Kingfisher(6)

And Merle, who, Carrie’s mother said for years before she left them, was just plain demented.

The chanting from the boat was getting eerie, high and reedy, like some ritual litany that should have been accompanied by gourd rattles and drums. Carrie looked down into the boat. Merle stopped his chanting abruptly and stared at her with such astonishment and wonder that she felt like something he had been trying, with no real hope, to summon. Well, here I am, she told him silently. As suddenly, he recognized her. He smiled. He was lying on his back beneath the broken seat planks, his head cushioned on a monstrous dandelion blooming through a hole in the boat bottom.

“Are you drunk?” Carrie asked.

He considered the question. “Not this morning.”

“Do you want some help up?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

“Coffee?”

“There’s a thought,” he answered, but showed no other signs of interest.

“Well, what exactly are you doing?”

“Waiting.”

“For what?” she demanded bewilderedly. “A bus?”

“For an answer.”

He’d been out all night, she guessed, as often happened on tranquil spring nights. He watched the reflection of the moon in the slough streams, or swapped tales with some transient beside a fire in the backwoods. Fish stories, hunting stories, war stories: Carrie had overheard some of those earnest, drunken conversations, when neither listened to the other, and whatever events they spoke of seemed to have happened in different countries, maybe even in different millennia.

“I have to go to work, Dad. You sure you don’t want a hand up?”

Merle murmured something inaudible. Then he said more clearly, “I’m working.”

Carrie glanced at the sky, saw a flock of geese in a ragged V flying the wrong direction for spring. “You’d be more comfortable out of here.”

“I can see better down here.”

“How about that cup of coffee?”

“You’d shudder, your blood would roar, your hair would stiffen tendril by tendril like quills upon the fretful porpentine if you could see, if you could see.”

Carrie gave up. “Okay. I guess that would be no.”

Her father’s eyes lost their vacant passion; he smiled at her again.

“No, thanks.”

“Don’t forget that Mom’s in town for the night. She wants to meet you for lunch. Call her?”

“I won’t forget,” he promised.

“You have a good day, Dad.” She hesitated. “You won’t forget, but will you do it?”

“Whatever you say, Sweet.”

“I have got to get out of Chimera Bay,” she said fiercely to the saint dangling on the rearview mirror of the pickup. Her father had found the medallion on his rambles, hung it in the truck because it protected travelers. How her father, who shied like a vampire at the shadow of a church spire in his path, knew one saint from another, Carrie hadn’t a clue.

She and the truck rattled across the old farmers’ road, then up the steep, rocky, rutted grade that joined a paved road at the top of the hill. In the mirror, before she turned, she could see the north end of the slough, the distant estuary waters broadening between the low, coastal hills to meet the tide. The paved road wound for a few miles along the crest of the hills before it dipped down to follow the sea, where it flowed around the headlands and into Chimera Bay.

The Kingfisher Inn stood at the edge of the broad bay, looking out over the deep shipping channel and the calm waters beyond it that ebbed twice a day into shallows and mudflats. From the highest curve, Carrie could see all of the inn at once, the huge central building with the two round turrets at its back corners, and the wide, graceful, four-storied wings that once overlooked lawn, rose gardens, and the docks where guests who sailed in on their yachts would tie up for the night.

It had all been a wonder: so the old photos, letters, and yellowed reviews, framed and hanging behind glass along the walls, told her. And what had happened to it all? Something had happened. She was uncertain what; everything had changed before she was born. For all the vagueness in everyone’s eyes when she asked, the good fortune might have vanished a century before. Not even her father could come up with a coherent explanation, and he had been there, she knew, beside the much younger Hal Fisher in a tuxedo under the blazing chandelier, his golden hair clipped, his mustache wild and thick, bracketing his confident smile, lord of all he surveyed, including Merle at his elbow, wearing a dress suit, of all things, and looking, in the old sepia photo, oddly watchful, as though from very far away he saw the something coming.

The glimpse of the earlier inn vanished in a turn as the road wound down into town. Now the inn was peeling paint, shuttered windows, walls hidden under scaffolding, its proud turrets piebald where slats had blown off. Carrie parked in front, where lawns stretching the entire length of the inn had vanished under tar and gravel. She recognized the half dozen cars already there, the usual bar dwellers.

She found her way under the plyboard tunnels beneath the scaffolding to the front door of the restaurant and let herself in. No one was there yet but Ella; Carrie came early to help her prep. Walking through the kitchen doors, she blinked at the morning light streaming in from the back wall of windows overlooking the bay. Around her in the kitchen, things burped, bubbled, steamed. She smelled oil, rosemary, yeast. For a moment she thought she was alone among the cupboards and counters, the wheeled chopping blocks, the stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything that still could, in the mix of antique and modern, making noises at once like an orchestra tuning up.