THE BEHAVIOR OF SEA CREATURES by Bradford Tice
After my mother died of cancer, Granny Gen moved out of her house and came to stay with us. She said she couldn’t live anymore with Grandpa, him constantly making a racket slamming doors and going up and down the stairs. She especially hated lying in bed at night, listening to him breathe around the wet pocket of phlegm hung at the back of his throat. “It was something awful,” she said. Her decision surprised everyone, considering the fact that Grandpa had been dead for nearly eight years. “Lord alive, you’d think that man would allow me some peace after seventy-six years. It wasn’t enough he kept me awake wheezing the last year he hung on, now he’s got to ruin what little sleep my arthritis will allow me.” So the spring ended with Granny dragging a shabby leather trunk across the road toward our house, leaving a rising column of dust in her wake.
On the day my mother was buried, me and my brother Shannon had the worst fight of our lives. It was at the funeral home. My mother had been laid out in a coffin with light-blue silk lining the inside. She was wearing a white dress that made her look fuller than she had in the hospital. Shannon and I were alone in the viewing room, standing beside banks of lilies and asters, which were my mother’s favorite. I was trying hard not to look at my mother’s face. She didn’t look peaceful as I had expected, but like she was hollow inside and held together with wires. I was waiting for her to snap like a fiddle string when Shannon suddenly approached the coffin and began unbuttoning the front of Mother’s dress. “What are you doing?” I stuttered.
“I want to see the scar,” my brother mumbled. He was having trouble getting the pearl buttons through their holes. Fumbling at the collar of the dress, his fingers looked meaty and swollen. “I wonder what a woman looks like with no breasts. I bet they scoop them out like ice cream.”
“Stop it, Shannon.” I tried to make my voice sound tough, like Shannon’s, but it broke mid-sentence.
“Fuck off, Ribbons. You ain’t got Mama here to protect you anymore.”
Before I even knew what was happening, the candelabrum from the table beside me was in my fist. The blow hit Shannon above his left eyebrow, the edge of the metal slicing through his skin. The candlelight wavered during the swing and then vanished in wisps of coiling smoke. Shannon stood stunned for a moment, wax curling down his face, and then his forehead opened like a flower.
It had taken both my father and Reverend Starks to pull Shannon off of me. Shannon was eighteen years old, four years my senior. It was not exactly a fair fight. In the background, I could hear Granny Gen yelling, “Go for the testicles, Rieland. It’s your only chance.” By the time it was over, my suit was covered in blood, some of it mine, and I was crying. Shannon’s forehead had to be sewn up. It took eighteen stitches, and the black threads made a crescent-shaped zigzag pattern that looked like a third eyebrow.
That night, Daddy whipped both of us with a willow cane from the backyard. He said if we ever embarrassed the family like that again, we’d both be laid up with Mother in the cemetery. I never told anyone what Shannon had been doing to Mother, and I don’t know if anyone noticed. If they had, nothing was said. It wouldn’t have mattered anyhow. Shannon had been doing shit like that for years.
For the next few months, I avoided Shannon, which was easy enough to do where we lived. Except for our house and Granny’s old place, there was no one for miles in any direction. Just wide open space with a hell of a lot of cover. After Granny Gen came to live with us, I started hiding out in her old house. There, it was like the world forgot I existed. Like it never knew I was there.
* * *
Our house stood at an angle from Granny Gen’s property. On three sides were my father’s fields, and behind them, the deep woods spun out around the lake. In the summers, the winds picked up, and the green body of the cornfield surged like an ocean. Lone crows rose and fell into the fields like flying fish, while the wind moved over the tassels of the stalks in slow-moving waves. I had never seen the ocean, yet my mother used to tell me about the movements of the Gulf down in Florida, the mass of everything stirred by unknown and invisible influences. Sometimes I wondered if this is why my mother stayed all those years, hundreds of miles from the waters she had learned to love. Perhaps the sound of the corn driven before the wind convinced her the Caribbean lay blue and teeming just outside her window, waiting for her like faith.
Center, Tennessee, so named because it lies in the middle of the county, rests nestled between Laurel Hill Lake and the thick pinewoods that run along the high ridges to the north. Spread along the red-chert roads are farms separated by fences and alternating fields of cotton, tobacco, and corn. Over the years, little has changed. Abandoned silos stand out against the sky like silver bullets, while kudzu wraps its arms around anything that will stand still long enough. My father’s family has lived here for four generations, ever since my great-grandfather came over from Germany. It was the only home any of us – me, my father, or my older brother Shannon – had ever known. My father was a farmer, and he owned every inch of land between Sugar Creek and the edge of Center Woods, which was not that much when it came right down to it, but it got us by.
Granny Gen’s house had been falling apart ever since Grandpa’s death. The paint on the ceiling was webbed with water stains and peeled in places, revealing the bare ribs of the boards underneath. Half the windows were broken and stuffed with cloth. Under the house, a family of opossums had made their den, and in the attic brown bats clung to the rafters. A colony of bees had built their hive in-between the laths of the walls, and you could hear them through the thin plywood. During the day, the bees poured out of the walls like flecked sunlight, while at night the bats moved out in swarms. This was probably the real reason Granny Gen decided to migrate. With so much life moving in, it must have been hard to believe the house was still hers. “The woods is coming into that house, and I’m too old to stop it. I had to get out of there before it took me over.” But Father told a different story. “Rieland, I want you to help me look after your Granny Gen,” he said. “I know it hasn’t been long since your mother’s funeral, but Granny Gen’s mind is going. I need you to try and be there for her.”
