Professor Latzarel, however, was set on tugging the corpse into the boat. The thing had webbed fingers and toes, and although the fleshy parts of its head and neck had been nibbled away by fish and crabs, the gill slits were apparent. The body was entirely hairless and was covered with scales the size of a thumbnail that caught the rays of the suddenly appearing sun and shone for a moment as a scattering of tiny pastel rainbows, the beauty of which was utterly at odds with the choking scent of decay.
“Give me a hand with this, will you?” Latzarel puffed, irritated at Edward’s hesitation.
“You won’t budge him,” said Edward, holding an ineffective hand over his face. “He’ll fall apart. You need a snow shovel.”
“Nonsense. He’s entirely firm. Hasn’t been dead a week yet. Jump out and steady the boat against the rock. When the surge lifts it, I’ll lever this fellow in between the thwarts.”
For the sake of science, Edward dropped over the side into a sandy tidepool that was two or three feet deeper than it appeared. Chill seawater swirled up around his chest. He gasped for shallow little breaths and hooted in spite of himself.
Latzarel watched the sea for the hump of an approaching swell. “Quit singing and steady this thing,” he said. “Here we go!” And a moment later Edward’s feet were swept out from under him in a rush of ocean that whirled in around the rocks, lifting the rowboat and tossing it seaward. Edward tumbled beneath the surface, found the bottom, thrust himself upward, and rose with a bang into the underside of the rowboat, his eyes jammed shut. He thrashed and kicked himself into a tangle of kelp tendrils, sputtering out of the water seconds later, hung with brown leaves. The rowboat had swung around and floated seaward ten yards or so. Latzarel crouched with his merman on the rock, wet to the knees, with an irritated look about him that seemed to imply that Edward could have picked a better time to take a dip. “Get the boat, old man,” he said, nodding at their bobbing craft. “One more good surge will wash him off the rocks. We’ll have a devil of a time fishing him out of the water without a net.”
Edward splashed out after the boat, which obliged him by rushing in again, quartering down the face of a swell that broke across an exposed reef. Edward kicked to stay afloat, grappling with the boat, managing finally to grab the punter and wait for the surge to wash back out. He pulled and pushed the boat back in toward the rock, realizing as he did so that he was grievously cold.
“Here she comes!” shouted Latzarel, scrambling for a footing behind the merman.
Edward braced himself against a rock, shoved the boat forward, and held his breath as the ocean rose around him once again. The boat was abruptly jarred out of his hands. He fell forward, swam a stroke, and righted himself, scrambling up onto the big rock beside Latzarel who beamed with success. The merman, twisted into an impossible pretzel, lay in the boat, his head thrown back and eyesockets staring sightlessly at the sun. One of his hands had fallen across Edward’s binoculars, as if he intended to have a look at the cliff face himself.
“Success, my boy,” said Latzarel. “We’ll see what the Times has to say about this!” He turned and surveyed the cliffside. “I believe the best route for you lies west of us there. About fifty yards down. There’s a cut, it appears, in the precipice. There where that oak tree almost touches the water.”
Edward could easily see the oak tree and the rocky canyon that led away above it. But he didn’t, at first, grasp his friend’s meaning. “Route?” he said, pulling off a shoe and pouring out a stream of water.
“Back to camp,” said Latzarel. “All of us won’t fit into the boat. So I’m suggesting that you hike back. It’s far warmer on the island than on the ocean, and we’ll both make it into camp at about the same time.”
Edward started to protest, but Latzarel was likely correct. The thought of rowing slowly back against the current in the company of a long-dead merman settled the issue for him. He held the boat as steady as he could while Latzarel climbed aboard, taking off his cloth jacket and draping it over the grisly face of his new crew member. Latzarel dipped the oars into the sea, edging out around shallow pools. “I’ll see you in an hour!” he shouted, bending to his work. Edward set out to the west, picking his way from rock to rock, disappearing beneath the bows of the oak and plunging into the dry foliage of the steep canyon.
“We can’t keep him anywhere near camp,” Ashbless insisted, looking skeptically at Latzarel’s prize. “Not for the next two days. Lord knows what the sun will do to him by the time Squires arrives. He’s ripe enough now to satisfy me. I say we cram him into a dufflebag and bury him. Then we can dig him up day after tomorrow and carry him home in the bag.”
“How do we cram him into the bag?” asked Edward practically. “He’ll go to bits.”
Latzarel nodded his head. “He damn near lost an arm coming around the point there when I shipped the oars for a moment. I won’t shove him into any bags. What we need is refrigeration. It might be wisest to leave him in ocean water. Just weight him down with rocks and fill the rowboat. Let him sit here.”
“Here!” shouted Ashbless. “I won’t tolerate it. We’ll sail him downwind a hundred yards — into the next cove. But your boatful of water will heat up in a couple of hours with this sun. There’s no way to keep it cold without continually bailing and refilling. You can count me out for that job.”
“And how are we going to use the boat if he’s in it?” asked Edward. “We’ve got to roll him out of there and into something we can haul around.”
“A sleeping bag,” Jim suggested. “There’s enough extra blankets to use, and it hasn’t gotten cold enough at night to worry about anyway. We can unzip the bag, roll him into it, and zip him up.”
“He’ll broil,” Ashbless objected. “I can’t imagine what kind of muck we’d find in the bag when we got it home.”
“No he wouldn’t,” said Latzarel. “Not if we pulled all the down out of the bag first. I think it’s a capital idea. We’ll tie off the mouth of the bag with rope and float the whole thing in a tidepool down the beach.”
“Like a string of trout,” said Ashbless helpfully.
“Exactly.” Latzarel was already on his way toward the tent. Jim’s sleeping bag, the only one that unzipped entirely, was soon empty of feathers. They laid the open bag out flat, picked up the rowboat, and tumbled the corpse onto the bag, casting the boat down immediately onto the sand and fleeing upwind. Professor Latzarel, breathing through a handkerchief soaked in kerosene, worked at zipping the bag shut and tying it off. Then he and Edward dragged it along toward the tiny cove to the east, bumping it across clumps of shore grass and small rocks, Professor Latzarel cursing and wincing, fearing that he was reducing the thing to a gumbo of ill-connected parts. Finally, however, it was safely afloat in its pool. Once in the water it no longer smelled quite so overwhelmingly. Dozens of little tidepool sculpin and opaleye perch darted out of the shadows to investigate, pecking at the blue nylon bag. Latzarel regarded them suspiciously.
“Well keep watch tonight,” he said.
Edward agreed, although he wasn’t sure what they were watching for. He knew only that when it was his turn to watch, he’d do so from a distance. As it turned out, Ashbless volunteered for the job, since he rarely slept at night anyway.