“We can’t just stop here,” Lark says, and she sounds scared, almost, staring out at the sun beginning to set above the endless Pacific horizon. “I mean, there isn’t even a here to stop at. And before long it’ll be getting dark. ”
“Yeah, well, you tell that to Magwitch’s fine hunk of Detroit dogshit here, babycakes,” and Tam opens her door, slams it closed behind her and leaves the twins staring at each other in silent, astonished panic.
Lark tries to open her door, then, but it’s pressed smack up against the guardrail and there’s not enough room to squeeze out, just three or four scant inches and that’s not even space for her waif’s boneangle shoulders. So she slides her butt across the faded, green naugahyde, accidentally knocks the box of tapes over and they spill in a plasticloud clatter across the seat and into the floorboard. She sits behind the wheel while Crispin climbs over from the back seat. Tam’s standing in front of the car now, staring furiously down at the hood, and Crispin whispers, “If you let off the brake now, maybe we could run over her,” and Lark reaches beneath the dash like maybe it’s not such a bad idea, but she only pulls the hood release.
“She’d live, probably,” Lark says, and “Yeah,” Crispin says, and begins to gather up the scattered cassettes and return them to the dingy shoe box.
The twins sit together on the guardrail while Tam curses the traitorous, steamhissing car, curses her ignorance of wires and rubber belts and radiators, and curses absent Magwitch for owning the crappy old Impala in the first place.
“He said it runs hot sometimes, and to just let it cool off,” Crispin says hopefully and she shuts him up with a razorshard glance. So he holds Lark’s hand and stares at a bright patch of California poppies growing on the other side of the rail, a tangerineorange puddle of blossoms waving heavy, calyx heads in the salt and evergreen breeze. A few minutes more and Lark and Crispin both grow bored with Tam’s too-familiar indignation, tiresome rerun of a hundred other tantrums, and they slip away together into the flowers.
“It’s probably not as bad as she’s making it out to be,” Crispin says, picking a poppy and slipping the sapbleeding stem behind Lark’s right ear. “It just needs to cool off.”
“Yeah,” she says, “Probably,” but not sounding reassured at all, and stares down the precarious steep slope toward the beach, sand the cinder color of cold apocalypse below the grey shale and sandstone bluff. She also picks a poppy and puts it in Crispin’s hair, tucks it behind his left ear, so they match again. “I want to look for sea shells,” she says “and driftwood,” and she points at a narrow trail just past the poppies. Crispin looks back at Tam once, her black hair wild in the wind, her face in her hands like maybe she’s even crying, and then he follows Lark.
Mostly just mussels, long shells darker than the beach, curved and flaking like diseased toenails, but Lark puts a few in her purse, anyway. Crispin finds a single crab claw, almost as orange as the poppies in their hair with an airbrush hint of blue, and she keeps that too. The driftwood is more plentiful, but all the really good pieces are gigantic, the warped and polished bones of great trees washed down from the mountains and scattered about here, shattered skeletons beyond repair. They walk on warm sand and a thick mat of sequoia bark and spindletwigs, fleshy scraps of kelp, follow the flotsam to a stream running down to meet the gently crashing sea, shallowwide interface of saltwater and fresh. Overhead, seagulls wheel and protest the intrusion; the craggy rocks just offshore are covered with their watchful numbers, powdergrey feathers, white feathers, beaks for snatching fish. And pecking eyes, Lark thinks. They squawk and stare and she gives them the finger, one nail chewed down to the quick and most of the black polish flaked away.
Crispin bends and lets the stream gurgle about his pale hands. It’s filled with polished stones, muted olive and bottle green pebbles rounded by their centuries in the cold water. He puts one finger to his lips and licks it cautiously and “Sweet,” he says. “It’s very sweet.”
“What’s that?” Lark says and he looks up, across the stream at a windstunted stand of firs on the other side and there’s a sign there, almost as big as a roadside billboard sign and just as gaudy, but no way anyone could see this from the highway. A great sign of planks painted white and lettered crimson, artful, scrolling letters that spell out, “ALIVE AND UNTAMED! MONSTERS AND MYSTERIES OF NEPTUNE’S BOSOM!” and below, in slightly smaller script, “MERMAIDS AND MIRACLES! THE GREAT SEA SERPENT! MANEATERS AND DEVILFISH!”
“Someone likes exclamation points,” Lark says, but Crispin’s already halfway across the stream, walking on the knobby stones protruding from the water and she follows him, both arms out for balance like a trapeze acrobat. “Wait,” she calls to him, and he pauses, reluctant, until she catches up.
The old house trailer sits a little way up the slope from the beach, just far enough that it’s safe from the high tides. Lark and Crispin stand side by side, holding hands tight, and stare up at it, lips parted and eyes wide enough to divulge a hint of their mutual surprise. Lark’s left boot is wet where she missed a stone and her foot went into the stream, and the water’s beginning to seep past leather straps and buckles, through her hose, but she doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t matter, because this is that unexpected. This old husk of sunbleached aluminum walls, corrugated metal skin draped in mopgrey folds of fishing net, so much netting it’s hard to see that the trailer underneath might once have been blue. Like something a giant fisherman dragged up from the sea, and finally, realizing what he had, this inedible hunk of rubbish, he left it here for the gulls and the weather to take care of.
“Wow,” Lark whispers, and Crispin turns, looks over his shoulder to see if maybe Tam has given up on the car and come looking for them. But there’s only the beach, and the waves, and the birds. The air that smells like dead fish and salt wind, and Crispin asks, “You wanna go see?”
“There might be a phone,” Larks says, still whispering. “If there’s a phone we could call someone to fix the car.”
“Yeah,” Crispin replies, like they really need an excuse beyond their curiosity. And there are more signs leading up to the trailer, splinternail bread crumbs teasing them to take the next step, and the next, and the next after that: “THE MOUTH THAT SWALLOWED JONAH!” and “ETERNAL LEVIATHAN AND CHARYBDIS REVEALED!” As they get close they can see other things in the sandy rind of yard surrounding the trailer, the rusting hulks of outboard motors and a ship’s wheel nailed to a post, broken lobster cages and the ivory white jaws of sharks strung up to dry like toothy laundry. There are huge plywood and canvas facades leaned or hammered against the trailer, one on either side of the narrow door and both taller than the roof: garish seascapes with whitefanged sea monsters breaking the surface, acrylic foam and spray, flailing fins like Japanese fans of flesh and wire, eyes like angry, boiling hemorrhages.
A sudden gust off the beach, then, and they both have to stop and cover their eyes against the blowing sand. The wind clatters and whistles around all the things in the yard, tugs at the sideshow canvases. “Maybe we should go back now,” Lark says when the wind has gone, and she brushes sand from her clothes and hair. “She’ll wonder where we’ve gone. ”
“Yeah,” Crispin says, his voice grown thin and distant, distracted, and “Maybe,” he says, but they’re both still climbing, past the hand-lettered signs and into the ring of junk. Crispin pauses before the shark jaws, yawning cartilage jaws on nylon fishing line and he runs the tip of one finger lightly across rows of gleaming, serrate triangles, only a little more pressure and he could draw blood.