The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

  The state lady looked astonished, glanced at Florence, to see if she’d challenge me, then pulled a pen from nowhere and wrote on a small pink pad.

  Florence blinked slowly at me and swung her heavy nose a quarter inch from side to side.

  After Julie Winslow finally left, I told Florence it was good that the state lady saw that she wasn’t completely alone. I don’t know if she heard me. She was as distracted as I’d seen her, half-lidded and alone with her thoughts or wherever she’d gone although her body remained a couple feet from mine.

  I ran home, made her a tuna sandwich and ran back with it. Then I shook out her pills and left the vials open beside her next to a coffee mug half full of water. (I didn’t give her water glasses anymore. She needed handles.) I told her again that she did pretty well with the state lady, but she wasn’t listening.

  Her dentures stuck in the sandwich on her first bite, forcing her to pull the bite out of her mouth and clumsily tap her teeth back into place as my stomach rolled. She looked up, big-eyed, as if something just occurred to her. “I feel so grateful.”

  “It’s just tuna,” I said.

  She laughed and everything felt normal again, so I told her more about how my conversation with the cult made me feel terrific and phony at the same time.

  She listened intensely, and when I was done, said, “I just realized something.”

  I waited.

  “You were the love of my life,” she said.

  It wasn’t just the words that startled me, it was the tense. She talked for a while in that same tense, summing up her life. I let her go on, not out of respect, but because, like I said earlier, I was never any good at pretending. Finally, her eyes focused and she asked me to please finish stacking her books.

  She chatted on in an untroubled voice about a dream she’d recently had in which her grandmother was a young woman again riding a red bicycle and waving at her. It was obviously a phony dream she invented to make herself appear distracted, to make me feel comfortable finding and setting aside her tiny Kama Sutra guide while I restacked the others.

  After I finished, she sighed and asked me to please help her to the bathroom. Once I got her lined up, I left her to lower her pants and do her thing, but waited around just in case. After a long silence during which I worried she’d fallen asleep, she called for help. I came in, held my breath, braced my feet against the toes of her shoes, pulled her up by her bony wrists, then reached behind her and flushed. She apologized cheerfilly and kidded herself for being way too old to let someone like Julie Winslow rattle her, as if getting on and off the toilet were a matter of confidence.

  Before I left, she asked me to bring her one of the blue pills from the closet. “Sleep will give me strength,” she said, but didn’t sound convincing.

  Glancing back through her cabin window, I saw her trying to shield her eyes from the late sun, or possibly from me, her hand bouncing lightly, trying to land, as if it were loose at the wrist and about to wobble off.

  CHAPTER 23

  T HREE OF US huddled eagerly above a speakerphone in the tidy den belonging to the parents of Phelps’s obnoxious neighbor Blake “Blister” Cunningham. As soon as this girl named Ruby got on the line, Phelps took over. He introduced himself, told her two of his friends were listening in, then said, “Would you please fake an orgasm?”

  Ruby giggled through the speaker, then started panting lightly, as if climbing steps. That was enough to make us blush, although she still sounded pretty phony to me until she started whispering, “Oh yeahhhhhhhh,” before yipping like a puppy and mewing like a hungry kitten. Then came a series of jolting breaths as if she’d touched something hot, followed by long, supersatisfied noises that came from somewhere below her throat, as if she were lowering herself into a hot bath or had just tasted the world’s best soup.

  Suddenly there was nothing funny about it at all, and we dodged each other’s eyes until Phelps leaned toward the speakerphone and said, “We give up. Thanks. That was pretty convincing.”

  Her laugh sounded almost manly for some reason. Then she told us she hadn’t finished yet.

  “We get the idea,” Phelps said. “Great work. Really. Best I’ve heard in a while.”

