Spider Legs (8 page)

“Natalie, take a look at this!” Nathan screamed, almost choking. She came closer and looked into the 15-gallon aquarium.

“My God. How could the fish store not have noticed this? Let me get Martha.” As she ran to Martha one of the pycnogonids used its claws to rip a piece of flesh from the thumb.

“Hoped you liked my joke,” Martha said as he arrived. Her voice was light, trivial, like a rose bloom falling into silence without a sound, without any weight. Then she opened her mouth wide and started laughing. Natalie turned and stared at her. Martha's laughter stopped, as though Natalie had turned off a valve in her chest.

“Joke?” said Nathan.

“The hand,” said Martha. “It's fake. Made out of compressed fish food. You should see the looks I get.”

“Very funny,” Natalie said.

“Where did you get the pycnogonids?” Nathan asked.

“They're all over the place now. Lots of little ones. They get trapped in all the local fishing nets these days.”

There was a loud noise at the front of the store. Martha jumped quickly and ran to where the noise was coming from. Nathan and Natalie followed. Three young men stared back at them. Their heads were shaven and two of them wore black leather jackets.

“How are you today, freak?” one of the men said, leering at Martha. He wore barbaric jewelry around his neck and arms, and an ugly cloth coat fastened in front with wooden toggles. Martha said nothing but watched him closely. She looked into his protruding eyes shadowed by thick brows. Nathan was alarmed, but didn't know what to do.

Another man went to a tank of tiger barbs, placed his hand inside, and scooped up a handful, which he threw on the floor. His eyes were hard and cruel and pitiless. The three men laughed and started toward Martha.

“Why don't you get out of here,” Natalie said to them. Nathan wondered whether she had her police gun with her. Surely not, because this was more like a date than a professional mission.

The fish store continued to echo with hoarse laughter. Before Natalie could intervene, Martha shifted all her weight to her left foot, tensed, and kicked out at one of the hoodlums’ shoulders. The shoulder cracked with a brittle sound and the man dropped. The other two men opened their mouths in shock. So did Nathan. Had he seen what he thought he had?

“Hey freak, want to die?” one of the two uninjured gorillas barked.

“Oh, my shoulder is killing me,” their friend moaned on the floor.

The two uninjured men moved toward Martha. She reacted automatically, smashing her fist into one attacker's solar plexus. With a twist of her body, she tucked in her right leg and then lashed out at the remaining goon's jaw with her foot. She kicked him hard enough to put him on an apple sauce and pudding diet for about two months, Nathan thought.

“It's time to leave,” she told the three. She crouched low, her long calloused fingers rigid and extended toward them like knife blades.

Apparently the men were not convinced by her obvious fighting skills. The first one came at her again. She caught him on his fourth step, grabbing his right foot and lifting it. He landed on his side with a thud. He got up, but was very nervous now. He lunged at Martha and she hit him with a canister filter she had ripped from the tiger barb tank. His face smacked into the filter with what reminded Nathan of the satisfying sound of peanut brittle cracking.

“Son of a bitch,” the man mumbled, and then all three of them ran from the store.

For a moment there was silence in the room. Martha smiled. “Did I mention I have a black belt, first Dan, in karate?” she inquired.

“No you didn't,” Nathan said.

“Very helpful for those unable to accept my physical deformities.”

“Yes, you were—” Natalie tried to think of the right word. “Amazing.”

Nathan and Natalie looked at each other and decided to leave the store. As they reached the door, Martha pointed to a sign. It read:

I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS.

“Thank you very much,” Natalie said to her as they walked out into the cool evening. Martha Samules stood in a slanted oblong of light from the fish store and waved goodbye.

“I knew she was weird, but I think I underestimated her,” Natalie muttered as they got clear.

“Yet she knows how to take care of herself, and she had ample provocation,” Nathan pointed out.

She changed the subject. “Do you think there's any relationship between the sudden rise in the pycnogonid population that Martha spoke of and the abrupt appearance of the giant pycnogonid?”

“It seems like too much of a coincidence for there not to be a correlation.” But he knew that this was only conjecture, not proof of anything.

