Sea Creatures (4 page)

“I wouldn't know,” I said.

She looked back at the list, frowning. “More pea soup angora already? How's that possible?”

I didn't answer.

“I'm out of the medium-weight cactus flower. I'll have it next time.” She started to hand back the list, then stopped and looked at me again. She had pink, gently sagging cheeks and a silver stripe in her black hair. “I find it interesting, this list.” Her tone was confidential. “Sometimes more of one thing, less of another.”

“I saw it for the first time this morning,” I said.

After I paid, Frankie and I walked to the print shop, one block away in a different strip mall. We passed a small, crowded diner, outside of which men and women in suits smoked cigarettes and chatted, waiting for a table. Inside, people sat shoulder to shoulder on benches at stainless steel tables. A few doors down, the print shop was bookended by empty storefronts with
FOR LEASE
signs in the windows. I was struck by Miami's easy relationship with contradiction, economic upswing and downturn jumbled together. In other cities, there seemed to be ways to predict which homes would sell, which restaurants would close. Maybe there were Miamians who could predict these things, but whenever I hazarded a guess, I was wrong.

Even after walking only a block, the air-conditioning was a relief. Frankie's hair was too long for this weather. Dark, leafy chunks were pasted to his forehead, and his cheeks were bright pink. He peered over the counter at the maze of industrial printers being manned by gum-smacking teenagers, their faces glowing with each pass of the developer under the glass.

Mr. Henry Gale was in the back. I asked for him, and the man who emerged was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a voluminous dark beard that covered most of his face—an
un-Floridian
beard, was my thought. He wore a short-sleeved plaid button-down and long shorts with a surfeit of many-size pockets, an oatmeal-colored waist apron, and leather sandals. This man, with his ruddy cheeks and easy stroll, was clearly not a person one would address as
Mister
, which furthered my notion that the hermit was formal and old-fashioned.

The man whistled as he navigated the bunker of copiers. “You must be Georgia,” he said in a deep, softly articulated voice. We shook hands. To Frankie, he said, “Little man! How's it going?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But may I ask who told you I was coming?”

“Riggs said a new runner would be stopping by. You've got to explain something to Charlie for me—on the nautilus, I subbed vermillion red for the carmine red he requested.” He searched behind the counter, then pulled up an oversize brown bag. “It's a little brighter, a little
orangey
, but I think it works better with the dark water. Make sure to let me know if he doesn't like it, and I'll do it again.”

“Who is Riggs?”

“Charlie's lawyer. He called yesterday.”

“And what is vermillion red?”

He smiled. His teeth were very bright and straight, the teeth of a more sophisticated man. It wasn't that he wasn't attractive—he was—but it was the offhand kind of attractive that's composed mostly of confidence and cool, with physical attributes an afterthought.

He said, “Look here,” and pulled from the paper bag a stack of prints. He sorted through them gingerly, touching only the corners. The topmost piece, which Henry tipped toward me as he searched, was two things at once: a page from some kind of reference book, covered margin to margin in very small type; and also, superimposed over the type, a precisely drawn portrait of a multicolored jellyfish—or was it a man-of-war? Each tentacle was a different shade of yellow or green, its tendrils rendered painstakingly, some entwined and some jagged, some thin as noodles, some stubby and muscular. The dome of the creature was a soft emerald in color, its crown delicate as a snowflake. It appeared midswim, pushing itself across the page. Henry slipped another picture from the stack: a candy-striped nautilus (I didn't know what the creature was called at the time), its one visible eye cold but frantic, the rectangular pupil stamped and goatlike. This creature, too, was superimposed over a reference book page.

Beside the stack of prints, Henry placed a paper bag. “The originals,” he said, pushing them toward me.

I opened the bag and leafed through. These portraits were black and white, drawn on oversize book pages in what looked like charcoal pencil. My understanding was that it was Henry's job to add color to the drawings by hand, then print them on heavier stock using his equipment. Without color, the jellyfish was ruthless and astringent, masterfully depicted and beautiful in its way, but also cold, without the colored version's hint of playfulness.

“This is the vermillion,” Henry said, pointing to the nautilus's striped shell. “You see? Orangey.”

