Both versions of Buddy Towne start wondering if there’s too many boats darkening the shallows. Usually, Reeta would have shown by now. The largest and loudest of the fishermen, Howie Thurgood, belches and tosses his empty beer can into the surf. It washes right back, almost like the sea spits it out. “Some night we have,” Howie says, clapping Buddy on his back. “Shame this woman of yours ain’t showing.”
Both possible versions of Buddy feel like an idiot, even more than usual. He’s always the butt of every joke, the cautionary tale to every young boy in Apalachicola of how not to be a man or a fisherman, and now it’ll be worse. Come meet my gal, he said, come out to St. George Island when the tide’s low and the moon’s bright. But Reeta’s not here, and the men—ten of them come in on three outrigger boats—are drinking and giggling and whispering about what might drive a man to make love to a manatee, and Buddy’s clenching his fists, feeling like a rube.
The beam from the lighthouse swings overhead like bright fishing wire casting for something in the dark of the Gulf of Mexico, while the wind-tossed sea oats susurrate on the dunes. The men are starting to get bored, already a few have climbed back in their boats. They’d already have left if it weren’t such a pleasant night. The oldest of the men, Ellis Briggs, pushes a frosty beer into Buddy’s hand and then punctures it with his can opener.
“Loneliness can be a mean thing,” Old Briggs says, not so softly that the other men don’t hear his unexpected kindness to the social leper, but soft enough they can pretend they didn’t. One possible Buddy—call him Buddy One—slaps the can out of Briggs’ hand and the old man just shakes his head. The other, Buddy Two, accepts the beer, and receives a pat on the shoulder. In both versions, Briggs leaves his unopened beers and the can opener for Buddy on the sand—fine as sugar and cold and pale as snow—and then climbs into his boat, hauls up the anchor, and putters away. The other men are soon gone, leaving their empties to keep Buddy company.
At some point in the past, someone—maybe it’s his father, or one of the guys in his squad in Korea (these things always mash together)—tells Buddy that men don’t need to be pretty, they need to be useful. This is said as a kindness, because Buddy is awkward and funny-looking, but he still needs to feel beautiful, and Reeta lets him feel that way. Reeta is everything he’s ever wanted in a woman. She’s not just beautiful, she’s kind, smart, and curious about everything. But most important of all, she’s compatible. In their first encounters, after Buddy overcomes his apprehension of wading into the waters and Reeta her fears of getting beached, Buddy is stunned by Reeta’s vigor and enthusiasm, as well as how smooth and silky her scales are, soft as polyester. But the Buddies experience different first times. While Buddy Two enjoys a storybook fuck, Buddy One cuts himself on the sharp armored ridges that protect Reeta’s gills. He thinks he might bleed out on the sand, but Reeta’s cold, black tongue wraps around his wrist and the enzymes of her saliva coagulate the wound. Her amber eyes dilate with pleasure and then close as she tastes his inner sea.
The last of the boats is a little firefly twinkle on the western horizon when Buddy—on his third beer now—sees the shimmer start. Bright green and full of froth, like the water’s boiling, coming toward land.
“Now she comes,” he mutters. Buddy One says it loudly, Buddy Two says it under his breath.
But even as low and bitter as he feels, he can’t help but gawk when she breaches the water. He’s seen it a dozen times, but Reeta’s emergence is never less than spectacular. First the eyes—amber and bright, further to the sides of the skull than a human’s eyes—glimmer like brass foil. Then there’s the cascade of brine as she shakes her head and the water drips from the berries and flosses of her wig—the wig of red algae she shaped to look like Rita Hayworth’s famous mane. He calls her Reeta for this reason, but also because her true name is not something a human voice could pronounce unless they were drowning. Moonlight glimmers off the fine golden scales of her shoulders and throat and her mirrorlike silver stomach, while shadows puddle on the undersides of the round, firm mounds on her chest she’s said are egg pouches. Reeta rises to her navel, the pair of strong, finned limbs halfway between legs and tails still submerged in the low water. Pink slits where a human’s ribs would be —her gills—vent open and spray gasps of vapor, and her throat croaks as she opens her mouth with its thin lips and crystalline teeth like little green emeralds.
“Why didn’t you come?” he asks. “You made me look like a fool.”
“You have no right to be angry, Buddy Towne,” Reeta says. “I told you not to tell your people of me. You broke my trust.”
Buddy’s anger melts against these words, and he goes cold despite the balmy evening at the thought of her leaving him. Stupid, stupid man, Buddy.
“Please don’t,” Buddy says. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Those men won’t be a danger—they think I’m a rube, a crazy fool.”
