by Pat Conroy
“Mr. Beavers is from New York City.”
“You want some fried chicken?” Luke offered.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Mr. Beavers said, pulling out a drumstick.
“How about a Pepsi?”
“I’m strictly a coffee man. Hey, it’s getting close to closing time. I got to run you kids out of here. This job gets lonely. That’s its only drawback.”
He sounded a loud foghorn that was followed immediately by a recorded announcement asking that all visitors leave the grounds of the Seaquarium at once and giving the opening time for the next day. Mr. Beavers went outside his office door and blew his own whistle, walking between the killer whale amphitheater and the porpoise house. Savannah refreshed his coffee from the pot he had already brewed on his desk, snapped open the contents of two sleeping pills, and stirred the coffee until the powder dissolved completely.
Luke and I followed Mr. Beavers around the park as he good-humoredly urged the tourists to go home and return the next day. He stopped at the holding tank where the Snow was moving restlessly from one side to the other.
“She’s an aberration of nature,” he said. “But a beautiful aberration.”
As he turned, he spotted a teenager throwing a Popsicle wrapper on the ground. “My good young man,” he said, “littering is a crime against the maker of this green earth.”
As he walked toward the boy, Luke dropped the whiting into the water of Carolina Snow’s aquarium. The Snow passed it twice before she downed it.
“How many pills did you put in that fish?” I whispered.
“Enough to kill you or me,” he answered.
Mr. Beavers was sipping his coffee as we waved goodbye to him. I whispered to Savannah as we walked to the pickup, “Nice work, Mata Hari.”
Luke came walking up behind us and said, “I’m hot. How ’bout let’s go swimming in Key Biscayne.”
“What time are we coming back for the Snow,” I asked.
“I figure about midnight,” he said.
We watched the moon rise like a pale watermark against the eastern sky. We swam until the sun began to set in an Atlantic so different from the ocean that broke against our part of the eastern seaboard that it did not seem possible that they were related in any way. The Florida ocean was clear-eyed and aquamarine and I had never been able to see my own feet as I walked chest-deep in the sea.
“This water don’t seem right,” Luke said, expressing exactly what I felt.
The sea has always been feminine to me but Florida had softened its hard edges and tamed the azury depths with clarity. The mystery of Florida deepened on the shore as we ate mangoes for the first time. The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience. We were strangers to a sea you could trust, whose tides were imperceptible and gentle, whose cologne-colored waters were translucent and calm below the palm trees. The moon laid a filament of silver across the water for a hundred miles before it nested in the braids of Savannah’s hair. Luke stood up and fished his watch out from his jeans pocket.
“If we get caught tonight, Tom and Savannah, just let me do the talking. I got you into this and it’s my responsibility to get you out if we hit trouble. Now let’s pray that Mr. Beavers is counting sheep.”
Through the window of his small office we could see Mr. Beavers with his head on his desk, sleeping soundly. Luke backed the pickup into a grove of trees by the Cyclone fence and, working quickly, cut a large hole in the fence using his wire cutters. Entering the fence, we made our way through the shadows passing over the moat of sharks where we could hear the creatures moving through the water below us in their endless circuit, their horrible punishment for having been born sharks. We were running by the amphitheater when we heard the sound of the killer whale’s implosion of breath.
“Wait a minute,” Luke said, removing a fish from the bag he had brought for Snow in case she wanted a snack on the ride north.
“No, Luke,” I said, alarmed. “We don’t have time for no foolishness.”
But Luke was running up the stairs into the amphitheater and Savannah and I had no choice but to follow him. In the moonlight we watched him as he climbed the platform and we saw the great fin break the water below him. Then Luke moved to the edge of the platform, and mimicking the gestures of the blond trainer we had witnessed earlier in the day, he made a circular movement with his arm and we saw Dreadnought dive deep into his tank and heard the punished waters slapping against the sides of the aquarium as the invisible whale gathered speed beneath my brother. Luke put the whiting in his right hand and leaned far out over the water.
