Stay Cold, Oxfilia (ch. 1)

Stay Cold, Oxfilia

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INTRO QUOTES

An ef ya son aks ya fa a piece ob fish, ya ain gwine gim no snake, ainty?

-Luke, 11:11 (Gullah translation)

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

- T.S. Elliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1 – ONE TRIP BEGINS

In his basement were pictures. He was a man, but young, and employed.

His sister, he suspected, knew something of them. Not what they showed, but that they showed something. Something of value and reverence.

The family was not want for money, so her squealing, if she squealed, would have to be about something else. It's harder to sniff out that kinda thing.

Suspicion of her became RC’s infirmity. It corrupted his sense of adventure. The only thing he seemed capable of doing to satisfy his questions about Oxie's loyalty was to fortify himself in cool-hearted preparedness.

Living room is already a heavy-footed phrase. It suggests, by example, that other rooms in a house can serve other purposes. Another such phrase is waiting room.

As much as RC hated those phrases, he hated worse the Underground. He hated most its lack of distinctions and markings. There was nothing to say that one area was behind the traveler and another was upon him. More fundamentally, though, there was nowhere to hide a stash.

This also ended up being why Oxie left the Underground. Things didn’t quite feel alive without a sense of rooms.

But Undergound was the passageway to Coast. In that way, it was kinda like a hall.

Oxie was now outside that hall in another corridor of sorts. She was a kid on the road, above-ground, panting for a ride. Her hair was wet and her posture said her thumb was up by anyone who passed. It was hard to tell, from her hair, if she’d had a morning bath or bad luck with rain.

The sky was overcast, but nothing else about it said rain.

When she’d had enough of waiting, she walked. Feet moved, knees lagged. Hands dragged, not closed or open.

No matter how far she walked, she was center of the shoreline. A snake in a naked closet.

"Otherwise" is what their mother called mornings like this. “Otherwise it’s a nice day.”

Oxie had disliked sweets and secrets before going Underground. Now she was buoyed by the smell of both. A pastry shop pulled her. The cashier softly fielded a pastry under sliding glass with parchment paper and handed it smiling. He said nothing and went back to his stool, but not before squeezing a heavy drip of hand sanitizer into his coffee cup. He flicked at a denim hoop that was still attached to the leg of his jeans.

RC was finishing breakfast in the back. He poured broth on his shirt to dilute the blood smell.

The rock-salt crystals stared up at him. The last stabs felt like he was poking potato skins in the eye. Wetlands potatoes are starchy, but these were overcooked and extra easy to fork. The salt sounded like ice as he chomped it. Dishes clanged in the kitchen. Oxie peeked through the kitchen window to see that RC was still in the back. He overate, just like he’d planned. The empty plates at his table made it look less like a meal than a statement. Oxie made it safely, back Underground, before he finished eating.

The cabrito engaged him. RC dragged his feet through dry dirt.

The goat had been motherless for nineteen hours. He leaned with his horns towards RC’s bandaged hand. RC dragged by the horns, but the goat didn’t make it hard. They passed the hole and Oxie yelled up.

“Well?” Oxie asked. “How was it?”

“What?” RC asked.

“Ouch,” she screamed. “What was that?”

“Oyster,” he laughed.

“You tried one?”

“Haell no.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a hundred miles to an oyster patch.”

“You shoulda kept it.”

“What for?”

“Your necklace.”

“You keep it.”

“You think a bad oyster could kill you?”

“Go to bed.”

“I wonder if, when we die, God tells us what we died of.”

“Go to bed.”

“You coming?”

“Bout done,” RC said.

“I bet God was a doctor. Judge hasta have been a lawyer, so God musta been a doctor. Sometime, all I'm sayin'.”

“Go to bed.”

“I’m a say you wouldn’t die. Old oysters might even taste better, less slimy anyway.”

“How long since you had an oyster?”

“Not that long.”

“Well, we’a find you a fresh one. Don’t eat that one. Now get some sleep.”

“When?” she asked.

“Have one for you in the morning,” RC said.

“Never had one that I didn’t wanna spit out.”

“You ain’t eating um right.”

“But you said bad oysters are the worst thing possible. Renderrr.”

“Quiet.”

“What?”

“Less loud. And I mean that.”

“I can call my brother by his first name.”

“You don’t make the rules.”

“Why?”

