The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  Three mornings later, after Luke had made exhaustive preparations, we were on Highway 17, thundering south, with Luke stepping hard on the accelerator, and the radio turned up high. Ray Charles was singing “Hit the Road, Jack” and we were singing it along with him. We were drinking beer iced down in a cooler and had the radio tuned to the Big Ape in Jacksonville as we shot across the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge in Savannah. We slowed up at the toll gate and Luke handed the old man who was doling out tickets a dollar for a round tripper.

  “You gonna do a little shopping in Savannah, kids?” the old man asked.

  “No, sir,” Luke replied, “we’re on our way to Florida to steal us a porpoise.”

  On that bizarre and headlong flight to Florida my senses blazed like five brilliant fires behind my eyes. I felt as if I could point at a palm tree and it would burst into flame. I was electric, charged, ecstatic, and terror-stricken. Each song that came on the radio sounded as though it were sung expressly for my pleasure. Though I have an execrable singing voice, I thought my singing was terrific as we stayed on the coastal highway and burned down the oak-lined Georgia roads with Luke changing gears only when we slowed down for towns. Speed was in Luke’s blood and we crossed the Florida state line two hours after we had left Melrose Island, and we didn’t even stop for a glass of free orange juice at the welcome station.

  The city of Jacksonville slowed us up some, but the St. Johns River was a grand thing and the first river we had ever seen that flowed north. Once we hit Highway A1A we were blistering the asphalt again and the tires sang against the macadam and the ocean appeared in intervals to our left. As the warm wind rushed into the cab, we felt that the sea was racing south with us, aware of our mission, yes, aware and approving and partisan.

  We rode south with larcenous hearts and the sensibilities of outlaws, feeding off one another’s bewildered energy. I turned and saw Luke laughing at some remark that Savannah had made and I felt the flow of her long hair against my cheek and the sweet smell of that hair, and I filled up with a perfect, ineffable love of my brother and sister, a love so vivid and powerful I could taste it on my tongue and feel its glorious heat burn deeply in my chest. Leaning over, I kissed Savannah on the neck and I squeezed Luke’s shoulder with my left hand. He reached up and squeezed my hand, then surprised me by taking my hand and bringing it to his lips in a gesture of surpassing tenderness. I leaned back and let the smell of the state of Florida flood my senses in the watery light of Sunday.

  After ten hours of hard driving and two stops for gas, the city of Miami rose out of the sea as we drove past the sign for the Hialeah racetrack. Coconut palms rattled in the warm breezes and the scent of gardens overwhelmed by bougainvillea cologned the broad avenues. We had never been to Florida in our lives and suddenly we were cruising the streets of Miami looking for a place to set our tents beneath the lime and avocado trees.

  “What do we do now, Luke?” I asked. “We can’t just walk up and say, ‘Hello, we’ve driven down here to steal your white porpoise. Do you mind packing her bags?’ “

  “We look around,” Luke answered. “We put our heads together. I got a preliminary plan. But we got to be prepared. First we case the joint. There’s got to be a night watchman, some yo-yo who makes sure little kids don’t sneak in at night to try and catch Flipper with a cane pole.”

  “What will we do about the night watchman?” Savannah asked.

  “I don’t want to have to kill him,” said Luke evenly. “How about you two?”

  “Are you crazy, Luke?” I said. “Are you out of your goddamn tree?”

  “That’s just a contingency plan.”

  “No, it’s not, Luke,” said Savannah. “If that’s a contingency plan, then we’re not part of it.”

  “I was only joking. They’ve got a killer whale locked up in this place. We can check him out tomorrow too.”

  “We aren’t rescuing the killer whale, Luke,” Savannah said. “I know that sound in your voice and the killer whale is out.”

  “Maybe we can set every fish in the whole goddamn place free,” Luke said. “I mean, have a real breakout.”

  “Why do they call them killer whales?” I asked.

  “I think they love to kick ass,” Luke explained.

