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The boy pulled up, gasping, pointing back along the shore.
“A woman, a funny woman, by the North Rock!”
“A woman!” The words exploded from Chico’s mouth and he began to laugh. “Oh, no, no!”
“What you mean, a ‘funny’ woman?” asked Tom.
“I don’t know,” cried the boy, his eyes wide. “You got to come see! Awful funny!”
“You mean ‘drowned’?”
“Maybe! She came out of the water, she’s lying on the shore, you got to see, yourself … funny …” The boy’s voice died. He gazed off north again. “She’s got a fish’s tail.”
Chico laughed. “Not before supper, please.”
“Please!” cried the boy, dancing now. “No lie! Oh, hurry!”
He ran off, sensed he was not followed, and looked back in dismay.
Tom felt his lips move. “Boy wouldn’t run this far for a joke, would he, Chico?”
“People have run further for less.”
Tom started walking. “All right, son.”
“Thanks, mister, oh thanks!”
The boy ran. Twenty yards up the coast, Tom looked back. Behind him, Chico squinted, shrugged, dusted his hands wearily, and followed.
They moved north along the twilight beach, their skin weathered in tiny folds about their burnt pale eyes, looking younger for their hair cut close to the skull so you could not see the grey. There was a fair wind and the ocean rose and fell with prolonged concussions.
“What,” said Tom, “what if we get to North Rock and it’s true? The ocean has washed some thing up?”
But before Chico could answer, Tom was gone, his mind racing down coasts littered with horseshoe crabs, sand dollars, starfish, kelp, and stone. From all the times he’d talked on what lives in the sea, the names returned with the breathing fall of waves. Argonauts, they whispered, codlings, pollacks, houndfish, tautog, tench, sea elephant, they whispered, gillings, flounders, and beluga, the white whale, and grampus, the sea dog … always you thought how these must look from their deep-sounding names. Perhaps you would never in your life see them rise from the
salt meadows beyond the safe limits of the shore, but they were there, and their names, with a thousand others, made pictures. And you looked and wished you were a frigate-bird that might fly nine thousand miles around to return some year with the full size of the ocean in your head.
“Oh, quick!” The boy had run back to peer in Tom’s face. “It might be gone!”
“Keep your shirt on, boy,” said Chico.
They came around the North Rock. A second boy stood there, looking down.
Perhaps from the corner of his eye, Tom saw something on the sand that made him hesitate to look straight at it, but fix instead on the face of the boy standing there. The boy was pale and he seemed not to breathe. On occasion he remembered to take a breath, his eyes focused, but the more they saw there on the sand the more they took time off from focusing and turned blank and looked stunned. When the ocean came in over his tennis shoes, he did not move or notice.
Tom glanced away from the boy to the sand.
And Tom’s face, in the next moment, became the face of the boy. His hands assumed the same curl at his sides and his mouth moved to open and stay half open and his eyes, which were light in color, seemed to bleach still more with so much looking.
The setting sun was ten minutes above the sea.
“A big wave came in and went out,” said the first boy, “and here she was.”
They looked at the woman lying there.
Her hair was very long and it lay on the beach like the threads of an immense harp. The water stroked along the threads and floated them up and let them down, each time in a different fan and silhouette. The hair must have been five or six feet long and now it was strewn on the hard wet sand and it was the color of limes.
Her face …