“Cause you live in a sinkpit.” RC crouched, wobbling on the grass shelf that overlooked the hole. He dropped one ear. When the barking stopped, he whispered down, “Oxie, I’m coming.”

RC had work yet. He dragged the goat from smoke of the hole. When they were out of sight, Oxie yelled up, “The world is your oyster.” And that refrain sat in the tunnel, echoing. “But I still hate um.”

The only way RC could stop feeling hungry was to become nauseous. The earth had opened here earlier. He swallowed its musty huffs.

“Come on. It’s not your fault.” He watched his breath clear a line in the emissions of a cave down the shoreline.

His ID dripped when he leaned in to take sample of water from the shallow cave. His ID card got wet, but its filmy lamination protected the words and picture from running. His boss had dozens of ID cards on his dresser, the images of boys whom he’d picked up in desperation to avoid deportation to Coast. He marveled at its raised lettering: MAPPER.

The smoke was pungent. His hand felt gloved under it.

He wandered the shorelines and finished his assignment of charting disruptions to the buoys that carried self-registering tide gauges. The readings were drastically off. Storms were his busiest time.

Distractions found him whenever he aimlessly carried across the boundary of Wetlands and Underground. But especially tonight, with his bedtime long-past and his sister chomping at the bit to take the Underground route, east to Coast.

RC loved Wetlands life, which is heavy into angling, subsistence farming, and equestrianism with a healthy mix of cheeky and gentry. None of those things seemed likely to make him prosperous on Coast where their brother now thrived, presumably in exploitation of the following, in order: ocean animals and elderly beachfront proprietors. RC afforded Coast no rebuttal to his stereotypes. But his sister, Oxfilia, had no use for the timeless combat of Wetlands life. She’d been bunkered and threatening to leave for months. He was her escort.

They had one more stop.

Oxie’s figure begged for sunlight with features that threaten to make a girl thrive in the netting of beach life. RC tried everything to make her happy in the Wetlands. He even tolerated her prompt recovery from carnal chicanery. That’s a noble act for a kid brother. He was kind. That’s the best way to describe him in a loud crowd with a strained voice.

When he finished measuring the buoys, he went back to her cave. She asked for a story about Folio’s beachfront life.

Chigento is his post, he speculated. It’s built like a beach castle, he yawned. Kids are all right there, as long as they’re kept inside. The disparities between people are unknown inside, allowing different kinds to be cordial across their differences because they wear uniforms. Outside, you’re all right as long as labor isn’t part of making ends meet cause luck is a very big part of Coast life.

“The best shield for Coast,” RC told Oxie, “Is indifference to charm. That’s your shield and, without it, you’ll be refueled with what’s defeating you.”

Many of Chigento’s unwatched sons become Night Sailers. This is a pirate clan with rehearsed hand gestures. It’s with a whisker-scratching regimen that they find each other in port, a strumming up with their fingernails over short beard growth that makes a coarse noise. It is their homage to the motion picture gangsters who inform their confused code of ethnic pride.

Folio got recruited by the Night Sailers but he didn’t join them. He smirks at their boats which dot the skyline where he fishes. Now, with the hurricane bearing down, he likes it best cause the unguarded fishing spots are where he does best, conspicuous, searching out drowning victims. He still fishes with the bamboo pole we gave him, but new ones too since we seen him last, and he calculates bites by testing the tension on his line with his thumb and first finger.

He thought it was the Night Sailers playing tricks on him when he started receiving bottled letters. They were delivered poetically, on waves, sealed with cork. The author said he was buried in a cave and that he popped the letters through an opening in the sea. The letters were neat at first, with pretty handwriting like the hanging hs and capital Ls that dip and curl. The language was borderline chirpy, like one said, This bravery chose you, and these masculine days will prepare you for your youngest nights with the sorriest girls. The letters were pretty but sad and Folio worried about the author because the handwriting just got worse. Then it occurred to him, the author might be watching or having somebody else write the letters cause there’s something wrong with him. And the ideas are coming to Folio about every possible explanation. Even the logical ones, like that an ordinary man was setting loose these bottles from a peaceful shoreline excited him because there would be the moment of exposing a fraud, which would be gratifying. Like the Wizard of Oz, when the curtain gets pulled back and the puppeteer’s embarrassment is the most profound of discoveries.

