by Jim Lynch
I coasted closer without meaning to and the bright tumult—about six feet across—went from looking like a glow-in-the-dark octopus to something that slowly made sense. I’d read how worms occasionally mate in surface swarms, but I never imagined so many, nor worms so large. They were still twenty feet away, but I was close enough to count at least ten, their bodies blue and green and almost two feet long. And that’s the last I saw of those horny phosphorescent worms because the thought of one of them wiggling into my kayak inspired a flurry of short, frantic strokes that pulled me toward the unbroken shoreline belonging to Evergreen.
The only hint that there was a college nearby was the nude beach that spilled out beneath a curtain of tall firs. I’d rarely seen more than bearded, tattooed men looking like they’d lost their bathrobes, but the occasional oddly shaped woman was enough to lure me back—even at night. I paddled close enough to make out crumpled jeans and a half-empty pint of something clear. I looked eagerly up the beach, my heart still galloping from the worms, hoping for a moonlit glimpse of naked women playfully drunk at four in the morning.
I glided as high as the tide would allow without risking running aground or slamming into boulders or stumps that had washed up or tumbled down the hillside, my eyes straining, until I saw something rocking along the water’s lacy edge.
My first hope, of course, was entangled lovers, but whatever it was looked too long and bulky, even for a large couple. The closer I got the more it resembled a harbor seal, yet it was still too long. So I assumed it was a sea lion, but I knew they weren’t fond of muddy South Sound, and it wasn’t that big. I beached the kayak, stretched my legs, then trudged toward whatever it was.
The lapping tide gave it the illusion of life, but the creature already stunk. It was at least nine feet long, and had the girth, but none of the grace, of a tuna. It had fins, but no scales. It wasn’t a seal, porpoise, dolphin, sea lion or baby whale. The more I examined it the more prehistoric it looked, its chocolate-brown skin scarred and lashed as if it had been sideswiped by tugboats or dragged across broken glass. It also had a peculiar arc of circular welts across its side that I realized, with a jolt, were about the same size as the smaller suckers on the arms of that giant squid.
I removed my bow line, wrapped it around the fish’s tail and tied the line to a stranded stump that I hoped wouldn’t float away at high tide. Then I paddled hard toward home, imagining Angie watching from above as I blazed diagonally across the black bay like a phosphorescent fuse, trylng so hard to impress that girl my arms were sore for days.
This time it was just Professor Kramer and a state biologist. At first, I feared I’d called in a nonevent, but the way the two men glanced at that fish and each other told me it wasn’t a trivial discovery to either of them.
The professor’s first priority, however, was to lecture me on the dangers of boating alone at night. He inspected my ragged life vest, clucked his tongue, then examined my kayak.
My father had made me stack it broadside across our beach for a whole month after a storm magically delivered it to me. That was almost a year ago, but I still wasn’t past the fear that at any moment someone might claim it.
“You go everywhere in this?” he asked. I could tell that to him it looked like fourteen feet of cheap, battered plastic.
“It doesn’t leak at all,” I said defensively. “And it’s never flipped. It’s perfect . . . for me.”
The professor mumbled something that had the word careful in it, then rejoined the biologist in examining the fish. I didn’t interrupt to rave about the phosphorescent worms or ask about the squid. I simply waited for a moment to point out the welts.
The biologist eyed the fish through thick glasses that magnified his astonishment, then repeatedly glanced at the professor, checking to see if they were seeing the same things. That’s the way those guys played it. They didn’t share their thoughts aloud until they finished measuring, classifying, sketching and muttering technical terms. Icosteus aenigmaticus, in this case, which meant soft-boned enigma. I suspected it was a bottom fish. What I didn’t know was that, like the giant squid, it was yet another secret from the abyss usually only found in the bellies of sperm whales. And yes, the men slowly, reluctantly acknowledged the obvious, that the grouped circular welts along its flanks sure looked to be of the same size and pattern as the giant squid’s suckers.