Granny was never like everyone else. As she put it, she was open to influences. The stories and histories that are etched onto our lives came to her like a secret language, and for her, everything had its tale to tell. The weather blew in over the fields, and broke into gibberish in the tops of the trees, and she stood there listening. Or that’s how it seemed, at least. It was Granny Gen who taught me how to tell if winter were going to be harsh by looking at the fur on the woolly worms in the fall.
“If the fur is red, then it’ll be a mild winter,” she said. “But if the wool is black, you better buckle down for some cold.”
My father said Granny Gen listened to things she shouldn’t be listening to. Sometimes the world doesn’t whisper. Sometimes it screams. She supposedly saw spirits of people who had passed away. One summer when she was twelve, black widows had nested underneath the floorboards of her house, and they crawled through the chinks in the floor at night. Granny had known this was a bad sign, but she didn’t say anything. A week later, her father was dead. He was found in the barn with a shotgun in his right hand and a hole where his temple should be. No one ever really knew why.
I listened to her tell these stories while she sat under the oak behind our house, shelling peas or stringing beans. “It was awful. Simply awful. On the morning after we buried your great-grandfather, I went out while it was still dark to milk the cow, and as I opened the doors of the barn there was my father. He had a hole as big as your fist through the back of his head, and the shotgun was clenched in his fingers. I just stood there, not knowing what to do. He turned to me with this sad expression, and brought his finger up to his lips to signal that I should be quiet. Do you know what he said to me, Rieland? He said, ‘Shhh! Hunting vermin.’ I never went into that barn again after that.”
Granny Gen told a lot of stories that summer, and I stayed up late into the evenings listening while fireflies hovered around her head. Looking at her then, her hair rising in thin wisps like smoke from a brush fire, I could almost believe what she was saying, that there really were things waiting and watching from the darkness. Then I remembered what my mother taught me. A way to see the world as chemical and reasoned. That there were no such things as haunted houses and spirits, only haunted people.
* * *
My mother left Center after high school and had gone down to Florida to study marine biology at the University of Miami. She specialized in octopus behavior, and planned on writing her dissertation on cephalopod pigment cells and their role in octopus defense. She came home over the summer to find a quiet place to write, but what she found instead was my father. She had been staying at her parents’ house beside the railroad on the west end of town, writing at night and sleeping most of the day. I know this because she too told me stories, stories about the way the world worked, but different than the ones Granny Gen had to tell.
My mother was several years older than my father, and she remembered him as the lanky boy who sat watching her in church or during Mrs. Lambert’s lectures on biology in high school. He was also the boy who watched her while she sunbathed naked beside the lake, as she did on occasion to get away from the stuffiness of her parents’ home. There was a particular inlet that ran upon a sandy bank, which my mother knew of and frequented because of its seclusion. What she didn’t find out until later was that her hiding place was situated at the back edge of my father’s family’s land. My father always hid behind a line of sumacs, where he thought he was unseen, but my mother always spotted him. She had an eye for noticing things. At the time, she’d been mildly amused. She liked the idea of someone watching her as she swam.
When my mother returned to Center from college that year, she discovered that the lanky, walleyed boy she remembered had changed. “He still looked so childlike and innocent that summer,” she said. “But there was something different about him. He was more daring. Of course, I was different too. It didn’t take me long to convince him to come out from behind the sumac.”
Three months later, my mother was pregnant with Shannon. When she told my father, he immediately got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. In response she started kicking him and didn’t let up until my father broke down crying. Another month and they were married, but with the understanding that my mother was only waiting long enough to have the baby and then return to finish her degree. Of course, this never happened, and I’ve often wondered what my mother thought about in the long nights as she listened to the wind. What it must have taken to convince her to stay.
* * *
On the day Granny Gen moved in, Shannon took a can of lighter fluid from under the sink, sluiced down the rollout couch in the living room, and set a match to the soaked cushions. When Mother died, he said he thought he’d gotten rid of all the crazy women in his life. There was no love lost between Shannon and me. He had always resented the attention I received from Mother. So in response, he started setting fire to things. The first to go up was the dead apple tree in the backyard, then the old abandoned Hempstead place in the woods behind our house. He even tried to burn down the barn at one point, but my father caught him in the act.
Shannon and I had been engaged in a war of sorts ever since I could remember. No official declarations were ever issued from either side, but it was understood. Mother protected me most of the time, but even she couldn’t be watchful at all hours of the night and day. When I was eight, my father took Shannon and me fishing at the lake. On my brother’s first cast, he let go of the release too soon, and hooked my left ear with a barbed bass jig. It had to be cut out and my ear never mended completely, and since then my brother had taken to calling me Ribbons. Shannon said it was an accident, but I knew better. This was the kind of relationship we had, a listing of scars. I felt I had evened the score on the ear with the candelabrum, but there were others. The shiny line on my left arm caused by a thrown hubcap, and the red strawberry on my right thigh that never healed after Shannon tied me to the back of the four-wheeler and dragged me through the field. My only triumph had been the nail of Shannon’s pinkie toe that fell off and never grew back. I dropped a fifty-pound free-weight on it after a fight with him. That was how we related as brothers. No rules and no room for amnesty. Blood had already been drawn.
