Lily and the Octopus (21 page)

On day six we saw lightning, and the swell rose with an advancing storm. We rode out the worst of it belowdecks playing Crazy Eights, but the game reminded me too much of the octopus and I
quickly soured on it. I let Lily win two hands, and while shuffling the discard pile a second time I suggested we play War.

On day nine I took to carving some driftwood we picked out of the sea. I’d read in one of the books on sailing that whalers used to carve ivory and bone (and sometimes coconuts and
tortoise shells) in an art they called scrimshaw. My knife would never have carved ivory or bone, and I don’t know if I’d call what I did art, but I managed a pretty good likeness of a
dachshund out of the driftwood. I told Lily it was her mother, Witchie-Poo, who would look out for us and keep us safe.

“My mother’s name is Witchie-Poo?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “You know that.”

Before two weeks were even out I was unrecognizable as my former self. I was desperate for a shower. My beard had grown out rough and scraggly, filled with salt, both in color and from the ocean
air. My skin had burned and peeled and leathered. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the deckhouse window and thought I was someone else. I don’t think Lily would have recognized me,
either, were she not here to witness my slow mutation.

“Your coat is mahogany,” Lily told me. “Like mine.” We both now have gray hairs under our chins.

On day fifteen I swallowed my fear and jumped off the bow and into the ocean. The water was shocking, then invigorating. I thought of the monsters below, of the octopus attaching itself to my
leg and pulling me down to great depths, of my head exploding from the density of water, of drowning. But only for the briefest of moments. I felt too alive to die. It took a great deal of
encouraging, but at sunset I talked Lily into a swim. I held her tight with two hands and close to my body, using my legs to kick and keep us afloat, and she paddled with her paws but mostly out of
panic.

“I’ve got you, Monkey. And I’m never letting go.”

Together we drifted, looking at the orange sky, clouds tinged with lava from an unseen volcano. I put my head back in the water, submerging my ears, and for the first time in days everything
fell quiet. I kept one eye on
Fishful Thinking
so we wouldn’t drift too far, but I let all of our other cares wash away. It felt like a baptism of sorts. Once we had been submerged in
the ocean, we were protected by it. We were now pure.

It’s now day seventeen. We’ve stopped putting tuna fish on bread or a plate and just eat it out of the can. It’s easier that way, and there’s less to clean up. I glance
at Lily, who finishes her can first. She gazes stoically ahead. The light accentuates the gray on her neck and around her whiskers, and the little bit between her eyes. She is no longer young; she
is no longer my girl.

“I think it’s funny you packed canned tuna for an adventure at sea,” she says, with only a modicum of judgment.

I look around at the nets and the trawlers and all the gear that decorates
Fishful Thinking
. “Funny ha-ha? Or funny strange?”

She doesn’t answer. I finish my meal and I gather the empty tins. We’ll run out of canned tuna eventually and have to fish for our meals from the sea. But I don’t tell her
this. There’s no need to play on her fears.

“How will we know when we find the octopus?” she asks again, studying the ever-changing ripples surrounding the hull.

I have only the answer I have given her each time she has asked this question before. I scratch her under the chin and the tags on her collar shake. “We’ll know.”

For the past two and a half weeks, despite the boredom, despite the monotony, I have thought of little else but the octopus. He will not allow us this deep into his waters and resist the urge to
announce himself. He’ll take our presence in his home as a personal affront, much the way I resented his presence in ours.

At night, when I have trouble sleeping, I steel myself for a great battle at sea. I picture this monster wrapping his muscular arms around our vessel, trying to pierce the hull with his beak
while Lily and I try desperately to outmaneuver, fight back, and harpoon. It’s nothing I haven’t dreamed of doing to him in other ways. With surgery and radiation and pills. It’s
two to one, this fight, but I’m still not sure we’re evenly matched. He has the advantage of the sea.

“And why are we hunting him again?” Lily asks.

I check the ship’s compass and correct our course five degrees southwest. “It’s the best chance we have of staying together.”

Lily stands, turns around three times, then sits again. She does this when she’s bored.

“Do you want to sing a song?” I ask.

