“Here,” said Rodney, very gently, taking the hanky from her damp hand. He sucked awhile at the bitter cloth, then he knelt and cradled the girl’s jaw in his palm, rubbing at her mouth and chin. “Look out, you’re gonna take off all my skin,” she said, making a cranky child’s grimace, though she didn’t pull away. He heard her grunting lightly in her throat at the pleasure of being tended to. A smell was coming off her, a fragrance as warm and wholesome as rising bread. As he scrubbed the girl’s dirty face, he put his nose close to her, breathing deeply and as quietly as he could. He had mostly purged the gum from Katherine’s upper lip when she jerked away from him and hearkened anxiously to the sound of a slowing car. Arn Nevis’s eggnog Mercedes pulled into the gravel lot. He got out and strode very quickly down the shingle.
“Hi, hi!” Nevis cried. His hair was in disarray, and his hands trembled in a Parkinsonian fashion. In the hard noonday light, he looked antique and unwell. Rodney saw, too, that Nevis had a fresh pink scar running diagonally across his forehead, stitch pocks dotting its length. Rodney marveled a little that just the night before, he’d felt some trepidation in the big man’s presence. “Kath — Kuh, Kutch.” Nevis stopped, marshaled his breathing, and spoke. “Kuh, come here, sweetie. Been looking for you. Mom’s mad. Come now, huk — honey. See if I can’t talk your mom out of striping your behind.”
In his shame, Arn did not look at Rodney, which at once amused and angered the younger man. “Feeling okay, there, Arn?”
“Oh, shuh-sure,” Nevis said, staring at a point on Rodney’s abdomen. “Thank God it’s Friday.”
“It’s Thursday,” Rodney said.
“Oysters,” the old man said, looking at Rodney’s haul where he’d dropped it on the ground. “Oh, they’re nice.”
Rodney crouched and held them out to Nevis in cupped hands. Nevis looked at the oysters and then at Rodney. His was the manner of a craven dog, wanting that food but fearing that he might get a smack if he went for it. “Go on,” said Rodney.
With a quick move, Nevis grabbed a handful. His other hand seized Katherine’s arm. “Alrighty, and we’ll see you soon,” said Nevis over his shoulder, striding to his car.
—
The days found an agreeable tempo in Cora and Rodney’s new home. Each morning they rose with the sun. Each morning, Rodney swam far into the sea’s broads, then returned to the house, where he would join Cora for a shower, then downstairs to cook and eat a breakfast of tremendous size. When the dishes were cleared, Cora would set off to gather pictures. Rodney would spend two hours on the computer to satisfy the advertising firm in Boston for which he still worked part-time, and then he’d do as he pleased. His was a life any sane person would envy, yet Rodney was not at ease. He felt bloated with a new energy. He had never been an ambitious person, but lately he had begun to feel that he was capable of resounding deeds. He had dreams in which he conquered famous wildernesses, and he would wake up with a lust for travel. Yet he was irritable on days when he had to leave the valley for provisions not sold in Port Miracle’s pitiable grocery store. One day he told Cora that he might quit his job and start a company, though he grew angry when Cora forced him to admit that he had no idea what the company might produce. For the first time in his life, he resented Cora, begrudged the years he’d spent at her heel, and how he’d raised no fuss when she’d changed her mind after five years of marriage and said she didn’t want children after all. His mind roved to other women, to the Nevis girl, a young thing with a working womb, someone who’d shut up when he talked.
When Cora left him the truck, he often went fishing off the wharf at Port Miracle, always coming home with several meals’ worth of seafood iced down in his creel. He would wait until he got home to clean the catch so that Cora could photograph the haul intact.
“Ever seen one of these?” Cora asked him one night. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, whose screen showed a broad fish ablur with motion on the beach. “This thing was kind of creeping around in the mud down by that shed where the oldsters hang out.”
“Huh,” Rodney said, kissing Cora’s neck and slipping a hand into her shirt. “Snakehead, probably. Or a mudskipper.”
“It’s not. It’s flat, like a flounder,” she said. “Quit a second. I wish I could have kept it, but this kid came along and bashed it and took off. Look.”
She scrolled to a picture of Claude Hull braining the crawling fish with an aluminum bat.
“Mm,” said Rodney, raising his wife’s shirt and with the other hand going for her fly.
“Could you quit it?”
“Why?”
“For one thing, I’m trying to deal with my fucking work. For another, I’m kind of worn out. You’ve gotten me a little raw, going at me all the time.”
Sulking, he broke off his advances and picked up his phone from the counter. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll call the neighbors. Get them over here to eat this stuff. We owe them a feed.”
He stepped outdoors and called the Nevises, hoping to hear Katherine’s hoarse little crow timbre on the other end. No one answered, so Rodney phoned two more times. He had watched the road carefully that morning and knew the family was home.
In fact, Katherine and her mother were out on a motorboat cruise while Arn Nevis paced his den, watching the telephone ring. He did not want to answer it. His trouble with words was worsening. Unless he loosened his tongue with considerable amounts of alcohol, the organ was lazy and intractable. In his mind, he could still formulate a phrase with perfect clarity, but his mouth no longer seemed interested in doing his mind’s work and would utter a slurring of approximate sounds. When Nevis finally answered the telephone and heard Rodney’s invitation, he paused to silently rehearse the words I’m sorry, but Phyllis is feeling a bit under the weather. But Nevis’s tongue, the addled translator, wouldn’t take the order. “Ilish feen urtha” and then a groan was what Rodney heard before the line went dead.
—
Until recently, the headaches Arn Nevis suffered had been slow pursuers. A stroll through the neighborhood would clear the bad blood from his temples and he’d have nearly a full day of peace. But lately, if he sat still for five minutes, the glow would commence behind his brow. He would almost drool thinking about a good thick augur to put a hole between his eyes and let the steam out of his head. After five minutes of that, if he didn’t have a bottle around to kill it, white pain would bleach the vision from his eyes.
The pain was heating up again when he hung up on Rodney Booth, so he went out through the gate and strolled up to the dry tract slated to become nine new putting greens once the water lease on Birch Creek went through. He set about measuring and spray-painting orange hazard lines in the dirt where a ditcher would cut irrigation channels. Nevis owned most of this land himself, and he was tallying his potential profits when motion in the shadow of a yerba santa bush caught his eye. Scorpions, gathered in a ring, a tiny pocket mouse quaking at the center of them. The scenario was distasteful. He raised his boot heel and made to crush the things, but they nimbly skirted the fat shadow of his foot. The circle parted and the mouse shot out of sight.
He glanced at his watch. Four thirty. In half an hour, he had an appointment to show number eight Amphitrite Trail to a prospective buyer. The flawless sky and the light breeze were hopeful portents. Arn felt confident that on this day, he would make a good sale. To celebrate the prospect, Arn took the quart of peppermint schnapps from his knapsack, but then it occurred to him to save it, to drink it very quickly just before the client’s arrival for maximum benefit to his difficult tongue.