A Gentle Rain (25 page)

I had seen gorgeous Brazilian women, nearly naked and perched atop stiletto heels, balancing enormous, heavy, feathered topknots on their heads during Brazil's version of Mardi Gras, the infamous Carnivale; I had seen athletic Polynesian women dive off hundred-foot cliffs to seek pearls; I had seen incredibly graceful African women carry more than their weight in water on their shoulders.

But I had never seen chubby, gray-haired white women in Spandex mermaid tails gyrating to Dolly Parton singing Nine to Five.

Underwater.

Accompanied by curious turtles, aggressive largemouth bass, and several small alligators.

"They're fish angels," Lily whispered in awe, clutching my hand in hers.

"They're gonna get bit by something," Joey whispered back. Mr. Darcy whistled and shrieked from his vantage point on Joey's shoulder.

"They're gorgeous and brave beyond all reason," I concluded.

We stood in what might be called the orchestra pit of a small, subterranean auditorium, fifteen feet below the surface of the crystal-clear waters of Kissme Woomee Springs. The auditorium would seat no more than two hundred people. On the water-bearing side of ten tall, thick, Plexiglas panels supported by thick metal frames, Miriam, Lula, and a woman named Teegee undulated to the song. Each wore a wig of long, flowing, synthetic hair, a spangled bra and matching mermaid tail. Each smiled and held a bubbling oxygen tube in her left hand. Every ten seconds or so, they took a quick sip of oxygen.

Teegee, who lived in a small house on the Kissme Woomee property, was the youngest at sixty. None was svelte or glamorous, yet all became magically alluring in the water. Soft, theatrical lights flickered among the spring's fake plastic coral and real fish.

Minnows shimmered pink, then gold; a fleeing baby turtle became a sparkling star. When the baby alligators meandered into the performance the lights glinted off their slitted yellow eyes and turned them into gilded, gliding water tigers. The sandy bottom and silver-blue water of Kissme Woomee Springs made an ethereal setting.

A Florida spring is not a mere pond. It is a bubbling fountainhead at the top of a mysterious and bottomless water vent. Kissme Woomee's waters not only formed the spring, they formed the headwaters of Kissme Woomee Creek, which flowed to the famed Suwannee River, and then to the vast oceans, there to be channeled and evaporated, raised up into clouds, rained back on the earth and drained back into aquifers, to rise again in Kissme Woomee Springs. An infinite cycle, filled with the echoes of soft mermaid music.

Nine to five, they've got you tivhere they tivant you, There's a better life; you dream about it, don't you?

The song ended. Miriam, Lula and Teegee disappeared stage left, which was a wooden ladder that deposited them inside a small "backstage" changing room built atop a long, wooden platform that bisected the roof of the submerged auditorium.

"Let's go," I said. Lily helped me push Joey's wheelchair up a steep ramp between rows of molded plastic stadium seats. We emerged through a pastel archway into the bright afternoon sun. I wheeled Joey along a plank walkway so freshly constructed the boards had not yet weathered gray. We went to the Kissme Woomee gift shop and ticket booth, a square little building of concrete block painted pink, with fake palm fronds covering the roof. A sign near the door said it all:

FUTURE HOME OF KISSME WOOMEE PERFORMING MERMAID MUSEUM.

Around us, the Florida forest hummed with mating insects. Heat hung in the air like a mist. Aside from Teegee's small tract house and garage, Kissme Woomee Mermaid World was an oasis of quirky obscurity among the saw palmetto and pine trees. A gravel road trailed through the forest toward the paved route back to Fountain Springs.

Miriam, Lula and Teegee waited in wet glory on a fake stone bench in the gift shop. Behind them was a gaudy backdrop of palm trees and pirate ships. Around them were postcard racks and shelves of kitschy treasures.

Miriam, Lula and Teegee fluffed their spangled cloth tail fins into pastel fans on the gift shop's cheaply tiled floor. Teegee, a leathery blonde with a dazzling smile and pink fingernails that matched her lipstick, grinned at me. "I'm the CEM," she said. "That's Chief Executive Mermaid."

"Wha'd'you think? Miriam asked. "We're having our show in a couple weeks. Ten bucks a ticket plus what we make off the gift shop and an open bar. We get a full house of old ex-mermaids, their families, and flipper freaks."

"Flipper freaks?" I asked.

Lula guffawed. "Old dudes who get off on old mermaids."

"Ahab."

"Wha'd'you think?" Miriam repeated, watching me closely. "You're not a hick. You've been places. Is there any hope for this underwater sideshow just `cause we love it?"

"You love it. There's the answer. You love it."

"Yeah, well, I love Jerry Springer, too, but there's no accountin' for taste."

"You have the magic. You simply need money to make the magic spread. You need a good publicist."

"Honey," Teegee said, twirling a long frond of synthetic blond hair between water-wrinkled fingertips, "we need a good plastic surgeon."

"Need some young tits," Lula said.

Joey gasped. Lily covered her mouth and looked at me with laughing blue eyes. I often wondered how she and Mac could have been passionate enough to conceive me, given their general shyness. But now the light of joyful rebellion in her eyes spoke volumes. Once upon a time, Lily and Mac had loved and lived without fear.

She had been a mermaid, at heart.

And now, I would represent her. "I have a way with words," I told the group. "I'll contact some of the larger newspapers and television stations for you."

"Aw, baby, we've tried that," Teegee grunted. "The smug shits just shrug us of"

"But Karen's a lure for good luck," Miriam said.

"Benji gets up early every morning," Joey put in, "just to see what she's doing in the kitchen. If she can make Benji wake up early, she can do anything!"

