Ariel

by Steven R. Boyett

  “We’ll do it,” Ariel insisted.

  “How come you’re Miss Mystery all of a sudden?” I asked. “You got an antigravity device tucked away somewhere?”

  Shaughnessy interrupted and suggested I check out the interior of the crane—perhaps there was some kind of release lever. I climbed down.

  The crane’s mechanisms wouldn’t work. Big surprise there. Well—“If it doesn’t fit, use a bigger hammer.”

  I found a ballpeen hammer and lugged it back from the deserted boatyard. I had to stand in an awkward position with one leg braced against the side of the crane in order to swing it against the gear holding the winch in place. I was relying on the combination of six years of salt air plus no lubrication or maintenance. Sure, the weight of Lady Woof was locking those gear teeth in place—but nothing supported the gear if I smashed it from the side.

  I pulled back the hammer and swung. The solid steel impact made me blink involuntarily. I swung again, and again, the gear gonging in belltower rhythm.

  On about the tenth swing there came a faint, sustained squeaking which rapidly grew to a nerve-rending metallic shriek. I swung once more and the small portion of the gear that still bit into the winch gave way before I hit it. The winch began turning quickly. I was tugged toward it as it caught the hammer and ate it; I let go quickly. Steel cable began spilling from the winch. I ducked, rolled, and got the hell out of there.

  Next thing I knew, my back was soaked with cool water. There was the long, wet hiss of a huge splash. I turned around.

  Bobbing and rocking slowly, the Lady Woof settled herself into the waters of Chesapeake Bay.

  Sixteen

  Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle! Here in thy harbors for a while We lower our sails; a while we rest From the unending, endless quest.

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Dedication to G.W.G.”

  Shaughnessy applauded. Ariel cheered. I grinned, bowed, and clambered aboard the boat. Not that I’d be able to tell if there was any hull damage from the fall, but it wouldn’t hurt to look. Everything seemed all right, though.

  Aboard were two large coils of rope. Ariel made me take a third from another boat and Shaughnessy helped me carry it to the Lady. I didn’t ask what they were for, though I had my suspicions.

  The breeze cooled as night fell, and we brought our gear aboard. Shaughnessy tied us securely to the dock for the night. I went to the cabin and fell upon the sofabed. Shaughnessy and Ariel could do what the hell they wanted—I was going to sleep.

  *

  I awoke to gurgling noises and Ariel’s insistent prodding. “Come on, get up,” she urged. “The tide’s going out.” I was disoriented: the sea sounds and faint rocking motion were unfamiliar. My hand went automatically for Fred. I clasped air and remembered that I had left it by the backpack on deck the night before.

  “Pete,” said Ariel again. She had to crane her head in the cabin to keep from hitting the ceiling with her horn. Only her head and neck were in the little room; her body wouldn’t fit through the door. “Wind and tide are in our favor,” she continued. “We’ve got to put to sea.”

  “I don’ wanna go to school,” I muttered to her blurry image, and stepped past her and onto the deck. Early morning yellows lanced my eyes.

  “Good morning,” said Shaughnessy cheerfully. She sat against the bulkhead, wearing a yellow tanktop and cut-off jeans. “I found these in the cabin,” she explained to my raised eyebrow. “There were a few other things, but they didn’t fit.”

  Shaughnessy and I lowered the Lady’s dinghy into the water—which sounds pretty suggestive, I admit—and I settled myself slowly into the little rowboat, keeping my weight in the center, picked up the oars, and held them over my head threateningly. “Where’s me faithful cutlass Fred?” I bellowed. “Tie the scurvy dog to the yardarm! Hoist the Jolly Roger! Arrrh!”

  “Oh, Captain,” called Ariel, “don’t you think we’d better cast off first?”

  “You have in fact anticipated my next command—cast off!”

  Shaughnessy pushed us off and the Lady moved slowly from the dock. Shaughnessy scrambled aboard.

  We maneuvered the Lady by kedging. Once we had her away from the dock and able to head out to open sea, we took one coil of rope and tied it to a bow cleat, passing the end through the ring in the stern of the dinghy. I lowered myself back into the little rowboat, positioned myself, and began rowing. After twenty seconds the Lady began to move toward me, and I began rowing away until the connecting rope went taut. Shaughnessy waved encouragingly. I gritted my teeth and began to put some muscle into it. Towing a forty-foot boat with oars and a dinghy isn’t impossible.

