by Jim Lynch
“I don’t know anything about them,” I said. The day had been so crazy, having some cult come looking for me didn’t seem all that peculiar.
What I learned from my mother’s subsequent rant was that the Eleusinian School was a cult of loons, including Australian loons for some unknown reason, who followed a local crazy lady conveniently named Mrs. Powers who claimed to have visions about the secretive rites associated with the so-called Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. My mother called the cult’s fenced compound a nuthouse for suckers and psychic wannabes. “At least Florence only charged ten bucks for her mumbo jumbo. This woman takes your life savings.” Mom then mimicked the tall lady who’d just left: We’re students at a school.
My mother’s impersonations were often entertaining, but never flattering. She was so good at the rhythm of the judge’s words you forgot her voice was so much higher. She could flutter her eyelids exactly like Florence and talk without vowels like one of the three Dons after his second Crown Royal. She did Phelps once right back at him, flopping bangs in her eyes and asking, What’s up, Mrs. O? and followed that with a long smile that, amazingly, matched his.
“It’s getting to the point, though,” Dad said cautiously, “where you’ve got to be careful what you say about that place. I just discovered, for example, that Nellie Winters is a student. And Nellie says it’s basically good self-help information that a lot of people need to hear.”
“They’re a joke, Sean, and don’t let loony Nellie tell you otherwise. It’s new age bullshit at its worst. She mixes ancient rituals with the latest hokum. She blindfolds ‘students’ and sends them through mazes to teach them how to read minds! She makes them sit in bathtubs of seawater and scream while they listen to Yanni! She’s been married twenty-eight times! She’s a high-school-dropout-Rolls-Royce-driving con woman! Either that or she’s got an amazing multiple-personality disorder—probably both—all of which suggests to me, at least, that we shouldn’t let her anywhere near our son.”
“Shirley MacLaine swore by her,” Dad said sheepishly, lighting a candle.
“Shirley MacLaine,” Mom hissed, as if the words were more than a name. “Why is it, Sean,” she asked softly, “that you always believe the last person you talked to?”
“All I’m saying is that I don’t know that they’re any more ridiculous than a lot of other things going around these days.” He lit another candle. “And old Florence sure isn’t looking like such a crackpot tonight.”
Mom groaned. “You make enough predictions and something’s bound to come true! Everybody eventually wins at roulette if they play long enough, Sean. You think I was rude to them, don’t you?”
“You were fine.” He wouldn’t look at her. “It’s late.”
I eased toward the door to check on Florence and to step into a night where beauty loitered and the sun took its time setting, as if it, too, didn’t want to miss anything.
“Do you think I was rude, Miles?”
I looked past her to the trembling candle flames. “You didn’t seem to bother them.”
In other words, I knew they’d be back.
Chapter 18
The next day the bay swarmed with boaters, rubberneckers and three television crews, as if a Loch Ness monster or a Sasquatch might appear, or a prophet might speak, if they just hung around and didn’t blink.
Several minutes after my parents sputtered off to work the same odd duo that visited the night before moseyed to the door. I noticed another eleven cult members beyond them, including one with a drooling baby in her backpack, shuffling in our driveway. The tall lady introduced herself as Carolyn and asked if she could talk to me for a minute.
We did that while the others sheepishly loitered, their hands folded in front of their privates, as if waiting on a principal or a priest. They all looked normal enough, other than that they seemed too friendly. Whenever I glanced in their direction they smiled the way Aunt Janet did if she hadn’t seen me for months.
After hearing Carolyn’s boring talk about their school and her exhausting apologies about their “intrusion” the night before, I asked whether their leader had a personality disorder. That answer got so long and boring, with all sorts of filler about religious mysteries and some “goddess of life,” that I interrupted to ask if she wanted me to show them the flats, seeing how it was an hour before low tide and I couldn’t bear listening to her any longer.
Her face bloomed as if I’d flattered her.
