The New Moon's Arms (12 page)

I watched until they were all loaded onto the Coast Guard ferry and on their way. I got into my car, but my hand was trembling too much to turn the key in the ignition. So I sat. My breath shuddered in and out of my lungs.

In the quiet, the only thing left to hear was the boom of the waves below as they crashed into the overhang they had worn into the cliff, century by century.

I usually loved to fall asleep to the booming sound.

Those waves could wear down rock, and pulverize bone.

I wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.

Ife! I hadn’t called her about any of this! I tried a few times, longing to hear her voice, but the reception to Cayaba was bad tonight. I couldn’t wait until Gilmor Saline boosted the cell phone signal on Dolorosse.

When I got home, the house felt so lonely and strange. I didn’t have an appetite any more. Didn’t want to call anybody. Didn’t want to go down the dark hallway to the darker bedroom. Thought about a drink, but this morning’s hangover was still strong in my mind. Eventually I just sat on the settee, reading
Buxton Spice
.

A wash of hot air came and went in the living room, like somebody had opened the front door. Mrs. Soledad still had a key; and the Lessings from over the way. “Hello?” I called out.

No answer. I took off my reading glasses and went and peered down the hallway. The front door was closed.

I heard a little
thump
from over by the settee. A toy car lying on top of my open book tipped over onto its side. The fuck? Where that came from?

I’d gotten chilled, sitting so still for so long. I turned the ceiling fan off. Rubbing my arms to bring some warmth back to them, I went to investigate the toy car. But it wasn’t a car. I picked the toy up. Dumpy! Chastity’s old dump truck! Dadda must have saved him from the sea somehow. Just like the bastard not to tell me.

Dumpy was smaller than I remembered him. His yellow and blue body was dinged and half his red trim had peeled off, but my fingers still knew the scratchy feel of him, and the right back wheel with the nick in it that made him wobble as he rolled. There were even some sparkly grains of sand still in his hopper. Decades-old sand.

How he came to be on the settee, though? I couldn’t see anything to give me a clue. I knelt down and looked under the settee, which reminded me to take today’s aspirin for my arthritis. Didn’t look like anything was under there.

As I got back up, I braced myself on the settee cushion with one hand. The weight compressed the cushion till I could feel the springs of the settee frame beneath. Awoah. I took the two cushions up and found a ballpoint pen with the nib missing, two ten-dollar coins, and an afro pick. So long I hadn’t seen one of those. Bet you Dumpy had rolled down to the back of the settee years ago.

Someone banged on the front door. I leapt about a foot in the air, my heart pounding back a response. Who the rass…?

A muffled voice called, “Mistress Lambkin? Calamity?”

The hands on the clock said almost midnight. The banging went on. I stomped to the door. Somebody was going to get their ass handed back to them on a platter.

I yanked the door open. It was Gene. Again. This was getting creepy. And he was Coast Guard, too. Just what I needed; a stalker
cop
. “Officer Meeks,” I said, keeping it formal.

“I want to talk to you. I could come inside?”

Not a bit of it. I stepped onto the porch. At least he wouldn’t trap me in the house. “Well, it’s kind of late and I had a long day. I’d be happy to talk to you tomorrow.”

With a look of surprise, he checked his watch. “Jeezam. It late in truth. I didn’t wake you?”

I shook my head and edged towards the steps.

“I came to say thanks,” he said.

“For what? Oh.” For keeping my mouth shut back at the cliff.

“And I came to apologise. I had no business acting possessive on the beach this morning.”

“Huh. No, you didn’t. And what about at the hospital?”

A look of embarrassment came over his face. “At the hospital, too. And I had no right getting into an argument with you last night. I know better than to tell somebody under that much stress that she delusional.”

“Damned right. I didn’t imagine the blue girl, neither.”

He looked confused.

“Never mind,” I said. “Something that happened long ago.”

He gestured towards the wicker lounge chair. “I could sit down? Before I fall down?” His uniform was rumpled and his eyes were red with fatigue.

