“I’m going to find that wreck,” the golden-eyed diver promised.

Every season there’s at least one treasure hunter who wants to buy more than room and board from me. If I feel like it, I say yes. If he has nice eyes.

The golden-eyed diver had scars like he’d been at war with the sea. The snaking lightning of jellyfish whips. The dotted crescent of a small shark’s appetite. The starburst of a rogue harpoon.

I traced them with my fingertips and gathered his stories. And then he asked for mine.

“I can tell you know about the wreck,” he said, smiling with half his face, scolding with the other half.

“It’s just an old wives’ tale,” I said.

“Tell me anyway. What do the wives say?”

“There’s a ship, somewhere out there. Too big and too old for the Salton Sea, and no one remembers it. There are bodies aboard—rich people with nice jewelry. Gold. Pearls. They must have gone down in a flood, or when the water receded.”

“But no one has ever been there, to see what’s left?”

“The water changes. Sometimes it’s sea, sometimes it’s sand. Bone. It might have been re-submerged in toxic water, or buried in a sandstorm. There are people who say they’ve seen it, but no one has ever seen it twice.”

“Ah. Well, not much point then. How far have you been out onto the sea bed?”

His probing fingertips and thick red wine made me sleepy, dizzy. I wanted to lay my head on his sun-hot chest and sleep.

“A half day, no more. I could never sleep on those bones.”

***

In the morning, he was gone, as adventurers often are—but this was the first time I felt sad for it. Alden noticed.

“You wanted that one to stay?”

“Wouldn’t have minded. Best he left, though. He only wanted the wreck.”

“They all want the wreck, even the ones who don’t know it. You didn’t tell him where, did you?”

“No. Told him it was probably long buried. Or never existed.” I toyed with the stones in my pocket.

Alden nodded approval and handed me coffee. “Maybe he’ll come back for you after he’s made his fortune.”

“Ass.”

Some did come back, but not for me. They came for treasure.

I licked my lips, tasting him still. “I hope he does come back, though. He had good stories.”

I stretched my sore back and made the climb to the roof to clean the day’s fish. The birds had learned to catch the strings of offal I threw over the side. I named them by the way their pinions pivoted on the wind—after fish, the way they dove for each scrap. Marlin was the largest. He’d eat till the breeze couldn’t carry him; then he’d drift into the sunflowers below.