Stay Cold, Oxfilia (ch. 2)

CHAPTER 2 – A MERMAID DEN

Fencetress woke up to the sound of saltwater chopping at his protruding extremity. It was like an uncooked noodle sticking out of club soda. Sand had gathered in a soft peak, smoothed out by waves, around his exposed body part. He’d dreamed about soft sand.

He must’ve been transferred from the cenote last night.

“If we gonna make you a marinera,” said Folio, “You got to stop acting like a mermaid.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Fencetress.

“Your gun won’t work. There’s sand in it, dummy.”

“When I get my legs back, I’m gonna kill you. What’s so funny? I told you that,” Fencetress said. “I warned you.”

“You boys don’t realize your smell.” Folio walked into his tabby hut, stopped in the doorway and bowed his shoulders in a stretch that people do when they’ve had too much sun. “There’s just nothing like a morning swim.”

“I tell you one thing,” Fencetress shouted, “Cyahn keep us een de sho shacks fuhr’ebbuh."

***

Fencetress’ travel route had not fooled Folio. He’d fallen, in fact, right into Folio’s scheme.

Folio had once stripped the peach lining off his webbed hands and feet tracing the same footsteps from Wetlands to Coast. He’d crashed his boat into a rock and walked by night to lose the echo. He was the original Deportee.

Echo is a big part of tunnel life and Underground travelers die from it. Their brand of masculinity is above-ground.

When Folio made the trip, his was inspired by myths about the Vinegar Island oystercatchers. Folio was obsessed with mermaids. He had Coastal goals, artistic ones, among them developing an emblem that he could put on the walls for subsequent travelers. It was hard to feel like he was accomplishing anything Underground and this emblem seemed like a good quiet-time activity, to up the ante on what he could only imagine to be suspicion that the echo behind him was somebody monitoring his movements. He worked on his signature, both for the hope that someone would see it and double-back to find identical ones along the path, and also for the hope that Tunnel Walkers would later know about an aspiring oystercatcher who’d spent time here. His devotion to branding felt a little silly, where it was so hard to see anything and his artistic medium, calligraphy, felt dated. Few would see his signature and even fewer, maybe none, would know to attribute its perfection to Folio.

But he worked on it, always retouching the ink to three circles that hovered partly inside each other, with the western of three overlapping circles drawn first and filled-in with three periods and then the center circle, which he filled in with the three east-facing fish squarely in the center. The eastern circle was also decorated with three fish, but they rotated around it, like hands on a clock. The center circle’s distinction was how lightly it was drawn, so light that you could never lose the urge to study adjacent sections of the circle to verify that no section of it was broken or exceeded by counterpoint. Below the center circle, Folio wrote in cursive: “Art is a drawing with a strong sense of democratic principles,” and this quote was written with slight indentation of the first line and a sweeping gothic “A” that dwarfed the rest of the paragraph but was intended, by its self-important font and size, to encourage the reader to pay more attention to the remainder of the quote than the “A” because the “A” was written with such artistic attention that its intention could only be interpreted by a no-nonsense oystercatcher as coercive and pushy, thus rewarding him as reader with a feeling of accomplishment when he ignored its beautiful block letter and started with “RT” which, years later, would be replaced with a vandal’s initials so that the message read, “Arc is a drawing with a strong sense of democratic principles.” He was careful about waking followers with his lantern and tools, but he felt fulfilled only when a drawing was complete.

He’d get greedy sometimes and think about doubling-back to see one of his completed ones, but even with his superior footing, it was hard to move that quickly Underground in the dry tunnel wind. There was nothing riskier than coming back too late, and trying to make out where the water was running today because, even on those days, they were constantly draining and flooding the tunnel. He cursed the ambition that dragged him back. But it never killed him. That’s how Folio became the original Deportee.

Walking made the search seem longer. Boating is a sublime way to travel. Walking on rocks in the dark is apocalyptic. The tunnel had been drained so recently, some days, that the exposed seafloor was still moldy. Dead fish were still full of flesh, meaning eating was ok but he kicked over a fair share of idle boats, left by runaway Tunnel Dogs. Sometimes he looked up the walls when he found a boat or heard an extreme amount of echo, and more than once he gripped the wall and looked up, like he was going to climb, but he always managed to remind himself against taking the bait.

