6

CAMITY!” PIPED AGWAY. WE WERE INSIDE THE cashew grove. “Look!” He held up his little bucket to show me. It was full of fat, grey cashew seeds. And a rockstone or two, and his shorts and wee-wee damp diaper that he’d discarded. He still couldn’t be convinced to keep much clothing on. His little boy’s totie, brown and perfect as a mushroom, was all exposed. Well, we had a little time before I had to civilise him enough to enter the real world. Let him enjoy it. I smiled.

“What you bring for me, baby?”

“Ka-soos,” he said proudly. The bandages at his knees were coming loose again. I’d have to replace the dressings soon. But he seemed to be healing fine from the surgery.

“That’s right, baby; cashews. Thank you.” Me, I wasn’t doing as well as Agway. Kept asking myself if I should have let Evelyn order the surgery, superficial as it was. But I couldn’t have stopped her. I wasn’t Agway’s legal guardian yet.

He was good at tearing the grey nut free of the fruit, but he wasn’t tidy at it. From fingertips to elbows, he was smeared in red and yellow flecks of cashew fruit. He must have been eating them, too; fruit mush was all around his mouth, which was gritty with dirt where he’d wiped his hands against it. At least his hair was finally neat and trim. He’d given me such a fight when I tried to chop off that rats’ nest! Eventually I had just done it in his sleep. He’d been furious when he woke up. But I had given him one of the chopped-off locks; the one that had the shell tied into it that he most liked to rub between his fingers. He kept it in his dresser drawer now; whenever he needed comforting, he got it and held it and worried away at the shell between his fingers.

I took his bucket and emptied it into my bigger one. I pulled out the rockstones and tossed his shorts and diaper into the wheelbarrow. I handed him his bucket back. “You going to get some more for Mamma?”

“No.” He squatted and began trying to jam the mouth of the bucket into the gravelly soil.

“What you going to do, then?” I rolled the wheelbarrow to the foot of the next nearest tree. Plenty of freshly fallen nuts there. I bent, began twisting the grey pericarps free from the red, pear-shaped flesh of the fruit, tossing the nuts into the wheelbarrow and the fruit onto the growing pile of red-yellow mush that oozed happily in the clearing. The flies had already gathered for the banquet. The smell of fermented cashew juice and the buzzing blue-bottle flashes of blue from the flies made the warm morning air sleepy.

Agway stood, bowlegged, the battered red bucket at his feet. He frowned gravely at me. He still stood a little too wide-legged. But partly that was the cast on his leg. Once it was off, he’d be able to walk normally. He’d fit in just fine. “Want to play with the…,” he told me, making a liquid noise that I couldn’t follow.

“Play with what, baby?”

He pointed with a chubby finger. I looked. Sir Grandad was in the tree above me, staring curiously down at us. “That’s a mongoose,” I told Agway. “What you called it?”

He said the word again. I wondered what it was the word for; what in his old watery home looked like a mongoose. I tried to imitate him.

“No” He chuckled, holding his little round belly.

I laughed and said it again.

“No! No!” He looked irritated this time. “Stop! Stop talking like me!”

The buzz of flies around the clotted remains of the fruit suddenly seemed less pleasant. I held my hand out for Agway’s. “Come. We have to change your dressings.” It was almost time for Ifeoma to come by, anyway. I hoped she’d found St. Julian mangoes in the market. Was the season for them.

Agway toddled over to me, put his hand in mine. I grabbed up his discarded clothes on the way out. I left the wheelbarrow for now.

He stumbled. I was walking too quickly for him. The child had just had surgery to his legs. I slowed down. “You want a Popsicle when we get to the house?”

He frowned up at me, confused. “Popsicle,” I told him. “Remember? It’s cold and sweet and you eat it?”

“No. Want stimps,” he informed me.

“What a way you own-way today! Mr. Mckinley didn’t come yet. How about some breadfruit? With butter?”

He nodded. “Beddfooot.” Child after my own heart.

A wash of heat soaked me. “Hold on a minute, Agway.” I stood to let the hot flash pass. No itching fingers this time. Nothing popped out of the air. More and more, I was having just the regular hot flashes. The after-chill came on, but in the heat of the day, it was almost a pleasant thing. If the manifestations had stopped, I could handle this menopause business. I took Agway’s hand again. “Come. Almost time for Dora the Explorer.”

“MUMMY! YOU HOME?”

Uh-oh. In only three words from her, I could name that tone. Ifeoma was on the warpath.

