Piper

by John E. Keegan

  On the way back, Willard seemed preoccupied and I finally asked him what the matter was.

  “You didn’t need to get so mad at him,” he said.

  “I’m not mad. We’re friends.”

  “Looks like you’re more’n friends.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He picked up a rock from the sidewalk and dropped it into the fenced circle at the base of a sapling. “I seen him coming out of your bedroom.”

  “Oh, come on, Willard.” I bumped my shoulder into his. “He’s just a neighbor.”

  The light was on in Dad’s bedroom, so Willard and I separated in the driveway. He headed for the basement entrance and I went to the front door, timing my opening to cover the racket of Willard and the dogs entering from below.

  Dad’s door was shut, and I stood in the hall deciding whether to say anything. Their bedroom had always been private space and I only went in there when they weren’t home. It had a smell like air trapped between the sheets. Maybe he was reading the national periodicals that had been piling up in a heap under the mail slot. Maybe he was falling asleep in his clothes again. Earlier in the week, I’d seen him wear the same clothes two days in a row, and his pin-striped dress shirt looked like he’d wadded it up and sat on it.

  “It’s me, Dad. Goodnight.”

  I heard ice cubes fall against the bottom of a glass and I thought I could smell a trace of dope eking out from under the door. I knew Mom had experimented when she was young, so had I, but the thought of Dad having a toke startled me. “You shouldn’t stay up so late on a school night,” he said. Some people got frivolous when they smoked; Dad was probably the kind who became paranoid. If he asked me where I’d been, I was going to tell him I was watching a video with Dirk. Although Dad didn’t particularly care for Colonel Thurgood, he knew the Colonel was strict and, therefore, safe. “Sorry I stayed so late at work.” He always said that and I think he meant it, but he couldn’t help working any more than I could stop thinking about Mom in the bottom of the Jacuzzi.

  My toes were cold and I put on a pair of socks to wear under the sheets while I read. Lately, it seemed as if I had to read to sleep, but I also had to read to stay awake. I kept thinking of Dad smoking dope by himself in the melancholy of his room. I hooked my toes into the back of my socks, pulled them off and stuffed them into the foot of the bed along with the others. I doused the light and tried to follow the exhalations out of my body, something Mom had taught me. Pranayama, part of her Hatha Yoga practice.

  My mind drifted to Dirk and the hangdog attitude that had enveloped him since the poster thing and it made me mad that he could be reduced to such a pathetic condition for doing nothing wrong. I tried to think of the good times when his back was straight and his humor was cutting and we thought we were two of the smartest people Stampede had ever begot. But the only place I could picture him was in the lavatory stall with his pants down around his ankles.

  I flipped on the goose neck light next to my bed and found the wrapping paper bag in the closet. I just wanted to take a quick look and see what all the fuss was about, get it out of my system so I could relate to Dirk again the way we always had. I propped my pillows against the wall and slid back under the covers. Pieces of masking tape were still stuck to the poster and I had to unroll it carefully so the tape didn’t rip the picture. I flattened the edges against the bedspread to keep it from curling back on itself. Someone must have had his finger over the lens because the top corner of the poster was dark. The rest of it was unmercifully clear. Dirk was leaning back against the toilet tank, his butt on the edge of the seat, and his legs wrapped around the toilet bowl. His left hand was holding the shirt out of the way, and his right hand was doing the business. It was hard to imagine a more vulnerable position.

  I covered the center of the poster with my hand, uncertain whether the nausea I felt was the result of bitterness over what Bagmore had done or something else. I’d seen pictures of male organs before, but there was something disappointing about it that had nothing to do with Dirk. In fact, I didn’t really believe that the thing in Dirk’s hand had anything to do with Dirk. It was a piece of meat, and it confirmed what I’d always suspected. The aesthetics of the imagination were superior to the real thing.

  I licked my lips; they were dry. I rubbed the insides of my thighs; they were numb. Instead of titillation, I was feeling the early stages of rigor mortis. I shook my head and couldn’t help but chuckle at what a perverse joke the culture had played on all of us. All the hype, the shows I wasn’t supposed to see, the magazines I wasn’t supposed to read, the eternal anticipation of that magic moment when penis meets woman. Instead of dancing around it, Father O’Malley should have just shown us his and ended all temptation.

