New American Stories

RAW WATER by Wells Tower

“Just let me out of here, man,” said Cora Booth. “I’m sick. I’m dying.”

“Of what?” asked Rodney, her husband, blinking at the wheel, scoliotic with exhaustion. He’d been sitting there for four days, steering the pickup down out of Boston, a trailer shimmying on the ball hitch, a mattress held to the roof of the camper shell with tie-downs that razzed like an attack of giant farting bees.

“Ford poisoning,” Cora said. “Truckanosis, stage four. I want out. I’ll walk from here.”

Rodney told his wife that a hundred and twenty miles lay between them and the home they’d rented in the desert, sight unseen.

“Perfect,” she said. “I’ll see you in four days. You’ll appreciate the benefits. I’ll have a tan and my ass will be a huge wad of muscle. You can climb up on it and ride like a little monkey.”

“I’m so tired. I’m sad and confused,” said Rodney. “I’m in a thing where I see the road, I just don’t comprehend it. I don’t understand what it means.”

Cora rolled down the window to photograph a balustrade of planted organ cactuses strobing past in rows.

“Need a favor, chum?” she said, toying with his zipper.

“What I need is to focus here,” Rodney said. “The white lines keep swapping around.”

“How about let’s scoot up one of those little fire trails,” Cora said. “You won’t get dirty, I promise. We’ll put the tailgate down and do some stunts on it.”

The suggestion compounded Rodney’s fatigue. It had been a half decade since he and Cora had made any kind of habitual love, and Rodney was fine with that. Even during his teenage hormone boom, he’d been a fairly unvenereal person. As he saw it, their marriage hit its best years once the erotic gunpowder burned off and it cooled to a more tough and precious alloy of long friendship and love from the deep heart. But Cora, who was forty-three, had lately emerged from menopause with large itches in her. Now she was hassling him for a session more days than not. After so many tranquil, sexless years, Rodney felt there was something unseemly, a mild whang of incest, in mounting his best friend. Plus she had turned rough and impersonal in her throes, like a cat on its post. She didn’t look at him while they were striving. She went off somewhere by herself. Her eyes were always closed, her body arched, her jaw thrusting up from the curtains of her graying hair, mouth parted. Watching her, Rodney didn’t feel at all like a proper husband in a love rite with his wife, more a bootleg hospice man bungling a euthanasia that did not spare much pain.

“Later. Got to dog traffic. I want to get the big stuff moved in while there’s still light,” said Rodney to Cora, though night was obviously far away, and they were making good time into the hills.

—

The truck crested the ridge into warm light and the big view occurred. “Brakes, right now,” said Cora.

The westward face of the mountain sloped down to the vast brownness of the Anasazi Trough, a crater of rusty land in whose center lay sixty square miles of the world’s newest inland ocean, the Anasazi Sea.

Rodney swung the truck onto the shoulder. Cora sprang to the trailer and fetched her big camera, eight by ten, an antique device whose leather bellows she massaged after each use with neat’s-foot oil. She set up the tripod on the roadside promontory. Sounds of muffled cooing pleasure issued from her photographer’s shroud.

Truly, it was a view to make a visual person moan. The sea’s geometry was striking — a perfect rectangle, two miles wide and thirty miles long. But its water was a stupefying sight: livid red, a giant, tranquil plain the color of cranberry pulp.

The Anasazi was America’s first foray into the new global fashion for do-it-yourself oceans — huge ponds of seawater, piped or channeled into desert depressions as an antidote to sea-level rise. The Libyans pioneered the practice with the great systematic flood of the Qattara Depression in the Cairo desert. The water made one species of fox extinct and thousands of humans rich. Evaporation from the artificial sea rained down on new olive plantations. Villages emerged. Fisherfolk raised families hauling tilefish and mackerel out of a former bowl of hot dirt. American investors were inspired. They organized the condemnation of the Anasazi Trough a hundred miles northwest of Phoenix and ran a huge pipe to the Gulf of Mexico. Six million gallons of seawater flowed in every day, to be boiled and filtered at the grandest desalination facility in the western hemisphere.

A land fever caught hold. The minor city of Port Miracle burgeoned somewhat on the sea’s western shore. On the east coast sat Triton Estates, a gated sanctuary for golfers and owners of small planes. But before the yacht club had sold its last mooring, the young sea began to misbehave. The evaporation clouds were supposed to float eastward to the highlands and wring fresh rain from themselves. Instead, the clouds caught a thermal south, dumping their bounty on the far side of the Mexican border, nourishing a corn and strawberry bonanza in the dry land outside Juárez. With no cloud cover over the Anasazi, the sun went to work and started cooking the sea into a concentrated brine. Meanwhile, even as acreage spiraled toward Tahoe prices, the grid spread: toilets, lawns, and putting greens quietly embezzling the budget of desalinated water that should have been pumped back into the sea to keep salt levels at a healthy poise. By the sea’s tenth birthday, it was fifteen times as saline as the Pacific, dense enough to float small stones. The desalination plant’s reverse-osmosis filters, designed to last five years, started blowing out after six months on the job. The land boom on the Anasazi fell apart when water got so expensive that it was cheaper to flush the commode with half-and-half.

The grocery-store papers spread it around that the great pond wouldn’t just take your money; it would kill you dead. Local news shows ran testimonies of citizens who said they’d seen the lake eat cows and elks and illegal Mexicans, shrieking as they boiled away. Science said the lake was not a man-eater, but the proof was in that gory water, so the stories stayed on prime time for a good number of years.

The real story of the redness was very dull. It was just a lot of ancient, red, one-celled creatures that thrived in high salt. The water authority tested and retested the water and declared the microbes no enemy to man. They were, however, hard on curb appeal. When the sea was only twelve years old, the coastal population had dwindled to ninety-three, a net loss of five thousand souls no longer keen on dwelling in a case of pinkeye inflamed to geologic scale.

The story delighted Cora Booth as meat for her art. She’d long been at work on a group of paintings and photographs about science’s unintended consequences: victims of robot nanoworms designed to eat cancer cells but which got hungry for other parts, lab mice in DNA-grafting experiments who’d developed a crude sign language using the hands of human infants growing from their backs. Once the tenants had fled and the situation on the sea had tilted into flagrant disaster, Cora banged out some grant proposals, withdrew some savings, and leased a home in Triton Estates, a place forsaken by God and movie stars.

—

Salvage vandals had long ago stolen the gates off the entrance to the Booths’ new neighborhood, but a pair of sandstone obelisks topped with unlit gas lamps still stood there, and they still spelled class. Their new home stood on a coastal boulevard named Naiad Lane, a thin track of blond scree. They drove slow past a couple dozen homes, most of them squatly sprawling bunkerish jobs of off-white stucco, all of them abandoned, windows broken or filmed with dust; others half-built, showing lath, gray bones of sun-beaten framing, pennants of torn Tyvek corrugating in the wind. Rodney pulled the truck into the driveway at number thirty-three, a six-bedroom cube with a fancy Spanish pediment on the front. It looked like a crate with a tiara. But just over the road lay the sea. Unruffled by the wind, its water lay still and thick as house paint, and it cast an inviting pink glow on the Booths’ new home.