Then the letters ceased to come, about ten months, before a disturbing one. The penmanship was ordinary. The language was still flowery but there were no well-wishes and it was bookmarked with questions about the reader’s loyalty. The letter got really long in the middle. Folio reread the beginning and decided it was the middle of a multi-part letter.

Rereading it, Folio saw where the pen changed colors and seemed to be shaking and he worried he was causing the author real health problems. He worried the pen shook for frustration that he wasn't responding, so Folio tied tight some sticks for a raft and anchored it with a fractured skull.

In the course of his search for the anonymous bottle-sender, Folio became an excellent diver. His dives were intense. The bleeding of sky through ocean made it hard to see underwater, but he searched for the cave where the author lived. At first the dives made him panicky, and to calm himself, he imagined he was running through the Wetlands where air was plentiful and that the tingle in his chest was inoculation and the sinking of his feet was a cushion, and his appendages were storing momentum, and the humming was restful, and the slipperiness was elusion. When the imagined resolutions stopped coming, he’d usually spun all the taut rope and was looking ahead, straight ahead, at a rock. But above that, one time, there was a foot. That was when he heard his calling, realized he was put on Coast to save mermaids, or more accurately, girls wanting to become mermaids.

It’s a forgetful feeling to climb out of a hole and pull to with daylight’s drizzle. Except on that one dive, the one in hundreds, when a foot prevented him from crawling up. The figure was blurry but the angle of her elbow was sharp. Like she’d been waiting and he was late. She was propped against a rock, but restlessly so.

She described a terrible course of discomfort. She clutched the wall and spoke fast, as if he’d been hiding from the truth and now she’d cornered him and there was a need for him to really connect with what she was saying.

“My family warned me about swimming alone. They said it’s dangerous.”

“They did right by you then, cause it is.”

“They moved me when I was young and I never liked it here.” Folio watched the white part of her hand where she leaned against the wall. “It’s not what you think. I’m just tired.”

“Walk to me. All the way. Don’t stop.”

“What for?”

“So I can see how you walk,” he said.

“I wasn’t followed. I kept a look-out,” she said. Folio bowed his shoulders. “I could’ve pulled up your rope and left you out there. But I didn’t.”

“This is a good place to stay the night,” he said. “Just relax. Mam, I recommend you, there. Ok now.”

He sat on the rock and pulled the rope so that it rested in a series of smaller circles, like a snail shell.

“What’s that?” She pointed at the anchor. Her stomach growled.

Folio nursed her back to health and oversaw her successful return to swimming first, and Chigento after that. He couldn’t remember a better feeling. She reclaimed a sharp take on youthfulness, without losing her distinctive stretch. He let her go back to Chigento. But then he missed her and wanted her back. He looked for a replacement. He swore to not let the next girl get away.

It was risky, keeping girls secluded so close to Chigento. His first task was always to anchor the girls with weight.

“He kidnaps them?” Oxie asked.

They need so much help, RC explained. Their complexion is dried-out and they leave Underground so underweight, only able to really stand in caves. And anyone that helps them is demonized. God forbid if one ever got away, they’d betray all the good he did them.

“Forever?” Oxie asked.

He studied her baby hairs against the shimmer of tunnel waves. They started at her shoulder. Everything lower was stripped.

He admired her scar, like a worm trying to emerge from her foot, and compared it to the finger he couldn’t straighten. He dropped it in the water. She swung the oyster shell across her ribbon necklace.

She would become savvy to saltwater luxuries and wise to its seductions. She seemed self-earning, just young.

“Can you float?”

“Course,” RC said.

“Can you teach me?”

“Beg your pardon.”

“Teach me to float.”

“Come back up and we can work on it.”

“You’re tricking me.”

“We’ll get up early and start.”

He woke up early that next morning. He rubbed the embroidered lines on his captain’s hat and rocked their boat out of the rocks. He steered it among the abandoned. The rocks were wetter than usual, on account of the wind. Right now it was strong at his hip, but last night’s gathered at his nose.

They were leaving later than he’d wanted. Oxie was shivering. He bunched their tent around her shoulders. He knotted his shirt laces. He swatted a droplet and watched it plummet.

He flicked his smoke into a wave.

They boated until the sun had set above-ground. RC was assigned the conclusive act of burying a magnetic coin in the bog his team had just mapped. The bog was called Whistling Hollow. It was an isolated bog in the Wetlands, making it a good provisions stop. Oxie seemed to appreciate the importance of the assignment. The coin chirped like a frog. She pressed the cap and watched it indent.