She shoved the front door open before I could get to it. Right in the entranceway, she put down the plastic shopping bags she was carrying. What the hell was her problem?

“Thank you,” I said prettily, picking up the bags. “And don’t worry if you couldn’t find any smoked herring. I’m sure that everything you brought is fine.” First step: try harmless disarmament.

She glared and walked past me into the living room. She pulled Agway away from the bookcase he’d started climbing in the few seconds I hadn’t had my eye on him. She put him on her hip. “What’s your problem with Hector? Eh? Why you told Stanley not to do his science fair project with him?”

I put down the bags and took Agway away from her. “I will help Stanley with his project! You don’t let me spend enough time with him as it is.” If step one fails: self-defense.

Then I couldn’t resist saying: “Besides, Hector’s not a nice person.”

She sucked her teeth. “Bullshit, he’s not nice.”

I blinked. She hardly ever swore. She picked up the bags. I turned the television on for Agway and followed Ife into the kitchen.

As she unpacked the produce onto the kitchen counter, she said, “I have plenty of opportunity to see what Hector is like. I’m the one who hired him for Caroline.”

“You hired him? For that politician woman? She trust you with a job like that?”

She took a dozen eggs out of a bag and very carefully set the box down. She growled, “You even know what it is I do?”

“How you mean? You work the front desk at the Tamany.”

She sighed. “Not any more. I told you that a couple weeks ago.”

“You didn’t tell me you left! I thought you were doing the other thing in the evenings, or something! That little piece of work is enough to support you and Stanley? Especially now that Clifton gone?” Step three: destabilize.

“You right, I didn’t tell you. Didn’t want to give you more ammunition against me. And what it is I do in Caroline’s office?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Answering phones and so.”

“I am the junior research assistant for the leader of this country’s opposition party. They made me full-time last week.”

“What?”

“You even have any idea why I want to work for Caroline Sookdeo-Grant? Enh? When I joined the 4-H club in high school, you laughed at me. When I organized that letter campaign in ’02 to protest the death penalty, you told me I was wasting my time. Nothing I do is good enough for you. I don’t think you ever had a word of praise for me yet.”

I think I actually rocked back on my heels with the shock of that one. Who had taught her step three?

She started unpacking one of the bags. “This nonsense about Hector is really because he not interested in you, nuh true? It don’t have anything to do with Stanley’s project.”

Shame heated up my face. I covered quickly: “Chuh. I wouldn’t want Hector if he was the last man on earth. Next thing I know, he go and leave me for some man.”

She grimaced. “God, that attitude is so backward.”

“You need to watch yourself with me, Ife. I not in a mood to hear no stupidness today.”

“You know what your problem is? You jealous.”

I guffawed. She wanted to play rough, I would unleash step four on her ass: berserker rage. “Me, jealous? Of what? Tell me, nuh? Your flour sack dresses and your bad diet? Your marriage that dying on you? Maybe I jealous that the two-three men in your life more interested in each other than you? Or that your own mother could thief a man right out from under your twenty-one-year-old nose? What I have to be jealous of, Ife? Enh?”

To my astonishment she surged right over me with: “You give yourself as a gift to your best friend one day, and you still can’t forgive him for saying ‘no thank you.’ ”

She dare to talk to me that way? Meek little Ife? She went on, “Nearly forty years now you chewing on that grudge like a wad of old gum that have all the taste suck out of it.”

“And who it is still whining about how her mother didn’t buy her the right colour dolly when she was nine?”

No reaction from her. Ife was as cool as running water, and as impossible to make a mark in. I’d never seen her like this before. I didn’t have a step five. Stammering, I improvised: “I still don’t hear what I have to be so jealous of.”

“Anybody Daddy have in his life, Mummy! You ever watch at yourself? The way you carry on? You look at Orso like you starving and he hoarding all the food.”

I gaped at her, completely off my stride.

“Tell me,” she said, “when exactly it is you got stuck? ’Cause it seem like you reached a certain place in your life, and you never managed to move on from there.”

I was trembling. The roaring in my ears was too loud to let me think up a comeback.

“You know what the sad thing is?” she said. “You could have been part of Daddy’s life any time you wanted. But if you couldn’t have him all to yourself, you didn’t want nobody else to have him, neither. Wouldn’t even let his own daughter get to know him.”

I found my voice. “I did that to protect you!”

“The same way so you protecting Agway? By shutting him away from everyone?”