* * *
On the day of their fourth wedding anniversary, my father had a saltwater tank installed in the living room, complete with living, blood-red coral and sand from the Gulf. My mother was six months pregnant with me when Daddy drove down to a hobbyist shop in Florida and bought an octopus for the tank. It was a Caribbean reef octopus, species Octopus briareus. My mother named it Legs. It had the coloration of cotton candy, and it moved along the bottom and sides of the tank like a blush. Octopi are normally nocturnal, and my mother watched it at night. As I got older, I watched with her, at first poised upon her lap, and then later at her side. The lights from the tank moved across her face in bright scribbles, making her both beautiful and strange at the same time. Every year, nearing the eve of their anniversary, Legs would die. This was not abnormal, as my mother later explained, a year being the normal life span of most adult octopi. So every year, my father made the same trip down to Florida, and every year I watched as my parents’ marriage was rejuvenated by an eight-legged sea god, an unlikely messenger of love.
My mother carried no illusions about the way life worked. She had taken her lessons from the ocean – the way it could be stunning and deadly. When I was born, my mother began pouring her dreams into my ear like rainwater. Watching Legs navigate his crystal tank, she would tell me everything she knew of octopi. The way they could change color depending on their environment, going from lipstick pink to muddy brown. The magic with which they disappeared into clouds of ink. She even took him out of the tank at times and let his tentacles wrap around my arm. I always gasped at the sheer exhilaration of how it felt, like a hundred kisses crawling over my body. Standing there in the blue light from the tank, Legs cradled in-between our arms, she whispered into my ear, “One day, Rieland, you’re going to live by the sea.”
Once, when we were younger, Shannon made an effort to share in these nightly experiences with Legs, but my mother made it clear that was not possible. He stood in the threshold of the kitchen doorway and watched the two of us, me with Legs cribbed in my arms and my mother reciting her lessons from heart.
“Mariners used to call octopi ‘devilfish,’ in the old days. They thought octopi were monsters that would pull sailors from their ships and drown them in the sea.”
“Can they?” I asked.
“Of course not. That was simply ignorance. The only real monsters are people. Nothing else in nature is capable of cruelty.”
I saw Shannon out of the corner of my eye try and edge his way into the living room. The movement alerted my mother to his presence. She turned to him. “What are you doing here? I thought you were helping your father with the threshing.”
Shannon stopped and began to kick at a dried clod of dirt caught in the threads of the carpet. He mumbled through the purr of the aquarium filter, “We finished early and Dad said I could go.”
“Stop smearing mud into the carpet, Shannon. Is it too much to ask that you not ruin what few comforts we have in this house?”
“Sorry.”
As my mother spoke, Legs moved up my arms and began to wrap himself around my neck. He pulled himself up my chest using his tentacles for leverage. In his wake, he left a wet trail of fluid staining the front of my shirt. The cold puckers of his tentacles sent violent shivers down my spine as they suctioned to my skin. “Mom!” I wheezed as Legs’ grip tightened.
My mother turned back to me and smiled. “Is he getting away from you? Here, let me take him.”
Shannon took another half step into the darkened room, edging into the undulating blue circle of light. “Can I hold him?”
My mother turned her back and began to pour Legs back into the tank. She did not look at Shannon when she answered. “Not right now, Shannon. He’s had enough excitement for one day. Maybe next time.”
Shannon dropped his outstretched arms to his side and wedged them into his pockets. “Why does Rieland get to hold him, and I don’t?” he demanded. Even then, Shannon had a backbone.
My mother seemed exasperated by the question and she slammed the lid of the tank, the sound of which seemed enormous in the stillness. “Shannon, stop being selfish. You always did think of nothing but yourself.” Her voice betrayed a long-growing frustration and resentment. “Why don’t you run out to the barn and see if your father needs any help putting up the machinery?”
Shannon retreated through the kitchen, a cold layer of frost forming over his eyes. Secretly, I think my mother resented Shannon for keeping her in Center. He was never before met with open hostility from my mother. In fact, she relegated all issues of discipline regarding Shannon to our father. From my mother, Shannon received nothing but a cold exclusion. I think our father noticed Shannon’s pain, and tried to protect him. That’s why, later, he allowed Shannon to get away with the things he did. It was a form of atonement of sorts. As a result, Shannon’s anger took shape in the small fires he tended and hedged, stoked with his hatred until they erupted in brilliant conflagrations that consumed everything in their paths.
* * *
Granny Gen claimed she still saw Mother every so often, but only faintly. Not like Grandpa, who she said hung on like the smell of cat piss. “I usually see her standing beside that stinking tank, looking in at that monstrosity.” After her death, it became my job to feed Legs, so every evening I traveled through the woods to Ham Bottom Creek. There I rolled up my pants’ legs and stood in the glare the light made upon the chilly water. I turned over round, flattened rocks along the bottom, looking for crawfish. Once I snared one big enough, I headed back to the house. I always found Legs hovering at the top of the tank, waiting for me as I unclasped the lid and held the crawfish over the water. Legs took the victim with a flick of his arm and then squeezed until there was an audible crack. It was an intimate and devastating love.
