Dead in the Water (33 page)

“Your date’s here,” she told John.

“What?” Donna pointed. “Oh,” he said. He held up his plate and Reade nodded, pointed to the bridge.

“Yes,” John mouthed. The captain signaled that he’d understood and turned away.

A steward asked Donna how she liked her meat. “Rare,” she replied. To John: “Do you like him?”

“Medium well,” John said, then laughed. “Sure. He’s fine. Matt’s totally under his spell. The captain’s ‘radical,’ you know.”

“So he seems to think,” Donna said. “He himself, I mean. Where’s the ketchup?”

“At the end of the table, madam.” The steward pointed with his chin.

“Well, he gets the job done,” John ventured.

“
Some
jobs,” she shot back meaningfully. As she expected, John’s face perked up.

“So, we’ll go see Ruth later?” she pressed. “Maybe we’ll go for a drink after?” Hell, why not? Her dance card was empty, so was his, and they were both adults. She was sure he could handle being the object of a rebound, given the certainty that their shipboard romance would be brief. What the hell, what the hell.

Oh, hell.

“That’d be nice.” John’s face reddened. He pushed up his glasses and she wanted to bat his hand away, tell him he looked like a nerd when he did that. There was something so vulnerable about him that she wanted to strap a bulletproof vest on him or something. He and Phil were a pair, weren’t they? On the other end of the macho scale, on the other hand, stood Reade and the sleazy Ramón. She’d take John or Phil over either of them anyday.

And did guys think about sex this much?

Need you ask, Officer? Need you really? And were you thinking about sex, or were you proving you don’t care about Glenn?

“Penny for your thoughts,” John murmured.

“Oh, no, these are worth a dollar.” She picked up the ketchup bottle and turned it upside down. “At least a dollar.”

“Okay.” He smiled faintly. Not sure how to take her, she supposed. She kind of liked that.

“I was wondering if Nemo had had her litter yet.”

John frowned dubiously. “Donna, that was not worth a dollar.”

She shook the ketchup bottle harder. Nothing came out. “Damn. What’s in here, anyway?”

The ketchup slid out, thick and chunky and gooey, coiling on top of the seared meat. “That’s more like it.”

“Donna,” John pressed.

“Okay, okay.” She handed him the bottle. He set it down. “I was wondering how often guys think about sex, if you want to know the horrible, unvarnished truth.”

To her delight, he broke into a wolfish grin. “All the time,” he replied. “Every single moment of every single hour.”

She grinned back at him. “Oh, I see. Then there
is
such a
thing as shared experiences.” She gave her hips a swing as she led the way back to the table.

I have cast the net, I have played out the fish. The moon is red, and it’s time to harvest this newest catch. She goes first, as I promised. For seeing through my set-pieces, she dies first, and perhaps, worst (as we speak of poetry here, you moderns who are so primal, so terrified)
:

After ten minutes of walking, Elise slowed down, turned around fearfully, and scrutinized the faces around her. She was being foolish. Of course Captain Reade wasn’t following her.

Of course none of … that had happened. She hadn’t snuck off and she hadn’t, they hadn’t …

Dim memories sprang up and she fought them away before they could take shape. Something about pain, and faces, and a child. And her screaming.

No …

She walked along the promenade deck, the one with the thick glass sea wall that protected strollers from salt spray or rain during bad weather. The surface of the water sparkled and danced; as she watched, a gray shadow perhaps five feet long swam beneath the waves, faded. Dolphin? she wondered, as tears welled in her eyes. She stopped and searched the horizon.

Was she overreacting? No. While she’d been dreaming that she had snuck out of bed for a rendezvous with the captain, Phil had actually done it. But that wasn’t like him. Had she finally pushed him too far?

And those dreams. God. Had she said something in her sleep? Had he heard her? Maybe he thought she was playing around again. Maybe he got so angry he went off to a bar, as he had done the night before.

Well, the hell with him; was it so much to demand, what she asked? That he be a man, that he …

How disappointing their first time together had been. How diffident, how tentative he’d been. And he was
tiny
. She honestly had trouble knowing when he was inside her. That made
her angriest of all, but she didn’t understand why. Except that she felt cheated; that being with him made her less of a woman. That she was being wasted.