“The child is an orphan! He need somebody to look out for him. You didn’t need Michael. You had me.”

She kissed her teeth. “If you looking out for Agway so good, why you not finding out what language he speak? Enh? You quick to go and research what steel make of, but you can’t trace down one language? Why you not trying to learn what Agway saying to you? Stanley spend couple-three hours with the boy, and already he could talk a few words to Agway. Like you frighten?”

“Your rass. Frighten of what? What a three-year-old boy could say to frighten me?”

“He could tell you something about himself and where he came from. He could tell you what really happened to him. He could tell you his name, Mummy.”

I was breathing in little gasps. “He have a name! I give him a perfectly good name!”

“Make me wonder it’s who really wanted a black dolly to dress up and parade around and keep in a box.”

My hand actually twitched towards her face to give it a good slap. I killed the impulse, but Ife still saw. She didn’t even flinch, and she didn’t back down. She just drew herself up tall and looked me in my face.

I swallowed. “Leave my house,” I whispered.

“Not until I tell you this.” Gently, she set down the tin of salmon she’d been about to put in the pantry. “I am ashamed of you. You hear me good? Ashamed.”

As she was leaving, she stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked back at me. I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Every good deed you do have a price attached,” she said.

AGWAY WAS FRACTIOUS ALL EVENING. I had hell to pay trying to keep his hands from his dressings. Looked like he’d reached that itchy stage they’d warned me about at the hospital. Nothing to do but put on the ointment they’d given me and give him some painkiller. That seemed to help the discomfort a little, but Christ, he was irritable! Eventually I just picked him up and paced back and forth across the living room with him, like I had done when Ife was teething. I kept the tv on just to distract him. I think it was more to distract me. The memories of Ife’s words to me before she left were churning and sour in my gut. Well, if life give you lemons, suck them, I suppose. People had said worse to me before, when I was a teenage mother. I’d survived.

Slowly, Agway quieted in my arms and fell asleep. I lowered myself onto the settee; the few steps into the bedroom seemed like a marathon.

I must have dropped off to sleep. A clunk woke me. I was drenched in sweat. Damn. So tired, I had slept through a hot flash. That one had brought me something, too; I’d heard it land. What was it? Couldn’t see anything, and I didn’t want to move and maybe wake Agway. Tomorrow. I laid my head back. If I slept right here so, I would wake up so cricked I wouldn’t be able to crack. But fatigue was like waves washing over me.

“Are there mermaids swimming in Cayaba’s waters?” chirped the television.

Oh, bite me. The eleven o’clock “news” with the same old filler crap.

“Finally,” said the announcer, “we may have proof.”

I raised my head. On the tv screen was a blurry, green-tinged photograph of two naked brown women floating in the sea. One had a baby lolling on her breast. The other one was doing a frog-swim. Her long, ratty hair rayed out from the top of her head. A second baby floated in the water, clinging to her hair. The two women were looking up, presumably at a plane or helicopter above them, where someone with a camera was taking their picture.

“Shit,” I said. “This is bad.”

The photo shrank and tucked itself to a corner of the screen so that we could see the announcer. “This nighttime photograph was taken by an ingenious young man whose name is Stanley Fernandez.”

Oh, God. He did his project already? Without me?

The announcer continued, “It is only one in a series of photographs of Cayaba taken by Stanley’s airborne glider-cam.”

Blurry photo stills, very close-up, started flashing by on the television: two men in police force uniforms sitting on a sea wall—one was in the act of handing a forty-ouncer of something to the other; what looked to be a very startled fishing bat, clutching the silver flash of a minnow; a thin-faced, big-eyed young man with hands like shovels, sitting behind the wheel of a car with a look of bliss on his face, holding—a huge pair of panties?—to his nose; a totally mystifying shot of two young men and a woman, all quite fat, climbing out of the seal enclosure at the Zooquarium. They were naked.

How the hell he had gotten those pictures? For a moment, pride for my grandson quieted my guilt for not having helped him.

The announcer came back on screen, smiling a little and shuffling her notes. “Stanley put the mini digital camera on his remote controlled glider with the help of a family friend, Mr. Hector Goonan.”

Oh, Ife. You came here knowing this had all happened.

“Stanley only meant to take daytime photographs for a science fair project, but one night he took the glider for a spin, just for a lark. Only a handful of the photos were good images, but a few of those were very good indeed. When Stanley realised what he had on his hands, he wisely sought the advice of another adult, his grandfather, Michael Jasper.”