After the incident with the couch, Shannon disappeared for two days and returned home on the eve of his nineteenth birthday. That night, my father took him out behind the barn and gave him a stern talking to, saying that if anything like that happened again, Shannon would be out on his own. I had listened to the whole exchange from the loft of the barn. The moon had just risen huge and burning over the fields, and my father looked small and ineffectual under its light. Shannon nodded to everything my father said, but I could tell by the way he leaned arrogantly against the wheel of the tractor that nothing was really sinking in.
Like my mother and Granny Gen, I too had begun to notice things. When my mother died, I found a stack of her old biology books from college in the back of her closet. I read them at night when everyone else had gone to bed. I struggled over words like germination, zooxanthellae, and spermatozoa. I never really fully understood what they meant, but I was fascinated by the girth of the words as they filled my mouth. I became fascinated with the study of ecology, a branch of science which states that every living thing exists at the mercy of its environment. A fish couldn’t live outside of water, just as a camel couldn’t last in the Arctic. Everything had its place within the world. In the ecology section of the book, words like community and niche, survival of the fittest, jumped out at me from the page. My mother told me it was possible to understand any living organism as long as you could observe it in its natural habitat, like the way we observed Legs in his tank, the waters of the Gulf replicated through salt tablets and pH levels. It was then that I began to think seriously about my place within the world, and I became possessed by an idea, the notion that you could encapsulate the world outside, and with patience, figure it all out.
From the well house out back, I started taking the Mason jars my mother had used for canning. I punched holes in all the lids. At first, I started simply, only taking things from around the house: fireflies, grasshoppers, toads, potato bugs, whatever I could find. I learned what each thing needed for survival through a combination of common sense and trial and error. Other than the few unforeseen accidents, I was able to create tiny pockets of the world, perfectly capable of containing and supporting life. Under a canopy of apple blossoms, the June bugs coupled on their torn beds of grass. The praying mantis I’d found in the garden deposited hundreds of thousands of silvery eggs onto a segment of stick, each one hardening beneath a coat of protective slime. I kept everything a couple of days before letting it go, making notes in a folder about coloration, feeding habits, and sex, if at all determinable.
Granny Gen said I was a regular zookeeper. After she vacated her house and the burned shell of the couch was moved to the front yard, Granny slept in my room and within a week the sheets smelled of camphor and mint. I didn’t mind so much, except the snoring kept me up at night. However, when Granny Gen refused to sleep in a room containing innumerable jars of bugs and reptiles, I moved my collection, two jars at a time, across the road to her empty house.
On the day I entered my grandparents’ old bedroom, I lined the jars along the baseboards and on the tables Granny Gen had left behind. She had taken very little with her when she left, and most of the furniture was still in its usual place. I sat on my grandparents’ four-post bed and watched the jade sliver of a green snake as its forked tongue sensed the cold borders of its cage, and I thought that at any moment it was going to tell me what I wanted to know. It was going to tell me everything.
The house got hot in the summer, so I opened all the windows in the hope that the breezes blowing in from the cornfield might find their way inside. Despite my efforts, I was salted with sweat. It ran down the sides of my chest as I wrote in my notebook. As afternoon progressed, the air began to cool, and I lay down in the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Stray honeybees stumbled in through the windows. They bounced around the ceiling as if they understood nothing about the limits of the world. In the walls beside the bed, I listened to their kin vibrate the air with their wings. I imagined the insides of the walls spongy with honey, teeming with life.
Lulled by the buzz, I drifted off to sleep. I dreamt of the oceans I’d studied in my mother’s thick, glossy books. Schools of fish moving through pink coral beds in brilliant flashes of silver and bronze, while octopi turned through the water with their tentacles splayed into perfect stars. Overhead, the shadows of boats passed through the sunlight, making everything violet and dim. I drifted through it all, detached and removed, and watched as the great mysteries of the sea glided silently by. Sometimes my mother was there with me. Sometimes she wasn’t.
I woke to the sound of a door slamming upstairs. Above my head, the tread of heavy boots moved across the floorboards. I sat and listened as the steps came down the stairs and grew louder as they approached. They stopped right outside the door, and I could see under the crack the shadow of something moving on the other side. “Who’s there?” I asked, my voice huge in the heat. I closed my eyes and listened as the bees droned like machinery in the background. No one answered, and I exited through the window.
* * *
Shannon wouldn’t say where he had stayed for the two days he had been gone after burning the couch, but he came back with some odd convictions. The day after the conversation with my father behind the barn, Shannon left the house at noon with a frog gigging spear, the cleaver from the kitchen, and a leather game-bag my father used for hunting quail. He disappeared into the woods until dusk. When he returned, I was sitting under the elm tree out front with a jar of blister beetles beside me, taking notes. I could see Shannon’s bag was full, and it gave off a muffled rattling noise as he walked by me and headed for the barn. Later, after Shannon disappeared into the house, I snuck out to the barn to see what was in the bag. Across the tops of the stalls, I found the bodies of five snakes. Their heads had been cut off, and blood dripped from the wounds onto the concrete floor in a quiet patter. Two of the carcasses had the stacked buttons of rattlesnakes, but the other three were a mixture of varying lengths and designs. I left them there and headed back for supper. I thought about telling Daddy what Shannon had left in the barn, but knowing that my father hated snakes more than the devil himself, I kept quiet instead, figuring my father would discover them the next morning.