Barking rained from the ceiling, earlier on the nights after he’d tried climbing. That part made Fencetress nervous. Tunnel dogs were nocturnal and savvy.

It seemed no coincidence that the most extraordinary pedestrians popped up the day after he’d looked ready to climb the wall.

Folio found his island by accident. He would be sure Fencetress found it too.

"¿Seguro que está bien?" Fencetress asked a man that morning, pointing to a tall opening where you could see the tunnel’s beachfront opening. Through the opening, the water went blue-black as it chopped left to right. You could tell the water was deep because it had those clean cobalt seams, as if knit together.

"Eso es," he waved, dropping ash into Fencetress’ boat and wiping his leg. "Dios guarde a vuestras hijas y advierta a sus hijos."

"¿Permítaseme reformular la pregunta?" Fencetress asked. "¿Dejarías que tus hijos ir por ese camino?"

"No necesito los niños por esa razón."

"¿Quieres ir allí?" he asked. He shaded his eyes, then laughed.

"Escuchar un cuento. Un misionero de los Humedales llegó a Costa, para salvar las almas, hacen la vida mejor."

"¿Es esta parábola?" Fencetress asked, narrating to help pace the dialogue chug-a-lug of his Spanish-speaking acquaintance.

"Sea paciente," the fisherman said, waving to keep his balance. His fingers were extended, but tightly clenched as he gestured. His eyes were encased in thick mucus that sheathed his eyes with gray film like spider eggs trapped in a sunny window. "Esposa del jefe indio, que había este bebé y le salió blanco. Jefe es como, 'Solo hombre blanco que hemos visto.' Misionero dijo: 'No jefe, no dormir con su esposa. Honestidad. Su bebé es albino.' Jefe dijo, 'Lo que eso?' El hombre blanco se lo llevó a un cerro y le mostró un rebaño de ovejas. 'Mira a tu oveja,' dijo, 'Un niño negro y nada más que los padres blancos. Es la forma justa de la a veces.' Jefe pensado en lo que el misionero dijo que un par de minutos, luego miró al hombre blanco de arriba abajo. Dice: 'Mantenga la boca cerrada acerca de las ovejas, y luego tenemos a un acuerdo.'"

Fencetress smiled and nodded, waving as he made his pass through the wide-mouth canal, yelling, “Safe travels.”

Three nights later, the inlet was drained again. Again, it was after an attempt at climbing the wall. He met a man named Youngblood who told him that ahead, Sea Islanders were rallying against oyster farms. The farms covered the subterranean harbor. Youngblood offered Fencetress his maroon hat, the cloth of its bill split to reveal a synthetic backbone, brittle like the spine of a cuttlefish and thick like a guitar pick. The hat was his shade for thirty years of oyster harvesting. He offered it to Fencetress in hopes that he’d proceed to the tunnel’s end and fight to undo the oyster farming industry. He thanked the boy when he took it and said the efforts of ordinary walkers like him would help them keep a wild oystering trade that had sustained his family for four generations.

He spoke in a coastal language with which Fencetress found a conversational comfort.

"Dey’d named us de treat to coas’line security,” he told Fencetress. “Got us ’ese rakes and we’h told get to, to redeem ourselves."

"They teach you old dogs any new tricks?" Fencetress asked.

"T’row back shells. No more middens, oduwise dey tell’um, oysters ’ulbe gone."

Preservation wasn't a big concern for the oystercatching generation that mentored RC. This meant Fencetress had to seek out the story behind shell recycling. But information transfer was the crux of this Age, so an easy explanation for why oysters needed preserving was laughably simple to find. He sought a non-verbal one. Oysters once grew plentiful in the harbor, but their supply started to deplete and farming was concocted as a logical answer to the supply problem.

Fencetress saw poles, perfectly spaced in columns, stretching a half-mile from shore. The poles were anchored with cages that the farmers called "oyster baskets." In most industries, farmer connotes toughness. But Fencetress learned that hand-harvesters of the wild mollusks were more revered. Hand-harvesters resented the farmers’ designed oyster nests, scrutinizing nature only to simulate it. The entrepreneurial cultivators were most interested in farming round and opaque oysters that would present well on the half-shell, neglectful of rusticity in cluster oysters, trading tradition for the hygienic shimmer of farmed oysters that tasted half as good but looked twice as pretty above-ground. The only thing worse than oyster farmers were pearl cultivators, with the latter making an omni-colored coat out of the mollusk, deifying the unhealthy secretion prized by high society's reclined naturalists, making the pearl (and not the meat) the crowning byproduct of barnacles.

