by Jim Lynch
“I understand.” My voice shook, but I kept going. “Just wanted to tell you about this oarfish I saw.” It sounded ridiculous, but it was part of what I’d set out to tell her—the easy part—and I didn’t know how to change course once I was that nervous.
She stared at me through crow eyes in a bloated face, her lips chapped and parted. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Quit saying that! What the fuck did you do? I’m the one who hcked up! And I, for one, am sicker than hell of saying sorry. The world is overflowing with sorry people, Miles. Everyone’s so hckin’ sorry.” A huge housefly buzzed my forehead, bounced off a window, landed on a curtain rod, then flew off again, buzzing louder than ever. “So tell me about your hcking fish.”
Her eyes, I realized, had changed from green to black because there was nothing left but pupils.
By then I definitely wished I hadn’t come, and I could tell by the way my stomach was still a hot fist that I wasn’t even over my mother’s words yet.
Still, I told her every last thing I knew about oarfish, how the one I saw looked like a shimmer of light drifting behind Phelps, how it lifted its head in a way driftwood can’t, how I didn’t want to scare him worse than he already was, but how I saw what I saw, even if I thought I saw it again and it turned out to be a Japanese street sign.
I took a breath then told her how seeing an oarfish was almost as crazy as finding a giant squid, how oarfish grow to fifty feet and swim almost vertically and dive like dropped swords. Then I told her that what I’d read earlier that morning had planted a seed in my head that was blooming out of control. I took another breath, then shared the revelation that some Japanese believe that if you see an oarfish it means an earthquake is about to hit.
There was no sign she heard any of that. I might as well have told her about my imaginary friend or my revelation that ice melts in the sun. I continued anyway, like an actor who wants to finish a scene he’s already bombed. “Angie, I saw that oarfish—at least what I’m pretty sure might have been an oarfish—just five days before that earthquake hit right here!”
Still nothing. Her eyes were open, but unfocused. “I didn’t really know what I was taking,” she said in a raspy monotone. “I mean I knew, but I didn’t know it could do what it did. If something feels good I want more. I don’t understand people who don’t want too much of something that feels good. I’m told I have an addictive personality.”
I started talking because I was afraid of what she’d say next. “A lot of coastal sea life is like that,” I said. “Razor clams and certain kinds of fish get addicted to the high oxygen levels generated by the crashing waves.” Now I really hoped she wasn’t listening.
“I mean I knew I was mixing things I shouldn’t,” she whispered, “but I didn’t know it could kill me.”
I couldn’t have scripted a better cue for me to deliver the hard part of what I’d come to say, but nothing was anything like I expected. Even the air wasn’t right. I desperately wanted to open a window.
“For guys, an abortion is like getting a tooth yanked,” she suddenly said in that same sore-throated drone. “And it’s not even their tooth. Even if they do stick around, it’s still not their problem.”
She looked at me, waiting. My mind scrambled and came up with this: “Not all males are like that.” I sounded defensive. “Male sea horses carry the eggs around in kangaroolike pouches that work like placentas until they’re ready to hatch. And by then, the females are long gone.”
She let my blush burn holes through me.
“Do you hate yourself much of the time?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything, because no didn’t sound like what she wanted to hear and yes wouldn’t sound honest. I peeled dead skin off my nose.
“I hate myself pretty often.’’ She tilted her face back on the pillow, damming tears and attempting to smile at the same time. “Pretty fuckin’ often.”
I searched desperately for something helpful. “Meditating might push those bad thoughts aside,” I said. “At least that’s what Florence tells me—not that I’m any good at it.”
“Florence,” she said, as if it rhymed with ridiculous.
“Have you tried crossword puzzles?” I mumbled.
“Crossword puzzles?” She’d never looked at me with less affection.
“My mother says they make her feel good about herself.” I wished a trapdoor would open beneath my feet. “She tries to finish one before she goes to bed every night. Says it makes her feel good . . . about herself.”
It looked for an instant like she might laugh. Instead she silently cried, her face aging and collapsing. “I’he best thing you can do for me right now,” she said in an odd small voice, “is leave me alone.”