As they walked down Main Street, they passed a drugstore, chiropractor, and bakery. The bakery was having a sale on devil's food cake. A big Santa Claus kind of guy, obviously the baker, stepped outside and smiled at them. His front was draped with a whipped-cream splashed apron.

“Care for a piece of cake?”

“No thanks.” Natalie smiled, as if she wouldn't have minded some on another occasion. They heard jazz music leaking out of the bakery. A few of the people in the bakery laughed excitedly.

“Please sit down,” the baker insisted. In his hands were three large china plates. A raven-haired waitress came out and smiled.

“Maybe later,” Nathan said. The baker's welcoming smile faded when he saw the expression on Nathan's face.
Is this whole town a little weird?
Nathan wondered.

The two of them continued down the street and looked into an antique shop. Directly behind the window were battered, charmless teapots, some marble chess sets, carved African masks, and a selection of “Ugly Stickers” from the 1960s.

“Hey, I collected Ugly Stickers when I was a kid,” Nathan said. Each card contained a picture of a creature's head with a name like Joe, Sy, or Bob printed below the science-fiction physiognomies. Joe had wormlike appendages coming from his nostrils. Sy had prodigious teeth the size of cigarettes.

“How would you like to meet someone like that?” Nathan said. Natalie smiled.

They walked along Main Street, which became narrower and had fewer stores as they walked. Christmas-style lights outlined some of the roofs of the buildings. “By eight o'clock on a summer weeknight, most of Main Street is locked up as tightly as a safe,” Natalie said. Bronze street lamps, governed by some master photosensor, began to throw rectangles of yellow light on the sidewalk and the fronts of old stores.
Quite romantic,
Nathan thought.

They cast tall shadows across the front of a barbershop and auto parts store. They looked into the barbershop and saw a slender gray-haired man sweeping the floor. Some of the shiny cobblestones he swept glistened like hand-finished English porcelains. Natalie waved to the man.

“Look at the apartment up there.” She pointed to a small window above the barbershop. “I shared that little apartment with an older woman until she died of a stroke three years ago.” Nathan nodded, not sure exactly what to say. “She had a pretty good life and enjoyed Newfoundland.”

They stopped at a small truck with green twinkle lights that lent a festive sparkle to the vehicle. Inside a woman sold them ice cream cones dipped in chocolate and rolled in crushed nuts.

“Not bad,” Nathan said as he licked his lips. He sniffed at the air, which became scented by roasted peanuts and popcorn. This was more like a date than ever. They hadn't even started to talk business, and he wasn't going to push it.

Suddenly he heard a noise. A big Eskimo in a hunting jacket walked past them, weaving slightly, his brown eyes fixed on the sidewalk before him. Tattooed on the back of his hands were codfish. Natalie nodded to him as he passed.

“Who was that?” Nathan asked.

“A fisherman. An out-of-work fisherman. Eskimos, known today as Inuits, used to have a cheerful view toward stress. But now alcoholism is caused by a new kind of stress—cultural upheaval.”

They paused and watched a pair of inebriated Dutch-speaking dwarfs pass by, followed by a man who looked as if he had just come from a flophouse on the Bowery.

“Your town certainly is different, eclectic,” Nathan remarked.

“I take it that you don't see many drunk Dutch dwarfs in the U.S.?”

“Sorry, I didn't mean to stare.”

“So what did you think of those ultra-thin fish tanks of Martha's?”

“Crazy.” He shook his head. “Would anyone really buy those?”

They both chuckled, and people on the streets turned to look. That made them laugh harder.

As they walked, Nathan noticed that the stores stocked tropical fruits such as lemons, but the foods were expensive—$5 for an orange—because of the high shipping costs. Some of the stores accepted payments in pelts and whale meat in addition to the common currency of the country. In this part of town many of the apartments and stores had an Italian-Mediterranean look with cream-colored stucco and Mexican tile roofs. Various hedges flanked the front walks. Malibu lights often revealed small spruce trees.

They continued to walk as the streets became more desolate. A few more inebriated Dutch dwarfs walked by, as Nathan scratched his head wondering where they were all coming from.