“Oh, God. Michael’s mixed up into this, too?”

“Mr. Jasper sent copies of the images to us.” And there he was on the screen. “I’m very proud of my grandson,” Michael said. “He’s showed a lot of initiative in putting this project together.”

Agway stirred and woke.

“Clearly,” said the announcer, “the citizens of Cayaba have a very active night life indeed! The police will be investigating some of the instances of apparent mischief revealed by the photos. One question remains: is this photograph of the women swimming nude finally proof of the existence of fish people? Or is it just an example of the types of hijinks performed by some of the more boisterous visitors to Cayaba? We may never know. And perhaps, to keep Cayaba the beautiful mystery that she is, it’s best not to look too closely.”

Agway looked muzzily at the screen, just as they blew up the photo of the sea women to full size again. He gasped and reached a hand towards the screen. “Mamma,” he said quite clearly. He was not looking at me when he said it. Then he burst into tears.

It was like somebody had splashed cold water on me.

The photo had gone from the screen. The news continued. I got Agway’s attention. “Pet, is that your mother? Your mamma?”

“Jes!” he sobbed. “Mamma!” He said a long, mournful sentence in his language. I didn’t understand a word. Might be his mother, or a relative. Or it might only be that he’d seen home, and people who looked like sea people. He was tired, and probably in a bit of pain from the surgery. Maybe I could put him to sleep, and he would be fine in the morning. “You sure that was your mamma?”

He shrieked, “Mamma!” and arched his back like toddlers will do when they’re agitated. He kicked, too. Got me a good one in the thigh with the heel of his cast. I managed to hold on to him and get him upright again. Agway’s mother was alive?

“Who really wanted a black dolly to dress up and parade around and keep in a box?”

I went to the phone. Fumbling, I dialled Ife’s number. But I hung up on the first ring. Couldn’t face her. She wouldn’t understand about Agway, anyway.

I took a child from his family!

Gene’s cell went straight to voice mail. He was probably working tonight. “Gene, you have to help me,” I whimpered into the phone. “Agway’s mother not dead, I just saw her on the news in Stanley’s picture. We should find her. The sea woman. Give her back her boy. God, call me as soon as you get this, please?” I hung up the phone.

Agway had subsided into a low, bubbly sobbing. The woe on his face made me feel sick with guilt. “Pet, I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Three weeks since I’d found him. And he still cried himself to sleep nearly every night. Because of me. And what had his mother been going through, and the rest of his family, if he had any? All this time, they would have been thinking they’d lost him.

Lost.

He wasn’t lost! I’d found him; Maybe I could find his family, too. I had to do it. Had to bring his mother to him. Goddamned hot flashes could materialise a whole cashew grove, they could help me call one woman.

Couldn’t wait for Gene. I had to do this myself. I had made it wrong: I could make it right.

I hitched Agway up a little more comfortably on my hip. “We’re going to find your mother. Hear me? Going to get your mamma.”

He sniffled.

Mrs. Lessing had brought me a toddler life jacket that her great-grandson had outgrown. I picked it up and left the house with Agway. I had to jog through a light rain to get to the car. I drove us both towards the private slip where Dolorosse people kept their boats.

Agway was sitting in the passenger seat. I glanced at his bandaged knees. And all the way to the slip with the wailing child, I kept hearing Ife’s voice in my head:

“Every good deed you do have a price attached.”

Maybe so, but this boy shouldn’t be the one paying it.

EVEN GRIEF HAS TO GIVE WAY to sleep. Agway’s eyes were closed when I took him in his life jacket out of the car. Wrapped in his blanket, he was just conscious enough to put his thumb in his mouth and rest his head on my shoulder. The drizzle seemed to be easing up.

He didn’t even stir when I took him into the boat. I put him under a tarp to keep him dry, and laid him down far enough from me to balance the boat a little better. It made me nervous to have him even that little distance out of reach. But even if he fell in, the life jacket would keep the weight of the cast from dragging him down.

I was so upset and shaky that it took me two tries to start the engine. Agway startled at the noise. He stirred, but his exhausted little body hung on to sleep. I headed us out further along the archipelago, towards the tiniest islands.

“I am ashamed of you.”

Find the sea people. Find Agway’s mother. Just fix your mind on that. Give Agway back. I had to have a hot flash. I had to.

