The Salt Between Us

Act I

Cal found Maree on a Tuesday. It was always Tuesdays. The other days he went to the flats, she was not there. He did not know why. He did not ask.

The flats at Salt Point were the kind of place where good things went to die. Galveston Bay was twenty feet to his left, brown and wide and full of things he could not name. To his right was a strip of roadside stalls selling fried seafood to people who drove two hours from Houston to feel like they had discovered something. Maree was somewhere between the water and the stalls, in the mud between, picking at something with her bare hands.

He watched her from the boardwalk. She was small, maybe five feet tall, wearing a dress that had been someone else's once and had ended up, through a chain of thrift stores he could not trace, in a dumpster behind a Goodwill in Pasadena. The dress was grey now. Or had never been anything but grey.

She lifted something from the mud, examined it, and put it in her mouth. Cal assumed it was a clam. It might have been a crab. It might have been a bottle cap. He could not tell from this distance.

He went back to his stall the next day and did not sell much. The things people came to his stall for were the discard pile of the fishing industry—damaged fish, weird-shaped fish, fish that had been handled roughly and did not look great but would taste fine if someone boiled them with garlic. Three dollars a pound. Nobody paid three dollars a pound for damaged fish anymore. The bait companies had gotten cheaper. The ocean was running out of everything.

Maree came to his stall on a Thursday. She stood in front of it and looked at the ice and the fish and the fluorescent light that flickered every third second. Cal kept his eyes on his phone. He was reading a story about a new oil company applying for a drilling permit in Galveston Bay. He did not want to read it. He wanted to be somewhere else. But it was something to do with his hands.

She reached across the ice and picked up a fish. She held it to her nose. She put it back. Cal looked up. She was looking at him.

"You got no salt," she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"Salt. You got no salt on your hands."

She was talking about his hands. He looked down. They were pale and cracked from cold water and soap. He washed them maybe twice a week.

"I salt my hands," he said. It was not a lie. It was not a truth either. It was a sentence.

She nodded, as though that was enough, and walked away. She walked toward the water. She did not look back.

Act II

He started bringing her things. Not food at first—he was not that kind of person. He brought her a towel, the kind they used at the pool when he had a wife and a daughter and weekend meant something. She took the towel and did not thank him. People do not thank you for towels the way they thank you for flowers. A towel is a承认 that you are wet and cold and someone has noticed.

The second time he brought something, it was a can of beans. He had taken it from his own lunch box. He did not eat lunch. He had stopped eating lunch six months ago, after the divorce, when food became something that reminded him of other people eating together.

She ate the beans standing up, using her fingers to scoop them out of the can. She did not use a spoon. Spoons were for people who had plates and chairs and a table that did not wobble.

After that, he started talking to her. Not a lot. He was not a talker. His father had been a talker. His father had talked until his wife left him, and he had assumed the silence afterward was punishment. It was not punishment. It was relief, for both of them, and they had both known it.

He told her about the bay. Not the scientific stuff—he was not a scientist. He told her about the things he knew: where the redfish came in the spring, where the trout hid in the winter, how the oysters tasted different depending on which side of the island you were on. She listened. Sometimes she nodded. Sometimes she looked at him the way she had looked at the fish—examining, not judging.

Lorenzo Delgado told him about the old people's stories. Lorenzo was a Mexican-American fisherman whose family had been pulling nets out of this bay for four generations. He was fifty-two and already had the knees of someone twice his age.

"Before my grandfather," Lorenzo said, sitting on the dock with a cigarette that burned slowly in the humid air, "he told me there were things in this bay that his grandmother knew about. Not fish. Not oysters. Things underneath. The water here is different from other water. It moves different. She said it was because the bay has a memory."

"What kind of memory?"

Lorenzo looked at him sideways. "Like the kind that remembers every boat that ever sank in it. Every person. Every thing that was dropped and never found."

Cal thought of Maree. He thought of her standing in the mud, picking things up and putting them in her mouth, as though tasting the bay itself to see what it was saying.

Act III

The drilling rig arrived on a Friday. It was a white blob on the horizon, bigger than any boat Cal had ever seen, moving slowly toward the bay like a cloud deciding to land.

He stood on the shore and watched it come. Maree was beside him. She had come without him knowing she had—she simply appeared, the way she always did, without announcement or explanation.

She looked at the rig and her face did not change. It did not go angry. It did not go sad. It went the colour of the water—something deep and flat and impossible to read from the shore.

"They're going to poison it," Cal said. He did not know why he said it. He did not know why he felt the need to say anything at all.

Maree did not answer. She turned and walked toward the water. She waded in until the water was at her waist, then deeper, until she was swimming. She swam out toward the rig, and Cal stood on the shore and watched her go, and he felt the salt on his hands and knew that it was not from the bay.

That night, he wrote a letter. He wrote it on the back of a receipt from the fried seafood stall, with a pen he found in his drawer. He wrote the worst letter of his life. He was not a writer. He had tried to be one when he was younger, before the boat engine broke and the divorce and everything else that had taken his time. He wrote about the bay. He wrote about Maree—not her name, he did not know her name, not really. He wrote about the way the water moved differently here. He wrote about Lorenzo's grandmother's stories. He wrote about a woman who tasted the mud and knew what it was trying to say.

He wrote until his hand hurt. Then he folded the receipt and put it in an envelope and wrote the names of three people in Austin—he did not know them, had never met them, found their addresses in a phone book—and mailed the envelope with stamps he bought from the gas station.

The rig moved closer. Maree stopped swimming. She stood in the water and watched it. Cal stood on the shore and watched her watch it. Between them was the salt. It was not much. It was everything.

Act IV

The rig did not leave. The drilling started two weeks later. The bay filled with noise and chemical smell and men in hard hats who did not know the difference between an oyster bed and a rock.

Maree did not come to the flats after the drilling started. Cal went every day for a month. He waited. He brought beans and a towel and a book of poems he had found in a library discard box and could not bring himself to read because he was afraid of the words.

The letter had gone somewhere. One of the three people he had sent it to had called him—a woman with a Texas accent who sounded like she did not have much time for strangers but was willing to listen. She told him she had forwarded it to a lawyer in Houston. The lawyer said there might be something. It would take time. Time is the only thing poor people have and rich people buy.

Maree did not come back. But on the last Tuesday of the month, Cal found a shell on his stall. It was a conch shell, white and smooth, and when he held it to his ear, he heard something that was not the ocean. It was the sound of mud. Of water moving through mud. Of something alive, deep below, where the light does not reach and the salt keeps everything it has ever touched.

He put the shell on the counter of his stall. People who came to buy damaged fish looked at it and did not ask questions. In Salt Point, nobody asked questions. You survived by not asking.

Cal kept going to the flats. He kept picking things out of the mud. He kept salting his hands. He did not know if Maree was alive or dead. He did not know if the bay was saved or lost. He knew only that between him and whatever had happened to her, there was salt. It was not much. It was everything.