Every spring that breeze returns, a week or two before the first tornados sweep into Alabama. It scuds off Mobile Bay, carrying the melodies of a reborn sea, the caws and chirps and familiar trills. It beckons to the fishers and the sailors and the shore-bound dockers with a tangy mix of salt and sulfur, brack and brine, tempting us to abandon our land-shackled homes and live like sirenae. That year, that day when my wish was finally granted, it caught me mid-morning as I hectored a millhand I’d found sneaking a smoke in the timber yard, and the next few hours I passed half in a daze, fiddling with my gold ring and tugging at my beard and just generally letting the place run riot till I called an early lunch.
“Pining for sea-folk,” my gangly new apprentice said — loudly, to no one in particular — as I left the sawmill, bento box in hand. He was one of the mayor’s clan, a cousin twice removed or some such, which he frequently found call to mention. I ignored the jibe, however accurate, just as I overlooked all the other whispered workplace tales of my romantic escapades. Stacked against the host of troubles a shipwright faces these days — rotting lumber, scarce tar, machinery so old it has parts stamped “Made in USA” rusting inside it — the nattering of a silver-buttoned teenager with an oily mustache matters less than chicken feed.
The breeze coaxed me onward with scents recalling my distant youth. I skirted the remains of Old Mobile, not even glancing at the crumbling factories and the skeletal apartments. (As Lem once pointed out, back when he still liked to tease me, locals learn not to see the ravaged glories of the past.) About halfway between the mill and the shipyard a narrow footpath leaves the boardwalk and meanders down to an inlet scarcely bigger than a pond which nonetheless provides a panoramic view of the bay. Those who know the spot have dubbed it Rabi’s Cove; in deference, they allow me my privacy there at sun’s-height during workdays. I suppose they can do without my scowling for an hour, during which I can escape the clamor of saws and the pestering of novices.
The bay’s annual transformation still surprised me, even after forty-five springtimes. Fresh gulf air brushed crisply across my face. The seaside stretched in front of me, full of life: bullfrogs lurked in the cordgrass that lined the shore; newborn redfish snapped at midges on the placid waters; a lonely gator drifted by. Far in the distance bright red buoys danced over onetime islands, now sunken hazards in the risen gulf. Despite my disappointment in the momentary absence of sirenae, I couldn’t withhold a smile.
Settling in amid this cacophony, I sat and munched on a slaw made with wilted collard greens and spongy radishes. Lem’s mother must have packed my lunch; I always got the worst bits when the widow did kitchen duty. Usually Mondays were Lem’s turn, but he’d been up all night tending to the twins’ fever. I spit out a stem, and grimaced. Lem used to joke that she’d poison me one day and I’d never notice it. He used to joke a lot until last year, when little Siu drowned and the widow grew ten times colder.
But a flood of tears won’t wash away calamity, so I pushed those thoughts aside and, sipping from a canteen of weak sweet tea, looked out at the bay. For a stretch of heartbeats I forgot as well about the Texas Conflict that had us working overtime under orders from Colonel Jin. This quiet thought-free moment stretched on and on until, with a sudden flutter, a motley heron swooped into the cove. Cupping its wings at the last moment, it landed elegantly in the shallows but then let out a comic squawk. Their honk always put me in mind of a circus clown, that and its feathers — a riot of scarlet and indigo, lemon and lime. A far too showy relic of the Geneshift Days, the poor birds have nearly gone extinct just two hundred years later. To most folk around here, spotting one means good fortune: Ma had seen one the summer she met Pa, en paz descansen. To me, that day, it only kindled memories of one I’d seen a quarter century earlier.