  We took the causeway that led out toward Key Biscayne and passed the Seaquarium on our right. Luke slowed the truck as we drove through the parking lot, observing the single light that shone from a security man’s office. He came to the window and looked out, his face framed by a corona of electric light, making him featureless and absurd. An eight-foot fence, topped with barbed wire, protected the compound from intruders. Luke gunned the engine and we scissored out of the parking lot, spitting gravel behind us. We knew we were going by the zoo when we passed a place on the road that smelled like Caesar’s cage magnified a hundred times. An elephant trumpeted somewhere in the darkness and Luke answered him with a trumpeting of his own.

  “That didn’t sound like an elephant, Luke,” Savannah said.

  “I thought it was pretty good,” Luke said. “What do you think it sounded like?”

  “An oyster farting through Crisco,” she answered.

  Luke roared and put his arm around Savannah and hugged her to his chest. That night we slept on a bench at Key Biscayne and the sun was high when we arose the next morning, gathered our belongings, and headed for a visit to the Seaquarium.

  We paid our admission fees and walked through the turnstiles. For the first half-hour we circumnavigated the park, following the parabola made by the large Cyclone fence and its ugly toupee of barbed wire. Beside a cluster of palms contiguous to the parking lot, Luke stopped and said, “I’ll back the truck up to these trees and I’d cut a hole right through here.”

  “What if they catch us, Luke?” I asked.

  “We’re just high school kids from Colleton who came down to rescue Snow on a dare from our classmates. We act like total hicks and pretend the coolest thing we ever did was spit watermelon seeds at sheets hanging in our mama’s back yard.”

  “The guard at the gate was wearing a gun, Luke,” Savannah said.

  “I know, honey, but no guard is going to shoot at us.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Because Tolitha gave me a whole bottle of sleeping pills. You know, the ones she calls her little red devils.”

  “Do we just tell him to say ‘ah’ and pop a pill in his mouth?” I said, fearing that Luke’s master plan would prove a bit leaky in its execution.

  “I haven’t figured that out yet, little brother,” Luke said. “I just found me the place where I’m going to cut the hole.”

  “How we gonna get Snow out of the water?” I asked.

  “Same way. Sleeping pills,” he answered.

  “That’ll be easy,” I said. “We’ll just jump in the water, swim our asses off until we catch a porpoise that it took experts a month to catch when they had all the equipment in the world, and then slip a few sleeping pills between her lips. Great plan, Luke.”

  “More than a few pills, Tom. We’ve got to make damn sure that the Snow is completely tranquilized.”

  “This will be the first porpoise in history to die of a drug overdose,” Savannah said.

  “No, I figure the Snow weighs about four hundred pounds. Tolitha weighs a hundred pounds. She takes one pill every night. We’ll give Snow four or five of the babies.”

  “Who ever heard of a porpoise taking sleeping pills, Luke?” Savannah said. “Tom’s right.”

  “I haven’t either,” Luke admitted. “But I’ve heard of a porpoise eating fish. And if that fish just happens to be chock-full of sleeping pills, then it’s my theory that porpoise will be ready for rock-a-bye-baby time.”

  I asked, “Do porpoises sleep, Luke?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “We’re going to find out a lot about porpoises on this little expedition, Tom.”

  “What if it doesn’t work, Luke?” Savannah asked.

&nbs
p; Luke shrugged his shoulders and said, “No harm in that, Savannah. At least we’ll know we tried to do something. And ain’t we had some fun so far? All those people in Colleton crying about losing their porpoise and you, me, and Tom down here in Miami planning the jailbreak. We’ll tell our kids about it. If we manage to get Snow out of here, there’ll be parades and confetti and riding in convertibles. We’ll brag about it until the day we die. But first, you got to see it. Neither of you see it yet. Now that’s real important. Here, I’ll help you. Close your eyes . . . ”

  Savannah and I closed our eyes and listened to our brother’s voice. “Okay. Tom and I have the porpoise in the water. We move her over to the place where Savannah is waiting with the stretcher. We get ropes around the Snow and very gently we roll her out of the water and tie her to the stretcher. The guard is asleep because we drugged his Pepsi a couple of hours before. See it? Can you visualize it? We get the porpoise in the pickup and we’re off. And here’s the important thing. Listen to this. We’re standing in the boat landing in Colleton and we take the Snow and we untie the ropes and we set her free in the river where she was born and where she belongs. Can you see it? Can you see it all, Tom and Savannah?”