The whale exploded out from below and took the whiting from Luke’s hand without so much as grazing his fingers. Then the lordly fall from space carried the whale over on his side, exposing his brilliant white underbelly, and he washed twenty-three rows of bleachers as he entered the water again in a fabulous wave.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I whispered as Luke joined us again.
“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” Savannah said, exhilarated.
We ran to The Amberjack and went to the storage bin on deck where the crew kept the equipment we knew we would need. Luke pulled out the ropes and the stretcher. He threw the foam rubber mattresses to Savannah. She took them and raced back to the truck to lay them out neatly on the flatbed. Luke and I hurried to the porpoise house and Luke again used his wire cutters to enter the area where the Snow was kept.
We reached her just in time. She was almost motionless in shallow water and I think she would have drowned if we had waited another hour. When we entered the water, she was so drugged that she did not even move. We caught her beneath the head and stomach and moved her over to the side of the pool where we had placed the stretcher. She was so white my hand looked brown against her head. She made a tender, human sound as we floated her across the pool. Savannah returned and the three of us girded the stretcher beneath her in the water and bound her with the ropes in three places.
Again, we passed through the shadows of palms and citrus trees, Luke and I bearing the stretcher like medics in a war zone, keeping low and moving fast. We passed through the opening in the ruined fence and untied the Snow gently and rolled her onto the mattresses. Savannah and I splashed her with the Key Biscayne water we had gathered in buckets and in our beer cooler. Luke closed the tailgate, and running to the cab, he started the motor and eased out of the parking lot and moved down the causeway toward the lights of Miami. I think we were the nearest to getting caught in those first two minutes, because going down that nearly deserted highway, the three Wingo kids from South Carolina were screaming, screaming, screaming.
Soon we had left Miami forever and Luke had his foot pressed against the accelerator almost to the floorboard, and the warm air streamed through our hair as every mile brought us closer to the border of Georgia. Snow’s breathing was ragged at first, like the tearing of paper, and once or twice when it seemed as though she had stopped breathing I blew air into her blowhole. She answered me with a breath of her own but the effect of the pills did not seem to wear off until we stopped for gas at Daytona Beach. Then she rallied and was perky for the rest of the trip.
After we got gas, Luke drove the truck out onto the beach and Savannah and I leapt out and filled up the buckets and cooler with fresh seawater, then hopped back in as Luke spun through the sand and made it to the highway again.
“We’re doing it. We’re doing it,” he screamed out the back window to us. “We got five more hours and we’ll be home free.”
We doused the porpoise with salt water and massaged her from head to tail to keep her circulation going and spoke to her with those phrases of endearment kids normally reserve for dogs. She was supple and pliable and her flesh was satiny to the touch. We sang lullabies to her, recited children’s poems and nursery rhymes, and whispered that we were taking her home and she would never have to eat dead fish again. When we crossed into Georgia, Savannah and I danced around the flatbed and Luk
e had to slow down because he thought we might dance ourselves right out of the truck.
It was right outside of Midway, Georgia, that a highway patrolman pulled Luke over for going about forty miles over the speed limit. Luke said through the back window, “Cover Snow’s head with one of those mattresses. I’ll handle this.”
The sun had already risen and the patrolman was young and slim as a blade. He had that maddening arrogance of the rookie. But Luke bounded out of that truck just bubbling over about something.
“Officer,” I heard him say as Savannah and I got Snow’s head covered. “I’m so sorry. Honest I am. But I was so excited about catching this here shark and I just had to get it back so my daddy could see it while it was still alive.”
The patrolman came over to the truck and whistled as he looked in.
“He’s a big ’un,” the patrolman said. “But that’s no cause for you speeding like that, son.”
“You don’t understand, Officer,” Luke said. “This here is a world record. I caught him with a rod and reel. It’s a white shark. They’re the real man-eaters. I caught this one near the jetty off Saint Simons Island.”
