Being raised around dogfighting might condition you to its brutality.

This was my first dogfight. They were still setting up when I got there, holding the dogs by the collars in a hunch near the scratch lines. The fight-pit was a rectangle with scratch lines drawn across from each other, giving each dog a starting position from his corner, akin to the area from which boxers emerge off their stools to meet their opponent with trainer and medic rooting on, leaned over the ropes.

Like boxers, fighting dogs are silent. Most are.

I saw one exception. He had a pale coat and a red leash. He was lifted into the pit by an owner who smoked cigarettes during fights to calm his nerves. They were fighting a pitbull with a white nose whose owner had no trouble hoisting the barrel-chested animal over the 2-foot threshold into the pit.

There were three interested parties in attendance: (1) owners, (2) handlers, (3) watchers. I fit into the last category, although I was an exception to the rule that watchers are bettors.

The only disinterested party is the referee. His duties are administrative. Like cleaning the mat between fights, supervising the prefight wash to confirm that neither dog is covered in poison, and with prefight things done, he officiates. Officiating begins with Face your dogs, a shouted instruction accented by spit, which tells each owner to spread his legs and show the dog’s head and shoulders.

When each dog has peaked through his owner’s legs, Leeggoo is the referee’s shouted invitation to dogfight.

The pale dog spreads his paws as the pitbull charges. The pale dog lays his nose close to the mat which, I am told, they don’t use in third world countries to help the dogs keep from slipping in their own spit and blood. The chain-smoking pale dog’s owner further assures me that American owners try to protect their dogs by laying back on water for their prize-dogs before fights, to reduce their saliva during the head-thrashing that can last (despite posted Rules about times) up to two and three hours.

“How do ya know it’s done?” I ask.

“You can tell,” he says. And he could, along with everyone else there. It was this instinct, telling them all simultaneously, “The fight is now over.” I had that impulse, but it triggered as soon as I watched his dog start to fight. Pale Coat has a soft black nose that almost touches its shadow across from a pitbull that has everything but a shark fin protruding from the ring.

The mat is forever black.

The pitbull circles with Pale Coat frozen, eyes fixed on the ground. The pitbull’s owner adjusts a tie on his do-rag. Pale Coat’s owner puffs his cigarette and slaps the wall.

The break in action gives me a chance to study things. There are two mats, fastened together with electrical tape down the middle. It is a less forgiving version of the wrestling mat setup that cushioned my primitive years in practice rooms where I’d wrestled and been beaten, I thought, like a dog.

Pale Coat, with tail drawn and knees back in an eclipse formation with his front paws, dodges the leaping pitbull. The bull’s tail is perpendicular to the earth. He bear-hugs Pale Coat’s neck. Pale Coat tries to pass. His eyes read VACANCY.

For a moment, it matters to the pitbull. His momentum stops, in midair, with his torso pressing deadweight on Pale Coat’s neck. Pale Coat is silent, but his tail wags now against the far wall. I can’t hear it. But I can see it. He is doing everything he can to test the integrity of the pit walls. Integrity, I repeat to myself, and look up at the man who’s led me here. He led me with little explanation of what I was supposed to look for. I’d been handed off to him as a scout. A learned observer of combat. He expected me to educate him on which dogs seemed more capable.

I had seen Pale Coat before we got in here. I wondered if he trained like the other dogs. If he’d ever been subjected to the Jenny, which was their phrase for the treadmill to prepare dogs for the cardiovascular challenges of dogfighting contests, which I was now being told, could last up to four hours.

I looked back up at the wall where PIT RULES stated, under Rule 8: The interested parties shall choose one timekeeper, who shall remain at ringside.

The trainers seemed excited for an outsider to learn of their ways. They had primitive tools but elaborate routines. It was not unimpressive the way their human words excited sincere responses from headstrong, if impressionable, animals.

I was not smitten but I was intrigued. Perhaps the Surveillance Man was right to identify me for something that, in its narrative description, resonated with my eminence in football evaluations. Everyone here was a layperson, distinguished only by instinct. Much the way I had risen up the ranks of football fandom, these men hadn’t been to school for this. Like them, I hadn’t gotten a diploma to become an agent. Sure, I passed some tests. But the NFLPA exam wasn’t much more of an obstacle for my kind than the mortgage application that deeded these people the homes where they trained their animals, and the drivers’ licenses that got them cigarettes and cars to drive here.