“I like it,” said Cora, stepping from the truck. “Our personal Alamo.”

“What’s that smell?” said Rodney when they had stepped inside. The house was light and airy, but the air bore a light scent of wharf breath.

“It’s the bricks,” said Cora. “They made them from the thluk they take out of the water at the desal plant. Very clever stuff.”

“It smells like, you know, groins.”

“Learn to love it,” Cora said.

When they had finished the tour, the sun was dying. On the far coast, the meager lights of Port Miracle were winking on. They’d only just started unloading the trailer when Cora’s telephone bleated in her pocket. On the other end was Arn Nevis, the sole property agent in Triton Estates and occupant of one of the four still-inhabited homes in the neighborhood. Cora opened the phone. “Hi, terrific, okay, sure, hello?” she said, then looked at the receiver.

“Who was that?” asked Rodney, sitting on the front stair.

“Nevis, Arn Nevis, the rental turkey,” said Cora. “He just sort of barfed up a dinner invitation—Muhhouse, seven thirty—and hung up on me. Said it’s close, we don’t need to take our truck. Now, how does he know we have a truck? You see somebody seeing us out here, Rod?”

They peered around and saw nothing. Close to land, a fish or something buckled in the red water, other than themselves the afternoon’s sole sign of life.

—

But they drove the Ranger after all, because Rodney had bad ankles. He’d shattered them both in childhood, jumping from a crabapple tree, and even a quarter mile’s stroll would cause him nauseas of pain. So the Booths rode slowly in the truck through a Pompeii of vanished home equity. The ride took fifteen minutes because Cora kept experiencing ecstasies at the photogenic ruin of Triton Estates, getting six angles on a warped basketball rim over a yawning garage, a hot tub brimming and splitting with gallons of dust.

Past the grid of small lots they rolled down a brief grade to number three Naiad. The Nevis estate lay behind high white walls, light spilling upward in a column, a bright little citadel unto itself.

Rodney parked the truck alongside an aged yellow Mercedes. At a locked steel gate, the only breach in the tall wall, he rang the doorbell and they loitered many minutes while the day’s heat fled the air. Finally a wide white girl appeared at the gate. She paused a moment before opening it, appraising them through the bars, studying the dusk beyond, as though expecting unseen persons to spring out of the gloom. Then she turned a latch and swung the door wide. She was sixteen or so, with a face like a left-handed sketch — small teeth, one eye bigger than the other and a half-inch lower on her cheek. Her outfit was a yellow towel, dark across the chest and waist where a damp bathing suit had soaked through. She said her name was Katherine.

“Sorry I’m all sopped,” she said. “They made me quit swimming and be butler. Anyway, they’re out back. You were late so they started stuffing themselves.” Katherine set off for the house, her hard summer heels rasping on the slate path.

—

The Nevis house was a three-wing structure, a staple shape in bird’s-eye view. In the interstice between the staple’s legs lay a small rectangular inlet of the sea, paved and studded with underwater lights; it was serving as the family’s personal pool. At the lip of the swimming area, a trio sat at a patio set having a meal of mussels. At one end of the table slouched Arn Nevis, an old, vast man with a head of white curls, grown long to mask their sparseness, and a great bay window of stomach overhanging his belt. Despite his age and obesity, he wasn’t unattractive; his features bedded in a handsome arrangement of knobs and ridges, nearly cartoonish in their prominence. Arn was in the middle of a contretemps with a thin young man beside him. The old man had his forearms braced on the tabletop, his shoulders hiked forward, as though ready to pounce on his smaller companion. On the far side of the table sat a middle-aged woman, her blouse hoisted discreetly to let an infant at her breast. She stroked and murmured to it, seemingly unaware of the stridency between the men.

“I didn’t come here to get hot-boxed, Arn,” the smaller man was saying, staring at his plate.

“Hut — hoorsh,” stuttered Nevis.

“Excuse me?” the other man said.

Nevis took a long pull on his drink, swallowed, took a breath. “I said, I’m not hot-boxing anybody,” said Nevis, enunciating carefully. “It’s just you suffer from a disease, Kurt. That disease is caution, bad as cancer.”

The woman raised her gaze and, seeing the Booths, smiled widely. She introduced herself as Phyllis Nevis. She was a pretty woman, though her slack jowls and creased dewlap put her close to sixty. If she noticed her visitors’ amazement at seeing a woman of her age putting an infant to suck, she didn’t show it. She smiled and let a blithe music of welcome flow from her mouth: Boy, the Nevises sure were glad to have some new neighbors here in Triton. They’d met Katherine, of course, and there was Arn. The baby having at her was little Nathan, and the other fellow was Kurt Hackberry, a business friend but a real friend, too. Would they like a vodka lemonade? She invited the Booths to knock themselves out on some mussels, tonged from the shallows just off the dock, though Cora noticed there was about a half a portion left. “So sorry we’ve already tucked in,” Phyllis said. “But we always eat at seven thirty, rain or shine.”

Katherine Nevis did not sit with the diners but went to the sea’s paved edge. She dropped her towel and slipped into the glowing water without a splash.

“So you drove down from Boston?” Hackberry asked, plainly keen to quit the conversation with his host.

“We did,” said Rodney. “Five days, actually not so bad once you get past—”

“Yeah, yeah, Boston—” Nevis interrupted with regal vehemence. “And now they’re here, sight unseen, whole thing over the phone, not all this fiddlefucking around.” Nevis coughed into his fist, then reached for a plastic jug of vodka and filled his glass nearly to the rim, a good half-pint of liquor. He drank a third of it at one pull, then turned to Cora, his head bobbing woozily on his dark neck. “Kurt is a Chicken Little. Listens to ninnies who think the Bureau of Land Management is going to choke us off and starve the pond.”

“Why don’t they?” Cora asked.

“Because we’ve got their nursh — their nuh — their nads in a noose is why,” said Nevis. “Because every inch of shoreline they expose means alkali dust blowing down on the goddamned bocce pitches and Little League fields and citrus groves down in the Yuma Valley. They’re all looking up the wrong end of a shotgun, and us right here? We’re perched atop a seat favored by the famous bird, if you follow me.”

Nevis drained his glass and filled it again. He looked at Cora and sucked his teeth. “Hot damn, you’re a pretty woman, Cora. Son of a bitch, it’s like somebody opened a window out here. If I’d known you were so goddamned lovely, I’d have jewed them down on the rent. But then, if I’d known you were hitched up with this joker I’d have charged you double, probably.” He jerked a thumb and aimed a grin of long gray teeth at Rodney. Rodney looked away and pulled at a skin tab on the rim of his ear. “Don’t you think, Phyllis?” said Nevis. “Great bones.”

“Thank you,” Cora said. “I plan to have them bronzed.”