Fencetress read about the origin of oyster farming. It was reported to have developed underground, when mermaids eager to simulate the open sea deseeded wild oysters and planted their meat in shells adhering to the tunnel walls.

Mermaids recruited oystercatchers inside the tunnel to farm the oysters. They feigned an interest in "ol' Gullah.” Generational oystercatchers resented it.

“You’d be foolish to turn us down,” the scarfed mermaids told the capped oystercatchers from their cliff that guarded Underground currents from the open sea.

"Wuffuh?" the oystercatchers asked.

"You scratch our backs, we scratch yours."

"Mussy."

"Just think on it," the mermaids said with a sweep of their scarves back to the tunnel.

"Disyuh cyas'net ketch mo den dey kin grow," they yelled.

"You’re men, you’re fathers. You want to die like this? With rusty equipment and unlaced shoes?"

But generational oystercatchers seemed to elude Fencetress’ first tour of Coast. He found Vinegar Island to be less than the off-shore paradise prescribed by mythology. It was adjacent to a theme park and its smells were oceanic but recognizable. This was supposed to be a secluded island with precolonial relics. Instead its shore necklace was flat and stripped of sand dollars. Beach decorations were kitsch.

He tried stopping a boy who was wading out to a sandbar watchtower, his jumpsuit dragging in the tide as Fencetress chased. He ran to the sandbar and climbed into his watchtower, at the foot of which Fencetress shouted up: “I’m puhtickluh too.”

The boy ignored him. He gripped the armrests of his watchtower.

The force trailing Fencetress had a good view of him. The water was still where he’d anchored. The sun did set and the park luminaries did come on, introducing his portrait to Coast’s commercial nightlife, distracting him from the surveiller’s squatting position.

He tried talking to the watchtower boy. Explained he was brothers with an oystercatcher and that he could be trusted to keep their heritage alive. But when morning came and they descended from his post, they saw poles had been pulled and three docked boats were sinking. Dock planks were pulled-up and oyster cages were turned-out. The lookout boy didn’t speak. He figured serious fright was put in Fencetress by this martyring of boats, equipment, and oysters. He knew he’d be the main suspect.

So this is the Great War, Fencetress thought. Oyster farmers versus oystercatchers. It was plainly a man’s fight and a more brutal life than The Age had warned in stories and still-shots of oceans and harvesters holding up their tradition on isolated rocks. An oyster farmer was dead on shore. He was facedown, facing the ocean which looked like the destination in a desperate sprint. Waves played a game of tag with his body hair.

"Wuffuh yo dress lukkuh dis' ?" the watchtower boy whispered, hunched over the corpse. "Stan'lukkuh nudduh gal. Yo recognize this gal? Lia," he nodded. Fencetress started to speak, then stopped himself. "T'ief iz bad, but lia. Summuch wus. Lemme say do, he spik up tuh de notch Gullah. Same lukkuh native. In da baa’nyaa’d now ‘n wif wut, ax’e, wut? Seddown all dese osiituh t'iefs freehan’ . She she talk, spik it luhk a native do. 'E da one. Hab no trus' in yo. Folluh ‘um. Wut yo t'rowin? Deseyuh ashish off'uh juntlemun dead fuh good reasun. Stedduh osiituhs o'my fa'm. Yo kill too? Chryce. T'iefs and haants," he nodded, rubbing before throwing another handful. "Don' wan' kill a mun who kin, a mannusstubble. But if killum fuh jestuss, den spread da ashih for puhtek'shun, sperrit o'da sea puh'tek my island. My Chig ‘membuh? 'Fo' wut, de huntahs? 'Membuh it luk a teet'ache," he said, water dripping from his fingers where he'd grabbed a small wave under the pier. "Sperrit gone'way. Kill'um, puhtek a fa’m, save a osiituh or a baa’nyaa’d off’um. Ax'me for a fabuh if da' yo 'tenshun. 'Fo' I do andduh, onduhstan' I ax'um fuh da island. Lub’uh de sea. Why yo bre't'ing luk dat?" He clutched his chest. He rapped his sternum with a closed fist. "Luk ’e become da haant. Be de longis'. Da's okay, cyan trus' priest b'dout feah. Da yeh he good song uh muhmaids, still yeh, de one trutemout' . Yeah yuh."