  The phone call, of course, was Phelps’s brainstorm after he heard Blister’s folks had flown to Reno for the weekend. He talked Blister into it by convincing him there was no way the 900 number on the ad—which featured some remarkably limber Asian girl—would stand out on a phone bill. And if in the long shot it did, Blister could say he’d ordered vintage baseball cards like the ones Phelps swore he’d ordered on a similar 900 number earlier in the summer. Once Phelps pointed out again that the call would cost just $2.99, Blister agreed his parents wouldn’t notice.

  Blister was a wrestler, not a genius. He loved to ask if you wanted to learn the fireman’s carry. Then he’d grab your right bicep, drop to a knee, swing a forearm under your balls, roll backward and fling you onto your back. It was Phelps who first observed that Blake Cunningham was as annoying as a blister.

  After that phony orgasm, Phelps pointed to me, and said, “Ma’am, my good friend Squid Boy here would like to ask you some technique questions.”

  “Hello there,” I said timidly.

  She giggled. “Why do they call you Squid Boy?”

  “Because I have ten arms and two hearts.” That killed Phelps to the point he knocked his hip into the heavy wooden desk and started cussing.

  “Okay,” Ruby said. “Let’s hear the questions.”

  “When we’re kissing,” I asked, “when exactly should we get the tongue involved?”

  “For real?” she asked.

  Phelps nodded approval of the question.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She giggled. “Well, that all depends.”

  Phelps looked at me, agitated. “Depends on what?” he asked.

  “On how aroused I am and how aggressive your tongue is.”

  Phelps looked disappointed.

  “What about breasts?” I asked. “When should they be squeezed and how hard?”

  Phelps nodded again.

  “Depends on the time of the month,” she said. “Sometimes even a light touch is too much.” Her voice turned breathy. “Sometimes you can almost bite them.”

  “What time of the month can you bite tits?” Blister asked. “The last week of the month or what?”

  She laughed herself into a cough.

  “’Just so you know,” Phelps said, “the Einstein who asked you that question has just one eyebrow.”

  Until then I hadn’t noticed Blister’s left eyebrow was nothing more than a gray smear, the result, I learned, of him getting so excited lighting a joint he’d stolen from his sister that he hadn’t noticed his eyebrow burning until it started to stink.

  Phelps waved his hand to silence Blister’s noisy counterattack, then urged me to ask more questions.

  “How much moaning should the guy do?’’ I asked.

  She laughed her manly laugh. “As much as he wants.”

  “What about talking while you’re doing it?” Phelps asked. “Is that expected?”

  “You mean like dirty talk or chitchat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which one?”

  “Both.”

  “Not expected.”

  That was a relief to all of us.

  I asked more questions, including how best to remove a bra, until Phelps got bored and asked: “Do you ever call the penis a ‘wand of light’? And what can you tell us about your fountain of nectar?”

  “What are you even talking about?” She sounded annoyed.

  Phelps stopped laughing long enough to say, “Just tell us how important it is that your boyfriend knows his way around your G-spot.”

  Ruby sighed, then said, “You guys aren’t eighteen, are ya?”

  I was afraid she was about to hang up on us, so I asked, “What’s your favorite Kama Sutra position?”

  “Come again?”

  I
pulled Florence’s little picture book out and flipped through pages. “Do you like the “crab’s position’?”

  The boys crowded me, demanding to know where I’d come up with the guide, struggling to glimpse the drawing that showed some bored woman with her feet on her belly and her bored boyfriend inserting himself.

  I’d committed almost every position to memory, but it was hard to pick which ones to ask about. To be honest, most of them didn’t look that fun. I mean these people were all dressed up in these silly hats and still looked as bored as seventh-graders during the second hour of social studies, the only difference being they were mostly naked and stuck together like dogs.

  When she didn’t answer, I asked, “What about ‘the embrace of thighs’? You like that one?”

  Her lips smacked twice and she exhaled, as if she’d lit a cigarette. “You boys know this phone call is two ninety-nine a minute, right?”

  Blister flashed as red as a stoplight. “It’s two ninety-nine for the whole call,” he said unconvincingly.

