The Highest Tide (11 page)

Yet aside from the Angie distraction, it was starting to feel like the summers before it, with long, anonymous, and forgettable, but nearly perfect days away from stuffy classrooms, sloppy joes and the puke in the halls that the janitors covered with maroon sand that stunk even worse than puke.

It wasn’t easy talking Phelps into his first night run. His stepdad slept so lightly not even his brother risked sneaking out, but there was skinny Kenny Phelps waiting for me on Chatham Cove, shivering next to his bucket with an already dimming flashlight.

He had none of his daylight swagger. In fact, he looked spooked. The night beach can do that to anyone who isn’t drunk or oblivious. Instead of the comforting banter of bickering gulls and scavenging crows there is the whoosh of bats and the screech of owls. Even the subtle scraping of a mid-sized hermit crab dragging its shell across grains of sand can sound menacing. I once crouched on Chatham Cove for fifteen minutes after spotting a huge Doberman just above the high tide line. It still scared me long after I figured out it was driftwood.

Phelps didn’t regain any of his cockiness until he’d plucked a dozen butter clams from the dark sand and I’d granted him his union-mandated smoke break. I joined him, and he was feeling so good by then he didn’t razz me about not inhaling. He even indulged my futile effort to get him to see the bullfight I saw in the moon.

“So when’s that Channel Seven babe airing her thing on us?” he asked.

“Hard to tell with these things.” I was suddenly a media expert. “Hopefdly never.”

“Fuck that! I was awesome that day.’’ Phelps’s teeth were the color of the moon.

I was thrilled Channel 7 hadn’t run anything, which I considered the result of my erasing their three phone messages. The thought of talking to the mannequin again turned my belly into needles, especially after the call I got from Professor Kramer. He asked what I knew about the new crabs at Whiskey Point and the seaweed in Flapjack Bay that she’d questioned him about. After I told him, he’d sighed and said, “Well, do you see how you kind of made me and the state look foolish, Miles?”

My heart took off. “Didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” I squeaked.

“Well, Miles, you certainly know about invasives and the havoc they can cause.”

I really didn’t, and after I stammered a response I could tell he felt guilty for cornering me. He then explained what Chinese mitten crabs can do to cliffs and what that same strange seaweed did to the Mediterranean. His long explanation was designed to let me know everything was okay between us but it rattled me even more, and I cowered until he updated me on the squid and said a doctor named Stanley Glover was flying out from the Smithsonian to help study it. “We need a working name for her, and seeing how you found it, we though—”

“Rachel,” I said instantly. “Call her Rachel.”

We found another cluster of butter clams in the dark and tossed in a few hefty horse clams, which work in chowders and eventually don’t taste like rubber bands if they’re shredded and boiled long enough with onions and potatoes. Once our buckets were two-thirds full, I rewarded Phelps with another smoke break and a news flash: “I checked out a book on the G-spot.”

“From the library?”

“Yeah.”

He laughed. “You got balls for a pipsqueak. You tell ‘em it was for your mother?”

“Nope. Mixed it in with books on mollusks and cephalopods.”

Phelps snorted. “So what’s the title?”

“The
G-Spot
.”

“Clever. How many pages?”

“One hundred and eighty-five.”

“Well?”

“Read it last night.”

“You read it in one night?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So it was good?”

“It was strange.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s about women who go through life without ever getting that one spot rubbed just right or any number of other complicated things that go wrong.”

Phelps digested that. “So where’s the spot?”

I told him.

He nodded knowingly. “What else?”

“Well, it kind of grossed me out.”

He laughed. “How could any of that gross out anyone but a homo?”

I let that go. “It was kind of like reading about how to fx a dream car that you don’t have yet. Know what I mean? You don’t really want to know how complicated and difficult it is to keep it running before you’re even old enough to drive.”

He smiled. “Speak for yourself.”

“Well, it’s kinda intimidating and kinda gross is all I’m saying.”

“What’s gross about it?”

“Well, the long discussion about women ejaculating, for one.”

“Cool! I didn’t know they could.”

“It’s a whole lot like peeing.”

“
No
.”

“I don’t particularly want some girl peeing on me, or thinking she’s peeing on me, or worrying that I’m thinking that she’s peeing on me. Or—”

“Gross.”