Maybe, I wondered as we wandered the considerable property where this fight would take place in a dungeon of a plainly visible house, I can learn something here. Perhaps I’ll become a more proficient talent scout or considerate member of the human race. Either way, I figured it would be an athletic event, and there’s never been anything I love more.

When Pale Coat realizes the weight around his neck is moving, he twists toward the wall and tries to run through it. The wall, indeed, is still there. With the integrity of the pit walls not letting him escape, he tries to walk around the bull.

The pitbull looks confused.

He looks over his left shoulder. His owner glances across the ring, to Pale Coat’s owner. Somewhere nearby, I hear, “That dog ain’t got it.”

“Sure don’t. Ain’t gon’ be long.”

“Sure ain’t.”

I glance back to PIT RULES where it states, under Rule 12: If , when turned loose, a dog refuses to start up or stops on the way over, or if he fails to reach his opponent, then the opponent shall be immediately proclaimed winner.

I’d turned away, to read that rule, with some part of my soul hoping that the disconnect between my eyes and the event would create a synergy with the universe that stopped the fight. I can’t say this worked. What ensued was not a fight. It was a pale dog briefly in union with a wall and the shadow of a man who called himself his owner, canopied by people who called ourselves watchers. The pitbull stood straight up, so securely fastened into the soft footing of the black mat that he looked human for a moment. His hind legs supported his trunk with thighs so striated in muscle fiber that I had to physically pull a lever in my head to stop comparing the pitbull to my best clients.

The pitbull, posed like a statue, awaited instruction without looking at his sideline. His owner, who was also his handler, gave the go-ahead, shadowed by his son, who was laughing with the watchers.

“Oh shiiit,” someone yelled as the pibull clamped down on Pale Coat, who was writhing supine with his pelvis exposed and front paws reaching for the bull’s neck.

Pale Coat managed to stand, and they competed for a preferred hold, locked around each other’s neck on their hind legs, until Pale Coat committed a turn.

I looked at PIT RULES. It didn’t define turn, though I’d been told it is when one dog turns his head and shoulders away from his opponent.

Pale Coat had done this, but no one yelled, Handle your dogs. Without that prompt, Pale Coat’s owner could be penalized. Pale Coat searched the crowd.

The pitbull, now standing, dragged his front paw across Pale Coat’s bottom half. It was like shark teeth through a map. The pitbull buried his face in Pale Coat’s thigh, his head swiveling on a stick that answered to the calls of a do-ragged guy in a 40oz. to Freedom shirt named Rob. The eyeholes of the crying sun on his album cover T-shirt were cut out so that his nipples protruded over the pit wall, which he banged with a closed fist in anticipation of his dog’s victory. I don’t hear the words. I just see the spit, slow and profuse.

Rob’s older brother was the owner and, to his credit, he didn’t instruct the pitbull to reengage with the chew toy that nature gave him. It was nature’s way that Pale Coat succumbed to the battery-operated shark tooth exhibit affixed to the seizuring neck, reinforced by the steel concrete that had found its way into the pitbull’s neck and perpendicular tail.

Pale Coat took on a human quality as he hugged the pitbull, gathering up for a sound signal that shook me, if no one else. It was the first intentional noise to come out of the pit, after a day of inadvertent noises from being spent or angry. But Pale Coat gave a bagpipe whimper. I don’t even think, if it were translated into language, that it meant anything. Maybe, if it meant anything, it just meant something. The noise he made, I imagined it to mean in his head: something. He said it over and over again. Something, someone. Something, something.

It might’ve been the lighting on our side of the ring--to which he’d made his way as the chew toy for the pitbull--or maybe it was the dark hands gripping the pit wall that I was just now noticing around me as Pale Coat flopped at our feet, but he was yellow now. He’d been a soft opaque before.

But now he was a tufty yellow. The wet flaps of his skin clumped in the gloved grip of a boy wearing square glasses and green scrubs.

“Our new medic.”

The fight had been called. Pale Coat’s face had been washed and now, the boy in scrubs who introduced himself as Paul adjusted his V-neck compulsively as Pale Coat’s owner addressed him with very little distance between his face and Paul’s.

Paul’s pants were loose. So loose that his bare bottom peeked out when he leaned to study Pale Coat.

