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A Thousand Slimy Things

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 01/09/09

Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest !
‘Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corpses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest.…

~ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The water was shallow and a dusky jade color. The old man trimmed his motor just enough to pass over the turtle-grass, leaving a white and churning trail. He had been fishing off the southern tip of Florida for over fifty years, and could navigate every shoal and coral reef, every flat, channel, and bank. He could name each small island, no matter how insignificant. He knew where the mullet muds spread, attracting trout. He knew where to set his lobster traps, and the best locations to catch stone crab. He could tell where the snapper were hiding, and in deeper water he hauled in bonefish, mackerel, bluefish and pompano.

Now he shaded his dark eyes with the side of a brown, weathered hand as he set the outboard motor on idle, and trimmed it higher. The twenty-five foot boot rocked lightly, drifting slightly. The pungent water sucked and lapped at the white hull, facets of waves glared and glistened in the midday sun. “Another one,” he whispered to himself, his breath whistling through gaps in his teeth as he inspected the marl banks of Ramshorn Shoal about one-hundred feet away.

He quickly collected his largest net, and waited as the tide gently rolled the figure towards him. Slowly, undulating golden hair reached for him, white puffy hands flipped back and forth, back and forth as if trying to signal him, and pale, torn breasts broke the surface and sank again in a rhythmic dance. The old man felt tears sting his eyes; she was special, he could tell at once. He hurled his net as soon as she was close enough.

The twenty-two foot T-top cruiser skipped over the waves, approaching one of the small islands somewhere in the vicinity of the Calusia and Corinne Keys. In the boat were five impatient men, all carrying automatic weapons. In the last blush of the setting sun that cast a russet and violet glow on the rippling surface of Florida Bay, the pilot abruptly spied a pier jutting out into the surf ahead of them. It was long, built on wooden stilts, and looked like a finger pointing in their direction. In the distance they could make out the island where the pier originated, and a large dock area with shadowy boats heaving and bowing. Beyond that, they could see the silhouette and yellow windows of someone’s home.

The old man looked up from his work as he heard the distinct sound of an outboard motor approaching his quay. He smiled to himself. “It never fails, sweetie-pie,” he said to the figure of a woman sitting at the kitchen table. “Our newest friend must have called them.” He carefully put down his knife and disconnected his tubing and lowered the flame on his burner. He untied his rubber apron and pulled it up and over his head.

He left through the side door of his house, and walked casually to his fish and bait shop that stood next to his home. He unlocked the shop from the rear entrance, and switched on the overhead fluorescent lights. He moved to the front where he rotated the sign in the only window so that it showed “OPEN” to anyone outside.

“Hello Oliver,” he said to a man seated at a small table to the left of the door, frozen in the act of playing checkers. “Hi there, Preston,” he greeted Oliver’s opponent across the checkerboard, also sitting motionless as if contemplating a move. “Sorry to bother you-all,” he said to the dozen or so inert and tranquil human forms paused in their various activities, as if the light had caught them by surprise.

“How are you Margaret,” he asked, tipping an imaginary hat at a beautiful woman wearing a flowered shirt-waist dress, who hovered in front of his display cases, gazing silently at the open mouths, glazed eyes and glossy scales of the plump dead fish buoyed by mounds of chipped ice.

He listened to the sound of footsteps, the rapid tread of brutal and arrogant men moving closer and closer along the planks of his pier. He heard them advancing across his dock. “Seems like we’re going to have visitors,” he said as he leaned back against the front of his sales counter.

He caught a scant reflection of himself in the warm light of the plate-glass window; he was always startled by how he had aged, how leathered and wrinkled and bald his head had become. Life always startled him, human and otherwise; how it plowed forward towards degeneration, death, and decay without fail. “That never seemed fair to me,” he said to the young woman leaning against a wall to the right, talking on a payphone, caught in a moment of animated conversation. “No, it never seemed right….” he added as the thudding of heavy boots stopped outside the shop entrance.

The door slammed open, making the little wrought-iron bell above it jangle helplessly.

One of the five men pushing into the fish store reached up and pulled the bell down and threw it to the wooden floor. Another of them, a red-headed tough with a thick burned neck and cruel eyes, strode in front of the group and motioned them to halt. They readied their weapons — two appeared to be carrying AR-15s, one of them a M1911 semi-automatic pistol, and two of them AK-47s. “I thought we cleaned out all these islands,” the red-haired man said in a flat and cold voice. “Who are you?” he demanded, shoving the point of his AR-15 into the old man’s stomach.

The old man didn’t raise his hands, or move; he looked almost comical, standing so casually with the muzzle of a gun in his gut. “People around these parts call me ‘the hermit,’ and sometimes ‘that crazy old guy,’ but my birth name is Sam,” he answered, his voice devoid of fear of anxiety. “I’m a fisherman. I’ve been fishing these parts for fifty years or thereabouts. I sell what I catch.”

The dark and tall owner of the only pistol aimed it at the old man’s head. “And what’r you doin’ here, ‘Sam,’” he said, not really caring if he got an answer. He swept his gaze around the store, and for the first time noticed several other human figures. He jumped back, swung his gun around and around in an arc. “Okay, you people, stop where you are. Now,” he shouted, his voice tinged with alarm.