If my father ever said anything to Shannon about the snakes, it did no good. He must have thought snake killer was a better profession than firebug. My mother once told me that octopi were the most brilliant and brutal hunters of the sea. Due to their massive brain size, they were one of the most intelligent sea creatures, second only to the dolphin. Octopi had even been known to drop rocks into the shells of clams so they couldn’t close, allowing them easy access to their prey. My brother Shannon was not this kind of killer. He was not calculating, but rather wasteful, like widespread pestilence or famine. Apparently, what he sought was extinction. Every day, Shannon left at the same time and returned as the sun’s light melted back into the earth. Every day, the number of snakes thrown over the walls of the barn grew. The bodies writhed for hours from their reflexes, causing them to fall from the boards of the stalls. Eventually, Shannon took to nailing them to the walls of the barn.
Pretty soon there was no more room, so Shannon threw the rope-like bodies over the rafters. In the mornings, before he headed out on his hunts, he took my father’s Bowie knife out to the barn and sat on an overturned bucket, skinning the hides off the snakes. He threw the fleshy insides in the ditch at the side of the road. It wasn’t long before the buzzards descended in black clouds upon the grisly snake-flesh rotting in the weeds. Shannon took the hides and hung them back on the stalls where the bodies had been.
He claimed he had plans to sell the skins, but he never did, so the walls were soon filmed with glistening scales. After a while, the barn took on a rank coppery smell, and dried blood trailed into the drains of the concrete floors. The only mention of the snakes made in my presence came from Granny Gen at the dinner table. “So how many snakes are you expecting to pack into that barn out there, Shannon?” Shannon grunted at the question, and stuffed his cheeks with another mouthful of sauerkraut. He then looked at Gen and shrugged. “Until there’s none left,” he replied.
“Fancy yourself Saint Patrick, do ya?” Granny asked.
“I like being at the top of the food chain.”
“Sounds like you don’t fancy the competition.” Granny huffed through her teeth and gave Shannon a sharp look, then returned her attention to her plate.
Shannon got the mention of the food chain from me. He had no real idea of how the world worked. He slaughtered indiscriminately, just like the angels in the old Biblical stories, only Shannon wasn’t as pretty. I didn’t particularly like what Shannon was doing. I had read enough to see that Shannon was causing a population crash in my ecosystem, and pretty soon the house was crawling with mice.
I started following Shannon on his hunts. I waited behind the well house until he headed into the corn, and then I trailed behind him at a safe distance. When he reached the woods, he began overturning logs and large stones and jabbing with his frog gig in dark crevices trying to flush something out. The first snake I saw him take was a rat snake. He shoved it down with the gig, pressing the prongs into the earth around its head until it was pinned to the ground. Then he took the cleaver from the belt loop on his jeans and brought it down on the snake’s head, severing it with a single swipe. He gathered all the snakes in this way.
I also learned that snakes were not the only things Shannon hunted. On one occasion, Shannon headed back toward the woods where the Hempstead place had been before it burned. All that was left was the stone foundation, behind which grew a thin thicket of trees filtering out toward Sugar Creek. Under the trees, violets crowded in the shade like nun’s faces looking up at the world from the forest floor.
On a blanket laid out over the violets, a young girl was picking the blue and purple flowers and tossing them into the creek. When she saw Shannon coming toward her through the shade, she jumped up to meet him, and they collided in a rough kiss. I watched them from behind the low wall of the foundation. Shannon lay on top of the girl and started running his hands up under her blouse, groping the small knobs of her breasts. Eventually Shannon started to unbutton the girl’s jeans, pulling fiercely at the stiff denim. She stopped him, and giggled as she re-buttoned her jeans. “You know what I told you, Shannon Niedergesses. I don’t plan to be dropping any babies anytime soon.” Shannon’s face took on an expression I had never seen before. His lip stuck out in a slight pout, and his eyes filled with a boyish petulance. “I’d be careful,” he murmured.
The girl smiled, her coppery hair catching at the corners of her mouth. I watched in amazement as Shannon gently pulled the hair away and twisted it into thin ropes in-between his fingers. “My mother told me about boys like you, Shannon. You act all sweet and innocent, but you’re really nothing but a lady killer.”
Shannon smiled. “Cold-blooded,” he whispered. Then he pulled off the girl’s blouse, exposing everything underneath.
* * *
Before she died, my mother explained that the top of Legs’ tank had to be clamped at all times, because octopi are the greatest of nature’s escape artists. This was the first lesson of my mother’s I forgot, and two months after Granny Gen moved in, Legs disappeared. I searched everywhere. I imagined him, with colors altered to match the upholstery of the couch, moving so smoothly over the fabric he went unnoticed. I thought eventually he would show up in the bathtub or in the sink, but the weeks stretched by into months without a trace. As time passed, the tank sat desolate by the wall. To make matters worse, Granny Gen’s mind followed Legs to wherever he had gone. She became more and more insistent that she was seeing octopi everywhere.