“Humor,” Nevis said flatly, gazing at Cora with sinking red eyes. “It’s that actress you resemble. Murf. Murvek. Urta. Fuck am I talking about? You know, Phyllis, from the goddamn dogsled picture.”

“Drink a few more of those,” said Cora. “I’ll find you a cockroach who looks like Brigitte Bardot.”

“Actually, I hate alcohol, but I get these migraines. They mess with my speech, but liquor helps some,” Nevis said. Here, he sat forward in his chair, peering unabashedly at Cora’s chest. “Good Christ, you got a figure, lady. All natural, am I right?”

Rodney took a breath to say a hard word to Nevis, but while he was trying to formulate the proper phrase Phyllis spoke to her husband in a gentle voice.

“Arny, I’m not sure Cora appreciates—”

“An appreciation of beauty, even if it is sexual beauty, is a great gift,” said Nevis. “Anyone who thinks beauty is not sexual should picture tits on a man.”

“I’m sure you’re right, sweetie, but even so—”

Nevis flashed a brilliant crescent of teeth at his wife and bent to the table to kiss her hand. “Right here, the most wonderful woman on earth. The kindest and most beautiful and I married her.” Nevis raised his glass to his lips. His gullet pumped three times while he drank.

“His headaches are horrible,” said Phyllis.

“They are. Pills don’t work but vodka does. Fortunately, it doesn’t affect me. I’ve never been drunk in my life. Anyway, you two are lucky you showed up at this particular juncture,” Nevis announced through a belch. “Got a petition for a water-rights deal on Birch Creek. Hundred thousand gallons a day. Fresh water. Pond’ll be blue again this time next year.”

This news alarmed Cora, whose immediate thought was that her work would lose its significance if the story of the Anasazi Sea ended happily. “I like the color,” Cora said. “It’s exciting.”

Nevis refilled his glass. “You’re an intelligent woman, Cora, and you don’t believe the rumors and the paranoia peddlers on the goddamned news,” he said. “Me, I’d hate to lose it, except you can’t sell a fucking house with the lake how it is. Of course, nobody talks about the health benefits of that water. My daughter?” He jerked his thumb at Katherine, still splashing in the pool, and lowered his voice. “Before we moved in here, you wouldn’t have believed her complexion. Like a lasagna, I’m serious. Look at her now! Kill for that skin. Looks like a marble statue. Hasn’t had a zit in years, me or my wife neither, not one blackhead, nothing. Great for the bones, too. I’ve got old-timers who swim here three times a week, swear it’s curing their arthritis. Of course, nobody puts that on the news. Anyway, what I’m saying is, buy now, because once this Birch Creek thing goes through, this place is going to be a destination. Gonna put the back nine on the golf course. Shopping district, too, as soon as Kurt and a few other moneymen stop sitting on their wallets like a bunch of broody hens.”

Nevis clouted Hackberry on the upper arm with more force than was jolly. Hackberry looked lightly terrified and went into a fit of vague motions with his head, shaking and nodding, saying “Now, Kurt, now, Kurt” with the look of a panicked child wishing for the ground to open up beneath him.

—

When he had lapped the fluid from the final mussel shell, Arn Nevis was showing signs of being drunk, if he was to be taken at his word, for the first time in his life. He rose from the table and stood swaying. “Clothes off, people,” he said, fumbling with his belt.

Phyllis smiled and kept her eyes on her guests. “We have tea, and we have coffee and homemade peanut brittle, too.”

“Phyllis, shut your mouth,” said Nevis. “Swim time. Cora, get up. Have a dip.”

“I don’t swim,” said Cora.

“You can’t?” said Nevis.

“No,” said Cora, which was true.

“Dead man could swim in the water. Nathan can. Give me the baby, Phyllis.” He lurched for his wife’s breast, and with a sudden move, Phyllis clutched the baby to her and swiveled brusquely away from her husband’s hand. “Touch him and I’ll kill you,” Phyllis hissed. Nathan awoke and began to mewl. Nevis shrugged and lumbered toward the water, shedding his shirt, then his pants, mercifully retaining the pair of yellowed briefs he wore. He dove messily but began swimming surprisingly brisk and powerful laps, his whalelike huffing loud and crisp in the silence of the night. But after three full circuits to the far end of the inlet and back, the din of his breathing stopped. Katherine Nevis, who’d been sulking under the pergola with a video game, began to shriek. The guests leaped up. Arn Nevis had sunk seven feet or so below the surface, suspended from a deeper fall by the hypersaline water. In the red depths’ wavering lambency, Nevis seemed to be moving, though in fact he was perfectly still.

Rodney kicked off his shoes and jumped in. With much effort, he hauled the large man to the concrete steps ascending to the patio and, helped by Cora and Hackberry, heaved him into the cool air. Water poured from Rodney’s pockets. He put his palms to the broad saucer of Nevis’s sternum and rammed hard. The drowned man sputtered.

“Wake up. Wake up,” said Rodney. Nevis did not answer. Rodney slapped Nevis on the cheek, and Nevis opened his eyes to a grouchy squint.

“What day is it?” asked Rodney. By way of an answer, Nevis expelled lung water down his chin.

“Who’s that?” Rodney pointed to Phyllis. “Tell me her name.”

Nevis regarded his wife. “Big dummy,” he said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Rodney said. “Who’s that?” He pointed at Nevis’s infant son.

Nevis pondered the question. “Little dummy,” he said, and began to laugh, which everybody took to mean that he had returned, unharmed, to life.

Kurt Hackberry and Katherine led Arn inside while Phyllis poured forth weeping apologies and panting gratitude to the Booths. “No harm done. Thank God he’s all right. I’m glad I was here to lend a hand,” Rodney said, and was surprised to realize that he meant it. Despite the evening’s calamities, his heart was warm and filled with an electric vigor of life. The electricity stayed with him all the way back to number thirty-three Naiad Lane, where, in the echoing kitchen, Rodney made zestful love to his wife for the first time in seven weeks.

—

Rodney woke before the sun was up. The maritime fetor of the house’s salt walls and recollections of Arn Nevis’s near death merged into a general unease that would not let him sleep. Cora stirred beside him. She peered out the window, yawned, and said that she wanted to photograph the breaking of the day. “I’ll come with you,” Rodney said, and felt childish to realize that he didn’t want to be left in the house alone.

Cora was after large landscapes of the dawn hitting Triton Estates and the western valley, so the proper place to set up was on the east coast, in Port Miracle, with the sun behind the lens. After breakfast they loaded the Ford with Cora’s equipment and made the ten-minute drive. They parked at the remnant of Port Miracle’s public beach and removed their shoes. Most of the trucked-in sand had blown away, revealing a hard marsh of upthrust minerals, crystalline and translucent, like stepping on warm ice. Rodney lay on the blanket they had brought while Cora took some exposures of the dawn effects. The morning sky involved bands of iridescence, the lavender-into-blue-gray spectrum of a bull pigeon’s throat. Cora made plates of the light’s progress, falling in a thickening portion on the dark house-key profile of the western hills, then staining the white homes scattered along the shore. She yelled a little at the moment of dawn’s sudden ignition when red hit red and the sea lit up, flooding the whole valley with so much immediate light you could almost hear the whong! of a ball field’s vapor bulbs going on.

