by Jim Lynch
Chatham Cove was the next twinkling backdrop with distant silhouettes of me and Phelps on the flats. I couldn’t believe it, but there I was, slapping him on television. From a distance, it looked like horseplay. Kids. Her voice-over explained that after hearing about the ragfish discovery, she decided to get to know Miles O’Malley. “I truly had no idea,” she teased, “where this story would lead.”
She explained in far more detail than I thought she knew how I’d created my own summer business by selling clams to a local restaurant and collecting tidal life for Tacoma, Seattle and Port Townsend aquariums.
“Not only has this precocious scientist-slash-entrepreneur found a market for his beach finds, but he has even convinced his buyers to drive to his home to do business—seeing how he’s much too young, and probably too short, to drive.”
She had an uncomfortable-looking Professor Kramer explain my “gifts,” and showed Phelps furiously digging up a geoduck as if that stationary clam were a runaway mole. “What’s different about your friend Miles?” she asked him.
The camera crowded Phelps’s face. He took a breath. “The better question is, what’s normal about him?”
She asked if I amazed him with my knowledge of marine life.
“Ask him anything.” Phelps swept his bangs aside and smiled. I hated to admit it, but even with brown kelp caught in his eyetooth he looked like a dang movie star.
“I think Miles even knows more about all this stuff than the people who write all those books he reads,” Phelps said. “What cracks me up is that he’s clueless about just about everything else.”
What a friend, huh?
Then came the sunflower star. It didn’t look as stunning on television, but it still startled me. She pointed out how unusual it was to find such a big sea star that high on the beach. Then it was all me, talking fast and excited, face pinkening, nose peeling, answering her big questions and telling her about the new crabs at Whiskey Point and the new seaweed in Flapjack Bay and exactly where to find everything.
“We received a very interesting response,” she said, “when we asked state fish and wildlife officials about the strange crabs and seaweed that Miles told us about: They hadn’t heard about them.
“So we asked if they’d be willing to take a look with us, and this is what we discovered: The crabs are called ‘Chinese mitten crabs,’ and they are not native to this area. They’re what biologists call an ‘invasive species.’”
Then came the close-up of the tiny crabs. “They look harmless enough, right?” She awkwardly held one in her hand. “They only grow to about three inches across, and their hairy pinchers aren’t big or intimidating. So how could a little crab like this be of much concern? Well, for starters, it bullies native crabs, and more importantly to locals perched above this beach, it tunnels.”
The next footage showed hundreds of four-inch-wide holes I’d never noticed bored into the base of the sandy bluff. “If enough tunnels are dug they create instability, erosion and landslides,” she said. “As unlikely as it sounds, these little crabs may have been responsible for the mysterious bluff collapse earlier this month just around the point here, which destroyed Joe and Edna Stevenson’s four-hundred-thousand-dollar retirement home.”
She then cornered two shy biologists to explain why the state had been unaware of the invasion of the Chinese crabs if it was already common knowledge among thirteen-year-old beachcombers. “We can’t be everywhere at once,” one of them explained. “This is actually an example of the system working. We rely on the public to keep us informed. And we appreciate the help.” That’s what he said, but it looked like the subject gave him a sunburn.
Then Wide-eyes was out on Flapjack with a handful of that strange seaweed. “The proliferation of this Caulerpa, which Miles had pointed out to us, also was not known by the state. And it appears the weed is already spreading across the channel toward tribal shellfish grounds. The same seaweed reportedly took over portions of the northern Mediterranean where it grew so fast it threatened all marine life.”
Then she showed me giddy again with that sunflower star, head backlit, hair glowing, eyes sparkling. It’s not being melodramatic to say that I looked possessed, maybe even holy.
“Why is it that you always seem to find amazing things in these bays?” she asked.
“Because I’m always looking,” I said, “and there are so many things to see.”
“But you keep seeing things that people shouldn’t normally be able to see, right?”
I rambled.
“So, maybe,” she continued, “like you said the other day when you found that squid, ‘maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.’ And if so, what do you think it’s saying?”
“It’s probably saying, ‘Pay attention.’”
“Professor Kramer agrees,” she said dramatically, noting that he’d told her that it was obviously high time for a fresh inventory of sea life in South Sound. “In fact, the professor says he intends to push for something he called a ‘BioBlitz,’ in which a variety of scientists would team up to perform an animal census of sorts in the Sound’s southern bays.”
The feature ended with me talking about Rachel Carson, followed by that phony chitchat in which one of the anchors congratulated the mannequin for her amazing story and mentioned that he found it fascinating that a thirteen-year-old was a huge fan of Rachel Carson.
She nodded so vigorously it looked like whiplash. “His sidekick Kenny Phelps told me that Miles can quote long passages from Rachel Carson’s oceanography books—from memory. And when he was given the honor of naming that giant squid still being examined at the University of Washington, I’m told Miles didn’t hesitate to call her Rachel.”
Even the weatherman loved that crap.
I waited for my parents’ response, hoping I wouldn’t puke up my share of the tuna loaf in the meantime.
