ii. "The Siren of Seagash"

Her real name was Delores Wiebe. Born in the late 1800s, her legs
fused together during development in her mother's womb and her toes
splayed out like long thin fingers, upon which thin webbing crept
part way down the lengths, joining each digit. A man collecting freaks
squinted in just the right light and saw himself a genuine mermaid.
His name was Eric Jarvis, a showman and grifter who was aging and
looking to set down roots. Delores' parents did not abandon her so
much as sell her, exhausted from the efforts of rearing her. No doubt
they saw the charms of her youth slowly twisted into a parody of
adolescence. I did not learn the daily details of her life, but I
could imagine them unpleasant. To sell his attraction, Jarvis stripped
young Delores naked and had someone carry her onto a small,
semi-aquatic stage with an unnatural island for her to pine at young
men from a distance, all for the cost of a few coins.

I don't know why I started researching the mermaid, but I was intrigued. I
knew of the Fiji Mermaid, a con job of P.T. Barnum and wondered if
this Siren may also be the somewhat convincing chimerical concoction
of an over-stimulated taxidermist. But Ms. Wiebe was no shaved monkey
fused to a tuna. I found no other pictures or photographs of her,
beyond the initial discovery of the carved wooden advertisement. In
Small Wood's Elk Lodge, a newspaper clipping existed to re-enforce her
historical existence. I will return to its significance later on.

Interlude

It's not like I was poring over books to find out the history of this
woman. The story of Delores came to me in fragments during the years I
lived there, like most such stories that come out of small towns.
Understand that there is a veil about places like Small Wood and that
veil must be actively lifted, bit by bit, if you ever wish to see past
the ignorance of the place and the populace. Small towns guard their
secrets well, as the stain of time will forever tarnish family names,
local businesses, and whole generations whose ideas and practices have
fallen out of fashion with modern thinking. If anything, Small Wood
was a wonderful repository for wayward ideals, a time capsule, sealed
tight, of mores, taboos, and tragedy.

I had a dream about the mermaid while I was napping between morning
and evening sessions of football practice. I was not expecting the
sheer exhaustion of the routine and did little for the first week
besides eat, sleep, and bathe. I remember the dream because it was vivid,
and I was soaking out my soreness in the large sunken first-floor
bathtub when it
occurred.

I was back in Venezuela, in the Canaima region, naturally rich in elevated
tepuis, dense with dark green vegetation, and flowing with towering
waterfalls, a primal, unspoiled, and humbling place. Specifically, I
was in one of the many smaller Sapo Falls, under the beat of the
cascading wall. The opaque film of water in front of me, distorted the
world outside the cool calm wet of the underneath. And that's where
she came to me, this mermaid. Her lower half was more eel
than fish, leather thick with mucous, her hair long and looped in on
itself wet, her eyes curious but innocent, like a neighbor's timid pet
dog. Her lips found mine under the water and she pressed up against
me. It was a short dream, far more sensual than sexual. I woke up with
a nervous anxiety that had to do more with the imagery of being late
for practice, than of leaving behind a pastoral tropical dreamland.

I did not give the dream much thought. I had an eye on a teammate's
sister who picked him up after practice, and she in fact occupied most
of my waking fantasies. She was a very thin dark featured young woman,
exotic looking to the thick and pale sorts such as myself who made up
the majority in Small Wood. In two months time, my tan was quickly
fading, and serious sunbathing out on the roof above my bedroom could
not sustain what I'd acquired at the equator. Her name was May, and
she was fun to think about amid all the poundings in pads, the forced
repetition of drilling, distracting my thoughts from the sounds of whistles and grunts.

She was casual carefree, beautiful and strong in self, content just to sit
around half the day and watch the boys practice football. She
eventually settled on a star player and disappeared into the
background noise of life once school started. But May and I crossed
paths many times, for many reasons, and her connection to Delores in
my mind was always liquid, never firm, as May and Delores were as
different as two individuals could be, living a hundred years and just
one mile apart.

End interlude

The Cliffside Circus looked more like a bordello or gaming parlor than
an actual circus. The main building was true enough built up along the
edge of a cliff, overlooking jagged rock outcroppings, beaten raw by
the harsh surf beneath. Smaller satellite lodgings and showrooms were
built up in a semi-circle, like half a wagon train.