He landed at dusk and broke ground within toting distance of his boat in Whistling Hollow dirt that was well-moist for digging and well-dense for nesting. He was unarmed and dressed in civilian clothing. Oxie kept lookout.

They’d given a glance through the local village to confirm that his clothing was ok. Just fine, he decided. He practiced the local dialect too, just in case they needed to feign residency in this no-name bog he was tagging. Team camp, where his colleagues presumably waited as armed comrades in cartography, was out of eyesight and earshot. Alone, RC paced the memorized route between boat and digging spot on Whistling Hollow, a bog name that, it occurred to Oxie, was scary. Any name that promotes self-mockery, as if provoking its own disproving, is scary.

He was nearly finished when fire started. He doubled back to the boat. Oxie was gone. He pushed off and started to escape. He stopped before hitting a curtain of boats, bobbing in an uneven formation, poised to attack shore. He’d lost Oxie and now, his team.

Surrounded is a rotten time to feel inspired by questions about whether your ascension to prodigy was premature.

He ran into the water. It became a tripping walk and then, a complete submerge. He lifted his torch to keep it burning. He treaded water between the boats and shore. Fireman arrived. They pulled hoses from the shallow water, anchored in the swamp. A boy ran out of it. He was burned. He put his hands on his knees in the shallowest part of the swamp and just vomited. The boys with hoses fired them up at the fire, and the vomiting boy was still leaned at the waist, vomiting. RC yelled at him. There was some back and forth. RC stopped and watched it.

If Captain’s Survey Team was cautious about avoiding damage to the swamp, then the three boys with hoses were violent about redressing it. They were successful in a clumsy way that made the fire a secondary attraction. The squatty leanings-about of boyish firefighters upstaged the fire.

RC was trapped. He stuck to his script: he was an orphan foraging on the island when fire swept around the bend and into his field. Natives seemed receptive to that fiction.

They built levies around farms to contain the pond which seemed to decorate every flat space on this island.

RC kept a low profile, lest someone discover his surname. His brother was a villain here. Folio stood for the Coastal Empire. Folio’s mission was to punctuate Wetland bogs with a magnetic coin to help Coastal refugees during hurricanes. Defeating Folio was celebrated here as a victory over the compromises that Coast wanted to impose on the Wetlands. The Wetlander tradition of resisting Coastal influence had receded, but the spirit lived on. It was hard to resist vilifying Folio’s mission here: when there’s a legend that Wetlanders drove a Coastal Surveyor into his death in the freshwater, because they refused to let him compromise Wetland traditions, that’s a fierce hymn of homeland pride.

There were dozens of Coin Ponds, and each said it was where they’d drowned Folio, and each decided its shoreline was worth preserving with a special set of rules on plants that could be grown on its banks and what animals could graze nearby. The most popular, or most outlawed, of all the crops was the scuppernong, which was an almost forgotten fruit.

Albert Mebane saw this, the drowning of Folio, as his chance to paint a picture about Wetland culture being self-sufficient, how it could sport its own weight. He raised money for Coin Park Hospitals with the water-birth plans to reward Lake Babies with a lifetime of free medical care. His goal, and the idea, was to keep healthcare local.

One native who wanted to be a movie-maker or, yes, sorry, a film-maker, and was in a school for it, on Coast of course, came back to make a movie, sorry, a film, that disparaged Mister Mebane from an insider perspective, according to the movie, ah, film. She insisted you call her movies films and it was hard to do for some people because really, they were just movies, but the point is, in the opening of her movie on Mister Mebane, it started out, The crew gathers at daybreak to pick out a spot for filming in this Wetland crevice, a swampy place that was once famously on fire if you believe local hymnals, and we drink our coffee looking out on a current that’s very calm, like it’s trying to invite us out from the cameras. A fisherman left his yesterday’s catch tied between two limbs. That’ll be th doing a good job with the subject: first thing now, some Lake Baby reaches for when she comes up for breath. Above here is where New Hollow made out good on its cause for reaching water-level. This paticular bog use a be tough, I grew up not far from here, where it looks like, or it least used to look like, a movie set on sometimes. Great fishing at times, and at times, there was plenty a winning and some clowning-on and some bad. But the park is when things sorta changed to being real serious, when if you made a change to your property, it was supposed to be saying something. Everything was overnight a lot more serious. And I’m sure the swamp is lower for it. I’m originally from here, this area, and I’m proud to call that out. I think the thing I question sometimes is whether the pond and all those ponds like this one are a badge, like a good badge, or a scab from a stupid fall when you were drinking and we ought to just let to heal.

