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ake that tilled him forty-three cents in dimes, pennies, and nickels. He stared blindly at the coins shimmering down the wires like a pinball game all afire.
Tom did not move, holding his breath.
They both seemed to be waiting for something.
The something happened.
‘Hey … hey … hey …’
From a long way off down the coast a voice called.
The two men turned slowly.
‘Hey … hey … oh, hey …!’
A boy was running, yelling, waving, along the shore two hundred yards away. There was something in his voice that made Tom feel suddenly cold. He held on to his own arms, waiting.
‘Hey!’
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 farther 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 lizard folds about their burnt pale-water 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 Uttered 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, hound-fish, 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.
