St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Out to Sea

At first, Sawtooth thought it was a damn fool program. All of the residents at the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community got letters about it in their mail buckets:

Dear Mr./Ms. SAWTOOTH BIGTREE,

We are pleased to announce that you have been selected to participate in the No Elder Person Is an Island Volunteer Program! You will be paired with one at-risk youth from the Mainland who is completing his/her court-ordered community service. All aboard the “Friend Ship” to intergenerational rapport! Your Volunteer Buddy is AUGIE RODDENBERRY.

Sincerely,

Out-to-Sea Management

“Volunteers!” he’d grumbled. It didn’t sound to Sawtooth like there was anything voluntary about it. And the last thing Sawtooth had wanted was some juvenile scoundrel barging onto his barge. Sawtooth stuffed the Suggestions Buoy with complaints about the program. He bottled threats and floated them towards the Administration Ship. He flat-out refused to participate — until the day the girl showed up at his cabin door.

“Augie’s a damn fool name for a pretty girl” was all he could think to say when he found her standing on his deck. Sawtooth still refuses to call her Augie — that ugly, braying sound. He thinks of her as, simply, “the girl.”

The girl has a child’s face, round and guileless, and eyelashes so long that Sawtooth thinks that he could fish with them. She reminds Sawtooth of someone from his past, a wife or a mother, possibly one of his own granddaughters. Someone whose name he can no longer remember, but whom he feels certain that he loved very much.

“Are you the amputee?” she’d asked that first afternoon on his deck. “I told Miss Levy that I wanted the amputee.”

“Are you blind?” he’d glowered, shaking his left crutch at her. “See any other one-legged mariners around here?”

But he’d smoothed his empty pant leg and smiled as she came aboard.

The girl is an apple-cheeked high-school junior and a convicted felon. She won’t tell Sawtooth what crime she committed, and he doesn’t ask. All he knows is that the Loomis County Court System has sentenced Augie to fifty hours of visiting him. In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he needs the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn’t forget her own face.

Increasingly, Sawtooth’s own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl’s hands, her slack mouth.

The girl is coming today, and Sawtooth wants everything to be perfect. So when he looks outside his porthole and sees Miss Markopoulos strewing a bucket of fish entrails across his property, he gets understandably irate.

“I seen you!” Sawtooth wheezes. “I seen you feeding them!”

Sawtooth uses his aluminum crutches to carefully swing himself over to the starboard side of his houseboat, to where she can’t ignore him. His amputation gives Sawtooth a flamingular majesty. He rears up before her on his one remaining leg, feather-ruffled and pink with rage.

The neighbor woman, Miss Markopoulos, fills her days with a steady diet of black olives and soap operas and, most recently, the maternal nurture of stingrays. Like most of the residents of the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, Miss Markopoulos has spent decades hoarding a secret cache of love, shelved and putrefying in a quiet cupboard within her; and now, at the end of a life, she has no one to share it with. No one but the rays, Sawtooth grunts, a bunch of wall-eyed invertebrates. He would pity her, if she wasn’t such a damn fool.

Today she is grinning over the railing of her deck. Her teeth are as yellow and uneven as calliope pipes. Her hands are clasped to her heaving bosom. Tiny fish scales and bright spots of blood glint along the webbing of her thick fingers.

“You better cut it out, you hear me?” Sawtooth narrows his eyes and swings his free arm like a cudgel. His height gives him an impish quality that’s become only more pronounced with old age and his amputation. Lately, Sawtooth has the uneasy sensation that he’s shrinking — even as, perversely, parts of him have started to grow at a delirious pace. His hairy ears boomerang out from the sides of his head. His eyebrows have overtaken his face like milky weeds. When he confronts Miss Markopoulos, he furrows them into a single white line and draws himself up on his one remaining leg.

“My buddy is coming today,” he repeats, “and I don’t want those goddamned strays in my backyard when she gets here.” Miss Markopoulos feigns deafness in whatever ear is facing Sawtooth to avoid confrontation. She smiles blankly up at Sawtooth. She continues to strew bloody fistfuls of krill like wedding rice.

Between their two boats, the water is alive with stingrays.