The two of them began to take a few steps along the slate sidewalk and looked into an alleyway where there was a small garden from which all the vegetables, with the exception of a few pumpkins and squash, had been harvested. Near the sidewalk were the dying remains of pretty chrysanthemums and cimi-cifuga. The heavy rain of the previous night had turned the garden into a swamp. Some squash were submerged. In the corner was a decayed doll whose face bobbed in the water. In another corner was a dead, gray Scandinavian cat. Its mouth was wide open, its teeth exposed to the rain and dirt. Lodged in its throat was an ornamental cabbage. Natalie looked a little sickened by the sight, and shivered.

“Let's keep walking,” Nathan said. He found the alleyway too depressing to linger by.

“What's that?” Natalie asked as she saw something crawling through the mud. She backed away and looked at Nathan. He looked closer and smiled.

“I think we're both a bit on edge,” he said. The movement in the mud was just a floating tree branch. At the far end of the alley was a fence with the graffiti:

THE SPIDER IS COMING

written in pink spray-paint.

“Looks like the town is preoccupied with the spider,” Nathan said.

“Aren't we all?”

As they walked, Nathan looked uneasily at the paintless walls of abandoned stores overrun by climbing ivy. The wood was peeling from a few of the nearby balconies. The cracked windows stared back at them like the eyeless sockets of a giant skull.

Soon Main Street changed direction and ran along the coast. The mood seemed to change as sharply as the direction of the street. A cool sea breeze tickled their hair, and Natalie said, “Ah.” Nathan took in a big breath of fresh air. Sand from the beaches came right up to the road, which glimmered like a great swatch of silk. On the side of the road away from the ocean there was grass.

They looked out toward the ocean and saw thousands of penguinlike murres and Atlantic puffins congregating on a faraway iceberg. When viewed from the air the dark birds formed a pointillistic canvas on the white ice. The puffins were probably feeding on small shrimp, krill, which populated the frigid North Atlantic waters in vast swarms. Many years ago, Nathan had heard, seafarers killed millions of puffins and boiled them, sometimes alive with wings flapping, for their oil. Babies and adults were thrown into steaming black caldrons, screaming for a few seconds, until shock and death overtook them. Today, near the top of the Newfoundland coastal food chain, the puffin’s primary land-based predator was man.

“I've found that each puffin has its own personality,” Natalie said as they paused to watch the noisy birds.

“You wouldn't want one as a pet.”

“I know, they bray and squawk—and produce a prodigious amount of smelly guano.”

“Of course, they're good to have around in Newfoundland. Did you know that the guano of puffins fertilizes the algae, and invigorates the ecosystem?”

“You're a wealth of facts,” Natalie said, sucking her mouth into a rosette. In repose, she was almost plain looking, but in animation she was beautiful. “What should we do about the giant sea spider?” she said, finally coming to the subject. “Tourism is declining. Everyone's a bit nervous. Some creeps at the north of Bonavista Bay are dropping randomly placed bombs into the sea, hoping to hit the monster. At the same time, they're destroying thousands of fish.”

“I think we have to wait for it to attack again and quickly get to the scene before it gets away. Probably we should also set some traps with bait. But it would be hard to trap something that large. Maybe big cage-like traps could be constructed and set on the ocean bottom.”

“Good idea. I'll make sure the police department sets up some huge spring-loaded cages with chunks of meat.”

Main Street started to break up: the asphalt had potholes, and sand covered vast stretches of road. Everywhere small weeds grew through the cracks in the pavement. After another few minutes of walking they could barely perceive the road. Oh, there were a few scattered pieces of asphalt here and there, a few charred board-ends, some road-litter, and an occasional hard patch of ground that delineated the road from the sand and weeds to give the tired traveler some guidance. But an occasional chunk of asphalt did not make a road any more than a few organs made a body. It was as if the street gradually grew weary and finally gave up, ending in a small gravel path.

Mists fell across the path like steam from a bubbling kettle. It
was as if the entire coastline were boiling, and whole waves were turned to steam along a volcanic beach. Their footsteps echoed hollowly through a place where children once played and tourists once traveled. A few pieces of broken colored glass twinkled in the waning light. In the faraway western hills was a panorama of golden light that filled the lowlands as far south as they could see. Nearby long fingers of land stretched into the sea. Massive black rocks roared up from the water's edge. Dusk was approaching as Nathan kicked at long strands of kelp which lay like dead worms on the gravel way.