Back then, I’d left the journeyers’ party just before midnight, when the revelry was beginning in earnest. A full dozen of us had been raised up from our apprenticeships, so the taverns were full of sweaty young laborers already drunk on cheap beer and cheaper moonshine. I’d gotten politely tipsy on toasts in our honor, smiled through long reminiscences by various greying adepts, nibbled on the cornbread and the sweet potato pie. Eventually a few of us stepped outside to share a spliff and speculate about the next seven years of service. Such a stretch seemed mighty long back then, and my thoughts turned to the futures I’d just lost, having signed on under that snarling one-armed tyrant, Yoshikawa-sencho. My mood turned sour, and when the rest of the crew returned inside, I simply wandered off homeward, back toward the apprentices’ dorms which, for a few hours, I would have all to myself.
The ballad of the Alabama night accompanied me as I meandered up the boardwalk — barking treefrogs and lowing bullfrogs, the whippoorwill mourning, the katydids bleating. That muffled the partiers’ chatter, gracias a Dios. But as the wild choir ran through its repertoire, a motley heron swept past not a meter in front of me, landing to snap up a mouse hiding in the brush. While the bird gobbled down its prey it eyed me placidly, and then with a bob of its head and a flutter of its wings strode off toward the shore.
Like a fool in a folktale I followed it. Not for three wishes, not for a path to paradise, not even for the prestige that nabbing one of its feathers would bring, though I suppose each of these crossed my mind, particularly the last. But mostly I stumbled after this omen that had plopped down in my path on graduation night because the splendid bird had flown across entire nations, while I’d never left this simple harbor. Envy, besides curiosity, drew me onward.
When I caught up to it it was floating idly in the shallows of this same cove, occasionally swallowing up small fish that ventured incautiously near. Maybe I could pluck one feather for luck and remembrance? It paid me no mind as I stripped off my blue and white journeyer’s gown and slipped into the muck and the warm ripples of the bay. I waded slowly through submerged weeds that tangled my ankles and scratched at my legs, and though the heron haughtily pretended to ignore me, as I approached, it somehow receded. Soon the water was at my chest and doubts had begun to filter into my fuzzled brain, and at that moment I felt a gentle tug at my arm.
I pulled away with a shout. In the moonlight a cadaverous figure rose from the bay. Long black hair clung to a pale body about as old as my own, skin pocked with myriad tiny scars and adorned with luminous tattoos. Gill-like folds draped around an eellike neck, and after a moment’s shock I recognized it as a sireno, one of the sea-folk genetically altered by the ancients to dwell in cities swallowed by the rising oceans. It smiled — he smiled — mouth full of sharp teeth, and in a croaking voice said, “Come.”
Some coast folk call the sirenae monstrous: misshapen caricatures of humanity that infest our waterways, raiding our aquafarms and scuppering our ships. We apprentices took more notice of a different sort of accusation, swapping jokes and lurid yarns about the sea-folks’ sexual depravities (which perhaps included a fair amount of invention on our part). Finally face-to-face, skin-to-skin with a sireno, I understood the allure of the grotesque. No man I’d ever touched had seemed so raw and otherworldly. My fingers tingled with an urge to stroke his earless skull and caress his mottled chest.
I knew the other stories, too: tales of children snatched from the shores, of bathers lured to the deep and ravaged, of sailors dragged overboard and drowned and eaten. Stories to frighten youngsters, yes, but I was not then old enough to entirely disbelieve them. I backed away but he followed, legs ungainly in the shallows, webbed hands extended. The stories say as well that the sea-folk exude a drug to pacify their prey, and perhaps that’s not balderdash, for as he neared me my fears dissolved, and I found myself entranced by his sparkling eyes, his muscular arms, his brawny, husky thighs. Whether behexed by his chemicals or by my own inebriated lust, I hesitated, my heart pounding, and then I took his hand.
As he led me out into the bay, I heard behind me the boom of fireworks and the cheering of partiers. Ships huddled against creaking docks, and among them a few startled curlews whistled their complaints about the nearby pandemonium. But the shore soon grew distant, and ahead past the mouth of the bay lay the vastness of the Gulf, and above it the deep star-dotted inky sky. The ships I helped build sailed in the one, and our ancestors (so the chronicles say) traveled in the other, while for me each breaststroke brought me the farthest I’d ever ventured from home. I followed dreamlike onward, feeling neither fear nor triumph.