“All right,” I said warily. If he was reclining, that would slow him down if he tried to grab me or something.

“Thank you.” He sighed and plumped himself down in the wicker lounge chair. And it’s like all the starch went out of him. He looked up at me. “Beg pardon, Calamity. I didn’t want to disturb you. Been a long day for me, too.”

“Say what you have to say,” I told him.

“All right.” But for a little while, he just pursed his lips and looked doubtful. “It’s difficult to talk about, you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“True that. I mean the dead man tonight.”

“Something you want to tell me about him.”

He nodded.

“Something you don’t want to talk where other people can hear.”

“You’re a very wise woman,” he said.

“Wise women are
old
.”

He looked amused. “Sometimes they’re just wise. And I saw you inspecting that little boy’s hands.”

“Checking to see if they were bruised.”

He said, “Maybe. But I think you know what I want to tell you about his daddy. Rare for them to come so close to where people live.”

I risked a step or two closer to him. “Say the words,” I demanded.

“Which words?”

“Say what he was.”

“What you think he was?” he asked. He was playing cautious. Me, too.

I sat in the chair beside his. “I can’t say it. Only crazy people would believe a thing like that. Crazy people and Ifeoma.”

He frowned. “Who?”

“Ifeoma not crazy, that’s not what I’m saying. Sometimes I think she saner than me. But all the shit she do: if you spill salt, throw some over your left shoulder to keep the jumbies away; don’t step on a crack or you put your grandmother in traction; never wear white shoes after Labour Day.”

He smiled. It suited him.

“It’s like she think…” I reached for the words. “…she think that the marvellous things in this world, the wondrous things, we can find a
trick
to them, you know? And if we work the trick just right, well then, we can control them.” I kissed my teeth. “Why you want to control a miracle? Then it won’t be a miracle no more!”

He leaned forward, closer to me. “So you frighten that if we believe in mermaids, they going to disappear?”

“No, I frighten that hope will disappear when we find out they don’t…” I stopped and stared at him. I knew my eyes had gone wide. “Mermaids?”

His grin got even broader. “That what you call them?”

“You said the word first. Don’t play with me, Gene.” Because I wanted a world with mermaid boys in it, not one where parents kept their children tied up and locked away.

He frowned, sighed. “We scarcely talk this out loud. Even those of us that know they’re there, we don’t really palaver about it. Because you can’t tell who to trust; if you open your mouth to somebody, they might go and talk to your boss or your wife, and next thing you know, you’re in a room in the psych ward, getting Prozac every few hours and eating peach Jell-O with a plastic spoon.”

I sat back and crossed my arms. “Don’t expect sympathy from me,” I said. “You know what they say: the best prevention is abstention.”

“Come again?”

“If you really wanted to keep your big secret safe from me, you wouldn’t be here talking to me in the first place.”

His laugh sent a little lizard on the wall scurrying behind the light fixture. “You’re a hell of a woman, you know that?”

“No, no, no!” I shook my finger at him. “Don’t try to sweet-talk me, neither. I too old for that.” I stood up. “Time up, Gene. Say all you have to say and say it plain, or please to come off my property at this late hour in the evening.” I tried to look stern, but I was having fun in a way.

He leaned back in the lounge chair. Gave me a measuring look. “They don’t have fish tails,” he said. My mouth went dry. “But you know that already. And they don’t breathe water. Like you saw tonight, they can drown. So they not mermaids in that sense. But anybody who work near the sea around Cayaba will buck up one eventually. Fishermen, Coast Guard, Emergency Services. Not the doctors, for the most part. They scarcely do outcalls. Even the police know about this. We all know it. We just don’t talk it. But they real. The sea people? They real.”

I just stood there, blinking.

“Calamity?”

“You…” I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. “You not making a joke on me?” My voice came out squeaky.

“What happened this morning when Pamela and Jerry saw the little boy?”

“The two paramedics?”

“Yes.”

“Pamela’s hands were shaking, and her voice, but nerves could do that. She looked at the little boy like it’s jumbie she was seeing. The man—Jerry?—I think he wanted to shake her. He kept trying to keep her mind on what she was doing.”