Once we shuffled to the beach, I treated them like third-graders. I told them to stick their heads between boulders to listen to the barnacles slamming their doors shut. Like most people, they couldn’t believe the crusty little bumps actually housed live animals, much less critters who sealed seawater inside their shells whenever the tide rolled out. I also explained how tube worms recoil and trap water with filaments that work like corks, and how snails contract and slide doors shut too, and how crabs and sand fleas burrow beneath rocks to stay as moist as possible until the tide returns.
Then I strolled onto the flats, showing them exactly where to walk and how to avoid sinking in the mud. I pointed out how tidal life descends into everything, every crack, every shell and even between grains of sand, how if they slowed down and relaxed their eyes, they could see that much of what looked stationary was moving, like the thirteen tiny hermit crabs I pointed out in identical brown and white checkered periwinkle shells. I showed them life on top of life, barnacles and limpets stuck to oyster shells, clinging to each other, piggybacking on larger shells and barnacles on top of everything, as if there’d been a Superglue party the night before.
Most kids just want to know about the biggest and grossest stuff. This group was interested in everything. They jockeyed for position to actually see me explain things to the point I wondered if some of them were lip-readers. Carolyn was the only one who asked questions. The others smiled whenever I poured on the details. One of the ladies kept glancing around and chewing the side of her mouth. My guess is she was imagining aftershocks. I suspect we all were. It didn’t help that Fort Lewis kept firing mortar rounds thirty miles away, with each blast sounding like a heavy table skidding across a wooden floor above our heads. But it was more than that. It takes time to trust the earth again once you’ve seen it move. It even looks different, the way your father looks different after he spanks you.
I pointed out how the eel grass lay flat on the beach, and asked them to imagine what it must be like to live in a forest that worked like a folding stage prop, going from three-dimensional to two-dimensional twice a day. And I asked them to consider that the hundreds of stranded moon jellies, scattered like palm-sized transparent blobs on the mud, would all be dead by the first fall storm if they even survived the wait for the next tide. I picked one up and showed them its torn underside. “They don’t live long, but they got it pretty easy once they get to a size where nothing wants to eat them.” I gently tossed that jelly into deeper water. Carolyn followed my lead, then all of them were hunching over, scooping moon jellies into their bare hands and ferrying them to deeper water like some jellyfish rescue squad. If Phelps had been there he would have laughed himself breathless.
I told them how the Cyanea jelly grows from the size of a gum ball to that of an umbrella in a few months. “And when they’re full grown,” I said, “they trail these long poisonous tentacles behind them that some smart baby fish use to shelter themselves from predators.”
After I warned them to try not to crush the sand dollars—though there was no avoiding them completely—they tiptoed across the flats, as if sand dollars were an endangered species. One of the ladies limped slightly, and I noticed that her left ankle was twice the size of her right. I watched her pick up a sand dollar, turn it over and gasp at its tiny shimmering legs quivering in the sun like a stadium audience seen from above.
“You all probably know this,” I said, knowing none of them would, “but the moon’s influence on the tides is twice as strong as the sun’s. Distance is mor
e important than size when it comes to gravity. So it’s obviously no coincidence that the tide and the moon usually rise about fifty minutes later than they did the day before.”
They looked at me like I was Copernicus. Why did my mother mock these people? If they were crazy they seemed crazy in the right direction. I dodged their eyes and looked around my feet for clam signs. Even a middle-aged horse clam would get an ovation from this bunch. They mimicked my clam-hunting stoop and followed my path so precisely I made sure to traverse only solid mud, which was what I was concentrating on when I spotted the mermaid’s purse.
I’d seen them on the flats before, but never this late in the season. Yet there it was, looking like a leather satchel some child had left behind. They crowded me as I kneeled to study it. I glanced up. “What is it?” I asked.
A stubby man cleared his throat and said, “Petrified bark?” Another one said it looked plastic. “It’s not manmade?” Carolyn asked.
