When I awoke, a black face hung over me like the dark side of the moon. The dark moon was the face of a girl about my age.
It was the mermaid and she was outlined in the moonbeams. She was sleek of build. Her dark skin was wet and shiny. Moon-glistened beads of water dripped off her nose and cheeks, lips and chin, and wilting Afro hairdo. She looked at me as if examining a formerly unknown species of fish. She had at first seemed nude, but now I realized she wore a dark shirt and dark shorts. No fishtail.
I rolled my head to the side to let some water flow out of me, and I remember when doing that I saw across the lake a little light moving through the trees like a large firefly, and then I didn’t see it anymore.
Then another black face leaned over me, this one larger and rounder and older and not so beautiful. The man who owned that face was fully clothed and wore a fedora.
The older, dry man lifted my head, said, “Breathe easy. You been to the bottom of the lake.”
I hadn’t actually, but I had certainly come close to it.
Feeling nauseated, I turned my head and coughed up enough filthy water to start a fish farm.
“It’s all right,” said the man. “You’re going to be all right.”
The girl was still staring at me, her eyes wide, her lips parted, her chest heaving slightly. Sight of her didn’t take away the pain I felt that night, but it was a mild balm to a soulful wound. I felt some puppy love howling around inside of me.
“You saved me,” I said.
“Yep.” She smiled. Oh, heavens, that smile.
“My daddy?” I said. “In the car.”
The man shook his head. “Sorry, son. You’re all that came out. He’s gone down with the car, and he didn’t come up. It’s deep out there.”
“You have to get him,” I said.
“I’m sorry. Lake owns him now.”
I started to cry and I don’t remember when I quit crying. I don’t remember them helping me up and out of my wet coat and into their pickup, loading up their fishing gear, for they had been night fishing on the bank of the lake, tucked up between trees and dark shadows—a lucky break for me—but I remember the drive to town.
It was long and lonely. The world came back in starts and spurts. Cold, wet memories, slices of this, slices of that, the car in the water, going down, down, down.
I sat in a puddle of my own making, shivering. The girl beside me was making a puddle of her own. She wore a jacket now over her wet clothes. We shivered together. The truck was full of warmth, though, as the heater was turned up high. Gradually I began to lose the chill.
The town wasn’t too big, but it had bright streetlights, and the main highway split it right down the middle. On either side of it there were businesses and old houses and great trees with limbs that dangled over the edges of the road. Many of the houses were two stories, and a few were three stories tall.
I saw a Dairy Queen all lit up, and I was suddenly hungry and felt ashamed of the feeling. I was alive and craving a hamburger, and my father was at the bottom of the lake, maybe still behind the wheel of our car. In my happier thoughts, he was driving along the lake bed, and all he had to do was find a place where he could drive up from the deeps, onto the bank, and into town, where he would find me. It seemed perfectly reasonable.
The police station was a blur. A big white man with a big round belly wearing a dark blue cop suit with a badge pinned on it was there. He was also wearing a white cowboy hat with a brim wide enough to use as a patio awning, and when he turned in his chair, I saw he had a colorful patch on his sleeve that had all the flags that had flown over Texas, including the Dixie flag.
On the wall were a lot of photographs of him with other law enforcement officers in uniform. One photo had him with three older-looking people, a woman and two men. Beside him, solemn and pale as they were, they looked like wax figures of executioners.
There was another man in the room. Also large of size but better proportioned. He was dressed in slacks and a crisp white shirt and he had a thick head of red hair. He was placing a tray with a cloth over it on the sheriff’s desk. There was a placard on the desk that said SHERIFF JAMES DUDLEY.
The redheaded man removed the cloth from over the tray as if it were a magician’s trick, and there was a plate with fried chicken and mashed potatoes and white gravy on it.
“Thanks, Duncan,” the sheriff said, and smiled at him. The redhead nodded, smiled back, and left the room, trailing a cloud of Old Spice.
The sheriff studied me. I was still damp and dripping. Questions were asked of me and of those who saved me. Notes were taken by the sheriff on a pad with a pencil.
I did the best I could to say what I knew, but my mind wandered. I could see a room off of the office with the words COLORED WAITING ROOM above it. The words had been painted over with white paint but were still visible under the thin coating. Just a few years back my rescuers would have had to come through the back door and sit in that waiting room, where they would be attended to. Eventually.
“What the hell am I going to do with him this time of night, Jeb?” the sheriff said. “Get some foster folks or some such, I guess. I can get a wrecker out to the lake in the morning, couple of boys who can really swim, see if they can find the car.”
“You’ll need swimmers who can use diving rigs. It’s deep there,” the black man said. I would find out later his full name was Jeb Candles and his daughter, Veronica, was known as Ronnie.
“That’ll cost the county a good chunk,” Sheriff Dudley said. “More to the point, this boy needs a place to stay, some food, and dry clothes. I’m not sure what to do about that.”
In 1968 the idea of protecting children was different. There wasn’t a whole lot of thought put into the struggle of orphans. Not in that small East Texas town, anyway.
“He can stay with us for now, Sheriff. May I borrow your phone?”
The phone was borrowed, and the next thing I knew, I was brought dry clothes from somewhere and given a large beach towel. My donations had come from black folks Mr. Candles knew. They arrived quickly and quietly and left the same way they arrived, like beach-towel ninjas.
I went into the bathroom and dressed, looked in the mirror at somebody I didn’t know: snow-faced, dark hair drying in a matted wad, eyes seeming as if they were without true color, my skin popped with goose bumps.
I could hear the sheriff talking in the other room. I heard him say, “If you’re up late, I’ll be by later and we can discuss a few things. I got to do some thinking on this first.”
“We’ll wait up,” Mr. Candles said.
When I came out, I was wrapped in the beach towel by Mr. Candles and loaded back into the pickup. We drove away, leaving the sheriff happily alone with his notebook and fried-chicken dinner. It had been all I could do not to grab a chicken leg and shove it into my mouth. I was starving.