But Reeta is already withdrawing into the waves. He’ll not touch her tonight, won’t feel her scales against his skin. Buddy’s running into the water, but she’s gone.
She doesn’t show the next night. Nor the night after. He starts to feel like he did before he found her, those dark times he’d walk the deserted beaches of St. George Island under the lighthouse’s blind eye and imagine opening the estuaries of his body to the ocean.
Once on his lonely nocturnal walks, in the time before he meets Reeta, Buddy One meets the old keeper of the St. George Island lighthouse. He’s a short bald guy with a wild, white beard streaked with yellow tobacco stains, and he wears a heavy oilcoat even though it’s a balmy, clear night. The old salt, who’s out fishing, finds Buddy looking out at the ocean with haunted eyes and approaches him and says, The ocean gonna take what’s offered, son, and what’s offered it ain’t like to give back. Buddy Two never meets this man, and comes to believe the lighthouse is a derelict pulsar, a bright tombstone on the shore.
Four days after his stupid mistake, four agonizing days and three painful, fruitless waits at the beach later, Reeta finally shows again. Each of the no-show nights, Buddy plays his guitar on the sand with the spume and foam lapping at his toes. He plays and sings the songs of Elvis, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Chuck Berry, and Hank Williams, but more than any of the rest he plays the songs of his hero, Buddy Holly. He doesn’t just like Buddy Holly because they share the same name—though unlike Holly, Buddy was given the name at birth—but because Buddy Holly is like him, a gangly, goofy-looking guy who no one would ever accuse of being handsome. Sometimes when he’s vain, Buddy dreams of making it on American Bandstand and playing some of the songs he’s wrote himself but won’t ever perform, not even for Reeta.
That fourth night Reeta comes with her show of light and froth. Buddy plays his favorite song, Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” for her, and she listens with her head just an inch under water, because her earholes hear better submerged.
When he’s finished, Buddy puts his guitar down and Reeta drags herself out of the water, fine, white sand dusting her limbs and belly like sugar. Buddy One puts his hand around her narrow waist and nibbles on her throat the way she likes. She tastes just a little like the fermented seaweed he remembers floating in the broths the locals cooked when he was at the army hospital in Okinawa. Buddy Two hauls her all the way onto the beach and she coils her impossibly strong tail-legs around him as he rests his head against the pillowy swell of her bust. Both Buddies cry just a little, because forgiveness is a potent opiate. Buddy One lets her lead, lets her use her lower appendages to position him. Reeta is like almost every species of fish: ectothermic, cold-blooded. It’s always a surprise when Buddy is inside her and she is colder than the balmy waters of the Gulf that lap against his hips. Buddy Two is more assertive, and flips her over onto her belly so he can admire the thin gold sheet of protein-silk projecting from the keel of her spine, a dorsal fin rigid and bladelike in the water but slack and soft as muslin to the dry air.
Reeta tells him to slide his fingers into her gills, and Buddy Two’s never cut himself there, so he doesn’t hesitate. It’s clear it causes her pain to have his fingers jammed into such sensitive fissures, but the way Reeta quivers and thrashes her tailfeet speaks to a greater pleasure. After the passion is spent, both Buddies slump and pant, feet in the surf and heads in the sand.
Reeta holds Buddy and shudders as the protective moisture around her scales begins to dry. Soon she’ll have to return to the water, but for the moment she squeezes Buddy tightly. She’s much stronger than him—that would bother some men, but Buddy likes the feeling of safety her strength offers.
“I’m sorry I did not come the other nights,” Reeta says. “I was angry with you still.”
“That’s okay. You’re here is what matters.”
She closes her eyes. She has a humanlike face, but there is just enough ocean in it that he never forgets she’s not a human woman. Her eyes are too round, too far apart, her lips too narrow and rigid, and there are two vertical slits for nostrils and a shallow ridge of cartilage where a nose would be.
Buddy plays with the tangled weave of her kelp wig. A thought occurs to him. Buddy One lets it lie, but Buddy Two works up the nerve to ask. What’s she look like under her wig?
Reeta is clearly nervous, but she removes her wig, and Buddy finally sees what she’s been hiding from him. Three short, translucent fins run along the dome of her skull, spiderwebbed by luminous veins aglow with a soft green like the color the water turns when she approaches the shore.
“You don’t need to bother with the wig anymore,” Buddy says.
Reeta lets out a hiss of vapor. “But I like the wig. I like being Rita Hayworth.”
Maybe there’s a deformity in her fins, something she’s ashamed of. Buddy doesn’t press, because he doesn’t know what a mermaid’s scalp is supposed to look like and he doesn’t want to embarrass her.