“Rodney, how about you go swimming for me?”

“I don’t have a suit.”

“Who cares? It’s a ghost town.”

“I don’t want to get all sticky.”

“Shit, Rodney, come on. Help me out.”

Rodney stripped grudgingly and walked into the water. Even in the new hours of the day, the water was hot and alarmingly solid, like paddling through Crisco. It seared his pores and mucous parts, but his body had a thrilling buoyancy in the thick water. A single kick of the legs sent him gliding like a hockey puck. And despite its lukewarmth and viscosity, the water was wonderfully vivifying. His pulse surged. Rodney stroked and kicked until he heard his wife yelling for him to swim back into camera range. He turned around, gamboled for her camera some, and stepped into the morning, stripped clean by the water, with a feeling of having been peeled to new young flesh. Rodney did not bother to dress. He carried the blanket to the shade of a disused picnic awning. Cora lay there with him, and then they drowsed until the sun was well up in the sky.

Once the drab glare of the day set in, the Booths breakfasted together on granola bars and instant coffee from the plastic crate of food they’d packed for the ride from Massachusetts.

Cora wished to tour Port Miracle on foot. Rodney, with his bad ankles, said he would be happy to spend the morning in his sandy spot, taking in the late-summer sun with a Jack London paperback. So Cora went off with her camera, first to the RV lot, nearly full, the rows of large white vehicles like raw loaves of bread. She walked through a rear neighborhood of kit cottages, built of glass and grooved plywood and tin. She photographed shirtless children, Indian brown, kicking a ball in a dirt lot, and a leathery soul on a sunblasted Adirondack chair putting hot sauce into his beer. She went to the boat launch, where five pink women, all of manatee girth, were boarding a pontoon craft. Cora asked to take their picture but they giggled and shied behind their hands and Cora moved on.

At the far end of town stood the desalination facility, a cube of steel and concrete intubated with ducts and billowing steam jacks. Cora humped it for the plant, her tripod clacking on her shoulder. After calling into the intercom at the plant’s steel door, Cora was greeted by a gray-haired, bearded man wearing something like a cellophane version of a fisherman’s hard-weather kit. Plastic pants, shirt, hat, plus gloves and boot gaiters and a thick dust mask hanging around his neck. His beard looked like a cloudburst, though he’d carefully imprisoned it in a hairnet so as to tuck it coherently within his waterproof coat.

“Whoa,” said Cora, taken aback. Recovering herself, she explained that she was new to the neighborhood and was hoping to find a manager or somebody who might give her a tour of the plant.

“I’m it!” the sheathed fellow told her, a tuneful courtliness in his voice. “Willard Kamp. And it would be my great pleasure to show you around.”

Cora lingered on the threshold, taking in Kamp’s protective gear. “Is it safe, though, if I’m just dressed like this?”

“That’s what the experts would tell you,” said Kamp, and laughed, leading Cora to a bank of screens showing the brine’s progress through a filter-maze. Then he ushered her up a flight of stairs to a platform overlooking the concrete lagoons where the seawater poured in. He showed her the flocculating chambers where they added ferric chloride and sulfuric acid and chlorine and the traveling rakes that brought the big solids to the surface in a rumpled brown sludge. He showed her how the water traveled through sand filters, and then through diatomaceous earth capsules to further strain contaminants, before they hit the big reverse-osmosis trains that filtered the last of the impurities.

“Coming into here,” Kamp said, slapping the side of a massive fiberglass storage tank, “is raw water. Nothing in here but pure H’s and O’s.”

“Just the good stuff, huh?” Cora said.

“Well, not for our purposes,” Kamp said. “It’s no good for us in its pure form. We have to gentle it down with additives, acid salts, gypsum. Raw, it’s very chemically aggressive. It’s so hungry for minerals to bind with, it’ll eat a copper pipe in a couple of weeks.”

This idea appealed to Cora. “What happens if you drink it? Will it kill you? Burn your skin?”

Kamp laughed, a wheezing drone. “Not at all. It’s an enemy to metal pipes and soap lather, but it’s amiable to humankind.”

“So what’s with all the hazmat gear?” asked Cora, gesturing at Kamp’s clothes.

Kamp laughed again. “I’m overfastidious, the preoccupation of a nervous mind.”

“Nervous about what?”

His wiry brow furrowed and his lips pursed in half-comic consternation. “Well, it’s a funny lake, isn’t it, Cora? I am very interested in the archaebacteria, the little red gentlemen out there.”

“But it’s the same stuff in fall foliage and flamingos,” Cora said, brandishing some knowledge she’d picked up from a magazine. “Harmless.”

Kamp reached into his raincoat to scratch at something in his beard. “Probably so. Though they’re also very old. Two billion years. They were swimming around before there was oxygen in the atmosphere, if you can picture that. You’ve heard, I guess, the notion that that stuff in our pond is pretty distinguished crud, possibly the source of all life on earth.”

“I hadn’t.”

“Well, they say there’s something to it,” said Kamp. “Now, it’s quite likely that I haven’t got the sense God gave a monkey wrench, but it seems to me that a tadpole devious enough to put a couple of million species on the planet is one I’d rather keep on the outside of my person.”

—

Of Port Miracle’s eighty dwellers, nearly all were maroon ancients. They were unwealthy people, mainly, not far from death, so they found the dead city a congenial place to live the life of a lizard, moving slow and taking sun. But they were not community-center folk. Often there was public screaming on the boulevard, sometimes fights with brittle fists when someone got too close to someone else’s wife or yard. Just the year before, in a further blow to the Anasazi’s image in the press, a retired playwright, age eighty-one, levered open the door of a Winnebago parked on his lot and tortured a pair of tourists with some rough nylon rope and a soup-heating coil.

According to the rules of the Nevis household, young Katherine was not permitted past the sandstone obelisks at the neighborhood’s mouth. But the morning after the dinner party her father was still abed with a pulsing brain, and would likely be that way all day. Knowing this, Katherine slipped through the gate after breakfast, wheeled her little 97 cc minibike out of earshot, and set a course to meet two pals of hers, Claude Hull and Denny Peebles, on the forbidden coast.

She found them by the public pier, and they greeted her with less commotion than she’d have liked. They were busy squabbling over some binoculars through which they were leering at the fat women out at sea on the pontoon barge.

“Let me look,” Claude begged Denny, who had snatched the Bausch & Lombs, an unfair thing. The Bausch & Lombs belonged to Claude’s father, who owned Port Miracle’s little credit union and liked to look at birds.