“Good God,” the professor groaned. “What in God’s name is this ragfish doing here?”
The startling thing about that question was he didn’t look at the state guy when he asked it. “Do you think they were fighting all the way down the Sound?” he asked. “Good God, Miles.”
I started tingling. His words put the giant squid in motion for me, wielding its tentacles like long sticky whips as it battled this strange bottom fish, the two of them tumbling from the deep into the Sound, dueling toward shallow water, confusion, exhaustion and death.
“Good God,” Professor Kramer said again. It was one thing for me to be startled, but the professor had seen and read everything, and he was at such a loss he was throwing God into the equation.
That was probably the moment when I started to secretly wonder whether I was being used as a messenger of sorts. Maybe Florence was right, I thought, about me being put here to do something big.
All that self-grandeur over finding a couple dead animals may sound childish and delusional, but you weren’t the thirteen-year-old standing out there on that freakishly warm phosphorescent night with those two overgrown scientists exchanging spooked and excited glances, their flashlights winking off that fish, making it look even more unworldly than it ever would in daylight, as if it were some relic the ocean had spat up to remind us how little we know.
Even the noisy half-dressed college lovers that stumbled upon the three of us couldn’t get their minds around that fish well enough to speak.
CHAPTER 10
A REPORTER CALLED the next day to ask if she could talk to me about the unusual fish that had been hauled away that morning to the same university lab where Professor Kramer and other scientists were still examining that dang squid.
When I opened the door, a tall angular lady with a camera strapped diagonally between her breasts looked down and asked me if Miles O’Malley was home. She couldn’t hide her delight when I told her she was looking at him. It fell out in a half-laugh.
“You were the one who found the ratfish?”
“Ragfish.”
“You also found that giant squid?”
“Uh-huh.”
I thought she was going to squeal. She had one of those faces that would be perfect to hang out with if you were deaf. She wanted to know where my parents were and seemed even more delighted when I told her they were at work. Her eyes ransacked the house. Then I took her outside and showed her my room. She kneeled to scribble Rachel Carson titles and the names of the marine books stacked next to my bed. From my angle, I could see down her unbuttoned shirt to her lacy bra and the upper bulge of mid-sized boobs. I felt obliged to look, knowing Phelps would have swallowed three jellyfish for the view. I showed her my aquarium and talked about my collection business. Her head bopped as if listening to her favorite song.
I assumed this all fascinated her the way it consumed me, that I’d found someone who—on impact—shared the obsession. After struggling to enlighten Phelps, I was thrilled to find a pretty lady who not only seemed to understand my excitement but even took notes on what I said. She urged me to continue yakking as we strolled toward the bay, then snapped pictures of me, her camera clicking madly as if she’d confused me with some jeans model.
“Act like you’re collecting stuff,” she directed from behind the lens.
I glanced around. “At high tide?”
“Don’t you collect stuff at high tide too?”
“Not really.”
“Well, just look like you are.”
Some kids are terrific pretenders. I wasn’t wired that way, but if you saw the photo you know I
squatted and picked up your basic heart cockle shell and puzzled over it as if it were a riddle.
“What’s that, Miles?” she asked, while the clicking continued.
A clam shell,” I said.
“Really? What kind of clam?”
She squatted with the camera to her face and her blouse sagging open. I resisted looking again and glanced nervously about to make sure there wasn’t someone kneeling behind me so that I’d trip onto my back at the slightest tap to my chest. Phelps, it won’t surprise you, loved that gag. But there was nobody out there but us. And as my eyes swept across the bay she caught the image that landed in the newspaper of me holding that stupid cockle, gazing out on the water as if I were about to spot another ragfish, giant squid or perhaps a few dozen blue whales.
The truth is I thought all this would roll into a paragraph deep inside the newspaper somewhere, but then she abruptly demanded Professor Kramer’s and my parents’ work numbers. She also informed me that she intended to talk to Judge Stegner and even Phelps.
