by Jim Lynch
He smiled. “Speak for yourself.”
“Well, it’s kinda intimidating and kinda gross is all I’m saying.”
“What’s gross about it?”
“Well, the long discussion about women ejaculating, for one.”
“Cool! I didn’t know they could.”
“It’s a whole lot like peeing.”
“No.”
“I don’t particularly want some girl peeing on me, or thinking she’s peeing on me, or worrying that I’m thinking that she’s peeing on me. Or—”
“Gross.”
“Told ya.”
“Weren’t there good parts?”
“There were a whole lot of parts about women, who only had first names for some reason, blabbing about how their lives changed when they finally discovered their spot. Kinda like those before-and-after commercials when some lady squeezes into tight pants and says, ‘I used to be a hippo before I started eating nothing but raisins and sunflower seeds.’”
“Any pictures?”
“Nope. Just some diagrams that, to be honest, were confusing. If you don’t have a diagram on the wall while you’re trying to do all that it sounds like you could get lost in a hurry.”
Phelps thought that one over. “Thousands of people are fucking right this very minute without any problem.”
“How do you know?”
“There are how many billions of people? Do the math, Miles.”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
He laughed. “People fuck in the dark all the time without charts or diagrams to guide them, don’t you figure?”
I figured he was right about that, but I didn’t want to give him credit. He hadn’t read anything. “So?” I said.
“So none of this is helping me.”
“Don’t blame me.” I rocked my shoulders, then stretched my back. “Read it yourself if you want, as long as you get it back to me before the twenty-sixth.”
Phelps pondered that during an inhale so long I thought he’d absorbed the smoke. “I don’t need it,” he said, then snuffed his Kent into a rock and stuck the butt into a plastic bag just like I’d trained him.
Ten minutes later he said, “Name any band.”
“Zeppelin,” I said, reluctantly playing along.
“Jimmy Page,” he replied, and performed a dramatic air riff on Page’s double-necked guitar.
“Cream.”
“Clapton.” In the faint light I swear I saw Eric Clapton, his glasses, light beard and everything.
Phelps was a classic-rock freak, and considered himself an aficionado of lead guitarists during “the age of guitar,” as his brother called it. We all deferred to Phelps on music and forgot he didn’t know how to actually play anything. He didn’t sully his musical reputation by struggling to play “Yankee Doodle.” He pursued his calling by acting like a rock star, by sleeping in, smoking in public and scowling at adults. It was easy to forget he wasn’t already a bandleader.
“Stones,” I said.
“The great Keith Richards.” Phelps draped a new cigarette from his lower lip, then leaned back with the expression of a man who’d recently enjoyed a terrific blood transfusion.
By then, Phelps was completely himself again. It didn’t matter that it was still pretty dark, that his flashlight beam had shrunk to an orange circle the size of a sand dollar, or that his stepfather would ground him for a month if he got caught. He stood on the flats beneath that peephole moon, his skinny, Keith Richards hips cocked to the left, legs splayed, as if posing for an album cover.
We hunted for more clams to top off our buckets, but the only promising signs were too close to the incoming tide. A fundamental rule of clamming: Don’t try to dig water.
Phelps waded up to his calves, looking for what I don’t know, but I enjoyed watching him explore on his own. Then he was up to his knees. He’d worn chest-high waders, so I didn’t worry about him getting wet, but the mud usually softened the farther out you went, and I told him that.
“Thanks Dad,” he said, without looking back. I didn’t say anything when he dropped past his knees. “Never seen so many starfish,” he shouted. “Some of them might be keepers.”
“Probably not, unless they’re freaks.” I reminded him of the fussy touch-tank buyers. “Plus they’re probably too deep for you to grab without getting soaked or stuck, so come on back.”
Phelps turned to scowl, I think, but I couldn’t make out his expression. He bunched his sweater around his biceps and reached down. His sweater got wet, of course, but he came up with a star that was a burnt orange rarely seen in anything but sunsets.