Denny sucked his lips and watched the women, herded beneath the boat’s canopy shade, their bikinis almost wholly swallowed by their hides. They took turns getting in the water via a scuba ladder that caused the boat to lurch comically when one of them put her bulk on it. The swimming lady would contort her face in agonies at the stinging water while her colleagues leaned over the gunwale, shouting encouragement, bellies asway. After a minute or two, the others would help the woman aboard and serve her something in a tall chilled glass and scrub at her with implements not legible through the Bausch & Lombs. The women were acting on a rumor that the sea’s bacteria devoured extra flesh. It had the look of a cult.

“Big white witches,” whispered Denny.

“Come on, let me hold ’em, let me look,” said Claude, a lean, tweaky child whose widespread eyes and bulging forehead made it a mercy that he, like the other children who lived out here, attended ninth grade over the computer. Denny, the grocer’s child, had shaggy black hair, a dark tan, and very long, very solid arms for a boy of fourteen. “Fuck off,” said Denny, throwing an elbow. “Get Katherine to show you hers. You’ll like ’em if you like it when a girl’s titty looks like a carrot.”

“I’m not showing Claude,” said Katherine.

In the sand beside Denny lay a can of Scotchgard and a bespattered paper bag. Katherine reached for it.

“Mother may I?” Denny said.

“Bite my fur,” said Katherine. She sprayed a quantity of the Scotchgard into the bag, then put it to her mouth and inhaled.

“Let me get some of that, Kathy,” Claude said.

“Talk to Denny,” said Katherine. “It’s not my can.”

“Next time I’m gonna hook up my camera to this thing, get these puddings on film,” said Denny, who was lying on his stomach in the sand, the binoculars propped to his face. “Somebody scratch my back for me. Itches like a motherfucker.”

“Sucks for you,” said Katherine, whose skull now felt luminous and red and full of perfect blood.

“You scratch it for me, Claude,” said Denny. “Backstroke, hot damn. Look at those pies. Turn this way, honey. Are you pretty in your face?”

Just last week, for no reason at all, Denny Peebles had wedged Claude Hull’s large head between his knees and dragged him up and down Dock Street while old men laughed. Claude loved and feared Denny, so he reached out a hand and scratched at Denny’s spine.

“Lower,” Denny said, and Claude slid his hand down to the spot between Denny’s sacral dimples, which were lightly downed with faint hair. “Little lower. Get in the crack, man. That’s where the itch is at.”

Claude laughed nervously. “You want me to scratch your ass for you?”

“It itches, I told you. Go ahead. It’s clean.”

“No way I’m doing that, man. You scratch it.”

“I can’t reach it. I’m using my hands right now,” said Denny. “I’m trying to see these fatties.”

Katherine sprayed another acrid cloud into the bag and sucked it in. Dust clung in an oval around her mouth, giving the effect of a chimpanzee’s muzzle.

“Just do it, Claude,” Katherine said. “He likes it. He said it’s clean. You don’t believe him?”

Denny took the glasses from his face to look at the smaller boy. “Yeah, you don’t believe me, Claude? What, I’m a liar, Claude?”

“No, no, I do.” And so Claude reached into Denny’s pants and scratched, and this intimate grooming felt very good to Denny in a hardly sexual way, so to better concentrate on the sensation, he rested the binoculars and held his hand out for the can of Scotchgard and the paper bag.

—

After an hour on the beach, Rodney put a flat stone in his paperback, retrieved his pants, and got up to stretch his legs. He had the thought that strolling through the still water might cushion his ankles somewhat, so he waded in and set off up the cove. Forbidding as the water looked, it teemed with life. Carp fingerlings nibbled his shins. Twice, a crab scuttled over his bare toes. He strolled on until he reached the pier, a chocolate-colored structure built of creosoted wood. Rodney spied a clump of shells clinging to the pilings. These were major oysters, the size of cactus pads. He tried to yank one free, but it would not surrender to his hand. It was such a tempting prize that he waded all the way back to the truck and got the tire iron from under the seat. Knee-deep in the water, he worked open a shell. The flesh inside was pale gray and large as a goose egg. That much oyster meat would cost you thirty dollars in a Boston restaurant. The flesh showed no signs of dubious pinkness. He sniffed it — no bad aromas. He spilled it onto his tongue, chewing three times to get it down. The meat was clean and briny. He ate two more and felt renewed. Wading back to shore, a few smaller mollusks in hand, he peered under the wharf and spotted Katherine Nevis on the beach with her friends. The desolation of the town had cast a shadow on the morning, and it cheered Rodney to see those children out there enjoying the day. It would be unneighborly, Rodney thought, not to say hello.

When Rodney got within fifty yards, Denny and Claude looked up, panicked to see a shirtless fellow coming at them with a tire iron, an ugly limp in his gait. They took off in a kind of skulking lope and left Katherine on the beach. Obviously Rodney had caught them in the middle of some teenage mischief, and he chuckled to see the boys scamper. Katherine cupped a hand over the beige matter on her face and looked at her toes as Rodney approached. He wondered about the grime, but instead asked after her dad. “I dunno,” she said. “I’m sure he’s doing awesome.”

Rodney nudged the Scotchgard can with his foot. “Stainproofing the beach?” he asked. Katherine said nothing. “Whatever happened to just raiding your parents’ booze?”

“He has to drive all the way to Honerville to get it,” she said. “He keeps it locked up, even from my mom.”

Rodney put the tire iron in his belt and dropped his oysters. He took out his handkerchief and reached for her, thinking to swab her face. She shrank away from him. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she said. “Don’t, I swear.”

“Easy, easy, nobody’s doing anything,” Rodney said, though he could feel the color in his cheeks. “It’s just you look like you need a shave.”

Cautiously, a little shamefully, she took the handkerchief and daubed at her lips while he watched. The girl was conscious of being looked at, and she swabbed herself with small ladylike motions, making no headway on the filth.

“Here,” said Rodney, very gently, taking the hanky from her damp hand. He sucked awhile at the bitter cloth, then he knelt and cradled the girl’s jaw in his palm, rubbing at her mouth and chin. “Look out, you’re gonna take off all my skin,” she said, making a cranky child’s grimace, though she didn’t pull away. He heard her grunting lightly in her throat at the pleasure of being tended to. A smell was coming off her, a fragrance as warm and wholesome as rising bread. As he scrubbed the girl’s dirty face, he put his nose close to her, breathing deeply and as quietly as he could. He had mostly purged the gum from Katherine’s upper lip when she jerked away from him and hearkened anxiously to the sound of a slowing car. Arn Nevis’s eggnog Mercedes pulled into the gravel lot. He got out and strode very quickly down the shingle.

“Hi, hi!” Nevis cried. His hair was in disarray, and his hands trembled in a Parkinsonian fashion. In the hard noonday light, he looked antique and unwell. Rodney saw, too, that Nevis had a fresh pink scar running diagonally across his forehead, stitch pocks dotting its length. Rodney marveled a little that just the night before, he’d felt some trepidation in the big man’s presence. “Kath — Kuh, Kutch.” Nevis stopped, marshaled his breathing, and spoke. “Kuh, come here, sweetie. Been looking for you. Mom’s mad. Come now, huk — honey. See if I can’t talk your mom out of striping your behind.”

