The Greyhound (6 page)

Then there was the pond near the old house. It wasn’t big, but it was full of great animals — bullfrogs, toads, and garter snakes, and redwing blackbirds that clung like feathered trapeze artists to the bulrushes that swayed in the summer breeze. Tadpoles squiggled their way through the shallows around the edge of the pond, which smelled of moss and earth, heat and life. Water striders skated across the surface and water bugs did a breaststroke down into its shallow depths. Blue jays careened across the pond, enacting mock aerial battles. Of all the birds at the pond, the blue jays really seemed to live just for fun.

In the evenings, raccoons visited the pond to try their sinewy hands at catching the crayfish that skittered nervously across the pond bottom. Reduced to a distant rumble, the traffic from the highway a mile away was barely audible under the rustling of leaves. Danny liked to walk among the maple and scrub trees that grew randomly around the pond. Danny’s father had told him it would eventually become a meadow. “If you look at the baby trees,” he’d said, waving an arm across the landscape, “they love to be close to this kind of earth. It has all kinds of nutrients in it. Eventually the trees will get closer and closer, and more plants will move in until the pond eventually disappears.”

“But what will happen to the animals?”

“They’ll be fine. This kind of change takes place over years. More ponds will be created and more meadows, and the animals will find places to live.”

A few years ago, maybe six or seven, Danny went to the pond and decided to bring home some frogs. But he had nowhere to put them once he got home. His mother was at the neighbour’s house, and both his dad and sister were out. So he filled up the tub and put the frogs in. He counted them, getting up to eighteen before their crazy-legged hopping made him lose count. They leaped about, most of them too small to get up the smooth sides of the tub, but one fair-sized bullfrog leaped all the way to the toilet bowl while Danny was out of the room. What a surprise for Dad when he looked inside! His folks didn’t get mad, though. “Just kid’s stuff,” they said, and laughed. They still laughed about it. About how the bathroom smelled like a swamp for a couple of days, even after the tub was cleaned.

Man, I wish I could go back in time,
he thought.
It was so much easier then. Everything just seemed better.

THE ENGLISH CLASS

His first trip to the guidance counsellor at his new school started in English class. English class was the worst. Reams of stuff by dead authors that Danny didn’t know and didn’t care about. It would be totally awful, if not for the opportunity to see Nicole, who sat in the third row, second seat. The afternoon sun would glint off her diamond nose stud, as if beckoning Danny’s attention; her black hair had purple streaks in it and her eyes were blue. No, grey, Danny decided.
Grey eyes of mystery
, he said to himself. He tried to concentrate, but how could he when she was sitting there, looking the way she did? But it was so
boring
otherwise. So when the teacher assigned an essay, Danny had to fight to dispel the boredom that crept into his bones.

The English teacher was ancient; a sonorous old bag of bones who looked
(ok, maybe it’s because we had to study both Hemingway and Hermann Melville this semester)
like a whale on legs, a great blue whale with its wrinkled throat waiting to swallow a class of students reduced as krill, and who boomed out to the classroom: “Take
The Old Man and the Sea
and create a new story that touches on the sentiments expressed by Hemingway. Make us feel that we are one with the character of the old man. Be prepared to share it with the class.”

Danny was less than enthusiastic about the assignment, but as he sat at his computer that night, the words started to flow. And a week later, he was the first one to present.

He cleared his throat slightly, took another glance at Nicole, and began:

The old man sat in the stern of his sailboat, straining slightly at the mainsheet with a knobby, arthritic hand, and hoisted the sail. He had done it for so many years it seemed impossible to count the number of times he had been at it, so years ago he had lost count. The water was so blue it was matched only by a wealthy matron’s jewels, or by the old man’s eyes, which were themselves fading after years on the ocean, but in the old man’s mind it was just a little bit. In his heart, he felt the strength of endurance, of surviving a hard and sometimes difficult life.

A school of fish darted underneath the boat, turning at right angles, as if directing the old man on the water. He steered the boat away from the shore, with the expertise of one who has decades of practise, listening to the skirling sound of the gulls above. The sun cast a million precious diamonds of light across the water’s surface, and landed softly in the creases of the old man’s face. His thin whiskers cast tiny shadows across his leathery skin. Thin cirrus clouds streaked the sky, and the wind, well-muscled in the early hours, sought to push the boat farther on its course. All was as it should be. He cast his memory back to his wife, who had died in childbirth so many years ago, giving him his fifth child, and his only son, a son who now was many miles away. He felt a sense of peace in knowing that his life had been spent doing what he knew, not trying to achieve someone else’s goal. But his peace was broken by the sound of engines and the evil smell of petroleum. He was surrounded by roaring engines and by the yelling, jeering, and taunting of a pack of young men, five of them, on Jet Skis. They raced around the small sailboat.

“Go back, old man!” they cried. “Get the hell out of our water!”

Whose water?
the old man thought to himself, but didn’t want to argue. The water was churning with the movement of the Jet Skis, and it was all the old man could do to keep the sailboat stable. But it was not the time to argue with young men. He looked at the shoreline, a thin line of darkened sand, and at the tiny, dark square near the coconut grove, now barely discernable, that was his hacienda. And yet, here on the water, he still felt as close to home as if he were sitting by the wood stove, reading his sport fishing magazines, and wondering how his grandchildren were doing.