Eric Jarvis had an only child whose name was David. Since the age of
fifteen, he was known as a hard-drinking, hard hitting man. He was
eventually killed at the age of thirty-three for allegedly raping a
prominent mill owner's daughter. David grew up on the road, a brutal
life for any child of that era, leaving his siblings dead and buried across the
landscape of his youth. At his father's insistence, David had
relations with many of the retinue retained at the circus. He often
said he loved the face of Delores, in more ways than one, but by all
accounts he truly did care for the misshapen girl. He was often seen
nursing a bottle, standing watch over her like a protective older
brother, often intimidating the rowdies who'd try to climb over the
rail, wade into the pool and grab a feel.

David's uncle and Eric's brother, Jeff, was the primary attraction at
the Cliffside Circus, a very talented and renowned clown and
vaudevillian performer. He was a bitter misogynist, though his disdain
for life was spread pretty evenly out across all ethnicities,
religious convictions and sexual hang-ups. He was a foul and funny
individual, and according to rumors, a very successful chicken hawk. There were no
surviving women in the Jarvis household, so Jeff took it upon himself
to hold the dwindling family together.

In the cold spring of 1902, an ice storm hit the coast hard. It was an
unusual sight, to see frost in the sand, trees glazed in clear. It
lasted close to a week and culminated with hundred mile an hour winds,
and a torrential wash of misery. Water came down off the mountains in
wicked gushes, uprooting trees and tearing through homes. The
Cliffside Circus had the unfortunate position of being situated at a
washout point on the coast. The staff and workers worked in freezing
conditions to salvage as much as they could, as fast as they could,
before it all was swept into the sea.

Somehow Delores was forgotten about until the end. They heard her
screaming as her tropical island enclosure was being slowly carried
away over the erosion of the actual cliff side itself. The shelf was
sloughing off completely, weakened beyond the point of no return. She
called out for help, but the ground was an unstable, sinking mess.
Invisible cracks in the earth filled with water, and a misplaced foot
would at best, sprain an ankle, at worst, disappear you completely in
quicksand.

A split tree had gashed David's arm and he was being tended to, and
implored his father to go after the trapped girl. Eric got a team of
able-bodied young men, tethered with ropes, and inched towards the
stranded, perilous mermaid exhibit. Reports differ about the exact
timing of the collapse, but it was at this point that much of cliff
gave away, and about twenty feet of rock slid into the surf, taking
several buildings down the side, and leaving the remainder straddled
on the very edge. When the team got into the home, it was already at
an angle, mud pouring into it, and out a window. Delores was seen
holding herself above the cold thick shock of it all, grasping for
dear life to the tropical tree. She was screaming ever more
desperately, but knew that to release hold would be to swept out the
back, and to her certain death. Eric did his absolute best to save her
life, but their timing was just not good enough. The rest of the shelf
gave way, and the house crumbled into the ocean, taking Delores Wiebe,
Eric Jarvis, and two other men into the sea.

In the hours that followed, another team led by Jeff ventured to the
rocky bottoms, and recovered all the bodies, save for Delores. Whether
or not Jeff refused to waste time to salvage the corpse of Delores, or
it was never actually found, remains an unresolved sticking point.

But the story of Delores does not end there. As she was a tragic
figure in life, she remained, if not became, and even more tragic
figure in death.

Second Interlude

The grunion is a fish. A small, silvery fish that crawls ashore to reproduce. It is in almost every way unimportant, save for the fact that Small Wood holds an annual grunion festival, a celebration dedicated to the peculiar lifecycle of the odd fish. Local artisans and tourist shops promote the sale of special grunion bags, to make an extra buck or two off those who hold an opinion of the event an actual importance or significance. All this in hopes of sacking a fish driven defenseless by its basest instinct to mate.

It happened on a Sunday. I was kissed by a girl who had a boyfriend, and the kiss was not innocent. It was lust, plain, simple, and if there was fault for it happening it was my own. I pushed her away and held her at arm's length and her smile, her heat, turned to cold, sad anger as I watched her breathe in and out.

It all started earlier in the day. There was a beach-clean up my family was a part of. We scoured the coast for whatever nuggest of refuse we could find. The problem of beach litter wasn't much of a problem, so the whole ordeal turned into a competition to see who could fill the inside of a whole trash bag, and even then everyone joined together to work in teams. The beach-clean up was a community event in preparation for the Grunion Festival, whereupon carnival equipment and food vendors were turned loose, high school beauty pageants held, and middling prizes raffled off. Many of us found it somewhat shortsighted that we were putting all our effort into making the town look good before the whole ordeal, instead of after. As it was, the festival put the whole town in a heightened sense of activity and tempers ran short all the way down the one main street that ran from the pacific coast inland. The town cop was being a bigger dick to dick teenagers, and the four beauty pageant queens were in cuthroat competition to build floats, bolster their support, and be highly visible for their own charity work.