The first instance occurred while Granny was hanging clothes on the line beside the house. Our shirts and pants were flapping in the breeze, and I watched from the window as Granny hurried to pin them down with the wooden pins. I had been keeping an eye on Granny ever since the conversation I had with my father. He worried that her condition was deteriorating. She repeated questions constantly, and she wandered away sometimes and ended up back at her old house. I always found her there, cussing out Grandpa, calling him an impotent son-of-a-bitch for leaving her alone with the woods perched at her doorstep, waiting to get in.
On the day she was hanging out the clothes, I saw her drop the basket in the middle of her task and run back toward the house. When I met her at the door, she told me that she had seen the octopus. “He was in the hole the woodpeckers drilled into the post of the clothesline. I saw him.” I went out to the clothesline to investigate, but all I found was a silver-green tree frog perched at the lip of the hole. He scrutinized me with a lazy unfriendliness. I tried to show Granny, but she refused to go near the clothesline again. Over the next few weeks, Granny refused to take a bath, saying that Legs might be hidden down the drain, waiting until she filled the tub with water before he surfaced and attacked. It took me hours to talk her into bed at night, her eyes searching underneath the mattress for the cold tentacles.
Granny Gen eventually focused her fears on her old home, claiming Legs had taken it over. She claimed she saw him at night through the windows. He had grown huge since his escape, feeding on opossums and mice in-between the walls, oozing like honey through the bees’ comb. “It’s waiting for us out there. Must’ve already gotten Grandpa, because I don’t see him anymore.”
My father’s face took on a pained expression whenever Granny Gen started talking about Legs, as if he was confused about what to do next. Shannon wanted to get rid of her. “She’s crazy. We should take her out to the barn and put her out of her misery.” He received a backhand from my father for his efforts. “She’s family,” my father responded. “And you don’t talk that way about family.” Shannon reared back and an expression of hurt passed over his face in a dark rush of blood. I couldn’t help but smirk. Shannon glared at me, his eyes narrowing to thin slivers of glass, and then stalked off.
I looked over at my father, whose head was lowered. He made several swipes at the dirt gathered at the knees of his pants. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “That’s not how your mother would have handled it.” He raised his eyes and looked at me, and for a second I thought he was going to say something more, but then he simply turned and left the room.
That afternoon, I went to Granny’s house to check on my collection. I went around back so Shannon wouldn’t see me and entered the house through the screen door. The kitchen was overflowing with canned jars of vegetables and Tupperware containers. Every available inch of counter space was taken up by junk. As I went through, I heard mice scatter through the jumble. When I entered Granny’s old bedroom, I found there had been no need to avoid Shannon’s detection. He had already found the place. All the jars lay scattered across the room, their jagged edges glinting in the light stealing in from behind the curtains. Insects and tadpoles had been crushed underfoot, many no more than smears on the hardwood floor. All along the walls were nailed the headless bodies of snakes. My green snake dangled from under the lampshade like a mock pull-string, its tail tied in a loop around the brass stem.
I looked around at the slaughter, and felt my hatred for Shannon rise up raw and new, blazing like fire through the dry stubble of a field. I walked into the room and listened to the bees, to everything they were saying, and then I knew something else was here. I looked again at the floor and noticed a trail of water that ran across the bedroom and out the door. It was as if a wet towel had been dragged through the dust. I followed it out and saw that it moved up the stairs onto the second floor. I stood listening, and over the hum of the bees, I heard a door slowly open and close up above.
As I ascended the steps, the sound of the bees dropped away and was replaced by a thick silence that was weighed down with the heat of the house. Upstairs was a hallway, and on the right-hand side was a room that did not appear to have ever been used for anything. The trail of water led to the door of a closet in back of the room, which I could see from the landing of the stairs. I didn’t go any further, and I didn’t call out to see who was there. I simply stood still and listened. I thought about my mother. About the day she came home from the hospital after the surgery. We had stood in the dark living room and watched Legs maneuver about the confines of his tank. My mother was wearing a light cotton nightgown, and her features looked frail and hollow in the glow from the aquarium. She had turned to me and unlaced the top of her nightgown, pulling down the front of it to reveal a long crescent-shaped gash that was held together with silver staples that glinted in the creases of her flesh. The skin around the wound was raw and slightly purple. She took my hand and placed it on the gash, running my fingers over the mottled surface. I didn’t know what to do. I was spellbound, locked somehow behind the glass of her eyes which drew in around me with an almost angry expression.
“Do you feel that, Rieland?” she asked. “This is what can happen to people when they give up their lives. They waste away from the inside. I want you to remember this, what I gave up for you.” In the tank, Legs reached out with a tentacle and ran his puckered feet along the glass, as if he too wanted his turn to feel, to touch the space of an ever-expanding absence. In the dimness of the living room I noticed that my mother’s chest was nearly the same color as Legs himself. The color of a fresh wound. Two months later, she was dead.
Now, as I stared into the dim room of Granny Gen’s house, sweat ran down my face and into my eyes. I dug my fingers into the flaking paint of the newel post as the closet door gave a slight groan and then swung open. In the space behind the door, there was something gathered near to the floor. A bulbous head and intelligent, slatted eyes gazed out at me, while behind it, a figure stood in the gloom. A figure I could almost make out as something human and vaguely feminine. Suddenly, it seemed as if the oxygen in the air went to nothing. I took half a step forward, then my nerves broke, and I ran.
