Storyteller Read online

  “Why, so it is,” said the blind man, his smile deeper and happier than any she had ever seen. “Then, you are my Bedpinny,” he said, his enthusiasm hushed with reverence.

  She hugged the elephant’s trunk, as she often did for comfort. “I am,” she whispered softly for fear of shattering the moment.

  “And the people I’ve been telling you about . . . they are your people.”

  The realization oozed magically into her bones, seeped into her spirit. “My people.”

  The blind man placed a hand on her head and stroked her hair gently. “How proud they would be of you, Bedpinny. Thank you for being my guide.”

  Bedpinny almost didn’t hear. As she and the elephant padded down the dusty road, the voices of all those generations were shouting, singing, and rejoicing in her ears. They had found her!

  The blind man inclined his head in the direction of their departure and waited. When he could hear their footsteps no longer, he smiled. He had learned the story of the elephant walker from the elderly missionary lady on her last day in Yei. Even as he spun Bedpinny’s tale, he wondered how he could weave the baseball cap into the telling. It had all come together nicely.

  “It could have happened that way,” he said. “Why not?”

  As the mists cleared from his sight and Bedpinny’s consciousness slipped slowly from his brain, Rat Badger found himself staring at the mirror on the back of the bedroom door. He had no idea how long he’d been there. He became aware that he’d been holding his breath. Something was tugging at him, something so deep inside it was beyond him. In the mirror, the room was reflected in all its particulars, except for him. There was at first no discernible change in the wretched gargoyle that occupied his place among the images. The anxious red eyes were the same. The ragged grasping claws were the same. Then its lips parted in a stupid, inscrutable grin, revealing a brand new tooth.

  “You slept well, sir?” said Cummings, who had sifted into the room as unobtrusively as that quality of mercy that droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, and materialized at Rat’s bedside. The golden rays of the sun, sliced into neat oblongs, inquired through the large French window at a respectful angle, creating a shadow-laden still life of the silver salver in the butler’s left hand and the lightly frosted glass of papaya juice it held. It was morning, the first day.

  Cummings placed the glass on the bedside table.

  Rat Badger, rap icon, hadn’t slept a wink, as far as he knew. Nor, if the crust that coated his eyes was any indication, had he blinked in a very long time. Draped awkwardly over the mahogany footboard, his feet tangled in the sheets, he had been staring at the mirror on the back of the bedroom door.

  The images that haunted its depths the previous night had dissipated when Cummings interspersed himself, but a disturbing effluvium remained. Rat breathed a blasphemy, as was his wont when at a loss for words to express deep emotion, blinked a few times and massaged his sandy eyes with trembling fingers. He was about to commend himself, somewhat shakily, on having survived the night, when he awoke to the fact that he was in another bedroom —this one rustic and humble—and that Cummings was, once again, tucking him in.

  It was night. A soft, cool breeze, scented delicately with sea rose and salt, brushed the white curtains aside and waltzed about the room with the haughty command of a corpulent duchess.

  “It’s time already?” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I missed the whole day?”

  “On the contrary, sir. You had a very active day, the events of which I shall be happy to recapitulate at some future date, should you so desire. It is another of the peculiarities of this island that the days are often no sooner completed than forgotten. Night and day trade places—are juxtaposed, as it were—with the events of the daylight hours dissolving like a dream, branding themselves upon the brain. Forgotten, that is,” Cummings added with a politic clearing of the throat into the back of the white glove on his right hand, “except by me. Thank you for the daisy chain, by the way.”

  “Say what?”

  “It’s of no consequence. Is there anything you require, sir, before you sleep?”

  Rat considered. “Shouldn’t I be hungry?”

  “No, sir. You ate most heartily at luncheon.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Well, he wasn’t hungry. He was tired, though, and said as much.

  “It is to be expected, sir. You have been greatly exercised.”