“What for?” The incoming current was delivering a kelp or trash wad behind her.
She frowned impatiently. “If I’m gonna write a story about you, I need to talk to people who know you, right?”
“I thought the story was about the ragfish.”
She laughed. This lady showed every card. “It’s just a little story about the boy who keeps finding cool stuff in the Sound.”
“What kind of a story?”
“A good one. A good little one.”
I nodded, but I was confused. She put her camera away and glanced toward her car.
“The next good low is at eleven-eighteen tomorrow,” I said desperately, “if you want me to show you around.” I felt like I was losing a friend.
“I’d love to,” she said, though her face told me that wasn’t close to true. “But I doubt I’ll be able to make that.” She eyed her tiny wristwatch. “Are you considered small for your age, Miles?”
“Are you considered rude for yours?” It just popped out.
She stepped back as if I’d fired a spitball at her forehead, then laughed a one-note laugh, a comic-strip ha! “Touche,” she said.
Suddenly she was thanking me and pumping my hand in her long hot fingers as if I’d agreed to weed her garden for free.
She then ran-walked to her tiny car and drove off, her tires spitting gravel.
I waded to my hips to see what had drifted in behind her. Tiny barnacles had claimed almost every inch of it so it wasn’t until I twirled it around that I realized it was a hockey glove.
A baseball glove would have made a lot more sense. I didn’t know anyone who played hockey. Plus, the glove was stiff as wood and amazingly heavy. I studied it for a long while, wondering if it meant something.
My mother’s hands shook as she read the paper.
Sometimes her pulse alone could do that, shaking her bones with each beat. My father never shook, but he usually stunk. If it wasn’t Old Spice it was Mennen’s or Scope. And if it wasn’t those it was BO, tuna breath, Crown Royal or a mixture of the above. This morning his breath smelled like an aquarium that hadn’t been cleaned in a month. He was reading over Mom’s shoulder, telling her to wait, wait, wait before she turned the page.
I’d already read the story twice, once at the mailbox and once on the way back to the house. That newspaper lady cast me as the local Tom Sawyer who spent his summers finding beach treasures with his buddy Huck Phelps. Professor Kramer called me a gifted child with an “insatiable interest in marine life” and called the squid and the ragfish two of South Sound’s biggest finds ever. Then Judge Stegner called me the most knowledgeable and reliable youngster he’d ever hired to oversee his oyster farm. And my loyal pal Phelps had this to say about me: “He’s a freak. He’s a decent enough guy, but he’s a total freak when it comes to sea life.”
There also were things I said, or that the lady claimed I said, that left me thirsty and dizzy, imagining the little article yellowing over time, lining people’s drawers like some cold historical document. I pictured all that before reluctantly handing the paper to my mother, feeling the way you feel when you have too many blankets on your bed and your fever turns from cold to hot. I knew bad things would come of that story, but on that morning I couldn’t get past the opening line. It was such a daring lie it left me mute.
“The beach talks to Miles O’Malley.”
I didn’t tell her that! I spoke to her for almost two hours and never said anything about any beach saying boo to me! Where’d she get that? Kids already thought of me as the science dork. I needed them to think I conversed with sand?
I waited for my parents to question me about it, to ask whether I was psycho, but they somehow read right over it. What pissed Mom off was the description of our house as “a modest old cabin that looks like it’s about to collapse into the bay.”
“She’s saying we’re poor, Sean!”
“Where does she say that?” Dad’s eyes were bloodshot. It took him forever to read the sentence. Maybe he read it a few times. “Sounds “bout right,” he said, then returned to where he was in the story until Mom leaned away from his breath again and tried to rile him by repeating the line that said, “Miles’s father, Sean O’Malley, works at the brewery.” “She doesn’t mention that you’re a shift manager, does she?”