The force was watching Fencetress and he knew now, he’d have to reveal himself. The force had a rich supply of burlap-tucked meats, still firm, and crackers in Teignmouthian supply. But the food was not meant to be exhausted watching Fencetress. At sunrise, the force-man scrunched his sausage wrapping and approached. He explained his boss’ request for an appointment. Fencetress accepted without asking any of his questions.

The boss-man was, according to Fencetress’ escort, returning from his sunrise visit to the docks. There, unflattering press clippings shadowed him from the cork bulletin board that faced the ocean in his harbor office, his first and still his favorite place to watch and hear from oystermen. Their harvesting took them far from Coast, but they could rely on finding the boss-man back here, above it all. The press clippings had the coloring of dried tobacco leaves, flapping like propellers in the humid wind, fueling the boss-man with what it requires to keep watch over animate fellowship without getting lost in philologist apology.

"Shut my door," he said to his housemaid who followed him not too closely because he walked feet-first with his hips pulled back to accommodate his pocketed hands, his sides giving the soft impression of heavy pockets. Sweat beaded down his slick calves like damp carnival leaves. The seagrass rug cracked when his maid came, toward whom his back fur saluted to allow a cover that would suck off the last water from his swimmer’s skin.

"I’d like to help the oystercatchers,” Fencetress said.

The boss-man stood at the tip of the wall’s shadow and held up his hands. Fencetress reciprocated. He gripped Fencetress’ palms and poked, like a doctor checking reflexes in the creases deep in a baby’s hip. He touched lightly the boy’s palm and his index finger twitched. The boss-man twisted to allow his maid to know that he wanted her to lean in and hear from him. She handed him thick-rimmed eyeglasses and he paused, as if remembering a name, then wrapped their pliable ends over his ears, rubbed his head and took on a thousand-yard stare—you could tell from the angle of his head. Fencetress was doing his best to say nothing. The sun angled to obscure half his face. The boss-man took an unannounced shirtlessness. He didn’t speak to his inactivity.

Fencetress imagined that the boss-man had become a caricature of his work environment, as vocational characters are inclined to do. His pillow-shirted torso mimicked a mast. His hairline mimicked a boat's nose. His wiry moustache mimicked blown fishing line. His eyebrows mimicked the prickly beard that pins a barnacle to dock pillars. His small breasts sagged as if underwater.

“Have you seen where we work?”

“I have,” Fencetress said.

"People fail, some, but they don’t fail often enough to discourage more people from trying it. There’s a fortune to be made if you keep at it. You’ve got to strip away. You’ve gotta really strip down to the roots and focus on finding your smell.”

“See I had a good mind to stay down for longer but the smell, it was something. I mean it was really something. The ceiling pushes it down and you, oh, it was something. The animal sounds were bad but the smell was so much more haunting. That’s the part I wasn’t ready for. The smell. It was like the cave was put there just to create that smell.”

“For some things in life, you need permission and sometimes you’re the only person who can give it and living with that smell is something you have to give yourself permission to do. It’s tough. But if you’re really gonna reap the staying-down-there benefit, is worth it."

A cloud blocked the sun. The boss-man had taken a shell from his bathrobe pocket and gripped its hinged end to honor—at least superficially—the other end as the snapping beak on a live animal.

"Here. Is okay, touch him." He tapped the “mouth” of the shell, or the part that could separate and show the shimmery creature residing inside.

“I saw,” Fencetress said, “It musta been a dead farmer on the beach,”

"I don't understand. He usually opens right up." He tapped the shell. "You’ve been where you liked so far, yes? Seems like you’re enjoying yourself ok. Yes? If I were you, and I’m not being bossy, but I’d ask myself, ‘What could get someone killed here?’ That probably wouldn’t be my first question but it’s an important question.”

“What would be your first then? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Probably how to get away,” he laughed. “But when you realize there’s no answer, probably my second question would be what I just said. To see about people who have not survived and why."

“I appreciate that, really, very much I do. I have another question too and, well, actually it’s more direct than I’d prefer to ask since we just met, but it involves my brother.”

He directed Fencetress away from the shoreline. The roadside was lush and there weren’t ugly over-passes and, from Fencetress’ passenger view of things, no indication that the land was state-maintained or funded by anything but indecent family wealth. The intention to rusticity seemed private. The effortful biology screamed enterprise.