"She can't lure any reporters here," Teegee insisted. "Nobody can."

"Let me see what I can do," I said.

"They ain't coming less we offer something new"

"How about the debut of a brand new young mermaid?" Miriam said.

"Yeah, like who?"

"Guess. Look at that Irish red hair. We could play some music from Riverdance. Call it `Waterdance."'

"Hmmm. She's not real big in the lung department, but we can pad her."

"Cover them freckles with some waterproof foundation."

They all turned to look at me. The implication began to sink. in, but I played innocent. "Who would this flat-chested, freckled, ingenue mermaid be?" I asked in a small voice.

"You," Miriam said.

"Sedge, I need coverage for my debut as a mermaid. I need publicity so Miriam and Lula and their friends can lure investors. Who do we know in the major media?" I lay despondently across my bed in my daisy room, that night. Mr. Darcy picked peanuts off my Kissme Woomee World t-shirt. "Who in the media owes a Whittenbrook favors?"

"Everyone," he replied.

I smiled.

Maybe this would be easier than I thought.

Ben

I got this thing for mermaids, even the fake ones in gaudy polyester tails and rhinestone bras. Pa would sit outside our trailer beside a charcoal grill full off-bones on Saturday nights, with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other, and look across at Mama while she arranged paper plates on the picnic table. I could see by the gleam in his eyes he knew she'd given up her special world for his ordinary one. She'd given up being a mermaid to be a cowboy's wife. She'd left the ocean for dry land.

That's what I was waitin' for. A mermaid. A woman who'd trade a kingdom for a chance to be with me.

So that's why, when I looked at Karen in a practice mermaid tail and a snug blue sports bra, floating in the pinkish underwater show lights of Kissme Woomee, behind a foot-thick panel of glass, her hair rising in the water like strands of red silk, one hand clutching a bubblin' oxygen tube while the other gently brushed away a minnow that was trying to taste her lips, my mind ignored everything that was silly about mermaid shows, and all I saw was Karen, mysterious Yankee Karen-beef-not-eatin', Lily-and- Mac-protectin', Estrela-taming, Glen Tolbert-provokin' Karen-swaying in the hot summer water like a brave dream, and I was speechless with want.

Miriam stood beside me in the mermaid theater. "Ben's here," Miriam said into a little wireless mike that led to Karen's waterproof earpiece.

Karen's eyebrows shot up so fast the minnow skittered away. She squinted at the wall of glass between her and me. I been told performers can't see the audience through that wall, but she was sure tryin' to. I guess she felt a little shy about practicin' in front of me. I like to think so, anyway.

About that time, a snap broke on her borrowed sports bra, the bra popped free, and I caught a flash of her pink parts before she slapped one arm across her chest. Then she dolphined to the surface like an underwater rocket being shot toward the moon.

Miriam pressed a red fingernail to the receiver in one ear. "What? Aw. Aw, shit." She dumped the mike in a chair on the front row. "Karen came up too fast under the wooden walkway and hit her head on a nail. She's hurt."

I ran up the aisle and outdoors.

Teegee and Lula hovered over Karen. She hung onto a ladder along the walkway on the auditorium's submerged roof. Blood gushed from a wound in her hair. "Thank God there are no piranhas here," she said with a painful squint. "I'd be nothing but skeletal remains and a synthetic mermaid tail."

I got down on my knees, latched my hands under her armpits, and pulled her onto the walkway. Being a saint, she kept one arm clamped over her bare bosom the whole time. I hoisted her against my chest. With the tail, she weighed about a ton. "Can we strip off her fins?" I asked.

"She ain't decent," Miriam said. "When we zipped her into the tail she shucked her panties and went commando."

"Pull off these fins and wrap me in a beach towel," Karen ordered, bleeding onto my sweaty shirt. "I have no shame. You," she said to me, "have to look the other way or blind yourself."

"I'll squint hard and think about that Greek guy who slept with his mother."

Teegee headed for the gift shop. "I've got a towel to wrap her in. It says, `Kissme Woomee Mermaid World-Where You Can Get Some Mermaid Tail.' We never could sell it."

Wrapped in nothing but that towel, Karen looked up at me sadly as I carried her to my truck. "Promise me, you won't tell everyone about this."

"I won't have to. Miriam and Lula will."

She sighed and put her bloody head on my chest.

Gloria was a nurse practitioner who oversaw the Fountain Springs Emergency Medical Services Clunic. She had a Down Syndrome sister, so she was especially patient with Joey and my ranch crew. She walked out in the waiting room snapping a bloody glove off one chubby hand. She grinned at me. "Puncture wound. No stitches. Tetanus shot, and she's good to go. She offered to pay but I said you got an account. I'll bill you."

"Bless your heart."

"How's Joey?"

"Doin' great." A lie, but he was better since Karen came. At least not getting' worse.

Gloria leaned close and chortled. "That's some tattoo she's got. Don't usually see one there."

Tattoo? Karen had a tattoo? Took me a second to believe it. "Uh, I wouldn't know. I'm just her boss."

"Yeah, right." Gloria hooted and went off to finish some paperwork. Like I was Karen's boyfriend and everybody knew it. Guess everybody thought I was irresistible.

I knocked on the exam room door. Tattoo? And where was `there?' I intended to spend a lot of time thinking about that.

"Entrez-vous," Karen said. "You may enter ..."

"Yeah, that's French for `Come on in.' I know." I stepped into the little room. The front of my t-shirt and jeans were smeared with blood from her head. I'd been scruffing a hand through my hair while I waited, so it pretty much stood up in black whirlwinds slicked with water and probably a little of Karen's blood, too. I wasn't exactly a heal n' sight for sore eyes.