At the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, all of the elderly residents live in individual houseboats. Like their occupants, the boats themselves are retired. They are battered cargo ships and naval jalopies; boats whose iron hulls are liver-spotted with rust; boats with mud-clogged pipes, with barnacled rudders, with unhinged portholes that hang like broken eyeglasses — all of which have been refurbished and converted into “independent living units.” Sawtooth is living in a Biscayne star-fishing barge. Zenaida Zapata, Sawtooth’s neighbor to the right, is living in La Rumba, a former Venezuelan party rental. She complains that the smell of limeade and fornication has saturated the wooden walls. These are boats that fought in foreign wars, that survived wild hurricanes, that carried young lovers along moonlit currents. Now they sit on short tethers in shallow water, permanently at anchor. After two of the residents tried to elope, they sent Gherkin from maintenance around to remove all the engines.

Man-made waves lap gently against the sides of the boats, controlled by a machine that hums like the rise and fall of a giant respirator. But the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community has been sealed off from the real ocean. A stone seawall extends under the water and wraps around the marina like a giant gray honeycomb. Spidery crabs scuttle down the sides and disappear through the cracks.

The perfect balance, the brochure advertises, of privacy and community! Most residents spend their afternoons peering into one another’s houseboats with prescription binoculars. On weekend afternoons, Sawtooth can sometimes hear the siren song of children playing farther down the beach. The sound lures even the saltiest old codgers out of their cabins, pale and vulnerable as shucked clams. They all turn their deck chairs to face the seawall, even though there’s nothing to see.

Thanks to the wall, there’s no danger of the residents setting out on the open sea anymore, but things occasionally drift in: golden coils of kelp, an old bowling pin, a colorful potpourri of jellyfish and used condoms, and, most recently, the stingrays. There’s a nearby cove where they congregate, dozens of them swooping around submerged stalagmites like aquatic bats. Their flat bodies glide easily through the narrow openings in the seawall.

Sawtooth doesn’t mind the stingrays, personally. He grew up on the swamp, and he has a gator wrestler’s respect for wild things. But the girl is coming today, and the stingrays terrify her. “They look like monsters,” she’d squealed the first time she saw them. “They’re horrible.” She’d clutched at Sawtooth’s moist palm reflexively, watching them sponge the clotted fish chum into their smooth white bellies. “They’re like one giant mouth.”

At the time, he’d just blinked at the girl with a glassy-eyed incomprehension. But watching the stingrays now, Sawtooth decides that there is something unsettling about the way they feed. Their bodies reinvent themselves below him, a boneless dance of empty appetite. They’ve eaten all the shrimp, but they continue to noiselessly storm around imagined food.

“Listen, woman—”

“They are my angels.” Miss Markopoulos sniffs. “You go away now, please.” Miss Markopoulos feeds the stingrays with the same fanatic devotion that other elderly women lavish on pigeons or cats. Chumming the water, it’s called, and it’s strictly prohibited by the Out-to-Sea Code. Sawtooth keeps leaving copies of the code in her mail bucket, with “Policy 12: Zero Tolerance for Chummers” circled so many times that the paper’s torn through. Miss Markopoulos feigns an ignorance of written English. She continues to spend her entire Social Security check down at Don Barato’s bait shack. Sawtooth watches as even more stingrays come flying their way. First there are only two or three, ink-blotting towards them; then they coagulate into a dense black mass, like a fast-moving cloud under the water. They flap their pectoral fins like yellow wings. Whenever the clouds part, spasms of light go rippling over their spotted backs.

“You better quit chumming up my water before the girl gets here,” Sawtooth bristles, “or I’m calling Gherkin.”

Sawtooth gives her a final scathing glance and swings himself back inside his cabin. He doesn’t have time to fool around with her. He has to get ready for the girl.

First he sheds his pajamas and worms his way into faded dress pants. He pins his empty left trouser leg into a dapper crease. He scatters tiny flecks of orange rind around the boat — a trick he’s learned to cover up his sickly sweet old-man smell, to mask the black stench of seaweed curling in the sun. There’s not much left to tidy in Sawtooth’s cramped houseboat.