I was grateful that she didn’t look at me when she said that. That crazy fly beat its head against the window while I muttered something useless about hoping she felt better.
I floated down the curved staircase into that high-ceilinged living room where the judge and Angie’s brother gave me some false assurances about how she’d be better in a couple days, as if solving her problems were just a matter of picking the right sentences, the perfect tone.
I shuffled outside on stiff legs, my ridiculous words spinning through my feverish head. Oarfish? Sea horses? Razor clams? Crossword puzzles! No matter how I rehashed it, there was no getting around the fact that it was the most pathetic cheer-up effort of all time.
Frankie was smoking alongside the house looking like a sad Marlboro man in need of a hug. There wasn’t anything phony about him that day, and I was truly curious how his dog was doing. If I’d asked about Lizzy it would have made things easier for both of us, but I didn’t even give him a nod, a grin or a grunt, which made me feel even crappier. I couldn’t fake anything for anyone, especially not for Frankie Marx. I shuffled home wondering what I’d do with myself if Angie was never herself again. I guzzled milk straight from the carton until my stomach cooled.
“I’m sorry to hear you got a little smart-mouthed with your mother today,” Dad said. I was in such a blind funk I hadn’t noticed anyone else was home. I stuck the milk back in the fridge, then started for the door.
“Hold on, Miles.”
“What?”
“You have anything you’d like to say to your mother?”
I looked at him, then at her. “Angie asked me to say hi to you, Mom.”
My father cleared his throat and asked how she was.
“Fine,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” Mom added.
It was as close as we’d get to apologies. I tucked my lips against my teeth, then headed toward the door again.
“Miles,” my father said. “It’s already the fifth.”
I had one hand on the doorknob. “I haven’t grown, Dad.”
“I beg to differ. Look at him, Helen. Isn’t our boy sprouting?”
My mother hummed a neutral response and started fussing in the kitchen.
“Later, okay?” I said, afraid of what I’d do if he didn’t agree.
“Won’t take a second.”
I kicked off my shoes and stood like a prisoner against the broom closet. I didn’t bother to fluff my hair or sneak air beneath my heels. I just stood and glared, my insides wheeling, while they discussed whether the hardback was level.
“That’s it, Sean. Right there.”
“Well, he hasn’t shrunk, has he? I’m pretty sure of that. Come on, sailor. Stand tall.”
So I did, to get it done, then listened to him exhale as he darkened the same four-foot-eight-and-seven-sixteenths-inch line he’d darkened the prior month and the months before that.
“Don’t be discouraged,” he said, masking his disappointment. “Your spurt is coming.”
I unloaded. “Deng Xiaoping was five feet tall! Buckminster Fuller was five two! So was Napoleon! Beethoven was five four! So was Houdini! You don’t have to be a giant to be a wild success on this planet! And there’s no such thing as being smart for your size!”<
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His eyebrows twitched, as if tuning in to a radio station. “We’re not going to love you any more or less,” he said, “if you end up six one or five seven.”
Five seven. That was the shortest he’d allow himself to imagine me ending up—two heavenly inches taller than himself.
I knew I had to check on Florence, but my mind was overheating, so I slipped between the barbed wire behind the Stegner property and into the pasture.
I figured out how to approach cows after I read about their vision. They can see just about everything that isn’t directly behind them, but their depth perception stinks. They can’t tell if you’re five feet away or twenty feet away. That’s why they startle so easily, and if one startles they all jump, and then you’re in trouble. And that’s why cowboys move so slowly. They’re not just trying to look cool.
I moseyed toward the three largest cows in the low grassy depression closest to the bay. Whenever they glanced up, I stopped, letting them adjust to the sight of me before easing forward. One snorted finally, and dared me to keep coming. She snorted again, fiercely this time. Her head alone probably outweighed me. I plucked a tall blade of grass, stuck it between my teeth and waited. After a long pause, the others resumed eating, and she eventually joined them.
