The Very Best of F & SF v1 (6 page)

“No you don’t. I
think that’s real nice, Mr. Smith. A touch of strange. A touch... you know, you
just told the story of my life. Yes you did. I was born and brought up and went
to school and got a job all right there in Springfield, and—”

“Springfield?
You mean Springfield Massachusetts? That’s my town!” he blurted excitedly, and
fell off the ledge into the sea. He came up instantly and sprang up beside her,
blowing like a manatee.

“Well no,” she
said gently. “It was Springfield, Illinois.”

“Oh,” he said,
deflated.

She went on, “I
wasn’t ever a pretty girl, what you’d call, you know, pretty. I wasn’t
repulsive either, I don’t mean that. Well, when they had the school dances in
the gymnasium, and they told all the boys to go one by one and choose a
partner, I never got to be the first one. I was never the last one left either,
but sometimes I was afraid I’d be. I got a job the day after I graduated high
school. Not a good one, but not bad, and I still work there. I like some people
more than other people, but not very much, you know?... A touch of strange. I
always knew there was a name for the thing I never had, and you gave it a good
one. Thank you, Mr. Smith.”

“Oh that’s all
right,” he said shyly. “And anyway, you have it now... how was it you happened
to meet your... him, I mean?”

“Oh, I was
scared to
death
, I really was. It was the company picnic, and I was swimming, and
I—well, to tell you the actual truth, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Smith, I had a
strap on my bathing suit that was, well, slippy. Please, I don’t mean too
bad,
you know, or I wouldn’t
ever have worn it. But I was uncomfortable about it, and I just slipped around
the rocks here to fix it and... there he was.”

“In the daytime?”

“With the sun on
him. It was like... like... There’s nothing it was like. He was just lying here
on this very rock, out of the water. Like he was waiting for me. He didn’t try
to get away or look surprised or anything, just lay there smiling. Waiting. He
has a beautiful soft big voice and the longest green eyes, and long golden hair.”

“Yes, yes.
She
has, too.”

“He was
so
beautiful. And then all
the rest, well, I don’t have to tell
you.
Shiny silver scales and the big curvy flippers.”

“Oh,” said John
Smith.

“I was scared,
oh yes. But not
afraid.
He didn’t try to come near me and I sort of knew he couldn’t ever
hurt me... and then he spoke to me, and I promised to come back again, and I
did, a lot, and that’s the story.” She touched his shoulder gently and embarrassedly
snatched her hand away. “I never told anyone before. Not a single living soul,”
she whispered. “I’m so glad to be able to talk about it.”

“Yeah.” He felt
insanely pleased. “Yeah.”

“How did you...”

He laughed. “Well,
I have to sort of tell something on myself. This swimming, it’s the only thing
I was ever any good at, only I never found out until I was grown. I mean, we
had no swimming pools and all that when I went to school. So I never show off
about it or anything. I just swim when there’s nobody around much. And I came
here one day, it was in the evening in summer when most everyone had gone home
to dinner, and I swam past the
reef line, way out away
from the Jaw, here. And there’s a place there where it’s only a couple of feet
deep and I hit my knee.”

Jane Dow inhaled
with a sharp sympathetic hiss.

Smith chuckled. “Now
I’m not one for bad language. I mean I never feel right about using it. But you
hear it all the time, and I guess it sticks without you knowing it. So
sometimes when I’m by myself and bump my head or whatnot I hear this rough
talk, you know, and I suddenly realize it’s me doing it. And that’s what
happened this day, when I hurt my knee. I mean, I really hurt it: So I sort of
scrounched down holding on to my knee and I like to boil up the water for a
yard around with what I said. I didn’t know anyone was around or I’d never.

“And all of a
sudden there she was, laughing at me. She came porpoising up out of deep water
to seaward of the reef and jumped up into that sunlight, the sun was low then,
and red; and she fell flat on her back loud as your tooth breaking on a
cherry-pip. When she hit, the water rose up all around her, and for that one
second she lay in it like something in a jewel box, you know, pink satin all
around and her deep in it.

“I was that hurt
and confused and startled I couldn’t believe what I saw, and I remember
thinking this was some la—I mean, woman, girl like you hear about, living the
life and bathing in the altogether. And I turned my back on her to show her
what I thought of that kind of goings-on, but looking over my shoulder to see
if she got the message, and I thought then I’d made it all up, because there
was nothing there but her suds where she splashed, and they disappeared before
I really saw them.

“About then my
knee gave another twinge and I looked down and saw it wasn’t just bumped, it
was cut too and bleeding all down my leg, and only when I heard her laughing
louder than I was cussing did I realize what I was saying. She swam round and
round me, laughing, but you know? There’s a way of laughing
at
and a way
of laughing
with,
and there was no bad feeling in what she was doing.

“So I forgot my
knee altogether and began to swim, and I think she liked that; she stopped
laughing and began to sing, and it was...” Smith was quiet for a time, and Jane
Dow had nothing to say. It was as if she were listening for that singing, or to
it.

“She can sing
with anything that moves, if it’s alive, or even if it isn’t alive, if it’s big
enough, like a storm wind or neaptide rollers. The way she sang, it was to my
arms stroking the water and my hands cutting it, and me in it, and being scared
and wondering, the way I was... and the water on me, and the blood from my
knee, it was all what she was singing, and before I knew it it was all the
other way round, and I was swimming to what she sang. I think I never swam in
my life the way I did then, and may never again, I don’t know; because there’s
a way of moving where every twitch and wiggle is exactly right, and does twice
what it could do before; there isn’t a thing in you fighting anything else of
yours...” His voice trailed off.

Jane Dow sighed.