His four companions also abruptly realized that customers seemed to be scattered about. They likewise began swinging their weapons in the air, and shouted for everyone to keep still, to obey, or someone would get hurt.

As the end of a gun barrel was no longer pressing against the old man’s belly, he folded his arms and said firmly, “Haven’t your kind hurt these people enough?”

The red-haired man spun around, again jabbing the AR-15 in the old man’s direction.”Shut the hell up,” he barked.

“You murder people and run drugs for any country that’ll pay you. And not long ago, you killed a very nice, pretty woman. No, you did more than just kill her….”

“What the fuck,” he said. “What did you say? How do you know that?”

“She told me. She’s been waiting for you.”

“Who told you what?”

The old man could only smile broadly as he perceived the noises of motion coming from every direction. He watched the red-haired man about-face in time to see Preston and Oliver rise from their chairs.

“Defense position,” the tall man ordered, and the five mercenaries pressed against each other, forming a clump that bristled with firepower as they nervously circled back to back.

The old man sighed and shook his head as he slipped to the side. He quickly raised up a hinged part of the sales counter, and ducked behind. “You guys are the best,” he said to his friends, “and don’t worry, I’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

The red-headed man darted his eyes after him, but then became immediately distracted by the woman in the flowery dress who had been so perfectly stationary, and was now incrementally turning around to face him from the far end of the display cases. “Holy fucking shit….” he sputtered.

They all turned to look. At the woman with the curly black hair, perfect tan skin, and glassy bright eyes who now faced them. They could hear chair-legs scraping and shuffling shoes and the unmistakable sound of a phone receiver being slammed forcefully into its cradle.

“Shoot her,” the red-headed man bellowed. “You want more of what I gave you the first time, cunt?” he shouted at the woman as she took short, awkward steps towards him. And he and the others started firing.

The old man lowered himself to a sitting position behind the humming refrigerated cases as the bullets bounced off of them, pinging and banging. He waited for the shooting to stop and the screams to begin.

***

A few nights later, in the kitchen of his 1950s style dockside home that sat next to his fish and bait shop on the small island somewhere in the vicinity of Calusia and Corrine Keys, a radio was playing oldies. But not old enough for me, the old man thought, and smiled briefly.

His kitchen was airy with the glass jalousie windows cranked half-open, the Venetian blinds pulled all the way up. Outside he could hear, as he had heard every night of his life, the comforting sound of palm fronds rustling in the sea breeze, the swooshing of waves rhythmically advancing and retreating on the sandy shores. In the nearby thickets of red mangrove he knew fiddler crabs were scurrying for their tiny burrows to escape raccoons, and in the dense stands of mahogany, gumbo limbo, tamarind and buttonwood trees that covered most of his island, birds were settling, seeming to sleep.

He gazed at the corpse of the teenage girl stretched out on the oil-cloth draped across his kitchen table. Tubes fed chemicals into the bloated, discolored, and shark-mangled body. This process was uniquely his, something he had developed over time. As a fisherman and charter captain, he had taught himself taxidermy in order to satisfy customers who wanted to mount their trophies, like soaring sailfish or silvery barracuda. In time, given the isolation, the lack of supplies, he had improvised, experimented with ways to prepare fish with preservatives of his own invention.

And he would have continued with fish, except a few decades back, it seemed something happened to South Florida, something evil. He began to find human bodies in the bay. Victims, voiceless, they came to him. They drifted and floated to him, begging for his help. And he, out of desperation, read about and tried to learn all the ways to preserve the dead. After many years of hard work, and failures, he had finally perfected a system, a method. He used aspects of taxidermy, but something of plastination as well. Unable to readily obtain or afford chemicals like acetone or silicone or any of the fancy polymers, he hunted his own substitutes in the hammocks and jungle-like forests, and in the freshwater or saltwater shallows close to shore.

Of course, he hadn’t expected that his methods would work so very well. Or that his new friends would be so single-minded about their vengeance. “It’s funny how life turns out,” he said out loud.

He wiped his hands on his apron and pulled out a chair, sat down next to the beautiful golden-haired woman who reclined at the table, lounging in her pink house-dress with the fuzzy collar. “This young lady was in the water for a long time, honey,” he said to the woman.

She remained motionless, a cheerful smile transfixed on her lovely face, her teeth white and luminescent, her large blue eyes twinkling. Her hands rested in a cupped position around a mug of coffee.

He stroked her long, wavy yellow hair with the back of his left hand while gazing at the wedding band and engagement diamond that sparkled on her left ring-finger. “I love you so much, sweetie,” he said in a low and husky voice. He waited a moment, studying her, and then caught the slightest movement of her head. “That’s a girl,” he exclaimed happily, giving her a hug with his right arm. “You’re doin’ fine. I’m so lucky, so grateful you found me that day off Ramshorn Shoal.”

He held his wife for a moment more, then said, “Well, back to work.” He stood, pushing back his chair, and walked around to where the tangles and snarls of chestnut hair cascaded from the cadaver’s head. He watched as the mix of natural ketones and other chemicals seeped from the tank, through the tubes and needles into the girl’s every cell and interstitial space. He began planning how his latest guest might like to abide during her days and months and years to come.