From a carrying bag near his right knee, Paul took out a vial into which he stabbed a syringe at a sharp angle. He withdrew the syringe, full of clear liquid, and held it perpendicular to the sky, flicking the side before filling his chest with air and leaning into Pale Coat with a heavy-thumbed pump of its syrupy center.

Pale Coat shook. Paul dropped to study him. He held his cheek parallel to the dog’s heart. Then Paul dipped his nose between the dog’s front paw and chest, as if sniffing, and turned away. He dug through his bag.

They’d dropped Pale Coat on the concrete, tufty yellow feathers of his coat fanned out like loose carpet. Blood spread through the creases of fleece. The cement corner, where the mats didn’t reach, had a collection of stiff dog hair shreds, like a wig dropped from a great height on the pavement of a girls’ locker room. Dog hair was swept into it by the broom-like sweeping of fighting dogs.

Pale Coat’s blood made its way inside the ring, under a hole in the wall, and it pooled in that corner.

The man who’d led me here was Ben Blake, and he’d been quiet for most of Pale Coat’s fight. He spent the last several seconds of it shouting. He had wagered on the pitbull, and he was congratulating me on my victory before the fight was called. By now, he’d stopped savoring the victory and directed his attention to Pale Coat. He was yelled at by Pale Coat’s owner. I had a hard time understanding whether, near the fight’s end, Ben was encouraging the black or mocking the yellow. It seemed implausible that he was pleading for the mercy of the latter, which is what he claimed later.

By that point, it didn’t matter. I’d seen enough of him. Heard his screams. Watched him grip and pound.

I left him in the velvet folds of an Appalachian stream.

Why did I quit smoking?

The prophylactic rationale doesn't apply to me.

The world would be improved by my absence and my reluctance to watch it go is, at least, tempered by that acknowledgement.

I hate myself with the fury of a young Bruce Springsteen on an acid trip in Florida.

Not a coastal part either.

Somewhere inland.

Somewhere dry.

Somewhere that people like me go in search of trouble.

Are there people like me?

Or am I the only monster?

I don't have clothes that feel comfortable.

I need a bath in charcoal and a sauna in hell.

Goodnight Elizabeth.

Goodnight Chloe.

Goodnight Rachel.

Goodnight Sarah Jessica Parker in Annie.

Three Hail Marys, somebody tell me if I'm sleeping.

I would love to be sleeping.

I would love to not own flip-flops.

I would love a head that knows when it's done and forgets what.

I vomit and nothing comes up.

I rush and nothing comes out.

I pray and nothing comes through.

No signal.

Five bars. No reception.

I have a kind of curelty that doesn't burn.

Doesn't boil or tan or fade or rust.

It doesn't cheer or cry or smile or watch documentaries.

It won't try diet drinks.

It likes nice clothes.

It needs readers.

In the end, it will be fine.

In the meantime, pray for the things that make it grow.

For their gods don't answer or catch them on the way down.

May God find my soul and choke it out.

I'd like that, actually. 

Dr. Paul Pastorini welcomed and trusted people who didn’t always deserve it. That’s a dangerous and beautiful quality to have. I’ll always admire it about him.

He lived life with urgency. He was an Italian and a New Yorker. I met him before I can remember. But I always knew where he was from. That’s something else I admire about him.

He worked at the hospital with my dad. I didn’t know what a urologist was or that that’s what he did until I was probably 20. By that point, he’d already done enough good things for me that I didn’t care what he did for a living. He was a friend of mine.

I agreed to babysit his kids when I was in high school. That’s pretty much all I knew about the job when I first showed up at their house.

I was short on life skills at 16, but I was a fine big brother. That seemed a good resume for a babysitter. But I was nervous. There were two girls in there. Diapers.

They welcomed me. Dr. and Mrs. Pastorini laughed through my mistakes. The kids liked me to throw them in the air. I did one too many times. The youngest daughter, Sophia, bounced off the kitchen ceiling. I’ve never hated myself (or ceilings) more. I’ve probably told that story 20 times in my 2 years of fatherhood. I remember it so well because I was so worried. It’s a fun story to tell because Dr. and Mrs. Pastorini laughed off my failure. My failure was that I’d been trusted with three kids and I’d failed to exercise the restraint that distinguished me as the adult-having-fun from the kids-having-fun.

