Demons in the Spring

by Joe Meno

  Jack lets out two enormous lungs full of smoke and smiles. “Let’s do it,” he says. “What’s on your mind?”

  Barry is trying not to act like the older brother here: He has to remind himself he is not in charge. He has been gone for eight years. He is not the general manager. While he’s been away, working as a very successful if underappreciated CPA, and also developing an enormous, meteorite-sized ulcer, his little brother Jack has been here, running the place with their grizzled father, learning how to operate Oceanland. Jack, younger by four years, is now Barry’s boss. It is this sad fact that has been eating at Barry since he moved back. This, and all the wounded-looking animals, and Marcia walking around their apartment with no clothes on, and, well, many, many other things actually.

  Barry stares down at his feet and asks, “It’s like 9 a.m., Jack. Why are you getting high?”

  “Barry, there are a couple of things I think you should know about me.”

  “Okay.”

  Jack exhales, blowing a puffy cloud of smoke out through his nose. He flexes, the pectorals in his chest turning to fleshy stone.

  “One: In the last couple of years, I have become one of the greatest living guitar players of all time. And I’m not bragging. I can do the guitar solo to almost any Allman Brothers song note for note. I mean, you should hear some of the songs I’ve written myself. There is this one I’m calling ‘Angel with a Devil on Her Shoulder’ and it has probably the most infectious riff that you ever heard. I mean, if you hear it, you can’t get it out of your head. You’d need like surgery or psychotherapy to forget it.”

  Barry looks down at his feet again. This time he sees his younger brother is shoeless.

  “Two, second, segundo: I sometimes enjoy a mild narcotic in the morning to take the edge off. Being in charge comes with certain pressures and I don’t need these certain pressures clouding up my workday.”

  Barry grips the spot between his eyes and sighs.

  “Okay, third, and maybe most importantly: Because Dad is no longer running the show here, we now have a very comfortable, relaxed work environment. We have drinks together after the park closes on Thursday. We all head over to BJ’s Grill and I let the employees drink whatever they want for free. It’s kind of a radical concept and I haven’t seen the numbers from it yet, but I think it’s really great for everyone’s morale. I know some of these new radical ideas might be hard for you to adjust to, coming from the corporate world. But the thing is, I’ll tell you what I told Dad when he asked me to take over: I don’t want any part of it if I can’t do it my way. And my way is to have fun with it.”

  Barry turns and stares at the tranquil waterfall rising just beyond the front gates. The water should be blue but it is green and brackish and full of algae.

  “Jack, listen, it’s way after 9 and the gates aren’t open yet.”

  “Barry, listen, I didn’t hire you to worry. I hired you for your amazing bookkeeping skills. And also because you’re my only older brother and I know you needed someone to throw you a line. So listen, okay: The gates will open when the gates open. What is this place called? Oceanland? Am I correct? The ocean doesn’t run by man’s clock. It has its own schedule, which we would be fools to try and interfere with. Does that make sense? We’re running on the ocean’s schedule, if that’s okay. So if we’re done here, I’ve got a family marine park to maintain.”

  Barry nods and stares as his younger brother staggers off: He watches as Jack stops to frown beside a pool of hyperventilating hammerhead sharks, sparking them to life with an electrified prod. Barry feels like crying but knows he will not.

  The last time Barry cried he was fourteen and leading a guided tour around Oceanland. His father suddenly appeared and cut him off mid-sentence, then grabbed him by his knobby ear in front of the worried-looking tourists. Shoving Barry’s face hard against a Plexiglas tank, his father began shouting: Barry had forgotten to feed the eels and three of them were now floating along the surface, greasy-looking and gray. Barry, embarrassed and guilty, picked himself up and ran through the park, past the gawking strangers and brightly lit exhibits, past the souvenir shop and Breaktide Falls. He leaped and dove headfirst into Dolphin Cove, kicking to the bottom as hard as he could. He grabbed the cold steel vent as Mandy and Sarah, the trained dolphins, bobbed around him like ghosts, and he began to cry uncontrollably, the salt of his tears mingling with the salt of the sea. He cried for what felt like hours, then surfaced and changed clothes, not telling anyone else about what had happened.

