The Highest Tide (3 page)
“The moon was bright and I had a headlamp.”
This struck them as astounding. People kneeled in front of me. Four microphones crowded my chin.
“Did it actually wake you up, Miles?”
See how people put you in a position where you have to lie or get in trouble? I tried to find my mother’s puffy eyes. “I was kinda already awake.”
“So you heard it and came out to see what it was?”
“Uh-huh.”
“All by yourself?”
That’s the sort of crap you hear when you’re tiny for your age. I didn’t respond, hoping the cameras and the microphones would go to someone else.
“How old are you, Miles?”
“Almost fourteen.” I heard people murmuring, repeating the number.
“Why do you think this deep-ocean creature, this ‘giant squid,’ as Professor Kramer calls it, ended up in this little bay by your house?”
That’s when I said what I said. It was a throwaway line, the sort of thing I’d heard fancy-smart people say on television when asked impossible questions. I could blame it on exhaustion, but there was a part of me that believed it. AU of that doesn’t much matter, though, because I said it: “Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.”
They liked that a lot. A kid says something like that, and people go
ahhh
. Offer a plausible scientific explanation and they yawn. Dip into the mystical, especially if you appear to be an unsullied, clearheaded child, and they want to write a song about you.
A
NGIE STEGNER ALMOST
slept through it all. By the time she rose, all she saw was the squid sprawled on bright silver tarps on a flat trailer above the boat ramp next to the tavern. She moseyed around it once and laughed at the sky, as if the squid were a joke from above, then sauntered back across the bridge toward our side of the bay with me at her hip.
My parents had rushed to work after giving me more looks that assured me I had some explaining ahead of me. I didn’t care about that or anything. I was dizzy with sleepiness, and Angie had her arm around me, bracing me, as if she could tell I might collapse. I milked it, walking as slowly as I could, trying to fur in my mind the leafy smell of her hair and the weight and warmth of her long tanned arm draped across my shoulders. I considered asking her if we should try to get old Florence out to see the squid before it got hauled to the lab, but I knew what an ordeal that would entail and didn’t want to share Angie with anyone.
I think my fixation with Angie started when she read
Goodnight Moon
to me, back before I stored much in my head beyond emotion. She babysat me so much in the early years she smelled like family, but it was hard to keep up with her moods and changes. When she turned eighteen she cut her hair to chin length and had a black rose tattooed to her stomach. She also pierced her eyebrow with a silver hoop, which made her look as if some fisherman had hooked her once but she got away. She chewed her nails, rarely washed her hair and wore baggy cargo pants, trying everything imaginable to hide her beauty. It didn’t fool me. I found it difficult to think around her. Even breathing got complicated.
Angie sang in a band called “L.O.C.O.” You couldn’t call it for some reason. I’d seen her perform just once, at an outdoor concert in Sylvester Park. She wore a horizontally striped red and pink dress that fell to the middle of her thighs, and she sang—whispered and screamed, actually—some song about charming devils and two-faced angels. It went on and on as if she were afraid to stop. It was just her and this drummer with too much hair and thick, crablike forearms. She played bass and howled, bobbing her head just enough to swing her hair while her frantic drummer turned into a sweat sprinkler. The music spooked me but literally moved others. People didn’t dance so much as vibrate to it, shaking across the grass as if it were an involuntary act. And Angie was getting famous, in part because she occasionally fainted during shows, which provided rich gossip for those of us huddled around the bay. I overheard my mother asking her friends what it would mean for the judge now that his only daughter had “gone public” with her craziness. When I heard about Angie’s faintings I had just one thought: I wanted to figure out how to catch her the next time.
Angie asked better questions than the others had, and I didn’t mind telling her everything I knew and a few things I made up. When I finally pried my eyes off her, I noticed the tide climbing all the way back up, which somehow always relieved me, especially when it came up higher than usual, mirrored the sky and slowed time.
After I finished telling Angie everything, I started over again with the moment that interested her the most—when it was just me, the moon and the squid-hoping she wouldn’t leave me while I climbed inside a huge hammock my mother brought back from Mexico long before I was born.
