Elpie dropped her backpack, climbed over the rail and let go from the pier, ungainly and urgent as an accident, chasing some vague glinting thing see-sawing among vexed and invisible pockets of current – some flash of substance, like a new coin that she thought she’d just glimpsed through the hard morning glare at the sea’s little peaks. How strange for Elpie, so near where she’d been walking on her way to school, diving for this enigmatic trinket fallen from the sky - and so suddenly cold! Nothing ever moved toward the water from that spot on the pier but lonely fishhook worms and cigarette butts; this was where they went to sink and molder or be lost in gray gullets. The harbor had only ever been a buoyant causeway for practical workmen.
Likely, the fleeting subsurface descent of that delicate bauble was disrupted and hurried by Elpie’s impulsive plunge and the subsequent pressure of displacement as the harbor accommodated her perfectly. With eyes open and straining for light, Elpie swam deeper, algae spinning and suspended in cloudy clumps, catching in her hair like wind-blown tufts of dandelion seed.
The treasure might have been lost to her but she didn’t cease her search. A moment might come, a glorious transmogrification that would find her soaring deeper and deeper like a perfect otter, slick fast and insulated by a sheen of luxurious oil. She’d have that treasure and raise it to the surface, roll onto her back and clutch it to her heart with both hands like tender abalone, in full view of fishermen at the pier and the sun.
It was Elpie’s lungs that denied her; her heart starved and its oxygen fast consumed by her own imperative and irrepressible respiration. She turned from the bottom at once - kicked away from the shadows of abandoned lobster pots and the ghosts of tangled crab nets and anchor chains betrayed by rust, twisted into stiff helixes like fractured arms reaching up through graves.
She gasped when she broke the surface, the air sweet and washcloth warm, and her long, plum-colored hair floated about her upturned face like an oil spill. The harbormaster gasped, too, idled his boat, and took the cigar nub from the corner of his mouth and shot it beneath his boot like a dart. He rummaged for a boat hook and passed it over the gunwale, over the water like a mid-pew tithe collection where it wavered within her reach, the smoke reluctantly trickling from the crack of his lips.
The fickle water touched the hollows of Elpie’s ears and replaced his instruction with timpani echoes. She wiped the saltwater from her eyes and mouth then took the hook with both hands. The harbormaster pulled her close and braced his foot at the hull and hauled her in by the forearm and elbow. “Stay out of the water,” he shouted, and his face was sour and red and close enough to hers that his bitter tobacco breath warmed her ear. She shivered. Her jeans were cold and heavy and her shirt as suffocating as a drawn net. She’d lost a sandal. She pressed herself against the floor of the boat immediately, before she lost her balance, and the harbormaster leaned closer still. “Stay out of the water,” he said, and he annunciated each word as though speaking to a foreigner. His fingers were the color of cigarette filters and they hooked and moved toward her thin shoulders but then stuttered and retreated to his hips. “You can get leukemia from going into the water like you did. That’s a hell of a thing to happen to a kid your age.” He shook his head. His gray hair was matted in spots and whorled and stiff-sprung in others as though he’d slept restlessly and for a long time. “See that coal plant past the bridge? Just go on and have a look at it. You think it’s pumping soda pop and Kool-Aid into the harbor? It’s a lot worse than that, I’d say.”
She’d need that sandal. She couldn’t go to school without her sandal. “I thought I saw something,” she said, and the harbormaster mistook that she was talking to him. She said it again even as he interrupted.
“Swimming in this water is no joke. If the poison doesn’t get you, you can bet some poor captain will come by running twin screws that’ll cut you to ribbons worse than any shark movie you’ve seen. I don’t care what you saw. I don’t care what. You need something fished out of this polio pit, you come see me.” He turned to the center console and nudged the throttle forward and leaned and turned the wheel with his forearm. A puff of blue smoke spat from the outboard. The bow rose to meet the waves and the cold brown bilge leaked to the stern and pooled at Elpie’s seat and crotch and she shivered from the new cold and wet. “I was watching you the whole time, anyway,” he sighed. “You didn’t drop anything.” He raised his voice to overcome the chug and sputter of the engine and looked directly down at Elpie. “You know,” he said, and he raised both eyebrows while tipping his head low, “I’m a police agent for the town – lying to me is the same as lying to a cop. I have the authority to write you a ticket or even arrest you if there’s cause. And, believe me, there’s cause - your own personal safety, for one thing.”
“What?” Elpie said. “You can’t say that to me! You can’t!” She pulled herself to her feet, gripped the console with both hands and swayed as the little boat drifted into its slip. “I didn’t lie to the cops,” she said, “and you can ask them all you want. I never lied to anyone.” Her lips were blue and hard as the morning. “I just thought I saw something – something falling through the water that shouldn’t have been. That’s all. That’s all that happened.”
Puck stood there squinting and grimacing from some chronic ache in some failed joint. He wore his ball cap backward, brown and deflated as an old popover and his hands were already black from engine work. He had Elpie’s backpack slung over one shoulder and he leaned on a piling and waited for the bowline. When the harbormaster tossed it, Puck caught it and crouched and tied it off to a cleat. Elpie didn’t wait. She hopped from the boat to the dock and began to squeeze the seawater from the cuffs of her jeans. She rubbed her palms together and gathered her hair and twisted it and wrung and pulled the water through and it dripped and stained the planks at her feet.
The harbormaster tied off the stern and pulled a fresh cigar from a small box beneath the console and unwrapped the cellophane. Puck offered him a light and when he leaned forward, cupping the flame, the backpack fell and dangled from the crook of his elbow. The harbormaster puffed and nodded to him and a breeze came up and pulled the new smoke away. “Well, let’s see it then,” he said, as he stepped from the boat.
Elpie turned up her palms and told him, “it’s lost. I never got a hand on it at all.”
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