The sireno swam easily into the deep, and when I struggled to keep pace, he had me cling to his back and carried us both out, out beyond sight of land, beyond even the lighthouse’s blinking. I clutched him tightly, felt his taut muscles pulling us through the mild surf and the salt spray. My last doubts vanished with the shoreline as we sped toward the horizon. We plowed on, on through the gentle waves, until after ten minutes or then again an hour I found we had stopped, and he was turning to face me as we treaded water.
His prickly hand swept across my cheek and neck. I grasped his scar-speckled shoulder, and we kissed. I tasted the ocean on his lips, felt the sea in his embrace. Buoyed by the water, my legs moved up against his chest, and slowly, gently, he entered me. I winced once yet never wavered from looking into his violet-flecked eyes. As we rocked together in the soft night tides, he suddenly took my forefinger and bit it, hard enough to draw a few drops of blood that trickled down his throat. I swore, but he had quickened his pace, and soon we were rushing together toward satisfaction. As he came he released my finger and howled gutturally at the sky.
An hour or a few minutes passed, and I was floating on my back — the cradling bay beneath me, the Triangle sparkling above — reaching out for the sireno, when he said, “Wait,” and vanished under the surface, down to the depths, the drowned past, as obscure to me as any distant shore, as far from my reach as Arcturus or Spica. I hung alone in the universe, neither down nor up nor far nor home. For a brief moment I attained what Lem tells me is sati: I and the breeze and the waves were one; I drifted unattached from my past, unlinked to my future; every ripple was the sea’s breath, every twinkling star was the night sky winking. I observed the feeling, and it slipped from my grasp.
How long since the sireno left? I shooed away that qualm and lolled in the water, hoping to regain transcendence. Out of habit I searched for the Little Bear, for Polaris low to the horizon. Every child who plays in the gulf learns to follow it home, that if you just head north you’ll reach the coast. But the coast is long, and I’d be alone, naked, unarmed, lost in the wilderness. Without much realizing it I moved to treading water, as if waving my arms could swat away my worries. My finger still bled, and I wondered what its taste might draw. A swarm of suspicions seized me, of plots by the sea-folk, lures and traps and dreadful appetites, vengeance against the unshifted who still could walk the land. My breath grew ragged and my swimming choppy.
A rogue wave splashed my face. I spluttered, coughing up the ounce of water I’d almost swallowed. I had begun to panic, and with the mouthful of brine I was five again, my father at my side, teaching me to swim the year before he went off to die in the last war with Texas. I’d been terrified then, but he’d put his hand on my back, and I heard his baritone voice chanting the old rhyme:
Arms down, won’t drown.
Breathe slow, fears go.
over and over till I floated safely in the shallows and he grinned with pride.
I clutched at that memory, one of the few clear recollections I have of him. I seized it and lay still in the sea, occasionally raising my head to breathe, imagining my father beside me, letting the fear dissolve.
After a few minutes I regained my composure and sought out the North Star again. Easy enough, but now beneath it I saw the fin of a sharpnose circling me at a distance. Small and not particularly hostile, it didn’t pose much of a threat, except that it might draw the attention of larger sharks — bulls or tigers — which would be troublesome. Apprehension and exhaustion made my decision simple, spurring me toward the coast.
I’d only swum a few meters when I felt the pull on my ankle, not teeth, but a hand. I turned to the sireno full of anger and relief, both of which he seemed oblivious to. I wanted to shout at him, but could summon neither the energy nor the right words. Ignoring my distress, he took my hand and placed on one of my fingers a ring, a glistening gold band that he must have fetched from some trove he’d hidden in the deep. Words fell even further away from me, but he had one: “Wait,” he said again.
He seemed to expect a response, so I nodded as if I’d understood his meaning. At that he grinned, baring his long sharp teeth, and turned so that I could climb onto his back. Exhausted, confused, I lay atop him and let him swim us back to shore, returning to the cove in which we’d met. He dropped me there in the shallows, kissed me once, long and thirstily, and then was gone, vanishing into the dark waters of the bay. I stared out after him wondering what, exactly, had just transpired.