  Mom had bandaged the boy in the accident and all anyone remembered was the fact she’d stripped down to her bra. Dirk was crazy about Rozene Raymond and all she’d probably remember about him was this damn poster.

  7

  The first day Dirk came back to school he slunk around with his chin on his neck and his hands in his pockets. The hunchback of Notre Dame had better posture. People ribbed him, but he’d never had more girls looking at him in the hallways. At lunch hour, I took him out to the pole vault pit so we could have some privacy. I had to practically yell at him, but he finally told me what had happened with his dad.

  “He got out the camcorder and made me strip.”

  “He filmed you?”

  “‘Come on, cowboy,’ he kept saying, ‘beat the hog. I want to see cum. Where’s your cum?’” This had to be worse than the taunts of his classmates when he ran home, because this time there was no place to run. He was home. The Colonel had used Dirk’s video recorder to magnify the shame. Nothing was beyond the reach of the Colonel. “I’ve never felt so small,” Dirk said. “I wanted to make something happen just to get it over with.” He bulldozed the weathered wood chips in the pit with his shoe. “I figured I could burn the film later … but I couldn’t do sickum.”

  It was cold. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt. That might have been the reason I was trembling. “You gotta get back at him.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got something in mind.” There was grit in his voice, the leftovers from the rock in his jaw he must have chewed to pieces.

  When some guys appeared doing chin-ups on the goal-post, I nudged Dirk to finish this somewhere else. We walked across the running lanes on the rubberized asphalt track, ducked under the railing, and into the grandstands. Neither one of us said anything as we passed through the tunnel, which smelled of urine and was littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Kids went in there when it rained to have a smoke. Once we were out in the open again, Dirk drifted apart from me and I couldn’t blame him. He was carrying enough baggage at school without taking on the daughter of Mary Magdalene.

  “Meet after school?”

  He shook his head. “Nah.”

  “The billboards?”

  He shook me off.

  Maybe it was a mistake to force out of him what had happened with his dad. He’d been subjected to double jeopardy already and I’d added a third. I’d caught him afraid to stick up to his dad. Whatever it was, our talk in the pole vault pit marked the beginning of an estrangement between us. He started avoiding me in the hallways and made a point of sitting at the opposite end of the cafeteria, even though that meant he usually had to eat alone. When I called his house, his mom answered. “Colonel Thurgood’s residence,” she’d say in a dutiful voice. I’d hear her call up the stairs, where there was an extension phone in the hallway, and I’d wait for it to click on, but she’d come back and say he didn’t feel good or he was studying or he’d call me back, but he never did. Then he stopped showing up at school again.

  I bounced back and forth between angry and just plain worried. He’d never done this before, even when I’d accidentally recorded over his copy of Casablanca or left his new ten-speed at the park and we found it rusted out under the bridge. I
wasn’t stupid. This was poison and it had the potential to drag him under, but he obviously didn’t want me in on it. All I could do was watch and wait.

  Dad surprised me one night with an invitation to go whale watching on the Greenpeace boat that ran out of Anacortes. It wouldn’t have been my first choice of things to do, but I knew it had to be important to him because he was going to take off a day of work and let me skip school.

  “You always turn me down for baseball,” he said. “So I tried to think of something at the other end of the spectrum.” Dad had made the obligatory attempts to engage me in sports when I was little, to help Mom break down the sexist stereotypes. He’d stand in the yard throwing me short spirals with the football, but mine wobbled back in return. He always said Nice throw, but I could see the pain in his eyes. If there was a vote when I was adopted, I was pretty sure his had been for a boy.

