the songs she used to sing undersea, and their melodies, but it was as if they’d all escaped her with the severing of her tongue. A mechanism of the mind, she supposed, that kept her from lamenting their exact loss.
Axel smoked from the pipe, too, and his dark mood lifted into melancholy. Around midnight he wheeled Rapunzel over to The Ink and Stab, where an elegant old Japanese woman in a man’s red smoking jacket, her white hair pinned up in a nautilus swirl, tattooed Axel’s back. “Give the mermaid that pretty girl’s face,” he said, gesturing toward Rapunzel in her chair, her long secondhand prom dress reaching down past her fin. The tattooist, who herself was covered throat to toe with sea dragons committing gory violence, pumped the machine’s pedal with the tip of her peg leg, setting the needle to buzzing. The pain she inflicted as she painted the many glittering green scales was excruciating, and he squeezed Rapunzel’s hand so hard for comfort that she bit through the flesh of her lip. The tattooist wrote cruel destiny in a fluttering banner beneath the mermaid, in lettering that reminded Axel of the Popeye comic strip he used to read every Sunday after church.
“How much for that on your back?” the casino boss asked as Axel waited in the living room of the mansion, popping wheelies in Rapunzel’s chair. The doctor had Rapunzel up in the kitchen, bleeding her for a transfusion.
“What do you mean?” Axel asked.
The casino boss licked his bony middle finger and ran it across his own forehead, straightening the line of his comb-over. His shoe-polished hair was as black as the shiny suit he wore. He stepped behind Axel in the chair and tenderly touched his fingers to the back of Axel’s neck. Axel leaned forward, and the casino boss’s fingers followed the curls in Rapunzel’s hair shaped like sea waves. “I meeeeeeean,” the casino boss purred, “how. much?”
Ever since the tattoo had healed, Axel had gone shirtless everywhere, despite the unlifting fog that kept Mudpuddle Beach cold and wet in the late autumn. People would gather behind him, enraptured by the tattooist’s art, as he strummed his banjo on the boardwalk and sang the love songs he wrote for Rapunzel.
“It’s not for sale,” Axel said, leaning forward, allowing the casino boss’s fingers to follow the lines of the mermaid’s hips, and down to where the points of her fins ended just above his ass. The casino boss playfully snapped at the elastic of Axel’s briefs, which stuck up from his baggy dungarees.
“Nothing’s not for sale,” the casino boss said cheerfully. He took the lid from a vase on the credenza, and reached in for a thick roll of bills held together with a rubber band. “Think of all the intoxication you could buy your little sweetie. And a boy so young as yourself would heal in a matter of weeks. Our good doctor has all the latest medical gadgets. And strawberry-scented anesthesia to boot! You won’t feel a thing.”
Not only did Axel then agree to be skinned, but he signed a far more sinister contract with the casino boss. He promised he would give him a child. “You young people,” the casino boss said, “have unwanted infants all the time. It’s no loss.” He then offered Axel a much-consulted pornographic pamphlet disguised as a medical guide: Properly Defiling the Mermaid, by Dr. H. W. Easterman, with illustrations by the author, its pages taped together and falling loose from the staples.
In the flophouse bathroom that night, Axel thumbed through the pamphlet with horror — the text and illustrations were graphic, but the photographs were more so: full-on mermaid snuff, the girls vivisected, their flesh peeled back and their innards laid open atop a clinical bench. He slapped the book shut and examined his back in the mirror, staring at the tattoo, divorcing himself from it, gritting his teeth and furrowing his brow, as if willing himself to slough off the skin painlessly.
He took Rapunzel to the roof then and, within the fence of wrought-iron spikes of the widow’s walk, made love to her sweetly and passionately, in a variation on diagram #142 from the pamphlet. After, as he watched the stars flicker in and out within a netting of smoke-colored clouds, and considered the chilling magnitude of his own smallness, he knew he would be defaulting on all contracts with the casino boss. But the refusal of their first-born would most certainly be the end of them; the casino boss’s spiny network of thugs infected every district of the world. Where could they go but into the air?
Just before dawn broke, Axel took Rapunzel to the convent of the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, its massive doors crafted from the hulls of retired ships, barnacles still crusting the wood. The door knocker was an anchor dangling from a chain. At the noise of it, a tall nun with a paralyzed hand swung out her claw and captured Rapunzel by the hair. “We have no place for boys who violate helpless creatures,” the nun said in a voice gravelly with sleep and the whiskey she nursed every midnight, as she snatched away Axel’s lover. Rapunzel, so long voiceless, howled with the keening of a rabbit in a trap, and she didn’t stop, and Axel didn’t leave the front garden, not for two days and two nights, until the nuns, unable to worship peacefully even with cotton in their ears, evicted Rapunzel, a twenty-dollar bill safety-pinned to her smock. Back in her wheelchair, Axel kneeling next to her, she wrote in her sketch pad, in a shivery, old-lady cursive: I am an animal.
