Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  Of course, the Ambergrisians knew the man was a walking wooden nickel, which is why I was astounded that Fiona seemed so beguiled by him. During his performance he offered up maddeningly intimate asides she found entirely too wry or amusing, our fake chemist demonstrating one implausible finding after another for her sole enlightenment, each causing her to lean against him or gaze into his face as if he were the amalgamated reincarnation of Louis Pasteur and Ronald Colman. I was embarrassed for her. The Fiona I loved did not fawn over a man. Men fawned over her. Besides, it seemed to me that such shameless flirting might well unlid the magician’s box of our little plot and thus reveal to everyone that the lady inside wasn’t really sawn in half. I left before the play was over, offering up a good bit of huffing and foot-stomping for Fiona’s benefit. She was oblivious to it. I brushed past Mei Ling on my way out. She, too, seemed captivated by Everson Dexter but at least offered a goodbye of sorts. “Treasure Boy,” she said, “…Funny.”

  I went home to sulk, an exercise that lasted through the evening despite the efforts of Ma and James to cheer me up. Alex joined them, pleading with me to toss the baseball around or head over to the lighthouse where we could sneak up on Angus and startle him, afterward listening to him cuss in a Gaelic dialect we found inexplicably hilarious. It was no use. I was irretrievable and ignored them all until fitful sleep claimed me.

  The next morning I picked up my stack of Chronicles from the Sinclair station and made my first stop at C. Herbert Judson’s house. I was still in a black mood.

  “Who kicked your dog this morning, Connor?” Mr. Judson teased.

  “I don’t own a dog,” I grumbled, my impudent tone provoking a bemused look that made me even more irritable. Mr. Judson tried to pull me out of the dark hole I’d fallen into, but I merely growled responses until he went back to his newspaper. Eventually I left, muttering a goodbye before furiously pedaling off. I then purposely threw the next few papers on my route onto the roofs of my customers.

  I finished my route before making my usual stop at Fiona’s mercantile for a scone and a cup of milk with a little coffee in it. Roxy Littleleaf, one of Fiona’s twin maiden aunts, was at the counter.

  “Why are you here? Where’s Fiona?” I demanded.

  Roxy was tongue-tied, offering the face of one who has walked off the edge of a cliff and only just realized it. This was not too far afield of her usual expression, given that Roxy always behaved as if she thought a piano about to fall on her. She and her sister, Rosie, had been briefly conjoined at birth, a fleshy rope connecting their abdomens. The midwife, Miss Lizzie’s predecessor, had tied off their common tether at either end and excised the rest. However, before severing the tenuous bond, an exchange of essences had occurred that gave Rosie a stiff backbone and Roxy a limp one. Hence, as was her shy way, poor Roxy didn’t answer me; instead, she pointed toward the Kittiwake Inn next door, her complexion as red as Fiona’s should have been when I discovered her exiting Everson Dexter’s room with hair tousled in the same way as Mrs. C. Herbert Judson’s the morning she sat on the front porch swing next to her husband wearing nothing but a fuzzy oversize bathrobe and an enigmatic smile.

  Every boy has a friend with an older brother happy to introduce an innocent younger sibling and his pals to pornography. Mine was Webb Garwood, whose brother Tuck had already initiated our education with a library of postcard photos depicting Rubenesque women and hairy men engaged in naked Greco-Roman wrestling. Thus, I believed myself to have more than a nodding acquaintance with what went on behind a bedroom door and was incensed with Fiona. My indignation might seem silly in today’s world, but I assert with some confidence that it is difficult to stumble across a bigger prude than a ten-year-old boy in 1934. Thus, I was profoundly ashamed of Fiona as well as frightened by the prospects a liaison with Everson Dexter had put in her future. I knew sex resulted in babies, rejecting the claim of Judy Buford, my fourth-grade teacher, who had solemnly informed our class that childbirth was a result of marriage, prayer, and a good night’s sleep. “You pray very hard, and when you wake up, you’re pregnant,” Mrs. Buford told us. So, I hope it’s understandable that what I next said to Fiona was a product of my worldliness, when compared to Mrs. Buford, and the distress attending Fiona’s decision to become a fallen woman before I was old enough to fell her.