But all I willed it to happen, my fingers wouldn’t itch, and the heat wouldn’t rise. Old Slave Joe the finder had been able to use his power at will. “I can’t even tell which muscles to flex,” I grumbled.

“If you couldn’t have him all to yourself, you didn’t want nobody else to have him, neither.”

Tiny Dutchie Island was somewhere here-bout, nuh true? Didn’t think to bring the fucking compass. Shit, shit, shit. Okay. Just keep looking for the whiteheads of its reefs, and wait. Bloody hot flashes were like buses; there was always another one coming.

I had cut Agway’s hair. I had let the hospital cut his legs. What the sea people would do when they saw all that? I blinked the warm drizzle out of my eyes.

The skimming boat hit a swell especially hard, and sea water splashed us. That woke Agway. He sat up. Saw that we were in the sea. I cut the engine so I could hold him. Probably best to just let her drift, anyway. The noise of the engine might frighten them away. For good measure, I turned off the green starboard light. The port light was dead. I hadn’t used the boat in a while.

Silence and dark blanketed us, and the percussion of raindrops. I hated the sea at night. If it wasn’t for the reflective patches on his life jacket, I’d have had a hard time seeing Agway.

I sat him beside me, rewrapped him in the tarp, and put an arm around him. “We going to find her,” I told him. “Somehow.”

He asked me a question.

“I don’t understand you, Pet. Ife was right. I didn’t even try to learn.”

What a three-year-old boy could say to frighten me?

Fingers itching any at all? No, not a rass. No sensation like ants crawling on my skin. “I don’t know how to do this!” I said, frustrated.

The darkness was getting to me. Every slap of sea water against the boat made me jump. Except where there were stars, and the light cloud that Dolorosse cast above itself, I couldn’t distinguish sea different from sky. “I don’t know how allyou manage out here come nighttime,” I told Agway. The rain was making me shivery.

I decided to keep looking for Dutchie Island. Go slow. Keeping the engine revving low. When I opened up the throttle again, the prow of the boat began slapping the water, too hard. We were overbalanced. But now that Agway was awake, I needed to keep him within reach. I slowed us down even more, and sat him on the floor at my feet.

He pointed out into the water. “Mamma!”

“Smart boy. Yes, we going to find Mamma. You just sit right here, you understand? Don’t stand up, you will fall out. You will sit, Agway?”

“Ehe.”

We crawled along. I kept trying to will the magic to happen. I didn’t know how far out we were. Could have reached the shipping lanes, for all I knew. And still the feeling of being weightless in an infinity of ink. I kept looking all around us, trying to get oriented in space, trying to spot any trouble before it got to us.

What the rass I was doing, really? This was ridiculous. It was dangerous for the child, and I was cold. Take us both back. Get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow, ask Gene’s advice.

I was concentrating on turning us around: that’s how I came to have my eyes off Agway. Only a splash slightly louder than the rain told me that he had gone overboard.

“Agway!” I screamed. I slipped my alpagats off. “Agway, I coming!”

I jumped. The blood-warm water took me in. When I surfaced, the life jacket was floating beside me, empty, on a pock-marked sea like black glass.

“Agway!” I couldn’t see him! I screamed for help, but the open expanse of water swallowed my voice.

… So the devil woman of the sea wait until the ship was approaching the archipelago. Then she swim close to the porthole of the cabin where the young woman was sitting in chains, and she sing,

Young girl, young girl,

Drop your hat in the water.

Agway’s empty life jacket was a small orange blur, bobbing away from me quickly, disappearing into darkness. Without it, the cast would have dragged him down. I tried to dive, but the groaning black of the sea entombed me immediately. There was no way to see, no air to breathe. Mindless with terror, I surfaced, choking. I felt at my waist for my cell phone. I hadn’t been in the water long; it just might work.

It wasn’t there. Must have fallen off when I jumped in. I had to go for help. Fast. I slewed around in the water; tried to peer through the rain.

I couldn’t see the boat any more. The sea was obsidian. I stopped, bobbed in the water and tried to listen for the slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. But my panicked heart was beating too hard, my breath coming too quickly; they and the rain were all I could hear. Weeping, I struck out again, heading for where I thought the boat might be. Didn’t even know what direction I was facing any more. The sea was vast; it went on around and beneath me in blackness forever. My boy was drowning, and the nighttime ocean was monstrous. There was no way to know what could be rising from the depths this very moment, its maw stretched wide around dagger teeth the length of my arm. My lizard back-brain screamed at me to get out! Out! A cold water current ran just below the surface. Every time I dipped a hand or foot into the ribbon of cold, I knew it was taking my scent, carrying it to the invisible horror rising up from way down deep. I swam harder, going nowhere. My side began to ache. I was gasping, my strokes getting weaker, my head dipping occasionally below the water. No boat. “Agway!” It came out a hoarse whisper. I coughed and sputtered on brine. I was scarcely paddling at all now, too tired to move my arms. The pain in my gut made my belly feel distended. Salt syrup burned my throat.

