs sprang from the wart.
“And you’re a pretty little thing, too. What happened, fall off your boat?”
Don’t talk, Lenny said. Don’t say a word. Trust no one.
“Can you walk?” the dough-man said. “I can carry you, if you need me to.”
The man took a step toward her and Martha pushed herself up. The mud, hardened during the night, cracked as she moved, falling away in slabs, exposing patches of pale skin.
“Are you all right?” The man rocked on his haunches, jaw working slowly. “I can take you back to the port, if you want. Got my boat right over there, see?”
Martha turned her head slightly and saw a shape in the mist—square cabin, dark booms, a drapery of fishing nets. Closer by, a rubber dinghy perched on the mud.
The man crouched down in front of her in his overalls. Martha pulled her knees close. The man stared at her a long time, saying nothing, his dull eyes fixed in wonderment. Water, she thought. Please, oh please, give me some water.
“You’ve got pretty eyes, you know that?” The man clutched a green cellophane bag in one misshapen hand. He tipped the bag sideways. Small, brightly colored objects tumbled into the palm of his other hand.
“Would you like some gummy bears?” The man held his hand toward her.
Water, Martha thought, her eyes pleading.
“These are the best kind. Black Forest. I went all the way out to McNalley’s yesterday just to get some of these. It’s a little bit out of the way. But I go over there sometimes because they don’t carry this kind at Tenesco’s. All they got is them hair bows.”
The man tossed the colored things into his mouth and watched her, his jaw moving in slow circles.
The mud was irritating Martha’s skin and she started knocking it off, breaking it away from her legs in chalky-wet chunks. The man watched her, fascinated.
“I done seen you when I was just coming by on my boat this morning. That’s when I first seen you. I been watchin’ for quite a while. I didn’t know if you was alive or what. Then I saw you was breathing, I even thought you might be a mermaid.” The man snorted. “Dang, you got pretty eyes.”
Martha brushed the mud away from her left calf, exposing the mud-soaked bandage. Blood oozed through the fabric in dark red seeps.
The man knelt next to her, his mouth agape. He was missing several teeth, and the remaining ones slanted at random angles. “Hey, let’s clean you up a little bit.”
Martha watched the man walk to the dinghy on uneven legs. He returned with a cracked plastic pail and paused next to her, nodding at her legs, smiling.
Martha understood that he was offering to rinse her legs, and she extended them for him. He poured the water slowly over her calves and feet. The water was cool, but not frigid. The caked mud turned pulpy. He fetched another pail and rinsed again.
“Now, that looks better, don’t it?” he said after several rinsings. “My name is Loren.” He glanced toward the rising sun.
“You know, another hour, it’s gonna be hot out here. Hotter than August hell, and no shade. Maybe you’re thirsty? I’ll get you some water and food too, if you’re hungry.”
He slid his arms under her knees and back. Martha was too weak to resist, lacked the energy to be frightened. He lifted her up out of the mud and carried her toward a rubber dinghy on the shoreline. He smelled of fish.
Inside the boat cabin, Loren set Martha on a wood bench that ran the length of the sidewall. The cabin had round portholes in the sides, a rectangular window in front. Martha tried to remember—what was it called, this part of a boat? The wheelhouse.
“Welcome to the Ha-Le-Loo,” Loren said.
Loren took a plastic cup from a shelf, twisted the spigot on a yellow plastic barrel, and filled it with water. The barrel sat on a shelf and was attached to the plywood wall with bungee cords. Martha drank the water gratefully, leaning against the plywood.
“That’s good, huh?” Loren smiled at her, showing stained gums. She held the cup toward him and he refilled it. Then he turned to the controls, twisted the ignition key, and the engine gurgled to life.
“Had ’er for thirty years now. My lifeblood, this old boat. We can’t turn around here, have to go farther down the channel. Then I’ll take you back over to my place so’s maybe you can get yourself cleaned up and we can get you something to eat, maybe figure out where you belong. I had a pretty good run with the bluegills yesterday, so it won’t matter.”
Martha wanted to thank him for his kindness, but she knew she mustn’t speak. Loren reached with one hand to turn up the throttle. She noticed that the other hand, the one holding the wooden wheel, was shorter. The fingers fused together into one member. The hand resembled a fleshy crab claw.
Martha looked around the cabin. There was a tattered map of the marshland stapled to the wall. It was a familiar pattern, the same tentacled landscape she’d first seen hanging above the reception area of the Historical Society and later, rendered in Lydia’s story quilt. Specks of shrimp shells clung to the wooden surfaces. She concluded that Loren caught shellfish, and this made sense to her, in a way that few things had recently, because the man himself seemed part crustacean.
“Do you like seafood?” Loren reached up with his crab claw and yanked off his knit cap. “Hope so, ’cause that’s what I’ve got, mostly. Crab, shrimp, or fish. Or I could fry us up some channel cat.”
