The Highest Tide (7 page)
Phelps groaned. “Except for that stuff about the barnacle peckers that was some of the boringest shit I’ve heard since school got out.”
I couldn’t even look at him.
“Cheer up,” he said. “I brought some real entertainment.” He pulled a brittle copy of
The God father
from his backpack and started reading some scene that began on page twenty-seven—he knew the sexy page numbers by heart—in which some imaginary woman described how
big
this imaginary Sonny was to her friends, then suddenly Huge Imaginary Sonny was having his way with one of those imaginary friends, fast and rough, with no more romantic conversation than strangers at a Laundromat.
Something about it made me feel defensive, as did most of the crap I heard directly or indirectly about what girls wanted.
Tall, dark and handsome?
I was short, pink and ordinary. My size, I was beginning to fear, put me on the outside of romance, like a frog who couldn’t croak loud enough to attract a female.
“How ‘bout them apples?” Phelps threw his entire face into a leer.
“You would like that,” I muttered. “Bigger is better. Might is right. All that crap. That’s so you.”
His mouth fell open. “Crap? Are you doubting Mario Puzo?”
“You’re in love with Mario Puzo,” I snapped.
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Just because you read someone’s made-up sex lies doesn’t make you an expert on love.” I instantly regretted my choice of words.
“
Love?
” Phelps cried. “Who’s talking love? What do you think love is anyway, Squid Boy?”
“Love means you’d do almost anything for someone even if you knew you’d get nothing in return.” I couldn’t stop myself. I’d been thinking about rescuing Angie again, and for some reason I was furious. “You’d even do it anonymously!”
Phelps looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “That is so fucked up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Love isn’t charity. Love is doing fun stuff for each other. You bring her flowers and she takes off her shirt. Stuff like that.”
“What’s the difference,” I demanded, “between that and going to Seattle and paying a prostitute to let you feel her up?’’
That stopped him. “You’d be paying someone you don’t even know,” he said finally. “Plus, it would be more expensive and not as fun.”
“So, love is affordable, fun sex with someone you know?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re sick.”
“Me? I’m not the one who was caught French-kissing chocolate Labs.”
“You’re fired,” I said, walking away.
He laughed. “On what grounds?”
“Being a jerk,” I shouted over my shoulder.
“You know that’s not a
fireable ofense
.”
Phelps followed me into the water, chatting away, trying to reel me back. I wouldn’t give him anything, even though I was dying to ask him how much warning he’d had before his parents got divorced, and how long he’d lived in that apartment before his mother married his stepdad, and, most importantly, how much say he’d had in picking his stepdad or their next house.
But I still couldn’t even look at him. It’s hard to see anything when you’re that angry, which is probably why it took a giant sea cucumber lounging in a foot of water to get my attention.
It wasn’t fair to the cucumber or Phelps what happened next, but who’s any good at defending decisions they make when they’re pissed?
“The hell is that?” he asked.
It was at least sixteen inches long and red enough to sell to the aquariums. But I wasn’t thinking about money.
I held it evenly and gently at my waist with both hands until Phelps reached for it. I handed it to him gingerly and stepped back.
He studied it intently, trying to patch things up with me. When he turned it lengthwise and looked down into its flowering end it ejected its red, stringy innards with such force they splattered against the right side of his head.
From where I stood it looked like half of Phelps’s face had been shot off. He didn’t make a sound. He just one-eyed me in total astonishment.
I took the deflated animal from his long fingers and set it back into the bay to recuperate, then yanked off my shirt and handed it to him.
“You knew that would happen.” He wiped his face and splashed it repeatedly.
When frightened, sea cucumbers have this strange ability to vomit their organs, then amazingly and quickly regrow them once they’re out of danger. I’d never actually seen them do it, but I’d read about it and had my hopes.
He continued splashing his face. As the water settled beneath him I felt relief at the sight of his reflected smile.
Calm open water amplifies voices. Quiet conversations are overheard a hundred yards away. So it’s safe to say that you probably could have heard our laughter from a couple miles.
