After the Flood. Kassandra montag

the mackerel. “Oh, lovely. You must be an excellent fisher. Not easy to catch this much mackerel ’round these parts. And you were the one last year with the sailfish, right?”

      “I want to talk to you about wood—”

      “You don’t want to buy or build here, dear. We’re growing by leaps and bounds. The mayor just put a limit on cutting lumber. We hardly have any saplings and there haven’t been any shipments in three weeks. I’d go farther south if I were you.”

      My stomach dropped. How much time was it going to take to find wood, much less build a boat? Would Row still be in the Valley by then?

      “Do you have a salvage yard?”

      “Small one, up past Clarence’s Rookery. Where you sailing, if you don’t mind me asking?” The woman began weighing the mackerel and tossing it in a bin beside the scale, the meat landing with a thud.

      “Up north. What was Greenland.” I glanced around the shop and saw Pearl looking at an advertisement pinned to the wall by the front door.

      The woman clicked her tongue again. “You won’t get up there in a salvage boat. Sea’s too rough. If you ask me, stick around here. Richards told me they found a half-sunk oil tanker off the coast down south a few miles. Going to try and excavate it and renovate it. You know that’s what I’d love—a nice spacious tanker to spend my last days on.”

      I used my credit on linen for a new sail. The woman and I negotiated back and forth over the mackerel, finally settling on trading it for an eight-foot rope, a chicken, two bags of flour, and three jars of sauerkraut and a few Harjo coins. Pearl and I had tried to avoid scurvy by trading fish for fresh fruit in the south, but sometimes a whole bucket of fish would only get us three oranges. Sauerkraut lasted longer and was much cheaper, but you had to find a place where cabbage grew to get it.

      I handed Pearl the box of sauerkraut to carry and she said, “You got it.”

      “My one bright spot,” I muttered. The little bell attached to the door rang as another customer stepped inside. I smelled stone fruit and my mouth began to water and I turned around to see a man carrying a box of peaches to the counter. The scent clouded my mind with longing.

      “We need to tell Daniel about the advertiser.”

      I glanced down at her in surprise. I’d been trying to teach her to read in the evenings with the two books we owned—an instruction manual for hair dryers and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth—but didn’t know if my lessons had really stuck.

      The advertisement asked for a surveyor, displaying pictures of a compass, divider, and plotter, with the words EARN MONEY, QUICK!

      “You read that?” I asked.

      She glared at me. “Of course. Where’s the saloon?”

      “It’s pretty far. Besides, I’m sure he’ll run across the advertisement on his own.”

      “You’re only pretending like you don’t want to see him again, too!” Pearl said. She jiggled the box, the jars clinking against one another.

      I smiled despite my disappointment. She always could disarm me. I never could read her half as well as she read me.

       CHAPTER 9

      THE SALOON WAS a run-down shack with metal siding and a grass roof. Light filtered through dirty windows made of plastic tarp. In the dark, voices were disembodied, lifting and mixing in the shadows and the rank smell of dirt and sweat.

      Upturned buckets and stools and wood crates served as chairs around makeshift tables. A cat lay on the bar, licking its black tail while the bartender dried canning jars with an old pillowcase.

      Daniel sat at a table with a younger man who had the look of a runaway teen; disheveled, jaunty, like he could make use of anything and leave anywhere at a minute’s notice. Daniel leaned forward to hear what the younger man was saying, his brow deeply furrowed and his fists clenched on the table. His face was turned toward the door, as if trying to block the commotion of the bar from his view.

      Pearl and I were in his eyesight, but he didn’t notice us. Pearl tried to step toward him but I caught her shoulder.

      “Wait,” I said. I ordered moonshine at the bar and the bartender placed a teacup of amber liquid in front of me. I pushed a Harjo coin, a penny with an H melted into the copper, across the bar.

      When the younger man stopped talking, Daniel leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrows low and heavy over his eyes, his mouth a tight line. The younger man got up to leave and I thought about slipping out after him. I had wanted to see Daniel, to convince him to help us, but we didn’t need to get involved in whatever he was part of.

      Pearl leapt toward Daniel before I could catch her. He jumped when he saw her and he forced a smile and tried to level his face into a friendly expression.

      “The advertisement even had a picture of your tools,” Pearl was saying, moving her hands in excited circles as she told him.

      Daniel smiled at her, that same sad smile he often wore around Pearl.

      “I appreciate you coming to tell me,” he said.

      Daniel wouldn’t look me in the eye, and I felt tension coming off his body like steady heat.

      “Maybe we should go, Pearl,” I said, setting my hands on her shoulders.

      An old man from the table next to Daniel’s tottered toward us and laid a gnarled hand on my arm. He smiled widely, showing a mouth with few teeth. He pointed in my face.

      “I see things for you,” he said, his voice coming out wheezy, stinking of alcohol and decay.

      “Town prophet,” Daniel said, nodding to the old man. “He already told me my future.”

      “What was it?” I asked.

      “That I’d cheat death twice and then drown.”

      “Not bad,” I said.

      “You,” the old man pointed in my face again. “A seabird will land on your boat and lay an egg that will hatch a snake.”

      I glanced at the old man. “What does that mean?”

      “It means,” the old man said, leaning forward, “what it means.”

      I felt a blankness in my head, like my thoughts had nothing to connect to. A white fear rippled through me. Why did the prophet talk about snakes and birds? I shook myself inwardly. Snakes and birds were some of the only animals not extinct. He probably brought them up in everyone’s fortunes. But Row and Pearl’s faces rose up in my mind, their lives like tenuous things that could drift away.

      “Myra,” Daniel said. He touched my arm and I startled, stepping away from him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

      “I know.” I glanced around the dark saloon, the silhouette of heads bent over drinks, bodies slumped toward tables in fatigue. “We should go.”

      “Wait—can—can I stay one last night on your boat?” Daniel asked.

      I glared at him. “So you don’t have to pay for the hotel?”

      He tilted his head. “I’ll help you fish in the morning.”

      “I can fish on my own.”

      “Mom, stop. You can stay, Daniel,” Pearl said. I glanced at Pearl and she raised her eyebrows at me.

      “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

      “Just an old friend,” Daniel said. “I’m only asking for one more night. I like being around you two.”

      He ruffled Pearl’s hair and she giggled. I regarded him coolly, arms crossed over my chest, wishing I could read his face the way I could read the water.