Stiltsville: A Novel (2 page)

“That’s different,” said Marse. She slipped out of her shorts and spread a towel. I took her cue and removed my shirt, revealing the top half of a navy one-piece. It was the only swimsuit I owned. Kyle went to the big boat and returned with sweaty cans of beer. I took a long swallow of mine, then unzipped my shorts and wiggled out of them, frowning at my pale legs. Wasted on the young: I didn’t know how pretty I was, with my smooth skin and strong limbs. I had the habit of slumping to appear smaller and more feminine. Yet I admired the way women like Marse—she was almost as tall as Dennis, nearly six feet—seemed to relish their height. I lay down and put a palm on my stomach. The fabric was warm from the sunlight. “Here he comes,” said Marse.

I sat up. Dennis, returning from the other house, carried a wad of netting above his head as he swam. He struggled to keep the net in one hand while taking clumsy strokes with the other. Every few strokes, a corner of the net dangled and he stopped to gather it up again. “Jesus,” said Marse.

Kyle, who’d been lying with his face over the water, splashing at the eel, moved to stand beside us. His shadow darkened our towels. I scanned the channel, empty of boats. We were quiet. We were, I assumed, all imagining the same scenario: if the net came loose and Dennis found himself under it—what then? Could he keep his head above water without thrashing around? He could lie on his back, maybe, and breathe through a square in the net, and Kyle could swim out or Marse could take her boat.

Dennis inched closer. I kept glancing at the mouth of the channel, certain that a speedboat would come screaming down it, spreading white wake. Dennis’s s stroke was sloppy. I didn’t know him well enough to decide if he would have considered the danger of swimming with a net. Why didn’t he drag the net behind him, or put it in the duffel bag? Maybe, I thought, he was one of the careless but lucky, as so many people are.

Kyle bounced on the balls of his feet, as if preparing to dive in. From where she was sitting beside him, Marse put a hand on his leg. “Don’t,” she said.

A corner of the net dropped behind Dennis’s head; he kept swimming, oblivious. I took a breath and Marse looked at me. Kyle called out to Dennis and Dennis stopped swimming. Kyle gestured. “Pick it up,” he shouted, and Dennis gathered up the net again, then resumed swimming. I could see the light lines of his legs through the water, the white bottoms of his feet. He reached the dock and tossed the net onto the wood. Kyle kicked it aside and braced himself against a piling, then reached down to help Dennis climb out. I sat down beside Dennis on the dock. Kyle handed him a beer and he drank from it. My toes dipped below the waterline and, remembering the eel, I drew them up. “That was kind of dangerous,” I said.

Dennis looked at me. Then he looked at the net, heaped in a puddle on the wood, and up the channel toward the Becks’ stilt house. I saw the notion—the net dropping, his body flailing—enter his mind, but he shook his head. “I made it,” he said. It wasn’t bravado or machismo. He
was
one of those people, the careless but lucky. He always would be. “Do you want to see it?”

“The eel?” He nodded. Beside us, Marse’s little boat rocked on the waves, its lines tautening and slackening. “Yes,” I said.

Dennis jumped up and stepped onto the big boat—this was his father’s boat, a twenty-one-foot Chris Craft Cavalier with a lapstrake hull—then returned with fins and masks and snorkels. “Marse?” he said, holding out the gear.

She sat up on her elbows and propped her sunglasses on her head. Dennis’s eyes slid over her long body. She shook her head. “Fish freak me out.”

Dennis handed me the mask and snorkel. “Try these,” he said. I pulled the mask over my dry hair, and Dennis came forward to adjust the fit. I watched him through the binocular lenses, and when he was finished, he tugged it off. “All set,” he said. “Get wet before you put it on.” He laid his hands on my shoulders for a brief moment, then withdrew them. I looked down at the water, at the flash of porcelain beneath the surface. I curled my toes over the lip of the dock, then pushed off.

The water felt like soft warm fabric. Dennis crouched and I swam until I was underneath him, several feet from the toilet bowl. He handed me the mask and snorkel and I pulled them on and tested the suction. Water beaded on the lenses and slid off. I fitted the snorkel to my mouth and blew out, then let it dangle from its loop in the mask. Dennis slid onto his stomach, his face over the water. His shoulders, spotted with watery freckles, flexed as he gestured below. “It’s pretty harmless, don’t be afraid,” he said. “Don’t get too close, though, and don’t—
do not
—put your hand inside the bowl.”