T
HE NIGHT OF
July seventeenth was attached to one of those forgettable summer days when everyone is so slowed and dazed by heat it seems nothing memorable is capable of happening other than a sunset that turns as purple as the inside of a mussel shell.
Shoreside temperatures along South Sound usually swing between forty and sixty degrees, with summer offering more of the same until it suddenly broils into the eighties and nineties for a few weeks, the aggressive heat feeling like a fabulous mistake, as if tropical weather had been sent to the wrong zip code. When the sun sets, though, the temperature falls with it the way it does in the mountains, but in this case it’s the ocean, not the altitude, chilling the air. Any breeze blowing off the north Pacific is refrigerated by cold deep water unless the sun is around to bake it. So T-shirt nights are as novel as blizzards to kids growing up along the Sound. And this was one of those nights, with the added attraction that every paddle stroke lit up the water like a wet torch.
Phosphorescent nights turn paddles into magic wands and children into wizards. I indulged the fantasy for years until Professor Kramer made it even richer by explaining what was really going on. During certain plankton blooms the bay gets so dense with luminescent plants and animals the size of dust motes and smaller that they slam into each other and light up whenever the water stirs. Such nights often go unnoticed in calm inland waters, but they’re hard to miss on the coast when waves light up as they crash ashore. The professor’s explanation helped me understand how much denser life is in the sea than the air, as did learning that hundred-foot blue whales survive on rice-sized shrimplike krill, which if you think about it, is like elephants living on gnats.
So the heat wave and the phosphorescence pulled me onto the bay, and I didn’t bring bags or a shovel because I wasn’t looking for anything beyond my flashing paddle and whatever else flickered in the quietest hours. I sat too low to see much beyond the light I created and the flash of fish darting past like shooting stars, but the luminous thrashing off Penrose Point was dramatic enough to pull me off course.
I assumed it was the work of a playful seal or wrestling birds, yet it seemed too intense for them to sustain. It went on for so long that I had time to paddle a quarter mile to take a look. I slowed as I neared, not wanting to get all the way up on something so frenzied before I knew what it was. When I got as close as I dared, I flicked on my headlamp—the batteries were fading—and felt as if I’d paddled into one of those old seafaring yarns in which captains swore they saw multiarmed monsters writhing on the surface.
I coasted closer without meaning to and the bright tumult—about six feet across—went from looking like a glow-in-the-dark octopus to something that slowly made sense. I’d read how worms occasionally mate in surface swarms, but I never imagined so many, nor worms so large. They were still twenty feet away, but I was close enough to count at least ten, their bodies blue and green and almost two feet long. And that’s the last I saw of those horny phosphorescent worms because the thought of one of them wiggling into my kayak inspired a flurry of short, frantic strokes that pulled me toward the unbroken shoreline belonging to Evergreen.
The only hint that there was a college nearby was the nude beach that spilled out beneath a curtain of tall firs. I’d rarely seen more than bearded, tattooed men looking like they’d lost their bathrobes, but the occasional oddly shaped woman was enough to lure me back—even at night. I paddled close enough to make out crumpled jeans and a half-empty pint of something clear. I looked eagerly up the beach, my heart still galloping from the worms, hoping for a moonlit glimpse of naked women playfully drunk at four in the morning.
I glided as high as the tide would allow without risking running aground or slamming into boulders or stumps that had washed up or tumbled down the hillside, my eyes straining, until I saw something rocking along the water’s lacy edge.
My first hope, of course, was entangled lovers, but whatever it was looked too long and bulky, even for a large couple. The closer I got the more it resembled a harbor seal, yet it was still too long. So I assumed it was a sea lion, but I knew they weren’t fond of muddy South Sound, and it wasn’t
that
big. I beached the kayak, stretched my legs, then trudged toward whatever it was.
