Lantean Sands
by Rudi Dornemann

This was when I worked for Johnny Nemo back during the summers for a couple years right after high school. Me and my brother Dean and this older guy who called himself Neptune Slim, we ran errands and such in and around Nemo's territory out past the end of the boardwalk. It was a cool gig, better than the assembly-line work we did in the off-season over at the Christmas tree factory in Fellington. Sure, we knew the job had hazards-- we might get roughed up, or have to rough up somebody else. If we'd had an idea of real hazards, though, we probably would have traded in our snap-brims for white paper caps and gotten ourselves scooper's jobs down at the 1001 Flavors.

First off, so you can picture it all properly, you should know Johnny Nemo had a thing about how we had to look sharp on the job. Soon as he hired us on, he took us to this tailor who owed him a few favors. Little rabbit-like guy who worked out of a shop the size of a closet down in Lantis-Town; you had to step out into the alley to get measured. I can still picture the tailor, fingertips white with chalk so he smudged everything he touched, measuring tape looped around and around his neck like one of those Hawaiian leis. His idea of style was a few decades out of date, but Johnny Nemo didn't care-- as long as it was stylish it didn't matter which style.

So there we'd be, most evenings, dressed to the nines, strolling down the shore from Beller's Light to the Jade Arcade. Past the souvenir and T-shirt shops; past the hot-dog stand and the popcorn wagon; past the shooting gallery, the ski-ball lanes, the fortune teller and the bumper cars. We'd saunter on through the crowds of sticky-faced kids and shell-shocked parents, tip our hats to old couples who sat holding hands on the boardwalk benches, make like we didn't even see the packs of kids our own age loitering in T-shirts and cut-off denims. We walked like we had our own secrets, our own purposes, and we never met anyone's gaze, didn't even spare a glance when girls we knew from high school waltzed by in bikinis. Nothing ruffled us.

The beach along that stretch is shallow for a long ways out, and at low tide you can walk on the wet, packed sand like you're walking on a mirror. So we'd stand on our reflections and we'd tell Johnny N. how the day's errands had gone, and he'd tell us our assignments for the next day-- all petty stuff, mostly he was just running a protection racket, nothing heavy, and it'd been years since anybody challenged anybody else's turf. Hell, most of the local bosses were married to each other's sisters and would trade off who had whom over to dinner on Sunday afternoons. It was real quiet, a sleepy scene. Course all that would change when the next generation stepped in-- and it'd get pretty bloody 'til one of the cousins finally came out on top. Bodies washing up under the arcade piers, that kind of thing. Bad scene, and very bad for business, once the papers got a hold of it and the tourists started staying away. But that was years away-- the summer I'm talking about, those cousins were still tearing up and down the boardwalk on their banana-seat bikes. Meanwhile, me and Dean and Neptune Slim and Johnny Nemo, we were taking our evening constitutional up the beach in our snap-brims and wide ties and baggy suits, looking like old-time forties gangsters even though it was 1977.

We were an odd bunch, sure.

Me and Dean aren't twins--he's just over a year ahead of me--but we look a lot alike. Both of us with the same curly brown-blond hair and the same band of freckles across the bridge of our noses, so we're always taken for a couple years younger than we really are. Dean grew himself a mustache as soon as he was able, trying to put some difference between us. It came in kind of light, though, and it didn't really help much. The one time he tried to thicken it up with some mascara he'd pinched from somewhere-- I can't imagine him walking up to a counter and actually paying for it-- that was one of the only times the whole summer that it rained, and Neptune Slim nearly laughed himself sick when Dean's upper lip started to run. Myself, I couldn't laugh, being Dean's brother, and his younger brother at that, and my sides were sore from holding it in.

Neptune Slim was Lantean dark but with eyes as green as the water out by the breakers on a sunny day. He wore a ring on every finger and a different crystal in each ring. This was before all that New Age stuff about Lanteans being mystically inclined by nature, but Slim seemed to think he had some kind of special spiritual gift. He'd punch guys, just spontaneously; some guy's walking past us on the street and-- POW!-- Slim would bust the guy's lip with a crystal-covered fist. And he'd say, "Just realigning your chakras, man, no big thing. You'll feel better tomorrow." He'd insist he'd just done the guy a big favor, karmically; people should be more grateful. I used to have to do a lot of explaining, days I got paired up with Neptune Slim, just to keep us from getting hurt by some guy who was a hop, skip and a jump closer to enlightenment. Slim offered to realign my chakras once or twice. "Your aura's gone akimbo, my man," he'd say, "but I can fix that." I thanked him but always declined the offer. He meant it in a friendly sort of way (and at least he asked first and didn't just let fly) but I figured if my spiritual energy had drifted a bit off center, maybe there was a reason for it, and who was I to mess with reasons? Maybe my being out of whack balanced someone else who out of whack in the opposite way.

Slim was always unreliable, but he got results. He wasn't living in reality, Johnny N. would say, but he had promise. Mind you, he'd say it in a voice that suggested he wouldn't bet good money that Slim would live long enough to deliver on that promise. Dean and me, he'd just roll his eyes-- "You guys," he'd say, "you guys..."

