Thom Conroy

MERMAIDS OF PERKIOMEN CREEK

For one winter season twenty years ago, Paul Lerver’s dad worked lights during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this light he made could not be explained. Paul tells it like this: act 2 opens in the woods; stage is moonless black. Three a.m., wool-over-your-eyes black. But the audience sees. In the darkness of the theater, Paul’s dad had found a light to make the dark shine like clean black shoes. The audience could see the fairies’ faces. Could see Puck’s earring, twinkling.

     When the house lights came up, the audience crowded the doors, pushing each other to get a look at the moon’s honest face, though they knew it wouldn’t compare, because the moon is a rock in the sky, and stones and air don’t take faith.

     The way Paul tells it, you’d expect that the story ends with his father moving the family to Broadway and winning political office. Or at least you’d guess his dad had escaped scot-free, withdrawing some miracle from life and keeping it in the past, where he stays immortal.

     Truth is, Paul’s dad lives at 477-b, a duplex on Kelly Lane in Parkersburg. He drives a bakery truck thirty miles a day. Paul visits when he can, but he has a hard time keeping his dad’s schedule straight. Last time he made the drive, his father was out, so Paul left a note. Missed you, it said.

These days, in the back room of Paul and Brenda’s Video, Paul churns out his own sunshine. For eight dollars a half-hour, he’ll be your solar deity. In the dark of winter, he’ll lay you down in an eight-foot coffin of ultraviolet bulbs, and you will emerge sweaty and darker than you were before.

     Truth is, the tanning bed was Brenda’s brainchild. Two years ago, the video business was touch and go, almost gone. So awful Paul and Brenda talked about closing up. Maybe they’d move to Cleveland and buy a gas station up there.

     Then one day, the middle of last January, Brenda sees a woman wearing short sleeves in the dairy aisle, arms white enough to be behind the freezer’s glass. And Brenda’s inspired. She orders the Solalux, state of the art in tanning: built-in dehumidifier, digital temperature control, swipe-easy plastic for fast cleanup. By last May, though, Brenda was done with Paul and Salfield for good. She moved back home to Pennsylvania, but the Solalux stayed.

     Now Paul’s Solalux is the only tanning bed within twenty-five miles, and with summer coming, it’s booked solid—six and a half hours a day, five and a half days a week. The women who live in the trailers along the Perkiomen Creek crowd the aisles of Paul and Brenda’s Video, waiting for an opening because they know that women with appointments will cancel. They understand how it is. If you look closely, you will see a bruise on one’s shoulder.

     Paul knows that these women who come in to change the color of their skin have nowhere to go, so he talks to them. What he wants to say is that one season, twenty years ago, his dad did lights at the Salfield Theater, but he knows these women don’t care about the Salfield Theater or his father’s miracle of light, so he ends one version of his story with a car wreck, his dad walking away. He recycles hunting-trip murders that they’ve already heard. In one version, his dad gets it twice in the back at close range.

     If you asked, Paul would tell you it doesn’t matter so much what he says, as long as the lips and teeth stay moving. Since Brenda’s been gone, what he wants are words instead of thoughts. And sleep.

     Paul’s an insomniac. It makes him tired, but it sets him apart. What happens every night is this: Paul falls into bed, sleeps three, four hours, then rises to the verge of consciousness and dreams dreams that come like ants at a picnic. In these dreams, he alphabetizes videos, scrubs the Solalux with citrus-scented cleaning spray, and listens to the women talking about failed transmissions and the locks changed on trailer doors.

     Sometimes he dreams his waking day, almost exact. Then he wakes, thinking yesterday was something that happened in his sleep. Going on a year, it’s been like this. Waking and dreams, dreams, waking, washed one into the other until he’s come to doubt that line between.

This morning it’s only three-thirty when Paul opens his eyes, but he puts on coffee because he knows that sleeping is past for the night. The moon is three-quarters full, and he can see the fields across Bartlett Road sloping down to where Beech Marsh Trailer Park used to be. Until last November, the music from Beech Marsh could wake him up, too. Some nights they didn’t turn it off until four, five in the morning.