In his shame, Arn did not look at Rodney, which at once amused and angered the younger man. “Feeling okay, there, Arn?”

“Oh, shuh-sure,” Nevis said, staring at a point on Rodney’s abdomen. “Thank God it’s Friday.”

“It’s Thursday,” Rodney said.

“Oysters,” the old man said, looking at Rodney’s haul where he’d dropped it on the ground. “Oh, they’re nice.”

Rodney crouched and held them out to Nevis in cupped hands. Nevis looked at the oysters and then at Rodney. His was the manner of a craven dog, wanting that food but fearing that he might get a smack if he went for it. “Go on,” said Rodney.

With a quick move, Nevis grabbed a handful. His other hand seized Katherine’s arm. “Alrighty, and we’ll see you soon,” said Nevis over his shoulder, striding to his car.

—

The days found an agreeable tempo in Cora and Rodney’s new home. Each morning they rose with the sun. Each morning, Rodney swam far into the sea’s broads, then returned to the house, where he would join Cora for a shower, then downstairs to cook and eat a breakfast of tremendous size. When the dishes were cleared, Cora would set off to gather pictures. Rodney would spend two hours on the computer to satisfy the advertising firm in Boston for which he still worked part-time, and then he’d do as he pleased. His was a life any sane person would envy, yet Rodney was not at ease. He felt bloated with a new energy. He had never been an ambitious person, but lately he had begun to feel that he was capable of resounding deeds. He had dreams in which he conquered famous wildernesses, and he would wake up with a lust for travel. Yet he was irritable on days when he had to leave the valley for provisions not sold in Port Miracle’s pitiable grocery store. One day he told Cora that he might quit his job and start a company, though he grew angry when Cora forced him to admit that he had no idea what the company might produce. For the first time in his life, he resented Cora, begrudged the years he’d spent at her heel, and how he’d raised no fuss when she’d changed her mind after five years of marriage and said she didn’t want children after all. His mind roved to other women, to the Nevis girl, a young thing with a working womb, someone who’d shut up when he talked.

When Cora left him the truck, he often went fishing off the wharf at Port Miracle, always coming home with several meals’ worth of seafood iced down in his creel. He would wait until he got home to clean the catch so that Cora could photograph the haul intact.

“Ever seen one of these?” Cora asked him one night. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, whose screen showed a broad fish ablur with motion on the beach. “This thing was kind of creeping around in the mud down by that shed where the oldsters hang out.”

“Huh,” Rodney said, kissing Cora’s neck and slipping a hand into her shirt. “Snakehead, probably. Or a mudskipper.”

“It’s not. It’s flat, like a flounder,” she said. “Quit a second. I wish I could have kept it, but this kid came along and bashed it and took off. Look.”

She scrolled to a picture of Claude Hull braining the crawling fish with an aluminum bat.

“Mm,” said Rodney, raising his wife’s shirt and with the other hand going for her fly.

“Could you quit it?”

“Why?”

“For one thing, I’m trying to deal with my fucking work. For another, I’m kind of worn out. You’ve gotten me a little raw, going at me all the time.”

Sulking, he broke off his advances and picked up his phone from the counter. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll call the neighbors. Get them over here to eat this stuff. We owe them a feed.”

He stepped outdoors and called the Nevises, hoping to hear Katherine’s hoarse little crow timbre on the other end. No one answered, so Rodney phoned two more times. He had watched the road carefully that morning and knew the family was home.

In fact, Katherine and her mother were out on a motorboat cruise while Arn Nevis paced his den, watching the telephone ring. He did not want to answer it. His trouble with words was worsening. Unless he loosened his tongue with considerable amounts of alcohol, the organ was lazy and intractable. In his mind, he could still formulate a phrase with perfect clarity, but his mouth no longer seemed interested in doing his mind’s work and would utter a slurring of approximate sounds. When Nevis finally answered the telephone and heard Rodney’s invitation, he paused to silently rehearse the words I’m sorry, but Phyllis is feeling a bit under the weather. But Nevis’s tongue, the addled translator, wouldn’t take the order. “Ilish feen urtha” and then a groan was what Rodney heard before the line went dead.

—

Until recently, the headaches Arn Nevis suffered had been slow pursuers. A stroll through the neighborhood would clear the bad blood from his temples and he’d have nearly a full day of peace. But lately, if he sat still for five minutes, the glow would commence behind his brow. He would almost drool thinking about a good thick augur to put a hole between his eyes and let the steam out of his head. After five minutes of that, if he didn’t have a bottle around to kill it, white pain would bleach the vision from his eyes.

The pain was heating up again when he hung up on Rodney Booth, so he went out through the gate and strolled up to the dry tract slated to become nine new putting greens once the water lease on Birch Creek went through. He set about measuring and spray-painting orange hazard lines in the dirt where a ditcher would cut irrigation channels. Nevis owned most of this land himself, and he was tallying his potential profits when motion in the shadow of a yerba santa bush caught his eye. Scorpions, gathered in a ring, a tiny pocket mouse quaking at the center of them. The scenario was distasteful. He raised his boot heel and made to crush the things, but they nimbly skirted the fat shadow of his foot. The circle parted and the mouse shot out of sight.

He glanced at his watch. Four thirty. In half an hour, he had an appointment to show number eight Amphitrite Trail to a prospective buyer. The flawless sky and the light breeze were hopeful portents. Arn felt confident that on this day, he would make a good sale. To celebrate the prospect, Arn took the quart of peppermint schnapps from his knapsack, but then it occurred to him to save it, to drink it very quickly just before the client’s arrival for maximum benefit to his difficult tongue.

Eight Amphitrite was a handsome structure, a three-thousand-square-foot Craftsman bungalow, the only one like it in the neighborhood. The plot was ideally situated, up on high ground at the end of the road with no houses behind it. Sitting there on the front steps, Nevis felt a particular comfort in the place, an enlargement of the safe feeling he experienced in restaurants when he found a spot with his back to the wall and a good view of the door. Nevis checked his watch. Ten of five. He opened the bottle and tipped it back. He stretched his tongue, whispering a silent catechism: “Radiant-heat floors, four-acre lot, build to suit.”

Arn had just finished the last of the schnapps when a Swedish station wagon pulled into the drive. A young man got out, tall, with soft features, combed sandy hair, and a cornflower-blue shirt rolled to the elbows. He watched Arn Nevis pick himself up off the stairs and come toward him with his hand out. “Mr. Nevis?” the young man had to ask, for Arn did not much resemble the photograph on his website. His white shirt was badly wrinkled and yellowed with perspiration stains, and his hair looked like a patch of trodden weeds. His left eye was badly bloodshot and freely weeping.