Now, Johnny Nemo was the most normal of any of us, at least on the outside. About all I remember looking out of the ordinary about him was that he was double-jointed in all his fingers. He could fold a paper airplane one-handed, using only the thumb and forefinger. There were rumors that he'd started out as a cardsharp and a flimflammer, back when there was a casino in the Jade Arcade, and that made sense. His hands had calluses where I've never seen anybody else have calluses, and he could do this one-handed move where he slapped his finger-tips against his palm to make a genuine clapping sound. He would do the clapping thing when he was feeling nervous, or when he was just being sarcastic. Nervous, he would slap out stuttering rhythms, the kind other people might tap with a pencil tip. Sarcastic, he single-hand clapped with both hands at once like he was an audience of one.

Our territory was mostly barbershops and newsstands, souvenir shops and ice cream carts, and the closest thing we had to a decent bar was a drugstore with a malt counter. Johnny N. tried to use that soda fountain as his "office" for a while, but the pharmacist kept trying to sell him things, and after a while Johnny gave it up. Said he didn't want the clientele thinking he had any of the conditions that would necessitate such purchases. "For flare-ups of lumbago, this is the absolute best thing you can buy without a prescription," Mr. Terranno would say in his TV-commercial-loud voice. Or: "Have you tried this? Best thing going for psoriasis-- lemon-scented, too." He didn't seem to have anything in stock that wasn't the best thing. Dean and I offered to drop some polite but pointed hints that Mr. Terranno should be keeping his advice to himself, but Johnny N. just waved us out of the shop. He must have needed something the old man had.

The Jade Arcade wasn't in our territory, but we all wished it was.

Under the Arcade's green glass dome even the brightest day looked like deep-sea twenty fathoms down. And the waitresses with their trays, gliding up and down the spiral ramps, they always reminded me of mermaids. Maybe it was all the sequins or the way the wind caught their harem pants as they roller skated by me. Maybe it was the sparkly eye shadow they wore. The scent of cheap perfume still makes me think of the shore.

Downstairs, they really did have a mermaid, in a little sideshow in the basement, a buck to get in. I think I paid twice at the beginning of the summer-- after that, the ticket taker just nodded us through whenever we came by, didn't even look up from his paper. We made sure to come in when it was more or less deserted-- that was Johnny's suggestion, he used to wander through the sideshow from time to time himself-- so we never got any guff about scaring off customers like we got from any of the other establishments outside our own territory. Around lunch, the arcade swarmed with vacationing families and small kids, all thronging in out of the heat, but a couple hours either side of noon was generally O.K.

The other place we spent a lot of time that summer was a coffee shop restaurant up on the strip. It was a couple blocks inland from the shore, but Dean and Slim and I would find an excuse to drop by once or twice a week and talk the waitress into serving us a late breakfast. "Yeah, I know it says right on the menu and it says again up on the wall that breakfast is only served until 11, but aren't we regular customers? We're steady guys, aren't we, Dean? And we tip well, don't we?" Dean would nod throughout, and the waitresses generally let us get away with it. That far from the water, we were in Cold Boy territory, but the couple of them we ever saw just gave us a grunt to let us know we were O.K., long as we didn't get up to anything.

The place was called The Lantean Sands, which always sounded to me more like a hotel, or maybe some kind of dark, loungey bar, a place where it took five or ten minutes for your eyes to adjust if you came inside from a bright summer day at noon. But no, the Sands was all smudged diner-style chrome, with vinyl-upholstered booths and one of those slowly spinning cake and pie displays up by the register. I swear the desserts never changed in that case. It wasn't just that they always had the same selection; they always seemed to be exactly the same pastries, missing exactly the same pieces. As if someone had lost the key to the case, or time had somehow been suspended within its octagonal glass walls.

What the Lantean was doing in the name I could never figure out either. The decor was more like Egyptian, a gold sphinx next to the register and a hieroglyphic border around the walls up by the ceiling. The menu, when it wasn't just fried seafood or paint-by-number diner fare, was Greek, more or less-- I never did work up the courage to order the souvlaki omelet.

I went in there once on one of the few days Johnny N. ever gave us off. Without my suit, no one recognized me. I was wearing cut-offs and a Star Wars T-shirt. Even the red-headed waitress, Bernadette, the one with the lisp, who I always flirted with, barely glanced up from her notepad as I gave my order. I sat there and didn't even have a second cup of coffee: it was too creepy, like I was eavesdropping on another life.

But about that sideshow under the Jade Arcade-- there wasn't much to it, just five or six rooms, and it was always kept half-dark to make it seem more mysterious. There was a display of shrunken heads, the bones and dented cutlass of a pirate, and the mummy of an alleged Egyptian princess. I always hurried through that section, and if the guys were with me so I couldn't hurry, I'd keep my eyes over to the blank wall side. The mummy was the color of old furniture that's lost its shine and every summer a couple more of her fingertips crumbled off. That wasn't so bad, but one morning I came through and the janitor was scraping some kind of mold off her shins with a putty knife. He saw my expression. "Ain't this humid in Egypt, y'know," he said, and went back to it.