There is a mustard-yellow kitchenette and a windowless commode. A gator skull hangs on the bathroom wall, a smirking memento of Sawtooth’s able-bodied youth on the swamp. In the main cabin there is a lint-furred sofa, a gimp table, a captain’s chair that doubles as a geyser of yellow stuffing. Wavy ribbons of light fall across the carpet. In the far corner, hidden in the shadows, sits a cardboard box full of Sawtooth’s useless left shoes.

Sawtooth scans the room for something he thinks the girl might like, something she could fit easily in her pocket. His gator skull? His egg timer? There’s not much left. He drapes a grimy pair of overalls over the chair and stuffs a ten-dollar bill so that it hangs half in, half out of the pocket. Then he takes his Demerol off the high bathroom shelf and counts out his remaining pills — twenty-two. He puts them in the center of the table. Too obvious, he thinks. He slides them over next to the lamp, hoping that she’ll see them. He positions the money and the medicine with painstaking care, the way he used to bait fishing hooks in the swamp.

The girl has been stealing from Sawtooth for some time.

When things first started to go missing around the cabin, Sawtooth chalked it up to the onslaught of dementia. He was relieved when he realized that it was just Augie. He does little experiments to test her. He’ll leave something small on the table, a pack of Sir Puffsters or a withered red starfish, and go crouch in the bathroom. When he comes back, the table is always empty, the girl smiling with her hands folded neatly in her lap.

Sawtooth likes it best when she takes sentimental things, objects with no resale value whatsoever. She steals his left socks, his grocery lists; she pries the little hand off the wall clock. Once he watched her surreptitiously sweep his gray whisker clippings into a plastic bag. Probably for hoodoo love spells, he flatters himself. Probably for a locket.

On her last visit, the girl stole one of his family photographs right out of the frame. He thinks this means she is starting to care about him, too. Now whenever he looks at the empty frame, Sawtooth is moved to tears. He has to stare straight up at the ceiling, a loophole that prevents fluid from falling out of the eyes, thus saving a man the embarrassment of crying like a damn fool infant.

And then, a little over a month ago, Sawtooth noticed that his pain pills were disappearing in small increments, two or three pills at a time. Even before Augie, Sawtooth was reluctant to take the Demerol. “Highly addictive stuff, Mr. Bigtree,” the doctor had cautioned. “For emergency use only.” Once he realized that the girl was stealing his meds, he stopped taking them altogether. Now he’s begun hoarding the pills for her. He tells himself that this isn’t so different from those old women who set out dishes of candy to bribe their grandchildren.

Sawtooth is lucky. The other residents willingly endure far worse indignities at the hands of their buddies. Mr. Kaufman has been paired with a junior arsonist, a boy with sinister ears and a face like a waffle iron. He keeps setting kitchen fires. Mr. Kaufman recently confessed to Sawtooth that he’s started stocking up on lighter fluid. “Keeps him interested.” He’d shrugged.

Zenaida had a buddy, but she kicked him out after his frank appraisal of Undersea Mary’s erect nipples. Some buddies! Sawtooth harrumphs. Fat boys with slitty eyes like razor blades. Skinny girls with hyena laughs and spotted faces. Burly girls who break into the liquor cabinet after being invited to make themselves at home. Old ladies smile their sweet, terrified smiles while the buddies ransack their pantries and rock their boats.

The program, overall, has been hailed as a huge success.

After he finishes shoving his dirty dishes in drawers, Sawtooth settles in to wait. And wait.

When Sawtooth first arrived at the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, the silence seeped into his lungs like water. Whole days whispered by, a stillness broken only by the ticking of Sawtooth’s clock, the intermittent cries of the sooty gulls, the asthmatic gasping of the sea. But today, the silence is made bearable by the knowledge that a sound is coming.

The sound comes sooner than expected. A low moan of pain causes Sawtooth to jump in his chair. He grabs his cane and goes outside to investigate. Two boats down, Ned Kaufman is sprawled on his deck in staged agony, mispronouncing the names of various organs. Sawtooth shakes his head and looks away. Damn fool Ned. Everybody knows that Ned is a shameless faker. He just wants someone from the Medic Ship to row over and take note of his vital signs.