Restraint is the hardest part of being an adult. The greatest part of being a parent is that it feels ok to love your kids without restraint. It’s the first time since you were a kid that your conscience doesn’t tell you to ease up. You can over-extend yourself with professions of love for your baby. Nobody can blame you.

But there’s a burden to that, when you’re the kid, and Dr. Pastorini knew that. He taught his kids the value of restraint. His son was one of the most diligent students in restraint I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Pastorini and I discussed restraint in the roundabout ways of two guys in the gym, clanking free weights and spotting each other, round-tabling new workout regimens and eating patterns.

The really empowering thing about exercise is that it gives us a feeling of control, or restraint. I have a real weakness for that feeling. I’ve been an obsessive exerciser since I was 16. Dr. Pastorini knew that about me. Admired it about me.

It’s the people who flatter and confuse you that stay with you. When I die, I want to go in privacy. With the dignity of no one knowing what I looked like, maybe even where I was. A city name is fine, but not much more. Surrounded by people who knew what to order on my pizza.

Dr. Pastorini did not go like that. But he was an Italian, a New Yorker. He wore Yankees gear and a moustache in the 90s. Scrutiny sustained him. I’ll always admire that about him.

Dr. Pastorini will never leave me. He was a friend of mine. God rest his soul.

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.

Charlie Murphy narrated the funniest skit on the best sketch show in TV history.

It was made possible by his younger brother who, as long as he wanted to be, was the funniest man in the world.

Eddie gave up that position, voluntarily, for different reasons than Dave Chappelle.

It's kind of weird to think that Charlie was the right-hand man to the two funniest men over the last 25 years, and watched them both wipe their hands of it. While still in their primes.

It must've been like if Denzel finally felt like he was vibing with Jesus on the boardwalk about going to State, and then Jesus looked at his pops and said, "Sorry, Dad. Tell the warden I'm done with basketball."

Except Eddie and Dave weren't Jesus Shuttleworth. They were Game 6 MJ.

The SNL class behind Eddie didn't have a replacement. And, if Tosh.0 is the heir to The Chappelle Show, then Beyoncé is the next Marilyn Monroe.

My favorite Charlie Murphy character was Tyree, but my favorite memory of him is from the Player Haters' Ball. The Haters have all arrived, leaned against the bar, except Silky who strolls up solo, firing personalized barbs at Buc, Beautiful, and "Boss Hog".

Silky, from his interview chair, sets up the next scene which is a game called "Photo Flip". Fans of The Chappelle Show know, as we cut to the ballroom game scene, it's gonna be mostly improvised. The haters are relaxed and loose, and the filming location is the medium-sized conference room of a Ramada Inn that seems to usually house white men who think Monty Python is a riot.

Silky, under interview lamps with red hat pressing down his bangs explains the game, with the drag of his toothpick across every word, but especially the consonants in "monk", "trick", and "scallywags".

First up in "Photo Flip" is a poster of Puff Daddy on a red carpet. The group mocks his goofy smile and, when one of them says, "He got dolphin teeth," I erupt in a swallowed first-punching laughter you use when something hilarious happens during a Chappelle episode when you're trying not to laugh over the next joke.

By the time I can look back up, it's Ozzy Osbourne's family and Silky goes, "I like the song the girl sings: 'Papa Don't Preach'. I got a song for you too, bitch. It's called 'Daughter Don't Sing'."

The haters are starting to swing-laugh and they slowly sway in cadence with a movement toward the "ah lawd" we all feel coming from Dave. The best joke is coming. You know it.

The Chappelle Show is undefeated. It's not like a sports team, where you prepare for the letdown. Watching a great comedian in the zone is the ultimate human experience. It's the only thing that can occasionally eclipse a historic band in its peak.

Our gameshow host looks like Trina, and she flops down the next poster-board. It's Rosie O'Donnell.

Goddamn I'm gonna piss myself with excitement. It's an awful picture of Rosie too. Not a stomachable image of her, like you get when she's playing catcher for Madonna in A League of Their Own, or when she and LD are competing for the same woman in Curb.

Rosie's hips are angled toward the camera and she's recovering from some sort of Brian Bosworth situation above her left sideburn. If I ran a hermaphrodite clinic, this poster would adorn my wall in case I heard the parents of a newborn shim whisper, "Sigourney Weaver".

The haters get a couple chuckles from their cracks on Rosie before Silky leans back. He gets his feet under him.