  “A minute,” she said. “’It’s two ninety-nine a minute.”

  That was the last we heard of Ruby before Blister hung up and glanced wildly at the loud antique wall clock and slowly figured out we’d been talking for at least fourteen minutes.

  Then he shouted at Phelps who shouted right back that he’d read the ad the exact same way. Blister found a tiny solar-powered calculator and twice screwed up punching in numbers with his thick fingers before letting thirteen hcks and shits fly after announcing that the call was gonna cost his parents $41.86!

  Phelps shrugged and said, “Ruby didn’t really sound all that Asian, did she?”

  “I am in such deep shit!” Blister shouted.

  “Personally,” Phelps soothed, “I’d be more worried about explaining how you lost an eyebrow.”

  Blister chased him around the couch and outside before tackling him near the gazebo and twisting him into a painful double-arm bar that had Phelps laughing and screaming for help all the way onto his back.

  I took the long way home so I could get a look at whatever the highest tide of the week had stranded.

  Every week left behind more shells, bones, seaweed and litter. If the weight of the bay’s tidal debris had been charted weekly that summer the line would have sloped relentlessly upward from June through August.

  It wasn’t my imagination.

  I was accustomed to beach buildups after winter storms dragged bushes and trees into the bay. This was different. There hadn’t been any big blows since April, so most of the tidal slop was broken-down sea life.

  I found a four-foot-long tangle of driftwood, barnacles, crab backs and oyster shells lassoed together with mussel threads. And I saw an amazingly intact large sculpin skeleton, as if whatever ate it had vowed to preserve its architecture. I poked a stick into the bulge of seaweed next to it, expecting to find a dead salmon or gull. But it didn’t smell and it was too firm for flesh. I parted the seaweed and picked up yet another barnacled hockey glove.

  I studied it quickly to make sure it wasn’t the same one I’d stuck in the garage, then glanced around to see if anyone was messing with me. One strange hockey glove was interesting. Two was a bona fide mystery.

  But now that I didn’t feel comfortable calling Professor Kramer about big stuff like oarfish sightings, I definitely couldn’t call him about an invasion of hockey gloves.

  I crossed the Heron bridge and hopped log to log past the sticker bushes, seeing how far I could go without touching sand or water, until I smelled that the blackberries had finally sweetened. After gorging on them, I dropped the hockey glove next to its dried twin in the garage and climbed my stairs to get out of my wet sneakers. I’d almost pulled off the second soggy tube sock before I saw the fancy M on the front of the envelope on my pillow.

  The card was a close-up of red sea stars and green anemones. Inside were these words in green ink: “Sorry for being so rude the other day. Sometimes not even you can make me feel better or act right.” Below that was a stylish heart next to the letter A.

  I studied the handwriting. It was as if she’d invented her own slightly offbeat alphabet for me. Part of it, I knew, was that she was left-handed, but it also just made sense that Angie Stegner’s letters wouldn’t look like everybody else’s. I read and reread those twenty words (not counting the A or the heart), searching for meaning or emphasis I’d missed. The heart was code for love, right? I mean, she wasn’t encouraging me to eat healthy and it wasn’t Valentine’s Day.

  When I skipped inside, my parents were sitting formally across from each other, eating silver salmon covered in that gross gray fat that oozes out of them sometimes. Their wooden postures told me they hadn’t spoken in a while, and my father didn’t even look up to greet me. He was so absorbed in the teamwork between his knife and fork it was like watching someone stitch a wound.

  “Grab yourself a plate,” Mom said. “We couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Lost track of time.”

  Nothing else was said while I scraped fat off my fillet and choked down a few bites.

  “Miles, we need to discuss something,” Mom said.

  Her firm tone and my father’s bloodless expression suddenly made sense. Blister’s parents had already found out about the sex call somehow and had already called to complain!

  “Yeah?” I said warily.

  “I’m going to stay with your aunt Janet in Seattle.”

  “For the night?”

  “For a while.”