I closed the bag of originals and carefully picked up the jellyfish print. Frankie rose on his toes to peer over the edge of the counter. I signed to him,
What's that?

Fish
, he signed, one hand swimming in the air in front of his face.

“Jellyfish,” I said. “We'll look it up.”

We kept a big book of American Sign Language and consulted it daily, sometimes three or four times in an afternoon. We were constantly running up against the limits of a vocabulary acquired on an as-needed basis.

Henry looked back and forth between us. “You like fish, little man?” he said to Frankie, who gave an exaggerated nod. “Check this out.” He thumbed through the prints, then pulled out a drawing of a giant octopus attacking a clipper ship. The ship's bow was consumed by the water and its stern hovered tenuously above it. Each of its three masts was wrapped in a ropey lavender tentacle lined with fleshy pink suckers. I caught the typed heading of the page beneath the drawing, which read
ABSTRACT OF STATE LAWS REGARDING WILLS
. I marveled at the technical ability, the artistry, of rendering an animal so vividly on the page. “What do you think of
that
?” Henry said.

Frankie had ways of making up for his lack of speech. His eyes devoured the drawing. They spoke for him. He looked up at Henry, cocked his head, pushed out his lower lip, and blinked once—a gesture of pleasure.

Henry came around the counter and handed me two small boxes. “This one goes to Charlie,” he said, indicating the bottom box. “And this one,” he said, pointing to the top box, “goes to the RZ Gallery on LeJeune. Drop it off with the curator—I think her name is Helen? Elena? Something like that.”

“Today?” I said.

“She's waiting. I can't leave the shop, and a messenger will take too long.” He put the prints back in the bag and handed it over, along with the bag of originals. He shook my hand again, but this time he cupped mine in both of his for a moment, as if we were old friends. To Frankie, he gave a salute. “Until next time, little man,” he said, and Frankie waved.

 

FRANKIE PLAYED IN LIDIA'S BACKYARD
while I unpacked the car. Since leaving the printer, we'd unloaded the drawings at RZ Gallery—the curator was reading a gossip magazine and wearing a wool turtleneck in the gallery's biting chill—and spent over an hour at the grocery store. It was one o'clock; Lidia had implored me to get to Stiltsville before noon. I rushed back and forth from the boat to the car, checking on Frankie each time I rounded the corner of the house. He was a passable swimmer for his age, but I didn't like having him unsupervised around the pool, even for a minute. After several trips, the Zodiac's aft deck was crowded with bags and boxes, including three twenty-pound bags of ice that each required its own trip. These, I crowded under the captain's bench to keep out of the sunlight. I fastened down the boxes and bags with bungee cords I'd found in the garage.

At the tackle shop, I'd picked up the only life jacket on the shelf that came close to fitting Frankie. It was purple and had a pink butterfly across the back, and even on the smallest setting rose up around his shoulders. He kept pulling it down, patting his front and shaking his head, as if the foamy presence were a mosquito he could shoo. I stepped onto the boat and pushed off, and in that moment felt the clutch of anxiety.

The Zodiac had a two-seater captain's bench where I leaned and Frankie sat with his legs dangling. I pushed forward on the throttle as a Jet Ski raced by—too fast for the canal, I thought—and the Zodiac rocked on its waves. I signed to Frankie:
Hold on
.

The Coral Gables waterway was dredged in 1925. Back then, gondoliers ferried residents out to the bay down the eight miles of snaking green canal. Now the homes that lined the banks were Mediterranean in style, the nearby streets named for places in Spain—
Seville
,
Andalusia
,
Granada
—and lined with banyans that fractured the sunlight into spires. Some canal-front homes, like Lidia's, were modest, outdated ranches with large backyards and terra-cotta tiles and sunken great rooms, called Florida rooms, their stucco exteriors painted hibiscus colors. But many of the old homes had been razed and replaced or swallowed by additions. The newer homes were similar in style but strangers in soul, some pretty and some grotesque. Along the canal, each lot was belted by a pier and a boathouse or a slip. Many bulwarks, Lidia's included, were crumbling, and they were all marbled in green algae and pocked with butterscotch snails as big as Ping-Pong balls. Between many of the homes, swampy mangroves or sea grape trees rose like haphazard fences, sending dark roots into the water to claw for space. There were boats at most of the piers, and several of these were gleaming yachts with broad white hulls and no obvious signs of use. They blocked the sky as we passed beneath them. I drove slowly. We were passed twice, once by a lone man in a cabin cruiser and once by a little Mako so crowded with teenagers that it rode frighteningly low in the water.