  Being possible doesn’t make it easy. I felt every ounce of her twenty thousand pounds on the blades of the oars as I strained to keep us at our snail’s pace. Humphrey Bogart and the African Queen. I was beginning to appreciate why the boat was named Lady Woof.

  Ariel stood on the bow to provide moral support. Ah, she was a sight! Standing nobly behind the rail, horn catching the light, wind rippling her mane, land so very gradually receding behind her.

  Around ten-thirty I shipped oars and forced my hands to unclench. They felt as if they were burning off. I stuck them in the cool water and screamed. Burning salt water dripped from my hands and ran down my forearms. The Lady was beside me, her momentum having carried her a little farther. I grabbed her rail and stifled a cry: the metal was searing cold-hot, as if I’d grabbed dry ice. I straddled the rail, swung my other leg over, and fell on my ass. I lay back until I was looking at the sky, lacking the strength to get up, right forearm shielding my eyes from the sun. An unmistakably-shaped blot appeared above me and I smiled tiredly at Ariel. “Well, so far so good. What now, Skipper?”

  *

  The three lengths of thick, strong hemp sank lazily into the water and began to lag behind Lady Woof. Ariel had had me tie the three coils of rope into huge nooses, tie their other ends to the two T-shaped metal cleats in front, one rope on the left and two on the right, and toss them overboard. We’d been drifting out to sea for an hour but were hardly making progress. We were still well within sight of land, so I was at least sure of our direction. The sun was almost straight overhead. I watched the three ropes slanting beneath the Lady. “Well,” I said, leaning back to prop myself up on one elbow, the other hand holding onto a bright metal cleat, “now we just wait for three good Samaritan killer whales to wander into the nooses and pull us merrily on our way, right?” I squinted at Ariel. She’d spent most of the last hour deep in thought, focusing her concentration. This was the only time I’d interrupted her; watching the three ropes trail languidly along made my curiosity itch. “Actually,” she said, “I’m hoping for humpbacks. But killer whales would do.”

  I sat up.

  Ariel rose unsteadily, trying to compensate for the boat’s hardly noticeable pitching. She had a keen sense of balance but seemed quite out of her element at sea. She stepped cautiously to her left and looked out over the rail. “I need to get closer to the water.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “I need to touch it.”

  “Oh. Of course.” I stood. “Whatever you say, Cap’n Skipper Ma’am. How do you propose to do that? Jump overboard? Can you swim? Could you get back on board? Or would you rather I leaned the whole boat a little—my arm muscles ought to be capable of that by now.”

  She glanced back at me. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty. It won’t work.”

  “What are we doing?” asked Shaughnessy. She’d snatched the Coppertone from my backpack and was greasing herself liberally.

  I shrugged. “‘Ours is not to reason why … .’”

  “Quiet,” snapped Ariel. She craned her powerful neck forward to look at the water and dipped her horn. Flash: it caught sunlight. Shaughnessy squinted just before I did. Ariel was thoughtful a minute. I tried to picture her pursing her lips. “Get a bucket and some rope,” she ordered.

  “Aye-aye, sarr.” I fetched a bucket from the cabin and a le
ngth of line from my backpack. She ordered me to tie the line to the bucket, lower it into the water, and bring it up full. I complied and held the bucket of seawater before her. “Set it down,” she said. Her eyes narrowed in concentration, and she lowered her head until the first six inches of her horn were immersed in the bucket.

  Landward was a flock of seagulls, their greedy cries reaching us like the sound of a hundred rusty gates swinging in the distance.

  A muscle rippled in Ariel’s neck. It spread to her shoulder like a small wake in a silken pond. She closed her eyes tighter and let out a long, silvery breath. She raised her head. “There,” she said. A few drops of salt water dripped from her horn; a few more traced an incomplete spiral down its length.

  I looked into the bucket. It still looked like seawater to me. “‘There’ what?”

  “That ought to do it. Just toss it overboard.”

  I eyed her doubtfully, but picked up the bucket and emptied it over the side.