I have one eye on Silky and one eye on Buc. Buc's anticipation gets me hype.

Silky's fur coat (fashioned from the pubic hair of his hate-hate-hating colleague) puffs out a little. Buc, to his right, dips his head and looks out the side of his eye at Silky. With Buc's eyes moving in different directions, I am reminded of the Charlie Murphy True Hollywood Stories where he describes the bouncer trying to break up his karate session with Rick James: "One eye was looking at me. The other eye was looking at Rick."

"She wears the underwear with dick holes in 'em," Silky says. Buc steps back, dips his hat, and gives a wide-mouth coyote cackle.

He trots a half-circle.

He breaks character. The way Eddie made people do on SNL.

Charlie wasn't Eddie. He wasn't Dave.

He was Tyree. "And yeah--I went to prison."

Charlie wasn't a standalone talent, like his older brother or new boss. But there were plenty of links between Charlie and Richard Pryor besides co-starring on a sketch comedy show with Paul Mooney.

"The entire period you in my room, I bet not see you stand up peeing. You in my room: you sit down to pee."

Dave Chappell was Tron. Charlie Murphy was Tyree.

In case anyone asks, he did not fuck Katie. Lysol had sex with Katie.

"No, Tyree, you had sex with me, too."

Correction: Tyree had sex with Katie.

Hard to imagine he finished her off with pancakes.

But, what Charlie Murphy helped us do with stories about his hero, is what his hero said to ladies right after Charlie Murphy's most famous line.

"I'm Rick James, bitch. Enjoy yourself."

I fucking did. Your aura or whatever, I seen it. It wasn't orange.

It was pure fucking gold. With dread locks coming out.

You were a habitual line-stepper and I will never forget the yarn you spun or what it looked like on Dave's forehead.

God rest your soul.