  His voice was hypnotic, transported, and we both opened our eyes at the same time and we nodded toward each other. Both of us could see it.

  We continued our long walk around the perimeter of the park and saw The Amberjack tied up at its berth at the south end of the Seaquarium. There was no sign of the crew around, but we avoided any approach to the boat. Turning toward the porpoise house, we crossed a wooden bridge suspended high over a deep clear moat where huge sharks moved sluggishly in an endless circle. The sharks swam at twenty-yard intervals and there was very little room or inclination for them to pass one another. We watched a hammerhead and a young mako make their torpid passage beneath us as the crowd watched with breathless wonder. So monotonous was the movement of their great tails, so proscribed was their freedom for improvisation or movement, that they seemed purged of all their ferocious grandeur. Beneath the gazes of tourists, they looked as docile and harmless as black mollies.

  The crowd was large and good-natured and we followed a processional of Bermuda shorts and rubber-soled thongs toward the amphitheater where the killer whale, Dreadnought, would perform at noon. From our brief encounter, Florida seemed to be a place where amiable crowds met to display white shapeless arms and acres of sun-starved hairless legs. The sun had parched the grass to the palest of greens and automatic sprinkler systems worked the infields off the gravel paths and ruby-throated hummingbirds droned among the lilies. As we neared the amphitheater, we passed a sign that read, “Visit Moby Porpoise at feeding time.”

  “I think we will,” Luke said.

  We listened to the tourists talking about the white porpoise as they filed into the rows of seats that ringed a vast two-million-gallon tank aquarium. When we were all seated, a well-made blond boy with coppery shoulders walked out onto a wooden peninsula jutting out over the water and waved to the crowd. A woman announcer presented the history of Dreadnought, the killer whale who had been captured in a pod of twelve whales near Queen Charlotte Strait off Vancouver Island and flown to Miami by special flight. The Seaquarium had paid sixty thousand dollars for the purchase of Dreadnought and it had taken a year to train the killer whale. The whale could not be incorporated into the porpoise show because porpoise was a favorite food of Orcinus orca.

  As she spoke, a gate opened invisibly underwater and the passage of something awesome roiled the opaque depths below.

  The tanned boy peered into the water, seeing something rising up toward him. His platform was twenty feet above the surface and you could study the intensity of his concentration by counting the lines on his forehead as he leaned forward holding a Spanish mackerel by the tail. The boy made a circling gesture with his hand and in obedience the water was suddenly runnelled with waves spun outward from the center of the aquarium. Then the whale went to the bottom of the tank, maintaining his speed and momentum, and came out of that water like a building launched from below and took the proffered fish daintily, like a girl accepting a mint. Then the whale fell back down in a long arc. His shadow blocked the sun for a moment and when he hit the surface of the aquarium it was as if a tree had toppled into the sea from a high ridge.

  Then a massive wave, in answer, broke over the railing and drenched the crowd with seawater from row one to row twenty-three. You watched Dreadnought do his act and bathed at the same time, the salt water running out of your hair, smelling of the essence of whale.

  As he made the circuit around his pool again, urging himself toward his moment of piebald beauty in the Florida sun, lifting out toward the heavy-scented odors of citrus and bougainvillea, we could glimpse his white-bottomed streaking image in the water and the amazing iridescences on his black head; he was the color of a good pair of saddle shoes. His dorsal fin was set like a black pyramid on his back and moved through the water like a blade hissing through nylon. His lines were clean and supple; his teeth were set in his grim mouth, each one the size of a table lamp. I had never seen such contained and implied power. Dreadnought leapt again and rang a bell that was suspended over the water. He opened his mouth and let the blond boy brush the whale’s teeth with a janitor’s broom. For his finale, Dreadnought came blasting out of the water, his flukes gleaming and shedding gallons of seawater, and the whale grasped a rope with his teeth and ran our American flag to the top of a flagpole high above the aquarium. Whenever the whale reached the apogee of one of his agile leaps, the crowd cheered, then braced itself for his graceful, streamlined plunge back into the water, when again we would be covered by a prodigious wave.