Sawtooth won’t admit it, even to himself, but he has come to look forward to his own visits to the Medic Ship. It’s one of the few pleasures left to him, the pressure of a gloved finger on his pulse.

“Mr. Ned,” comes a woman’s quavery voice. “Que te sanes! I will light a candle for you!”

Sawtooth groans. His neighbor to the right, Zenaida Zapata, has started praying to Undersea Mary on the prow of her boat.

In her previous incarnation, Undersea Mary was La Rumba’s plaster figurehead. Her pert breasts used to greet Sawtooth every morning, until she fell into the water after a tropical storm. For months, she lay sideways on the ocean floor. Needlefish nibbled the paint off her lemon meringue bikini. Then Zenaida moved in. She fished the statue out and installed her on a pedestal made out of floral Kleenex boxes and the cushion of a rusty Exercycle.

Now Zenaida courts Mary’s attentions like a lover. She has robed her in sateen bedsheets, celestial blue. She leaves Undersea Mary bouquets of napkin roses in nightmare shades of red and ocher. Today she is lighting waxy votive candles that she stole from the Hurricane Supply Kit. Sawtooth tries to hobble back inside his cabin without acknowledging her.

“You buddy coming today, Mr. Sawtooth?” she calls.

None of your goddamn business, Sawtooth thinks. He glowers at her.

Zenaida nods smugly. “I don’t need no buddy,” she tells him. “The Virgin visits me. I see her in the morning and in the afternoon. I see her during the news shows and during the commercial breaks. Everywhere,” she says, gloating like a child, “I see her everywhere. She is always with me. I am never alone.”

Zenaida turns around and lights another candle. Sawtooth watches as tiny plumes of smoke go curling up to join the gray clouds. What could she possibly have to pray for, at her age? he fumes. Whose lungs does she think she’s filling up there with all her damn fool prayers?

Sawtooth hurries back inside his cabin. He doesn’t understand how he came to be adrift in this sea of crackpots.

Around three-thirty, Sawtooth’s heart starts pounding at a rate that poses a serious health risk at his age. The girl is scheduled to arrive any minute now. He hops around the room like an agitated stork, making imperceptible adjustments in the placement of the lone sofa cushion, the crumpled bill, his pain pills.

He wonders what the girl does with the pills, if she takes them or sells them. He wonders if there’s a chance that she might get addicted, too.

Finally, at a quarter past four, Sawtooth can hear the squeal of tires pulling into the boatyard, followed by a chorus of multilingual obscenities and the chaperone’s cries for order. From his porthole, he can see the buddies come streaming down the dock, in ones and twos at first, then the whole raucous flock of them.

“Permission to board?” the girl chirrups. She is right at the edge of his boat slip.

Sawtooth swallows his chewing tobacco. He licks his fingertips and fluffs his hair into a wispy, silver crown—“the rooster gawk comb-back,” somebody used to call it. An uncle or a brother, possibly a wife. A wife. Sawtooth takes a deep breath and reaches for the door.

“Hiya, Pops.” She grins, pushing past him. She laughs her wind-chime laugh and plops onto the sofa.

“Hello, girl,” he grunts happily.

Today Augie is wearing a potato-colored T-shirt that says DAPPER CADAVER and a baseball cap pulled down over her blue eyes. Sawtooth doesn’t understand why she always dresses like a boy, in slouchy black pants that billow around her legs like garbage bags. Sawtooth’s even tried to give the girl shopping money himself on several occasions — although she never accepts money if it’s offered to her.

“Whadda you think, Pops?” Augie pulls off her baseball cap and shakes out her hair. Augie has short, auburn hair, but Sawtooth sees that the damn fool girl has gone and streaked it through with flamingo pink. Sawtooth doesn’t want to like it, but he does. It sparks like copper wire, like the fiery ball of sunset over the swamp.

“You look like a damn fool Easter egg,” Sawtooth snorts.

He’s pleased to see that she’s in one of her penny-bright moods. Some days she just sits on his couch, prickly as a sea urchin, while Sawtooth reaches feverishly for something to say. Some days she arrives seething with a formless rage, a heat that Sawtooth can feel radiating from her pale skin. Once she didn’t come at all. On that day, Sawtooth watched the ebb and flow of the artificial tides and felt like he was evaporating.