“What’d you catch him with?”
“I caught him with a live shrimp, if you can believe such a thing. They caught a white shark in Florida last year and found a man’s boot and shinbone in his stomach.”
“I got to give you a ticket, son.”
“I expect that, sir. I was speeding I was so excited. You ever catch a fish this big?”
“I’m from Marietta. I once caught a twelve-pound bass in Lake Lanier.”
“Then you know exactly how I feel, sir. Look, let me show you his teeth. He’s got teeth like razor blades. My poor brother and sister are half dead from trying to hold this rascal down. Let the officer have a look, Tom.”
“I don’t cotton to seeing no shark, son. Just you run along now and slow it down a bit. I guess you got a right to be excited. That bass I caught, that was the biggest one taken out of Lake Lanier that whole day. My cat ate it before I could show it to my daddy.”
“Thank you so much, sir. You sure you don’t want to see its teeth? He’s got a powerful mouthful.”
“I’d sure rather be driving than sitting on that dang thing,” the patrolman said to me and Savannah as he walked back to his car.
My mother was hanging out wash when we came blitzing down the dirt road and Luke made a few triumphant doughnuts on the lawn and we slid to a stop. My mother ran to the truck and did a little softshoe of triumph around the lawn, her arms raised in the air. Luke backed up the truck to the sea wall and we rolled the porpoise back onto the stretcher. Mama kicked off her shoes and the four of us stepped into the high tide and moved out toward deeper water. We held Snow in our arms and walked her into deeper water, letting her get used to the river again. We let her float by herself but she seemed unbalanced and unsure of herself. Luke held her head above the water until I felt her powerful tail flip me off her and she began to swim slowly and unsteadily away from us. For fifteen minutes she looked like a dying animal and it was painful to watch her suffer. We stood on the dock praying for her, my mother leading us through a rosary without beads. The Snow floundered; she seemed to have trouble breathing; her sense of balance and timing were not functioning. Then it changed before our eyes. Instinct returned and she dove and the old sense of rhythm and grace returned in the easy fluency of that dive. She sounded after a long minute and was two hundred yards further out in the river.
“She’s made it,” Luke yelled, and we gathered together, holding on to each other. I was exhausted, sweaty, famished, but I had never felt so wonderful in my life.
Up she rose again and, turning, she passed us standing on the dock.
We cheered and screamed and wept. And we danced a new dance on our floating dock on the most beautiful island in the world on the finest, the very finest, day of Tom Wingo’s life.
17
On the day that Benji Washington integrated Colleton High School, television crews from Charleston and Columbia recorded the exact moment his parents let him out of their lime-green Chevrolet and he began his solemn walk toward the five hundred white students who silently watched his approach. The atmosphere of the school that day was estranged, dangerous, and tense. The halls were magnetized like sea air before a hurricane. Hatred prowled the rooms and alcoves. The word nigger appeared in angry, hastily applied graffiti in whichever room the black boy had a class until the teachers, nervous and unstrung, would enter and expunge the word from sight with birdlike skitterings of the erasers. In each class, he chose the last seat by the window and spent much of the first day staring impassively toward the river. The seats around him were empty, a forbidden zone that no white student would or could enter. Rumors circulated and annealed in the boys’ lavatory, where the tough kids smoked illegally between classes. I heard one boy say he had shoved the nigger in the cafeteria line; another claimed to have jabbed him with a fork. He had not responded to either provocation. It was as if he had no emotions, that he had been trained not to feel. Plans to get him behind the gymnasium alone were whispered along the breezeway. Chains and clubs appeared in the lockers down the main hall. There was a rumor of a gun. I heard Oscar Woodhead, left tackle on the football team, swear he was going to kill the nigger before the school year was out. You could see switchblades outlined against the buttocks of swaggering boys with slicked back hair. I had never been so afraid in my life.
