Katherine Nevis did not sit with the diners but went to the sea’s paved edge. She dropped her towel and slipped into the glowing water without a splash.
“So you drove down from Boston?” Hackberry asked, plainly keen to quit the conversation with his host.
“We did,” said Rodney. “Five days, actually not so bad once you get past—”
“Yeah, yeah, Boston—” Nevis interrupted with regal vehemence. “And now they’re here, sight unseen, whole thing over the phone, not all this fiddlefucking around.” Nevis coughed into his fist, then reached for a plastic jug of vodka and filled his glass nearly to the rim, a good half-pint of liquor. He drank a third of it at one pull, then turned to Cora, his head bobbing woozily on his dark neck. “Kurt is a Chicken Little. Listens to ninnies who think the Bureau of Land Management is going to choke us off and starve the pond.”
“Why don’t they?” Cora asked.
“Because we’ve got their nursh — their nuh — their nads in a noose is why,” said Nevis. “Because every inch of shoreline they expose means alkali dust blowing down on the goddamned bocce pitches and Little League fields and citrus groves down in the Yuma Valley. They’re all looking up the wrong end of a shotgun, and us right here? We’re perched atop a seat favored by the famous bird, if you follow me.”
Nevis drained his glass and filled it again. He looked at Cora and sucked his teeth. “Hot damn, you’re a pretty woman, Cora. Son of a bitch, it’s like somebody opened a window out here. If I’d known you were so goddamned lovely, I’d have jewed them down on the rent. But then, if I’d known you were hitched up with this joker I’d have charged you double, probably.” He jerked a thumb and aimed a grin of long gray teeth at Rodney. Rodney looked away and pulled at a skin tab on the rim of his ear. “Don’t you think, Phyllis?” said Nevis. “Great bones.”
“Thank you,” Cora said. “I plan to have them bronzed.”
“Humor,” Nevis said flatly, gazing at Cora with sinking red eyes. “It’s that actress you resemble. Murf. Murvek. Urta. Fuck am I talking about? You know, Phyllis, from the goddamn dogsled picture.”
“Drink a few more of those,” said Cora. “I’ll find you a cockroach who looks like Brigitte Bardot.”
“Actually, I hate alcohol, but I get these migraines. They mess with my speech, but liquor helps some,” Nevis said. Here, he sat forward in his chair, peering unabashedly at Cora’s chest. “Good Christ, you got a figure, lady. All natural, am I right?”
Rodney took a breath to say a hard word to Nevis, but while he was trying to formulate the proper phrase Phyllis spoke to her husband in a gentle voice.
“Arny, I’m not sure Cora appreciates—”
“An appreciation of beauty, even if it is sexual beauty, is a great gift,” said Nevis. “Anyone who thinks beauty is not sexual should picture tits on a man.”
“I’m sure you’re right, sweetie, but even so—”
Nevis flashed a brilliant crescent of teeth at his wife and bent to the table to kiss her hand. “Right here, the most wonderful woman on earth. The kindest and most beautiful and I married her.” Nevis raised his glass to his lips. His gullet pumped three times while he drank.
“His headaches are horrible,” said Phyllis.
“They are. Pills don’t work but vodka does. Fortunately, it doesn’t affect me. I’ve never been drunk in my life. Anyway, you two are lucky you showed up at this particular juncture,” Nevis announced through a belch. “Got a petition for a water-rights deal on Birch Creek. Hundred thousand gallons a day. Fresh water. Pond’ll be blue again this time next year.”
This news alarmed Cora, whose immediate thought was that her work would lose its significance if the story of the Anasazi Sea ended happily. “I like the color,” Cora said. “It’s exciting.”
