There is still much talk about the stranger. He must have been a rain-dancer and no one knew. Someone says they thought he had an eye in his heart because he made them feel, and one of the things they feel especially when they see the shell houses uncovered by the fallen hillside is that the past is still with them. They feel beauty again.

“I just wish we could have sent him to the Sonora,” says Aurora. But after the hillside collapsed and Dwight’s house fell to pieces on wet earth, she feels a secret glee.

Besides, the Rain Priest reminded her somehow of the octopus that walked out of water that time, she tells her daughter. “I couldn’t identify it at first, the feeling I had, but then I did. He had a feel to him. You should have seen it, but you were an infant yourself,” she says. “There was nothing like it. Could you clean my glasses, dear?”

AFTER THE RAIN

A week or two later, when Vince comes in to the café, he is still wearing his fishing clothes. Many faces turn toward his dirty gold-colored overalls and his worn woolen shirt.

“Gee, Vince, you’re smelling up the place,” Linda says, pouring him coffee, all of them accustomed to the smell of fishing boats. “And now you’re using too much sugar in your coffee.”

He pays no attention. “Ruth, I’ll be damned, but I found your old Trophy. Way out there. Way out.” Vince chewed a toothpick and squinted, but there was a small wave of happiness across his face, being able to tell Ruth this, for not only had her boat been stolen, it was about damned time something good happened for her.

“No way, Vince.” Ruth is afraid to even hope. She thought the Marco Polo would be far north by now. “Where is it?”

“I’ll take you there. It’s about seventy-eight degrees northwest and I’ve got it plotted. Pretty far out, though.”

He’s already up and so is Ruth.

“But there’s one thing,” he says as they leave the café. “I saw an octopus climbing down out of it as I approached. I said to myself how strange it was, because it was so large and everyone knows how they hate boats, and yet I swear it looked straight at me like it wanted to be seen.”

“Kind of like the toads,” Linda says, overhearing as the two leave.

He talks all the way to the marina. “It was the eeriest thing.” And then there is the noise of the boat starting and they head out, cutting straight through the water. Ruth stands in the spray, looking for sea life. She knows the sea. She thinks of it as time and right now it all seems timeless, as if she can pass through years to the past. As she reaches her father’s old boat, so cared-for, she feels as if no time has ever passed, that she has moved backward.

It looks clean, tidier than Ruth ever left it. She walks through it, feeling strange to be in it again. Ghostly is the word that comes to her, but only because it is such a strange sight out there, alone on the water, no other ships or boat, no rocks jutting out of water, just the blue and white Marco Polo with everything in its place, except Ruth.