I panicked completely, struck out in one direction, then the next, never finding the safety of the boat. I whimpered and spat out water.

Exhaustion had set in. My arms felt so heavy. All of me, heavy as rockstones. Rain water filled my eyes, and sea water kept getting into my nose. In the back of my brain, I knew I should go horizontal, try to float, but terror and despair kept me thrashing. Please, please let Agway still be alive. Let me get help.

But it was too late, for both of us. I couldn’t make my legs scissor any more. They sank into the chilly current, and the rest of me began to follow. My head sank into the water.

Something hard touched my ankle. I screamed, sucked in the sea.

Something held me, bore me up. My head surfaced. I coughed out the water. It was hands I was feeling on me, many hands, not the grip of a massive jaw. In the dark I could just make out the heads of people bobbing in the sea with me.

“Thank you,” I shouted hoarsely, over the increasing storm.

One of them gurgled a reply, a liquid sound. So did another. Sea people. Agway’s people. Holding me fast. “You found him?” I heard myself ask, my teeth chattering. “You found Agway?” Just this once, let my name not hold true.

A little voice warbled, “Camity!”

I twisted about to try to see where it was coming from. I saw him. Agway! A sea man was towing him through the water. I held on weakly to the shoulder of one of the people holding me up, and sobbed for joy. Agway held tight to the man’s long hair. So that was why he grabbed hair like that.

“Nna,” he informed me merrily. He tugged at the hair of the man towing him. The man grinned.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. My body was shaking with cold and after-reaction. Through the water blurring my eyes, I peered at the man. Did he and Agway have the same nose, the same shape mouth? The man sank quietly beneath the water, taking Agway down with him. I gasped. But seconds later they surfaced again. Agway was laughing. He spat a stream of water from his mouth. “Camity,” he chirruped. He swatted his father on the head. “Nna.”

“Yes, baby, I think I understand you now. So stop beating up your daddy, all right?”

Agway pointed at another man and then a third, called them both “Nna.” So it meant something like “uncle,” then? No matter. Family.

“I’m sorry,” I said to them. “I should have brought him back earlier.”

Another creature broke surface not two feet from me. I yelped. It snorted, as though in surprise, and sank again. “What the fuck is that?” I asked. Some of the people holding me laughed and joked. Fuckers. I grabbed the shoulders of one of them, and pulled my feet up as close to my body as I could. So hard to see in the dark with water stinging my eyes! A dog? A seal? I thought I’d seen large, liquid eyes. An intelligent face. The sea people didn’t seem worried at it being there. They kept pets?

Another head broke the water, this time beside Agway. A person. “Mamma!” squealed Agway, and tried to throw himself into her arms.

“Chiabuotu,” she said, with a catch in her voice. She gave the man towing Agway something large and floppy to hold. A blanket? I could use one of those right now. Then she took Agway into her arms. “Chichi,” she murmured. She was definitely weeping. I felt heartsick at what I’d put her through. She bobbed upright in the water like a bottle, holding Agway tightly to her, laughing through her tears and chatting back with him as he tried to catch her up on everything he’d seen and done. And the whole time, she kept inspecting his shorn hair, touching his arms, patting his face, stroking his back. Every touch said love, love, and Agway echoed it back at her. He curled his fist tightly in her hair.

Damn. One thing to see a dead one, or a little boy who might or might not be one. Something else again to be right here in their own environment with them. Sea people were real!

We were moving. Where were they taking me? Not deeper out to sea! “No, no, I can’t.” I tried to pull free from the ones holding me. “I’m not made like you. I have to go back to land.” They ignored me. I pushed against the bodies moving me. I was too weak, there were too many of them, and they were in their element. Didn’t stop me trying to break free. I fought and fought until I heard a hollow “thunk.” I shook water out of my eyes and peered. One of the sea people had just slapped his hand against the side of my boat.

“Oh,” I said. “My mistake. So sorry.”