He said, “She
went for the rocks like a torpedo and just where she had to bash her brains
out, she churned up a fountain of white-water and shot out of the top of it and
up on the rocks—right where she wanted to be and not breathing hard at all. She
reached her hand into a crack without stretching and took out a big old comb
and began running it through her hair, still humming that music and smiling at
me like—well, just the way you said
he
did, waiting, not ready to run. I swam to the rocks and climbed up
and sat down near her, the way she wanted.”

Jane Dow spoke
after a time, shyly, but quite obviously from a conviction that in his silence
Smith had spent quite enough time on these remembered rocks. “What... did she
want, Mr. Smith?”

Smith laughed.

“Oh,” she said. “I
do beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Oh please,” he
said quickly, “it’s all right. What I was laughing about was that she should
pick on me—me of all people in the world—” He stopped again, and shook his head
invisibly. No, I’m not going to tell her about that, he decided. Whatever she
thinks about me is bad enough. Sitting on a rock half the night with a mermaid,
teaching her to cuss... He said, “They have a way of getting you to do what
they want.”

It is possible,
Smith found, even while surf whispers virtually underfoot, to detect the
cessation of someone’s breathing; to be curious, wondering, alarmed, then
relieved as it begins again, all without hearing it or seeing anything.
What’d I say?
he thought,
perplexed; but he could not recall exactly, except to be sure he had begun to
describe the scene with the mermaid on the rocks, and had then decided against
it and said something or other else instead. Oh. Pleasing the mermaid. “When
you come right down to it,” he said, “they’re not hard to please. Once you
understand what they want.”

“Oh yes,” she
said in a controlled tone. “I found that out.”

“You did?”

Enough silence
for a nod from her.

He wondered what
pleased a merman. He knew nothing about them— nothing. His mermaid liked to
sing and to be listened to, to be watched, to comb her hair, and to be cussed
at. “And whatever it is, it’s worth doing,” he added, “because when they’re
happy, they’re happy up to the sky.”

“Whatever it is,”
she said, disagreeably agreeing.

A strange
corrosive thought drifted against his consciousness. He batted it away before
he could identify it. It was strange, and corrosive, because of his knowledge
of and feeling for, his mermaid. There is a popular conception of what joy with
a mermaid might be, and he had shared it—if he had thought of mermaids at
all—with the populace... up until the day he met one. You listen to mermaids,
watch them, give them little presents, cuss at them, and perhaps learn certain
dexterities unknown, or forgotten, to most of us, like breathing under
water—or, to be more accurate, storing more oxygen than you thought you could,
and finding still more (however little) extractable from small amounts of water
admitted to your lungs and vaporized by practiced contractions of the
diaphragm, whereby some of the dissolved oxygen could be coaxed out of the
vapor. Or so Smith had theorized after practicing certain of the mermaid’s
ritual exercises. And then there was fishing to be eating, and fishing to be
fishing, and hypnotizing eels, and other innocent pleasures.

But innocent.

For your mermaid
is as oviparous as a carp, though rather more mammalian than an echidna. Her
eggs are tiny, by honored mammalian precedent, and in their season are placed
in their glittering clusters (for each egg looks like a tiny pearl embedded in
a miniature moonstone) in secret, guarded grottos, and cared for with much
ritual. One of the rituals takes place after the eggs are well rafted and have
plated themselves to the inner lip of their hidden nest; and this is the
finding and courting of a merman to come and, in the only way he can, father
the eggs.

This
embryological sequence, unusual though it may be, is hardly unique in
complexity in a world which contains such marvels as the pelagic phalange of
the cephalopods and the simultaneity of disparate appetites exhibited by
certain arachnids. Suffice it to say, regarding mermaids, that the legendary monosyllable
of greeting used by the ribald Indian is answered herewith; and since design
follows function in such matters, one has a guide to one’s conduct with the
lovely creatures, and they, brother, with you, and with you, sister.

“So gentle,” Jane
Dow was saying, “but then, so rough.”

“Oh?” said
Smith. The corrosive thought nudged at him. He flung it somewhere else, and it
nudged him there, too... It was at one time the custom in the Old South to
quiet babies by smearing their hands liberally with molasses and giving them a
chicken feather. Smith’s corrosive thought behaved like such a feather, and
pass it about as he would he could not put it down.

The
merman
now, he thought
wildly... “I suppose,” said Jane Dow, “I really am in no position to criticize.”

Smith was too
busy with his figurative feather to answer.

“The way I
talked to you when I thought you were... when you came out here. Why, I never
in my life—”

“That’s all
right. You heard
me
, didn’t you?” Oh, he thought, suddenly disgusted with himself, it’s
the same way with her and her friend as it is with me and mine. Smith, you have
an evil mind. This is a nice girl, this Jane Dow.

It never
occurred to him to wonder what was going through her mind. Not for a moment did
he imagine that she might have less information on mermaids than he had, even
while he yearned for more information on mermen.

“They
make
you do it,” she said. “You
just have to. I admit it; I lie awake nights thinking up new nasty names to
call him. It makes him so happy. And he loves to do it too. The... things he
says. He calls me ‘alligator bait.’ He says I’m his squashy little bucket of
roe. Isn’t that awful? He says I’m a milt-and-water type. What’s milt, Mr.
Smith?”

“I can’t say,” hoarsely
said Smith, who couldn’t, making a silent resolution not to look it up. He
found himself getting very upset. She seemed like such a nice girl.... He found
himself getting angry. She unquestionably
had
been a nice girl.

Monster, he
thought redly. “I wonder if it’s moonrise yet.”

Surprisingly she
said, “Oh dear. Moonrise.”