“Urt! Guh,” Arn Nevis said, then paused in his tracks, opening and closing his mouth as though priming a dry pump. The client watched him, aghast, as though Nevis was some unhinged derelict impersonating the man he’d come to meet. “Guh — good day!” Nevis said at last, and having expelled that first plug of language, the rest flowed out of him easily. “Mister Mills? It’s an absolute delight, and I’m so glad you could pay us a visit on this fabulous day.”

“Daniel, please,” the young man said, still looking guarded. But the anxiety slowly drained from Mills’s features as Nevis rolled into a brisk and competent disquisition on eight Amphitrite’s virtues. “That nice overlay on the foundation? That’s not plastic, friend. It’s hand-mortared fieldstone harvested out of this very land. Clapboards are engineered, and so’s the roofing shake, so eat your heart out, termites, and fifteen years to go on the warranty on each.”

Nevis was ushering Mills over the threshold when his pitch halted in mid-stream. Nevis gaped at the empty living room, his mouth open, his eyes stretched with wonder. “My gosh,” he said.

“What?” asked Daniel Mills.

“My gosh, Ted, this is that same house, isn’t it?” Nevis said, laughing. “From Columbus. When you and Rina were still married.”

Mills looked at Arn a moment. “It’s Daniel. I–I don’t know any Rina.”

Nevis’s eyes moved in their sockets. He began to laugh. “Jesus Christ, what the hell am I saying?” he said. “My apologies. I’ve had this fever.”

“Sure,” said Mills, taking a step back.

“So over yonder is a galley kitchen,” said Nevis, leading the way. “Poured concrete counters, and a built-in—”

“Excuse me, you’ve got something here,” murmured Mills, indicating Nevis’s upper lip. Nevis raised a finger to his face and felt the warm rush of blood pouring from his nose, dripping from his chin, landing in nickel-size droplets on the parquet floor.

—

By his sixth week in Triton Estates, an exuberant insomnia assailed Rodney Booth. While his wife snored beside him, Rodney lay awake. His body quivered with unspent energy. His blood felt hot and incandescent. With each stroke of his potent heart, he saw the red traceries of his arteries filling with gleeful sap, bearing tidings of joy and vigor to his cells. His muscles quaked. His loins tittered, abloat with happy news. His stomach, too, disturbed his rest. Even after a dinner of crass size, Rodney would lie in bed, his gut groaning as though he hadn’t eaten in days. He would rise and go downstairs, but he could not find foods to gratify his hunger. Whether cold noodles, or a plate of costly meats and cheeses, all the foods in his house had a dull, exhausted flavor, and he would eat in joyless frustration, as though forced to suffer conversation with a hideous bore.

Exercise was the only route to sleep for Rodney. His ankles plagued him less these days, and after dinner he would rove for hours in the warm autumn dark. Some nights he strolled the shore, soothed to hear the distant splashes of leaping night fish. Sometimes he went into the hills where the houses stopped. The land rose and fell before him, merging in the far distance with the darkness of the sky, unbroken by lights of civilization. A feeling of giddy affluence would overtake Rodney as he scrambled along. All that space, and nobody’s but his! It was like the dream where you find a silver dollar on the sidewalk, then another, then another, until you look up to see a world strewn with free riches.

On these strolls, his thoughts often turned to Katherine Nevis, that fine, wretched girl imprisoned at the end of Naiad Lane behind the high white wall. He recalled the smell of her, her comely gruntings that day on the shore, the tender heft of her underjaw in his palm. One evening the memory of her became so intolerable that it stopped him in his tracks, and he paused between the dunes in an intimate little hollow where dust of surprising fineness gathered in plush drifts.

Rodney stooped to caress the soft soil, warm in his hand. “Listen, you and me are in a predicament here, Katherine,” he explained to the dust. “Oh, you don’t, huh? Fine. You stay right there. I’ll get it myself.”

With that, he unbuckled his pants and fell to zealously raping the dirt. The sensation was not pleasurable, and the fierceness of the act did not sit right with Rodney’s notion of himself, but in the end he felt satisfied that he had completed a job of grim though necessary work.

Floured with earth, he made his way to the water and swam vigorously for twenty minutes. Then he crawled into bed beside his wife and slept until the sun rose, minding not at all the pricking of the soft sheets against his salty skin.

—

The following night Rodney ranged along the shore and back up into the hills, yet his step was sulky and his heart was low. As with the pantry foods he did not care to eat, that evening the great open land had become infected with a kindred dreariness. Squatting on a boulder, Rodney gazed at the column of clean light spilling from the enclosure of the Nevis home. A breathless yearning caught hold. The desert’s wealth of joy and deliverance seemed to have slipped down the rills and drainages, slid past the dark houses, leached south along the hard pink berm, and concentrated in the glare above the one place in the Anasazi Basin where Rodney was not free to roam. He stood and walked.

Rodney told himself he would not enter the Nevis property. The notion was to loiter at the gate, have a glimpse of the courtyard, sport a little with the pull of the place, the fun of holding two magnets at slight bay. And perhaps Rodney would have kept his promise to himself had he not spotted, bolted to the top of a length of conduit bracketed to the wall, a fan of iron claws, put there to discourage shimmiers. The device offended Rodney as an emblem of arrogance and vanity. Who was Arn Nevis to make his home a thorny fort? The spikes were pitiful. A determined crone could have gotten past them. Rodney jumped and grasped in either hand the two outermost claws. With a strength and ease that surprised him, he vaulted himself over the hazard and onto the lip of the wall.

He dropped onto the flagstones and the agony in his ankles caused his lungs to briefly freeze with pain. Rodney held his breath, waiting to hear a barking dog or an alarm, but heard nothing. Beyond the batteries of floodlights, only a single window glowed in the far corner of the house. Rodney waited. Nothing stirred.

Crouched in the courtyard, a new oil seemed to rise in Rodney’s joints. His body felt incapable of noisy or graceless moves. He removed the screen from an open window and found himself in the Nevises’ living room. He paused at a grand piano and rested his fingers in a chord on the sheeny keys. The temptation to sound the notes was strong, so electrified was Rodney that the house was under his authority. The fragrance in the room was distasteful and exciting — an aroma of milk and cologne — and it provoked in him an unaccountable hunger. He padded to the Nevises’ kitchen. In the cold light of the open refrigerator, Rodney unwrapped and ate a wedge of Gruyère cheese. Then he had a piece of unsweetened baking chocolate, which he washed down with a can of Arn’s beer. Still, his stomach growled. Under a shroud of crumpled tinfoil, he found a mostly intact ham, and he gnawed the sugary crust and then went at it with his jaws and teeth, taking bites the size of tennis balls, glutting his throat and clearing the clog with a second, then a third can of his neighbor’s beer.

When he had at last had all he wanted, Rodney’s breathing had become labored. He was dewed in hot sweat. His bladder, too, was full, but his feeling of satiety there in the kitchen was so delicate and golden that he did not feel like shifting an inch to find a toilet. So he lowered his zipper and relished the sound of fluid hitting terracotta tiles, which mingled with the keen scent of his own urine in a most ideal way.