My plan was a simple one, as my plans always were. I was going to ignore the fact of Benji Washington’s existence, go my own way, and cheerfully navigate through the tainted electorate of that aroused high school population as well as I could. I could talk nigger talk with the best of them, and had a glossary of a thousand nigger jokes on file to entertain my contemporaries should my loyalty to the tribe ever be questioned. But my racism issued forth from my passionate need to conform rather than from any serious credo or system of belief. I could hate with ardor but only if I was perfectly sure that my hatred echoed the sentiments of the majority. I was without moral courage of any kind and it suited me well. Unfortunately, my twin did not share these secret troves of superficiality.
I did not know that Benji Washington was in my sixth-period English class until I saw that sullen mob who had shadowed him all day gathered outside the door. I looked around for the teacher but he was nowhere in sight. I made my way through the crowd like a sheriff parting a lynch mob in a bad Western.
I saw the black kid staring out the window, sitting in that final forlorn seat. Oscar Woodhead was sitting in the windowsill, whispering something to him. I took a front-row seat and pretended to write something in a notebook. I could hear Oscar saying, “You’re an ugly nigger. Did you hear me, boy? You’re an ugly fucking nigger. But that’s natural, I guess. Because all niggers are ugly, ain’t they, boy?”
I did not see Savannah come into the room and did not know she had entered until I heard her voice behind me. “Hello, Benji,” she said in her most perfect cheerleaderly voice. “I’m Savannah Wingo. Welcome to Colleton High School.”
She extended her hand.
Washington, who without question was the most stunned inhabitant of that room, shook her hand reluctantly.
“She touched it,” Lizzie Thompson squealed near the doorway.
“If you have any trouble, let me know about it, Benji,” Savannah said. “If you need any help, just holler. These folks aren’t as bad as they seem now. They’ll get used to you being around in a couple of days. Is this seat taken?”
I put my head down on my desk and moaned inaudibly.
“There hasn’t been a seat taken around me all day,” Benji answered, looking out to the river again.
“There is now,” she said, placing her books on top of the desk next to him.
“She’s sitting next to a nigger,” Oscar said loudly. “I ain’t believing that.”
Then Savannah called from the back of the room. “Hey, Tom. Bring your books back her
e. Yoo-hoo, Tom. I see you. It’s me, Savannah. Your loving sister. Get your ass over here.”
Furiously, knowing there was no use arguing with Savannah in front of a roomful of people, I obeyed and brought my books to the back of the room as the entire class watched.
“Hmmmmph!” Oscar snorted. “I wouldn’t let no girl talk to me like that.”
“No girl would want to talk to you, Oscar,” Savannah shot back. “Because you’re stupid and because you got more pimples than the river’s got shrimp.”
“You don’t mind talking to black niggers, though, huh, Savannah?” Oscar cried out.
“Why don’t you go down to the guidance department and try to break into double figures on an IQ test, creep,” she said, rising out of her seat.
“I don’t mind, Savannah,” Benji said softly. “I knew it would be like this.”
“Nigger, you don’t know what it’s going to be like yet,” Oscar said.
“Why don’t you get a job selling zits to young teenagers, Oscar,” said Savannah, approaching him with her fists clenched.
“You nigger-loving bitch.”
My cue and I entered that arena cautiously, filled with dread and praying for the arrival of Mr. Thorpe, a notorious late-arriver from the teachers’ lounge.
“Don’t talk to my sister like that, Oscar,” I said weakly, sounding like a postoperative eunuch.
“What’re you going to do about it, Wingo?” Oscar muttered at me, grateful to have a male antagonist at last.
“Tell my brother Luke,” I said.
“You ain’t big enough to fight your own battles?” he asked.
“I’m not as big as you are, Oscar. You’d beat me up if we had a fight. Then Luke would come hunting for you and rearrange your face anyway. I’m just skipping the step where I get beat up.”
“Tell your big-mouthed sister to shut up,” Oscar ordered.
“Shut up, Savannah,” I said.
“Kiss my ass, Tom,” she replied sweetly.
“I told her, Oscar.”