Lillian
Toni Morrison called Jacksonville bad, bad country. The government said it was the murder capital of Florida. The kids in my classes called it Bang ’em Town as if the sound of gunfire was dance music. But to think of it that way, they must have never driven the Wonderwood Expressway in the early evening through the swamp and pine forest, over the Intracoastal Waterway, and into the marsh surrounding the dragon-body winding of Cemetery Creek. They must have never hooked north on to Highway 1A, crossing more wetlands and endless nameless streams, where egrets and blue herons stood knee-deep in the brackish water and giant fish crows perched on the branches of faraway trees. They must have never swung east again past the naval station into the little Mayport shrimping village, where the big, lazy mouth of the St Johns River opened into the Atlantic Ocean.
Johnny and I ate dinner on the waterside deck at Safe Harbor Seafood Market. On the other side of the railing, shrimp boats – with salt-burnt hulls, spars, working booms, and drying nets – hung to the docks from wrist-thick lines. The car ferry angled across the river, grinding its engines against the current. Brown pelicans dove into the water at the end of the docks. The sun grew orange and huge as it set over the far riverbank.
A waitress put a basket of shrimp and oysters on our table, but when I reached for it, Johnny took my hand. He’d done that lately – taking hold of me as if I was slipping away.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ Then he nodded toward the river and the setting sun. ‘This is good.’
He told me once, years ago, that he saw a brown pelican dive into the water and never come up. He said for a soldier with a gun there’s nothing more blinding or dangerous than a setting sun. I wondered now if the river he saw over the Safe Harbor railing looked anything like the river I saw. ‘There’s no place more beautiful than this,’ I said, and he let go of my hand.
We drank Coronas and, after the shrimp and oysters, ate grouper that the Safe Harbor fleet had just brought ashore, and when the sun dropped below the far riverbank and the sky turned black, Johnny said, ‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘A student of mine seems to have disappeared. Counseling thinks she might’ve hurt herself.’
‘How old is she?’
‘I don’t know. Nineteen?’
He drank from his Corona. ‘At that age, it’s her right.’
‘To hurt herself?’
‘To disappear. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Who is she?’
I told him about Sheneel – her intelligence, her appetite for Dickinson’s poems, her disappearance from class, her brother’s worries, the rift between her and her parents. I left out that we danced together in class and that she haunted me like desire.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m hoping you might do it.’
His face fell. ‘I don’t know what I can do.’
‘That’s your job. Finding people.’
He said, ‘I’m thinking about trying something else.’
‘You just started this job.’
‘I’ve been doing it two months and no one has called. No one has come in the door. No one.’
‘I’m offering you work.’
‘This isn’t work.’
‘Try?’
‘No.’
‘My brother—’
‘He gave me the rental. I appreciate that. I’ve told him I appreciate it.’
‘And he got you the license—’
His face turned hard. ‘I know. But I don’t owe him—’
‘What are you going to do?’
He glanced at the dark river. ‘Open a falafel joint?’
A breeze crossed the water and made my arms and back cold. ‘Sheneel Greene needs help. I think she must. Try to find her.’
He kept his eyes on the river, as if its dark comforted him in ways I never would. ‘I can’t.’
‘She needs help,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’
I didn’t. ‘I just do.’
He had no answer.
I left him at the table, walked to the exit. He called my name once and fell in behind me. After he paid the bill, we crossed the parking lot in silence – the moon rising in the east, the river water silvering in the moonlight – but before we reached the car, he turned from me and jogged to the rail that separated the lot from the river. He leaned on the rail as if he would climb or dive over.
I ran to him. ‘You have no right!’
He nodded at the water. ‘Dolphin.’
In the silver light, the fin of a single dolphin rose from the surface a hundred feet or so from the docks. ‘Oh,’ I said.
He pointed downriver. ‘Two more.’
I stood by him and watched the three fins dip under the surface and, twenty seconds later, re-emerge upriver. When the Greek poet Arion was drowning, a dolphin supposedly saved him, and afterward artists made mosaics and rulers stamped coins that showed him riding the dolphin like a horse, sometimes playing a lyre. During the Renaissance, Salvator Rosa painted him riding side-saddle, the sky behind him as silver and dark as the sky over the St Johns River.
Before shipping out, Johnny said he’d watched from the deck of the hospital ship as a pod of dolphins herded a shoal of mullets toward shore and massacred them. Johnny said they turned the water as bloody as a battlefield.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
By crossing the river on the car ferry, in less than a half-hour we could be in Fernandina, where Sheneel Greene lived. Instead, we drove back the same way we came.
After we put Percy into the backyard, we stood together in the bright light of the kitchen. When we first met, Johnny had the tight muscles, lanky torso, and deep suntan of the boys I knew in high school who spent their summers surfing or lifeguarding at the beach – looked just like them except for his Navy haircut and occasional dark seriousness. I desired him from the beginning.
Now, his hair was growing and curling the way it curled in the pictures he’d shown me from when he was a teenager, but in the hard light his skin looked sweaty and cold. He came to me, but I turned away. ‘No,’ I said – the word he’d said to me at Safe Harbor.
He went into the backyard with Percy, and I climbed into bed, picturing Sheneel Greene as I closed my eyes.
During the night, Johnny came to me again, and I took him in the warmth and dream wash of the dark bedroom as though the night and our love were the flowing brown water of the river, and sharks and predator fish swam past, invisible, brushing their hard skins against us.