Amazingly, they didn’t lecture me again about sneaking out at night or badger me about how much I was pocketing from my collections or ask any of the other questions for which I’d rehearsed answers.
My father pointed out that while I might be the smallest kid around, I apparently had a bigger brain than anyone working for the state, which sent a quiver across my mother’s forehead. Then he asked nobody in particular how it was that the only thing he knew beans about was baseball and beer when his son somehow knew stuff big-shot professors and fancy-pants scientists didn’t? He sipped a flat beer, his face stuck in a lopsided grin that made me wonder if he’d had a stroke. “You realize how many people might have seen that broadcast?” he asked. “The Seattle area has what, Helen, a million people?”
“But it was just on in Olympia,” I said.
They laughed and told me that Channel 7 was a Seattle station.
It creeped me out to think of all those strange eyeballs looking at me and our bay up close like that. I felt that odd sense of loss and betrayal you feel when you see a bad movie of a book you loved.
Mom told me that I amazed her, but it looked like I troubled her. She reached for my shoulder, but didn’t quite touch it. “What do you want from us, Miles?”
When I hesitated, she said, “I mean what can we do to help?” Her nose twitched, and I knew she smelled the rising bay through the floorboards.
The phone rang. She ordered Dad to ignore it.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Are you challenged in school?”
“Sometimes.”
“Should we look into getting you into a private school?”
“I’m fine.”
The machine picked up, and some work friend of hers babbled about how her “boy wonder” looked like a miniature Michael J. Fox.
“You want to try to get an internship with Talcott Seafoods?” Mom asked, then sneezed.
The phone sounded again.
“Billy Eckert lives next door to one of the Talcott brothers,” Dad blurted. “I could talk to him about it.”
“I’m all right. Really.”
“You need us to take you to the library more often?” Mom pressed. “You need money for books?”
The answering machine kicked on again, and Aunt Janet asked in her party voice who the heck would have thought that her little nephew would be the family’s first television star.
“Come on, Miles,” Dad urged. “We had no idea you were getting so damn smart about all this. We really had no . . . If you’ve already found your gift, son, let us help.”
I probably should’ve felt flattered, but instead it stung that it took some mannequin on some crappy television program to make my own parents realize I might be somewhat special.
“For God’s sake,” Mom persisted, “there must be something—even if it just makes us feel better. A bigger aquarium?”
“No,” I said. “Just . . .”
Dad froze mid-sip. I heard the tide settling beneath us.
“Yes?” Mom whispered. “What is it? Anything.”
What did I truly want? A twelve-foot Lund with a red stripe and a six-horse Evinrude so that I could take Angie Stegner out for a boat ride. I also wanted a dog.
“Just stick together,” I said, louder than I’d intended, “and don’t move out of this house.”
That left them speechless as the phone begged for more attention and I slipped outside to the bay where the tide brimmed so high and smooth it looked like pale green Jell-0.
Chapter 16
The judge and I were cleaning and sorting his oysters, discarding the dead, crating the mature ones, reorganizing the young and playing our roles, him talking authoritatively with his French-horn voice, me sunburning and listening along with the gulls, the herons, the nudists and the rest of creation.
“Well, we now know that Angie is as bipolar as they come,” he suddenly volunteered. “See, it’s all about chemicals, Miles. That’s all we really are upstairs, as much as we’d like to think there’s all this magic going on up here.”
Bipolar? Was he telling me that she was crazy?
“The only way to manage something like that is with more chemicals,” the judge continued. “It’s not hard to figure out what somebody needs, but the catch is they have to take it. And you can’t make Angela Rosemary Stegner do anything. Least I’ve never been able to. My three boys combined were easier than her. I don’t know if that says something about boys and girls or something about me.”
He looked up, face reddening, as if lifting something much heavier than oysters. “I was having lunch last Thursday with Judge Crosby, and we were arguing again over whether judges should be elected or appointed when Angie waltzed in. Crosby gave her a look like she was some street kid panhandling for bus money even though she gave him a smile that should’ve floored him. ‘Saw you through the window, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Just thought I’d say hello.’ I was so flustered by how gorgeous and poised she looked at that moment that all I could come up with was, ‘Thanks.’ She laughed the way she does and everyone stared, but she couldn’t have cared less what anyone thought. She bent down to kiss my forehead the way she used to before bed, then waltzed back out as Crosby leaned across the table and asked, ‘So when’re you gonna spring for an eyebrow ring, Norman?’ as if she’d embarrassed me, as if I felt anything but gratitude.”
The judge picked up another oyster, turned it over in his rubber gloves, then looked at me so intensely I glanced away, straight into the pulsing late-morning sun, and burned my eyelids trying to piece together what he was saying and why. I was used to adults spilling oddly intimate stories around me, as if I were too small to gossip, but this was unusual, even for the chatty judge.
“All she has to do is take her medicine and we can all move forward, but I know full well that she mixes Clozaril and the other one with whatever she’s into that week. Part of me wants to know everything, of course. Another part doesn’t. The problem with Angie is that making smart choices bores the hell out of her. I imagine you heard she passed out during one of her performances?”
“No,” I lied.