I opened the purse to what I expected to see, two baby skates set like human eyeballs against a black backdrop.
Carolyn gasped and tripped into the man behind her who stumbled into the lady behind him which set off a series of apologies that took a while to settle. When everyone crowded forward for a better view they were beyond startled and gawked at me as if I’d unwrapped the beginning of time.
“They usually show up in the spring in rockier areas,” I explained, “but every now and then they wash up down here. They’re egg cases for baby skates, better known as rays.” I mimicked their kitelike glide through the water. “They come out soft, then harden into purselike pouches to protect the eggs. But these ones are very dead. I’m surprised nothing’s eaten them yet.”
I closed the purse and set it back in the mud, then splashed the stink off my hands.
“Where’d you find that giant squid?” Carolyn asked. “Around here, right?”
I pointed in the general direction.
“Could we see that too?” someone else asked.
“See what?”
“Where you found it.” More heads nodded.
“Why?” I stalled. “There’s nothing to see, and most of you don’t have the right shoes.”
“We don’t care if we get wet.” More nodding.
“You wanna risk getting stuck?” My eyes settled on the lady with the snoozing baby on her back, then on the limper with the huge ankle.
The nodders won, and I led them out. We had to help the fattest one out of two sinkholes, but eventually we all stood on the mud bar where the relentless tides had erased almost every sign of the squid, the TV crews, Professor Kramer’s news conference, the judge’s coffee stand and the rest of that morning.
I showed them exactly where the squid beached. I described its size, how my flashlight bounced off its purple skin, how its siphon quivered, and the loud sigh I thought I heard come out of it.
Then Carolyn talked quietly to all of us, although mainly to me, about the way their school viewed nature and particularly seawater. She said they were having a special gathering in two weeks, and that their leader herself had hoped I could attend and discuss sea life with her.
“Take me to your leader,” I said in my best alien voice, which dazzled them all over again. Two weeks was a long ways off. It was so easy to say yes.
The backpack baby yawned into the next lull and peeked over her mother’s round shoulder at me. I didn’t make any faces or anything, but she broke into this gummy, fat-cheeked smile to the point people started giggling and I blushed so hard I must have looked like a cartoon character.
Florence had told me that babies often look slightly above your head because they’re checking your aura to see if you’re friendly. She claimed it’s a skill we all lose and have to relearn. I admit it: I gave Florence’s psychic lessons a second chance after she predicted that earthquake. In fact, I’d tried to meditate earlier that morning, although I couldn’t even settle on a mantra. And the truth is, babies had always made a huge deal out of me. But until then, I’d assumed it was just because I was usually the closest one to their size.
I took a break from their relentless friendliness by resting my eyes on the next mud bar and a shimmering rectangle swaying along the tide line. It didn’t look like an oarfish at first, but the more it shimmered and the more I studied its length, the more it looked like the same long silver creature I still couldn’t shake from my mind.
I walked toward it, without excusing myself, and was almost upon it before I gave up. The light on the ripples, and the way it lurked an inch beneath the surface had been enough to trick me. It was nothing more than a five-foot-long four-by-four, which wasn’t unusual at all, especially with all the waterfront construction past the college and along Sunset Estates. Yet it definitely wasn’t new lumber. It was actually remarkably weathered with strange faded designs on one end. As I got closer, I saw they looked like those angular characters above Chinese restaurants. A souvenir, I suspected, that someone had carted home from the coast then lost off their dock. When I picked it up, though, it was obvious that wasn’t the case.
Two men splashed out to help carry it back while the others continued rescuing jellies. A murmur spread, then they all eyed this weird, waterlogged post.
I tried to hide my excitement, but heard myself talking fast and loud about the odds against it showing up in Skookumchuck Bay. I explained how the coasts of Washington and Canada are separated by the fifteen-mile-wide mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and how Asian debris occasionally shoots that gap, but rarely, if ever, corkscrews all the way down the entire eighty-mile fjord to our southern bays.
