Brine

Copyright © 2016 by Kate Smith

Two Harbors Press

322 First Avenue N, 5th floor

Minneapolis, MN 55401

612.455.2293

www.TwoHarborsPress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author. This is a work of fiction.

Additional Cover Art: Ishmael Woodcut by Charles Ailstock

ISBN:
978-1-63505-033-2

for my saltwater husband

“The hypothetical aquatic phase of the ancestral apes during the fossil gap would have been brief, a matter of maybe two or three million years. Nobody has suggested that they turned into mermen and mermaids.”

Elaine Morgan

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

LET’S NOT TIPTOE AROUND IT: this is a story about mermaids.

Not a fairy tale. A true story.

My story.

I suppose I could swim up beside you to prove myself, but that would take away the mystery.

I’m a mermaid.

You’re just going to have to take my word for it.

SHE WHIPPED AROUND THE BLIND CURVE, windows down, music blaring. Beyond the guardrail, lacy waves glittered with a hint of pre-dawn light. Their fight had left her boiling.

She’d spent last night at her place, the first night back in the trailer park in almost a year. God, Nick’s place was so much nicer than hers—ocean view and leather couches. Was she jealous? Maybe. The realization unsettled her. Who had she become? In the stale darkness of her cramped entryway, she’d plopped her bag on the laminate floor, not sure whether to cry or run. She had wanted to punch a wall, break a window.
Who did he think he was?

Instead, she’d snatched paintbrushes from an old coffee jar, tugged the cord on a hanging light bulb, and thrown a blank canvas on the easel. She’d worked through the night in her trailer, braless, in overalls and a Hanes V-neck, her strawberry blond hair tied back in a messy knot. She finger-painted at times, livid reds swathed across the canvas, temperamental purple accents, sad blue undertones, wiping tears from her cheeks with messy fingers.

Her face was still streaked with paint when the Mexican border cops checked her California license that morning and waved her onward into Baja.

Screw Nicholas.

She thought about her parents’ wedding, in a small chapel with only a handful of guests. How different from the wedding she and Nicholas were planning. She wondered if her mother had worn a veil; if her father had gone so far as to borrow a jacket and tie. She wondered what it would feel like to walk down the aisle with neither of them there.

If someone asked her, she would’ve said that she still loved Nicholas. They’d fought like this before. She was pissed off—sure as shit she was—but she was still wearing the ring.

The sun peeked out over the hills. She saw a red flannel shirt and a man waving it. An overturned eighteen-wheeler blocked the entire road, a dark gush of oil spilling from the ruptured tank, the man waving his arms frantically. She slammed the brakes, but her tires had already caught the slick.

She slid sideways, crashed through the guardrail, and plunged over the cliff.

The truck felt heavy for a split second, then became weightless. Her bag spilled across the seat and the contents—spare change, pages of her journal—hung in space for a moment as gravity lost its grip. She was falling. She glimpsed the froth beneath her, the churning blue-green rushing toward her. Then the slam of concrete water and a swarm of delicate bubbles as the truck broke through the crust of the sea.

Nothing hurt.

A hand with fingernails like talons yanked her through the window of the sinking truck and jerked her to the surface.

She coughed up water. Hands pulled off her shoes and unbuttoned her pants. She was breathing heavily, pushing the hands away, shocked and scared, but too weak to fight whoever— whatever—had her. The hands stripped her jeans and underwear, leaving her naked from the waist down. She blinked the stinging salt water from her eyes, trying to see. As soon as her eyes began to clear, she was tucked beneath the water again, the strong arm of her rescuer wrapped around her, towing her away from the scene. She watched the blur of bubbles from her sinking truck disappear. Just as her lungs felt as if they would burst, she was brought to the surface.

And then she noticed it: a warm tingling in her legs and feet she’d never felt before. The sensation was strange, painful even— like rope burn—but also mildly comforting, like a constricting embrace. Underwater, her vision had a dreamy quality. Her two legs—was this possible?—had grown together into one extension. Her eyes burned from the brine, and she pinched them shut, skeptical. But her hands needed to know what was happening, and they reached down to feel that the skin of her lower half had thickened to the texture of rubber.

She kicked and felt her feet move as one. Disbelieving, she forced her eyes open and saw, not her two legs, but the elongated and flattened form of a flipper. She choked water into her lungs and was again brought to the surface by her rescuer. She belched and coughed; water streamed down her face. Her savior cooed and petted her hair with a clawed hand.