  Rat’s head, suddenly the density of overcooked oatmeal, sank into the abyss of his pillow, which smelled of mothballs. It was then he noticed the mirror on the ceiling. The room began to roll slightly as his sleep-besotted numen drifted upward. Seagulls cried in the distance and he was aware of the taste of stale tobacco and Budweiser on his tongue and an alcoholic fogginess that taunted the suburbs of his brain. Nevertheless, he untied the sheepshank with practiced, work-worn hands—white hands, he was surprised to see—and, stumbling only slightly, pulled his way to the middlemost seat of the rowboat, little suspecting that he was about to partake of . . .

  An Omelet of Fishermen

  The second night

  The first thing tourists observe as they cross Penobscot Bay in the ferry to the islands is the lobster buoys. Recreational boaters also remark on them in Anglo-Saxon terms. In fact, the bay is so carpeted by these multicolored impediments to navigation that it’s almost possible to walk upon them like stepping stones from Rockland to the islands without getting your feet wet.

  There is an exception, however, an area of about one mile in radius that the fishermen call, simply, the Deep. Ancient experience has told them that this particular quarter is bottomless, and many a fisherman’s gear has been lost in the attempt to prove otherwise.

  Partly Smith, who earned his nickname by virtue of the fact that his mother was a Smith, but his father was anybody’s guess, had spent the day at the Lobster Festival and was going back to the island as night descended.

  Despite being drunk he had managed to make it to the end of the pier, find his skiff—or at least one that looked enough like it to make stealing it excusable—row to his lobster boat, which must have been his because the key worked, undo the mooring without falling overboard, and crank ’er up.

  Emboldened by these successes, and wanting to be home before Maggie, his wife of thirty-odd years, got home from the crab factory, he chose to fly in the face of local wisdom and take a shortcut across the Deep, which commercial fishermen, wisely it turned out, had come to avoid.

  Bacchus had few surprises in his bag of tricks for Partly, who had come to regard hallucinations as an acceptable side-effect of his liquid lifestyle.

  Thus, when an island or two turned up in the wrong place, or mermaids frolicked in the phosphorescence of the wake on his evening forays across the bay, he winked and, laying a finger knowingly aside his nose, plowed on.

  As the bow of the Vengeful Maggie cleaved the placid waters of the Deep, however, he was met with a novel apparition: a configuration of lights that floated just below the surface. His first thought—describing the random firing of the synapses in his brain in liberal terms—was that he was looking at the reflection of stars. He looked up. Clouds blanketed the sky.

  There were no stars, or anything else that could account for the lights. He looked down. There they were. He closed his eyes and shook his head in a manner that had long ago proven useful in dispelling vagrant islands and wandering mermaids, and opened them again. Still there.

  Partly pulled the throttle all the way back and in a moment the boat gathered in her foaming skirts and squatted down in the water like a somnolent duck. He shut off the engine—as if silence would help him see better—and leaned over the rail for a closer look.

  The lights were of a soft aquamarine hue, what an interior designer, had there been one aboard, might have described as a dusty sea-foam green, and about the size of a baseball. They pulsed subtly, hypnotically, and those nearest the surface were
no more than three or four feet deep. So it seemed.

  After a brief monosyllabic soliloquy, Partly decided he’d grab one and take it home to show the boys down at the lobster co-op next morning and see what they made of it. He took the gaff from under the gunwale and, leaning over as far as his gut would allow, plunged it into the water. His first swipe passed below the nearest object. He tried again. This time the hook connected, telegraphing a tantalizing gelatinous sensation up the pole. At the same time, the orb sank a few inches. He leaned over a little further and took another stab, and the process repeated itself. Another touch.

  Another slight retreat.

  What he needed was a gill net, which he didn’t have aboard.

  A fisherman is motivated by the challenge of snatching objects from Neptune’s grasp, so it was with a heavy heart—after a few more bootless efforts, the last of which nearly propelled him into the drink—that Partly gave up. “I’ll be back,” he vowed, unaware that he was plagiarizing a copyrighted phrase. He fired up the engine and, threading his way through a network of imaginary islands peopled by creatures from Greek mythology who waved cheerfully as he coasted by, made his way to safe harbor.

