Sharkey makes ninety-two varieties of chaw. His recipes are secret. They’re not written down. He uses bricks of loam, dried and packed with rice in crates, but no one knows from where. And beyond that his ingredients are a mystery to everyone but him. Today Sharkey starts off with a jug of hard apple cider, boils the liquid away to a glaze, then douses the pan with the contents of a small brown bottle and a pinch of fine red powder from a cup made from an ox’s horn. The liquid sizzles. Sharkey adds some yellow dust and a dash of salt from a shaker shaped like a piglet in a chef’s hat. He lightly drizzles the hissing pan with maple syrup. Then he upends a jar of molasses. He thumps the bottom a few times; when the glob finally plops out, liquid spills down onto the burner below. Sharkey curses. He’s sweating. The gray strands in his chest hair sparkle in the dim light. He’s making variety number twenty-nine, Forbidden Fruit Jam.
When the mixture on the stove is stirred and bubbling, Sharkey tastes it, mutters, salts it some more, adds a few slices of dried apple that fall into the brew as white and spongy as human ears. Then he flips off the heat, takes a new brick of loam from the crate, and carves off a hefty slice with his biggest knife. It’s dull greenish-brown and fragrant, like musk and fresh-turned earth. Sharkey crumbles it into the goo on the stovetop and folds it in with the wooden spoon.
Once it’s cool, he’ll come back down and shape it into ropes: penny width, two-penny width. He’ll wrap them in rags and twine and hang them over the clothesline to dry, in heavy twisted coils like nooses. Then he’ll douse the pan with grain alcohol and light it on fire, to burn away the traces. He’s not sloppy with his chaw. A new batch is never tainted with the aftertaste of the last one.
Sharkey peels off his undershirt, dunks it in the bucket on the floor, and pats his face with it. Then he takes a new undershirt from the clothesline and walks up the basement stairs. No one’s on the street. The gator snaps at him. He kicks it in the teeth.
4
ELECTRICITY
Duncan Ripple is writing his name on the inside of her body. The Girl holds him close while he grunts and puffs, breathing in the woolly dust of the saddle blanket beneath them. His face is hot and near, but she doesn’t notice the greasiness of his unwashed hair, the clogged pores on his forehead, his morning breath, or his chapped lips, which occasionally scrape her neck. When he mumbles, “Hey, fem? Hey, Abby, is this technique too hardcore for you?” she doesn’t respond in words-out-loud. Instead, she shapes her mouth around each letter of this foreign alphabet, spelled out in flesh and ache and heat, reverse tattoos on the inside of her skin. The R is two pairs of legs, hers looped around the top of his. The I is a blue-green vein pulsing in his temple. The PPLE is the beginning of please, the beginning of pleasure. Ripple moves clumsily, persistently, in his one-handed push-ups. A mouse skitters across the floor. In the corner of the ceiling glows a patch of morning sun. Who is he? Who is she? Answers beyond language fill her heart. The Girl breathes in the Island, this fragrant museum of a dying world, then breathes it out. The horse trailer contracts around them, her bird lets out a cry, and the shapeless, nameless thing within her vanishes in the new light.
Later that morning, Ripple lies stunned, stark naked except for his bandage, on a sagging trampoline near the water’s edge. The Girl adorns his hair with bows of dental floss. Gulls tug at fish entrails amid the busted rocks.
“Whoa,” he murmurs. His eyes are shut. “I can’t believe it. We just fucked.”
The girl ties a bow around a lock of his chest hair.
“Yes, fucked,” she says with approval.
Ripple coughs noisily, wheezes. A few yards away, a gull squawks in answer. “I mean, I can believe it, but for you, it must be like discovering fire or something. Well, you’ve already got fire, I guess, but you know what I mean. It’s like an alien came down from Mars and ate your planet’s face. Only, you know, in a good way, obviously.”
The girl adds another bow to his sideburn. She tries to tie his neckbeard, but the stubble there is too short.
“And I mean, not just once, even. That was three times in under two hours. I was like, ‘Let’s go, wench,’ and you were like, ‘Bring it, son.’ That was hot. That was so hot I didn’t care about the bird watching us. This is the best day of my life.”
The girl admires her handiwork. “You’re pretty.”
“I bet I hit your G-spot. I’m pretty sure. I struck oil the first time I drilled.”
The girl winds what’s left of the dental floss around the metal trampoline frame. “Dunk?”
“Yeah?”
“Go fishing now?”
He yawns. “Do what you gotta do. I’m pretty comfortable right here.”
“OK!” The girl springs up and bounces off the elastic mat. Ripple raises himself up on his good elbow.
“Hey. Hey, Abby?”
She’s zipping on her coat. “Uh-huh?”
“You don’t happen to have a few brewskis lying around, do you?”
She rubs her nose with the back of her hand, perplexed.
“Never mind.”
He watches her as she scrambles away, over the exploded macrozap ovens and cracked PVC pipes. Then he looks beyond her, out to where the water is flashing and twinkling with the full light of midday. No barges toot in the distance; no HowFlys roar overhead. So ironic, the coolest thing he ever did, and no one was around to watch. What would his old film crew say about this?
The thought makes him sad for a second, but only a second: he feels too good for regrets. Sure, he could stand some pills to numb his arm, but right now his body’s making quite a few chemicals all on its own. Maybe sex works like acupuncture, or massage, or that weird thing with the candles and suction cups. Holistic healing—his mom believes that shit. It needs some time to work, is all.
It might be just as well to stay lost another day.
* * *
Katya Ripple can tell her husband isn’t enjoying the lap dance. She tosses her head, platinum hair cascading down her back, and shimmies, moving her shoulders faster and faster until her bangles shake. Her manicured hands cup the delicate fabric of her gold lamé bikini top, then release its central clasp. Out bob two tanned, perfect breasts, naked except for tasseled pasties. Distractedly, Humphrey fingers her ruby-encrusted belly-button ring, plucks the G-string of her thong. She grinds her hips a moment more, then rises and sulkily sashays back to her pole in the center of the room.
“Please call the police,” she says, squeezing the polished chrome between two toned thighs. She enunciates her words with the uninflected care of a nonnative speaker. She arches her back, the column of her throat, and the platinum hair sweeps the floor. “It’s on your mind too, I know. Three days, Hummer. I’m asking you. If anything, we’ve waited too long.”
“What good will it do to get them involved?” Humphrey sighs. His toupee is askew. He releases the backrest of his leather recliner and reaches for the half-empty bag of BacoCrisps on the nearby end table. “It’s a family matter. I grease enough palms as is. Besides, he’s a big boy. He’ll get found when he wants to get found.”
Katya kicks her leg and hugs the pole in a waist-high knee hold. She licks the daggerish spike of her six-inch metallic heel. “And that child the Torchers took, whose electric heart they used to charge the motors of their SkateBlades? He didn’t want to be found?”
“Kitty, that’s an urban legend. Next you’re going to tell me Duncan’s been abducted by Leather Lungs.”
“He would have texted. He would have called.”
“He would’ve thought twice about worrying his mother.”