Dead Fish Wind

By Cooper Levey-Baker

Cicely works to support a deadbeat father in a town stricken with a catastrophic outbreak of red tide. But then Cicely starts dreaming of a way out of her predicament through a scheme involving stolen placentas and an outlaw doula.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madville Publishing
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781948692755

Book preview

Part One

1.

Dead fish had been washing up on the beach off and on for years, but Cicely had never seen anything like this: dead fish everywhere. The bodies floated in on the crests of the gulf’s small, foam-filled waves and piled up along the water’s edge. Mucus bubbled up between the fish’s gills as the waves knocked the corpses farther and farther up the beach, leaving them to bake in the punishing sunshine. Cicely could see the final limp kicks of the few fish still living, twisting in pain. As the final holdouts dropped from this life, one by one, the stacks of fish grew still.

The air stung. It felt like Cicely’s eyes were being rubbed with sandpaper. Her whole face grew wet with tears. The stench from the dead fish crawled up inside her and scratched.

Up and down the beach, people fled. Teenagers squeezed their noses shut as they packed up their coolers and towels and bolted for the parking lot. A gray-haired woman launched a hacking cough as she waddled away from the water.

Cicely wanted to stay, wanted to reread her mother’s letter again, but every line became a blurry mess. She slipped the pages back into the envelope in which it came, the envelope her mother had addressed to her at work. Cicely hadn’t seen or spoken to her in more than a decade—how had she known where she worked? The city in the upper left hand corner, Orlando, at least gave Cicely something to go by, a place to write to. But the PO box told her that her mother didn’t want her to find her. Or maybe she just didn’t want Cicely’s father to find her.

She folded the envelope in half and squeezed it into the back left pocket of her jeans. Sand clung to her legs as she ambled between the dunes, back to the path that wound through the mangroves that clustered between the beach and the bridge, the bridge near home. She wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her green men’s button-down shirt. What would she tell her father she had been doing down at the beach? It wasn’t like her to slip away without telling him. She couldn’t mention the letter—he would insist on reading it. But it was hers; it belonged to her.

The mangroves offered respite from the ludicrous heat. A hush fell as she traced the path among their shadows. Kids sneaked back here to have sex, and every now and then she saw an empty beer bottle or a discarded condom sunk into the wet sand. Back here, away from the beach, closer to the bay side of the island, she could still smell the dead fish, but the stench wasn’t as sharp. Her path cut underneath the bridge that connected the Circle to the island to the north, where she and her father lived.

What did her mother look like? Cicely had no photos of her— those had all been lost the last time she and her father had been evicted—but Cicely could still summon the details of one taken in their old backyard. In that shot, her mother rested in a tire swing, her feet dangling down almost all the way to neat, freshly chopped grass. The high, curled blond hair, the freckled cheeks, the big shoulders—Cicely remembered all that. But her expression? Was her mother smiling in that photo? Cicely did not know.

She stepped over the battered-down No Trespassing fence that circled her lot. The home stood two stories tall, unfinished and still wrapped in plastic, with hollow spots for doors and windows. The man downtown who owned the property was known to his tenants simply as the Owner. According to the story Cicely heard, when everything collapsed, he bought up all the abandoned half-built homes in the area and started illegally renting them out. Cicely’s friend Delanna—who also rented from the Owner—had once pointed out the skyscraper that was supposedly his, but neither of them had ever seen him. Cicely dealt only with one of his lieutenants, known for his red bandanna and the baby blue box cutter he wore in his belt. He drove around to all the homes at the start of each month to collect the rent.

The rent. The surprise of her mother’s letter had made her forget about it. Cicely’s father lived with her, but she alone paid their way. For a couple years, Cicely never missed a payment, but last month she caught strep throat and the walk-in clinic had sucked up most of her savings. Now she owed for last month, plus this month, plus interest—almost a thousand dollars. She had no clue how she’d get the cash in the next ten days, before the man with the box cutter was due to drop in again, and she didn’t know what to expect if she couldn’t come up with the loot. Delanna told her tales about what happened to tenants in arrears. First, they paid interest. Then, if they still couldn’t pay, it wasn’t enough to just kick them out—they were beaten bloody and told to leave town.

Cicely entered the house through the hole where the double doors were supposed to hang. The room that was intended to be the parlor sat mostly bare. The foundation had been covered only halfway with tile, but Cicely had stolen a tarp from a nearby construction site and used it to cover the bare concrete, weighing it down at each corner with bricks, also stolen. The only furniture were their two chairs, empty. Cicely was perplexed. Had her father actually gone to the VFW to see if someone there might help them with the rent? Cicely had asked him to do so several times, but he never agreed. She felt a surge of relief. She didn’t have to hide the letter from him, for now, and maybe, for the first time in years, it wouldn’t be on her to find a solution to their problems.

