Marse’s little boat rocked on the waves, its lines tautening and slackening. “Yes,” I said.
Dennis jumped up and stepped onto the big boat—this was his father’s boat, a twenty-one-foot Chris Craft Cavalier with a lapstrake hull—then returned with fins and masks and snorkels. “Marse?” he said, holding out the gear.
She sat up on her elbows and propped her sunglasses on her head. Dennis’s eyes slid over her long body. She shook her head. “Fish freak me out.”
Dennis handed me the mask and snorkel. “Try these,” he said. I pulled the mask over my dry hair, and Dennis came forward to adjust the fit. I watched him through the binocular lenses, and when he was finished, he tugged it off. “All set,” he said. “Get wet before you put it on.” He laid his hands on my shoulders for a brief moment, then withdrew them. I looked down at the water, at the flash of porcelain beneath the surface. I curled my toes over the lip of the dock, then pushed off.
The water felt like soft warm fabric. Dennis crouched and I swam until I was underneath him, several feet from the toilet bowl. He handed me the mask and snorkel and I pulled them on and tested the suction. Water beaded on the lenses and slid off. I fitted the snorkel to my mouth and blew out, then let it dangle from its loop in the mask. Dennis slid onto his stomach, his face over the water. His shoulders, spotted with watery freckles, flexed as he gestured below. “It’s pretty harmless, don’t be afraid,” he said. “Don’t get too close, though, and don’t—do not—put your hand inside the bowl.”
I swallowed a mouthful of seawater and coughed. “Why would I put my hand inside the bowl?”
“Just swim on by, like you’re minding your own business.” There was the question of the eel’s intelligence. I watched the bowl through the water, keeping my arms and legs clear. I would learn, months later, that electric eels can discharge as much as six hundred volts of electricity—enough to kill a horse. “Do you want me to get in?” said Dennis.
“Stay there,” I said. I backed away from the dock, kicking, then turned and dove. Under the dock, the world was dim and calm. My body swayed with the current. I could see, but I couldn’t see far. I did not know, then, that there was a difference between the tidal current that tugged at my legs and the surface current, wind-driven, that lifted my hair from my neck and dropped it again. The sandy seafloor sloped toward the house, textured with a thousand vulnerable peaks, the way dunes texture a beach. By nighttime the seafloor would be wholly rearranged, each peak erased and re-formed in mirror image.
A school of needlefish, bright as new nickels, flashed by. I’d traveled several yards from the dock. Dennis stared down at me, his arms across his chest. I dove deep enough to fill my snorkel with water and kicked toward the toilet bowl. By the time it entered my range of vision, I could have reached out and touched it, and the eel did not uncoil or snap or even blink—it just nosed its bald head beyond the rim of its home, and watched as I kicked by.
I knifed one knee between my body and the dock, and levered myself up. “Well?” said Dennis.
“I saw it,” I said, breathing hard.
From his towel, Kyle raised his head. “Dangerous son of a bitch,” he said.
“I think you should leave it alone,” I said.
Dennis seemed pleased. He nodded and handed me a towel. “From now on, no more swimming near the toilet bowl.”
“Amen,” said Marse.
In July in South Florida, the sunlight fusses and adjusts a hundred times over the course of the day. By mid-afternoon, hours from sunset, the blue of the sky was rich and dense, as if a dusting of powder had been wiped from its surface. Marse and I chatted on the porch for a while, but the conversation grew sluggish and she started filing her fingernails, so I took myself on a tour of the upstairs. Every so often, male voices filtered up through the floorboards: the boys were underneath the house, gathering lobsters from traps for dinner.
The main room of the stilt house was paneled with wood and stocked with old appliances and a shabby wicker sofa with turquoise vinyl cushions—it occurred to me that the cushions would likely float, if called upon. The kitchen and