  “Now you’re gonna get pregnant!” I shouted.

  I ran off and went to the beach below the lighthouse, firing sand dollars into the surf until my arm ached. Then I sat on the damp sand, muttering curses I’d heard the men use at the Last Resort, all the while plotting various ways to make Fiona sorry she’d chosen Everson Dexter over me. The air was filled with the smell of the sea, and although it was a scent I usually found invigorating, it now seemed dank and rotten, redolent of brackish tide pools and decay. My mood, already sour, grew more bitter. And then, in the way of all spurned lovers, anger drifted into despondence, self-pity rolling over me like the low gentle waves curling relentlessly onto the beach, the thin rim of foam at their crests like the tears clinging to my eyelashes. I was heartbroken; indeed, it was my first broken heart.

  I had nearly worked up the courage to drown myself when James showed up.

  “Nice day,” he said, sitting next to me.

  “Leave me the heck alone, James,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He didn’t make me and we spent a couple of minutes in silence. Of course, I did want to talk about it, but when I at last chose to speak, my voice was little more than a whisper.

  “Is Fiona a whore now?” I asked him.

  James frowned. “You watch your tongue, young man,” he scolded, his tone making clear that there was only one adult on the beach and he’d be sure to let me know when there were two. “Fiona Littleleaf has been really good to you and your brother. She loves you and you love her. You don’t put names like the one you just used on someone you love.”

  I wrapped my arms around my knees and leaned forward, burying my face in the nest made by the crooks of my elbows.

  “Fiona’s not your usual woman,” James said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “She’s not a plow-horse. She’s a bit of wild mustang. No one man will ever put a saddle on her.” He went on to describe Fiona in various ways, trying to unravel her mystery for me. I would much later understand that my first love was not a nineteenth-century harlot but a modern woman, one who didn’t allow herself to be hamstrung by convention or what others thought to be shameful. James went on for a while, attempting to decode Fiona’s liberated nature for me. I listened, the pitch and timbre of his calm, steady voice almost hypnotic. I might have fallen asleep had my heartbreak not been suddenly swept aside by the image of Tuck Garwood’s postcards…and curiosity.

  You see, once I was able to put the pictures of Fiona and Everson Dexter out of my mind, it seemed I had a safe opportunity to figure out the sex business once and for all. Tuck had described sex for his brother Webb and me based on diligent study of the lewd postcards and a single romantic encounter he had observed between his family’s Rottweiler and a couch pillow. It seemed to me that James, despite his bachelorhood, was likely to have a firmer grasp on the real thing and I pressed him for information. He was briefly taken aback, but after a moment, bravely forged ahead.

  James had no experience as a father or wisdom to draw from; his own father, old Axel, was a devoted disciple of the philosophy that sex education was best obtained in the back seat of a car or the hay loft of a barn. However, James acquitted himself nicely and I resurrected much of his approach years later with my own sons. He began by getting the engineering out of the way, making sure I understood what tab went where. Afterward, he focused on what he called the “psychological particulars.”

  “No matter what the older boys tell you, Connor,” he finished up, “remember that there are two voices in the bedroom and you’ll do well to listen to the one other than your own.”

  I didn’t entirely under
stand what he meant. Still, I felt better. That was the thing about James. He had a way about him I found comforting.

  “Are you gonna marry Ma?” I asked on our way back to the village.

  James wasn’t surprised.

  “Would that be okay with you?” he asked.

