learn), and his teeth were uneven (he’d resisted braces), and his legs were pale and skinny. “I hope Marse told you about our mission,” Dennis said to me. His hair, drying in the sun, stuck up at odd angles. It was more red than blond, and it needed a cut. Freckles spotted his shoulders and earlobes. “Just because this is your first time,” he said, “don’t think we don’t expect you to contribute.”
“Damn straight,” said Kyle. He opened the duffel bag he’d brought from the other stilt house, pulled out a machete, and removed its sheath; it glinted in the sunlight. They had swum to the other house, which Marse told me belonged to a family named the Becks, to borrow the weapon and also to prove which boy was the faster swimmer. Kyle had won.
“What’s the mission?” I said.
“I don’t want anything to do with it,” said Marse.
“She disapproves,” said Kyle to me. He brandished the machete in the air, then brought it down over an invisible kill. “Take that,” he said, “and that.”
Dennis took the machete and set it down on the flat top of a piling. “Let’s eat.”
The boys cooked burgers on the grill on the upstairs porch while Marse and I fixed potato salad in the kitchen. “What do you think?” said Marse. We could see Kyle and Dennis through the kitchen window. They stood with spatulas in hand, swatting at mosquitoes.
“Of which one?”
She reached over and pinched my elbow. It was an intimate gesture, a gesture fitting old friends. It was Marse’s style, I gathered, to rush into intimacy. I was flattered. “Come on,” she said.
“He’s cute,” I said, and she frowned at me. “I can’t tell yet. I need more to go on.”
Marse put down the knife she was using to dice the potatoes. In her expression, I recognized a cautious optimism I’d felt many times. “I know he’s not interested right now,” she said. “But I don’t see why he couldn’t get interested.”
She was pretty and strong. There was something dynamic about her, something vital. “I don’t see why not,” I said.
There was, explained Dennis and Kyle over lunch, an electric eel living in a submerged toilet bowl under the stilt house dock. “It’s the meanest-looking creature you’ve ever seen,” said Kyle, chewing his hamburger.
Dennis nodded. “It looks like a very old man. It looks like something that would yell at a kid for cutting through the yard.”
I laughed. Marse crushed a peanut shell between her fingers and handed the nut to Dennis. “It’s probably been there for years,” she said.
“My father sank that bowl a year ago,” he said, “and I’ve swum by it a hundred times without that thing poking out at me.”
“Why did your father sink a toilet bowl?” I said.
“For the fish,” said Dennis.
“But—” Marse started.
“Real fish,” said Dennis. “Playful fish. And coral and plants and such. We replaced the downstairs toilet, and we wanted to see what would grow there.”
“You have your answer,” said Marse.
“It could hurt someone,” said Kyle. “Shit, it flashed its fangs at me, and I’m big. What about a kid? That thing could grab hold of a little arm.”
“Ridiculous,” said Marse. She handed me a peanut, then winked without letting the boys see. I admired the way she baited them.
Dennis stood up. There were crumbs on his lips. “I think it’s time,” he said, “for the skeptics to see for themselves.”
Marse clapped. We followed Dennis downstairs, then lay on our stomachs on the dock, watching the rim of the toilet bowl skip beneath the water’s surface. The water was the near-cloudy green of jade dishware, shrouding the seafloor. Marse jumped up and snatched the machete from the piling. “Dennis, you are not going to kill that animal.”
Dennis faced her, smiling slyly, and I saw that he’d never intended, truly, to kill the eel. “We’ll catch it,” he said. “We’ll give it a new home.”
“Where?” said Marse.
“I thought we were going to kill it,” said Kyle.
“We’ll take it to Soldier’s Key,” said Dennis. “We’ll find it a cozy little cave in the reef.”
“We’ll all be electrocuted,” said Kyle.
Marse put down the machete and Kyle reached for it. She snatched it up again. “No,” she said, pointing a finger at him.
There were two nets on the premises—a flat one with holes the size of playing cards, which wouldn’t hold the eel, and a round one attached to a pole, which was too small. Dennis decided to swim back to the Becks’ house, where a cabin cruiser