In the bathroom, Cicely splashed water from a bucket onto her face. Even inside the house she could smell the dead fish from the beach, but the pain in her eyes had subsided and her throat no longer itched. She poured a glass of water from another bucket and gulped it down. She checked her watch. She needed to go to work.

2.

The sun was dissolving into pink evening stripes by the time she stepped off the bus, and her shadow stretched way out in front of her, tickling the pitted pavement of the parking lot that sprawled between her and the dance hall where she worked. Built decades ago, the hall predated the retention pond that flanked it, not to mention the Interstate that passed by just to the east. It had once been surrounded by pines and dwarf oaks, but all that was gone now. Back when the hall was built, this area was a separate town from the downtown near the beach, but over the years the county slashed more and more east-west corridors into the woods, and then the Interstate replaced the train tracks, and in what felt like an instant the two town centers bled out toward each other, forming one long, low, concrete mass of subdivisions and shopping centers. The hall—once the site of sock hops, Easter picnics, political rallies—lost the town center it served, and was shuttered for decades. But an investor, the son of a former mayor, had come along a few years ago and restored it. The venue became an instant hit—part concert hall, part city hall, part titty bar, part rec center. Everyone went there, and everything happened there—bake sales, handshake deals, burlesque shows. The same investor who spruced up the hall also paid to construct the towering sign that Cicely now walked toward—a neon-animated outline of a woman lifting up her skirt, with a bright red tongue flashing between her legs.

The bouncer nodded as she walked in the back door. Inside, she heard the music of the evening’s first act—soft and dreamy, a muffled digital beat submerged beneath warm synthesizers and arpeggiated guitar chords. A female singer cooed. The music was fuzzy; it seemed to crawl through the hall, poking into corners and settling into the grooves of the walls and rafters. It wasn’t loud, but it filled space.

Cicely poked her head out through one of the side curtains. The singer’s face was unfamiliar. Her dress looked like it was made out of a thousand pearl coins, and it rattled when she shook her hips.

The stage had been built for the big brass bands popular decades ago, and it dwarfed the singer, who was backed by a tight tuxedo-clad trio. Lights hanging from the ceiling filled the air with a woozy blue light. Only a few of the tables at the foot of the stage were full—it was early still. A pair of servers, each of them topless, dressed in nothing but black, low-slung tights and heels, brought Mai Tais, the house cocktail, to the men sitting up close. The men stared at the singer, transfixed. One mouthed the words she was singing. Like the singer’s face, the faces down front were unfamiliar to Cicely. Had the singer brought them out? Did they know her from some other venue?

Cicely walked back to the dressing room, where she found Delanna, who started as a server on the same day as Cicely a few years back, and Hilda, another server. Delanna nodded when Cicely came in; she was in the middle of telling Hilda a story about her boyfriend.

… been hurting him for weeks, so he finally goes to the doctor. The doctor says it’s clogged up and needs to get cleaned out. This assistant comes in with this little water sprayer and starts shooting it into his ear. Delanna leaned into her mirror and streaked her eyelashes with mascara. So he’s already freaking out, because he says it feels like his brain is getting soaked, when, no joke, the assistant looks down in the bowl where all this gunk from his ear is collecting and sees this little worm-thing, this parasite, wiggling. Delanna rubbed the edge of her eyes with a pinkie and laughed. So she starts freaking out. He’s freaking out. God what a scene. She twisted her mascara brush back into its tube.

So what was it? Hilda asked. Still new to the job, Hilda always arrived a half-hour early and was ready for her shift well before everyone else. She had already taken off her top. Her breasts curved outward; the nipples pointed away from her body. Delanna’s, meanwhile, sat upright. Her areolae stared at Cicely.

Delanna shrugged. They wanted to do a follow-up, but we can’t afford that.

Hilda shook her head—Fucked up, she said—and walked out the door, down the hallway that led to the hall floor. Now that the sun was setting, the venue would start filling up with the customers the women were happiest to see—the businessmen and politicians entertaining clients and benefactors. They tipped too much and drove up prices for the rest of the room.

Cicely wiggled out of her jeans and grabbed a pair of black tights from a rack loaded with them. Those stories about being late with the Owner, that’s bullshit, right? The gentle murmur of the singer floated through the walls.

Delanna was putting on lipstick. I hear bad things.