     One night before last Thanksgiving, Paul walked out onto his porch and saw fire climbing into the trees. He didn’t call the fire company or jump into his pickup and try to be the first on the scene. What he did is nothing, sat on his porch in a lawn chair, watching the fire the way you look at clouds, the way you admire art or stare at a rebuilt engine.

     That day at the store, the fire was not a story Paul told to the women waiting for the Solalux. Paul talked, sure. Maybe he told them about Billy Bishop, a first-grader he still remembers. He told them that Billy had bright red hair, wore orthopedic shoes. During recess, Billy’d spin in circles so fast he’d get dizzy and fall down on the asphalt and just lay there as if he were sleeping.

     But the fire in the Beech Marsh Trailer Park, its flames blooming orange and vapory blue above the trees? One of the women asked him, Don’t you live right across from that trailer park? The one burned down?

     Paul said he did.

     Well, were you home when it happened?

     Paul had never considered this question. No, he said. I wasn’t home.

When they tell stories, these women who live along the Perkiomen Creek talk shotguns and sewer lines. They drink it straight, take it on the cuff. Bury their own dead.

     Paul likes the younger ones. Women less practiced in their savagery, like Alisa Torento. Alisa’s the most beautiful woman Paul’s ever seen. Her face in his head makes him sweat, but it’s also the way she lays him down to sleep. This past winter, he tried to tell her what he felt, that in his dreams she smelled like coconut but that he didn’t mind that at all. Instead, what he did is stare at eyelids dark and oily as caramels.

     Last week, he tried giving her a coupon for free tanning.

     “How many sessions?” Alisa asked. Paul shrugged. One lifetime, at least, and when that was over, they could see where they stood.

     “Why?” she said. It’s what she always said.

     “You’re my best customer.”

     Alisa laid the coupon back in Paul’s palm. “You want to lose your best customer’s money?”

     Today, when she comes in for her appointment, Alisa’s skin looks so dark her white jumper glows as if it were lit by the moon. You cut her open, her insides would be terra-cotta. The sight of her is something Paul feels in his stomach, and later, in his legs.

     Every week, a hairy man in a gold Duster drops Alisa off. Before she can open the door to the video store, this man’s got his foot on the gas. By the time she’s inside, the gold Duster is out of sight, the hairy man’s gone for the half hour that Paul will spend with Alisa.

     Before Alisa makes it to the tanning room, Paul says, “Wait.”

     “Why?”

     “It isn’t clean,” is what Paul says. “The bed.”

     While Paul leans over the Solalux, spraying the citrus-scented cleaning solution on the clean plastic, Alisa sits in the folding chair behind him. “You run one lousy business,” she says, and then she makes a sound, half laugh, half threat. It’s strong as salt, but desperate, too. The laugh of street punks.

     When he hears this laugh, Paul thinks of the man who speeds away in the gold Duster, and he doesn’t want to know what Alisa might say next. So he talks instead. “Want to hear how red toenails changed my life?”

     “Sure,” Alisa says. “I really need to hear this.”

     “My dad did lights at the Salfield Theater. I was a stagehand. I fetched cokes, picked up litter, washed the sweaty capes and tights. One night, this girl, Cathy is her name—she’s maybe twenty at the time—she follows me down to the basement where I’m doing laundry and sits on the dryer. She’s wearing knee-high boots, and she takes them off right there in front of me.”

     “Is the bed clean yet?” Alisa says. Paul puts one arm behind him, hushing her.

     “Listen,” he says. “She’s wearing these nylons, and underneath them, I can see her toenails. God, were they red. And that’s how red toenails changed my life.”

     “Who was this girl?” Alisa says.

     “Some local girl. I’ve never seen her since.”

     “Maybe you frightened her away.” Paul turns around, sees Alisa stepping out of her jumper. “It’s a bikini,” she says. “Ever seen one?”

     Alisa guides him out of the way and takes her place on the Solalux. She says, “You look like shit, you know that.”

     Paul would like for Alisa to understand that he’s traced his flight of innocence just now. He told it just like it was: boy meets toenails, and his youth is gone. Up in steam.

     “I bet it’s the radiation,” Alisa says.