“Pamela is a trainee. She been kinda suspecting, but this is the first time she ever see one of them up close.” He shook his head, chuckled. “She did better than me. The first time I saw the body of a sea person…”

His eyes flashed up and to the right.

“You’re telling the truth.” I sat down hard in the wicker chair. “They’re real.”

“Yeah.”

“Or maybe you’re
hallucinating,
” I said evilly. “You know, the stress, the fatigue… You been drinking enough water? Maybe you just need a good night’s sleep.”

“I guess I deserve that. But I’ve touched other sea people corpses before. Examined them.”

My familiar world left me with the breath I let out. When I breathed back in, it was the air of a foreign land. “Shit. Agway.”

“Who?”

“The little boy. That was his family! They were real, and now they’re…”

“Dead is still real. Just gone.”

“You were just stringing Evelyn along with that story about child abuse.”

He shrugged. “The sad thing is, it was a plausible story.”

“What going to happen to him? You will send him back?”

He shook his head. “He on the books now. If he disappear, there will have to be an investigation.”

“But you could manage it somehow, couldn’t you? Say that he wandered away and got lost; something!”

“Maybe. But think about it. They won’t let us get close to them. I think they can smell us coming. If we put the little boy out there and leave him, anything could happen before his people find him. High tide. Tiger shark.”

He saw my face.

“Sorry. Don’t think about it. We just have to hope he will find a home on land.” He stood. “I’m saying goodnight, Calamity. Past time for my day to end.” He stopped at the top of the steps. “Maybe somebody will adopt him.”

I didn’t reply. I had had two years of not being my own person, of changing diapers and feeding someone pap from a spoon. Plus I had raised a girl child, on my own. I had done my share. Time for some freedom now. So I would keep my mouth shut. And hate myself for it.

The dada-hair lady didn’t know what to do. She’d been scared when they’d snatched her as she was drawing water from the well outside her village. They’d gagged her when she screamed. And they had been rough; pushing and chivvying her until they reached the long forced march of people, all chained by the neck. They’d added her to the end of the line. There was never enough water to drink by the time the ladle reached her.

The dada-haired lady had tried to tell herself that even bound and forced to walk was better than being at home, taking orders from Chiefo’s first wife.

In her village, she had kept her ability hidden as well as she could. Bad things happened to women accused of being witches. But word did get out. Some of the women knew. They would come, furtively, asking for help for every problem under the sun. She had to explain that she could only tell them where the things they’d lost were, and only during her blood time.

When they’d reached Calabar, the big ship anchored offshore had been a wonder she’d never seen before; the papa to the small canoes she knew well. Chineke! How something so large, large as a village, could bob like cork on the water and not sink! She’d wondered what was inside.

She’d gone wild with panic when the strange men forced them onto the ship.

The sailors had taken the men to another part of the hold. The women and children they forced to clamber into a dark space in the belly of the ship. They had been packed in so tightly that everyone’s back was jammed against the belly of the person behind them. They were chained together in threes. You couldn’t stand. You had to crab-walk when you needed to get to the necessary, treading on other people and dragging your two other shipmates grumbling along with you.

With a creaking of timbers the ship had started on its journey. Many of them had never been on the sea before. The nausea soon had them retching. Often you couldn’t reach the necessary in time. Within hours, the heat and the stench in the hold were unbearable, and there wasn’t enough air. Women and children moaned and cried out, and eventually stopped. In the first weeks, one small child, unable to keep any food nor water down for more than a few minutes, had died from sea-sickness.

Back in the village, the dada-hair lady had told Chiefo’s newest wife Ngoli that she could not make the child in her womb come out a boy. That made Ngoli angry; angrier still when she gave birth to a girl. Two days after that, the dada-hair lady had been kidnapped. So no use wishing for rescue by her family. She had a pretty good idea who had sold her to the white men.

The dada-hair lady would have rejoiced at giving birth to any child, girl or boy.