The girl pouts and puts her cap back on. She settles back on the couch, and they spend the next few minutes playing a round of This Object Is Older Than You Are. It’s Sawtooth’s favorite game.

“How old are you today, girl? Fifteen? Ha!” He chuckles, his eyes thin and steely as dimes. “You see that flounder thermometer? It’s older than you are. You see this carpet stain? It’s older than—”

“Say, let’s cut to the chase, Pops,” Augie interrupts. “Are you going to show it to me today, or what?”

Sawtooth grins with a childlike pleasure. “Sure it don’t make you squeamish, girl?” Then he starts fumbling with the pin to his trousers.

Ever since Sawtooth mentioned his phantom-limb syndrome, the girl has been fascinated with his scarred left stump. He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he’s still whole.

Sawtooth rolls up his pant leg coyly, with the practiced languor of a showgirl. They both stare down at the white nub of his thigh.

“So you can still feel it?”

The girl’s fingers hover gingerly over the place where his left leg used to be, shaping it in the air.

“I mean, you’ll be looking at it, you can see it’s not there, and you feel it?”

Sawtooth nods. “You think I’m pulling your leg?”

The girl smiles wanly.

Then she gets down on her knees. Sawtooth holds his breath. He will never grow accustomed to this, but now his uneasiness is spiked with a hot, wincing thrill. It makes him feel like a much younger man, this sort of attention. He learned early on that he could use his own mangled body as a kind of bait, something the girl would keep coming back to nibble at. The girl flicks her pink tongue at the very tip of his stump. She circles around it, once, twice.

“You feel it,” Augie repeats. She smiles up at him, her eyes glinting with a dull satisfaction.

Sawtooth grunts. She is tracing the outline of his ghost leg with her tongue, and he feels it, by God he feels it. If Sawtooth could verbalize the hitching in his chest, he would tell her exactly what he feels. He would thank the girl, for making his pain meaningful. Before he started saving his pills for her, his phantom limb used to infuriate him. It was a senseless aching, a bad neural joke. Now the pain reminds him that the girl has been here.

“Your body is haunted,” she intones, with an adolescent portentousness. “Like a house.”

“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.” Sawtooth frowns. The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

“So, how much time you got left to serve, girl?” He feels grateful that at his age, the tremors in his voice pass unnoticed.

“Oh, I was meaning to tell you,” Augie says. She stands, smoothing her hair. “Miss Levy got them to lessen my sentence. I’ll be out of your hair soon.” The girl keeps her voice casual, but she still won’t meet his eyes. “Which reminds me, look at the time! I guess I’d better get going. Sign my form?”

Sawtooth stares dumbly at the form that she’s waving in front of him. He tenses, half expecting his ghost leg to cramp up, but there is nothing.

If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don’t go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It’s stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.

“Do you want an egg?” he asks instead. He grabs her hand desperately. “Do girls still eat eggs? I could fry you up an egg.”

“No thanks,” she says, withdrawing her hand. “No, I really should get going, the bus will leave without me….” Her smile darkens. She taps at the blank space on the bottom of her form.

“In a minute, girl,” he rasps, panic sealing off his throat. “In a minute…” Sawtooth gets up to go to the narrow bathroom. He leans his cane against the door and squats on the lidless commode, feeling the mechanized sway of the waves beneath him. One, two…he can hear the girl bumbling around outside. Sometimes he has to resist the urge to lecture her on the proper way to burgle your elders. Kids today don’t know the first thing about theft, he thinks. He hopes the girl doesn’t have trouble with the damn fool childproof lid on his Demerol. Three, he breathes, four…

On the other side of the marina, one of the stingrays slides dangerously close to the Wave Assuager. It struggles against the machine’s currents, its stinger pointed like an arrow towards the undertow. The ray gets sucked into the whirring underwater fan, silvering between the blades like a quarter into a slot. The accordion pump of the Wave Assuager lets out an elastic sigh. It sparks and groans. It vaporizes clouds of minnows with its electric death throes.

Then the Wave Assuager sends a final, renegade crest coursing up beneath the houseboats.

