Four Times Blessed (13 page)

“The story is, they’re off of some pirate boat.”

“Did they jump ship?”

“Well they didn’t fall out of the sky, Crusa. You know, you were probably too in love to notice, but everyone was all upset at one point because the little boys were talking about how these two scary guys came running after them when Benito and Gino got hurt. They thought that the guys thought there was a fight going on over that stupid cow because of all the yelling. And our boys thought they were from Angie’s side and Angie’s thought they were from ours, so they all thought the new guys were going to go after them. They all say they would have fought them, but out of respect for zizi they were waiting for them to make the first move.”

Eleni and I both roll with laughter, and then tell each other to hush, they’ll hear.

“They were petrified. You should have seen their faces.” She sighs and flops onto her back, “Can you blame them, though? I mean, that one guy’s just plain scary, and that other one? He’s just massive. That one’s handsome, too, you have to admit. It’s too bad he’s so poor. Zizi says the poor age faster, and he probably won’t be so handsome in a few years, but I don’t think so. I think someone that handsome will make money.”

“If they stay here, they don’t really need money.”

“Nah, they won’t stay here. Everyone was saying they were definitely into something before coming here, so I bet they’ll lay low for just a little while. You see all those scars and tattoos? Zizi said they’ve come out of whatever it was better than they could have, so that’s why she’s allowing them into the house now.”

“Huh. And is there’s a tattoo lecture I missed out on?”

“There is. And a piracy one. You’re lucky you were too busy with your new husband to hear it, trust me.”

“What if I got a tattoo?” I say dreamily.

“Grandmothers, Crusa, don’t even joke. Zizi would kill you and I’d have to dig your grave myself.”

I kick her and she squeaks, so I laugh at her.

“You know you’d have to get stuck with needles over and over again, right?”

“Eh. Yeah, I don’t think I would like that. But what if it was something really pretty?”

“Crusa. Stop it.”

“Like a flower.”

“Crusa!” She smothers me with the pillow. I tear it off and whack her with it.

“Relax Len, I’m not going to get a tattoo. I was just wondering what it would be like.”

“It would be exactly like chopping off your own head with a shovel. Like I just told you.”

I roll my eyes. My cousin, always so vivid. “You know Andrew wants to build our own house?”

“A new one?”

“Yup.” Eleni and I spend a good long while picking out the perfect hypothetical location for my new hypothetical house. We even pull out some of my chalk and sketch a rough blueprint on the wall. It’s fine because the chalk is just for backup, in case my real slate dies. Plus we draw it with the yellow, even working the sticks down to stubs, because in the program yellow is reserved for catastrophic error, and it’s obvious if you’ve made one of those, so I don’t really get the point of color-coding it. Eleni insists on a corner room for visitors, namely herself, with a wraparound balcony. I say I like balconies so sure.

“Crusa, what are you doing?”

“I’m erasing this.”

“Why?”

“It’s completely not to scale, Eleni. Look at it. You drew the cornstalks higher than the second story windows.”

“So?”

“So, I’d rather not assume Andrew and I are building our new house on a radioactive plot of land.”

“Can it really do that?”

“I don’t know. It might be nice, though, if it did. We could have corn-trees instead of corn-stalks. They wouldn’t get flat and soggy after a rainstorm, and you could grow more corn in less space because it would stand up better on its own, you know? Do you think if the stalks were huge, then the ears would be too? Then you could eat the kernels like apples or nectarines or something, if the ears didn’t fall on your head like coconuts. I bet they would make a nice pie. I don’t know if they’d be sweet, though. Being so huge and all.”

I shrug and draw in a mutant ear of corn by the house.

                            “That’s why I love you, Crusy. You always have such good ideas.”

             
“Thanks.”

Later that night, I lay in bed with my cousin and listen to the kgowa-kgowa-kgowa-kgowa of the peep frogs. My day unlaces through my brain. I hit a few knots, definitely. One bad one even makes me positively squirm. My only solace is that it’s made up of thoughts I never spoke out loud. Thank goodness. Because when I first saw that obnoxious man Lium? After the whole thing with the little boys. I have to admit that my first instinct was to be rather suspicious that he was an angel. An angel sent to watch over Benito and Gino, obviously. He even brought something to wipe up Benito’s blood. Yes, I really thought he might be one.

              Then he smiled and called me beautiful.

              Andrew is here for ten more days. Ten more days to set myself up for marriage and the rest of my life.

I tell myself it’s good it’s only ten days because once it’s done that’s it. Then the next time I see him we’ll have the wedding and it’ll be done.

In fact, if I had it my way, we’d get married right this instant. I imagine him tugging me away from the breakfast table now, and the priest would magically be here, and we’d smile and kiss, people would clap and then because it was such a surprise the party would be small and we’d stay only long enough to make people happy, and then he’d carry me off to our new house, whichever one that’s available, I don’t need a new one, and I could finally relax.

That’s what I really want. But that’s a silly girl’s fantasy, so I say yes when he comes in and asks me to dinner down by the water. I feel better after that. Then I run down to the docks to pick up a bucket of American anchovy, as my zizi calls them, sections three dash seven stockfish as everyone else does, for everyone else’s supper.