They traveled for a long time on the river, passing under freeway overpasses, past housing developments and countless tributaries, until they merged into a larger river. Loren whistled fragments of a tune now and then. He seemed endlessly patient, standing at the front of the cabin and navigating the brackish waters.
The boat passed an industrial port with cranes and tanker ships. Warehouse buildings lined the waterway.
Loren steered the Ha-Le-Loo into a narrower channel, then throttled down the engine and guided the nose of the craft toward a planked wooden pier. The dock groaned as the boat nudged against it. Loren tied it off with heavy ropes.
“Here we are. My place is right over there, ’cross the path. That’s where I can get you some food.”
Martha started to rise from the bench.
“Here, let me help you.” Loren scooped her up again and carried her through the wheelhouse door, toward the pier. Martha felt like a child, both repulsed by the man and herself repulsive, but beyond resistance, beyond caring.
“I don’t know if you can walk with that hurt leg. Hope you don’t mind, but they’s prickle pears on the path. You don’t want to walk here without shoes. It’s okay, though, ’cause you’re light as a feather.”
She held on to the fabric of his overalls as they followed a sandy, tree-lined road flanked with dilapidated shotgun shacks. Another sandy path took them past a beige propane tank and to the front door of Loren’s cottage, a boxy cinder-block structure with metal awnings. He squeezed her a bit as he unlocked the front door and used his elbow to nudge it open.
“Here we are.” He turned sideways to enter.
He carried her into the living area, which contained a mottled brown sofa, a pipe stand, and a pale green vinyl chair with cigarette burns. He lowered her onto the chair.
“Okay?” Loren said. “Comfortable? You can rest your leg on the coffee table. I would have cleaned up a bit if I’d know’d you was coming.”
The room smelled like a male dormitory. The carpet was dark brown and stained. Toward one end stood a dining table with chrome and vinyl chairs, and behind that a kitchenette. Loren leaned down and looked into her face.
“Do you have a family? People you know around here?” His crab claw described small circles in the air. “Do you know what I’m saying? Maybe you can just nod your pretty head, yeah or no?”
Martha nodded.
“Okay, that’s good. I thought you understood my words. You’re such a pretty little thing. Maybe I’ll call you Angelfish, hmm? That okay? Who knows what happened to you? You remind me of that hurt pelican I found one time…his leg broken like a pencil. I brought him home and fixed him with tape. Fed him fish every day. His name was Andy. He was hungry. Anyway, I bet you’re hungry, too. What would you like?”
The thought of food nauseated Martha. Bath, she thought. I need a bath.
Loren went into the kitchen. She heard a door open and close, some rattles, then a thunk of something heavy in the sink. A hiss of running water. Martha scanned the room, calculating the distance between herself and the front door. On the other side of the room, a narrow door stood partially open and beyond that, a gleam of porcelain. She gripped the armrests of her chair and pulled herself to a standing position. She felt light-headed, wobbly, but her injured leg didn’t seem to mind holding her weight. She limped quietly across the dark carpet. Loren busied himself chipping at a block of ice in the sink.
She passed an old metal desk next to the wall and paused, holding on to it for balance. She quickly inventoried the desktop—a stack of yellowed comic books, a metal can full of bolts, a plastic tray with a tangle of rusted fishhooks, a coffee mug. The mug contained wooden pencils and a black Sharpie pen. Martha grabbed the Sharpie and loped past the desk and into the bathroom.
She pulled the door shut and leaned against it, looking at the compact room. There was a built-in tub unit, a toilet, a sink supported by flaking chrome posts. Above the sink, an aluminum window with two frosted panes and a hand crank. Too small to crawl through. Martha heard Loren’s footsteps moving toward the door. She spun around and secured the door with its hook-and-eye latch.
Loren knocked. “Hey, Angelfish. Angelfish? You in there?” There was a pause, another knock. “Everything all right?” The door shifted inward, pushing against the latch.
Martha moved over to the tub and knelt. She gripped the flaked chrome handles, which were shaped like plus signs, and twisted. The pipes knocked and water gushed from the tub faucet.
“Huh? You okay?” There was a pause. Martha heard the floorboards creak slightly. “You want to take a bath? You can do that, if you want to. I should have know’d that. I’m gonna make breakfast for us, all right?”
Martha crouched next to the tub and listened to Loren’s footsteps move away from the door. She put her hand in the flow of water, yanked it away. Scalding. She adjusted the temperature, leaving it as hot as she could bear, then took a rubber stopper hanging from a chain and plugged the drain.
A half hour later, Loren knocked again. The door sounded hollow. “You okay, Angelfish?”
Martha squatted on the floor next to the tub, steam rising from her skin. She could hear the sizzle of frying fish in the next room. The smell seeped under the door and nauseated her. She had turned off the faucet. The tub was full of pink-tinted water. She had stopped bleeding, at least for the moment. Her skin was also pink from the hot water, and stippled with the bumps of mosquito bites.
