“They serve drugs without a license,” he told me. “No inspection. If you like the stuff, you have no guarantee you won’t be served some crap the village idiot cooks up in an outhouse.”
“Then I’ll stick to beer. Still like to see the place.”
He shrugged.
“Not that much to look at. But here—”
He wiped his hands, tore an old leaf from the back of the wall calendar, and sketched me a quick map. I saw that it was a bit inland, toward the birds and mangroves, muck and mahogany. It was also somewhat to the south of the place I had been the previous evening. It was located on a stream, built up on pilings out over the water, he said, and I could take a boat right up to the pier that adjoined it.
“Think I’ll go over tonight,” I said.
“Remember what I said.”
I nodded as I tucked away the map.
The afternoon passed quickly. There came a massing of clouds, a brief rainfall—about a quarter-hour’s worth—and then the sun returned to dry the decks and warm the just-rinsed world. Again, the workday ended early for me, by virtue of our having run out of business. I showered quickly, put on fresh clothes, and went to see about getting the use of a light boat.
Ronald Davies, a tall, thin-haired man with a New England accent, said I could take the speedboat called Isabella, complained about his arthritis, and told me to have a good time. I nodded, turned her toward Andros, and sputtered away, hoping the Chickcharny included food among its inducements, as I did not want to waste time by stopping elsewhere.
The sea was calm and the gulls dipped and pivoted, uttering hoarse cries, as I spread the wings of my wake across their preserve. I really had no idea what it was that I was going after. I did not like operating that way, but there was no alternative. I had no real line of attack. There was no handle on this one. I had determined, therefore, to simply amass as much information as I could as quickly as possible. Speed always seems particularly essential when I have no idea what it is that might be growing cold.
Andros enlarged before me. I took my bearings from the place we had eaten the previous evening, then sought the mouth of the stream Vallons had sketched for me.
It took me about ten minutes to locate it, and I throttled down and made my way slowly up its twisting course. Occasionally, I caught a glimpse of a rough roadway running along the bank to my left. The foliage grew denser, however, and I finally lost sight of it completely. Eventually, the boughs met overhead, locking me for several minutes into an alley of premature twilight, before the stream widened again, took me around a corner, and showed me the place as it had been described.
I headed to the pier, where several other boats were moored, tied up, climbed out, and looked around. The building to my right—the only building, outside of a small shed—did extend out over the water, was a wood-frame job, and was so patched that I doubted any of its original materials remained. There were half a dozen vehicles parked beside it, and a faded sign named the place the chickcharny. Looking to my left as I advanced, I could see that the road which had accompanied me was in better shape than I would have guessed.
Entering, I discovered a beautiful mahogany bar about fifteen feet ahead of me, looking as if it might have come from some ship. There were eight or ten tables here and there, several of them occupied, and a curtained doorway lay to the right of the bar. Someone had painted a crude halo of clouds above it.
I moved up to the bar, becoming its only occupant. The bartender, a fat man who had needed a shave yesterday as well as the day before, put down his newspaper and came over.
“What’ll it be?”
“Give me a beer,” I said. “And can I get something to eat?”
“Wait a minute.”
He moved farther down, checked a small refrigerator. “Fish-salad sandwich?” he said.
“Okay.”
“Good. Because that’s all we’ve got.”
He put it together, brought it over, drew me my beer.
“That was your boat I heard, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“Vacationing?”
“No. I just started work over at Station One.”
“Oh. Diver?”
“Yes.”
He sighed.
“You’re Mike Thornley’s replacement, then. Poor guy.”
I prefer the word “successor” to “replacement” in these situations, because it makes people seem less like sparkplugs. But I nodded.
“Yeah, I heard all about it,” I said. “Too bad.”
“He used to come here a lot.”
“I heard that, too—and that the guy he was with worked here.”
He nodded.
“Rudy. Rudy Myers,” he said. “Worked here a couple years.”
“They were pretty good friends, huh?”