Past that, though, was the mermaid I've been meaning to tell you about, Shirlene. She wore a blond wig and a tail made of swimsuit rubber and sequins. She was old enough to be our mother, and her costume showed more skin than you would have thought seemly for a family attraction. Still, she was sweetness itself, never a harsh word for anyone, and she had an air about her as if she were presiding over a church bake sale, not sitting on a stool in a knee-deep pool she shared with a couple baby alligators and a snapping turtle. Neptune Slim used to sneak her cigarettes and pretend it was him smoking if anyone came by.

"You're a peach, Slim," she'd say.

It was the Manta-Boy, though, who we really came to see.

He never said much-- he couldn't, since he was inside a floor-to-ceiling tube of water in the middle of the room. He was in there, a guy who was probably our age or maybe a couple years younger. We'd come up close to the tank so he could see us and he'd wave. He was wearing a pair of black swimming trunks with that same sequin fish-scale pattern on them that Shirlene had on her tail. He had a web, a membrane, like a bat's wing or the skin between your fingers, except this one stretched from his wrists all the way up his arms and down his sides to his waist. It was like he had wings, fluttering a little in the current as he hung there in the tank, and you could see where they'd gotten the name.

Every so often, he'd bob up to the top of the tank for a breath, but it never seemed to me like it was often enough. Maybe it was just the slow way he moved, the almost regal way he hung there, turning in his column of water and light, that made it seem he was going longer between breaths than he really was.

There was no way to really talk to him, but we kept up a pretty good communication in hand signals and mime. We'd ask him how the water was, or kid him about the sign beside the tube that called him "An Exiled Prince of the Most Ancient and Longest-Lost Island of the Lantis Archipelago." Mostly, we told him what we'd been up to. Neptune Slim carried a little spiral notebook in his suit pocket and we'd write quick captions in it, like "last night" or "Dean always does that." For Ray-- "Ray" being the nickname we'd, for obvious reasons, given the Manta-Boy-- it must have been like watching one of those old silent movies. He seemed to appreciate it, having someone communicate with him, rather than just stare at him. Not that he could tell us much. He'd nod to show that he understood, make a few hand-signals back to us, or-- very rarely-- scratch a word in the algae film on his side of the tank, but that was about it. Not that he probably had much to say--spending all day everyday in a tank of water with a bright light shining on him in the middle of a dark room, it wasn't like he led what you'd call a rich life.

If you put your ear right up against the glass, you could hear Ray's voice, quiet and squeaky, chirping out the syllables. Sometimes you'd walk through and you could hear him, singing to himself, a mournful sound like wind through the bare branches of trees. If you weren't listening hard, you wouldn't hear it; if you did notice, you probably thought it was a radio playing in another room, sliding off of whatever station it had been tuned to and picking up more static now than song. Ray said these were happy songs, in spite of what they sounded like.

"That isn't English, is it?" said Slim.

"Lantean," wrote Ray in big block letters. With his big round eyes, it was hard to disbelieve him, although it sure didn't sound like any Lantean I'd ever heard.

We looked for some kind of seam, or some sign that the flaps were glued to his skin, but we never saw any. We used to spend hours at the Sands, debating Ray's true nature.

"Maybe it's a suit," I said. "With that all that glare, you wouldn't have to get the flesh color exactly right, just close to right, and it would look O.K."

"Maybe it's, I don't know, some kind of birth defect thing," said Dean.

Neptune Slim wouldn't join in. "The Manta-Boy is a manta-boy," he said. "He is the way he is, and that's way he was meant to be. It's a weird, weird world, after all."

The sideshow was called "Wellington's Weird, Weird World," by the way, and we never figured out who Wellington was.

Me, I always thought the suit idea made sense. I mean, look at Shirlene in the mermaid tank.

We knew Shirlene lived in a trailer up the coast a few towns beyond where the beach gives out into just rocks and cliffs. She lived cheaply, working the summers off the books at Wellington's World to supplement her social security, and spending the off-season in Florida. With the money she saved, she traveled, usually somewhere warm. Some years she headed to the Caribbean, some years she went further. She told us about trips to the Riviera, Italy, Greece-- she'd even been to Lantis. Twice. Neptune Slim always wanted to hear more about that, and she'd go on about the snake-priestess temples and the ruins of the bull-dancer arenas, and her glass-bottom boat excursions to see the archipelago's sunken islands and lost cities. "It's like looking at history, just going back and back," she'd say.

Slim was rapt, would listen for hours if we'd let him. "Those were my people," he'd say, once we'd finally rousted him from the sideshow basement. And he'd have a look on his face almost as faraway as the look on Manta-Boy's.