Axel lifted his fingers to her lips. He parted her lips with his thumb and slipped his pinkie in to touch at the powerful stump of her near-soundless tongue. “Thank God for your terrible noise,” he told her. He made love to her again, right there, in that garden overrun with a trumpet vine that attracted only flightless birds, and he knew they watched, the nuns, he knew they gathered in the crow’s nest because he could see the stem of it warping with their weight, could see the nest of it leaning forward like the head of a sunflower. The nuns watched, their neutered flesh tucked away in mortifying panties of thorns, growing slick, throbbing with afterlife. Never to be yours, he said in his mind to the nuns, about his love, never to be anybody’s but ours, and he knew this was true, because he and Rapunzel were impossible, everyone said so. And to hold something impossible in your hands, not just in your heart, was a rarity God afforded almost no one.
“Maybe our baby would be happier with them,” Rapunzel wrote on her sketch pad as they escaped Mudpuddle after dark, Axel pushing her wheelchair through the forest. Though the chair bounced and bumped along the pinecone-strewn path, Rapunzel drew a portrait of the child they’d have and give away, a baby with legs and wrapped in fox-fur bunting, resting in a pram so elegant it resembled a hearse with its silk curtains and its curlicues of chrome on a waxed black cab. “We’d have a rich child,” she wrote.
What Axel didn’t tell her was that the silver duct tape he’d wrapped around his knuckles concealed a missing finger. He’d left the nun’s garden only once during Rapunzel’s captivity, to go to the boardwalk for some pralines to sustain him in his vigilance, and was there nabbed by a goon who’d taken him to the lower guts of the Waterloo Casino. Luckily for Axel, the goon had been too giddy with sadism, determined to luxuriate in Axel’s slow torture. As the goon had delighted in Axel’s lost finger, using it to scratch his nose and chewing on its hangnail, Axel had escaped through a vent.
And it was the goon who’d revealed to Axel the casino boss’s true intentions — the organs of the first-born would be harvested. The casino boss’s wife was failing fast and needed fresh parts that were as like new as possible.
“When he finally told me about his finger,” the mermaid ghost told Desiree, “I felt so sad for our first-born. I cried and cried as if our baby existed, as if I’d seen him and lost him. So I don’t know whose idea it was, when we came up to the hanging tree, that we should put our necks through those nooses. Have you ever seen Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare?” Desiree hadn’t, but she’d had a part in Rothgutt’s all-girl production of Titus Andronicus last year. “Axel and I saw it at the Mudpuddle Beach amphitheater. Romeo had been played by a forty- year-old actor in a wig and with circles of rouge on his cheeks, but he was quite good, and you could very much forget that he was too old.”
“Like Romeo and Juliet,” Axel told Rapunzel as he lifted her from her chair and helped her to the noose that had lynched many men. In Axel’s arms, she felt euphoric, her soul given over entirely to this notion of absence, and she slipped her neck through the noose and reached up to tighten the knots. Axel stepped back, but couldn’t bear to have her die before he did, so he leaped up onto the seat of the wheelchair to reach for the next noose on the tree. The wheelchair rolled from beneath him and he fell to the ground, hitting his head on the skull of a long-dead convict, knocking himself unconscious. When he woke, Rapunzel swayed lifeless above him.
“It wasn’t that he changed his mind, Desiree,” the mermaid ghost insisted, “but that he thought he could somehow keep my soul alive if he lived.”
Upon hearing this, Desiree, her wrists too weak to hold on any longer, let go of the branch and fell to the ground. The mermaid’s ghost went instantly vaporous. When Desiree landed hard on both feet, she felt her Achilles tendon tear in her ankle, and, like a stretched rubber band snipped with scissors, the tendon snapped up inside her leg and balled behind her knee. She passed out from the pain but woke only minutes later, Miranda lifting her into Rapunzel’s wheelchair, which had sat wrecked beneath the tree ever since the half-orchestrated suicide pact. Miranda, with the screwdriver she kept tucked in her sock for protection against the pervy mashers who crept among the forest paths, repaired the chair’s wobbly wheels and pushed Desiree toward the wintry gray haze of the