The highway did not intersect any roads and there was only one exit, which they followed, its metal sign telling Fencetress nothing except that the illustrated edging was supposed to recall rough wood. In an adjacent field, tobacco wings shook under big-hatted people with harvesting sickles, the aching brevity of brute whacks. It seemed safe to assume that the harvesters were men, but that assumption was informed by experience, not these harvesters’ physiques.

Under the hill, harvested leaves were bundled in a cave, tied by twine over horizontal stringers with emphasis on the first syllable. The men in big straw hats with miner lungs coughed into the primo cut being hung while women folded the cured leaves and packed them for shipment.

"Do you know if this is private land?" Fencetress asked a woman walking out of the mine.

"No.”

“No it’s not, or no you don’t know?”

A brunette in a business suit was pacing the tongue of the mine, if the mine’s opening can be imagined as a mouth. He tipped his hat and tucked his hands under the hips of his patterned blazer and leaned back on his unlaced tennis shoes. Fencetress left the tobacco-folding woman, wiping her unibrow of soot, and walked towards the blazered man favoring his heels. Behind him the cave’s dry gray burned to a wet black.

He’d been travelling over caves the whole time and forgotten it. The farmhands called one of the fields he’d crossed a vineyard although the grapes had an air ring between skin and flesh. They were bad grapes, unfit for wine-making. You didn’t need to grow up in Scuppernong Valley to know that. Friction would tell you.

But friction told Fencetress nothing about the hollowness of the earth where he’d walked. How quickly he’d forgotten his underground trip and that the ground under his feet was hollow. He didn’t criticize the grapes and was glad he didn’t, now that he realized the hill was covered with holes, involuntary drop-offs into the cenote. How horrible.

He was looking up a hole when someone yelled. It echoed four times, each progressively deep and vowelled.

He was taken up to another grass loaf, where Fencetress stopped at a whale-spout in the ground. It was rocky, chiseled, prideful. Fencetress stared in the hole. Folio followed.

Fencetress expected Coast to be sandy beaches and soft banks. He expected the permanency of all structures to be negotiable. Leaning waves, foot-traffic, and sandcastles could change your immediate horizon in one half-hour. Instead, the landscape was rocky and the plants had attitude. This cenote was like nothing he’d ever seen, like a cast iron skillet dowered through matriarchs, with a black hole crown. Coast was striking and bullying. Nothing like what was predicted for him.

Before he was pushed in, there was a crash of light. It lit up the school of fish whose flutter shook the black hole. It was not the calm emptiness it seemed inside. But it cushioned him enough to survive the fall.

There was some light down in the hole. It revealed the stamp of enterprise in the meticulous bumps he leaned against. The pillars were positioned close enough to coastline to blend in with the sea, but he could see, in the light down here, that the pillars were synthetic, a co-op of the seafarer's skyline. He looked ahead to the underground merger of coastline.

He’d climbed a mountain for a basement museum. He slapped the man-made pole, a 15-story bedpost poking above-ground, textured like volcanic rock, manufactured like a parking garage.

It was a theme park down here.

He gathered feeling from the numbing fall and doggy-paddled the pool, a sloshy pit of green-lavender. He kept his head above water. He found a wall and looked it in. The steady stream against his face told him: “You’re not climbing.” But he churned his legs and tried to swim. He looked above, straight into the whale spout. No matter how hard he swam, he was always in the very center of the pool. Conspicuous as French fries in a dressing room.

He finally reached the wall. He studied his grip of the patterned cave grooves. They were perfectly conducive to climbing. Yet he made no progress.

He tried jumping but the sound was worse. Ker-plhnk. His first profanity echoed. He turned around and swam at the echo. The splash was too big to just be his physical echo.

A pallet was floating. It was the pallet he’d fallen from, just a few feet inside the whale spout. He looked up, gathering an image of the man who’d helped him on it.

Half an hour passed. He was an ice cube of flesh. The water shifted around his skin, bright and hard.

He followed the water to a rope and followed it up to a cliff. He climbed out on it and propped against the wall. He couldn’t stand. He waited for Folio to come back. It was emasculating.

Then, when the water seemed to have settled into a freshly-ironed tablecloth, an eruption of fins formed a half-moon around the cliff where he was glumly perched.

Fencetress imagined this was a mermaid den. He waited.