Once Slim got onto the subject of Lantis, you couldn't shut him up. How it's been gradually sinking for the last few thousand years. How the islands are mostly volcanoes and a couple more of them blow up or just slip below sea level every few centuries. The sinking's been going on since the days when the Lanteans had a big empire of their own, going toe-to-toe with the Greeks and Egyptians and Persians and whoever. Then half the islands were gone overnight and there went the empire. The most recent big eruption was a couple years after the Second World War, when they were still a British colony or protectorate or something, with some strategic shipyards and all, so the Brits helped resettle the refugees. Slim's grandparents had gone to Canada first, but didn't like the cold, so they came down here. Nice seaside town, long summers, big Lantean refugee community, what could be better? Slim had never been to the old country, but then the place his grandparents had been from was underwater now anyway, so going back wouldn't have exactly been easy.

Johnny Nemo used to get after Slim for getting all "misty-eyed and mystical," same as he used to crack jokes about Slim's rings.

"You want to see magic?" Johnny N. asked us, more than once, during our evening walks. "I can make things happen, just by saying the word. I say it; you do it. That's real magic."

Our days would start with a quick walk from our house to Terranno's Drugs, where Neptune Slim would be waiting for us. We'd get cups of coffee on the house and then pay 75¢ out of our own pockets for a day-old donut to clear the coffee's turpentine aftertaste out of our mouths. Two of us would spend the morning sauntering from one business to the next up the even-numbered side of Strand Avenue, picking up wherever we'd left off the day before. Like I said earlier, it wasn't hard work:shoot the breeze with the owner or whoever was at the counter, just kind of assert our presence. If they had a message for Johnny Nemo, they'd slip us an envelope or folded-over piece of paper.

At some point, we'd break for a leisurely lunch at one of the hot dog carts or at the Lantean Sands, meeting up with whoever had stayed back at Terranno's, waiting around reading comics and pulp magazines in case Johnny needed any special errands run, which wasn't often. We'd swap stories-- trade whatever gossip the two of us making the rounds had collected for whatever tales of the uncanny and unknown the third had been reading.

Dean was always the best at retelling gossip-- he had a memory that cross-referenced every detail. The college kid who'd gone to Peru with the Peace Corps and was sending love letter postcards of llamas back to Mary Lou at Elliot's T-Shirt Extravaganza? She, meanwhile, was the cousin of Glen over at the bumper boats. The reason the old woman who ran the donut shop kept that faded picture on the wall over the register? That was her son, MIA in Vietnam for nearly ten years now. Slim, meanwhile, was the best at retelling the trashy sci-fi, crime and just plain strange stories from Terranno's magazine section. Dean figured this was because Slim was a natural-born storyteller. I always thought that what really made the difference was that Slim believed, at least a little, in every story he read.

Our afternoon started whenever we finally wound up lunch, usually around two the afternoon. We'd spend from then 'til 6 visiting the shops on the odd-numbered side of the avenue, the beachfront places. Somewhere in either the morning or the sleepy mid-afternoon hours, we'd make time to visit Shirlene and Ray down at Wellington's. Like I said, it wasn't a bad gig. Sometimes we wondered, over our last few fries at the Sands, whether Johnny N. wasn't into something bigger and more illegal than just protection, something that all the penny-ante stuff was just a cover for, but we didn't really want to know. Somehow, he had the cash to pay all three of us, and pay us quite decently. So we didn't ask questions, and we never peeked at the notes we carried back and forth between Johnny and his clients. Sometimes, in the years since, I've wondered if we would've been better off if we had known more about what was really going on. I doubt it, but still I wonder.

The last Friday of every month was collection day. We'd drop by every shop and place of business up and down our territory, and everybody would have their envelopes ready. Everything went like clockwork, you just had to be careful not to spend too long on chit-chat, and you could get through it all by dark. It was a long, tiring day, and we would stay up late back in the boiler room in the basement of a building Johnny's uncle owned, counting and recounting the money, checking and rechecking the tally. Nothing was ever out of order; our biggest problem was staying awake through it all.

Even though he talked to us on our evening beach-walks, if Johnny Nemo had something important to tell us, something special he wanted to make sure we heard and understood, he'd wait until he had all of us together in the counting room. When all the money was packed, all the ledger books were back in the safe behind the old coal-bin, and the deposit slip for the bank had even been filled out, he'd tilt his chair back and hook his thumbs in his suspenders. We'd all shut up and put down our pull-top cans-- Johnny never allowed us anything harder than root beer on collection days, and certainly not in the counting room, but it was hot in there, what with the boiler and all, and we all drank plenty. We knew how serious his talk was going to be from how long he left us waiting.

One night, it must have been fifteen or twenty minutes we sat there, looking at him. I was sweating, my back was killing me from the straight-backed wood chair, and there was a pasty root beer residue coagulating on the back of my tongue. And Johnny Nemo was staring at us, looking us up and down, leaning back against the only vaguely clean bit of wall down there, until finally he snapped his suspenders and sat up straight.

"Boys," he said, "we have a problem." He paused, and started again, "Boys, we have a snitch."