“Wait,” he’d said, and so I had. Days, weeks, a quarter century had passed, twenty-five years of absence in which my life had gone on. I’d worked my way up from journeyer to maestro, and then two years ago, after Yoshikawa-sencho retired, had become head shipwright of the bay. Ma had long since succumbed to the fever, and I’d met Lem when drought forced his own family in from the farmlands. We’d gotten bonded (despite his mother’s pride) and taken in young ones to raise. And then, in a moment of inattention at the riverbank, Siu was gone.
Now I finished my tea as I watched the heron hunt in the shallows. How often had I sat in this cove and gazed at birds who traveled farther in a single day than I’d voyaged my entire life? “For a Mobile man,” Lem once said, “you’re awfully stationary,” and I’d smiled to hide how deeply the old joke stung. Every time one of my boats left the harbor I’d imagine myself aboard it, face to the fore, but every night I’d end up back in the house I was born in. I spat out a stray tea leaf, and the heron cocked its head at me, then snatched up a tiny fish and waded on.
I suppose I could have stalked it for its feathers, as I had on that earlier night, but such pastimes are for kids who still believe the promises of fairy tales. Instead I wadded up the last of my stale vegetables and hocked the ball at the gene-shifted bird. It ignored the splash. I sighed and started repacking my bento box, rehearsing my schedule for the afternoon.
The first figure surfaced with nary a ripple. I’d sighted sea-folk in the cove before, more often in the harbor proper, but rarely so shore-close in full daylight. Not wanting to startle the visitor, I froze; but it stood, brushed back its long, dripping locks, and stared directly at me. The face was weathered and bearded, the chest and arms covered in a multitude of scars, the whole scarcely recognizable until, catching my gaze, he smiled.
“You’re here,” he called, much more eloquent now, but his voice still just as gravelly. He waded toward me through the cordgrass, wet skin sparkling in the midday sun. I stood but neither approached him nor stepped away, opened my mouth but found no words came out. At this he laughed a seal’s bark, harsh and happy.
A year before, the Kukulkan limped back into harbor, sails tattered and masts splintered, a decade after we’d all presumed it sunk. My emotions now mirrored those I saw in the crowd that day: not just the sulky teen who greeted her resurrected mother with unrestrained cries of joy, but also the sudden un-widow who stood in mute anguish beside her second husband, their babe bawling at her breast. Half a lifetime of idle daydreams hadn’t, in the end, prepared me for this at all.
Pure foolishness, pining for sea-folk, so all the folktales say; but those who write the stories are those who stayed behind. What do they know of dwelling among the restless tides, or penetrating the lightless deep? And besides, fond as I am of the nomads, truly I yearned for only this one, the apparition I met long ago. Now here he stood, beaming as I trembled.
I tugged at my beard. Lunchtime was over. Back in town my timber supplier awaited my return, no doubt bearing more bad news about the pine borer infestation; and Colonel Jin would probably storm in again today to demand another warship we hadn’t the material for. The Texans threatened new blockades and the summer forecast promised drought. And I’d told Lem I’d stop in at the florist to order lilies to lay on Siu’s grave next week. My schedule didn’t allow for mid-day dalliances.
Yet I discovered I was undressing. Discarding my checked shirt and overalls in the brush, I schlurped through the muck into the chilly bay. The weeds fondled my thighs and the skitterbugs darted in my wake. The clanging alarm of a distant fire-wagon echoed through the woods — the brigade wasn’t headed toward the mill, surely? I briefly turned back toward the city, but then the sireno took my hand in his and tugged me close. He kissed me, and the commotion faded away.