  Barry has not cried, not once, since that day.

  Barry stares at the exhibit of dull-looking manta rays and feels a sadness deeper than he thinks he should. A young boy is jabbing at them with his finger, grinning with awful delight. An old man keeps trying to poke one of the rays in the eyes. Barry, getting upset, gives the old man a dirty look, which the guy ignores. Barry peers down at the rays and sees that they are all frightened and covered entirely in scars: Large parts of their skin are sandpaper rough and darkened from being touched by so many kids and adults. Barry knows this is why a manta ray will die—being pet to death. Another group of tourists draw close to the ray exhibit and Barry quickly hangs the bright yellow sign, the one with the cartoon shark speaking in a cartoon bubble that says, Sorry, folks, this exhibit is closed. Try back again later today.

  A boy, holding his mother’s hand, begins to pout, as Barry apologizes.

  “Sorry, but the manta rays are not feeling so well.”

  “But we drove an hour to see them.”

  “They just need a break is all.”

  “Well, this place is awful,” she announces. “I don’t see how you stay in business.” The mother and son march off toward the Porpoise Portal, which is stocked mostly with dolphins. Barry turns and stares down at the manta rays and whispers, “It’s okay. You guys have the rest of the day to yourselves.”

  While Barry is inspecting the pH of the deep sea tank, an activity which is not one of his official accounting duties, his wife calls.

  “Barry,” the marine park’s loudspeaker shrieks, “your wife is on line one.” Barry, slightly embarrassed, hurries toward the closest park phone, which is hidden behind a plastic panel shaped like a conch shell.

  “Hello?” he asks anxiously.

  “Hi, honey. How’s work?”

  “Marcia, honey, I thought we talked about you calling here. It’s kind of … I don’t know … it’s kind of unprofessional.”

  “Nobody notices things like that but you, Barry.”

  “No, that’s not true. People notice things.”

  “I don’t think anybody cares about things like that, honey.”

  “I just don’t feel comfortable here yet. I just feel like everyone is still watching me.”

  “Okay.”

  “So?” Barry asks. “What’s going on at home?”

  “I’m bored. So, well, I was hoping you could tell me if you know if there’s anything fun to do in town today. Like maybe you could tell me where I could go, some stores or something.”

  “What?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me if there’s anything fun to do. I’m bored. Like where can I go if I want to take a walk? I don’t know the neighborhood yet, so I don’t know. And, well, I guess I also kind of wanted to just talk to you.”

  “Marcia, honey, you can’t just call me and ask that. It’s got to be serious. It’s got to be an emergency.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Fine.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Barry hangs up the phone and scurries off, past a young couple arguing about the price of admission. He looks over his shoulder. A young boy in a blue cap is tapping on the thick Plexiglas of Porpoise Portal, driving the poor mammals inside crazy.

  On the way to the administration building, Barry notices a dark-haired girl in an aqua-colored Oceanland shirt standing perched above the tiger shark tank, staring down into the restless gray water.
Barry stops and watches for a moment as the girl dangles a black shoe over the edge of the tank. Barry gulps down some air as he pulls himself up the metal stairway, calling out to the girl, who looks up, her heavily blackened eyes wide with surprise.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Um, nothing. Looking at the sharks.”

  “You looked like you were going to jump in.”

  “I was just watching,” the girl says, the dark hair falling into her eyes.

  “Where in the park do you work?” Barry asks.

  “Concessions.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be up here anyway. This area is for the animal handlers only.”

  “It was unlocked.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You could have gotten hurt or you could have hurt the animals.”

  “I was just looking at them. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well, I think you should return to your work station.”

  “Whatever. Fine.”