     “It’s you,” Paul says. “All of you women who come in here.”

     “Like which ones?”

     Except for Alisa’s, no name comes to Paul’s mind until later, when he’s wiping her sweat off the Solalux, inhaling it along with the citrus-scented cleaning spray. “Laurel Brandley” is the name he says to himself. And this is true. Paul and Brenda’s Video takes up the middle third of a mini strip mall. Mornings when he pulls into the parking lot, Paul still notices the plywood that covers the storefront next to his.

     The left side was empty when Paul moved in, but there used to be a tobacco store on the right. Laurel Brandley, the proprietor, took Jesus into her heart and the two of them set off north up Route 33. One Monday, Paul came to work and found the windows boarded.

     A month before she left, Laurel came in for a tanning session. When she came out of the back room, she and Paul got to talking. She told him people let the important days slip by. Grandparent’s Day, for one. Flag Day, that’s another.

     He told her about what else people forget. He said, “We didn’t always have the highway.” It looked like Laurel was listening, so Paul leaned across the counter and kept going. He told Laurel how it used to be that if you wanted to get to the Salfield Theater, six miles outside of town, you crossed the Perkiomen Creek. Crossed it back and forth like a stitch. He knows because, for one season, twenty years ago, his dad did lights out there.

     First time Paul went out there with his dad was winter. Paul could see holes where the water ran under the ice. “You see those holes?” his dad would say. “Mermaids travel from the sea and come up through those holes.”

     When Laurel asked, “Where is he now?” Paul didn’t answer. A Bette Midler movie was playing in the background, and he remembers just standing there, listening to Bette talking, not to the words, but to her honest-sounding voice, and he could tell that whatever she was saying, you were supposed to care.

     Paul nearly told Laurel the truth. But at the last second, he moved one palm over the other like the one was taking off, headed up and up to bluer skies.

When Paul pulls up to the store at ten after nine the next Monday, Alisa is waiting. She’s wearing skin and denim. No sign of the gold Duster. She says, “My appointment was nine.”

     “It’s a long drive,” Paul says. He unlocks the door, flips over the Closed sign.

     Alisa pushes past him, grazing his back as she passes. She says, “Is the bed clean this time?”

     “I’ll turn it on for you,” Paul says. But Alisa opens the door to the tanning room, shuts it behind her. Paul follows, opens the door, and sees Alisa sitting on the folding chair, her sandals dangling on her feet. She watches Paul watch each sandal drop.

     Barefoot, she says, “No bikini today.”

     Paul walks out of the room, closes the door, and he’s facing the Action section of the store. What he picks out is Die Hard. This is the second time he’s put it in, and he still doesn’t know how it ends. But there’s Die Harder, so that’s a clue. Paul’s no film buff. He couldn’t name the classics for you. Like the Solalux, the videos were Brenda’s idea.

     Half hour into the movie, the door to the tanning room opens and Alisa emerges, face pink as it would be after a jog. Paul reaches for the volume on his TV. When he turns around, there’s eight bucks next to the register. No thanks, no regrets.

     Paul walks to the window. Alisa’s standing at the edge of the building where he can’t see her. She’s waiting and so is Paul. Together, they are waiting for the gold Duster. Couple minutes pass and nothing happens except what’s on the screen. The bad guys are in the building, bomb ticking. Outside, fbi. Paul has seen enough movies to know what’s coming. The odds are on the way up.

     The phone rings. On the other end, Sherry Malcolm, who’s ten minutes late for her session—or a voice that sounds like hers would if you beat it with a hammer. Sherry’s talking like a kidnap victim.

     “Can’t make it,” she says.

     “You okay?” Paul says.

     “No,” Sherry says. “Bus ran me over. I’m fine. I’m okay. See you next week.”

     Now Alisa’s leaning up against the window outside, jean jacket slung over her shoulder. Paul flicks off Die Hard, shuts down the register. There are two openings before lunch, no one waiting in the store. He turns over the Open sign, locks the front door, says, “I’m stepping out. Need a ride?”