The lapping tide gave it the illusion of life, but the creature already stunk. It was at least nine feet long, and had the girth, but none of the grace, of a tuna. It had fins, but no scales. It wasn’t a seal, porpoise, dolphin, sea lion or baby whale. The more I examined it the more prehistoric it looked, its chocolate-brown skin scarred and lashed as if it had been sideswiped by tugboats or dragged across broken glass. It also had a peculiar arc of circular welts across its side that I realized, with a jolt, were about the same size as the smaller suckers on the arms of that giant squid.
I removed my bow line, wrapped it around the fish’s tail and tied the line to a stranded stump that I hoped wouldn’t float away at high tide. Then I paddled hard toward home, imagining Angie watching from above as I blazed diagonally across the black bay like a phosphorescent fuse, trylng so hard to impress that girl my arms were sore for days.
This time it was just Professor Kramer and a state biologist. At first, I feared I’d called in a nonevent, but the way the two men glanced at that fish and each other told me it wasn’t a trivial discovery to either of them.
The professor’s first priority, however, was to lecture me on the dangers of boating alone at night. He inspected my ragged life vest, clucked his tongue, then examined my kayak.
My father had made me stack it broadside across our beach for a whole month after a storm magically delivered it to me. That was almost a year ago, but I still wasn’t past the fear that at any moment someone might claim it.
“You go everywhere in this?” he asked. I could tell that to him it looked like fourteen feet of cheap, battered plastic.
“It doesn’t leak at all,” I said defensively. “And it’s never flipped. It’s perfect . . . for me.”
The professor mumbled something that had the word
careful
in it, then rejoined the biologist in examining the fish. I didn’t interrupt to rave about the phosphorescent worms or ask about the squid. I simply waited for a moment to point out the welts.
The biologist eyed the fish through thick glasses that magnified his astonishment, then repeatedly glanced at the professor, checking to see if they were seeing the same things. That’s the way those guys played it. They didn’t share their thoughts aloud until they finished measuring, classifying, sketching and muttering technical terms.
Icosteus aenigmaticus
, in this case, which meant
soft-boned enigma
. I suspected it was a bottom fish. What I didn’t know was that, like the giant squid, it was yet another secret from the abyss usually only found in the bellies of sperm whales. And yes, the men slowly, reluctantly acknowledged the obvious, that the grouped circular welts along its flanks sure looked to be of the same size and pattern as the giant squid’s suckers.
“Good God,” the professor groaned. “What in God’s name is this ragfish doing
here?
”
The startling thing about that question was he didn’t look at the state guy when he asked it. “Do you think they were fighting all the way down the Sound?” he asked. “Good God, Miles.”
I started tingling. His words put the giant squid in motion for me, wielding its tentacles like long sticky whips as it battled this strange bottom fish, the two of them tumbling from the deep into the Sound, dueling toward shallow water, confusion, exhaustion and death.
“Good God,” Professor Kramer said again. It was one thing for me to be startled, but the professor had seen and read everything, and he was at such a loss he was throwing God into the equation.
That was probably the moment when I started to secretly wonder whether I was being used as a messenger of sorts. Maybe Florence was right, I thought, about me being put here to do something big.
All that self-grandeur over finding a couple dead animals may sound childish and delusional, but you weren’t the thirteen-year-old standing out there on that freakishly warm phosphorescent night with those two overgrown scientists exchanging spooked and excited glances, their flashlights winking off that fish, making it look even more unworldly than it ever would in daylight, as if it were some relic the ocean had spat up to remind us how little we know.
Even the noisy half-dressed college lovers that stumbled upon the three of us couldn’t get their minds around that fish well enough to speak.
A
REPORTER CALLED
the next day to ask if she could talk to me about the
unusual
fish that had been hauled away that morning to the same university lab where Professor Kramer and other scientists were still examining that dang squid.
When I opened the door, a tall angular lady with a camera strapped diagonally between her breasts looked down and asked me if Miles O’Malley was home. She couldn’t hide her delight when I told her she was looking at him. It fell out in a half-laugh.
“You were the one who found the ratfish?”
“
Rag
fish.”