Since it was down to the wire, all four girls were volunteering their last few hours, helping with the beach clean-up, each going at it with their own brand of chipper fascism. It was here I met Katrina. She was the youngest of the competing queens, very beautiful, quite fiesty and sometimes a chore. She would later develop extreme hypochondria as she grew older, and we would eventually become good friends, but at this exact moment, she was at once, headstrong, sweet and easygoing. She liked most every person she dealt with, and abstained from the gossipmongering that was so common in her clique.

She approached me during the clean-up, and wanted to know who I was and what my situation entailed. I knew right off she wasn't hitting on me, it was more of a determined curiosity. She enganged my younger sister as well, asking her just as many questions. Katrina was the only daughter of Russian immigrants in the early seventies, born on these shores, instilled with a certain anxiety and worldlook that was at odds with the rest of the local community. Perhaps this common thread was the root of a friendship, perhaps it was just that she was smart, friendly, and I gained much entertainment by working her into a frenzy. Just to clear this up, Kate was not the girl who kissed me. That was Kate's friend, Shannon, who I had met a few weeks back.

My parents wanted a night together, so they dropped my sister and I off at Small Wood Rec Center, a small, deteriorating one room building on the main drag of town. Unfortunately, that night was a young person's dance instead of the usual, casual come as you are games of foosball, pool, and scattered cartridges popped into an old nintendo system. A portly kid was the deejay, and there were eight kids making an effort, not counting my sister and I. We were standing at the entrance horrified, refusing to budge another step. A backwards glance confirmed that our ride had left for good. Janess and I made for the back where we arranged fold-up chairs in sitting positions and looked around for out-dated but readily available reading material. We could stonewall it together, if we were careful, block out the horrible spectacle playing itself out. The deejay sensed our combined resigned unease and came over to us, introduced himself while the music played itself out in the background.

His name was Jay Rose, and his aspirations in no particular order were actor, artist, and musician. He was popular in the sense that everyone liked the guy, not necessarily was he the most handsome, talented, charming person our age, but possesed a good mix of qualities that gave him confidence, most notably calm in the face of failure. He was out-going and energetic, very good at observing when people needed a solid word to pull them out of their own heads.

We never became fast friends, but always respected and kept a charitable distance from each other. We were alike in many ways, so the desire to stand apart was quite strong, and Rose was a senior so there was a natural falling out of touch after the school year was over.

Rose came up to inform me he'd kill the dance soon due to the poor turn out and instead open up the middle school gym to get a pick-up basketball game going.

Before that happened, a girl I hadn't paid much attention to came up and asked me to dance. I shrugged a confused sort of agreement and we walked out hand in hand sideways to the obvious dead zone of couples shuffling around in place ever so suggestively to the time of the beat.

She had a big grin on her face and kept her head rested on my chest for most of the dance. I wasn't really clued into the whole dating scene, and wasn't making any serious attempts at much of anything. If rumors that I was gay existed, which they probably did, I couldn't care less. My heart was actually getting nostalgic and pining for an older romance overseas, which was pesky and impossible, but still, that's where my head was. The major qualities I found attractive in a woman, outside of beauty, still eluded me in Small Wood, and I was craving something approaching serious intellect quite diligently. Shannon was not what I was looking for in the slightest, but we danced.

Jay Rose killed the thing dead and we all shuffled off to a ballgame.

End second interlude


In the immediate months following the death of his father, David Jarvis moved himself fifteen miles north and found work in a cannery. He was a frequent and noisy drunk, both on the job and off, and made few friends. His uncle had taken it upon himself to salvage the remnants of the circus, but David wanted nothing more to do with it. Jeff had the foresight to relocate the tiny operation to the new township of Cooper’s Bay, which would later become the coastal retreat of choice, due to its relative proximity to Portland, and the overwhelming and untapped natural beauty that surrounded the place.

David chose this new profession as a means to work his way onto a commercial fishing boat, an area he had no experience in, but also one where he’d have to be competing against hardened veterans who had been born into the industry, as had their still employed fathers before them.