“Not really,” she replies.

“I could try my hand at the harmonica again.”

Lily cringes, but remains polite. “No, thank you.”

“We’ll find him,” I assure her. “It’s just that the ocean is so vast.”

“So is Los Angeles.” To a dachshund, that probably seems equivalent.

“Not this vast.”

I study our charts. If I’m reading them correctly, we’re over a particularly deep trench. Something in me tells me the octopus is near.

Lily looks over the side of the boat and says, “It’s a wonder he ever left all this to come and live with us.”

I’d never given much thought to the octopus’s motivations; the why of it all seemed irrelevant. But Lily’s right. It is a wonder. “I hope the octopus has the same thought
about us, right before we harpoon him through his fleshy head.”

Lily blanches in a way that makes me question for the first time whether she’s come to feel some sympathy for that parasite. Stockholm syndrome. Capture bonding. Whatever they call it. I
hope she doesn’t. I don’t want that to be true. I don’t want her to hesitate when it comes time for the kill.

The sun fades. We’ve made a habit of watching it sink below the horizon, and tonight is no different. We sit out on
Fishful Thinking
’s bow, me Indian style and her perched in
the gap in my legs, and as the sun dips out of sight I say, “Going, going, going . . . gone.” And then usually we make some kind of wish. It’s my favorite moment of the day.

“What’s the first thing you want to do when we get back home?”

Lily considers this. “I’m not sure I’ve thought about it.”

Does she know something I don’t? Or is this just part of her canine ability to live entirely in the present? Part of me doesn’t want to know. “Well, I don’t know about
you, but I want to take a hot shower and sleep a good long sleep in our own bed. And have a slice of Village Pizzeria pizza with roasted red peppers and black olives and a cold Sam Adams
beer.”

The idea of it, of going home, piques Lily’s interest. Even if she’s not confident of it happening, even if it’s only a game. “I’d like to have peanut butter in my
Kong, I want to sniff around the backyard, and fall asleep in your lap when it’s still.” The rocking of the boat has been getting the better of us both.

“Good choices!” I say enthusiastically. A cool breeze sweeps across the deck of the boat, causing an eerie, almost haunted whistle.

“And I’d like a large bowl of chicken and rice, even though I’m not sick.”

“Seasick, maybe,” I say.

“Sick of the sea,” she replies.

I nod. She means the chicken and rice I always make for her when her stomach is upset. I don’t know why I don’t make the effort more often, since she clearly loves it. I can’t
really make it for her here. We don’t have any chicken.

Suddenly the stars appear, brilliant and sparkling, in all their majestic glory.

“Can I tell you something else?”

“Always,” she says.

Immediately I say, “Never mind.”

“No. What?”

I should never have said anything. I think about how what I was going to say would sound to Lily, about how it suggests a future without her, at the very least a future where it is no longer
just the two of us. But I’ve opened my stupid mouth and I can’t think of a plausible lie, so I feel compelled to finish my thought. “I’d like to fall in love
again.”

In the silence that follows, all you can hear is the rhythmic hum of
Fishful Thinking
’s engine. We’re so far from shore there’s not even the caw of a passing gull. I
know this makes Lily jealous. The idea of my falling in love. She doesn’t like to share my affection with anyone. I never explicitly told her that dogs don’t live as long as people. I
wonder, from her time with the octopus, how much she knows. I wonder if in the last few weeks she’s contemplated mortality like I have.

“You will,” she says. Then, almost as an afterthought, “I promise.”

A shooting star zips through the sky and I point and yell, “Look!” but Lily doesn’t turn fast enough to see it.

T
he light of a full moon streams through the opening at the top of the stairs, casting a bluish pall belowdecks. Maybe
pall
is too strong a
word. Maybe it’s the scotch and not the moon coloring my mood. Even so, I pour myself another two fingers. I should ration it more carefully, but right now it’s a smoky salve I
crave.

I undress Lily for bed, which means unsnapping the life jacket I’ve insisted she wear at all times since I first sensed the octopus nearby. She looks up at me as I do this, with an
inquisitive expression.

“What?” I ask her.