  I felt dizzy and slid my chair back from the table. “Is this a”

  “No,” they said simultaneously, cutting me off. Dad piled on a few extra no, no, nos and a not at all. Then Mom said, “We’re just taking a break, Miles.”

  “From what?” I asked.

  “Don’t make this difficult,” she scolded. “It’s best for everyone, including you.”

  They watched me swallow. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  They hesitated. “It’s not about you,” Dad said. “Not at all.”

  “But Mom just said . . .“ Then I stopped and stared at a place between them until I could speak without stuttering or yelling. “I ate too many blackberries. I’ll eat something later.”

  “Are you excusing yourself, Miles?” Mom asked.

  “For God’s sake,” Dad hissed, “let him go.”

  They stared at me as if I were staggering too close to a flame, but the truth was I’d already been dealing with what they thought I was facing for the first time. And once I stepped outside, it surprised me how quickly my anger turned to unexpected relieE I wouldn’t have to leave the bay, at least not yet.

  Later that night, I heated a can of split-pea-with-ham for Florence and, after watching her spill twice, fed it to her one spoonful at a time without looking away until she sneezed out her dentures.

  CHAPTER 24

  T HE STORY THAT changed everything came out the next Sunday, with the first heart-stopper being the photo of me with a golden halo around my head. Another one showed me sitting in the back of Carolyn’s car, leaving the cult compound, looking thoughtful, the way Kennedy looked in those motorcade photos before someone shot him in the head.

  I knew another story was coming because that lanky, always-rushed Olympian reporter had come out to chat again. You’d think I would have been suspicious, but I was in love with words that day. I took her out to Chatham on a decent low and explained everything until her notebook was full and she had to go. See, I figured I was a harmless piece of her big story about Mrs. Powers. Of course, that’s not the way it unfolded.

  The article included plenty of what I told the cult and listed off my marine “discoveries”—including the invasive crabs and seaweed—which she called the sole reason for an upcoming examination of sea life in South Sound bays. She even recounted the details about me reviving a drowning Lab and saving Phelps with a makeshift snorkel. Then she had some cult member calling me a “chid prophet�
� and Mrs. Powers herself saying, “God is in him.” (The article didn’t mention that the Eleusinians said that sort of thing all the time, that they believed God is in everyone.) Then there was Judge Stegner, of course, calling me the next Cousteau. Even Florence picked up the phone: “Miles has one of the brightest yellow auras I’ve seen,” she’d said, adding that she wouldn’t trust any spiritual leader who lacked a yellow aura.

  And I thought “the beach talks to Miles O’Malley” was embarrassing.

  Near the end of the article, for no reason at all, she described me strolling “pensively” on the beach, pointing things out and wishing aloud that “everyone” would spend a half hour on the flats at low tide—ten minutes listening, ten minutes looking, ten minutes touching. I said it, sure, but I came off like one of those schmaltzy naturalists I couldn’t read more than three pages of without barfing. Yet sure enough, there I was, insisting that such an exercise should be a “minimum requirement” for anyone living near salt water. Maybe that’s just how ridiculous you sound if you keep talking and someone is taking notes and you want to say something that makes them write faster. She also had me saying this: “If you don’t feel any connection to the ocean, then ask yourselfwhy your tears, blood and saliva contain about the same percentage of salt.” The article ended on the craziest note possible, with one Eleusinian describing me finding that Japanese street sign, and another one swearing that the gout in her left ankle subsided after wading with me.

  The calls came so steadily that morning my father finally ordered me to stop answering “the damn thing” because he was having one “helluva” time getting through the story with so many “goddamn” interruptions. His breath smelled like charcoal-lighting fluid, and he kept guzzling pints of water and farting as he read and reread the same paragraphs.

  He’d talked to the reporter too, but he also hadn’t sensed where she was headed, even though he apparently told her that ever since I was about seven he’d thought of me as an adult trapped in a child’s body. By the age of ten, he said, my vocabulary surpassed his.