Ned Kaufman cracks skulls with his buddy and lets out a howl of real pain. Undersea Mary gets swept back overboard, her votive candles extinguished. When the wave hits, Sawtooth is squatting in the bathroom, his carbuncular ear pressed against the bathroom wall. If he had two legs to stand on, he might have been able to regain his balance. Instead, he spills out onto the living room floor.

“Fuck!” Augie falls backwards into the box of left shoes. The pain pills go flying out of her hands, raining down on Sawtooth’s prone body. Sawtooth grunts and struggles onto his knee. Augie is regarding him with a stricken expression, still holding the empty orange bottle.

“I didn’t see anything,” he wheezes. He sweeps the nearby pills into his clammy palm and holds them out to her. “I didn’t see a damn fool thing….”

“Oh, God…” She starts scrambling to grab her things.

“I know you been stealing from me, girl,” Sawtooth cries. “I know and I don’t care….”

Augie already has her hand on the doorknob before Sawtooth realizes that she’s leaving.

“Girl,” he sputters. “Girl…”

Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he’s become tightlipped as an oyster. But he can feel the words pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.

What comes out is: “I used to steal muskrats.”

Augie struggles with the handle. “Fuck.”

“During the Depression.”

The door swings open.

“Stole ’em right out of the bigger boys’ traps.”

Sunlight spills into the dim cabin. Sawtooth takes a shuddery breath.

“Girl,” he says in a low, throaty voice, not unlike a bullfrog in heat. “I love you.”

Augie pauses, one foot out the door. She whirls around, slowly, and comes to stand over his prone form. Her eyes have narrowed into hard, bright kernels.

“You love me, Pops?” Her voice takes on a rib-kicking cadence. It elicits a moan from Sawtooth, like the lowing cry of a sea cow.

“You love me?” she keeps asking, her voice flat and pitiless. Sawtooth tries to speak, but can only make little strangled noises. A thin stream of spittle trickles down one side of his mouth.

“You love me?” Her voice tightens, and Sawtooth thinks of a hand squeezing some dumb animal’s udders.

“Yes!”

“No,” she says with a bitter little laugh. “No. I don’t think so, Pops. How could you?” She shakes her head angrily, as if Sawtooth is the one who has committed a stupid, indefensible crime. “How could you?” As if to echo her own question, she scoops a few yellow pills up from the crease in his flaccid trouser leg and pockets them. Then she strides onto the dock without a backwards glance.

Sawtooth flops back onto the floor. A small puddle seeps into the rug, his empty trouser leg dripping toilet water. He can feel the gravelly pills pressing into his back. He sees no reason to struggle, to get up.

Eventually, Sawtooth dozes off. He has a nightmare about the stingrays. He is lying on his back, naked and whole, on a velvety carpet of rays. There are dozens, hundreds of them, undulating beneath him. They do a cartilaginous dance through the warm salt water. The tips of their wings smooth against his wrinkled skin like bruising kisses. They brushstroke Sawtooth’s pebbly spine, his scrawny ass, the hollows of both knees: all the soft, forgotten places that haven’t been touched for decades. He can’t enjoy it. He lies there, holding his breath with a terrible anticipation. His spinal cord screams like a silver wire. His whole body tenses, waiting for the stinger. In the dream he can see Undersea Mary watching him from the opposite deck, her cheeks shining with painted-on compassion.

When he wakes up, night has already fallen. He goes and peers nervously over the side of his boat. It’s too dark to tell what’s under the surface of the water. Gherkin must have repaired the Wave Assuager, because he can seen Zenaida’s Medicaid Lifeboat bobbing alongside her slip. Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It’s a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth’s old eyes. Tonight, the phantom pain banshees through him with a pointless fury. He considers taking one of his pills, then thinks better of it. The doctor is reluctant to give him refills. And the girl might come back. He massages the roaring space where his leg used to be. If she needs the pills badly enough, he thinks, she just might.

When he was a boy growing up on the swamp, Sawtooth used to know all of the constellations, but now he has forgotten how to find them. Overhead, the sky lurches in unfamiliar, opalescent swirls. All around him, the muted yellow lamps of his neighbors’ boats blink off quietly, one by one, until Sawtooth is left bobbing alone in the darkness.