     “I’ve got a ride,” Alisa says. Paul starts up his car anyway, and when he puts it in reverse, Alisa’s standing by the passenger door. She says, “I live on Feltgoose Road. Down at the end.”

     When they get out onto Route 14, Alisa lights up a cigarette without asking. Paul comes to a rolling stop at a sign. He says, “Guess he didn’t show.”

     Alisa lets out the Torento laugh, drops her cigarette into the wind. “Guess not.”

     “I wonder what kind of man does that.”

     “Does what?”

     “Leaves you high and dry.”

     “You know what I wonder,” Alisa says. She’s on to her next cigarette already. “I wonder what kind of man owns a tanning bed.”

Paul’s dad once made the most perfect light Salfield, Ohio, has ever seen. Now, twenty years later, that light is gone. Like no one had ever noticed. Gone. My God, don’t they see? But how can he expect these women to understand? What is this light to women whose stories end with hiding a tire jack, with the vow to live like ants, bone on the outside, soft spots so deep you’d have to kill them to get a look?

     So Paul’s past changes from customer to customer. One day, he added a tornado to it. The day of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s last performance, Salfield became stormy. Dark like the end of the world, Paul told the women in his store that day.

     Paul told them how he stood in the back of the ticket office watching cars fill the lot. And this much was true. But he made up the gathering clouds pointed earthward like the roof of a cave. He did climb the catwalk to see the show, but in the version he told these women, he said he could hear the thunder from up there. He said the house lights dimmed, and the windows were flashing.

     Then he told them how act 2 opened and his dad made the darkness glow just like it always had. Below Paul, the audience gasped. Up on the catwalk, Paul scanned the rafters and thought he’d find the secret: a hidden bulb reflected in a mirror, a string of Christmas lights. But there really was nothing to see. From where he sat, Paul could make out all the lights, and every one was off. In that dark, he could look down at the stage and see Cathy’s eyes. He could see the sequins glittering in her cape. He still can see the pinpoints of lights in her sequins.

     But the women turned on him, midstory. What about the tornado? they wanted to know. Were the roof nails sucked into the sky? Tell us about people spiraling heavenward like confetti.

     Everything is sinister, Paul told them, and no one survives.

Next Monday, eleven a.m., last appointment before lunch, is Alisa Torento all over again. Today a woman in a white minivan drops her off. Alisa walks in the door wearing a yellow two-piece, short skirt fanning out like a beach umbrella. She leans over the counter like she could be moving in for a kiss, but a foot from Paul’s face, she says, “You insured?”

     He says, “Everything except acts of God. Otherwise, I’m covered.”

     “Good,” Alisa says. “I was just talking to a friend about this tanning stuff.”

     Paul turns down the volume on a game show he’s watching, says, “So?”

     “So she tells me the radiation will kill you. If you’re insured, I can sue when I get cancer.”

     Paul watches Alisa walk into the tanning room, and he sees her looking up at the circular mirror on the ceiling, watching him back. The door to the tanning room bounces against its frame, creaks ajar. In the one-inch gap of the door, yellow flutters.

     Ten minutes before Paul’s expecting the bell on the Solalux to ding, he hears its hinges creak. The floor thuds with bare feet. From behind the counter, he says, “I didn’t hear the bell.”

     Alisa’s voice sounds wrong when she answers. She sounds like she could be sleepy. At the door to the tanning room, Paul says, “You okay?” Instead of an answer, he hears the jerky breath that comes from dressing quickly. The floor creaks. The hot plastic of the bed pings.

     What Paul sees when he pushes open the door is Alisa’s brown legs, then her yellow skirt, then the dark brown of her stomach. Above this, a white sports bra. Above this, Alisa’s face, wet-cheeked, unfamiliar.

     “The temperature’s too high,” Alisa says. The space between her nose and her lips is wet, and she wipes at it with the yellow shirt in her hand. “I swear you’re trying to kill me.”

     Alisa tries to jump-start the Torento laugh, but it comes out like a white lie. Paul thinks Alisa’s eyes are shallow as two drops. He says, “What’s wrong?”

     “Lots of things.”

     “Like what?”

     “Like you trying to kill me.” Alisa shoves her face into her shirt.