  I stopped and appraised him. I have previously asserted that James was a big man and he was. Fully four inches over six feet tall, he was likely two hundred fifty pounds, bone dry, with curly hair thinning over the crown of his head and the start of a second chin to match the slight belly he carried about. He was not rugged like Clark Gable or as handsome as Everson Dexter. However, standing on the beach, I could see how a woman might be drawn to a fellow like James. His eyes were steady and warm, his lips always slightly upturned. When he put his hand on my shoulder it reminded me of how he grazed Ma’s hand when we went to the movies, or leaned against her when they stood next to the sink and washed dishes, or touched the small of her back to help guide her through a door he’d just opened. He was a gentleman, and along with C. Herbert Judson, Mr. Johns, and even old Angus MacCallum, more of a man than either Everson Dexter or Gable’s wisecracking reporter could ever be.

  The prospect of James as my father suddenly seemed quite all right, although the still vivid memory of Tuck Garwood’s scandalous postcards was disturbing. The pornographic images had shown a limited variety of positions, most of them involving the man rutting about atop the woman. James, as I have pointed out, was large, and my mother of average size at best.

  “You won’t crush her, will you?” I asked.

  James pulled his lips inward, swallowing an urge to laugh—an impressive display of self-restraint that I didn’t fully appreciate until years later.

  “I won’t,” he said. “I promise.”

  Chapter Twenty:

  The third town meeting

  The third town meeting to hear to the results of Everson Dexter’s analysis was scheduled for three o’clock in the afternoon. Before the meeting Alex and I dropped by the library to pick up Ma. Alex immediately disappeared into an alcove in the back where a huge atlas and various other maps were housed. He had developed a fondness for geography, determining to learn the names of every country in the world. Eventually he did, too. Ma had a basket of books to re-shelve, and I followed her as she moved among the stacks.

  She had been drinking Miss Lizzie’s disgusting green remedy for three months, her transformation from madwoman to mother quite remarkable. She still had periods when I could see her eyes darken as she teetered on some precipice in her mind or dart about nervously if her mood was about to scatter like dry leaves in the wind. James helped at such times, wrapping his arms around her if she was about to fall or providing an anchor with a hand on hers when she threatened to fly away. Indeed, even before he educated me about sex, I had stopped competing with him. It had simply become too easy to hand Ma’s reins over to James so I could enjoy the last days of perhaps the best summer of my life; one I’d spent hanging out with Alex and my friends, sailing with Mr. Judson, and sneaking out at night to conspire with the Ambergrisians.

  Ma finished shelving books and sat at one of the heavy tables in the Fiction section of the library.

  “Sit down,” she said and I did. Her hands were in her lap and she studied them as if words were written there. After a few moments she looked up and fashioned an expression that unnerved me. I’d not been the target of such a thing, although my friends had described a “mom’s look” for me enough times that I recognized one when I saw it. My wife, Marjory, had a mom’s look she regularly used on our children, a face that snatches a lie out of the air and then dangles it in front of a kid, provoking an unsolicited admission of guilt in the same way a tendon hammer causes a knee to jerk.

  Had she heard me sneak out? Did Alex tattle? Did Mei Ling understand more English than I thought?

  I was about to break down and confess my role in the plot to scam Dinkle when Ma spoke.

  “I want to talk to you about James,” she said.

  My relief must have been palpable and she hesitated, head cocked in the way of someone who has opened a secret door only to find an even more secret door inside.

  “Is there something you want to tell me, Connor?” she said.

  There was, but I didn’t.

  “James has asked me to marry him,” she went on after a moment. Ma spoke as if requesting my permission, as if I were the parent. It made me uncomfortable. After my talk with James that morning her announcement wasn’t a surprise, but I tried to pretend it was, resurrecting my respect for the skill of a real actor like Everson Dexter. Our thespian from San Francisco was capable of lying with both credence and flair, while my wooden performance for Ma was about as convincing as a pickpocket’s claim of innocence after you’ve discovered his hand inside your coat. Nevertheless, she bought it, probably because she had expected some push-back and wanted desperately to believe it had been that easy to tell me. Her relief was unmistakable, her eyes watery as she went on.

  “Things will be different…better, I think,” Ma said. “You boys need a father.” Her voice was fluttery and thin as tears spilled over and began to trail down her cheeks. “Lord knows I’ve been a terrible mother.”