I swallowed a mouthful of seawater and coughed. “Why would I put my hand inside the bowl?”

“Just swim on by, like you’re minding your own business.” There was the question of the eel’s intelligence. I watched the bowl through the water, keeping my arms and legs clear. I would learn, months later, that electric eels can discharge as much as six hundred volts of electricity—enough to kill a horse. “Do you want me to get in?” said Dennis.

“Stay there,” I said. I backed away from the dock, kicking, then turned and dove. Under the dock, the world was dim and calm. My body swayed with the current. I could see, but I couldn’t see far. I did not know, then, that there was a difference between the tidal current that tugged at my legs and the surface current, wind-driven, that lifted my hair from my neck and dropped it again. The sandy seafloor sloped toward the house, textured with a thousand vulnerable peaks, the way dunes texture a beach. By nighttime the seafloor would be wholly rearranged, each peak erased and re-formed in mirror image.

A school of needlefish, bright as new nickels, flashed by. I’d traveled several yards from the dock. Dennis stared down at me, his arms across his chest. I dove deep enough to fill my snorkel with water and kicked toward the toilet bowl. By the time it entered my range of vision, I could have reached out and touched it, and the eel did not uncoil or snap or even blink—it just nosed its bald head beyond the rim of its home, and watched as I kicked by.

I knifed one knee between my body and the dock, and levered myself up. “Well?” said Dennis.

“I saw it,” I said, breathing hard.

From his towel, Kyle raised his head. “Dangerous son of a bitch,” he said.

“I think you should leave it alone,” I said.

Dennis seemed pleased. He nodded and handed me a towel. “From now on, no more swimming near the toilet bowl.”

“Amen,” said Marse.

I
n July in South Florida, the sunlight fusses and adjusts a hundred times over the course of the day. By mid-afternoon, hours from sunset, the blue of the sky was rich and dense, as if a dusting of powder had been wiped from its surface. Marse and I chatted on the porch for a while, but the conversation grew sluggish and she started filing her fingernails, so I took myself on a tour of the upstairs. Every so often, male voices filtered up through the floorboards: the boys were underneath the house, gathering lobsters from traps for dinner.

The main room of the stilt house was paneled with wood and stocked with old appliances and a shabby wicker sofa with turquoise vinyl cushions—it occurred to me that the cushions would likely float, if called upon. The kitchen and living area shared one open space, with two doors that opened onto the west and north porches. This design gave the house an inside-out quality, like the interior of a cabana or, I imagined, a yacht. A counter separated the kitchen from the rest of the living area, and trimming the edge of the countertop was a dingy decorative rope that sagged down an inch here and there. The windows had thick jalousie panes that operated on turn-screw cranks. On the coffee table was a stack of fishing and boating magazines, and above the sofa was a black-and-white photograph of a man—Dennis’s father, I assumed—wearing white canvas pants and a captain’s hat and holding a swordfish on a line. Beside the photograph was a hurricane tracking map, its tiny magnets (blue for watch, red for warning) huddled in one corner. Above the sink in the kitchen hung an enormous marlin with sparkling blue flanks and gray-green eyes. A short hallway off the living room led to a small bathroom and two dark bedrooms, one with two beds and a ratty dresser and the other with two bunk beds. All the beds were neatly made with a thin white blanket folded at the foot of each. I wondered how all the furnishings had come to be here, how the house itself had come to be.

There was a shower in the small upstairs bathroom, and a window that faced south, away from shore. There was a two-story rainwater tank just outside the back window, and beyond, the lumpy green bundle of an island a mile away: this was Soldier’s Key. A toothbrush lay bristles-up on the window ledge. The mirror over the sink was tarnished and nicked, and in it my cheeks were raw with sunburn and my eyes were bright. Studying my reflection, I felt the queasy thrill of recognizing something unfamiliar in my own face.