Nevis refilled his glass. “You’re an intelligent woman, Cora, and you don’t believe the rumors and the paranoia peddlers on the goddamned news,” he said. “Me, I’d hate to lose it, except you can’t sell a fucking house with the lake how it is. Of course, nobody talks about the health benefits of that water. My daughter?” He jerked his thumb at Katherine, still splashing in the pool, and lowered his voice. “Before we moved in here, you wouldn’t have believed her complexion. Like a lasagna, I’m serious. Look at her now! Kill for that skin. Looks like a marble statue. Hasn’t had a zit in years, me or my wife neither, not one blackhead, nothing. Great for the bones, too. I’ve got old-timers who swim here three times a week, swear it’s curing their arthritis. Of course, nobody puts that on the news. Anyway, what I’m saying is, buy now, because once this Birch Creek thing goes through, this place is going to be a destination. Gonna put the back nine on the golf course. Shopping district, too, as soon as Kurt and a few other moneymen stop sitting on their wallets like a bunch of broody hens.”
Nevis clouted Hackberry on the upper arm with more force than was jolly. Hackberry looked lightly terrified and went into a fit of vague motions with his head, shaking and nodding, saying “Now, Kurt, now, Kurt” with the look of a panicked child wishing for the ground to open up beneath him.
—
When he had lapped the fluid from the final mussel shell, Arn Nevis was showing signs of being drunk, if he was to be taken at his word, for the first time in his life. He rose from the table and stood swaying. “Clothes off, people,” he said, fumbling with his belt.
Phyllis smiled and kept her eyes on her guests. “We have tea, and we have coffee and homemade peanut brittle, too.”
“Phyllis, shut your mouth,” said Nevis. “Swim time. Cora, get up. Have a dip.”
“I don’t swim,” said Cora.
“You can’t?” said Nevis.
“No,” said Cora, which was true.
“Dead man could swim in the water. Nathan can. Give me the baby, Phyllis.” He lurched for his wife’s breast, and with a sudden move, Phyllis clutched the baby to her and swiveled brusquely away from her husband’s hand. “Touch him and I’ll kill you,” Phyllis hissed. Nathan awoke and began to mewl. Nevis shrugged and lumbered toward the water, shedding his shirt, then his pants, mercifully retaining the pair of yellowed briefs he wore. He dove messily but began swimming surprisingly brisk and powerful laps, his whalelike huffing loud and crisp in the silence of the night. But after three full circuits to the far end of the inlet and back, the din of his breathing stopped. Katherine Nevis, who’d been sulking under the pergola with a video game, began to shriek. The guests leaped up. Arn Nevis had sunk seven feet or so below the surface, suspended from a deeper fall by the hypersaline water. In the red depths’ wavering lambency, Nevis seemed to be moving, though in fact he was perfectly still.
Rodney kicked off his shoes and jumped in. With much effort, he hauled the large man to the concrete steps ascending to the patio and, helped by Cora and Hackberry, heaved him into the cool air. Water poured from Rodney’s pockets. He put his palms to the broad saucer of Nevis’s sternum and rammed hard. The drowned man sputtered.
“Wake up. Wake up,” said Rodney. Nevis did not answer. Rodney slapped Nevis on the cheek, and Nevis opened his eyes to a grouchy squint.
“What day is it?” asked Rodney. By way of an answer, Nevis expelled lung water down his chin.
“Who’s that?” Rodney pointed to Phyllis. “Tell me her name.”
Nevis regarded his wife. “Big dummy,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Rodney said. “Who’s that?” He pointed at Nevis’s infant son.
Nevis pondered the question. “Little dummy,” he said, and began to laugh, which everybody took to mean that he had returned, unharmed, to life.
Kurt Hackberry and Katherine led Arn inside while Phyllis poured forth weeping apologies and panting gratitude to the Booths. “No harm done. Thank God he’s all right. I’m glad I was here to lend a hand,” Rodney said, and was surprised to realize that he meant it. Despite the evening’s calamities, his heart was warm and filled with an electric vigor of life. The electricity stayed with him all the way back to number thirty-three Naiad Lane, where, in the echoing kitchen, Rodney made zestful love to his wife for the first time in seven weeks.