The Light Pirate(62)

“All right. Thanks.” Wanda paddles toward her and after a minute, she hears the stranger finishing with the water bottles, then cutting into the fruit. Wanda can smell it. The juice drips onto the deck, sticky. She already knows it’s perfectly ripe.

“Here it is,” she says. Wanda collects the offering by touch, trailing her fingers along the raft, following the trail of fruit juice to the flesh that sits, waiting for her in a sweet, mild crescent on the edge of the stranger’s deck. She tries to eat it quietly, but she’s hungry, and the silence is not thick enough to mask her urgency. Bird Dog eats, too, the smack of their mouths against the fruit filling the lagoon. Bird Dog cuts another slice. Wanda can hear her blade sawing into the skin, then slipping through the fruit flesh.

“There’s more,” Bird Dog says when she hears the wet plop of Wanda’s rind, sucked clean and dropped into the water. A treat for the manatees. A second later, there’s a break in the water’s surface as the two manatees rise in unison, chuffing out through their nostrils, inhaling deeply. A leisurely crunching as one of them snacks on the rind. Wanda can almost smell its breath, warm and earthy and a little sour. She feels Bird Dog go tense on her raft.

“Only manatees,” Wanda says.

Bird Dog relaxes and Wanda takes the second piece of fruit. They listen to the manatees splashing around near the musk grass and the water lettuces that grow at the edges of the lagoon. “They’re hungry, too,” Bird Dog says, and laughs. It’s a good laugh. Belly-deep and slow. The kind of laugh that starts low down and bubbles up—pure, like spring water. “You remember what folks used to call them?”

Wanda thinks, but her memory of the Before time is cloudy. “Sea…something.”

“Sea cows.” Bird Dog laughs again, because it’s just another saying, nickname, object, idea that is obsolete. Cows don’t exist here anymore. Or pastures, or grain, or milk. A shorthand that is now too long. “Someday we’ll call cows land manatees, don’t you think?”

“That sounds right,” Wanda says. “Or unicorns.” Bird Dog laughs even harder. Wanda allows a smile that no one can see, pleased with herself for making a joke.

“You been out here a long time?” Bird Dog asks.

“Since the start of it.”

“Alone?”

“Not…” Wanda pauses. Admitting solitude is admitting weakness. “Not always.”

“I’m fishing tomorrow, near the old marina.” Bird Dog rinses her knife. “If you wanted, you could come.” Her invitation is spoken softly, as if to speak it any louder would be to reveal how much she wants Wanda to say yes. But Wanda can hear it anyway. The wanting. As if Bird Dog shouted it. She can hear everything in this lagoon: the scamper of tiny feet in the branches of the mangroves. Manatees snacking among the grasses. The lapping of the water against the hull of her canoe. Mangrove leaves rubbing up against each other. Frogs, singing in the backs of their throats. And the faint, fast thrum of Bird Dog’s pulse. If you wanted, you could come. She does want. But wanting and surviving do not always go hand in hand.

“I could, I think,” Wanda replies. She isn’t ready to leave, but there’s nothing left to do here. Her water jugs are full. The papaya has been eaten. Even the manatees seem to have departed. Everything Phyllis ever taught her about how to survive, how to stay safe, swirls, sinks. And overlaying it, this new feeling, warm and soft and expansive. The spaciousness of wanting something she doesn’t need. It feels good, but she is afraid that when she finally dips her paddle back into the water and propels herself toward home, away from Bird Dog, it will fade.

“After the sun goes down,” Bird Dog says. “The flagpole?”

“The flagpole,” Wanda agrees.

They leave the lagoon together, through the channel, foliage drooping down over their heads, roots reaching up to grab at their boats. Bird Dog goes first and Wanda is impressed with how she handles her vessel; the shape of a raft is hard to manage in these narrow spaces, but what little Wanda can see looks effortless. They say goodbye near the wind chimes. Wanda waits to make sure Bird Dog is gone and there’s no one else lingering in the shadows to follow her home before she departs. Phyllis taught her to suspect such tricks. Remembering this, she also remembers how dangerous humans can be.

Heading back to her nest, she tries to convince herself not to go tomorrow, firmly assuring the Phyllis that lives on in her mind that she would never take such a risk. But even as she promises her dear dead friend she won’t, a part of her knows she will. Something is awake now, some part of her that will not, cannot, go back to sleep.



Dawn is creeping close by the time Wanda returns home. A growing light sizzles against the horizon. Heat rises from the water. She leans into the last stretch, pushing herself harder, paddling faster, driving the blades down like she is trying to punish the water, or herself, or both. The fullness of the night follows her no matter how quickly she goes—the forgotten sensation of a human being’s company, of using words, sharing food, making plans; the manatees’ skin on hers, moving so slowly, so gently, touching her like she was one of their own; and being surrounded by the glow that has been chasing her since childhood, cool and kaleidoscopic and fearless. She has been empty for so long. It’s strange to feel this full.

The tom waits for her on the dock, cleaning his face with an orange paw as she has watched him do a thousand times, but now, in this barely broken morning light, it is a wonder. She lets the canoe coast the last few meters, watching him. It’s both sensual and necessary, this methodical application of one part of his body to another part of his body, the tender, firm motion of his paw and the long, lithe lick of pink tongue skimming across pink toe pads. A gust of hot wind drives her hull into the dock with a sharp crack, and the tom, startled, disappears into the trees. Wanda hauls her water supply up the ladder in as few trips as she can, hurrying to unload the canoe before the sun clears the rim of the encroaching ocean and the wind blows from hot to scorched. She’s exhausted and energized at the same time, unspent adrenaline still buzzing in her veins. Sleep will fight her, but she must rest.