He raised a hand as if to stop our objections, but none of us was going to say anything-- at that point none of us was going to breathe, let alone make a sound. I could see there were ink smudges on all those weird calluses on the edges of his fingers.

"Boys," he said, paused again, and then smiled, "I know it isn't you. You're good boys. You wouldn't go around talking; you wouldn't shoot your mouths off about things that shouldn't be general knowledge. Heh, you'd shoot your mouths off plenty about all kinds of nonsense--" here he was looking right at Slim, and even though there might have been a hint of a joke in his voice, none of us was going to risk a laugh-- "but I know you wouldn't blab about anything important."

He turned away for a second, and we all took a careful breath.

"Not intentionally you wouldn't, but unintentionally, ah, boys, that's where things get chancy. When you leave here tonight, I don't want you to go down to the Seacomber, or any of the other dives you'd usually head to with a fresh paycheck in your pocket. I want you to go home. I want you to think. Think about what you might have said; think about what maybe you shouldn't have said; think about who you maybe might have said it to. Any little thing, you know? Didn't mean nothing at the time. You probably didn't even notice when you let it slip out."

He licked the corners of his lips-- it was hot in there.

"Now, boys," he said. "I'm not going to follow you. I'm never going to know whether you go right home tonight like I asked you or if you went out and painted the town. And I don't care. But I do care if news about our business gets out into common gossip. And I will know. So it behooves you, gentlemen, to figure out where the leak is and plug it, before I have to figure it out for myself. Have a good evening."

We knew he meant Ray, we just couldn't figure out how-- either how he knew about Ray or how Ray could have betrayed us.

Dean wanted to just kill him: Ray'd betrayed us and that was that. Neptune Slim couldn't accept that it was true. I thought it might be true-- Johnny's talk had me questioning everything-- but, even if we'd mentioned something to Ray that we shouldn't have, I just couldn't see how the Manta-Boy could have told anyone. Between me and Slim, we managed to get Dean cooled down. We distracted him with trying to come up with a plan-- break the tube and just beat him up? Poison his water? Drop a toaster or a hair dryer there with him? We left Dean to work out the details, knowing he'd be so lost in sorting through alternate plans that he'd never get one together and manage to carry it out. Just to be safe, we told him to let us know when he had it worked out and we'd give him a hand. Then we went back to trying to figure out what was really going on.

The first thing that we decided was that we should start by watching Ray. We'd keep talking to him-- being careful now not to tell him anything that was true-- and we'd watch to see who else visited him during the day, see who he passed his information off to. This meant we'd have to figure out where he went and what he did after hours as well. As far as we knew, he never left Wellington's Weird, Weird World. We'd tried a couple times to talk him into joining us for dinner at the Lantean Sands, but he always made like he couldn't leave, like the tube of water was his only home.

"C'mon," we'd say, "all you can eat fish fry."

It'd become a joke between us.

He'd write with his fingertip in the algae on the side of his tank: "Sorry, I dry out."

"Free refills on ice water," Slim would say. "Don't know what you're missing, man."

Ray would just smile sadly until we changed the subject.

Slim had never agreed that it was just an act, that Ray couldn't really be living day and night in the water. No matter how long and logically Dean argued that it was all just a gimmick for the tourists, Slim never wanted to think too hard about it. It was like the way he seemed to have a special category in his brain for all those pulp stories he read down at Terranno's: they weren't exactly true, but he didn't come right out and say they were false either. But now he had to admit that we need to cover every possibility and make our plans as if nothing about Ray were what it seemed to be.

The trick was staking out Wellington's without anyone who worked there noticing us-- not the ticket-taker, who nodded us through with a grunt so we didn't even have to pretend to pay, or the janitor, who polished the shrunken heads with a can of lemon-fresh furniture wax every Thursday, or Shirlene, who appreciated the company, but would get suspicious if she noticed we were hanging around too much. Or Ray himself for that matter. We finally settled on staking out the entrance, watching for anyone who seemed to be coming by regularly, anybody who didn't look like part of the usual tourist crowd. Particularly anyone we knew worked with one of the other bosses in town. Wasn't too hard to find a good vantage point-- the hallway leading to the ticket booth was a sort of fiberglass cave, complete with stone-age style paintings of mammoths and big-antlered deer and even a couple of UFO's, just to get the weird in there somewhere, and there were some gaps where you could slip in between the panels of fake rock and look out from the darkness. It was like you were watching from a little slice of another time, with your back up against the gold and emerald 1920's fancy wallpaper, and your head ducked down so it didn't hit the lamp fixture shaped like a flapper mermaid. A little boring back there, but cool in the dark. We'd take notes as best we could without being able to see what we were writing then had to decipher our scribblings when we snuck out into daylight again. Fortunately for us, the only way out was the same cave hallway that brought you in. At least, the only way out that didn't involve setting off fire alarms. About a week into our stakeout, we talked Dean into taking a turn at it-- Slim and I weren't seeing anything, no suspicious patterns, nobody who might be gathering information from Ray, and we seemed to be the only repeat customers.