“Nice,” I praised. “Let me take a look.” I reached out, hoping to reel him back.
“One more.” He switched hands with the star, bunched his sleeves higher and dropped into deeper water. From where I stood it looked as if he’d skipped a step on a staircase. Water rose past his thighs.
He called himself a dumbass, then warned me not to say a word. He tried to turn and retreat. He laughed, but my headlamp caught that trapped-animal look on his face. The more he struggled the lower he sank. His waist was almost under.
“Maybe you can reach down and dig your boots free.” I forced myself to sound calm, hoping Phelps didn’t realize the tide was returning swiftly enough for his hips to cast a tiny wake.
His face contorted with concentration before he lunged downward, soaking himself to the neck. He straightened a few seconds later, gasping and dripping, then growled, “The fuckin’ fuckers are fuckin’ stuck!”
“Can you wiggle out of your waders?”
“No way.” He was starting to whine. “I could barely get them on.”
“Then don’t move,” I said. He’d sunk another few inches. “I’ll dig you out. Relax.”
I stripped to my underpants, stepped into the water to my knees, took a shallow dive away from him, then circled back, hyperventilating with my head above the water until I dove again and felt his thighs and followed them into mud that felt as loose and light as flour. It was colder than I expected and impossible to see because the water was dirty and the moon only so bright. I dredged blindly then surfaced, spitting, treading, careful not to stick my own feet in the mud. As much time as I spent on water I was still a crappy swimmer. “Try now.”
He said he did, but it didn’t look like it.
I dove again and dug more aggressively toward his boots. My breath was so shallow I didn’t last long. I impatiently pulled up on his left leg, and that’s when I felt the mud grab my right foot and panic rip through the length of me.
I’d been temporarily stuck often enough to know that if I used my left foot for leverage to pry my right foot out I might never breathe again. That’s when Phelps grabbed my hair and neck and pulled me free as if I were a kitten. I came up choking, paddling toward shore. The water was up to his sternum now, and I realized I’d made things worse.
People rarely got stuck while wading. It usually happened while they were crossing soft exposed mud, with the typical rescue involving wooden planks upon which trapped mudders would lay their torsos and crawl free from the muck. Oystermen did it all the time. So did Evergreen students. This was different. Phelps wasn’t only knee-deep in mud, but also sternum-deep in incoming water. And there weren’t any planks around.
The tide was swinging almost eighteen feet over six hours that night, which meant it was rising an average of three feet an hour. Another hour and Phelps might be under. When I shared my next idea, he pleaded with me not to leave him, then screamed for help. Like I’ve said, water amplifies voices, but there still has to be someone to hear them. And nobody lived along the wooded lip of Chatham Cove.
I pulled on my sweatshirt and boots and ran with a shovel toward Judge Stegner’s oyster farm, then past it to the geoduck plantings. The judge and I had packed hundreds of fingernail-sized geoducks inside PVC pipes, which were then planted vertically into the flats. I dug up one three-footer, emptied it onto the beach, felt how it fit around my mouth, then
sprinted it back to where skinny Phelps broke the surface like a half-submerged totem pole. I rinsed the pipe, waded out as far as I dared and tossed it to him. He raised a trembling hand, but didn’t catch it. Was his arm stiffening? In the dim, reflecting light his face looked green and his eyelids were peeled so wide you could see all the way around his pupils. “Grab it!” I insisted. He slowly obeyed, then held up the pipe and looked at me miserably. “Practice fitting it to your mouth,” I said, “so you can make a seal.”
“Go get help!” he wailed. He wasn’t even trying to sound tough anymore.
A silver ribbon of light shimmered on the water top about twenty feet behind Phelps. There was some red in it too, and while I assumed it was luminous plankton we’d stirred up, it seemed too uniform somehow. Sharks visited South Sound, but usually just three-foot mudders, and what I thought I saw was at least eight feet long and narrow. It didn’t appear to be alive either, more like a long sheet of metal—except that it suddenly stuck its head up the way a turtle might. Luckily, Phelps didn’t see what alarmed me, but he did start yelling when I hurled a rock at it.