  Barry watches the girl walk off, disappearing into the throng of disappointed families and elderly pickpockets. He closes the gate, then checks the lock to be sure it is secure.

  Barry decides he has had enough. He does not want to do this but he will: because he loves Oceanland and, even more than that, he loves the animals, all of them, each and every one, the dolphins, the mollusks, the crabs, the skates and rays, the sharks, the sponges, the eels, the jellyfish, the anemones. He hurries to his father’s office in the two-story administration building, which is, at the moment, unoccupied. Barry is mad; he feels he should be righteously indignant. He thinks of the starfish, of the underfed eels, of the walrus and manta rays. He thinks of seeing the great purple octopus floating dead in its tank this morning, a group of schoolchildren standing there horrified, pointing, one of the little tykes already crying.

  Barry charges off, finding his father standing before the great white shark, the park’s most popular exhibit.

  “An adult great white shark can smell one drop of blood in a twenty-five gallon tank from as far as a quarter-mile away,” the old man mumbles.

  Barry knows the speech all too well: He had to memorize it and repeat it to hundreds and hundreds of tourists every summer, starting when he was twelve.

  “How’s she doing?” Barry asks.

  “Not so good,” the man says. “All of her teeth have fallen out for some reason.”

  “Some kind of algae?”

  “Probably.”

  Barry watches as the enormous shark cruises past.

  “Dad,” Barry whispers, placing his hand on the man’s arched back.

  “Jack runs the show.”

  “Pardon me?”

  The old man’s face does not move or flinch. “If this is about Jack, and this place, I want no part of it. Jack runs the show. That’s what I told you when you came back.”

  “Yes, I understand that, Dad, but why?”

  “Why? Why? Because I said so.”

  “But why? He’s doing a really terrible job.”

  “Because Jack was around. Because he wanted to learn the business. Because he put in the time required to learn what Oceanland means to me.”

  “But Dad. Really. Half the animals … I mean, take a look around this place. It looks, well, it looks like hell.”

  The old man turns, adjusting his large tinted sunglasses. He peers at Barry as if they have never met: He holds out a hand tentatively, tapping Barry’s shoulder once before turning back.

  “You always thought you were better than us, Barry. I never liked that about you.”

  Barry frowns. He turns and watches the gigantic fish zoom past like a sparkling torpedo through the murk.

  Before he can utter another word, the old man says it again: “You always thought you were better than this place. So now Jack is running the show.”

  Because Barry did not win a trophy at the company banquet, because he believed he was better than the rest of his coworkers at Hildebrant Manufacturing, because he’d had enough of the mediocre world of corporate accounting, he quit his job.

  It began when his accounting staff and budget had been drastically cut. Barry had soldiered on, finding a way to declare a portion of the company’s losses as a corporate donation, saving Mr. Hildebrant hundreds of thousands of dollars. But then they took his office and fired Roberta—his elderly secretary—and the two junior accountants. And even though they came to him with the obvious proof of clumsy financial fraud, Barry had gone to work every day and always did the best he could. He believed doing his best was important, the most important thing a person could do, even if it was only accounting. In the small unlit suite, one room which all three accountants had to share, Barry put up a photograph of Reggie Jackson, the same one he had in his room as a kid. The suite seemed like a punishment, like a sure sign that Hildebrant was doomed, but Barry bravely carried on, saving the company with a few daring accounting maneuvers.

  But when, at the company banquet at the end of that desperate year, Mr. Hildebrant, his starchy collar choking his awful, wrinkled neck, offered trophy after trophy to Distribution, Human Resources, and Development, completely neglecting the Accounting department, Barry, more furious than drunk, got up and began shouting. He kicked over his chair as he stood and yelled, “We got screwed! We all got screwed!”