I stood among those cows for almost twenty minutes, wishing I could get a do-over on the entire day to see if I could walk through it without making everything worse. House lights flickered on around the bay. Sunrise to sunset now took just fourteen hours and forty-two minutes, and my summer was down to thirty-four days.
I slowed my breathing, then my thoughts, until I cooled enough to leave the cows and traverse the pasture toward Florence’s cabin where high tide hovered a half foot higher on her stilts than the tables had predicted.
CHAPTER 21
I FELT FOOLISH standing outside the tavern waiting for a lady I barely knew, but I’d slept so little the night before all I could think about was napping on the way to wherever she took me.
By the time I woke we were already there, but it was hard to see any of it from behind the long stucco wall that flanked the compound. When Carolyn had to speak into an intercom to get an iron gate opened, I wished I’d told someone, at least Florence, the truth about where I was headed that morning.
I was so flattered by the attention Carolyn and the others had given me on the flats that I hadn’t worried about the cult visit I’d agreed to. Plus, I didn’t know anything about this conversation we were going to have other than that it was something my mother wouldn’t have allowed, which appealed to me until we wheeled through that gate.
The main building looked more like a castle than a house, and the large barns beyond it were surrounded by dozens of tents and tarps. A pack of ladies older than my mother watched us roll up. The sky was scrubbed so clean I could see more detail in the moon than I could on most nights.
When we entered through a heavy door the music reminded me of the background sounds on those stargazing shows. Glass beads dangled from chandeliers, and the ceilings were twice as high as they needed to be. I saw huge dark paintings with little museum plaques beneath them. All the furniture was covered with the same maroon velvet. Carolyn whispered with three women who all had the same gray haircut and gray pantsuits and see-through necklaces. A stooped lady asked me if she could get me a Pepsi. I said sure, to be polite. I was still waking up.
Carolyn led me into another room and then through a passage with a fake waterfall and some smelly hyacinths into a curved auditorium with a half-bowl of sloped theater seating. People were straightening a stage and double-checking microphones, testing, testing, testing. Meanwhile, that same endless stargazing song played on. I saw a whole lot of whispering, eye-swiveling and those pleasant zombie smiles that the jellyfish rescuers had bombarded me with on the flats. The stooped lady handed me a Pepsi and a plastic cup. I set the cup aside and drank from the can. Phelps had to be bluffing. Nobody’s kisses felt like that first sip unless maybe they’d been rubbing their feet on new carpet.
Carolyn left me with the Pepsi lady while the auditorium filled with peculiar-looking grown-ups, most of them fancy-dressed women, some with funny accents that made it sound like they were performing while introducing themselves. One man with a hamster-sized mustache told me to keep up the “terrific work.” It took five of those miniconversations for me to realize a line had formed to greet me. It reminded me of the time I went to church with the Stegners when visitors were singled out by the preacher. Afterward, people shook my little hand as if I’d won some medal. This welcoming, though, was more like those boring wedding lines when the couple begins their marriage by smiling and shaking and making crappy small talk with a line of ridiculously happy friends of their parents. I didn’t like shaking hands, but once it started the hands kept coming—some big and callused, others soft and even smaller than mine, or worst of all, damp. One lady, with a mole so close to her mouth I wanted to get her a napkin, stared down at me over small round glasses and informed me that she’d been looking forward to hearing what I had to say ever since she saw me on television.
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
She laughed quietly, as if not to wake anyone. “I’ll wait, young man. I’ll wait.”
Suddenly Carolyn peeled me away to meet the lady with the biggest hair in the room. She had shapely eyebrows and skin so evenly tanned it was hard to tell it was makeup until I got up close. She looked like an older, fuller Fairy Godmother, and introduced herself as Delia Powers.
Her hand was so warm and soft it relaxed me. She asked if she could get me a Pepsi. I said sure, and someone next to Carolyn departed without saying a word.
“It’s an honor,” she said to me.
“Yes,” I said. I had no clue what honor we were discussing, but I was pretty sure that she was the leader who wanted to chat with me. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
She smiled, as if I were delightfully clever, and Carolyn showed me where it was.