Johnny didn't say a word about the snitch problem in any of our evening walks. We figured he knew he'd lit a fire under us-- no need to fan the flames. Dean had backed off his idea of taking some kind of extreme action against Ray until we had a better idea what was going on, but it was hard to get him to act natural when we did go and talk to Ray. When started making up stuff to tell Ray, we started realizing how little we really had been telling him. I started to have some suspicions then, wondering if Johnny Nemo was just playing mind games with us.

"You gotta stay sharp, boys," he'd say, some nights while we were walking up the beach. "You gotta keep your edge." And he'd give us a long look like he was testing us with his eyes, holding our gaze for a long minute even if his double-dip cherry and pistachio sugar cone started to drip down his knuckles.

I wondered if this whole snitch thing was just so much sharpening.

Not that I ever shared these ideas with Dean and Slim at our Lantean Sands lunch sessions--we were all pretty tense and the last thing I wanted to do was start sounding disloyal. We had plenty else to talk about; our investigation wasn't getting anywhere. Slim had plenty of ideas out of his pulp reading, but none actually sounded like things we could do. It was a bit of work for me and Dean to talk him out of planting bugs or little tiny cameras in Wellington's World, or finding some kind of truth serum we could use to spike the water in Ray's tank. It was Dean who started coming up with usable ideas. Maybe Ray was relaying his information to someone else at Wellington's and they were the ones making the connection with some other outfit. None of us wanted to believe it was Shirlene, but we didn't know anything about the newspaper-reading guy at the ticket window, and we unanimously distrusted the janitor-- he was just a little too comfortable around dead things.

So we switched tactics. No more casing the grotto at the front of Wellington's World. Instead we trailed the janitor-- followed him around the arcade has he made his rounds, watched him getting his complementary meal from the roller-skating waitresses up in the Seaview room or a catching a couple innings of the ballgame in the Breakers lounge. We followed him five blocks inland to a basement apartment in a gray brick building that wouldn't have given him a view of anything but railroad tracks and electrical transformers even if he had had more than a couple inches of sidewalk level window. We knew that he went to sleep every night at exactly 11:45, that he smoked unfiltered Kools bought by the case at Terranno's, that he'd asked Shirlene out to dinner at least twice (she'd turned him down both times), that he'd spent sixteen years in the Navy and half of those years on a submarine. We knew enough to know he wasn't our man-- he was practically a hermit, and that didn't give him many opportunities to pass on illicit information.

So we moved on to the ticket-taker. Lived over a barbershop with his mom in Fellington Heights. His mother's brother was the barber and was as garrulous as the ticket-taker wasn't. Each of us went and got a haircut from the old man; by the time we were through, we knew more about his useless, no-account nephew than we knew about each other: his name (Garrett Andrew Phelps, went by Gary, but in third grade some of the kids had called him "Flash" for no reason anyone remembered), his favorite food (lasagna with hot Italian sausage), his favorite color (maroon), his bowling night (Thursdays during spring and fall league seasons, Tuesdays the rest of the year), his first kiss (with Margie-Lynn Nebel in the alley behind St. Alphonse's rectory while he was walking her home one day after school in sixth grade.) I walked out with one sideburn half an inch shorter than the other and a headache from trying to remember everything I'd heard. Dean and Neptune Slim had similar information overload experiences and we agreed that if Gary were in cahoots with any of the other gangs, we would have heard everything down to the shoe size of the wise guy who was his connection. So another suspect scratched off the list.

That left Shirlene. None of us wanted to deal with that possibility, and we tacitly tabled further discussion until lunch the next day. And when lunch came, we dawdled through our meatloaf-sandwich-and-onion-ring specials and were nursing our third cups of coffee before anyone dared approach the subject directly. We had the routine down from the shadowing the other two, so there weren't that many logistics to discuss, we just had to force ourselves into it. It seemed disloyal, even just saying her name, it was like suspecting your mom of being a spy for the Russians, or your grandmother of spiking her special-recipe fried chicken with arsenic

Slim finally broke through: "Same assignments as for the ticket guy. Start tomorrow, first thing."

We all slapped our money down on the table and nearly trampled an elderly priest in our haste to get out through the Sands' double set of glass doors.

What we learned about Shirlene made us feel even guiltier. She spent her evenings dishing out food down at the Third Avenue soup kitchen, her Saturdays reading newspapers to blind people and her Sunday nights calling numbers for the penny bingo games at the Shore Hills nursing home. The sequined mermaid spent her off time as a saint.

Dean and I shimmied the lock on her trailer one evening while Shirlene was off dishing out tuna casserole to winos. It was tidy as a museum inside, everything neat and precise. We sat on the sun-faded orange vinyl of the breakfast nook and looked around. Not a single plastic flamingo or tiki head out of place on the souvenir shelves; not a crumb in the kitchenette; not a hint of dust on the broken-handled black-and-white portable TV; not a drop of booze in any of the cabinets. Shirlene ate Grape-Nuts and squeezed her own orange juice. Her freezer was frostless and not one of potatoes in the bin under the sink had sprouted a single eye.