“Told ya.”

“Weren’t there good parts?”

“There were a whole lot of parts about women, who only had first names for some reason, blabbing about how their lives changed when they finally discovered their
spot
. Kinda like those before-and-after commercials when some lady squeezes into tight pants and says, ‘I used to be a hippo before I started eating nothing but raisins and sunflower seeds.’”

“Any pictures?”

“Nope. Just some diagrams that, to be honest, were confusing. If you don’t have a diagram on the wall while you’re trying to do all that it sounds like you could get lost in a hurry.”

Phelps thought that one over. “Thousands of people are fucking right this very minute without any problem.”

“How do you know?”

“There are how many billions of people? Do the math, Miles.”

I nodded. “Maybe.”

He laughed. “People fuck in the dark all the time without charts or diagrams to guide them, don’t you figure?”

I figured he was right about that, but I didn’t want to give him credit. He hadn’t read anything. “So?” I said.

“So none of this is helping me.”

“Don’t blame me.” I rocked my shoulders, then stretched my back. “Read it yourself if you want, as long as you get it back to me before the twenty-sixth.”

Phelps pondered that during an inhale so long I thought he’d absorbed the smoke. “I don’t need it,” he said, then snuffed his Kent into a rock and stuck the butt into a plastic bag just like I’d trained him.

Ten minutes later he said, “Name any band.”

“Zeppelin,” I said, reluctantly playing along.

“Jimmy Page,” he replied, and performed a dramatic air riff on Page’s double-necked guitar.

“Cream.”

“Clapton.” In the faint light I swear I saw Eric Clapton, his glasses, light beard and everything.

Phelps was a classic-rock freak, and considered himself an aficionado of lead guitarists during “the age of guitar,” as his brother called it. We all deferred to Phelps on music and forgot he didn’t know how to actually play anything. He didn’t sully his musical reputation by struggling to play “Yankee Doodle.” He pursued his calling by acting like a rock star, by sleeping in, smoking in public and scowling at adults. It was easy to forget he wasn’t already a bandleader.

“Stones,” I said.

“The great Keith Richards.” Phelps draped a new cigarette from his lower lip, then leaned back with the expression of a man who’d recently enjoyed a terrific blood transfusion.

By then, Phelps was completely himself again. It didn’t matter that it was still pretty dark, that his flashlight beam had shrunk to an orange circle the size of a sand dollar, or that his stepfather would ground him for a month if he got caught. He stood on the flats beneath that peephole moon, his skinny, Keith Richards hips cocked to the left, legs splayed, as if posing for an album cover.

We hunted for more clams to top off our buckets, but the only promising signs were too close to the incoming tide. A fundamental rule of clamming: Don’t try to dig water.

Phelps waded up to his calves, looking for what I don’t know, but I enjoyed watching him explore on his own. Then he was up to his knees. He’d worn chest-high waders, so I didn’t worry about him getting wet, but the mud usually softened the farther out you went, and I told him that.

“Thanks Dad,” he said, without looking back. I didn’t say anything when he dropped past his knees. “Never seen so many starfish,” he shouted. “Some of them might be keepers.”

“Probably not, unless they’re freaks.” I reminded him of the fussy touch-tank buyers. “Plus they’re probably too deep for you to grab without getting soaked or stuck, so come on back.”

Phelps turned to scowl, I think, but I couldn’t make out his expression. He bunched his sweater around his biceps and reached down. His sweater got wet, of course, but he came up with a star that was a burnt orange rarely seen in anything but sunsets.

“Nice,” I praised. “Let me take a look.” I reached out, hoping to reel him back.

“One more.” He switched hands with the star, bunched his sleeves higher and dropped into deeper water. From where I stood it looked as if he’d skipped a step on a staircase. Water rose past his thighs.

He called himself a dumbass, then warned me not to say a word. He tried to turn and retreat. He laughed, but my headlamp caught that trapped-animal look on his face. The more he struggled the lower he sank. His waist was almost under.

“Maybe you can reach down and dig your boots free.” I forced myself to sound calm, hoping Phelps didn’t realize the tide was returning swiftly enough for his hips to cast a tiny wake.