The urinal was too high so I went inside the stall, sat down and couldn’t believe it. That sickening stargazing tune was even louder in there. I looked around for speakers, then saw a damp flier on the floor next to my feet that I strained to read in the weak light. It mentioned upcoming classes on enlightenment, and below a wet blurred splotch was a schedule of “special events.” I read down the list: A discussion of quantum physics with Dr. Sinclair Freeman on August 5, a lecture on numerology by Brenda Pryor on August 9 and a conversation with thirteen-year-old ecologist Miles O’Malley on August 16.
I read the same words three times.
It was way scarier than seeing myself in the newspaper or on television. This was something that was about to happen. And nobody even knew where I was! I pictured myself on the back of a milk carton and my stomach cramped.
When I came out, Carolyn asked if I was all right.
“You tricked me,” I said.
She pretended to be surprised. “How?”
“You know.”
She gave me a whole bunch of words next, including all sorts of crap about how informal and relaxing it would be, but I didn’t hear most of them. Once someone lies it’s hard to care what else they have to say.
“Take me home,” I demanded.
“If that’s what you want, Miles.” Her eyes shone. “I just wanted to share you with others who I know would love to listen to you as well.” She said a whole lot more, but I didn’t make her feel okay about any of it.
“I want to go home.”
When we returned to the big room it was almost as noisy as a school assembly, but there wasn’t another kid in there and nobody else wore shorts or a T-shirt.
Mrs. Powers smiled down at me from the stage. “Ready?”
Someone handed me a new Pepsi, and Carolyn explained that there’d been a misunderstanding. She looked so pale and embarrassed I thought she might collapse. “Miles wants to go home. He didn’t think there’d be an audience.”
Surprisingly, M
rs. Powers was fine with everything. “You’re the boss,” she told me, “but before you go, just do me the favor of talking to me long enough to finish your Pepsi. That’s all I was hoping for anyway, just to hear your thoughts on things most of us rarely think about. So, please come on up here and enjoy that nice cold Pepsi.”
She walked toward center stage, assuming I’d follow. Everyone started clapping until she turned on a microphone next to her chair, thanked everyone for coming, then asked them to continue conversing while she got acquainted with her guest.
I hesitantly slouched into the chair across from her as she confided that she knew what it was like to be thrust into the spotlight, seeing how she’d experienced her first visions while washing dishes in her tiny Seattle apartment.
Something about her sparkling eyes reminded me of the Jesus peak who’d visited our school during recess when I was a fifth-grader, but something about her words reminded me of Florence, which relaxed me. She asked where I lived and how I got so interested in sea life, and suddenly I was explaining Professor Kramer and Rachel Carson and even telling her about Phelps. She listened a whole lot like Florence too. When I paused, she covered my Pepsi-chilled hand with her hot one and said, “I’his is all I want to do, and it’s so much easier to turn on the microphones than it is for me to try to recount what you’ve said. But if you want to leave, that’s obviously up to you, Miles O’Malley. You’re the boss.”
I shrugged. She nodded at someone, the lighting shifted, her voice amplified and people quieted the way they do on television when a golfer is about to putt.
She asked me why I was so interested in marine life.
“Well, I live on Skookumchuck Bay,” I said, then paused. “I’ve never heard my voice so loud before.”
The audience snickered. “You won’t even notice it in a minute,” she promised. “Don’t pay it any mind.”
“Well, I live on Skookumchuck, like I said, and I read a ton. I’ve read every book in the library on marine biology and quite a few they don’t have, but I guess what got me going is when I learned that about eighty percent of life on earth is in the ocean, and that about half of the ocean is so deep that sunlight never even reaches it, and that it’s been dark down there from the very beginning. Plus, we still don’t know that much about it, really, which makes it a whole lot more exciting than land.” I was full of Pepsi and talking so fast I didn’t know where to stop or even pause. “And since I live on the tidal flats it’s hard to resist, because that’s where it all comes together. It sounds phony, but if you’re out there enough you eventually think about the beginning of life on land too, because it probably started with stuff like mussels and barnacles so there was something for the first land scavengers to eat. You know what I mean?”