“How do you know someone didn’t bring it home from the coast?” Carolyn asked.
I pointed at the gooseneck barnacles stuck to its backside. “These guys cling to stuff that floats in the ocean. That’s what they do. I’ve never seen them in the bay before, or anywhere around here. And they’re still healthy, which means they probably haven’t been out of the water until now.”
“It’s a street sign!” one of them cried. “It’s an old Japanese street sign!”
After a long pause in which we all stared at that post and its odd, angular markings, Carolyn said: “You found it for a reason, Miles, didn’t you? Just as you found the squid and those other discoveries. You’ve been selected, haven’t you?”
What was guiding me to everything? My subconscious? Something from above? And, if so, what if there’d been a mistake? What if the wrong person had been selected?
A heron squawked past right then, as if to say it couldn’t wait to flap out of earshot of such nonsense.
Chapter 19
It was Phelps’s “brilliant idea.” That’s all he’d say about it other than to instruct me to meet him at the Heron bridge with my bike. I hadn’t seen him since he’d nearly drowned, so I didn’t care what he had planned and didn’t ask questions.
We glided through flickering daylight, the wind bending pines as we coasted across the Fourth Street Bridge, everything lodging in my mind; the girls smirking out passenger windows at us, Phelps humorously oversized for his bike, his brown hair flying behind him like a torn flag, Mount Rainier an enormous boulder in the sky on one side, the wounded capitol looming on the other, and beneath them both, the largest ship I’d ever seen docked in Olympia, a red and black freighter two blocks long and taller than half of downtown.
I’d read how Puget Sound was created by glaciers thousands of feet thick that advanced and retreated from Canada to Olympia again and again, dredging bays and carving passages over ten thousand years. I could almost picture it if I squinted, but it was much easier to visualize a tidal wave—maybe half the size of that two-hundred-footer that whacked Alaska—roaring down the Sound’s main trunk, squeezing through the Narrows, then rolling up Budd Inlet, a cliff of angry water shattering downtown windows and splashing up against the capitol with kelp and jellyfish flying everywhere.
We pedaled through Sylvester Park, then toward the Sound, the sidewalks uncommonly b
usy, the horny wind lifting skirts high enough to turn Phelps’s head. I looked away when I saw one of the three Dons pop out red-faced from the Eastside Tavern, and ducked when I saw my mother’s friend Alice on the same sidewalk with her brat kid I used to have to entertain. People were just out strolling, but it seemed like more was happening, or about to happen. Phelps kept flashing his maniac smile as if we were getting away with something.
Earthquake wreckage still cluttered taped-off sidewalks, but most of the damage involved old brick facings of buildings nobody wept over. I was enjoying the motion, not even thinking about where we were headed. If Phelps had turned around and pedaled home, I still would have considered his idea brilliant, but it was clear he had something else in mind.
We turned down a surprisingly noisy alley where music was bursting out of somewhere. I followed Phelps behind First American to a green Dumpster where we chained our bikes together. Then we strode, wobbly legged, thighs sizzling, toward the sound of crashing drums. As we got closer, he finally revealed that his brother had told him that The Sisterhood was the easiest club to sneak into. “The back-door bouncer is a head case,” he said, “and the place gets so loud and packed it’s a free-for-all.”
I said the obvious before we went any farther. “I can’t fake twenty-one. I don’t even look thirteen.”
“Nobody will even see you, Squid Boy. That’s your advantage.” He handed me a black hat with a Rolling Stones tongue on it, then instructed me to follow at his left heel like an obedient dog. I adjusted the hat to its smallest setting, then pulled it as low as it would go without blinding me.
Phelps waited for a cluster of loud older kids to make their move, then squeezed behind them once one of them got stopped by some thick-chested guy. I followed, and we somehow jackknifed past everyone through the far side of the door while the bouncer checked invisible hand stamps with a tiny flashlight. And suddenly there were too many people and too much noise in a place way too small to handle it.