“Be back in a flash,” I said, though I really didn’t know how long it would take to get to that first cabin or whether anyone would be there when I got there or where I would go next. “Practice breathing through it,” I yelled. “And don’t waste energy.”
“Go!” he yelled.
Then I ran and heard his shouts behind me. It was hard to make out the words, and I felt like a jerk for stranding him, especially when I wasn’t sure what I’d seen behind him. I fell twice before entering a dark forest that stayed so damp year-round that sweater-thick moss muted my screams for help.
Chapter 14
The closest cabin was less than a mile away, but I’m guessing it took almost ten minutes to get there, running full tilt in rubber boots. It felt like a whole lot longer than that.
The old man who answered the door later told me he thought he was losing his mind when he didn’t see anyone on his stoop until he looked down to find a kid in Fruit of the Loom briefs who couldn’t breathe well enough to speak.
Mr. Skugstad was one of those solemn, old live-alone Scandinavians with the deep cheek lines of a man who’d been large once but deflated with age. He looked so old I considered running to the next cabin, but after he calmed me enough to fill him in he phoned the sheriffs office, and we jogged toward the mud with a coil of rope and an inflatable raft he dragged behind us. He stopped repeatedly to bend over like a man about to hit a pool ball. His face was as red as a spawning sockeye, and his breath squealed like wind that’s trying to rip branches loose. It occurred to me that I might kill two people that night. Once we burst onto the beach, everything was easier to see, which made me worry I’d lost track of time.
It was impossible to tell by the peaceful water or the reassuring hint of a new sun that anything horrific was happening. That’s the thing about the earth: It doesn’t stop to acknowledge the daily disasters of the living. It just keeps on spinning and sucking. I think that’s what drives people toward faith, that unsettling realization that the physical world goes on without them, before them, after them, without recognition or sympathy.
The tide had returned faster than I’d expected. The truth is it rarely comes in evenly. Its initial retreat and final return are so sneaky-slow they fool you. It’s usually only after an hour drifting either way—when you’re paying the least attention—that it moves with conviction. It must have been hauling ass during the time it took me to get that old loner onto the flats because once we rounded the point and headed onto the beach where Phelps and I had begun clamming, I was in full side-aching panic: There was no break in the surface, no torso, no pipe.
Nothing.
I’d left Phelps alone with a long silvery creature, and now there was nothing but water.
Old man Skugstad looked across the cove, then wildly at me, as if I’d drowned his own son or pulled the cruelest hoax imaginable.
It took me a few swallows to remember that Phelps and I had roamed farther south on the beach, and another sickening moment to spot the narrow PVC pipe sticking up well beyond the shrinking beach line like one of those tall sticks marking old oyster farms.
On a second frantic look there also was the bulge of Phelps’s rock-star mop breaking the surface. I gasped, as if I’d been underwater too, then yelled that we were coming, which, of course, he couldn’t hear.
When we got close enough, a panting Mr. Skugstad shoved me out in his raft with the end of a rope tied in a loop. As I frantically hand-paddled out to Phelps, I could see his mouth slightly below the surface, his fist clenched around the pipe and his eyes bulging insanely. I followed the old man’s instructions and dropped the loop over the pipe and Phelps’s shoulders. He slowly grabbed it with his free hand. “Make sure it’s around his chest,” the old man yelled. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I said it was, then got out of the way as he coiled the slack, then turned and marched up the beach with the rope knotted around his hips. At first, Phelps didn’t move, then there was a slight pop, and I saw the PVC pipe moving like a fat snorkel, then Phelps himself emerging and coughing in the shallows like some stranded mammal. The old man repeatedly whacked Phelps’s back. He coughed violently. Nothing came out but drool.
“He’s gonna be fine,” Mr. Skugstad said. It didn’t look that way to me. Phelps’s lips were bruised purple and the skin around his neck was splotched orange as if he’d been hanged. We helped him out of his sweater and waders, then wrapped him in the old man’s coat and hugged him until his shivering slowed.