Camera crew asked, "How would you describe your feelings for the swamp?"

Man says, "What do you mean by feelings? You mean like a romance, like that?”

Camera says: “Naw, not that necessarily.”

Man says, “I just don’t know then.”

Second man, “We can help you find where you going.”

Camera looked up at the one and asked, “You had some good times out here?”

Second man says, “What is it you’re about?”

First man: “If you had like, you had some bad experience here, like somebody drowned and you were raised by a worrier who filled you with all the bad stuff about living near a pond, well, there’s that.”

Second man: “Yea.”

Camera: “How bout, you got kids? Ok, born here? I mean like, in here? Ok, was that when, was that when the swamp was dirty? The swamp was dirty, I’m right about that?”

Woman: “This a memory you have? Swamp being ‘filthy,’ if that’s your word and I think it was. No, it was.”

Camera, “Look I’m not trying to posture on you. Here, this is a posting, right, notice it says right here. You read this fore?”

Woman: “Yea I read things.”

Camera, “I didn’t mean nothing by that.”

Woman (twisting): “By what? This is the, oh yes, I mean I haven’t read this, but I remember, yes I member. This is the post, right?”

Camera: “Right, the post, right.”

Woman: “Up, yeah yeah. Okay.”

Camera: “And with this post, the Council basically or explicitly, I should say they explicitly advised citizens not to swim in there.”

Woman: “Right, sure. But where’s that Council based?”

Camera: “Did you read and just ignore it?”

Woman: “Watch where you’re shining that thing.”

Camera: “You had your son in there, yes?”

Woman: "My son has birthmarks but he’s got character and I’ll trade some birthmarks for some character."

Camera: “How do you define that?”

Woman: “What?”

Camera: “Character. Can you define it?”

Woman: “Character is, it’s a collectible that you know is worth a good sum and you’re reminded how much it, this, whatever, you think about how much it’s worth every time something bad happens around it, like a crash that makes you run in the room and check to make sure nothing happened to that marble sheet on top of your buffet. And it’s fine, and you go back at whatever you were working on. But you know, like in the back of your mind, you know you won’t ever cash out and sell the expensive thing because what you really love isn’t so much the thing but the pride you get outta knowing you’re protecting the expensive thing. It’s less about the object and more about what your protection of it says about who you are. Character’s an emotional, intangible, like a, it’s like collateral that you can borrow against all your life but you can’t cash in against it, or if you do it won’t be there anymore.”

Camera: "So, and you and I have never met, and I don’t want to sound critical, honest, but was giving birth to your boy in a swamp a decision you’d do again?"

Woman: “I asked you once.”

Camera: "Sorry. That better? Ok, sorry, I was asking if you’d do it over again?"

Woman: "Our kids play out of different decks of cards."

Camera: "Let’s try—how has the big show, the attention, the lights, how has it affected his childhood? If at all? Maybe it hasn’t. I don’t know. Thoughts?"

Woman: "How am I supposed to even, how would you answer that?"

Camera: "Okay, how has the press coverage affected your family?"

Woman: "You want me to answer your question on camera about how the press has affected our family? That doesn’t strike you as, as contradictory? As duplicitous? You know, I find that people think about their kidneys a lot less when they’re not battling stomach problems."

Camera: "Okay, moving past that question, it probably wasn’t a great question, what if I, I knew a lady who was a friend of my grandmother, and she would say, ‘Toxicology is the worst brand of imperfection.’ Do you agree with that?”

Woman: “How did she feel about toothpicks?”

Interviewer: “What?”

Woman: “How did she feel about toothpicks? What I’ve found is that people who use toothpicks, not like occasionally, but people who actually stock up on toothpicks, I mean like keep a little baggie in their kitchen filled with toothpicks beside the green twisties that you use to tie off bags, people who actually buy toothpicks tend to think of themselves as way less concerned with manicuring than they really are.”