  Fishermen are early risers. This is not, as folks from away might assume, because marine life is especially active in the morning hours, but because the sea is generally calmer before noon. Hence it is not unusual to find the species congregated at the co-op before dawn, fortifying themselves with mud-thick coffee while lying to one another about how bad the previous day’s catch was.

  Partly, whose typical daily routine would be described by a responsible journalist as ‘Get up. Fish. Get drunk. Fight with Maggie. Watch the news. Go to bed,’ was not a good storyteller, which is to say he wasn’t an imaginative liar. The story of the lights he had seen in the Deep, therefore, caused his fellow fishermen to lob surprised though not unadmiring glances at one another. For Partly, this was pretty good stuff and, there being nothing much else to do at that hour, they played along.

  “So you tried to snag one of ’em with your gaff?” said Marty Hopkins, tossing a few more fistfuls of sugar into his coffee cup.

  “Sure I did,” said Partly. He was not accustomed to being the center of attention, and found he kind of liked it. “Slippery buggers, they are. Somethin’ like jellyfish.”

  Bickford took a scientific approach. “Maybe that’s what they were.”

  Partly took umbrage, though if accused of it he would have protested that he hadn’t taken anything. “Lit up?” he said. “When’ve you ever seen a jellyfish lit up, Warren?” His eyes challenged the rest of those around the room with the same question.

  “I seen somethin’ like that on the Discovery Channel,” Warren replied calmly. “There’s all kinds of fish and worms and things down there that light up pretty good.”

  “Don’t do much for the theory of evolution, does it?” Pursy Jamison observed. He imitated a glowing nematocyst. “‘Here I am. Eat me. Eat me!’”

  Muffled laughter echoed across the harbor.

  “You ever seen a jellyfish in the Gulf of Maine light up so you could read a newspaper by it?” Partly snapped.

  “That proves you’re lyin’,” Carpy Bennett interjected. “You ain’t read nothin’ but a beer can since eighth grade.” More laughter.

  “I didn’t say I read anything by it,” Partly protested. “But I could’ve. They was that bright.”

  Booskie Small, who had been fishing the waters of the bay twice as long as most of those in the room, had been listening with interest.

  “There’s things happen out in the Deep,” he said. “Who knows what lives down there?”

  Pursy was incredulous. “You sayin’ you think Partly really saw somethin’?”

  “I know what he seen,” said Marty. “Rum horrors is what he seen.”

  Partly would not be misrepresented. “I just had a few beers!”

  Marty allowed for this. “Beer horrors, then.”

  “No such thing,” said Warren.

  “You ain’t seen my Suzy when she’s lit up some!” Carpy suggested.

  A good time was being had by all. Booskie lit his corn cob pipe, creating a substantial hole in the local ozone. “When was the last time you fished the Deep?” His old eyes sparkled mischievously through djinn-like clouds of smoke. The question was directed at Warren.

  “I ain’t,” said Warren. “No point in it. No bottom there.”

  Booskie sucked loudly on his pipe. “’Course there is. Somewhere, otherwise all the water’d drain out.”

  Even Warren’s scientific logic couldn’t dispute the likelihood.

  “It’s just pretty far down,” Booskie continued. “Nossir. The reason you don’t fish there is ’cause your daddy didn’t fish there. An’ he didn’t fish there ’cause his daddy didn’t fish there. And that’s ’cause it ain’t a normal place. Like I said, nobody knows what’s down there. Could be somethin’ that lights up.”

  Warren refused to be convinced. “The horrors is all it was. He didn’t see nothin’ ’cause there ain’t nothin’ there.”

  Booskie just looked out the window and took another pull at his pipe. The sky was brightening in the east. “’Bout time,” he said.

  “I saw what I saw,” said Partly as the fishermen gathered their gear and trooped out toward the dock, mocking him good-naturedly.

  “You go out there sober,” Carpy called over his shoulder as he descended the ramp, “an’ tell us what you see then.”

  Partly, who could get a pretty firm grasp of things stated plainly, decided that’s just what he’d do. That evening as the setting sun threw fistfuls of color at the sky, only one mooring bobbed empty. Partly hadn’t come in.