Another knock. “Everything okay in there?”
Martha realized she had been in the bathroom for a long time—in fact she had lost track of time—but this was where she wanted to stay. Maybe she could protect herself with magic; invoke the secret power of runes and spells. She uncapped the Sharpie and started to write along the base of the toilet.
Don’t use English, Lovie. They can read that. Lenny was crouched in the corner of the room next to the door, knees drawn up to his chin. The smell of his clove cigarettes, combined with the Sharpie and the frying fish, added to her nausea. Martha felt dizzy and her vision went dark.
In the void, it was there again—the white cloth sack, the crying baby.
Martha jolted at the image. She grabbed the edge of the toilet and vomited. A light brown gush, and then another one, clear. She snatched a bunch of toilet paper from the roll, wiped her face, threw the wad in the bowl, closed the lid. Then she gripped the Sharpie between her shaking thumb and forefinger and wrote a large, backward letter C on the base of porcelain. She added two hatch marks through the middle of it.
Loren knocked again. More time, Martha thought. I need more time to finish this. She flushed the toilet.
“Okay,” Loren said. “I’ve got to go check on the fish. I’ll be back to check on you in just a few minutes.”
Martha turned back to the toilet and drew an upside-down letter A, then a tiny, perfect circle below it. She carefully added more characters and embellished them, letting instinct guide her. She hoped the symbols would protect her, seal her from a myriad of dangers, contain her nausea, give her time to formulate a plan.
She drew the next figure along the bathroom’s baseboard. As she worked, a part of her noticed that the sound of the fish frying had died away. She heard the sound of something being dragged across the room, moving toward the door. She picked up her pace, kneeling and drawing a series of characters along the base of the door.
She paused when she heard the dragging come to a stop just outside. Then there was a slow, hissing sound, and Martha realized that Loren had pulled one of the vinyl dinette chairs up to the door and sat down, his butt forcing the air out of the cushion.
Loren began to talk, chatting through the door, some sort of one-way conversation. Martha drew a sideways X, and a double line below it, and turned toward the bathtub.
That’s it, Lenny said. Well done. All the way around. You’ve got to form a complete circle.
Martha worked intently as Loren’s voice rambled on. She didn’t really mind the sound. She didn’t know what he was saying, but there was something almost comforting about it, like a radio droning in the background.
Martha was drawing figures along the base of the tub when she heard the hissing again—Loren standing up. He knocked again, pushed the door against the latch. Martha paused, listening. Then she heard the footsteps move away. She returned to her work.
A few minutes later, the footsteps returned, and this time there was the sound of the chair being dragged aside. Martha paused and looked toward the door. It opened a crack.
“Don’t worry,” Loren said. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
The blade of a flat-head screwdriver poked through the crack, like the tongue of a snake. Martha scrabbled backward along the linoleum and grabbed a towel off the rack next to the tub. She slid into the corner next to the tub, trying to cover her torso.
The screwdriver blade slowly slid upward until it engaged the metal hook-latch and lifted it out of the eyelet. The hook dangled to the side and the door swung inward.
Loren stood and looked at her. His thick eyebrows rose. His lopsided mouth dropped open. His tongue probed the edges of his lips.
“You’re beautiful.” His eyes widened. “You hurt my eyes. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Martha drew her knees in and hugged the towel closer, feeling so vulnerable she wanted to scream. She wanted to beg him to close the door, to go away. Loren scanned the steamy room, took in her handiwork. His eyebrows lowered until he was squinting, his lips working slowly, as though trying to decipher the strange figures. Then his dull eyes fixed on her again and followed along the length of her body, his breathing labored. Martha sensed she was on a dangerous precipice.
He raised his claw-hand, gesturing at the letters. “What did you do?”
His eyes again followed the trail of symbols that marched around the room like a line of ants. “That writing—what?” He worked his mouth like a fish pulled out of water, his face showing something that Martha couldn’t quite read. Anger? Fear? “What are them words?”
Runes, Martha thought, looking at him intently. Runes, to protect me.
Loren worked his lips again. “Poems?”
He scanned the room in awe. His fleshy pincer opened and closed and he tilted his head. “Love poems?”
Martha held her arms across her chest, her knees drawn up under the towel, tightening herself into a ball. She tried to answer him with her eyes. No. Runes.
Loren dragged his pincer across his chin, surveying the room once more, then smacked his lips and looked back at her. “Those must be some beautiful poems, written by something beautiful as you. I wish you could read them to me.”
Martha looked at him, eyes wide. Just leave me alone, please. Go out of the room, and let me finish this.
“Ain’t we the pair, huh?” Loren nodded his head, his mouth forming a crooked grin. “I cain’t read, and you cain’t talk. Ain’t we just the pair?”