* * *
The next day, Shannon found Granny Gen sitting in the bathtub. She was fully clothed with a butcher knife in her hand. She had left the water running for quite some time, and it was seeping over the top and cascading onto the floor. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled. Granny Gen regarded Shannon from over the rim of the white porcelain tub. She was scrunched up into a corner with her legs drawn up close to her chest. She held the knife balanced on her knees. “I’m waiting for that monstrosity to come up through the drain. Then I’m going to stab it. Thing’s getting too big for its britches.”
By then, my father and I had arrived on the scene. After a good half-hour of argument, my father convinced my grandmother to give him the knife and get out of the tub. He wrapped a towel around her shoulders and tried as best he could to dry her hair. He pressed the back of his hand to Granny’s temple and discovered she was extremely feverish. “Shannon, go out to the barn and get the truck. I’m taking Granny to the hospital.” While Shannon went to the barn, I helped Daddy half-carry Granny Gen to the door. The whole time she ranted into my ear about monstrosities and ghosts. “Last night, I saw a black widow in my dreams. It was spinning something in that house.” After Shannon pulled up, my father and I placed Granny Gen in the front seat of the pickup, and Shannon jumped out and handed my father the keys. “I saw your mother and that thing in the old house, Rieland. They were both in the window last night.” Gen’s eyes were wild and frightened, and her fear was so convincing I looked over toward the far side of the road as my father jumped into the cab of the truck, but behind the broken windows I saw nothing but darkness.
My father left Shannon in charge and told the two of us to behave until he returned. Then he took off from the driveway, spinning gravel under his tires as he went. In the silence that followed, Shannon and I gazed at each other, sizing each other up. Then Shannon laughed. “Bunch of crazies in this family, Ribbons. A regular snake’s nest in this place.” With that, he spun around and headed out to the barn. I watched him go until he disappeared inside, then I turned and went back into the house to clean up the water left pooled on the bathroom floor.
Later, as I was hanging out the bundle of wet towels I had used to mop up the water, it happened. I looked up as a cloud of bats veered in spirals through the air over the trees. I knew then something was wrong. It was far too early for the bats to be heading out. I left the clothes where they lay, and ran around to the front yard.
Across the road, smoke poured out of the windows of Granny Gen’s. I could already see the flames climbing the walls like fast-growing creeper. As I ran toward the fire, Shannon stepped out the front door. He had a cigarette held between his lips, and in his hand was the gas canister from the barn. He began throwing gasoline onto the front door as I jumped the ditch and ran stumbling to the porch.
“Shannon, stop! What the hell are you doing?”
I grabbed Shannon by the crook of the elbow to stop him from flinging anymore of the gas. Inside, the rooms seemed to breathe. The wheezing sputter of air exiting dried wood escaped from the timbers. Shannon threw me off his arm and took a drag from the cigarette. “What does it look like? The house is upsetting Granny, so I’m burning it down.”
“Sick motherfucker! Give me that can, Shannon.”
As Shannon turned back, he drew back his arm to continue lobbing the gasoline. I jumped up to intercept it, but somehow I ended up in front of the can and I was drenched in a golden stream of liquid. The gas formed a second skin over my body, a film of greasy fumes. I stood sputtering as the gasoline burned the inside of my nose and my eyes.
“You dumb son-of-a-bitch. The house is already burning. What the hell ya trying to do?”
“You’re going to help me put it out, Shannon.” I was already feeling lightheaded from the smoke and exhaust, but I stood my ground in front of the house. Shannon laughed.
“You’ll do real good putting out a fire covered in gasoline. You’ll go up like a Roman candle. Now move out the way.”
“No.” In the back of my head, I already knew this was pointless. The house was already burning from the inside and I could hear it giving itself up to the blaze. This was no longer about the house. It was about Shannon and me. Somehow I knew what Granny Gen had seen moving toward the house was this moment. I wasn’t going to be the one to back down this time. For once, the killer was going to be me.
“Get out of the way, Ribbons, or I’ll set you on fire.” My brother made as if to flick his cigarette at me. I refused to move. Along the side of the house, honey bees poured out of the walls in a windstorm of sparks. I stood staring into Shannon’s eyes, refusing to budge.
“I’ll do it,” Shannon warned, raising the butt over his head.
I smiled from the threshold of the door. “You think you’re that cold-blooded, then go ahead.” Shannon’s eyes glittered, and suddenly his right arm came up in a hook and caught me just under the jaw. I fell back into the house and Shannon grabbed the front of my shirt, turned to the side, and hurled me off the porch in one smooth motion, as if I were a bag of cotton. With the other hand, he tossed the cigarette to the base of the door and the flames bloomed and began to grow.
I lay there on the ground for what seemed like a lifetime, watching as the house was devoured from the inside out. Shannon came down the front steps, his boots bouncing off the wood, as the fire spread over the walls. He stood over me grinning. He made a “tssking” sound with his lips. “I don’t even know why you try, Ribbons.”