Cicely hopped up and down to get the tights over her hips. As she picked up her jeans from the floor, her mother’s letter fell out of the back pocket. She hid it in her cubby before Delanna could ask. Every month, Cicely said, it just feels like I can never catch up. She never talked money with Delanna, had never told her much about her father, but desperation made bringing up the topic less awkward. She had taken the job at the dance hall thinking it would pay well, but it never did. Her father—if only he would help. The honest part of her told her she was stupid for thinking he might have actually gone to the VFW today. He probably spent the day wasting what little money she had managed to save. Cicely slumped into a chair and started doing her makeup, too. If Delanna heard what Cicely said, she didn’t show it.

The song onstage came to an end. Sparse but enthusiastic applause burst out. Someone turned on the house music. The singer brushed into the dressing room, out of breath and covered in sweat. She guzzled a glass of water and slipped the straps of her tight dress from her shoulders. Even without the straps, the dress gripped her lithe body. The singer stood a head taller than Cicely, with a bush of curly silver hair that shot out from her scalp, but she wasn’t old—maybe thirty, Cicely guessed. Her wrists looked delicate, but her upper arms swelled with a toned heft. As the singer kicked off her heels, Cicely caught a glimpse of the fine hairs that had just begun to show on her thighs. The singer downed a second glass of water and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. She unleashed a pent-up sigh.

Delanna stood up. Nice show.

The singer reached out and cupped Delanna’s right breast. You too. Her voice offstage sounded deep and beaten, so unlike the feathery sound she projected with her band. She had an accent, too, something glottalic, but Cicely couldn’t place it. Goosebumps rose along Cicely’s forearms. Who was this stranger?

The singer took her hand from Delanna’s breast and turned to Cicely. You?

Cicely looked down at her own chest. She was still wearing her green men’s shirt.

I don’t think they’ll let you out there like that, the singer said. She turned her back to Cicely and Delanna and began to wiggle out of her dress, which fit so tightly the top seam left a bright red horizontal line along her back, just below her shoulder blades. She wasn’t wearing a bra, just white panties, and when she turned around, Cicely could see her dark nest of pubic hair through the fabric. A faint scar cut vertically up her side, just above the elastic waist of her underwear. Cicely looked from the scar to the singer’s eyes, which had been watching her.

Delanna opened her eyes wide and looked back and forth from Cicely to the singer. Fucking weirdos, she said, turning to leave.

Cicely hurried after Delanna, unbuttoning her shirt as she walked down the hallway and out to the floor. Before the door to the dressing room closed behind her, she looked back one last time. The singer was lighting a cigarette, staring right at her, as the door closed from left to right, disappearing her inch by inch—arm, bosom, chin, neck, shoulder, arm—till it landed in its frame with a thud. A puff of the singer’s smoke hung in front of the closed door for a moment, then dispersed.

And then the men began calling for their Mai Tais, and Cicely’s shift began.

The crowd stood up for the evening’s main act, a reggae cover band. Some danced; most simply talked more loudly. A customer spilled sticky liquor down Cicely’s back. The bouncer threw out three men: two had started fighting and the third was recording the scene with his cell phone.

The air-conditioning kept the hall frigid and dry, and by the end of the night Cicely’s nipples were so sore they felt bruised. She shivered as she walked back to the dressing room to put on her shirt and jeans. The singer had vanished. Did any of the other girls know her? She’d ask tomorrow. Now, like always at the end of a shift, she just wanted out.

After changing, she counted the night’s money: forty bucks, minus the ten the hall deducted for the two Styrofoam containers of food she brought home. Her haul was paltry compared to Delanna’s. Cicely just pretended to be friendly with the customers; Delanna actually cared about her tables having a good time, pausing to flirt with the rich old guys and sitting in their laps if they begged enough. Did she feel their erections? The thought made Cicely shudder. She slipped her thirty remaining dollars into the envelope with her mother’s letter and stepped from the dressing room out into the hot, clammy night, hoping the bus driver wouldn’t be playing a movie. But her heart sank when she saw the idling bus. Light from the TV on board strobed out into the street. The screen was so big, so violently colorful, and the driver had cranked the sound up so high she could already hear the jokes and the farting noises as she walked across the parking lot. She had already seen parts of tonight’s movie—Famous Anus—on previous trips. Through the windows of the bus, she could see passengers laughing uproariously. She stepped up into the vehicle, crestfallen, almost unable to bear the prospect of having to endure the ride home.

The bus—its few remaining passengers still chuckling at the movie—dropped her off at the foot of the bridge that arched from downtown to the Circle. A gust of dead fish smell hit her in the face. The wind blew strong enough to bend the palm trees in half, and with each whip of air, she coughed a little. Out by the hall, where the smell had not yet reached, she