When I drew apart a minute later, I saw that company had joined us in the bay: behind him emerged a stout, jewel-braided sirena with skin even darker than mine; a beardless, swaggering adolescent who clutched a mid-size fishing spear by its freshly-hewn shaft; and an older, one-armed sireno riding herd over two shy toddlers who poked their heads above the surface, eyes goggling at my appearance. “My kin,” he said, his arm wrapped around me. “A few of them. Come, mix your blood with ours.” And he escorted me out to meet them.
The teen took two fierce steps through the water toward me, but the sirena caught the child by the shoulder and gave a shake of her head and a half-smile. Cross, the teen relented. The sirena untangled the youngster’s hair for a moment until the child remembered its petulance and swam apart. At my approach the two little ones dove behind their guardian, reminding me so much of how our twins greeted strangers that I halted abruptly, slipping a bit in the breast-deep water.
The twins! I was supposed to pick up some calamine lotion, now they’d made it through the worst of the fever and just had the rashes. A few nights last week had been particularly worrisome. Siu’s death had struck us hard, but to have lost all three children would have broken Lem for certain. Yet here I was, on the verge of abandoning them all. I yanked myself from the sireno’s grasp. He looked at me, perplexed and hurt.
The bay was quiet then. I heard no gulls call nor a single sandpiper wheet, just the tide lightly lapping. The speck of a freighter bound for Yucatán disappeared south across the horizon, and I recalled being told that sea-folk spend their winters there, carousing in the bahías turquesas and lolling on the white sand beaches. Back at the mill the afternoon whistle blew, shrill but distant, no louder than a piping plover. Still, it roused the heron, who took to the air with a raucous squawk.
The sireno echoed it with his laugh. “Garza knows to flee the song of dirt-folk,” he said as the gaudy bird circled us twice and headed out to sea. “That melody holds you fast and grinds you to dust.” The sireno held out his hand again, smiling that toothy grin, beckoning. The rest of his pack had closed rank behind him, the little ones bobbing and darting between the others. “I scouted your shores while I gathered my tribe. I saw how your cities drain your people of joy. I even spotted you, now and then, sitting seaside, dreaming of escape. Break free of your net, mud-strider, and come with us.”
The sirena, hands full with one of the little ones, exchanged whispers with the graybeard as they sized me up and smiled at some private joke. Then, graciously, she nodded. Meanwhile the teen peered over my shoulder at the woods and the land beyond, eyes blazing with the pull of adventure thoroughly mixed with doubt and fear. Despite our differences, I felt the comfort of this pack and reached out for the sireno’s hand.
His toxins had sedated me. His familia had charmed me. But I found there was a vast gulf between the midnight passions of a young man and the daytime responsibilities of a middle-aged shipwright. Squeezing the sireno’s hand once, I pressed the gold ring into it, then turned my back and waded resolutely back toward shore. I heard a brief burst of furious, incomprehensible chatter behind me, but I refused to turn around. My eyes were wet, though not with mist.
I felt a tug on my ankle, and I hesitated. What opportunities, what adventures lay just behind me, waiting only for my assent? But then I realized it was only weeds in the shallows that held me, and I clambered onto land, shaking the seawater from my brown arms and hairy chest.
There was a rustle of branches at the edge of the cove, enough noise to spook a dozen terns to flight, and the new apprentice broke through, muttering uninspired curses. “Rabi-sencho,” he called at last. “You’re late for the meeting.” He peered down his nose at me as I sloshed through the muck, then looked over my shoulder at the bay. “Enjoy your dip?”
I turned. Not only the terns had fled. The sireno and his kin had vanished, traceless in the sea. As the bullfrogs found their voices again and croaked farewells, I pulled on my clothes — judging by his grimaces, much too slowly for the mayor’s cousin’s taste. Once I had dressed, he all but dragged me to the boardwalk, imperious and impertinent as he marched me back into captivity.
That spring night, as I sat on the back porch watching the twins playing outside for the first time in a week, Lem took my hand in his and gently rubbed the emptiness that the sireno’s ring had left. The evening breeze slipped between us. He pecked me on the cheek as the children squealed and the fireflies glimmered, and in that moment the gulf felt very far away.