The next five minutes or so were pure joke as the sea people tried to help me into my boat. Every last one of them naked, wet, and slippery. Me shaking so much I couldn’t control my muscles. I would get a foot up on a helpful shoulder, but it would slide off one time, and braps! I’d go into the water again. It would have been funny, but I was so tired. And so cold! My arthritic knee was giving off a bright, gonging pain. “Should have climbed that blasted almond tree a few more times for practice,” I gasped at them.

Finally a sea man leapt agilely into the boat. He was fat. Right now, I envied him that. But that hair, milord, just hanging off his head like seaweed in the surf! So much for the legends of mermaids combing their hair out while sitting on the rocks. Whatever they were doing on those rocks, it wasn’t grooming. Getting warm, maybe. Or playing dangerous jumping games with little land girls.

The man got to his knees, held out his hand to me through the pelting rain. I reached for it with both of mine. He began to pull, but I couldn’t hold on. I wasn’t light like little Chastity used to be. I wasn’t nimble any longer like she had been. And I couldn’t make my fingers grasp. The man grabbed my wrists. The boat dipped sideways. If it shipped too much water, it would sink.

In the water, a pair of hands brushed my behind. I jumped. The hands held me firmly, long fingers wrapped around my ample thighs. “Leave me alone!” I croaked, no voice left to yell. Agway chuckled and shouted something out. He thought it was a game. I was in deep shit; half-drowned, and now about to be sexually assaulted by a sea creature. I kicked out at him. The water dragged at my leg and slowed it down.

The man in the boat was crooning something in a soft, encouraging tone. Then I felt a head between my thighs. “Get the fuck away from me!” I tried to push off, away from the person feeling me up so.

I was rising higher in the water. Oh. A piggyback, then, not freshness. The man in the boat made an approving sound. When the one below had got me high enough, the man in the boat leaned forward and wrapped his thick, strong arms around me, just under my armpits. He crushed my breasts to his naked chest. His breath smelled like raw fish, and under that, like human breath. “Up little more,” I said, panting. There… almost…

Just a few more inches and I was able to get one knee against the inside of the boat. The man in the boat called out something. The others in the water echoed it. Fuck me; they were cheering me on! That gave me little more strength. I dug my knee into the side of the boat. Of course it was the bad knee. The man below heaved, and the one above pulled, his face right up against mine. Suddenly I was up on the boat’s rim. My weight overbalanced the man pulling on me, and we both fell inside. The boat rocked beneath us.

I was in the boat. I lay there, pulling in air and wiping rain out of my eyes. “Oh, migod.” The rain felt chilly. My arms were all goosebumps. I was woozy.

The man under me was making funny heaving noises.

“Sorry,” I panted, but I had no energy left for moving. He had to roll my dead weight off him.

He was laughing! Blasted fish man was laughing at me!

And then I was laughing too, though I was dizzy and it hurt my chest. The two of us lay there, trying to catch our breath, laughing with each other. I could hear others in the water chatting, and Agway’s cheerful, high voice amongst them.

I managed to lift my head to look over the side. I ate Agway up with my eyes. Little brute. Clasps on the life jacket were just like the one on the old briefcase I’d given him to play with.

The man sat up. His knees and ankles pulled apart with a wet Velcro sound, and he tailor-sat. Christ. That’s what the patches were for. To streamline the legs so they could swim better. And I had let Evelyn take Agway’s away. I had fucked everything up so badly, I didn’t know how to unfuck it.

The boat was moving. They were towing it. Good, ’cause I didn’t feel in any shape to steer it myself. I didn’t even have the strength to bail. I lay and looked up at the stars. I was going to get up. Soon. For real. “I just hope it’s back to shore you taking me,” I said to the man. I barely understood myself, my teeth were chattering so hard.

“Yes,” he replied.

Holy shit. “You talk,” I gasped.

“I talk like you talk,” he said.

Nice accent. “All of you speak English?”

“No. Only some. We hear when land people speak.” He said something over the side.

“Where the fuck’s the rum?” a voice called out from the water, in a fair, though somewhat bubbly, imitation of an American accent.

“My God,” said another, “this is some shit-kicking weed. Trust the natives to grow the good stuff.”

From the other side of the boat came “Steven! Steven! Drop the anchor! Plenty fish here-bout!” That one was pure Cayaba.

And, “So I put twenty thou into the bank they have here. Offshore investment fucking rocks, man.”