Her eyes finally cleared, and she was looking into a woman’s eyes. Intelligent eyes. But was this a human? Could a human swim as fast as they had just swam?

A finger pressed its way into her mouth. She clamped down on the rough flesh, but the salty finger did not flinch. A gritty substance was rubbed into her gums, and immediately she felt drowsy as the bitter paste melted on her tongue. She felt the rocking of her body as she floated on a bed of kelp bulbs and the daunting swirl of creatures swimming all around her. She sensed the sheer heaviness of her legs: so heavy that when she tried to lift them, she realized they were the thick skin of a tail. She compelled her mind to stay alert but couldn’t resist the bliss of soft, downy sleep.

IT WAS DARK WHEN SHE FULLY AWOKE, disoriented. The sky above her was a sea of stars despite the glow from the round, milky moon. Muscles in her neck strained taut as she lifted her head. Her legs were back.

No way. Not possible.

She dropped her head. She could smell the ocean now, bitter and healing, like the amber blotch of iodine rubbed on her chin once after falling off the monkey bars. Higher in her nasal cavity, she caught the acrid stench of dried fish blood. She felt the soggy blanket of nets beneath her. She was in the bottom of a boat.

A man had found her on a beach: the flashback drifted in, strange and yet pronounced. The man—he’d pinched her cheeks to force her mouth open, poured fresh water from his canteen onto her face. She recalled him wrapping his long, bony fingers around a worn rubber tiller. She remembered how he’d watched the waves with knowing eyes, timing his approach between the swell lines. She’d heard him gun the motor and then the two of them were lifted, revved forward on the back of a wave, riding a hump of water to the beach. He’d cut the motor and lifted the propeller out of the sand just before the hull scraped the gritty shore. A lone gull squawked overhead as soon as the boat stopped, laughing down at her.

The man mumbled. She’d felt the boat shift, felt him struggle to get out. Where were they? She heard the man’s irregular footsteps limping away. Was he just leaving her there? She could feel the prickly pinkness of her sunburned skin. Hadn’t it been a woman who rescued her? Who was this man? But even beneath the blinding white of the blazing sun, it was too easy to slip back under, to surrender to the grogginess. Her lids closed mechanically and locked like garage doors.

Now it was dark. How long had she been here? She twitched her toes, opened and closed her fists a few times. Everything seemed intact. No broken bones. Exhaustion, but no pain. She reached for the side of the boat to lift her body to sitting. A muttering voice in the distance froze her movements. The man’s voice grew closer, approaching. Without a sound, she nestled back in the nets, perked her ears.

The footsteps came within a few feet of the boat, and with them, a miasma of tequila. The mumbling ceased, and she heard the unzipping of pants, the fumble of clothing. A dribble, then the trickling sound of urine splattering against the hull. She held her breath. The pants re-zipped. The footsteps moved off.

Her shoulders settled as she finally took a deep breath, but at that moment the man’s retreating footsteps stopped. She felt the hair-tingling suspense of his detection. He smelled her. He was sniffing the air. She envisioned him: his chin lifted, nostrils flared. His feet swiveled and he returned. A shadow loomed above her; contours of the face, backlit by the moonlight, were obscured by the murkiness of the night. He peered in, drunkenly angling his head. He whispered something to
Dios
and then fired off into spits of dialogue. His voice was slurred by his intoxication and at the same time freshly curious.

She sat up and slithered back farther into a shadow.

Think of something. A plan. Do something! Make a move!

She could make a run for it, but where was she going to go? She had no idea where she was exactly. The man fumbled in the bottom of the boat, laughing, repeating a man’s name.

“Jorge . . . blanca . . . Jorge . . . bueno . . . Jorge . . . mierda.” Her Spanish was minimal. She caught only pieces of what he was saying.

Jorge—white—Jorge—good—Jorge—shit.

His hand found something and he tugged, falling backwards. Surely she could take this guy. He was wasted. Yet the man regained control, chortling at his own clumsiness. He sang, his breath reeking, often adding drunken woo-woo-woos into his garbled lyrics. Harmless. She started to make her way out of the boat.

Ouch
! Wait—what was
that
? He snatched her arm and wrapped the rope twice quickly around her wrists. She heard the flick of something metal. The moonlight caught the shine; her eyes widened at the blade. The drunk guffawed at her expression before sawing off the excess end of rope. Okay, so he wasn’t going to cut her into pieces, but why the prisoner treatment? What had she ever done to this guy?