A choked sob left my lips as I lay in the dirt. I gasped for the air that had left my lungs at the moment of impact. It was then that Shannon’s face seemed to soften and his guard went down. He reached down to offer me his hand and I stared up into his face. “Come on,” he said. His features were framed against black smoke billowing into the air.
I don’t know how the stone found its way into my hand, but I hurled it at my brother’s face with all the strength I had. It hit him in the same place the candelabrum had struck, above the left eye. The scar reopened and began to bead blood. Shannon reeled back, and I jumped up and headed for the shelter of the corn, knowing there was no one to pull Shannon off of me this time. The corn closed around me like a wave, and I felt sure I could hear, above the roar of the fire, Shannon’s feet pounding the ground behind me. Then another roar took its place as the wind wound through the heads of the green stalks, and this sound followed me into the trees at the edge of the woods, and left me when I collapsed there.
* * *
I awoke later to the noise the wind was making in the tops of the trees. It was dark, and the smell of gasoline hung like a haze around me. It had soaked into the hairs of my arms, making them stiff as wicks. My skin had broken out in a rash, and I felt so lightheaded that I had trouble standing. When I got to my feet, I took a deep breath and doubled over vomiting into the underbrush.
After the nausea subsided, I looked around. I was having trouble remembering how I ended up in the woods. I remembered vaguely the house burning, and blood running down Shannon’s face. I looked around, and could barely see anything. In the distance, a faint light glowed, and out of instinct I stumbled toward it.
In my head, there was nothing but noise. As I walked, I listened to the wind in the trees. At first, there was just the creaking of branches and the roar of the leaves, but then there was something else under the racket. It was like voices whispering, and I could almost make out what they were saying. Briars snagged at my clothes and caught in the flesh of my arm. I didn’t feel anything. There was just a blunt throbbing throughout the limbs of my body, and above me, the stars seemed to unfocus, each of them growing larger and indistinct in the sky. I thought I heard someone call out my name, but when I turned to look, no one was there.
When I stumbled upon the light, I stood just beyond its reach. The light seeped from a lantern making a silver, half-dollar pool on the forest floor. In the spotlight there were two people twisting themselves together. It was Shannon and the girl. There was an ugly gash above Shannon’s eyebrow, with fatty ointment smeared along the scab. Neither Shannon nor the girl had shirts on, and the girl was spread out on the raised bank of the creek. Around her, the heads of violets stood out against the white of her skin, the tiny flowers seeming strangely sinister in the artificial light, like faces sneering. Shannon cupped the girl’s breasts in his hands and gently squeezed them, bringing his lips down onto the nipples.
I watched them, not saying a word. On the other side of the bright circle, above their bodies, a shape began to separate itself from the darkness. I recognized Granny Gen immediately, but she seemed somehow different. There was a solemn cast about her face, and I could hear her voice faintly above the roar in my head. SHHHH! Hunting vermin.
I looked back at Shannon and the girl. Shannon was struggling to pull off the girl’s pants, and finally they gave way, and the white skin underneath flashed in the lantern light. The girl sighed as the denim peeled away, and there was a desperate eagerness about Shannon now. He tore at the buckle of his belt in near frenzy. The wind in the treetops picked up, and I watched as the girl spread herself through the green leaves of the violets. She took my brother into herself, and they writhed against each other, chest to chest. Their arms and legs tangled and suddenly it was like they were a new creature – eight-legged and alien to this place, the sounds they were making no longer human.
I felt something change then, something nearly as imperceptible as a drop in the air temperature. I knew nothing would ever be the same after this. That even the best-kept worlds could be brought to chaos. The roar of the wind became a scream, a wave breaking, and Granny Gen stood smiling under the trees. Then my mother was there, just beyond the light so that I could barely make out her eyes in the dark. In her arms, she cradled an octopus as if it were an infant. She stared right through me, demanding as always, and as always, a lifetime beyond my reach.
My mother once told me that when an octopus loses its tentacle, it grows back again, magically restoring what had been lost. They were truly amazing creatures. I looked down at my skin lit up like a flare. The buzzing chorus of bees started up in my ears, and I knew what they were saying. I had breached the door between our worlds, and walked on through. They were saying I was something different, something savage and cornered, desperately alive. Then the moans of the wind and the Earth’s copulating organisms reached a pitch, and subsided. I stood rooted for a moment, the breeze like a balm against the burning of my arms and face, and then I turned my back to the light.
Sliding back into the darkness, I had the idea that I could retrace my steps. Years ago, for whatever reasons, my mother made a decision – and the effects of that choice burned like a film of chemicals on her flesh, eating away at her. I couldn’t help wondering what voices must have stayed her hand on the door, while outside the surge of the fields crested and became still. She should have lived like the creatures she studied, and left us to fend for ourselves. But she too, like all of us, was open to influences.
As I walked away, I thought I heard someone say my name, but I paid no attention. The sea of things seemed to drift, and the glowing eyes of predators began to circle and draw close. The pad of footfalls approached from behind me, but I was too afraid to look the killer in the eyes. I tried to run, but stumbled. Two arms snaked about my chest and caught me, pulled me back, and the tenderness in this act was terrifying, like some new and unknown species of love.
Bradford Tice lives in Boulder, Colorado. “The Behavior of Sea Creatures” is his first published work of fiction in a national literary magazine.