  “Now that’s an animal,” Luke said.

  “Can you imagine being hunted by a killer whale?” Savannah said.

  Luke said to her, “If that thing’s after you, Savannah, there’s only one thing you can do. Submit. You’d have to submit to your fate.”

  “I’d love to see a whale like that in Colleton,” I said, laughing.

  “This is how they should execute criminals,” Luke said suddenly. “Give them a bathing suit, stick a few mackerel in their jockstraps, and let them try to swim across this pool. If they made it they would go free. If they didn’t, they’d really cut down on the food bill at Seaquarium.”

  “Real humane, Luke,” said Savannah.

  “I mean the really mean criminals. You know, the mass murderers. Hitler. Baby killers. The real creeps on the planet. I don’t mean jaywalkers and shit.”

  “What a hideous death,” I said, watching the whale leap through a ring of fire and douse the flames with the backwash of his landing.

  “Naw, they could make it part of the act. Get Dad to run it. The killer whale jumps up and rings the bell, so as a reward, he gets to eat a criminal.”

  Dreadnought’s last colossal free fall covered us with a final wave and we joined the hundreds of drenched tourists moving out toward the porpoise house.

  After the killer whale, the porpoises looked diminutive and inconsequential and their act, though far more spunky and accomplished than the whale’s, seemed trifling after Dreadnought’s pièce de résistance. Their tricks were dazzlers, all right, they just weren’t whales. But they were sure a happy, supererogatory tribe as they left the water like artillery shells leaping twenty feet in the air, their bodies jade-colored and smooth. Their heads were creased with perpetual harlequin smiles that lent sincerity to their high-spirited performances. They played baseball games, bowled, danced on their tails the full length of their aquarium, threw balls through hoops, and took lit cigarettes out of their trainer’s mouth in a vain attempt to get him to give up smoking.

  We found Carolina Snow in her own small enclosed pool, cut off from the companionship of the other porpoises. A large and curious crowd surrounded her enclosure and she swam from side to side, looking disoriented and faintly bored. She had not yet learned a single trick but was certainly earning her
keep as an item of curiosity. The announcer described the capture of the white porpoise and made it sound like the most dangerous, exotic venture since the discovery of the Northwest Passage. At three o’clock we watched a keeper bring a bucket of fish to feed the Snow. He threw a blue runner at the opposite end of the pool from where Snow was swimming. She turned and in a movement of surprising delicacy accelerated across the pool and took the fish from the top of the water. We listened as the tourists tried to describe her color. We, her liberators, listened with pride as we heard strangers speak of her pale luminous beauty.

  We watched the feeding and noticed that the man kept alternating where he threw the fish and that it was all part of an elaborate design for the training of the Snow. Once he got her in one rhythm of going from side to side in the pool, he reversed the procedure and brought her closer and closer until she lifted out of the water and took the last fish from his hand. The keeper was patient and skillful and the crowd applauded when Snow came out of the water. It was like watching a priest administering the Eucharist to a young girl in a Communion veil when he put the blue runner in Snow’s open mouth.

  “We got to get to a fish market, Tom,” Luke whispered. “Savannah, you try to make contact with the night watchman before closing time. It don’t close until eight.”

  “I’ve always wanted to play the wicked seductress,” she said.

  “You aren’t seducing anyone. You’re just going to make friends with him. Then put the son of a bitch to sleep.”

  In Coconut Grove we bought half a dozen whitings and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. When we returned to the Seaquarium it was a half-hour before closing time and we found Savannah talking with the night watchman, who had just arrived at the security office for duty.

  “Brothers,” Savannah said, “I have met the nicest man.”

  “Is she bothering you, mister?” Luke said. “She’s only free on a daily pass from the nut house.”

  “Bothering me? It’s not often I get to talk to such a pretty girl. I’m the one who’s usually here when everybody’s gone home.”