The judge removed his sunglasses and methodically cleaned each lens with the bottom hem of his paint-speckled T-shirt. He looked so ordinary when he wasn’t talking, his small cloudy eyes recessed in a fleshy chinless face. His jawline started out fine, I noticed, then lost its way. He wasn’t fat, just unfinished.
He half-smiled, then crouched in his rolled-down rubber boots with four oysters that he surgically pried open. He displayed the raw, glistening globs on their shells in the mud, set perfectly equidistant, before nodding at me to begin.
I hated raw oysters, but ate them countless times with the judge. Always two oysters staged momentously in the mud like some grand sacrifice to Poseidon. It was a thrill he assumed I shared—eating his oysters, by God, straight from the bay. I threw those slippery blobs down, chewing as little as possible, trying not to squirm or wince as they slid into place so easily it felt as if they might slide right out of me. I studied the insides of the shells for pearls, but found only miniature purple murals.
“Good?” the judge asked.
“Tasty,” I said.
Before I could figure out how to ask him if he was warning me that Angie was psycho, he was on to something else.
“Friendships can ruin you,” he announced.
I smirked unconvincingly, assuming it was some witty aside about our oyster ritual.
“You have to be careful who you help,” he said, “even when acting on principle.”
He must have seen my bafflement, because he then loudly confided that he’d aggressively persuaded his fellow judges on a property-rights case that involved a college buddy by the name of Luther Stevens.
“Good for you,” I said.
He liked that. I could play the judge even when I had no idea what he was talking about.
“No.” He grinned bitterly. “Good for Luther, not for me. Loyalty and principle can come back around on you all gussied up as scandal—especially if you’re running for reelection.”
I was so lost I avoided eye contact. Again, I wanted to ask about Angie, but by the time I picked the words and readied my throat he thanked me for visiting Florence so often.
That struck me as beyond peculiar. Why was he thanking me? I’d rarely heard the judge mention her, and I never saw him at her cabin—although Florence often brought him up. Then it hit me: If he knew how often I visited, then he knew all about her condition, right? I felt the way I imagined people feel after confession. I couldn’t wait for the judge to tell me that she had the wrong doctor or was taking the wrong medicine, and that he’d straighten it all out by the weekend.
“She really should be in a nursing home already,” the judge half-hollered.
It took me a moment to find my voice. “Really?”
“Oh yes. I spoke with her neurologist last month. There’s nothing more he can give her. It’s dangerous for her to be alone, and it only gets worse.”
“She doesn’t want to go to a home,” I whispered.
“Who does?” he bellowed.
I think that was the moment I stopped admiring Judge Stegner.
“Want to know something about that woman?” he asked, as we shuttled six buckets of oysters to his boat.
“Okay.”
“Fifly years ago I considered her the most beautiful woman I’d seen in person. A young Sophia Loren had nothing on her.” He raised his right hand. “I swear.”
I tried to picture the face that went with a name like Sophia Loren while wondering where she or Florence fit into the judge’s confusing lecture. Was he commiserating with my crush on his daughter? Was he warning me about her insanity and temporary beauty? Had he seen me peeping at her window?
Someone like Rachel Carson came straight at you and told you exactly what she wanted you to know in the clearest language imaginable. The judge surprised you with statements, then waited for you to connect the dots. I gave up trying to see his point and offered mine: “I’ll help you with Angie.”
The judge tilted his head, as if draining wat
er from an ear, started a laugh, then smothered it. It was clear I’d misread him. There was no master plan, no collective message behind his midday ramblings. He’d just been babbling like anyone else who’d lost his footing.
“You are something else, young man,” he told me. “Something else, indeed.”
“Well, the offer stands,” I said, and turned toward the boat so he wouldn’t see the emotion twirling inside me.
The judge let me steer the Boston Whaler back toward Skookumchuck Bay. He stood upright the whole way, balancing himself with three fingers on the steering column as yet another show of his faith in me. The tide was still low. If I accidentally hit one of the ever-changing sandbars or a half-submerged log he’d vault into the suds at thirty miles an hour.
Mallards, gulls and Canada geese flapped clumsily from our path as the judge and I strained to see Evergreen’s five nude bathers—four bony men and one lumpy woman—sizzling like sausage links within twenty-five yards of where I’d found that ragfish.
It suddenly occurred to me that the judge would know exactly how fast divorces happen and who decides where the kids live and under what conditions judges insist that couples stay together, but I would’ve had to shout the questions over the howling outboard and I couldn’t imagine doing that.
The bay’s only hint of business, as usual, was the old, wind-peeled Mud Bay Tavern. Any renovation required bringing it up to code, the judge had explained, which was impossible seeing how there were no sewer lines that far west of downtown. So, year after year the tavern remained the same, without even a change in its two fading signs—one that said CHICKEN AND STEAKS, the other that just said EAT—or its fifty-five-year-old septic field buried in soil too soggy to absorb the sewage of more than a couple small families. Yet the tavern still somehow hosted overflow Monday Night Football crowds and the entire membership of the Bad Dogs, a motorcycle gang that showed up the first Thursday afternoon of every month for shuffleboard and clam chowder, which explained the fourteen Harleys lined up in front.