  The gulls stopped crying. For a few seconds everything—the sea, the wind, the birds—was silent and still. Then it passed and the gulls resumed their searching, hungry calls.

  Ariel walked gingerly back to the center of the deck and lowered herself to it, front legs and bottom-most rear leg tucked delicately. A reddish-gold glimmer of sunlight traced the graceful length of her right hind leg, becoming reflected magma at the hoof. “Well,” she said in answer to our unspoken but obvious next question, “now we wait.”

  “For humpback whales.” Shaughnessy was skeptical.

  Ariel regarded her blankly. “We’ll see when they get here.”

  I sat on deck with my back against the curving bulkhead. “Pass the Coppertone,” I said. Shaughnessy tossed me the brown plastic bottle. Tan, Don’t Burn! Right. I squeezed a healthy glop onto my left hand, rubbed both hands together, and spread the stuff over my face. It felt cool at least. Ten minutes later Shaughnessy shielded her eyes from the sun and looked out on the water. “Something’s coming,” she announced. “No, correct that—a bunch of somethings.”

  Ariel got up carefully. I shaded my eyes and squinted in the direction Shaughnessy was looking. Bright flashes, a half-dozen, now a dozen, now nine, leaping in silver arcs from the water. “Dolphins!” I grinned at Ariel. “Dolphins!”

  “Hmph. The call was for whales, but this might do.”

  They jumped from the water in well-timed groups, performing intricate maneuvers that made the best Olympic-level divers look palsied. Shaughnessy grinned, too, looking all of eight years old. Then they were by the Lady and we could hear the razzing noise of their playful chatter. They moved like shadows through the water, gliding gray torpedo shapes that left almost no wake. One nudged a trailing rope playfully with its snout. Ariel watched it a few seconds, then—I found out later—called to it. The call was ultrasonic, above the normal human hearing range. Though she stood in the center of the boat, she was large, and it must have seen her. “Seen” is the wrong word; I later discovered a dolphin has terrible eyesight. More correctly, it perceived her with its echolocational ability—a sense no human being can quite imagine, as it is alien to our physiology. It must have signaled its comrades, for when Ariel “spoke” to it, it stopped playing with the rope, shook its head from side to side, and dove below the surface with a flip of its tail. The rest did likewise. The water was calm again, as if they’d never been there. The gulls cried in the distance.

  “What’d you do, insult it?” I asked.

  “Him. No. Wait.”

  All at once they sprang from the water, a precise circle of two dozen dolphins diving for air. Simultaneously, they executed a complete backflip with a half twist. I could hardly distinguish the splashes; they were so well timed it sounded like one big splash, and again the water was still.

  “What just happened?” I asked.

  “I said hello,” said Ariel. “They said hi back.”

  “Oh.”

  Presently they surfaced again, blowing air in bull snorts from the top of their heads, frolicking, nudging one another like elementary school kids at recess. The leader separated himself from the group. He rolled left, looking up at us with his dark and intelligent right eye. His mouth was molded in a natural, friendly smile. He raised his right flipper, almost as if in greeting, and slapped down hard. A jet of water hit Shaughnessy in the face. She brought a hand to her eyes, sputtering. The dolphin let out a Donald Duck-ish exclamation and dove beneath the surface.

  “They love to play,” said Ariel.

  “Noticed that, did you?” asked Shaughnessy, drying her face with the tail of her shirt. She saw me regarding her with a too-innocent smile, looked down, and tugged her shirt back down to her waist.

  I laughed and turned to Ariel, who wasn’t laughing. “You know they can’t pull this boat all the way to New York,” I said, changing the subject.

  “I know. But they’re great messengers.”

  “How do you know? You never saw the ocean before yesterday.”

  “We’re birds of a feather, so to speak. We understand each other. There’s a lot more to it than that, but it goes beyond words. We’re … friends. Allies.”

  “How is it you can talk to them?”

  “Language is language. Now be quiet; I need to talk with the bull some more.”

  I stood out of the way and watched while Ariel palavered with the dolphin. It was a silent, five-minute exchange. Ariel turned away at the end of it and the bull submerged to join his herd.

  “So what’s the story?” I asked.