Camera: “Can I use your face on camera? I have to get your permission. Can I have your, yes there, just to use your face and voice? Ok, sure thing. See it’s just a formal, yes, there, very much obliged,” and she signed MMM. “Can you come up on deck so we can actually see your lower half?”

The camera crew interviewed her son, too:

“The worst thing isn’t even having a dermatologist, I mean that sucks, watching a doctor literally lose himself in all the things wrong about my appearance, but that part, the superficial part, isn’t actually as bad as having to hear that maybe it was preventable and that the reason I’m like a misshapen vegetable I’ve even heard it described like that, it isn’t God-made. Every part of it could’ve probably been preventable. To hear something like that, and I’m a good kid, but some things are just past my charity.”

And so Fencetress’ lot in life was to reconcile love for his mother with a compulsion to apologize for his founded resentment of her. It was her election of birthing forum that ruined his appearance and the Tunnel Doctors he sought out couldn’t justify the decision the same way as the Coin Pond Clinic did. Tunnel Doctors were known to stop explaining at a certain point, and just recommend that you move to Coast. That couldn’t be the only answer, but it was, at least, a answer. Staying Underground was their answer for disease and malfeasance. They told Fencetress, Your lungs are water-logged son and you can expect your skin—child and adult alike—to shed, giving you a sorta bluish glow to your smiles and a sweaty tomato look to your embarrassments and I’d have to expect a sharp-steering of your friendships toward intervention. You can do it alone if you commit to the Underground.

Fencetress couldn’t lose words like that and MMM didn’t actually ask him to. Nor did she deflect blame to his father for devising the water-birth campaign. She focused on remedies that would keep her son from leaving the Wetlands in search of magical Coastal cure.

Fencetress found allies in RC and Oxie. RC’s experiment was to induce hiccups, then squeeze them out. Fencetress questioned it. The hiccups were annoying, that “heec hc heeec” sound. But he’d try anything in the fight against Othellism. Especially if, someday, it might give him a shot at the discrete indulgences of masculine pliability with girls he’d grown up admiring.

Oxie pitied Fencetress. She asked RC to let him come to Coast.

RC said Fencetress would die there. RC focused on native Wetland outlets, like gigging. Don’t be indebted to sympathy, RC told Fencetress. He promised prominence among Wetland subsistence fishermen if Fencetress could learn to gig. Fencetress was no good at first, with the gig-wand in hand and frogs eluding his swamp strikes. He broke a shoulder one night.

So RC created a practice arena: an oversized tub filled with spaghetti and bottom-feeders and frogs. The noodles were meant to simulate algae and small fish were meant to teach Fencetress about fish patterns. RC transplanted the fish and, despite his best efforts, was seen doing it.

A snake dropped on RC’s arm. It was fleeing a fire. Its venom was the only thing to survive the fire. RC rubbed where it throbbed.

He was brought to a hospital and accused of losing consciousness and operated on with cinder-block efficiency, the doctor using tools from a black folding purse slender as the cigarette pouch in the supervising officer’s chest pocket. Swamp medicine and law were consistent with their practitioners: so exacting they could seem rhetorical.

RC coughed. The doctor checked his sedatives. RC studied the starched shoulders stretched about his face and a cold cigarette bobbing from the officer’s chest pocket. The doctor finished before the officer could close the curtain and sit.

“Where’s my chart?” RC asked.

“Fire,” the officer pointed, “Here give a look.” The doctor pulled back the curtain.

The fire extinguisher box was open. A path of fire led RC to the tunnel where his boat had been parked for the last few weeks.

“Burned,” the officer said. He took out a paper with two folds and read it silently, then folded it back on its original creases. “You will take that boy nowhere. He belongs here.”

“Who?” RC asked.

“Fencetress.” The officer patted RC’s shoulder, the asterisk on his fist unflexed and limp. He retreated in a boat much like RC’s former boat.

The water was quiet that night.

It was an isolated and cold setting, from the lights to the sounds. RC tapped his pocket to drown out the sound of his heels which, on deck, sounded like that pit-pat of a horse warming up to a sprint. He was, for the first time, intimidated by the sound of his own footsteps.

The gate at dock’s edge was a manual push, which gave a whooshing back-and-forth sound when it was opened. RC stared at the water and expected to hear any newcomers by the whooshing sound.

There was no whooshing sound when a head popped up from the water.

It was a lucky draw for a cocky traveller.