I wave and smile at Gino and Benito the entire way along the shore until they decide they would rather give me their three fish bladders instead of storing them inside of our Uncle Stonington’s lunch pail, and then I go to the main dock to pick up the fish.

Lium and Hale are in the bait shop nearby, and I swear I hear them snickering at my back while one of my grandfather’s goes through his entire basket and tries to show me every single one of the clear eyeballs, and I keep on having to compliment floppy dead fish whose tiny backbones his stuttering big hands keep crunching.

When I’m finally in possession of them, resettling the wide basket against my side, I happen to look up and notice the brothers still watching us. I say good morning, and they say hi and we start talking about the weather, which we all agree is very dry for this time of year.

When I say “we” I mean that I say it, Lium says if you say so baby, and Hale winds some heavy duty line that apparently has no end. We also remark on the lovely fish I just got, the early hour, and the shape of a certain cloud.

              “I hear you scared the boys last night,” is the next topic we happen to land on.

             
Lium laughs low in his throat and puts a thing with a tiny feather onto an even tinier hook.

“You’d better be careful, just so you know,” I add. “They all think you’re amazing now.”

Honestly, they couldn’t stop agreeing over and over again that those two are really great guys. As far as I can tell, their assessments are based solely on the fact that the brothers could have squashed them into American anchovy paste and didn’t. Scientific method-wise, it’s not too solid, but I think it’s good anyways because it balances out what my aunts have been saying.

Lium keeps putting together the teeny lures and I watch him, back and forth, following his hands. Plucking something from a box that has lots of smaller boxes inside it, holding the piece up, putting it back, or stringing it in.

“How’d you end up there, anyways? You weren’t out back when it happened, right?”              

Hale shrugs and I guess it’s my fault, having caused that extra upward movement, when he plops a heavy barrel on the floor, causing it to make a jangle that can’t be good.

Lium looks up from his work, but I think it’s less because of Hale and more because of me, because I’m the one he waits for to settle back down.

“We heard yelling,” he says and shrugs.

“Huh,” I say to that. I reach into the box for an impossibly small speckled feather and twirl it between my fingertips.

“So, how’s the husband?”

It’s my turn to shrug, “Good, we’re having dinner tonight, down here, actually.”

Lium gets up and starts dropping pieces of old metal parts into the blackened barrel.

“Well, have fun with that.”

“Thanks, I will.”

He grunts. He’s stopped chucking metal around, and now he’s just standing in the middle of the shop with the barrel hitched on his side.

“You going anywhere in particular with that, Lium?” I’ve fished my necklace out of my uniform’s collar and I’m working the little feather into it.

              When I’m done, he’s got his sharp gaze on me, and I feel like explaining why I’d never get in trouble for taking one little feather from my own uncle’s shop, until like last night I get distracted by the two copper rings.

             
“Yes,” he says. I have to replay the last few seconds of my life on audio so I can remember what I’d asked him. Oh, yes.

             
“Are you going there any time soon?”

             
“Does it matter?”

             
“I don’t know, I was just wondering.”

             
“Don’t you have better things to wonder about? Go wonder about your boyfriend or something.”

             
“My goodness, somebody’s cranky this morning. I’d tell you where my uncle usually puts his scrap metal except I don’t know where that is. I wish you the best of luck in figuring it out, though. Hopefully it’s before your arms fall off. Goodbye, Lium.” And I march out of the shop, taking my fish and my new feather.

             
The boy makes an unnecessary amount of noise putting the barrel down.

             
“Hey, wait,” he calls.

             
“Yes?”

             
He comes around and holds something up between his fingers. It’s another feather, a little bigger than the one I took, and perfectly white.

             
“Here,” he says.

             
I’m touched, “Thank you, it’s so pretty.” I take it from his pinched fingers, and run a crisp edge over the thumb that’s clutching my basket. Then I tuck it into my bun and pat it a few times.

             
“How’s that? Is it staying?”

             
He touches it, “Yeah, you’re good.”

             
“Great! I’ll see you later maybe, but I’ve really got to get back so I’m not late to the base.” I take a few steps backwards and tuck a spiral behind my ear.

“You’re a soldier?” he sputters.

            I frown. “Oh, no. I could never do that. No, I’m trained to support the soldiers. You know, run around after them with a bunch of equipment, translate the PRTs, do gps sets, code switching, field analysis, hack other people’s stuff. You know.”

 
           “No.”

 
           My first reaction is to sigh. But he is our guest, after all.

“In the M.S.A., we have specialized people who assist the military people,” I shrug. “Basically? I just go around sticking whatever the guys want into analysis programs, and then I just read back whatever comes out. I generally use an aural modality setup with visual backup,” I shrug again. Tell it to me in human, specialist, as one boy liked to tease.

Fun kid. I felt bad for him. Got the TAG team command. Talented and gifted, as it were. Offering advanced students advanced challenges. I got stuck there after one particularly interesting Problem Solving Tuesday where I found a use for a small aircraft that was just sitting there in the hangar, all lonely. Sad, really. I just took my partner and we flew, over all the other kids who were swimming through the sound, which had been set on fire. It was February and there was no way I was getting in there.