  On the way home from the awards ceremony, terribly embarrassed, Barry began to tremble, thinking of what would happen to him come Monday. Soon, he felt like he should cry but knew he could not: He had been unable to cry since that awful day when he was fourteen. Barry, driving alone, wanting to cry but unable, squinted to see and then, predictably, drove his wife’s new car into a telephone pole, and then a tree. He left the automobile there, staggering home on foot. When Marcia looked up from her pillow, Barry was sitting on the corner of the bed, moaning, his forehead bleeding. He told her he would have killed himself if he had bought a better insurance policy, but, always financially conservative, he had been too cheap.

  Barry sits despondently beside the jellyfish pool: It is one of the least popular attractions because the jellyfish are often invisible. People usually glance at the cloudy water and simply keep walking. But sometimes at night, when the moon is full, the tiny creatures will begin to glow, radiating with an amazing iridescent light. As a child, Barry remembers how, after the park closed, he would sneak down to the end of this row of exhibits and lean over the metal railing, watching as, like stars, the pool would begin to sparkle and sing, the tiny lights flashing in time. When he was alone like that, he believed they were talking to him. He believed they were trying to tell him secrets: secrets about God and the universe and nature and human beings. Sometimes, while they were glowing, making sure he was alone, he would fold his hands and begin to pray silently.

  At the moment, the jellyfish are only gray globs of tentacles floating in the water. Barry stares at them for a while before he realizes Jack is standing beside him. Jack is getting high again. He offers the joint to Barry, who just stares at it. He can see the smudge of his brother’s spit along its narrow end. He closes his eyes, sighs, then takes the joint and inhales deeply. He hands it back to Jack and exhales, coughing violently.

  “I knew you’d be over here. You’re the only person in the world who likes jellyfish.”

  “I guess,” Barry says. “Is it cool to get high here out in the open like this?”

  Jack grins. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m the boss now and Dad, well, he never comes down this way. It’s too far from the office.”

  Jack passes the joint back. Barry takes another hit. He coughs once again.

  “I haven’t smoked weed in a long time. It’s making my head hurt.”

  “I get this stuff from a guy in Acapulco. I love it,” Jack says. “It makes me feel like going swimming. Remember we used to swim here, when the park was closed?”

  Barry nods. “Yeah. The dolphins would always nudge our crotches.”

  “Yeah. These new dolphins, they won’t even let you swim with t
hem. They’ll bite you. They’re from the fucking Amazon and are very fucking snobby about it.”

  “Oh,” Barry says. He listens to the whirl of the jellyfish pool’s filter before Jack speaks up again.

  “I talked to Dad. He said you told him you thought I was doing a terrible job.”

  “I didn’t tell him that. I just said … I just said this place seems pretty disorganized.”

  “It is,” Jack says, nodding. “I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time. Which is okay. I mean, it’s the animals, you know, they’re the ones who make me worried. I can give a shit about the rest of it, like the paperwork and payroll and all.”

  “But why don’t you want me to help? I’m good at organization and planning, all those things. I really enjoy that kind of stuff.”

  “Yeah, I know. You were always good at it so Dad always put you in charge so I never had to do it. But I want to see if I can do this on my own, you know? I mean, it’s like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I want to see if I can figure this thing out without anyone else’s help.”

  “But this place is falling apart, Jack.”

  “It’s okay. I feel pretty confident that I’ll be able to fix it. If you’re gonna work here, you’re going to have to let me do this on my own. I can’t have you looking over my shoulder and checking the pH of the tanks and shit.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Well, then I don’t know if I can have you working here,” Jack says.

  Barry stares out over the jellyfish reef. The marine park is empty once again as families hide from the noontime sun beneath the shaded umbrellas of the concession court. The animals, unhealthy, underfed, and neglected in their cages, enjoy a moment of silence, a reprieve from shouting and electrified prods and brats tapping on the glass. Barry turns and looks at his brother leaning against the light blue railing.

  “Jack, I want you to know something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think I’m better than you,” he whispers. “I want you to know that.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Jack says. “You’re just no good at hiding it.”