His hands were agile even in his intoxication. It was clear he’d spent a lifetime filleting fish, tying nimble-fingered knots to secure lures. He pulled her from the boat with the strength of a man who lifted weighted nets for a living. Once she was on her feet, he feasted on her nudity in the moonlight. She swallowed, disgusted, rage tightening in her chest. Her eyes cut to slits. He tightened the grip on her upper arm and tugged.

In the distance, she saw the silhouettes of huts on a hill, only one hut glowing. They both stumbled in the darkness on the sandy path. It was hard to keep her balance with her hands bound and no other lights except the moon. She glanced around. Was there anyone besides this guy to hear her if she screamed? That’s when she noticed there were no power lines. She shuddered at the thought of the inside of the hut where he was taking her.

They reached the crest of the path, and a desert breeze swept around them, her matted hair unrelenting even in the warm gust. The boundless ocean shimmered out to the horizon in one direction. In the opposite, hills stained the color of an eggplant by the night sky rose just high enough to present a looming fortress.

“Jorge!” the drunk man suddenly shouted. They were approaching the front of the lighted hut.

Movement stirred inside, but the door remained closed. The drunk, still grasping her arm, repeated his shouts like a child throwing a tantrum.

“Jorge-Jorge-Jorge-Jorge!”

Geez
. The clamor in her ears.
The breath.

The door opened. A man stood holding a lantern. The drunk ceased his shouting. This must be Jorge: a salted, slate scruff for a beard, skinny in that old-man sort of way, barefoot and shirtless. The sternum of his chest protruded like a dinosaur bird. He had the unmistakable profile of the man who’d found her on the beach. Jorge barked back at the drunk until his eyes adjusted and he saw her, standing there in all her naked glory. He grew silent for a moment, then spit in the dust. He shouted, but she couldn’t understand him.

“Yell-yell-yell
, Esteban!
Shout-shout-shout
, Esteban!” was all she heard.

She should’ve paid more attention in high school Spanish.

Esteban bellowed back. He pointed behind him to the beach. Jorge lowered the lantern to show his leg, red and dreadfully swollen. Stingray.

Esteban cackled at the injury but ceased his interrogation. She felt a tug and was jerked into the hut. She glanced around the tiny room. A wooden chair with a broken arm. A mattress on wooden pallets. A battered pot hissing above a wood-fired stove top. Esteban rummaged through the paltry shelves. He uncorked a bottle with his teeth, drank heavily, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

Should she make a run for it? Surely she could outrun these two. One guy was drunk and the other was injured.

Jorge limped over and set a blanket around her shoulders. A stench bombarded her nostrils—unwashed skin and smoke, fish scales and seawater—but she wrapped the cover close.

Jorge’s eyes cut to Esteban. He hobbled across the room and took two musty glasses off a shelf. Snatching the bottle from Esteban’s hands, Jorge filled the small glasses and handed one to Esteban. Esteban slammed the shot back and leaned against the wall. Throwing back the amber liquid in his own glass, the old man exhaled.

Jorge looked at her and grunted. His sinewy arm extended to offer her a shot.

She hesitated, considering. No doubt she could use a shot of something right now, but she glanced at the filthy glass and declined. Jorge poured both men another. After the fourth shot, Esteban slid down the wall; his body fell limp and teetered to one side in a dusty splash on the earthen floor.

Jorge hobbled to the pot on the stove. As he stoked the coals with his breath, he stole glances in her direction. The whites of his bulging eyes gleamed each time the embers flared.

The sounds of the nearby ocean reminded her of her best option. She just had to get rid of the ropes binding her wrists.

She presented her arms to the old man. “Cut,” she said definitively.

She nodded to her wrists again. She had to get her wrists untied. “Por favor,” she added.

The old man reached for a knife above the stove. He sawed at the rope, mumbling in anger, presumably at the way this night was unfolding. When the rope was sawed to only a thin strip, he set the blade aside and tugged with opposing fists. The remaining rope popped. She circled her freed wrists. The two looked at each other, puzzled.

Still holding the rope, Jorge dropped his hands and backed away. She moved hastily, sloughing the blanket from her shoulders and circumventing the room to slip out of the hut. The old man limped behind her, futilely calling after her. She scuttled through a maze of dry brush, praying she didn’t discover a cactus patch with bare feet. Just in time, the moon passed from behind a cloud, illuminating the steep trail down to the beach, like a thin dark scar on the hill.