A week after the disaster at Cliffside, while David was holed up in rented lodgings on the physical mend, he wandered out onto the beach to watch the sunset and break the silence of his self-imposed exile. He related the tale of what happened next with irregular flourishes and inventions, and my own interpretation is as such,

”I walked down to the water’s edge. It was after dark, and the moon could not be seen behind the clouds. In fact, light was hard to come by, what little of it shone was caught up in water that gleamed off the fresh tide’s edge. There was a plague of sand fleas, newly emerged to congregate and swarm upon the living and the dead. It was sitting there, after some time, that I noticed a bodily form working its way up on shore. At first I thought it to be a lone sea lion, then it stood upright. I stood and strained my eyes to see. It was a woman, naked to the world. The weather this time of year was loathe to tolerate well-bundled, so I rushed to her, so that I might cover her. The sand at night would seem to go on forever, what with the ebb and pull of the ocean, giving and taking away the surface, but eventually I got near enough to call out to her and be heard. She was in up to her navel, her arms out, dragging them along the surface. People say, I wanted to make her real again, bring her back to life. She walked out to me, her arms out for me to take her in and hold her. She was walking on two good legs. So I don’t know what to think myself, let alone explain to others. She didn’t say a word, she just stood there, the water at her knees, and I just stared back at her. I hate to say it, but a real chill crept over me, my body was telling me that this was no good, and every small hair on my body went tight. I backed away slowly, not wanting to take my eyes off her, and she just kept standing there with her hands out. Naked as she always was, for the entire world to see.”

But it was just David out there alone that night, and the only witness to the dramatic rebirth and reconfigurement of Delores Wiebe. No words were reported exchanged between the two, no real objective contact was made. It had the makings of a ghost story, and could only be dismissed or embraced as such. It was true that Delores had a younger sister, Rachel, but the two were about as different as two blood related siblings could possibly be, and a case of mistaken identity was out of the question. Rachel was married at age fifteen to the captain of a San Francisco based light cargo vessel, and was not seen in Small Wood again until her twenty-eighth year.

So it was that David spread the tale of the one-time mermaid, full-time ghost, who haunted the shores of Small Wood with frequent regularity. It was noted in public record that no one associated with Delores and her short, strange life died under irregular circumstances, nor did they report any unusual supernatural out of the ordinariness amid the everyday humdrum, nor receive any death-rattle messages from the beyond. As hauntings were reported then tallied in later years, the frequency attributed to Delores Wiebe manifestations rose. Nude young women emerging from the water silently and unexpectedly happened far more often than one might imagine.

David, while not believing Delores alive, did also not think her dead. He was a harsh realist who enjoyed storytelling and conniving a few dollars out of an unwilling victim, but almost seemed to refuse to believe his own tale when it ended and his consideration of it began. To everyone else in Small Wood, the strange report of Delores had little to no value, yet it was a curiosity that consumed David, and to the select few that knew the young man, it was more a product of his psychological grief and torment, than an actual real supernatural manifestation of the tragedy that lingered.



Third interlude

School started, the football season began, and I joined the school newspaper on a whim. While football season was a glorious disaster and worthy of further commentary later on, the newspaper whim turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me in Small Wood. I had enough distinction at writing, design, reporting and editing to fill many capacities in an understaffed, underfunded academic endeavor and help make it shine in truly successful terms. The gig also got me out and about in the town under the pretext of scooping, digging my nose in and spending more time than necessary in a school or county library. It should be noted that Katrina was a photographer for the paper, Shannon a features writer, and it was Jay Rose who pencilled the one and only comic strip, "Drift Wood", about a teenager named Wood and his yearnings to leave forever. Most of my friendships in Small Wood were forged out of that classroom and the late nights that I learned to manage myself and others, finding an escape from the spotlight of athletics.

From that very first day, I took to the newspaper with a passion. I'd write my stories on bus rides to and fro football games with headphones on, and ask just enough questions to get plenty of dirty looks and sideways glances. I enjoyed the itching sensation from when a good idea gnawed at me, and the pressure of a deadline sawed through any mental laziness that accumulated over the course of a week. Writing kept me honest and sane I discovered, as there was a good deal of dishonesty and insanity going around.

It was no big secret that Shannon had a thing for me, but I brushed her aside and all but ignored her. I did not and still do not enjoy hurting the feelings of others, but I was young and dumb and made the mistake of trying to have it both ways and be a nice guy. Within a week of her writing notes, having friends relay vague come-ons and hints, I figured she'd moved on. Hell, I saw her riding shotgun on Derek's arm and was instantly relieved and thought nothing more on the matter until her lips found mine.