The young men were hostile … crazy, he thought. Maybe they were drug runners. Or maybe they were just looking for trouble. Was it too much to ask them to leave an old man alone? The look on their faces sent his memory back to the time when he worked on a much larger boat. That was a time when there was money to be made and the ocean was like a giving mother who would not let her children down, when on a troublesome day when the sky was moody, his fishing net was torn by a thrashing, angry shark. It had soulless, cold, dark eyes, a cutting dorsal fin, and finely serrated teeth. Despite its efforts to break away, and his efforts to try and release it, it died in the net anyway.
Such a waste
, the old man thought, looking at the dead shark. Another of God’s creatures, gone. He remembered the look in the shark’s eye as he worked to haul it on board.
His spirit is gone
, the old man thought.

His reverie was broken by the engines roaring. One young man threw something at him. It was sparking orange flames: an empty soda bottle filled with gasoline, a rag stuck in the opening and set alight. He saw the Pepsi logo and a red, white, and blue ball on the label. The bottle clanked about the cockpit of the sailboat, bouncing around as if possessed by the Devil himself. The old man deftly grabbed at the bottle, his seasoned hands giving themselves over to the years of gripping the slippery tail fins of the day’s catch. He tossed the bottle far out into the water, saving his boat from nothing more than a slight charring. But the young men were not around to see his minor heroics, having roared off down the shoreline.

Each day they came back, each day trying to roil the waters around the old man. A week went by, then two. By then, the old man knew the young hooligans’ pattern. He knew the way they moved their infernal machines, and the directness of their path. So, the old man crafted a plan.

On the Monday of the third week, the old man went out again, but he kept closer to the shore. He expertly weaved his way offshore, neatly tacking his sailboat, keeping one wizened blue eye over his shoulder as the sun continued to cast its immortal light upon the waters. Then came the roar and the nostril-burning scent of marine fuel. The young men, whoop-whooping and revving their engines, roared at him across the water, as though they’d morphed into a strange combination of man and machine. They were coming at him, relentlessly, across the water, and he could see that this time they weren’t out to tease or annoy him, but to defeat him. But he was undaunted. He turned toward them, gently raising himself in the cockpit of the sailboat until he was standing, taunting them.

“Bring it,” he said quietly, as much to himself as to them. One rider raised something. There was a crack, a small explosion, and the old man felt a bullet tear into his shoulder, hot lead searing his flesh. No matter — he’d taken a bullet before.
No more than a flesh wound
, he thought, though a thin line of blood trickled from the spot where the bullet had torn through the shoulder muscle. Then, as suddenly as they came near, charging and yelling and bellowing, angry young bulls that they were, the commotion stopped and the five Jet Skis were suddenly riderless, their wakes causing the sailboat to bob slightly up and down as they harmlessly glided by. The surface of the water ran red with the blood of the young men. Their heads were neatly lopped off below the chin, all five bobbing in the water like corks; their bodies, arms out to the sides, were doing the dead man’s float, and drifted silently on the waves. Soon the waters churned again, but this time with the movement of a nearby school of hammerhead sharks, hungry and looking for an easy meal. This was the easiest of all. The old man knew the hammerheads would come; he knew they would enjoy a good feed. Nothing would be left of these hooligans, he thought, and he allowed a small smile to crease the sun-burnished surface of his face.

What no one knew — and no one found out — was that the old man, in the dark of night and guided only by the stars, had driven stakes into the ocean bed offshore the previous night; thin poles that poked just above the surface of the water. It had been hard to do it, but he knew where to find the equipment to get the job done. To these poles he had strung taut razor wire, borrowed on permanent loan from a local prison, from skinny pole to skinny pole. Neither the poles, nor the wire, could be seen by the troublemakers until it was far, far too late. The Jet Skis would be found, he knew, at some point, and when the polícias showed up, he would just scratch his head. “I have been away,” he would say. “I have been visiting my son in São Paolo. Do you know that town?”

The class clapped. A couple of people cheered. Nicole stared at Danny with an inquiring glance. And the wrinkled whale of a teacher craned his head and set a beady eye on Danny as he made his way back to his seat. “See me after class,” he said, his whale noise a thin piping hiss, like he was expelling air through an invisible blowhole.

The guidance counsellor, a serene woman named Mrs. Rowcliffe, clad in jeans and a cotton shirt, a faded hippie from another era, smiled, even when telling Danny that he seemed “troubled.”

“And yet, Danny, I personally didn’t see
anything wrong
with your story. I thought it had impact.” She emphasized the last word. “
Impact
.”

“Well, that’s what I was aiming for,” Danny replied with a sigh. He knew Mrs. Rowcliffe would call his parents, but he also knew that they were more than likely to give him credit for being, in his mother’s words, “at least
somewhat
creative.”

As he was leaving the guidance counsellor’s office he reached into his back pocket to check for his house key and found a scrap of paper, a note. In neat script, in purple ink, it read, “You are a troubled and strange person.” There was that word again —
troubled
— but this time it didn’t seem so bad. The note finished with, “I think you are different, deep, and
wonderful
.” It was unsigned but there was a heart at the end, carefully filled in, in purple:

He knew, somehow, it had to be from Nicole. In the rush between classes, she must have slipped it into his pocket.
Wonderful
. He’d never heard that from anyone before.

As he had expected, Danny was told, first by the guidance counsellor, and then by Dr. Feinman, that community service would be a “good thing” to do. Mrs. Rowcliffe had practically put him to sleep with her lecture, but something she said struck a chord.