Reeta secures the wig again and then rests her head on Buddy’s chest. “Would you ever want to see my world? To meet my people?”
“Golly, it’d be some kind of outing,” Buddy says, thinking she’s joking.
“I’m serious. What if you could live with me in the water?”
“Well, it’s not possible.”
“But would you?”
Buddy thinks about what living in the ocean with Reeta would be like. He can’t begin to imagine such a life, even if it were possible, but he knows how little he’d miss the life he has. “I’d make a go of it.”
She ripples with excitement. “That makes me happy. Give me a few days to make arrangements.”
“Huh? What arrangements?”
“I can make you like me,” she says.
“How?”
“With magic.”
Before she ever reveals herself to him, Reeta observes Buddy out on his daily fishing trips. The first hint he has a guardian angel in the water comes when he loses his daddy’s gold watch and it’s thrown back onto the deck of his boat.
“Why don’t your people ever wash ashore?” he asks her once, early in their courtship.
“The ocean doesn’t give up its dead,” she answers.
Her kind don’t speak the way humans speak; she learned to imitate human speech by squeezing gasses through the valves of her throat, gasses produced by a form of indigestion. She always eats fatty fish and underripe kelp before meeting him so that she’ll be able to “talk.” It touches Buddy that she’d make herself uncomfortable for his sake. Her voice is a raspy croak; it reminds him of a jazz singer he once heard.
“How come you never get caught in ocean trawler nets?” he asks. “Those nets catch everything.”
“We have knives. We are a people of science and tools, just as you are.”
Buddy wonders if Reeta is like him, an outcast. Maybe she’s considered ugly, even hideous, and that’s why she’s a fool for him. Maybe she was thinking of beaching herself and letting the sun dry her out before she found Buddy.
The next time Buddy sees her almost a week has passed again. Each night in the interim he takes his boat from Apalachicola to St. George Island and anchors near the lighthouse and camps by the shore and waits, and each night when she doesn’t show up, he plays his guitar and sings Buddy Holly songs to nobody. He keeps thinking about the last thing she told him. It can’t be true—there’s no such thing as magic, even in a world where fishpeople exist. Buddy Two wants to believe, though, while Buddy One laughs at the idea so that it won’t hurt him when it doesn’t happen.
She lives to learn. She teaches herself to speak English before ever meeting Buddy, learning it from eavesdropping on fishermen and tourists. She studies the glamorous wives and mistresses of the millionaires, congressmen, sportsmen, and movie stars who come to the Gulf to fish, get drunk, and fool around at sea far from the flashbulbs of Hollywood, New York, and Washington D.C., and she learns to love as human women do from watching their deckside escapades. The rest of what she knows about humans she learns from discarded magazines and trinkets from shipwrecks, or from what Buddy teaches her.
One day he builds a fire for her on the shore, and she loves the colors it makes but loves less the way it dries the scales of her face when she leans for a closer look. Fire is a nice place to visit, but Reeta wouldn’t want to live there. Still, she collects the shards of glass shaped in the sand from the heat and the next time Buddy sees her, she’s created a necklace from the pieces.
Once he brings her whiskey. She doesn’t drink it from the bottle, and instead has him pour it into the water. The brown liquor dissolves in the ocean, and Reeta breathes it in through her gills. She says it’s like a kind of venom, and wonders why any intelligent creatures would knowingly poison themselves. When they kiss, Reeta funnels a concentrated stream of whiskey into Buddy’s mouth, and he’s quickly drunk. The stars blur and the ocean tides become radio static in his ear. Reeta coils around him and they look up at a dazzling show of light that’s labored a thousand years to reach their eyes.
At last she returns after a week of lonely nights.
“It’s all prepared,” Reeta says, slithering serpentine through the foam and onto the shore.
Buddy can’t help himself, and throws himself onto her, kissing her cold lips and shuddering when her tongue eels into his mouth and the anodynic enzymes numb his own tongue and his gums. When she pulls away, she says that she’s made the arrangements, and whenever he’s ready he can come with her.
“Come with you and then what?” Buddy asks.
“Come with me and stay with me.”
“In the water?”
“Of course in the water.”
Both versions of Buddy are full of worries, both are disbelieving. Both want to believe. Both have been hurt too much—by parents, by laughter, by shrapnel and sepsis and shellshock—to believe in magic. Buddy One wants to laugh it off, Buddy Two wonders if it will hurt, whatever it is Reeta will do to let him live with her.
“Could I ever go back?” both Buddies ask their respective Reetas.