Finally, Phelps looked at me and stammered, “That s-s-sucked.”
He was laughing and crying by the time two women built like softball players jogged onto the beach with a stretcher slung between them. As they panted out to us, burrowed clams greeted them with a squirting finale that could have been set to music, and the sun crawled over the tree line and made the water dance.
If you live on the Sound you learn to store moments like these so that you can pull them out months later during the fifty-sixth straight day of stubborn rain and shrinking daylight. I saw a seal’s tail swirl and a school of tiny silver fish break the surface and then some brown and white duck with frayed wings vanish like an arrow into the sparkling cove.
I saw everything.
Chapter 15
When something turns out well everyone dwells on what went right. It’s like reading about a ball game you saw. If a team wins, it’s all about what they did well, even though defeat was just a weird bounce or a bad call away. It’s the same way with almost everything. Who highlights the bums and thieves in their family tree? Everyone dwells on the doctors and mayors and the others who fit into some show-dog lineage that makes us feel more significant. It’s the way we are.
So, of course, the sheriffs rescue team focused on my brainstorm to get Phelps that PVC pipe. Only later did they ask why we were out on the mudflats before dawn in the first place, and only after that did they wonder if we were aware of the dangers of the mud, and only then did they call our folks to ask if they knew where the hell their boys were. Luckily, none of it made the newspaper, which I was learning was primarily reserved for scary crimes, boring politics and cute animals.
It took two days to find the guts to call Professor Kramer to ask him about the fish I thought I’d seen that night, but I couldn’t get a call back. Meanwhile, I read up on turtles, eels and barracudas, and every other long silvery fish I could find, including a rare skinny deepwater creature the Chinese mimicked at festivals. When the professor finally did call back, I told him I thought I’d seen an oarfish in Chatham Cove.
He snorted, then lectured me on how easy it is to be fooled at night.
I let his words hang out there to see if he realized how silly they sounded considering all that I’d already seen after dark. “I saw it lift its head,” I said.
“Did you see an eye?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was probably a f
in or a tail or even a branch,” he said vaguely. “You were under a lot of pressure.”
Something had snapped between us, and I had no idea how to glue it back together.
Phelps suffered a tiny bit of hypothermia, which worked out perfectly. It landed him loads of attention from his brother, who taught him how to play the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water.” And he watched tons of TV while grounded, which is why he was the first to warn me that Channel 7 was airing a special feature on a remarkable Olympia boy.
The mannequin sashayed onto a beach near the tavern explaining how she first met little Miles O’Malley at dawn on the first day of July on these exact same mudflats along Puget Sound’s southernmost bay.
“This is where the smallest boy heading into eighth grade at Griffin Middle School discovered the largest squid ever found on the West Coast.” The camera closed in on her wide-set eyes. “What has transpired since then has left marine professors and state fisheries biologists shaking their heads. Amazingly, the giant squid is just one of Miles O’Malley’s recent discoveries. Others include a mysterious deepwater fish never seen before in our waters, as well as the unsettling invasion of some Asian crabs, which may already threaten dozens of seaside houses near here.
“How has this little Olympia boy stumbled onto some of the most dramatic marine discoveries in the history of Puget Sound? Who is Miles O’Malley? And what does this thirteen-year-old make of all this?”
The next image was the stranded squid. She fired off its length, weight and other stats and let Professor Kramer put it into historical perspective. Then she showed me calling it a cephalopod—to set up the book-smart kid—and aired that comment I regretted about the earth trying to tell us something.
“Less than three weeks later, Miles O’Malley came up with yet another discovery near dawn while kayaking alongside the beaches of Evergreen State College.”
At first I didn’t recognize that bizarre ragfish—indoors on a long metal table with some state biologist I’d never seen before explaining how it’d been considered possibly extinct. He then used a pointer to note how the circular welts on its side were indeed similar in size and shape to some of the suckers on the giant squid.