Stay Cold, Oxfilia

~~~~~~~~

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.

I know a world-class butcher but just don't have an appetite

Filet is for the birds and bosses who crave how its blood pools when cooked just right.

I have hair after 30 and I'm cautioned about it leaving me, less I keep it well-fed.

I have shame about my first 30 that I'm supposed to sunbathe in clinics or else, keep hid with hopes that make it dead.

From the feeling in my hand, I'm holding a spoon.

The buffet line is young but dem belly in full-bloom.

I have a big guitar pick but it scoops real flat

I have a big heart but is it supposed to feel fat?

I do love you 

But you aren't home.

I did call then

It says it in my phone.

I can't break a screen that needs thumbs to unlock

I can't build a window that soaks up tossed rocks.

Sleep is ambitious but go go go

Winter sky in June snow snow snow.

The sweatered singer who asks about weather 

Knows a song-writer who Instagrams tea and wears leather.

The former college athlete who rides the erg at dawn

Knows a walk-on college athlete who kept moving on

From tryout to scholarship to audition for the pros

"You know what they say, brother, row row row."

If I ask to see your tickets, volunteer to move

If they ax you for seconds, tell em wrong line for food.

"We hungry but them belly full" feels like a slave song

Short on paper but, with music, it can be strung into a good kind of long.

If it feels like a slave song, it would be weird if it was short

A deserving illustration of its various contorts.

Down Rodeo drive 

Its ponies now ride

Ponies of their own.

Upstream from there

Banks still let hide

Songs of the owned.

The splintered fingers of a line cook who never got trained

Reads the handwritten order of a liberal arts disciple for deskinned poultry blossomed in salt-free steel rain.

The food-hut slave holding down two jobs

Knows the son of his ex but forgets how she sobs

It's a distant thing to think about but he pretends to not know

"I ain't plant you in quicksand, boy, grow grow grow."

Guy: "Women and children first."

Mohawk: "So, women first? Or children first? You said women first, like sequentially. But then you qualified children as first. Like explicitly."

Guy: "Damn I don't know, man. I love my kids. Code-man. And I love women."

Mohawk: "Jesus, GuyFi."

Guy: "Jesus too. I mean of course, gotta throw Jesus in there."

Mohawk: "So your boy, some ladies, and Jesus?"

Guy: "His big is this ark? No for real, though, I tell you what I'd kill for at night on the water is like the monster cookie they serve in like the cast iron skillet. And like a vanilla speck ice cream dollop just--"

Mohawk: "Just--"

Guy: "Just wrist flip of ice cream. Right there on top."

Mohawk: "So, number one your kids, number two your ladies, number three Jesus, and number four the cast-iron skillet cookie with the ice-cream wrist-flip."

Guy: "Damn bro, I forgot about guacamole."

Mohawk: "Guacamole's extra, everybody knows that by now. Can't add guac."

Guy: "Women cost more than guac."

Mohawk: "No guac, GuyFi. No guac."

Guy: "I gotta have guac, dude. No guac? Are you serious right now?"

Mohawk: "Totally for serious right now."

Guy: "Bro."

Mohawk: "Rules, bro. Gotta have 'em."

Guy: "Dude. You cannot be--are you serious right now? Are you even serious right now?"

Mohawk: "Oh I'm totally serious right now."

Guy: "Okay then. Here it is."

Mohawk: "The list?"

Guy: "The list."

Mohawk: "GuyFi's favorite things."

Guy: "GuyFi's. Mother clucking. List of. Mama said knock you out. Absolute favorite, stuff I bring in my designer bag that doesn't count toward my five. Apocalypse island."

Mohawk: "Five things. And I'll give you the bag."

Guy: "Five things."

Mohawk: "Five things."

Guy: "Five thangz."

Mohawk: "Five thangzzzzz."

Guy: "Get loose, bro."

Mohawk: "I'm loose."

Guy: "You loose, bro?"

Mohawk: "Loose as a KY chicken leg."

Guy: "Here's how we're gonna do this. Reverse order. Cause it's like that."

Mohawk: "Oh it's like that?"

Guy: "It's like that."

Mohawk: "On like Donkey Kong."

Guy: "Number five."

Mohawk: "Numero quattro."

Guy: "Numero. El muthafucnquattro."

Mohawk: "Quattrrrrrroooooo."

Guy: "I gotta do it."

Mohawk: "Got to."

Guy: "Guac."

Mohawk: "BRO."

Guy: "I know, bro. I know. Number four."

Mohawk: "Numero--wait. Dude I think I goofed on quattro. Isn't four quattro?"

Guy: "Bro, it's all love."

Mohawk: "One love."

Guy: "One love, coming in at number four. You know I gotta do it."

Mohawk: "Got to."

Guy: "Must be done."

Mohawk: "HOVA."

Guy: "The movie Friday on DVD."

Mohawk: "HEY MRS PARKERRRRRRR."

Guy: "Mrs. Parker just don't knoweeewww."

Mohawk: "Blacker the berry, sweetuhda juice."

Guy: "She darker than a mufuca too. Haha, alright alright. Top three."

Mohawk: "After this commercial break."

Guy: "Solid voiceover voice, bro. You got something there. I'm telling you. That was cra--zeeyyy."

Mohawk: "And we're back. Over to you, GuyFi. Top three before we drown."

Guy: "Alright. I'm loose. Ready to walk the plank. Into my ark. Flip-flops flopping. Pants sagging. You know I got the glasses."

Mohawk: "Oh no doubt."

Guy: "It's ark, right?"

Mohawk: "Wuddou mean?"

Guy: "I mean, it's ark right?"

Mohawk: "Yeah, it's ark."

Guy: "Okay just checking cause I'm bout to put some arc on it. I'm bout to go Steph Curry on it."

Mohawk: "OHHHHHHH, hit 'em with the range ball."

Guy: "I hit 'em with the range ball. All day, baby. But alright, here it is. Three: Jesus."

Mohawk: "Solid. Top three, respect. You know what? That's respect."

Guy: "I'm sayin', it's not like I love Jesus less or anything, but I gotta put my mother at one. And Code-man at two."

Mohawk: "There you have it folks. Children two, ladies one."

Guy: "One love. Women and children first."

Mohawk: "One love. No doubt."

Guy: "Women and children first. Lezride."

Wutta setuh saton.

Aunatteral 

AnIsetwEEEEEEEEEEEE!

WuttI wishId

Dusomethimorebetta withachedda.

aTime wshewt

Asetis

Tingsunseemindiffunt

Now

Maybe

Baby

Wuttawatu

Witawate

Go

BabyIgotta

Taagain

Mercewiteleaving

Be kind wittiwittleboi.

I'm only, yasee, aboi.

Burntacsp.

Towdwn.

Tutheflow.

Gotta go.

F'reeL.

Flippem.

Dippem.

Nunsuh quitem.