Reeta’s amber-backed eyes glitter with kindness, and she asks him what he’d have to go back to.
When neither Buddy can answer, Reeta’s tails coil around him. She tears open his shirt, shredding the cotton as if it’s wet paper, then rips open his blue jeans with the same ease. Both Buddies let her strip every scrap of cloth away until he’s as naked as her. Between Buddy One and Buddy Two is only a minor divergence: Buddy Two goes slack while Buddy One wraps his arms around her.
Reeta slides onto Buddy and tacks him into her cove while her twin tailfeet constrict his legs, so tightly his ankles start to ache and his calves throb from the pressure. And then they’re in the water. Not bobbing on the edge of the surf like all the times before; this time they’re drifting out into the darker depths of the Gulf.
“Let it come,” Reeta hisses into his ear, and then she unclasps from him, slides away, and leaves him to bob and kick in the water.
His toes can’t reach the sea bottom, and all the pleasure he felt a moment ago alchemizes to fear as he realizes he can’t see the shore, can’t see anything but water in every direction, water and the impossible brightness of the moon melting like a luminous slick of oil on the surface. Humans invented clothes to feel like they control the world, nakedness only reminds them of the truth that they don’t, and it’s this nakedness that puts the thrash and rattle into Buddy’s mammalian heart.
“Reeta!” Buddy One calls out, while Buddy Two can’t say anything because he’s coughing on some seawater he swallowed when he gasped from surprise at being released.
And then there’s Reeta, beautiful and luminescent under the moonlight and from the emerald glow of the veins under her skin. There’s something in her hand, something that shimmers under the water, and Buddy catches only a glimpse before she slashes it at him, twice, one incision on each side of his throat, deep wounds that break the arteries open, exposing the ocean inside Buddy’s veins to the greater ocean outside his skin.
Buddy One looks at Reeta, his love, with wide-eyed shock as his warmth leaks out in brushstrokes unseen in the darkened, turbid surf.
Buddy One dies quick, and mostly without pain. And Reeta breathes the coppery taste of his life through her gills, and then takes his pale corpse and holds it close to her in one final embrace. Poor Buddy, who could never be with her, who was despised by his own kind. Poor Buddy who believed in magic, when she told him very early on that her people were a people of science. And it is science—the cold science that must kill a thing to preserve it—that will immortalize him. A body—any body—that perishes in the sea is quickly gone, made a nothing by the frenzied feeding of the ocean’s bewildering web of life, the plankton and fish and so on. Whale carcasses never reach the ocean floor, they are bare skeletons by the time they sink to the mesopelagic zone, and these bones become forests of calcium in the nighted trenches. But Reeta will not let this happen to Buddy. She takes Buddy to her lair in the benthic zone, where she has the apparatuses ready to preserve her beloved. A transparent membrane of hard plastic insulates Buddy from the predation of microorganisms and an injection of a powerful preservative distilled from the brain matter of a deep-water octopus will maintain his internal structure for decades if not centuries.
Reeta secures this dead man, already forgotten by the surface world that disdained him, into an impenetrable cask of glass in a shrine where she will always care for him, and when she is old, long after she has spawned her final clutch of young, she will tell her progeny of the love she shared with this sad creature of the dry world. Here he will remain, in a place where he is loved. So ends Buddy One.
Buddy Two is also bleeding. Buddy Two is also thrashing with his arms, kicking his feet as the iron rills leak from his wounds. But then the pain stops, and Buddy is dragged under water, and he gasps again, but instead of an invasion of water, he feels invigorated, a rush of breathable air filtered from the water that courses into the newly made gills shaped from the incisions in his throat.
There is Reeta, smiling at him through the water that he suddenly sees in perfect clarity, his eyes now changed to be like hers, capable of seeing through fathoms of murk, to perceive the ocean’s secrets with the aid of only a thread of starlight. Reeta touches Buddy with her shell knife again, dragging the blade across his sternum, making a seam in the skin. Split, the skin peels away, sloughing off cleanly to open Buddy’s new scales to the moonlight.
Buddy watches his old skin float to the surface like a rumpled pink towel, and then drift away toward the sand of the dry world he’s left behind. Electroreceptive ampullae awaken all through his face and feel out the life in the water, Buddy now aware of the crackling energy in even the tiniest plankton. Reeta calls to him through the brine in the electric language of their kind, and Buddy swims after her into the beckoning depths.
| Jonathan Louis Duckworth is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything. He received his MFA from Florida International University. His speculative fiction work appears in Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Southwest Review, Tales to Terrify, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. He is a PhD student at University of North Texas and an active HWA member. |  |