  For the second time that day my heart genuinely ached. Her despair and my contribution to it by being born brought tears to my own eyes. I reached out and took her hand. “You aren’t a terrible mother,” I said.

  I wasn’t lying. I’d never viewed Ma as a terrible mother, probably because Angus McCallum had explained to me that parenting is a tag-team wrestling match. “Yer mither done ‘er best, boys,” Angus had once told Alex and me, “but she gotta slap hands wit’ other folk noo’ n’ then or get ‘erself pinned to the canvas.”

  I continued to hold Ma’s hand as she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “My goodness, look at me. Who’s the grown-up here?” she said. She mustered up a brave smile. “And you…When did you get so smart and so old?”

  I was neither but didn’t argue the point as she appeared to have already made up her mind about it. Besides, I liked feeling both smart and old.

  “I love you, Ma,” I said.

  It took her a few minutes to compose herself, but after a trip to the library’s restroom, she reappeared with both her makeup and her outlook refreshed. We collected Alex and headed for the town hall with my brother veering off at Fremont Park to run with his pals while Ma and I went across the street and entered the assembly room.

  As the discoverer of the ambergris, I was expected to preside with the town leaders during Everson Dexter’s climactic presentation. I got Ma safely settled between Rosie and Roxy Littleleaf about three rows from the front, then made my way to the line of seats on the stage where I took a chair as far from Fiona as possible. I made a great show of ignoring her, although lavishing her with attention would have elicited the same response. She ignored me right back, taken up in hushed conversation with Everson Dexter. I wanted to scream at the pair of them, exposing him as a phony and a philanderer and Fiona as the fallen woman who had allowed herself to be despoiled by such a villain. I might have done exactly that if not for James. From his seat on the stage he recognized my fidgeting as a pot about to boil and brought me back to a simmer with an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

  Shortly thereafter Mr. Johns called the meeting to order and requested nominations for moderator. Coach Wally Buford then spent five minutes campaigning for the position, this time with a set of hand-drawn pie charts and several whoppers exaggerating both his leadership experience and the authority naturally conferred upon anyone in possession of genuine rare documents. Over the years I’ve learned that a lie confirming what folks want to believe, especially when delivered with conviction, can be alarmingly convincing. However, Coach Wally had spent a lifetime showing folks his warts, because he was under the mistaken impression that one man�
�s warts were another’s garlands. Thus, the good citizens of Tesoro weren’t about to let him turn their heads with a pie chart of questionable validity. Still, the coach was nothing if not gung-ho and made a pretty good run at the moderator’s job until Milton Garwood interrupted from the back of the room.

  “Try again when your boys have actually won a game and maybe we’ll give you a shot,” he shouted, reminding the congregation that it had been eight years since the coach’s leadership produced a winning score for the Tesoro High Seagulls. This provoked a lot of laughter, most of it not particularly good-natured, as folks were impatient to find out how rich they were. After the hubbub provoked by Milton’s remark died down, Mr. Johns was elected moderator and the meeting proceeded with an introduction of Everson Dexter. The handsome actor glided to the podium, accompanied by cacophonous cheering and clapping. He waited for the applause to subside, the tiniest hint of a smile on his face, then launched into his presentation.

  In sharp contrast to the impromptu flamboyance of his “Good citizens” greeting the previous day, he spoke in a monotone. “Thallium was evidenced at four parts per million; calcium carbonate at sixteen parts per million; silica, basalt, and mica at two, seven, and fifteen grams, respectively,” Dexter droned, “with common seaweed in various stages of decomposition representing fifteen percent of the total mass.”

  He went on like this for two or three minutes, his report making about as much sense to the assembled townsfolk as algebra to Milton Garwood’s monkey. Slowly, the room began to fill with the sounds of shoes shuffling against the hardwood floor, nervous coughs, impatient sighs, and hoarse whispers. Finally, Milton Garwood had had enough.

  “How much is the damned stuff worth?” he shouted.