"Damn," said Dean, and I nodded emphatic agreement: It was only two rooms and a closet-sized bath, but we'd never seen a house this perfect on TV. The last of our guilty grudging suspicions evaporated. We just made sure to memorize what was on the shelf of Lantean knick-knacks and souvenirs -- we knew Slim would be full of questions-- and we scurried out.

No amount of Lantean Sands coffee could give us the inspiration we needed to figure out what to do next. We were worn out from round-the-clock surveillance, hiding the bags under our eyes with dark glasses that looked too modern for our zoot suits and stumbling through the sand like sleepwalker zombies when we walked with Johnny Nemo that evening. If he noticed, he didn't say anything. We resolved to take the night off to sleep on it, and come up with a new plan at lunch the next day.

The next day was a Friday, collections day for us and shrimp-basket-and-slaw day at the Sands. We spent lunch spinning out schemes, talking around mouthfuls of shrimp so hot the crumb coating was still sizzling as we chewed.

"So, what's next?" said Dean. "Are we back to Ray? Did we miss something?"

"I don't know guys," I said. "Something just isn't coming together for me. Something isn't right."

Nobody replied. I thought at first that meant they were thinking, or maybe they even agreed with me. Then I looked up from the shrimp tail I'd been trying to crack open with my fingernail. There was Johnny Nemo, standing over us. He had a look on his face like he'd been listening to us for while, and he hadn't liked what he'd been hearing.

"C'mon," he said. "Up. Out."

We all slid out of the booth. Slim and I each threw down more money than we needed to cover the check, but neither of us was going to hang back even a second to pick it up again. We followed Johnny Nemo out past the sunburned families in the waiting area, past the shelves of saltwater taffy and the bubble-gum machine that was shaped like an old-fashioned deep sea diver's helmet, out into the baking asphalt smell of the parking lot and the blinding glare of all the chrome on all the cars and none of us made a sound.

Johnny was doing his one-hand clapping thing as he led us to the boiler room where we did the monthly counting. I'd never been there in the middle of the day before, and it looked strange in full light-- oddly clean, the tangerine-colored walls too bright, the water stains too distinct on the ceiling tiles. Even the little piles of dust and grit in the corners were too visible, too neat.

"Boys," said Johnny Nemo. He was shaking his head. "Boys, boys, boys."

In spite of the clammy coolness, Dean and Slim and I were all sweating, waiting to hear where all this was going.

"I know you're young," said Johnny. "I know you don't have years of experience but-- sheesh-- I never thought you were total amateurs. I mean, I've been keeping an eye on you, and I have not been happy with what I've been seeing. Not happy at all. The thing with the barber-- cripes-- you don't think he noticed all the questions you were asking? You think he isn't telling half the city about these three junior wise guys who came around quizzing him about one of his regulars? You think this Phelps guy won't hear the whole story next time he goes to get a little off the top? And your little breaking-and-entering adventure in the old woman's trailer-- don't get me started."

When the silence went on a little too long, Dean spoke up:

"We were trying to find that leak. Figure out who was talking," he said. "Like you told us we should..."

"Don't." Johnny Nemo held up his hand. "Don't try to explain yourself. I know what you were trying to do. That's all perfectly clear. I also know how badly you botched things. Also clear-- at least to me. Now, you're going to tell me what you saw, what you heard, and I'm going to try to see what I can figure out from it all. Maybe this won't all be a complete disaster; maybe we can learn something after all. Start at the beginning, don't leave anything out-- not a thing-- not one thing, you understand me." He pulled up a stool, but didn't make any motion like we should take the other stools for ourselves. "Go."

We talked until our voices were raw. We told him everything, and, when we thought we were done, he took us back through twice more to make sure we'd scraped absolutely every detail out of our memories. When he finally let us go, it was sunset already upstairs. It took three vanilla cokes at Terranno's soda fountain before my tongue had rehydrated enough to stop sticking to my back teeth.

Johnny Nemo hadn't said what he was going to do with all our information, just said that we should be ready for when he made up his mind what we should do next. So we spent the next day on edge, back in our routine but expecting any a summons back to the boiler room at any moment. Day after that was Sunday, and I don't know what Slim was up to, but Dean and I were "nervous as cats," according to our Ma, who finally kicked us out of the house around three in the afternoon, saying all our fretting about was starting to grate on her nerves. We caught a matinee-- Paul Newman in The Sting-- and were on our way down to the Jade Arcade when we realized that Wellington's World was probably the last place we should be, until Johnny Nemo figured out what was going on. So we slouched home, only to find Johnny himself sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cake crumbs on a plate before him and Ma with a look in her eyes like she'd run out of small talk an hour ago.

"Having a good day off, boys?" He was doing some kind of one-handed origami with a paper napkin.

We shrugged in unison.