His face contorted with concentration before he lunged downward, soaking himself to the neck. He straightened a few seconds later, gasping and dripping, then growled, ‘The fuckin’ fuckers are fuckin’ stuck!”

“Can you wiggle out of your waders?”

“No way.” He was starting to whine. “I could barely get them on.”

“Then don’t move,” I said. He’d sunk another few inches. “I’ll dig you out. Relax.”

I stripped to my underpants, stepped into the water to my knees, took a shallow dive away from him, then circled back, hyperventilating with my head above the water until I dove again and felt his thighs and followed them into mud that felt as loose and light as flour. It was colder than I expected and impossible to see because the water was dirty and the moon only so bright. I dredged blindly then surfaced, spitting, treading, careful not to stick my own feet in the mud. As much time as I spent on water I was still a crappy swimmer. “Try now.”

He said he did, but it didn’t look like it.

I dove again and dug more aggressively toward his boots. My breath was so shallow I didn’t last long. I impatiently pulled up on his left leg, and that’s when I felt the mud grab my right foot and panic rip through the length of me.

I’d been temporarily stuck often enough to know that if I used my left foot for leverage to pry my right foot out I might never breathe again. That’s when Phelps grabbed my hair and neck and pulled me free as if I were a kitten. I came up choking, paddling toward shore. The water was up to his sternum now, and I realized I’d made things worse.

People rarely got stuck while wading. It usually happened while they were crossing soft exposed mud, with the typical rescue involving wooden planks upon which trapped mudders would lay their torsos and crawl free from the muck. Oystermen did it all the time. So did Evergreen students. This was different. Phelps wasn’t only knee-deep in mud, but also sternum-deep in incoming water. And there weren’t any planks around.

The tide was swinging almost eighteen feet over six hours that night, which meant it was rising an average of three feet an hour. Another hour and Phelps might be under. When I shared my next idea, he pleaded with me not to leave him, then screamed for help. Like I’ve said, water amplifies voices, but there still has to be someone to hear them. And nobody lived along the wooded lip of Chatham Cove.

I pulled on my sweatshirt and boots and ran with a shovel toward Judge Stegner’s oyster farm, then past it to the geoduck plantings. The judge and I had packed hundreds of fingernail-sized geoducks inside PVC pipes, which were then planted vertically into the flats. I dug up one three-footer, emptied it onto the beach, felt how it fit around my mouth, then sprinted it back to where skinny Phelps broke the surface like a half-submerged totem pole. I rinsed the pipe, waded out as far as I dared and tossed it to him. He raised a trembling hand, but didn’t catch it. Was his arm stiffening? In the dim, reflecting light his face looked green and his eyelids were peeled so wide you could see all the way around his pupils. “Grab it!” I insisted. He slowly obeyed, then held up the pipe and looked at me miserably. “Practice fitting it to your mouth,’’ I said, “so you can make a seal.”

“Go get help!” he wailed. He wasn’t even trying to sound tough anymore.

A silver ribbon of light shimmered on the water top about twenty feet behind Phelps. There was some red in it too, and while I assumed it was luminous plankton we’d stirred up, it seemed too uniform somehow. Sharks visited South Sound, but usually just three-foot mudders, and what I thought I saw was at least eight feet long and narrow. It didn’t appear to be alive either, more like a long sheet of metal—except that it suddenly stuck its head up the way a turtle might. Luckily, Phelps didn’t see what alarmed me, but he did start yelling when I hurled a rock at it.

“Be back in a flash,” I said, though I really didn’t know how long it would take to get to that first cabin or whether anyone would be there when I got there or where I would go next. “Practice breathing through it,” I yelled. “And don’t waste energy.”

“Go!” he yelled.

Then I ran and heard his shouts behind me. It was hard to make out the words, and I felt like a jerk for stranding him, especially when I wasn’t sure what I’d seen behind him. I fell twice before entering a dark forest that stayed so damp year-round that sweater-thick moss muted my screams for help.

CHAPTER 14

T
HE CLOSEST CABIN
was less than a mile away, but I’m guessing it took almost ten minutes to get there, running full tilt in rubber boots. It felt like a whole lot longer than that.