From the look in her eye, Mack knew that this was something really bad, and he wasn't about to admit to anything. "I don't remember," he said.
"I don't know, Miz Smitcher," said Mack. "I don't know nothing about naked women. That's nasty stuff."
She searched his eyes but whatever she was looking for, she didn't find it. "Never mind," said Miz Smitcher. "You shouldn't be thinking about naked women anyway, I'm sorry I brought it up."
But she paused in the door of his room and looked at him like he was something strange, and he decided right then that he'd never tell anybody about those cold dreams, not ever again.
And he probably would have kept that promise if it wasn't for Tamika Brown.
Tamika was older than him and he only knew her because of her little brother Quon who was Mack's age, and they played together all the time cause the Browns only lived a few doors down.
Mack even went into their house sometimes because Quon's mama wasn't one of those women who wouldn't have a grocery-bag baby in their house. But he didn't see Tamika except when she was just going out the door or running around getting ready to go out the door. And she was always wearing a bright red swimming suit because that's what Tamika did—she was a swimmer.
Quon said she was in competitions all the time, and she outswam and outdived girls two years older than her and people said she was a mermaid or a fish, she was so natural and quick in the water. "She just lives to swim."
And one time Miz Brown told a story about when Tamika was a baby. "My husband Curtis and I had her in the pool, with those bubble things on her arms, and she wasn't even two years old yet, so we were both holding on to her. But she was kicking so strong, like a frog, that I thought, I'm just holding her back, and Curtis must have thought the same thing at that very moment because we both just let go, and she takes off like a motorboat through the water and we knew right then that she was born to swim. Didn't have to teach her none of the strokes, she just knew them. Curtis says there's a scientist who thinks humans evolved from sea apes, and the way Tamika took to the water, I could believe it, she was born to swim."
So when Tamika showed up in one of Mack's dreams, he would have thought it was just a regular dream about people he knew. Except that he woke up shivering so bad he could hardly climb out of bed and go to the toilet without falling over from the shaking.
In the dream she was Tamika, but she was also a fish, and she swam through the water faster than any of the other fish. They swam around her when she was holding still, but then she'd give a flick with her back and just like that, they'd be far behind her. She swam to the surface and flipped herself out and flew through the air and then dived back in and the water felt delicious to her, and she didn't ever, ever have to come up because she was a fish, not a girl. She didn't have legs, she had big flippers, and in the water there was nothing to slow her down or hold her back.
"Why would a girl want to be a fish?" Mack asked Ceese one day.
"I know a lot of girls like to eat a fish," said Ceese. "Maybe some want to meet a fish. And if they cooking they got to heat a fish."
"Playing cards they might want to cheat a fish," said Ceese.
But Mack was done with the game. "I'm not joking."
"Whazz wet?—that's how you greet a fish."
"Tamika Brown, she really wants to be a fish."
"She likes to swim," said Ceese. "That doesn't mean she's crazy."
"She wants to get down in the water and never have to come up."
"Or maybe you crazy," said Ceese. "Give it gummy worms, that's how you treat a fish."
"I dreamed about her," said Mack "No arms and legs, just fins and a tail, living in the water."
"You way too young to be having that kind of dream," said Ceese, and now he was laughing so hard he could hardly talk.
"I'm not joking."
"Yes you are, you just don't know you joking," said Ceese.
Mack wanted to tell Ceese about the cold dream he had about Deacon Landry and how it came true in the real world, with Juanettia Post, and nobody liked how it turned out. What if Tamika's dream came true, too? Quon wouldn't want no fish for a sister.
Ceese would just laugh even more, maybe die from laughing so hard, if Mack told him that he was worried about a girl turning into a fish.
That's because nobody but Mack ever seemed to have dreams like his. Nobody else knew how real they were, how strong, how they gripped him with desire.
You don't know, Ceese, how it feels to want something so bad you'd give up everything if only it could happen. But in a cold dream, that's how it feels the whole time, and then it leaves me shaking when I wake up out of the wish.
Curtis Brown woke up on that hot August night, covered with sweat and needing to pee.
Happened a lot, sleeping on a water bed. The motion of it sort of alerted his bladder. Either that or he was getting old—but he and Sondra were still young. Their oldest, Tamika, was only ten. Curtis was a long way from being somebody's grandpa who had to get up and go to the toilet three times a night.
It was Curtis's daddy who stalked through his house late at night, flipping lights on and off and cussing under his breath about how it didn't make no sense that he feels like he's got to pee but he can't get anything out. And when Curtis says to him, Daddy, that means you got to get your prostate checked, Daddy just looks at him and says, You think I'm going to let some doctor stick his finger up my anus and smear jelly all inside my rectum? You get your ass reamed out, you think it's so fun. You the crazy one, not me, sleeping on a water bed like a yuppie, you need your head examined, don't go telling me to have my ass examined, at least my head ain't up my ass like you. And then he laughed and kept saying to anybody who'd listen, Curtis gone to the proctologist to have his head examined, cause you got to go through his ass to get to his head.
Curtis lay there on the bed, wondering if he really had to pee so bad he couldn't just go back to sleep, cause if he got up then when he got back to bed the sheets would be cold and clammy unless he stayed up long enough for them to get dry and then...
Something bumped him.
Bumped him from underneath.
He was out of that bed in a second, standing beside it, looking down. It was still undulating from his getting up. But Sondra lay there peaceful as could be, snoring just a little the way she did, even as she rocked slightly from the bed's movement.
I'm going crazy, thought Curtis as he stumbled to the bathroom. Either that or the chemicals in the bed ain't doing their job and the algae gone and growed into the Blob. Now that's the kind of nightmare would have kept him awake all night, back when he was a kid. Except they didn't even have waterbeds then. No, wait, yes they did. There was that 1970s movie where the cop—Eastwood? Some white cop, anyway—busts into some black pimp's room where he's lying with some girl on his waterbed, and when he's done asking questions the white cop shoots the bed for no reason at all, just to be mean and make it leak all over.
When he was done he didn't wash his hands, because he was tired and he hadn't got any on himself and besides, urine was mostly uric acid so it was cleaner than soap, or that's what that guy said at that spaghetti dinner at the Masons' house on Memorial Day, so it didn't matter if you washed your hands after you peed, you could eat a banana with your bare hands and be perfectly safe. It was wiping yourself that made it so you needed to wash, that's where diseases came from. Little-known facts, Curtis said to himself. That's all I got in my head, is little-known completely useless facts.
He padded down the hall to look at the kids' rooms. The boys had kicked their covers off and Quon, as usual, was asleep with his hands inside his underpants, what were they going to do with that boy, couldn't stop playing with it like he thought it was made of Legos or something. Tamika, though, her covers were all piled up on top of her. How could she sleep like that? Too hot for that, she was going to sweat to death, if the pile of blankets didn't smother her.