"Well, I could use your help, if you don't mind working a little overtime." Johnny Nemo mostly smiled for punctuation-- a flash of ivory to underline something he'd just said. But now he was a grinning in a relaxed way that suggested friendliness, holding the grin long enough to look at me and Dean and Ma each in turn; it was eerie.

"Sure," I said, "no problem," and Dean nodded along.

While we changed into our suits, which Ma-- bless her-- had pressed while we were out, we could hear Johnny N. thanking her for the cake and coffee and telling her not to wait up for Dean and me to get back. He hustled us out the back door as soon as we came back into the kitchen, and then into the back seat of his car. The upholstery was white leather and even the carpeting was clean as fresh snow. I spent the whole ride hoping my shoes were clean. A station wagon with out-of-state plates was parked in Johnny's usual space beside Terranno's back door, so the ride was stretched out by another ten minutes as we rode around looking for a space along the boardwalk. Neither Dean nor I said anything at then or at any other point in the ride. Johnny finally wedged us in between a couple of VW camper busses.

Dean found his voice at last as we climbed out onto the curb.

"So, what's up?"

"Walk with me," said Johnny Nemo. So we followed, down the street along the beach until we'd walked right out of our own territory and there was no question where we were headed-- the Jade Arcade. Kind of strange to be wearing the suit on a Sunday, an out-of-place feeling, like finding yourself in the grocery store in your pajamas.

"So," I said, "you figured it out-- who's the stoolie. And we're going to see them right now."

I think it must have been an after-effect of the movie that I said "stoolie;" none of us normally talked like that.

"Uh-huh," said Johnny N. "You boys did good after all. I know what I need to know."

After all the sweat and strain we'd been through, you'd have thought this praise would get Dean and me smiling, but Johnny's voice was so grim it didn't spark much happiness. We went around to the ocean side and dodged a family snapshot moment to duck into the downstairs entrance, headed straight down the cave hallway to Wellington's Weird, Weird World. Without breaking stride, Johnny Nemo tossed three crumpled bills at Phelps the ticket guy, who didn't even look up from his copy of Bowler's Monthly.

In we went, past the shrunken heads, the pirate room, and the mummy and on into Shirlene's room. The matronly mermaid was chatting with a family of tourists. Sounded like they were down from Quebec by the way Shirlene was stuttering French.

Johnny Nemo signaled that Dean should block the mummy-side doorway and I should stand guard at the door that led to the Manta-Boy. We sauntered into position while Johnny himself made a show of studying the seascape mural opposite Shirlene's pool.

I had no idea what the Canadians were going on about, but they were all talking-- both parents and three kids-- gesturing with their hands and practically shouting to get across the language barrier. Whatever it was, it involved a lot to compliments to Shirlene, because she'd blush and girlishly bat her eyelashes every time she said "Merci."

The baby alligators were wrestling over something. Each of them was at least as long as my leg, so they weren't exactly babies anymore, and Shirlene had her feet up on the wall of her pool to keep her tail out of the way of theirs. I didn't see the snapping turtle anywhere.

The family finally wandered past me. I caught a glimpse of Ray rippling his webbing to make a good show, but it was Shirlene and Johnny Nemo I was mostly watching.

"Oree-vwhar!" said Shirlene. If she'd noticed Johnny Nemo standing there, she wasn't letting on.

"We need to talk," he said.

"So talk." She kicked her tail in the water. "You haven't said two words to me in thirty years, John. I'm all ears."

"You know what it is Shirl," said Johnny, and there was something in his voice that made him sound younger, less sure of himself, or maybe it was just Shirlene's talk of thirty years ago that put those thoughts in my head. "Same as it was the last time we talked. Should have known it'd be you, standing in my way again. Doesn't matter, though; I'm ready now. I found the bell. I'm going to make it happen. I just want to know if you're with me, or against me."

"What do you care?" she said. "I'm just an old woman. It's not like I could do anything to stop you, now could I?" There was a sparkle in her eyes that said otherwise.

"I don't want any trouble, from you or from anyone else. This is tricky enough to pull off as it is; I don't need complications."

"Some things weren't meant to be easy," said Shirlene. "Some things weren't meant to be done at all."

"I was hoping you'd be reasonable," said Johnny Nemo. "That maybe you'd mellowed a bit with the years." He put one foot up on the wall of Shirlene's pool and leaned over so that his face was even with hers. "But I guess not."

He lunged at her, grabbed her arms to pull her out of the pool. I'd never seen him move so fast. His fingers would be blur-quick sometimes, practicing one of his old flim-flam moves, but this was his whole body; he had her off her stool and halfway out of the pool before I could even blink.

But she was just as quick. She shook loose of Johnny N.'s hands, flipped one of the baby gators right at his head, and kicked a big scoop of water at him with her tail.

He sidestepped the gator OK, but the wave of water that followed caught him right across the chest. The linoleum got slick when it was wet-- the janitor covered the floor with about a dozen orange traffic cones whenever he went to mop-- and Johnny's feet slid out from under him as soon as he took a step toward the pool again.

This time the alligator didn't miss.

Story copyright Rudi Dornemann, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com