He had only just shut the refrigerator door when a white motion in the window caught his eye. Who was it but Katherine Nevis, the darling prisoner of the house? She plodded across the rear courtyard, on flat, large girl’s feet, heading for the little inlet. She shed her robe, and Rodney was unhappy to see that even at that private hour of the evening, she still bothered to wear a bathing suit. She dove, and the water accepted her with the merest ripple. For many minutes, Rodney watched her sporting and glorying in the pool, diving and breaching, white, dolphinlike exposures of her skin bright against the dark red tide. When he could put it off no longer, Rodney stepped through the sliding door and went to her.

“Howdy!” he called, very jolly. She whirled in the water, only her head exposed. Rodney walked to the edge of the pool. “Hi there!” he said. She said nothing, but sank a little, gathering the water to her with sweeping arms, taking it into her mouth, pushing it gently over her chin, breathing it, nearly. She said nothing. Rodney put his fists on his hips and grinned at the surveillant moon. “Hell of a spotlight. Good to swim by, huh?”

Her eyes were dark but not fearful. “How’d you get in here?” the girl said wetly.

“Oh, I had some business with your dad,” he said.

“My dad,” she repeated, her face a suspicious little fist.

“Maybe I’ll get in there with you,” Rodney said, raising his shirt.

“Do what you like,” the girl said. “I’m going inside.” He put a hand out. She took it and pulled herself into the night air. He picked up her robe. Draping it on her, he caught her sourdough aroma, unmasked by the sulfur smell of the sea. His heart was going, his temples on the bulge.

“Stay,” he said. “Come on, the moon’s making a serious effort here. It’s a real once-in-a-month kind of moon.”

She smiled, then stopped. She reached into the pocket of her robe and retrieved a cigarette. “Okay. By the way, if I yelled even a little bit, my mom would come out here. She’s got serious radar. She listens to everything and never sleeps. Seriously, how’d you get through the gate?”

Rodney stretched his smile past his dogteeth. A red gas was coming into his eyes. “She’s one great lady, your mom.” He put a hand on the girl’s hip. She pushed against it only slightly, then sat with her cigarette on a tin-and-rubber chaise longue to light it. He sat beside her and took the cigarette, holding it downwind so as to smell her more purely. He made some mouth sounds in her ear. She closed her eyes. “Gets dull out here, I bet,” he said.

“Medium,” she said. She took back the ocher short of her roll-your-own. He put his hand on her knee, nearly nauseated with an urge. The girl frowned at his fingers. “Be cool, hardcore,” she said.

“Why don’t you…how about let’s…how about…”

“Use your words,” she said.

He put his hand on the back of her head and tried to pull her to his grasping lips. She broke the clasp. “What makes you think I want to kiss your mouth?”

“Come on,” he groaned, nearly weeping. “Goddamn, you’re beautiful.”

“Shit,” the girl said.

“You are a beautiful woman,” said Rodney.

“My legs are giant,” she said. “I’ve got a crappy face.”

“Come here,” he said. He lipped some brine from her jaw.

“Don’t,” she said, panting some. “You don’t love me yet.”

Rodney murmured that he did love Katherine Nevis very much. He kissed her, and she didn’t let him. He kissed her again and she did. Then he was on her and for a time the patio was silent save the sound of their breath and the crying of the chaise’s rubber slats.

He’d gotten her bikini bottoms down around her knees when the girl went stiff. “Quit,” she whispered harshly. He pretended not to hear her. “Shit, goddammit, stop!” She gave him a hard shove, and then Rodney saw the problem. Arn Nevis was over by the house, hunched and peering from the blue darkness of the eave. Nevis was perfectly still, his chin raised slightly, mouth parted in expectancy. His look changed when he realized he’d been spotted. From what Rodney could tell, it wasn’t outrage on the old man’s features, just mild sadness that things had stopped before they’d gotten good.

—

Three mornings later, Rodney Booth looked out his bedroom window to see a speeding ambulance dragging a curtain of dust all the way up Naiad Lane to the Nevis home. He watched some personnel in white tote a gurney through the gate. Then Rodney went downstairs and poured himself some cereal and turned the television on.

Later that afternoon, as Rodney was leaving for the wharf with his fishing pole and creel, Cora called to him. She’d just gotten off the phone with Phyllis Nevis, who’d shared the sad news that her husband was in the hospital, comatose with a ruptured aneurysm, not expected to recover. Rodney agreed that this was terrible. Then he shouldered his pole and set out for the wharf.

The day after the ambulance bore Arn Nevis away, Rodney began to suffer vague qualmings of the conscience relating to the Nevis family. He had trouble pinpointing the source of the unease. It was not sympathy for Nevis himself. There was nothing lamentable about an old man heading toward death in his sleep. And his only regret about his tender grapplings with the sick man’s daughter was that they hadn’t concluded properly. Really, the closest Rodney could come to what was bothering him was some discomfort over his behavior with Phyllis Nevis’s ham. He pictured mealtime in her house, the near widow serving her grieving children the fridge’s only bounty, a joint of meat, already hard used by unknown teeth. The vision made him tetchy and irritated with himself. He felt the guilt gather in his temples and coalesce into a bothersome headache.

That afternoon, Rodney harvested and shucked a pint or so of oysters. He packed in ice three pounds of fresh-caught croaker filets. He showered, shaved, daubed his throat and the line of hair on his stomach with lemon verbena eau de cologne. In the fridge he found a reasonably good bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and he set off up Naiad Lane.

Phyllis Nevis came to the gate and welcomed him in. “I brought you something,” Rodney said. “It isn’t much.”

She looked into the bag with real interest. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very, very kind.”

“And the wine is cold,” said Rodney. “Bet you could use a glass.”

“I could,” said Phyllis quietly.

Together they walked inside. Rodney put the fish in the refrigerator. He opened the bottle and poured two large glasses. Phyllis went upstairs and then returned with her baby, Nathan. She sat on the sofa, waiting for Rodney, giving the infant his lunch.

Rodney gave the woman a glass and sat close beside her.

“Thank you,” said Phyllis, tears brightening her eyes. “One week, tops. That’s what they said.”

“I’m so, so sorry,” Rodney said. He put his arm around her, and while she wept, she allowed herself to be drawn into the flushed hollow of Rodney’s neck. The infant at her breast began to squeal, and the sound inflamed the pain in Rodney’s temples, and he had an impulse to tear the baby from her and carry it out of the room. Instead, he swallowed his wine at a gulp. He poured himself a second glass and knocked it back, which seemed to dull the pain a little. Then he settled against the cushion and pressed Phyllis’s tearful face into his neck. While she quaked on him, Rodney stroked the tender skin behind her ears and stared off through the picture window. Far above the eastern hills, a council of clouds shed a gray fringe of moisture. The promise of rain was a glad sight in the mournful scene, though in fact this was rain of a frail kind, turning to vapor a mile above the brown land, never to be of use to women and men on earth.