  The morning of the excursion I got up at six a.m. so I’d have time to shave my head. Maybe I was arming myself against whatever Dad had on his mind. My baldness would remind him he had to keep his expectations realistic. We stopped at Marge’s for breakfast on the way out of town and neither of us said anything for the longest time. I kept my mouth full of pancake, which was crazy because I’d looked forward to doing something with him and there were so many things bubbling inside that it had never occurred to me I’d be so empty-headed. Dad must have had the same problem because whenever I caught his eye, his mouth was full too and he pointed his knife to his cheeks as if to blame it on the chewiness of the rib steak, part of Marge’s “Western Breakfast.” I wished someone had put a quarter in the jukebox.

  Our voices didn’t come until we’d boarded the Pequod, a made-over fishing trawler with a cabin in the center where you could go for coffee and watch a whale movie. There were about twelve of us, in addition to the skipper and a wildlife biologist with a battery-powered megaphone looped around her neck. Dad and I went to the bow where we could feel the spray off the tops of the whitecaps against our faces. He was wearing a yellow rain slicker with a rip across the chest that had been mended with duct tape and rubber boots that were unbuckled. The hair on his head danced in the wind.

  “Beats work,” he said, raising his voice above the rumble of the engine and the breaking of the vessel through Rosario Strait.

  “I didn’t know you liked boats so much.”

  “It’s not the boat. It’s the whales.” His eyes were squinting into the face of the wind. “Didn’t you read my story?” I vaguely remembered skimming an article he’d written about the Makah tribe’s petition to resume hunting of the gray whale. Knowing how delicate Rozene was it was hard for me to picture her people harpooning whales. Maybe it was to settle a score. Although the gray whale was a threatened species, the article said there were more of them left than Makahs. “The whale has the largest brain on the planet,” Dad said. “Twenty pounds. A sperm whale can dive a quarter mile down and stay forty minutes.”

  “Not too smart.”

  He laughed. “Depends on what’s down there, I guess. Moby Dick was a sperm whale.”

  “I thought Moby Dick was fictional.”

  “The ones we’re going to see are Orcas.” Passing through the cabin, I’d seen a picture of an Orca swimming upside down under water with a baby whale riding its stomach. They were sleek, two-toned animals, with an ivory lower jaw and belly and the rest of them rubber black. “The females suckle each other’s young,” Dad said. He looked wistfully across the water and blinked several times to clear the tears that were building in his eyes. “The families bond for life.” He turned away, wrestled his arm under the rain slicker, and fished a handkerchief out of the back pocket of his pants. The words for life still weren’t something that rolled easily off his tongue. The pod represented what we could no longer have, maybe never had. The bond. The fidelity.

  We went inside the cabin with everyone else for hot cocoa. Two tables were secured to the floor by a thick pipe and their tops were nicked with the ravages of time, probably by ordinary folks like us who’d sliced their apples and sandwiches there. In the video that played continuously from the overhead monitor, there was an Orca with its mouth clamped onto a seal struggling for its life. Nature was innocent only in the abstract.

  The biologist whose name tag said “Nadine” took the seat across from us. Her rough brown hair was gathered by a rubberband into a ponytail, and the weight of the megaphone pulled a pink cord taut between her breasts. “First time on the Pequod?”

  Dad looked at me. “Yes, it is,” he said. “For both of us. We’d heard about your expeditions.”

  She chuckled and I noticed that one of her front teeth was chipped. “I’m not sure it’s an expedition.”

  “Trust me,” Dad said. “For us, it is.” I knew what he meant. We hadn’t managed to leave the house together for a common purpose since Mom died. If an expedition was something rare and fraught with uncertainty, this was an expedition.

  “They’re sure an elegant creature, “I said, pointing to the video, trying to show my allegiance to the cause.

  “That’s a female,” she said proudly. “They’re sexually dimorphic.” Oh, God, I thought, wasn’t there anyplace I could escape it? She must have seen my panic because she chuckled, the same way Mom would have. “That just means they’re built differently. The males are larger than the females and they have those huge dorsal fins on their back. Sexy, huh?”

  I laughed politely.

  Dad changed the subject and fell into his journalist’s habit of asking questions. She explained how they knew every member of the pod we were searching for. They’d assigned names to them. Some of them were marked for tracking purposes. But Dad couldn’t control the direction of her answers anymore than he could control the migratory paths of the Orcas.