Angie not only didn’t leave, she swung the hammock by nudging her stomach into my hip. I looked up into her green eyes and her connect-the-dot freckles. I was close enough to hear her stomach gurgle. Offered a moment to be stuck in, I might have chosen that one. Against my will, I drifted. Sleep was like that with me. It only came uninvited.
I missed her first few words, then caught the ones that said boys try too hard to please her. When she paused over that, I said, “That’s real common.” I told her how the three-spined stickleback, a homely rockfish, dances wildly to try to attract a mate. “It’s way over the top,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe it. The male toadfish is even more ridiculous. When he wants to mate he vibrates his bladder muscles so fast they make a humming sound that’s so loud it can annoy people on houseboats.”
She showed me her teeth. Who knows if I would have become so obsessed with marine life if what I’d learned and found hadn’t made Angie Stegner smile.
I drifted again until her black rose bumped my hip and she volunteered that she still hadn’t met a boy—or man—who sought love that lasted more than one night. I had no idea what she meant, but I didn’t want to sound naive so I offered the first insight that popped to mind even though it was nothing more than a bumper-sticker slogan I’d puzzled over.
“Eat oysters,” I whispered. “Love longer.”
Her giggle was the last thing I recall from that morning.
T
HE NEWS CHANNELS
all had something on the squid. Most of them played it as yet another quirky news flash out of Olympia. They obviously didn’t know what to make of it, other than to repeat its dimensions—thirty-seven feet and 923 pounds—then shifi into phony chitchat about whether the squid was placed there by Republicans or Democrats and whether it would make people queasy about swimming in the Sound. Their footage of the squid itself was brief, as if they worried it might haunt people.
Channel 7 was the only one that went beyond snippets.
I’d never seen anyone I knew on television other than Judge Stegner, so I was surprised by how little Professor Kramer resembled himself. He looked pale, almost criminal, his collar askew, his hair reckless. Then the camera panned to some kid who came up to the professor’s bicep and looked a whole lot like me, staring at the squid, orange hair fluttering, the high camera angle reducing me to one of Charlie Brown’s big-headed sidekicks.
Suddenly my peeling nose was bigger than life in front of me. I looked into the camera the way a baby does, as if I didn’t realize it was really on
me
, which was the truth.
“Little Miles O’Malley says the squid was
alive
when he happened upon it in the dark early this morning,” the TV said. “
If so
, this would be among the first and only times
anyone
has seen a giant squid alive. Repeated efforts by marine scientists to study the elusive creatures in the wild have failed.”
Then I stared straight out of our TV at myself. “It was breathing,” I said, as if describing my run-in with an alien. The camera zoomed in on one of the squid’s eyes before fading to the studio where a cheerful lady gushed, “Wow! Miles will never forget that!”
The weatherman, who’d mastered the ability to simultaneously smile and speak, promised his forecast was next, then stranded me with a commercial that left me with the confusing impression that waterskiing was somehow safer and more fun with Tampax. I waited for the phone to bark, the door to collapse, the house to be surrounded by hecklers. But nothing happened.
Once my pulse slowed, I felt relieved that they hadn’t shown me saying the earth was trying to “tell us something.” Then it hit me:
I was on television!
So what if I looked like a mumbling dwarf! Then I panicked again, dwelling on their choice of words.
If so
. . . In other words, this Miles O’Malley is an unreliable child who claims he saw the squid alive.
If so
was code for
we all know this kid was lying or imagining things
. I wondered again if I’d really heard it breathing at all. The evidence would be there in Professor Kramer’s report, wouldn’t it? Then what would happen? I’d be sent to a reformatory school for liars—that’s what.
My parents didn’t see the five o’clock news, but they heard about it and huddled around the television at five before eleven with their late dinner of leftover tuna loaf and brass-colored cocktails.