So she kissed me and I might have kissed back a little. It was sensation and it was good, but my head knew better and I started talking and that sure did the trick. She was tears and bitter anger, and she quietly exploded on me. I just stood there silent while she lashed into me and it sure enough hurt, but there was something about her and the situation that made me numb. I did not understand her feelings, and all I could give back in return were looks of confusion. Up to this point, I was not passionate about girls at all, save for summer time romances, vacation liasons and bookstore glances. I was cold and insensitive for the most part. I was permanently nice and curious and could listen to them talk for hours, but when it came to giving, I didn't know what it was I could offer. I wanted so much that teenage girl presence in my life, that female half that was more wise and connected than my own twitcy male uncomfortable in my own skin nonsense, and I took advantage of their friendships because I saw them as good people I wanted in my life.

I suppose the reason I kept a tangible thread alive and well between us was because I didn't know that many people, and while I didn't have passionate longings for Shannon, she was decent company and I very much valued that in a human being. I couldn't explain my position in regards to her, so I did my best to stand there and let the backlash wash over me. The guilt I was feeling for hurting her was replaced by my anger for her own seething resentment. It was unfair, and while I understood it, it deeply hurt. Derek was a teammate, I was the new kid, and I got my ass a little kicked on the playing field by him and his friends. I suppose I welcomed that, playing the part of the whipping boy, to assail my own guilt. Nothing got broken or beat up too bad, but a little penance went a long way. One day harsh words were exchanged, and when it came to baritone ball-shaking bravado, I unleashed the honest truth and my godawful rage. Teenage angst if left unchecked, explodes, just like every other goddamn adolscent emotion. No short fuses, all or nothing.

End third interlude


Disappearances occur at a higher than normal percentile in towns such as Small Wood. Firstly, they get noticed as it is hard not to notice the absence when everyone knows, or knows of, everyone else. Second, the rural quality of life is a warm blanket that can both comfort and smother. When someone wants to vanish, it is very simple to do. Third, small towns put up the front of being a lone beacon of light amid so much darkness. At once, people flock together for company and distance themselves just so. This duality of small town existence is a fragile and carefully designed thing. And finally, the most very sad and true fact about a person who disappears off the face of the map is that they are most often never heard from again. There are always exceptions, as people are so prone to prove.

A girl by the name of Gloria Bryant was last seen tending to chickens in a coop outside her room. Because of the unusual nature of the disappearance, and the fact that she appeared to be a content young woman of the era, foul play was immediately suspected. In truth, she had absconded with David Jarvis to his small one-bedroom home. They lived in sin for four days, enjoying each other in as many ways possible. Gloria laid low in the home, tending to small inside chores and errands, and waited for David in the evenings. The hammer fell when David revealed to the girl that he really had no feelings for her, and was not looking forward to the prospect of marriage or the remotest possibility of commitment. Jarvis made the mistake of giving the girl too much credit. She showed a casual disdain for most men, and David figured she'd tire of him as quick as he tired of her. He was wrong.

Gloria was found by the side of the road, beaten and dishevelled. Her rescueer was a travelling minister by the name of Cook. Him and his wife tended to her cuts and bruises and delivered her into the safekeeping of her parents. Gloria was the victim of a horrible crime, an inhuman monster. She played like she had never met Jarvis before, though several citizens had seen the two trysting together previous. Her act worked, and her description of the rapist yielded a warrant for the arrest of David Jarvis.

Jarvis caught wind of the lynch mob headed his way, and managed to get as far as the port authority before a group manacled him and beat him to death. His body was delivered to the water and that was his burial.

But there is a further wrinkle to this narrative that begins like this. David Jarvis was at once, both reported killed in 1910, and working as a fisherman later that year. Unusual consistencies such as this showed up time and time again in Small Wood records. The town population hovered at around a thousand since the first official census. The article included the testimony of one David Jarvis, interviewed by an out of town paper covering the damming of the Shohshan River. I've summed up as follows,

"The fish will die, the industry will die, and finally the very town itself will die. If this action goes forward, there is nothing nobody can do to stop it. Those of us who still have voices are coming forward to say what needs to be said."

It is not known when or where the interview happened exactly, if the person claiming to be David Jarvis changed his name to protect his identity, or as some altogether cruel joke, but the words were writ in print and stamped with a date. If it was an anomoly, it was a curious one. If it was more than that, it was as if the boy afraid to cry wolf became just that.