“There’s a patch, just under your chin, where your beard doesn’t grow.”

I feel under my chin. The coarse hairs are getting almost unruly and I separate them with my fingers, finding just the spot Lily mentions. I can feel smooth skin.

“Oh, that. That’s a scar.”

Lily is only momentarily satisfied with my answer. “What’s a scar?”

“It’s the spot that’s left behind after the healing of a cut or a burn or a wound.”

Lily considers this. “How did you get it?”

“When I was five I pushed my sister, Meredith, into the coffee table and she split open her chin. It was mean and careless and a dumb thing for me to do. I don’t even remember why I
did it, except I used to do a lot of things to Meredith because she was close to me in age, and often simply there. One time, I shoved a pink crayon up her nose and snapped it off. A doctor had to
remove it with tiny forceps. Another time, I convinced her to rub an entire jar of Vaseline through her hair. She had to have a drastic haircut after that.”

“None of that explains really how you got the scar on your chin.”

I think about the point I am trying to make. “The best answer I can give you is that karma can be a bitch.”

“What’s karma?” Lily wants to know.

“Karma is the belief that a person’s actions in the present decide their fate in the future. A week after I pushed Meredith into the coffee table, I fell in the bathtub and split my
own chin open. And that’s how I got this scar.”

Lily mulls this over before saying, “I have a sister named Meredith.”

“No,” I correct. “I have a sister named Meredith. You have sisters named Kelly and Rita.”

“And my mother’s name is Witchie-Poo!”

“That’s right.” I take the Witchie-Poo talisman out of my pocket and place it over our bed. Lily hops up on the mattress and sniffs it.

“I have a scar,” Lily says, turning around on the bed so that I can see the length of her back. She looks back at me with doleful eyes.

“Yes, you do. From surgery when you ruptured two discs in your back. You gave me quite a scare.” I often wonder how much she remembers the experience, or if she’s blocked most
of it from her mind. I guess if she’s aware of the scar on her back, the events have left her scarred in other, less obvious places.

I take off my pants, fold them, and put them aside. I’ve been wearing the same underwear for three days without taking the time to wash them. “See these here?” I place my bare
leg up on the bunk. “These scars in my leg are from my own surgery when a doctor opened my leg to pull out several veins.”

Lily makes a sour face. “Why did he do that?”

“Their valves had collapsed and they had no way to return blood to my heart. The doctor yanked them out like a bird pulling worms from the ground.”

Lily blinks and lowers her head. “What about this mark over my eye?”

I grab her snout and lower her head even more. “That? That’s nothing. A pleasure scar. You were chasing your red ball so diligently you ran headfirst into the stove.”

Lily laughs as if even she thinks that’s a dumb thing for her to have done. And then, as if by instinct, she scurries across the room and finds her red ball under the little table where we
sometimes eat when we tire of looking at the sea. She hops up onto our bunk and drops the ball safely at her feet.

I hold out the index finger on my left hand as scotch laps against the sides of my glass like the ocean against our hull. There’s a mark just above the knuckle that joins the finger to the
hand. “This here I got battling you.”

“Battling
me
?”

“That’s right. I was putting groceries away and you snatched a chorizo sausage right out of my hands, chomping down on my finger in the process.”

“I did?”

“You wanted that sausage so badly you wouldn’t let up on my finger.”

“What did you do?”

“I punched you in the snot locker and laid you among the bok choy. Just so I could have my finger back.”

Lily shrugs. “I’m a sausage dog.”

“I know you are.”

Lily twists again. “What about this thing poking out the side of me here?”

I press on the side of her abdomen and feel her floating rib. “Oh, that. When you were a puppy you fell down a flight of stairs. The doctor thinks you broke a rib. I didn’t know it
at the time, but it must have healed funny. You scared me a lot when you were a puppy.” I raise my glass and toast. “I’ll drink to your floating rib.”

Lily hops off the bed and over to her water dish on the floor. “And I’ll drink to yours.” She laps thirstily at the water. I don’t bother explaining that I don’t
have a floating rib. I get where she’s coming from.

Lily jumps back onto the bunk and asks, “Do you have any more scars?”