And the captain. The captain had …

She shivered and shook her head. Dangerous shoals there. Uncharted territory. She’d had a bad dream that seemed very real. But it hadn’t been real, because she was here, and she was fine, and …

She closed her eyes and put her hands on the thick glass. She wished to God they hadn’t set out on the
Morris
. She hadn’t wanted to; now she couldn’t figure out how she had acquiesced after they’d seen that damn rust bucket. He had his ways, now and then. Money wasn’t his only charm.

The boat rocked. Though she felt dizzy, she kept her eyes shut. Beyond the glass, the water rushed like a caress. Footsteps sounded around her. People laughing, talking. Distantly, a piano tinkled something like “Camp Town Races”; or was it a calliope? Very
Natchez Belle
; oh, God, she hated the South, all that magnolia-sweet-potato-pie crap. Peachtree this and Tara that, and half the people were so ignorant they couldn’t even spell “confederate.” Small-town small minds, called you honey with one side of their mouths and tore you to shreds for being a Yankee with the other. And the men were so wrapped up in themselves, in their glory of being a good ol’ Southern boy. They were terrible lovers …

The sound of the water caressed her. A coldness swirled around her, and she opened her eyes as something—someone—

—a man—

—spread-eagled himself behind her and pushed her against the glass. The hard chest, the hard thighs, the penis—

“Wh—” she gasped, and the man said gruffly, “Look.” She struggled; he squeezed her against the barrier and clamped one hand around the back of her head, forcing her to face straight ahead. She tried to scream but no sound came out; she blinked rapidly in her panic, trembling violently. The other passengers walked by with apparent disinterest. This couldn’t be happening. This was another dream.

“Look, damn you.”

Snails covered the wall now, dozens of them, in a wide circle, sluglike, brown, and oozing; and each time she blinked they got bigger, and bigger, until she could see that they were taking each other from behind, each one, in a long chain of sex.

“Each one is male and female,” her captor said in a low, languid voice. “Each one fucks the one in front, gets fucked by the one in back. Look.”

He forced her head to the left. Black mussels clung to the glass. “Hermaphrodites,” he whispered. “They release their jelly into the sea. Queen bees require special jelly, do they not?”

Elise gasped. Her knees buckled, but he held her hard. His penis pushed against the small of her back and a wild roar of fear thrust through her.

He turned her head up and to the right. A crab clicked sideways along the top of the glass, carrying another crab in its claws.

“The ocean seethes with sex,” the voice said. Was it the captain? “It seethes. You will be happy in it. And I’ll wake you and fuck you from time to time, and you’ll live.”

Bile shot up from her stomach and trickled down her chin.

“It’s time for you,” he went on, squeezing her. “I’m tired. Perhaps I’m growing old. You saw through the
Pandora
. You saw my other lives. My ships. I wasn’t prepared for that.”

“I … I …”

“If you die aboard, you’re mine,” he whispered in her ear.

She heard the tinkle of the piano; the man’s hot breath, growing rapid; and then, a single woman’s voice, singing, a clear, sweet soprano. Elise’s eyes rolled back in her head.

When Elise woke, she lay on the floor of the museum, flat on her back with her legs spread apart. And he was there! On top of her, again, the dream, again; and it
hurt
.

But he was so real. Solid, as he leered and laughed at her, as he thrust through the crotch of her jumpsuit.

“Ss …” She tried to push him away; and he pushed in hard; he rent her. Blood streamed out of her, pooling around
and steaming, etching a hole in the floor where she lay. The linoleum warped beneath her like a badly tied hammock.

With a voiceless gasp, she shrank from him as he thrust again, slid a shaking hand between their bodies to his cock, hard and thick and

glass
.

She hadn’t known you could hurt like this and live.

Her hand pushed at him, stop, stop. There was a roaring in her body, a wail like a burning animal; and then she couldn’t tell if she was pushing it in or pulling it out; and behind him, around them …

the faces. The faces. Then, no faces.

His laughter. And incredibly: singing. Someone she knew. Donna. Donna,
singing
!

“God!” she shouted. “Help!”

The glass.

The agony.

Time, or no time. Space, or no space. Elise was, and wasn’t awake.