From behind the boat, “Daddydaddydaddy! Look at me! Look at me, Daddy!”

When one of them launched into the sound of the Coast Guard siren Dopplering across the water, I wept, too far gone to laugh.

“The problem is heat,” I creaked at my new friend. “Water will chill your body down twenty times faster than air. Can’t remember where I put my fucking glasses, but I can quote back a fact somebody said to me weeks ago.”

A shriek from the water nearly stopped my already stuttering heart. A woman’s voice, swelled with outrage and fury. Something heavy slapped against the boat. A hand grabbed the side of the boat and bodily tilted it towards the water. I nearly rolled out. The man in the boat held on to me.

A head followed the hand from the water. Agway’s mother. She was big and strong enough to tilt the boat, and even to my blurry vision, she looked ready to kill. She cradled a scared Agway along one arm. She turned one of his thighs outwards to show me. The bandages had long washed off. I whispered, “The doctors did it.”

Couldn’t hear whether I was speaking aloud. I was shuddering with cold. Hypothermia could kill, even in the tropics sometimes.

My friend in the boat translated for me. Mamma made it clear that she didn’t give two shits for that lame-ass answer, and she was going to reach into my mouth and tear my liver out with her bare hands. I said, “He couldn’t manage on land with those things, waddling around like that.”

The man translated. Still no go. I was shaking like a leaf from the cold, the shock, the confrontation. The woman shoved herself off from the boat and lunged towards one of Agway’s nnas. She pushed Agway into his arms and demanded her wrap back, or whatever it was. The man refused, though it looked like she outweighed him. She got into a tug of war with him, raging the whole time. Agway kept trying to get a word in edgewise. Finally she dragged the thing out of the man’s arms. She put it around her shoulders. Agway shouted something as loudly as his little body could manage, launched himself towards her, and yanked on her hair.

She stopped. He said it again. I made out “Camity,” and “nne.” So I was his uncle, too? So difficult to hear over the driving rain.

My mind was wandering. Concentrate, Calamity. “I fucked up!” I shouted. Barely a squeak came out. I tried to raise my hands towards her, but I couldn’t feel my arms any more. Just a thump as my head hit the floor of the boat, and everything went black. My last sight, strangely clear, was of the sea woman with her sealskin fur coat clutched around her. What is this fashion for leaving the heads on? I wondered. Then I didn’t think anything at all.

The ship began to creak more, and to shudder. The dada-hair lady could hear the thundering of the surf. The boss man was shouting orders, the sailors running back and forth. Some of the sailors began pushing the people back towards the stinking, cramped holds. Some of the men tried to resist, but they were beaten for their trouble. And no sign from Uhamiri.

The ship slowed down, then tacked. The turning motion brought the dada-hair lady’s nausea back. Some of the others retched, too. The ship proceeded a little way further, then lurched, throwing them all to the deck. There was a thump and a massive cracking sound. The child was thrown from the dada-hair lady’s arms when she fell, dragging the two chained to her along with her. Boards snapped. People were screaming and calling on their Gods. Not the dada-hair lady. She had already begged help, but none had come.

As she lay tumbled on the deck, the dada-hair lady felt wetness between her thighs, and a cramping of her womb. Her monthly blood had returned. She grinned fiercely. “She heard me,” she said to her shipmates, who were too terrified to pay her mind. Holding on to whatever she could, the dada-hair lady dragged herself upright. She looked around wildly for the little boy she had held. There! He had seen her. He was so small that the sailors couldn’t really see him in the throng. He was pushing his way through adult bodies to get to her. And the determined little child made it; squeezed between the last two people separating him from the dada-hair lady, and ran to her. She swept him up, laughing even through her own terror. She readied herself. It was time. The lost ones would go home.

The ship was tilted perilously to one side, and breaking up as they watched. The noises of cracking timbers, sliding cannon, and screaming people were astonishing.

The dada-hair lady bade her gift come down.

And for the first time in months, it did.

Me Uncle Time smile black as sorrow;

’im voice is sof’ as bamboo leaf

But Lawd, me Uncle cruel.

When ’im play in de street

wid yu woman—watch ’im! By tomorrow

she dry as cane-fire, bitter as cassava.

An’ when ’im teach yu son, long after

yu walk wid stranger, an’ yu bread is grief.

Watch how ’im spin web roun’ yu house, an’ creep

inside; an’ when ’im touch yu, weep…

—Dennis Scott, “Uncle Time”