  “The men leave the pod temporarily to mate outside of their natal group,” she said, bending a stick of gum into her mouth. “They form bachelor schools and head to cooler waters. Sound familiar?”

  I looked over at Dad and he moved the corners of his mouth upward, but it wasn’t a smile.

  Nadine made an announcement that we were getting close to them and everyone put their headbands and parkas on and went out on deck. The pilot slowed the engines and we cruised the western shore of San Juan Island. At the slower speed, the smell of the diesel was more pronounced and I thought how presumptuous it was for us to think the whales would trust this hunk of human machinery, no matter who owned it. I leaned over the rail and tried to train my eyes past the glare on the surface and into the depths, but the best I could do was detect a subtle change in the coloring of the water from blue to inky green.

  We cruised all the way to English Camp at the north end of the island without a sighting. Dad had warned me on the way up how much of a gamble this was. Nadine had resorted to describing the features of the shoreline. “You can still see the old lime quarries carved into the hillsides. Someday, they’ll probably be part of a subdivision.”

  Dad paced the starboard deck with his gaze forward. “It’s all right,” I told him on one of his turns. “I’ve learned something about whales anyway.”

  “I wanted you to see them. Until you see one in the flesh you won’t feel it.”

  I wandered up to the bow, climbed over the anchor, and leaned into the wind. The front of my jeans was pressed against the insides of the boat and the gunwale hit me at the beltline. I felt like a gargoyle. What had Nadine called it, dimorphic? I was taller than half the boys my age and flat-chested. If I were a whale, maybe I’d have a dorsal fin and swim to cooler waters with the boys in their bachelor schools. And if I didn’t play by nature’s rules, they’d probably chew me up and spit me out like the hapless seal.

  I was near the spot where Dad was standing when he’d wept earlier and I was feeling a strong sense of estrangement. His attempt to patch together a substitute family with me and Willard was valiant, but problematic. We were different generations, different temperaments. Dad and Willard weren’t sucklers
. I couldn’t tell either of them that I didn’t want what I was supposed to want, that instead of salvaging Mom’s reputation I was going to further shame it.

  “Starboard, thirty degrees!” Nadine yelled.

  At first I couldn’t see anything. The horizon was flat, wet, and unbroken. Then Dad came up behind me. The chocolate on his breath was pleasant and reassuring as I followed the imaginary extension of his index finger out across the water.

  “They’re like smooth rocks,” I said.

  “There’s six of them.”

  Then another one surfaced closer to the Pequod and snorted water into the air. “My God,” I yelled, “look at that dorsal fin!” It stuck up like an erection.

  Dad was leaning into me, pressing me harder into the gunwale. “He must be the bull.”

  “What if he decides to capsize us?”

  “Seeing them makes you believe there’s a God, doesn’t it?”

  We locked in on their speed and followed them south, staying about a hundred and fifty yards back. The boat was alive with murmurs and gasps. Nadine, who could recognize them by their flukes, counted nine as they arched and breached and slapped their tails to entertain us. People along the rail ran their video cameras nonstop. One man had a telescopic lens that was so hefty that he had to brace his elbow against his chest to hold it steady. Nadine walked along behind us with a huge smile across her face. No need for the megaphone now. The mammals were speaking for themselves and I was in awe. I could feel the power of that bond. They were fearless, and they were flaunting it. Now I understood why the men who pursued the whales became tribal leaders. The whales were gods.

  When we lost them near American Camp, everyone went inside the cabin and finished their sack lunches, played cards, and talked excitedly like they’d always known each other. Dad made the rounds like he’d gone to college with them, laughing easily, talking politics, making jokes. He ended up sitting with Nadine and they became engrossed in a conversation about sperm whales and grays. Dad knew something about everything. “It’s a survival skill,” he told me once. “What if you’re stranded in an elevator with a total stranger?” It was times like these that drove home the reality I wasn’t really his daughter, nor Mom’s. I had none of their softness with other people, none of that desire to befriend every member of my species. I found a place on the floor in the corner of the cabin where there was a decent light and pulled Giants of the Sea off a nearby shelf.