     “What about that guy in the gold Duster?”

     Alisa’s head pushes up through her shirt, and she says, “What do you want to know? That he was an asshole? He was an asshole, okay. And now I’m waiting for the next one.” Alisa’s voice breaks, but she smirks at the sound of it.

     Paul is crouched on the floor like Alisa’s still sitting there. Like she’s still got tears on her cheeks. Paul says, “Wait,” but Alisa is halfway across the room. She’s got her shirt on and her sandals in her hand.

That night, Paul sits on his porch. He’s got Alisa in his head. Her legs, himself in her pupils. His backbone must be solid as a milkweed. Show him the human heart split open, its pain caught in the center, shaky like a moth, and he closes his eyes. Could it be the lack of sleep?

     But what could he have said to Alisa? It’s not like he could have asked her to dinner. But he could say something. Here was a woman hard as a packed acre of beach, and he’d seen tears on her face.

     He’d seen her slip. What she needed to know was whether he could be trusted, and Paul doesn’t know the answer to this himself. He thinks of what he told Laurel Brandley. Who is the man in the stories he tells about his father? Who is the man who dies, rises up from the flames, runs for the border with twenty-year-old Cathy?

Next week, when Alisa comes in for her appointment, Paul says, “Can I tell you something?”

     Alisa shrugs. Touches the collar on her jean jacket to make sure it’s standing.

     Paul says, “I saw the Beech Marsh fire. I sat on my porch and I watched it burn down. I heard trees falling through the trailers. I saw the whole thing. I kept my light off so no one would know I was watching.”

     Paul waits to hear what Alisa will say, but for once she’s quiet. She doesn’t ask why. It could be she doesn’t want to know.

     “It was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” Paul says. “The fire made a sound like something was breaking through the trees, like an army. It was beautiful. I bet I’ll die and never see anything like that again.”

     Alisa backs away from Paul as if he were a dog she thought was friendly. While she’s back in the tanning room, Paul doesn’t turn on the TV. He sits at the counter, looking out at the empty parking lot and the trucks passing on the street.

     Half hour later, Alisa walks out, slaps a ten on the counter. She says, “Your story really broke me up. Really killed me.” She does a hand-to-heart stumble backward, like she’s been hit. Tops it off with her half-laugh, hacking it out of herself like smoke.

     Paul puts two dollars in her hand and feels her palm through the paper. He says, “You got a ride today?”

     Alisa pockets the change, says, “I’ll walk.”

     “Six miles?”

     Alisa says, “You don’t think I’ll make it?” and then she’s gone.

That night Paul sits on his porch, pouring an ice-cold one into a long-neck beer glass. Top of the glass opens like a lily. When she lived with him, Brenda always used this glass.

     A few hours later, Paul lays himself down to sleep, and he dreams that he tries to tell the women in the store about his father’s light but ends up with a sawed-off shotgun in the trunk. Then he opens his eyes, and the sun’s rising behind the trees where Beech Marsh Trailer Park used to be. From his porch, it looks like people never lived down there. Paul sits there, drinking coffee, cup after cup, until he sees a car’s brake lights slowing down at the driveway to Beech Marsh. And who’s in this car? Someone who hasn’t got the news?

     The car drives down to the debris, turns around, and stops at Paul’s place to ask what’s happened. Goodness, one of the women in the car says, was there a fire?

     But Paul doesn’t say one word. He drinks his coffee, wondering what story to tell. He could say they’ve got their roads mixed up, point them back toward Route 33 and have them headed north on the heels of Laura Brandley and Jesus. Or he could shrug, say this is how he found his neighbors when he moved in. Must have been some blaze, but he’s not sure. Say it gave him the creeps at first, but now he’s used to it. Say the sight of ash and burned-out cars seems like home.

     Or Paul can keep his secret the way Alisa does. He can let lost strangers do what they please. Scream two inches from his temples, bat his cheek like they slap newborns, treat him like a man who’s sleeping off a coma.

     But he’ll keep his voice locked up like a jewel.

                If they ask, “Are you deaf, dumb?” he’ll have nothing to say. Story in his mouth like a wet stone, he’ll swallow.