The grocery-store papers spread it around that the great pond wouldn’t just take your money; it would kill you dead. Local news shows ran testimonies of citizens who said they’d seen the lake eat cows and elks and illegal Mexicans, shrieking as they boiled away. Science said the lake was not a man-eater, but the proof was in that gory water, so the stories stayed on prime time for a good number of years.
The real story of the redness was very dull. It was just a lot of ancient, red, one-celled creatures that thrived in high salt. The water authority tested and retested the water and declared the microbes no enemy to man. They were, however, hard on curb appeal. When the sea was only twelve years old, the coastal population had dwindled to ninety-three, a net loss of five thousand souls no longer keen on dwelling in a case of pinkeye inflamed to geologic scale.
The story delighted Cora Booth as meat for her art. She’d long been at work on a group of paintings and photographs about science’s unintended consequences: victims of robot nanoworms designed to eat cancer cells but which got hungry for other parts, lab mice in DNA-grafting experiments who’d developed a crude sign language using the hands of human infants growing from their backs. Once the tenants had fled and the situation on the sea had tilted into flagrant disaster, Cora banged out some grant proposals, withdrew some savings, and leased a home in Triton Estates, a place forsaken by God and movie stars.
—
Salvage vandals had long ago stolen the gates off the entrance to the Booths’ new neighborhood, but a pair of sandstone obelisks topped with unlit gas lamps still stood there, and they still spelled class. Their new home stood on a coastal boulevard named Naiad Lane, a thin track of blond scree. They drove slow past a couple dozen homes, most of them squatly sprawling bunkerish jobs of off-white stucco, all of them abandoned, windows broken or filmed with dust; others half-built, showing lath, gray bones of sun-beaten framing, pennants of torn Tyvek corrugating in the wind. Rodney pulled the truck into the driveway at number thirty-three, a six-bedroom cube with a fancy Spanish pediment on the front. It looked like a crate with a tiara. But just over the road lay the sea. Unruffled by the wind, its water lay still and thick as house paint, and it cast an inviting pink glow on the Booths’ new home.
“I like it,” said Cora, stepping from the truck. “Our personal Alamo.”
“What’s that smell?” said Rodney when they had stepped inside. The house was light and airy, but the air bore a light scent of wharf breath.
“It’s the bricks,” said Cora. “They made them from the thluk they take out of the water at the desal plant. Very clever stuff.”
“It smells like, you know, groins.”
“Learn to love it,” Cora said.
When they had finished the tour, the sun was dying. On the far coast, the meager lights of Port Miracle were winking on. They’d only just started unloading the trailer when Cora’s telephone bleated in her pocket. On the other end was Arn Nevis, the sole property agent in Triton Estates and occupant of one of the four still-inhabited homes in the neighborhood. Cora opened the phone. “Hi, terrific, okay, sure, hello?” she said, then looked at the receiver.
“Who was that?” asked Rodney, sitting on the front stair.
“Nevis, Arn Nevis, the rental turkey,” said Cora. “He just sort of barfed up a dinner invitation—Muhhouse, seven thirty—and hung up on me. Said it’s close, we don’t need to take our truck. Now, how does he know we have a truck? You see somebody seeing us out here, Rod?”
They peered around and saw nothing. Close to land, a fish or something buckled in the red water, other than themselves the afternoon’s sole sign of life.
—
But they drove the Ranger after all, because Rodney had bad ankles. He’d shattered them both in childhood, jumping from a crabapple tree, and even a quarter mile’s stroll would cause him nauseas of pain. So the Booths rode slowly in the truck through a Pompeii of vanished home equity. The ride took fifteen minutes because Cora kept experiencing ecstasies at the photogenic ruin of Triton Estates, getting six angles on a warped basketball rim over a yawning garage, a hot tub brimming and splitting with gallons of dust.
Past the grid of small lots they rolled down a brief grade to number three Naiad. The Nevis estate lay behind high white walls, light spilling upward in a column, a bright little citadel unto itself.
Rodney parked the truck alongside an aged yellow Mercedes. At a locked steel gate, the only breach in the tall wall, he rang the doorbell and they loitered many minutes while the day’s heat fled the air. Finally a wide white girl appeared at the gate. She paused a moment before opening it, appraising them through the bars, studying the dusk beyond, as though expecting unseen persons to spring out of the gloom. Then she turned a latch and swung the door wide. She was sixteen or so, with a face like a left-handed sketch — small teeth, one eye bigger than the other and a half-inch lower on her cheek. Her outfit was a yellow towel, dark across the chest and waist where a damp bathing suit had soaked through. She said her name was Katherine.
“Sorry I’m all sopped,” she said. “They made me quit swimming and be butler. Anyway, they’re out back. You were late so they started stuffing themselves.” Katherine set off for the house, her hard summer heels rasping on the slate path.
—
The Nevis house was a three-wing structure, a staple shape in bird’s-eye view. In the interstice between the staple’s legs lay a small rectangular inlet of the sea, paved and studded with underwater lights; it was serving as the family’s personal pool. At the lip of the swimming area, a trio sat at a patio set having a meal of mussels. At one end of the table slouched Arn Nevis, an old, vast man with a head of white curls, grown long to mask their sparseness, and a great bay window of stomach overhanging his belt. Despite his age and obesity, he wasn’t unattractive; his features bedded in a handsome arrangement of knobs and ridges, nearly cartoonish in their prominence. Arn was in the middle of a contretemps with a thin young man beside him. The old man had his forearms braced on the tabletop, his shoulders hiked forward, as though ready to pounce on his smaller companion. On the far side of the table sat a middle-aged woman, her blouse hoisted discreetly to let an infant at her breast. She stroked and murmured to it, seemingly unaware of the stridency between the men.
“I didn’t come here to get hot-boxed, Arn,” the smaller man was saying, staring at his plate.
“Hut — hoorsh,” stuttered Nevis.
“Excuse me?” the other man said.
Nevis took a long pull on his drink, swallowed, took a breath. “I said, I’m not hot-boxing anybody,” said Nevis, enunciating carefully. “It’s just you suffer from a disease, Kurt. That disease is caution, bad as cancer.”
The woman raised her gaze and, seeing the Booths, smiled widely. She introduced herself as Phyllis Nevis. She was a pretty woman, though her slack jowls and creased dewlap put her close to sixty. If she noticed her visitors’ amazement at seeing a woman of her age putting an infant to suck, she didn’t show it. She smiled and let a blithe music of welcome flow from her mouth: Boy, the Nevises sure were glad to have some new neighbors here in Triton. They’d met Katherine, of course, and there was Arn. The baby having at her was little Nathan, and the other fellow was Kurt Hackberry, a business friend but a real friend, too. Would they like a vodka lemonade? She invited the Booths to knock themselves out on some mussels, tonged from the shallows just off the dock, though Cora noticed there was about a half a portion left. “So sorry we’ve already tucked in,” Phyllis said. “But we always eat at seven thirty, rain or shine.”