My father grunted, then shrugged. When people asked him what he did, he’d say he made beer, leaving my mother to boast about the twenty-six people beneath him. He plodded to the end of the story and looked at me, not with pride or shame, but wonder. “You got all these books beside your bed, and you’ve read most of them at least twice?”
He kept saying, wow, which didn’t help me gauge much until the phone chirped repeatedly, and they heard from four thrilled friends. Suddenly my mother was poaching eggs the way I liked them and calling me “our boy genius.” I liked the our part. How finding some ugly fish could help keep my parents together didn’t make sense, but I hadn’t seen my mother so happy since Judge Stegner told her she was one of the most informed citizens he knew. My father, though, looked as if he’d bonked his head. He tailed me into the garage for the first time in months and stared at my writhing, half-full aquarium, his bulging eyes lingering on that orange nudibranch.
After my folks left for work the next wave of calls hit. Reporters for the Tacoma News Tribune, the Seattle Times and three other newspapers tried to coax me into inviting them out to just talk. I had nothing to say. I called that reporter from the Olympian who’d left her little card on our table. She answered before it completed one full ring.
“This is Miles.”
“Front-page Miles? What’s up?”
“I never said the beach talks to me.”
She laughed a short ha! “I said that. You didn’t say that. That was my way, you know, of getting across how well you understand the beach.”
“Makes me sound crazy. I mean I hear the clams squirt, which tells me maybe they’re nervous, and I hear the tide drain through gravel, which tells me it’s going out instead of sloshing in, and there’s the sound of crabs skittering and barnacles clicking their shells shut, but the beach isn’t saying, ‘Hey Mies, what’s hap-penin’?’”
She laughed another hurried ha! as if there were no time for full laughs anymore. “It makes you sound smart, not crazy. Everyone who reads newspapers knows that only the sentences I put quote marks around are things people actually said. The rest is what I’m saying, Miles, based on what I observed.”
She was obviously trying to weasel out of it, but I didn’t feel right trying to make her feel guilty either. Some people won’t admit they screwed up no matter how many chances you give them. “Low tide is in two hours,” I said, “if you really want to see what’s out there.”
“What?” She sounded like a different person. “Sorry. Gotta go. Call ya later.”
She didn’t call back, of course, until her cutesy fable about little Mies O’Malley took a more dramatic turn.
“S o WHAT’S THE beach saying to you right now?” Phelps asked, straight-faced as a priest.
“Shut up.” I’d been blushing for hours. “You’re the freak. You’re a tit freak. You know that?”
“Who’s denying that? You’re upset about me telling that lady you’re freak? That’s why you’re all Mr. Moody? You should be proud of being a freak, Miles. Look at the attention it’s getting ya.”
“Oh yeah. It’s terrific.”
“Shhhh!” Phelps said. “I think the beach just said something. Shhh.”
“Quit it.”
“Shush. There . . . It said it again.” His voice lowered and he did a convincing job of not moving his lips: “’I can’t wait for the goddamn motherfucking tide to come back in.”’
He laughed until he lost his balance and his breath, which made him look so pathetic I almost joined him.
We were on Chatham Cove again, with a minus-two to ourselves, the sun frying me the way July did even when it was cloudy. Phelps had no such problems, being, as he put it, tall, dark and irresistible. Whenever I’d start to think I was actually tanning he’d stick his mahogany arm alongside mine and whistle—further proof I’d be chickless long h e r he scored.
When we broke for lunch, I worried about Florence. I’d made her lunch six of the past eight days. Just tuna sandwiches and grapes, but from what I could tell if I didn’t make it, she went without it. I thought of her waiting in her chair for me, and it struck me that in the span of a week I’d gone from feeling proud when I made her lunch to feeling guilty when I didn’t.
Phelps interrupted my guilt to tell me that he’d brought another educational treat for me. I braced for another Godfather reading that would make me feel like a hopeless dwarf, but this time it was a magazine called Variations that was no bigger than a TV Guide. The woman on the cover showed me her tongue and breasts.