  At first no one was alarmed. The Lobster Festival was still on and everyone knew that the bright lights of the mainland exerted a pretty strong pull on Partly, especially if they were neon and surged through a Budweiser logo in a bar window.

  Partly was not on the mainland, though. Early on he had formulated a plan that would put him in possession of one of the lights—if they were still out there—and he’d by gorry show ’em that what he said he saw is what he saw, then they’d see and there were no two ways about it. The plan was a simple one: he’d make sure he had a gill net with a good long handle.

  Partly was not one for elaborate schemes.

  It was nearly dark when the attention of Biff Steepleman and his wife Squeaky—summer residents who were enjoying an apéritif on the deck of their bungalow overlooking the Thoroughfare—was drawn by a sound not unlike that of distant thunder to the lights of a solitary boat heading through the White Islands toward the open bay.

  “A lobster boat, sweetums,” Biff observed. “Odd time of day for him to be out.”

  “Is it?” said his spouse disdainfully. It was part of her theology that lobster boats and the people that inhabited them were part of the Fall. God’s curse on sailors. In Eden, she believed, there had been a steady following wind blowing at about fifteen knots on the starboard quarter no matter which way you turned. Lobstermen and their paraphernalia were a consequence of Original Sin. It was not a profound theology, but one to which, with diamond-encrusted fingers, she held fiercely.

  “Salmon puff?”

  As Adam had taken the apple, Biff scarfed half the proffered puff and fed the rest to the Lhasa Apso, Lancelot, which had up to that moment been engaged in soiling the chaise-lounge. Biff gazed nautically in the direction of the retreating lobster boat. “Curious,” he said. And that was the last remark made about Partly Smith while he was alive.

  Spotty Spofford, aboard Abigail’s Knickers, discovered the Vengeful Maggie drifting in the Deep just after dawn the next morning and ventured into those strange waters to see what was up. He pulled alongside and called out, to which the only reply was the plaintive wail of a nearby loon. Partly wasn’t aboard. Spotty, fearing the worst, radioed the Coast Guard.

  There wasn’t a great deal of speculation as to Partly’s fate the next day. Fishe
rmen were lost from time to time. That’s just the way it was. It did strike a number of folks as odd, though, that he apparently hadn’t been lobstering the previous day. There were no lobsters in the holding tank. There was no bait or anything else to indicate that he’d been about his business.

  “His gaff’s gone,” Carpy noted as he assisted the Coast Guard in their inspection of Partly’s boat. And so it was. And so was Partly.

  A week or so passed and time had pretty much sutured the wound caused by Partly’s untimely extraction from the long intestine of life. By the third day after his disappearance he had ceased to be the central topic of conversation except over morning coffee at the co-op. None of the lobstermen wanted to be the one in whose gear he ultimately surfaced. Still, every day that separated them from the event was a day in the fishes’ favor.

  Maggie Smith quit the crab factory, took over the Vengeful Maggie, which she renamed Partly Gone, and began to do pretty well for herself for a change.

  Pinkie Peterson was the one who found the glowing orb on the shore. He and Wally Spofford (no relation to Spotty) had snuck down there after dark to smoke a Virginia Slim they’d pilfered from Pinkie’s mother’s purse. He’d been standing on a rock at the time, making a modest contribution to the water level when he spied it, undulating in the seaweed. On a shore littered with ocean-borne debris he had no difficulty finding a discarded Clorox bottle someone had cut out for use as a bailer. He used this to scoop up the viscous blob, which continued to glow as if it hadn’t a care in the world, and brought it to Wally whose reaction was gratifying in the extreme. When—after poking it with a stick, touching it with their tongues, burning it with the lit end of the cigarette butt, and other experiments of the type that seem expedient to eleven-year-olds—it continued to glow without the slightest acrimony, they decided to take it to Pinkie’s uncle Gabe, the chief of the island’s volunteer fire department.

  The next night the lobstermen had a meeting. They passed the orb around and considered it.