They were so startled by the attention their boy was getting that they didn’t even question my lie that the squid’s death moans pulled me from bed. Dad, however, made sure I understood—while showing me a mouthful of ground tuna—how easy it was to get stuck in the mud, something he knew nothing about. That’s what parenting looked like to me then, tuning in just often enough to warn your kids about things that they knew more about than you did. Mom scolded me for wearing the same green army shorts
evey damn day
, then cut me a half-smile the way she did right before she’d say she had no idea where I came from, which always left me wondering, if not from you, then who?
They didn’t ask a single question about the squid. They simply couldn’t get past their amazement that I was on the same segment with the judge, as if there’d been some sort of mistaken-identity screwup.
As expected, my father eventually dwelled on how tiny I looked on TV. It was obvious where he was headed, seeing how, unfortunately, it was the first of July. He asked me to slip off my shoes and stand in front of the broom closet. As usual, I started to sweat. Most kids were measured a few times a year. For me, it was the first of every month.
My father was obsessed with height. He was five five and wished he were six one, preferably six four. He was so height-oriented he respected people just for being tall, as if their elevation were some refinement or survival skill he lacked. It wasn’t just the crap that women crave tall men. He was convinced people listen more carefully if you’re tall, that tall men get better jobs, better pay and loom over crowds like gods. Plus, tall men dunk basketballs, and what could possibly top that?
You need to understand this about me: I loved being small and
undanged
. (My fifth-, sixth- and seventh-grade pictures were nearly identical.) Tall kids stepped into rooms and people expected them to deliver speeches. I could hide in daylight, and there were advantages to having my brain so close to my feet. I could scramble up trees and jump off low roofs. I was so small there was little that could go wrong. The only catch was I felt guilty for stunting my own growth after reading that kids grow the most in their sleep.
I fluffed my hair and stood so straight I felt vertebrae separating. I lifted my chin and snuck undetectable air beneath my heels. If my father could scratch a pencil line a quarter-inch above the last one it spun him into such a great mood that the house throbbed with his goodwill; the tuna was awesome, my mother was gorgeous and I was the perfect kid. But on this night he argued gently with my mother over whether the hardback balancing on my skull was level, then darkened the pencil line from the prior month, leading to a final wince and bourbon-tuna exhale. I’d grown just a third of an inch during the prior thirteen months. I was stuck at four eight and seven-sixteenths.
I later overheard them debating which side of the family deserved credit for my brains, singling out smart uncles, cousins and grandmas. At one point, Dad observed, “He’s always been really smart for his size.” Then my mother reminded him for the second time that week that she’d been on her way to med school before she’d
inexplicably
hitched up with him.
I’d seen it building inside her, this troubling investigation into the sequence of events that stranded her in a tiny, stilted house with an unambitious baseball fanatic who still barhopped with his high school pals—the three Dons—and cried during Academy Awards speeches. (My mother had little use for sentimentality. Our family photos stayed in shoe boxes, and Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy stopped showing up once I turned seven.) Maybe, I thought, her
pathetic
job at the state personnel department was what disappointed her most.
Or maybe it was me.
My father treated her increasingly frequent rants as comical interludes. And she could be funny in a breathless, sarcastic way, but it was easy to sort the humor from the anger. She talked faster and her lips paled whenever she was furious.
The truth is my father saw what he wanted to see, and if he could find a way around a showdown he’d take it. I rarely heard him state an opinion or suggestion that led to an argument. There was a hesitancy about him that snowballed around my mother. He started watching Mariners games with the sound off so they wouldn’t annoy her. He’d stand behind the couch, with an aluminum bat in his hands, sizing up the pitcher. Then he’d swing as the tiny ball darted across our twenty-one-inch screen, or rather he’d check-swing or half-swing, unsure to the end whether to commit.
The tide was all the way out again, and the flats stunk in a way that always made me uneasy. My mother hated our house; the winter mold, the fall spiders and, worst of all, the summer stink of the flats whenever sun-rotted seaweed drummed up too much hydrogen sulfide, which probably explained my nightmares in which the tide stayed out for days until every living creature on the flats baked, died and stank in the heat, driving my mother to scream that we needed to move.