I left the bathroom and went downstairs. Marse looked up when I passed but didn’t say anything. The bottom story of the house was open on all sides, existing only to elevate the second floor away from the water—except for one corner where there was a tiny bathroom and a storage shed with a generator inside. I opened the door to the generator room and inhaled the briny air. Beside the machine, which was quiet, there were ceiling-high shelves piled with tools and old shoes and fishing gear. I closed the door and walked to the dock, then crouched and looked through the slats of the steps that led from the dock to the first floor. From there, I could see beneath the house to the space underneath, where Dennis and Kyle stood in knee-high water. Sea urchins and sand dollars dotted the beige seafloor. Stripes of sunlight streaked through cracks between the floorboards. Dennis held a net and water inked the hems of his shorts. He noticed me and gave a wave. He pointed at a dark creature crawling across the seafloor. “Dinner,” he said. “You like lobster?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re going to feast.” Droplets of sweat or seawater fell from his hair. He glanced at the scuttling lobster, then back at me. “We’re almost done.”

“Take your time,” I said, then stepped up from the dock to the first floor. The water tower stood flush with the back of the house. I knocked on it to gauge the water level and it returned a booming, hollow sound. From below the house, Kyle called, “Come in!” and Dennis laughed. I looked around: the bottom story of the house was as bare as a picnic shelter at a park. The dock made a T with the first floor of the house, and alongside it the two boats rocked calmly on their lines, facing east, toward the Becks’ stilt house and the wide ocean beyond. The second story was aproned on three sides by a veranda with a white wood railing, but there was no railing on the first floor. One could simply step off into the water.

There was, however, a shallow wooden ledge affixed to the exterior wall of the downstairs bathroom. It looked like the scaffolding used by painters working on high buildings—and I guessed that this was more or less what it was, used originally when the house was being built, then left behind. The ledge was about eighteen inches deep. To get to where I could stand on it, I had to take a wide step over a triangle of empty air between the bottom floor of the house and the ledge itself. It didn’t occur to me until I put my foot down that the ledge might not hold. It did. Once I was standing on the ledge, though, I couldn’t manage to turn around. I slid down the exterior wall until I was sitting on the ledge, then crossed my legs so Dennis and Kyle wouldn’t see them dangling.

From seaward, the human eye can distinguish prominent shapes—the lighthouse or Freedom Tower or Turkey Point—at eight miles. To a person of my height standing above the waterline, the horizon is two and a half miles away: a stone’s throw. Considering the blue expanse of ocean in my vision and the thousands of glassy wavelets and the fathoms of veiled blond seafloor, I would have thought I could see to Cuba. I felt tremendously calm. I felt caught in a swell of well-being. Maybe I was lulled by the waves and the sunlight, or maybe I believed that there were no stakes on vacation, and had abandoned my usual anxieties regarding the future, that unnavigable ocean. When I returned home, I knew, I would spend evenings on the front porch of my apartment house in Atlanta, where I’d lived and worked since graduating from college, chatting with my neighbors and slapping at mosquitoes. Soon the sunlight would weaken and blanch, and I would add a quilt to my bedspread and unpack the space heater. A smattering of my still-single college friends would get engaged or married, and I would swim through fits of loneliness like cold undercurrents. But that afternoon, on that clandestine ledge, I felt like a stowaway whose trip had begun. All I had to do was wait.

Splashing sounds came from beneath the house. “Where did it go?” said Kyle.

“I’ve got it,” Dennis said.

With some effort, I swung my legs to one side and eased my stomach onto the bare, warm wood. I peered over the ledge until I could see beneath the house. Dennis was lowering a squirming lobster into a crate filled with other lobsters; their antennae lashed through the slats. Fish darted around the boys’ legs. “Join your family,” said Dennis to the lobster, and I pushed myself back into a sitting position.

The boys splashed through deeper water and hauled themselves onto the dock. “They’re angry,” said Dennis, and Kyle said, “Sweetens the meat.” Their steps on the stairs were noisy and quick. I knew I should join them, but I felt fastened to that ledge, partly from inertia and partly from reluctance to try to stand in so tight a space. Below me, seven feet down, the sandy seafloor was covered by only a few feet of water: it would hurt if I fell, might even break a bone. Dennis called my name. I thought it would confuse him if I answered—where would it seem like my voice was coming from?—so I stood, carefully. Then I heard his steps on the stairs. “Frances!” His voice was gruff and resolute. It grew quieter as he moved down the dock, away from the house, then louder as he returned. “Frances!”