The course of a life will shift—really shift—many times over the years. But rarely will there be a shift that you can feel gathering in the distance like a storm, rarely will you notice the pressure drop before the skies open. That morning, as Frankie and I had plodded from errand to errand, led around by the hermit's list like animals on leashes, I'd known on some level that this was one of those times. I would like to believe that I wouldn't again make the mistake of walking in blindly. Then again, blindly is the only way I would have walked in.

In the clear light of afternoon, the canal was transformed. The bay opened not like an unfurling serpent but like a feat of engineering, cleanly and without fuss. I followed the channel markers and kept our speed low, but the water was a little rough and without some momentum we rose too high and fell too hard. I sped up, and the bow bucked and planed and the ride smoothed out. The jostling waves were mild compared to those of the open ocean, beyond the continental shelf, and after several minutes, Frankie loosened his grip on the bench and I started to enjoy the sunshine and breeze and blue expanse of the water. The bay was sparsely dotted by boats in every direction. Behind us, my hometown gathered itself neatly on the shoreline, as if seeing us off. To the south wound the muddy green shoreline, and to the north rose the silver spires of downtown. A milky span of bridge linked the mainland to Key Biscayne.

The success of piloting midway across the bay buoyed me. I no longer felt unwise. I felt brave, as if I were the kind of mother who does not think, when her child has a nosebleed, of the potentially fatal ailments the nosebleed might augur. I felt like the mother who hands her child a tissue and tells him to wash his hands. At some point, I looked over my shoulder, and what I saw tripped my heartbeat: the yawing mouth of the canal had been sealed by distance.

It was ten minutes before Stiltsville—fourteen homes built on pilings in the middle of the bay—took shape along the horizon. From that distance, the houses resembled toy blocks on pins. Two channels ran through Stiltsville, and shallower grooves laced the northeastern quadrant of Biscayne Bay. From above, in aerial photos I've seen, these grooves look exactly as if a giant raked its fingers across the seabed. I knew from Lidia that the hermit's house was in the far channel, shingled in weathered gray cedar, with an exterior staircase that jutted out over the water before angling back to the dock, like a crooked elbow.

It was Monday, and most of Stiltsville's weekend residents were back on dry land. The place was empty of boats. From a distance, it had seemed as if the houses bundled together, but in actuality each stood alone on its own piece of narrow shoal, shouting distance from the closest neighbor. When you build a house beyond the edge of a continent, you're not looking to make friends. We passed a light blue house with an L-shaped dock, all the windows shuttered and a gate across the staircase. Next was a lemon-colored house with a wraparound porch, and, on the opposite shoal, a light pink house with plastic owls rooted to every dock piling.

The hermit's house was next. Lidia had mentioned that it would be the only one with the windows and gate open but no boat at the dock—still, the sight was jarring. Each house was a kind of island, yes, but especially the one inhabited by a person with no means of getting off. The Mansard roof was flat and thickly shingled, giving the house a top-heavy, vaguely French appearance. I approached slowly, the Zodiac's engine stuttering, intending to give the hermit some warning. Like the others, his house was raised above the water by cement pilings, so I could see underneath it to the open water beyond.

We reached the dock, which snaked back and forth toward the house like a line at an amusement park. There was a brief, alarming moment when I forgot how to cut the engine, but then I turned the key and that was that. I signed to Frankie to stay put, then stepped onto the dock with the spring line and secured it to a cleat. He watched me, then slipped off the captain's bench and stepped over to the gunwale. His arms came up and I lifted him onto the dock. When I turned—I suppose I knew this would be the case—there was a man standing on the upstairs porch wearing a faded gray T-shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled up. He stood with both palms on the porch railing, one bare foot perched on top of the other, as if there was all the time in the world for greeting, and for the moment he was content to stare down at us, these two strangers trespassing on his island.