  “They’re checking the area. Be patient.”

  Fifteen minutes later I saw it and nearly shit my pants. Beneath the water a shadow moved toward the Lady Woof. It looked like a frigging submarine. It broke surface a hundred yards from us, slapped its huge tail on the water, and dove again.

  “A humpback whale!” Shaughnessy shouted in delight.

  “Ariel, that thing’s bigger than this boat!”

  “Yes. Beautiful, isn’t it? There ought to be one or two more on the way. We should make good time.”

  My jaw ached; I shut my mouth.

  The leviathan circled and came at us from beneath and behind. I tensed, waiting for the impact, but none came. It was an effort to fight the urge to shut my eyes. I compromised and held a tight squint. It was hard to accept the reality of a living thing bigger than our forty-foot boat. Oh, sure, the dragon had been bigger—but we’d been on our element, on dry land, at the time. The sea was alien territory to me.

  One of the trailing ropes began to swing forward. I watched as the blue-gray shadow sped silently ahead of us, almost creating the illusion that the sun was setting alarmingly fast and our shadow was lengthening before us. Then the rope grew taut and my knees buckled as we surged forward.

  “Thar she blows!” yelled Shaughnessy, and it was true. A white geyser shot up from the whale.

  My heart pounded wildly. I was frightened and exhilarated at the same time. “Your friends seem to have connections in high places,” I said.

  Ariel said nothing. Instead she inclined her horn to the sea. I looked. Out beyond the humpback pulling us along, two more leviathan shapes broke surface with Brobdingnagian majesty.

  *

  Night at sea. There were few clouds and the stars were a riot of varying magnitudes. Ahead the phosphorescent shapes of three humpback whales pulled us onward. We must have been doing five or six miles an hour. I’m not sure what that is in knots. They seemed to be able to maintain that speed almost indefinitely, though occasionally one would back out of its noose and swim freely. The dolphin herd remained with us, their silvery shapes speeding about the Lady.

  Ariel had spoken to the leader for a long time after we were under way. She came back to me after an hour and a half of conversation. She seemed disturbed, but when I asked her what was wrong she only stared through me dazedly and said, “They’re very … different … from you,” and that was all.

  *

  Ariel had gone to sleep. The summon
ing spell had exhausted her and she retired early from the conversation. I stayed up and Shaughnessy talked to me about dolphins—they’d been the subject of a morphological report she’d written in college. After a while she realized I was no longer listening.

  “Am I boring you?”

  “Huh? Oh, no; I’m listening. I just … have a lot on my mind.” I stared at my hands.

  We were silent a long time.

  “You’ve been with Ariel a long time, haven’t you?” she finally asked. She looked at me steadily. There’s something about moonlight and what it does to a woman’s face, her eyes.

  “Almost two years.”

  “You two act like partners. Listening to you talk is like watching a ping-pong match. It has that … that interplay you see in people who are lifelong friends, who’ve been roommates for a long time.”

  “Partners.” I tasted the word. “Yeah, we’re partners. Familiars is the proper term. A friendship … .” I shook my head, looking at the pale form of Ariel lying on the foredeck ahead, at her mild, comfortable glow, so much like the dolphins swimming around us. “It goes deeper than that, Shaughnessy.”

  She looked at the deck. A dolphin broke surface beside the boat, its back a silver crescent as it curled into the water with a small splash. The motion startled Shaughnessy and she jumped.

  This is where she jumps toward me and I reach out to hold her protectively, I thought. And I look into her eyes, awkwardly for a moment, and we start to separate, but instead we pull closer together … . It would have happened like that in the movies. But it wasn’t a movie, and she just smiled a brief smile, an apology for jumping, with a small duck of her head. Was I disappointed? I didn’t know.

  “I like it here,” I said, much too loudly. I took an exaggerated, deep breath. “The sea air—it’s fresh, it’s invigorating, it’s … . Old Spice.” I laughed.

  “Please, I’d almost managed to forget about TV commercials.”

  I smiled and it faded away quickly. So did the conversation, again.

  A cry came from the sea ahead of us. A mournful, echoing thing, the ghost of a dead baby calling for its mother. My heart leapt. “What’s that?” I tried to keep my voice calm.