She was, and wasn’t alive. But alone, yes, alone.

all, all alone
.

“Oh,” she groaned, rolling over on her side. A sound of a bottle, rolling on the floor. Her legs slapped together and hot pain rolled through her sex organs. She moaned. The room tipped and swirled, dissolved, returned—

—for a moment she was sure, absolutely sure, that she was on some kind of long, flat barge, stretched out next to the wheel of a car, or a pile of dead fish—

She struggled to awareness. The fogginess receded, and she lay in the museum. She faced the back of the room where the figureheads were kept. Indian chief, bare-breasted Columbianna, ancient Chinese demon—

She screamed. They were—

No, no, they couldn’t—

—in a long chain, up and down the stairs, one in front, one behind, one in front, one behind, one—

—and then she was surrounded by writhing bodies, black
men in chains on the floor, grabbing at her, screaming, clawing.

“Hell! Help!” she shrieked, and rolled hard to the right.

The men disappeared. She lay on the deck of a large yacht, the sails full with sweet breezes. A man sat in a chair at the wheel, and he was singing:

“ ‘Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main …’ ”

“Wha …” she rasped.

Then someone clutched her ankle and pulled, hard; she shrieked as she tumbled down into a whirlpool, down,

down,

down,

and around, raging on black panthers’ paws, sucking her below, to the deadly deep, forty, fifty, sixty-nine thousand leagues; and the sharks came for her, the gray shadows half as long as the
Pandora
, serpent sharks smelling the forbidden fruit of her. They seized her with rows of teeth like broken glass bottles, and dragged her

“Phil!”

under, and out

of everything.

And also harvesting him; the male and female of the pair, though they are actually so sexless that I shall remember them as figureheads. I will use their faces and their memories, but I shall never give them knowledge of sex again. Adam and Eve before the Fall, poor sad and tasty duet
:

Phil staggered on with the lovely girl on his arm. It didn’t matter to her that he was in his pajamas, nor to anyone else who passed them by. On this sunny spring morning, the other passengers smiled and waved, the bustled ladies twirling their parasols, the men raising their top hats.

Phil shuffled on the steamboat deck, and he knew this was all wrong. Didn’t he? He knew he was on the
Pandora
, but this was a paddlewheel, wasn’t it?

“What …?” he murmured.

A flash—

a flash—

—and he was standing on some kind of catwalk, surrounded by blackness, and she was, oh, God, she was—

—like in the dining room, nothing but rot—

—beautiful, and smelling of the magnolia behind her ear. Her hair was loose, how daring, and it draped the creamy lace of her dress like a cape of shiny black—

Water! Black, foul water swirled around his knees! The
Pandora
was sinking! It was—

“Come,” she urged, and stepped into a metal cage. No, an elevator. Yes, up to the surface, before the water got them.

He jumped in. “I’m, I’m all mixed up,” he said, grabbing her shoulders.

Her shoulders of bone, her spine of bone, her skull. She dangled from the top of the cage like a puppet, a skeleton, whose jaw opened, closed, whose bony arms reached for him.

Whose
tail bones—

Phil screamed and threw himself against the back of the elevator. She reached for him—

—it started to go down, down, into the water.

Jump overboard, Phil. Jump now
.

“Gahh!” he shouted. His jaw locked open as he dug his heels into the floor and hurtled himself against the cage—the glass case—the cage—

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her deep-set brown eyes large with worry. Her hair fell in a curtain as she raised her hand and touched his sweaty cheek.

His jaw hung open and he made gagging sounds. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t make sense. Where was he? Dream, dream. Pajamas, a dream.

Whoosh
.

That sound! He swiveled his head.

Whoosh. Whoosh
.

The tinny plunk-plunk of a piano, a banjo.

“It’s all right. Just jump,” she said softly.

Whoosh, whoosh, whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh

And Phil saw, but didn’t see, a white wood column grow behind her, and he felt, but didn’t feel, the floor bow upward into a curved wooden deck. And heard, but didn’t hear—

—the whoosh of the paddlewheel—

—the cry of the steam whistle shrieking, shrieking, too much steam, too much, the engines, racing; and the riverboat swerved to avoid something dead ahead, a black shape in a bank of fog huge as a cathedral.