He shook his head.
“Not especially,” he said. “They just knew each other. Rudy worked in back.” He glanced at the curtain. “You know.”
I nodded.
“Chief guide, high medical officer, and head bottle washer,” he said, with rehearsed levity. “You interested…?”
“What’s the specialty of the house?”
“Pink Paradise,” he said. “It’s nice.”
“What’s it got?”
“Bit of a drift, bit of an up, the pretty lights.”
“Maybe next time,” I said. “Did he and Rudy go swimming together often?”
“No, that was the only time. You worried?”
“I am not exactly happy about it. When I took this job nobody told me I might get eaten. Did Mike ever sav anything about unusual marine activity or anything like that?”
“No, not that I can recall.”
“What about Rudy? Did he like the water?”
He peered at me, working at the beginnings of a frown.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because it occurs to me that it might make a difference. If he was interested in things like that and Mike came across something unusual, he might take him out to see it.”
“Like what?”
“Beats the hell out of me. But if he found something and it was dangerous, I’d like to know about it.”
The frown went away.
“No,” he said. “Rudy wouldn’t have been interested. He wouldn’t have walked outside to look if the Loch Ness monster was swimming by.”
“Wonder why he went, then?”
He shrugged.
“I have no idea.”
I had a hunch that if I asked him anything else I just might ruin our beautiful rapport. So I ate up, drank up, paid up, and left.
I followed the stream out to the open water again and ran south along the coast. Deems had said it was about four miles that way, figuring from the restaurant, and that it was a long, low building right on the water. All right. I hoped she had returned from that trip Don had mentioned. The worst she could do was tell me to go away. But she knew an awful lot that might he worth hearing. She knew the area and she knew dolphins. I wanted her opinion, if she had one.
There was still a lot of daylight left in the sky, though the air seemed to have cooled a bit, when I spotted a small cove at about the proper distance, throttled down, and swung toward it. Yes, there was the place, partway back and to the left, built against a steep rise and sporting a front deck that projected out over the water. Several boats, one of them a sailboat, rode at rest at its side, sheltered by the long, white curve of a breakwater.
I headed in, continuing to slow, and made my way around the inward point of the breakwall. I saw her sitting on the pier, and she saw me and reached for something. Then she was lost to sight above me as I pulled into the lee of the structure. I killed my engine and tied up to the handiest piling, wondering each moment whether she would appear the next, boathook in hand, ready to repel invaders.
This did not happen, though, so I climbed out and onto a ramplike staging that led me topside. She was just finishing adjusting a long, flari
ng skirt, which must have been what she had been reaching after. She wore a bikini top, and she was seated on the deck itself, near to the edge, legs tucked out of sight beneath the green, white and blue print material. Her hair was long and very black, her eyes dark and large. Her features were regular, with a definite Oriental cast to them, of the sort I find exceedingly attractive. I paused at the top of the ramp, feeling immediately uncomfortable as I met her gaze.
“My name is Madison, James Madison,” I said. “I work out at Station One. I’m new there. May I come up for a minute?”
“You already have,” she said. Then she smiled, a tentative thing. “But you can come the rest of the way over and have your minute.”
So I did, and as I advanced she kept staring at me. It made me acutely self-conscious, a condition I thought I had mastered shortly after puberty, and as I was about to look away, she said, “Martha Millay—just to make it a full introduction,” and she smiled again.
“I’ve admired your work for a long while,” I said, “although that is only part of the reason I came by. I hoped you could help me to feel safer in my own work.”
“The killings,” she said.
“Yes. Exactly. Your opinion. I’d like it.”
“All right. You can have it,” she said. “But I was on Martinique at the time the killings occurred, and my intelligence comes only from the news reports and one phone conversation with a friend at the IDS. On the basis of years of acquaintanceship, years spent photographing them, playing with them, knowing them—loving them—I do not believe it possible that a dolphin would kill a human being. The notion runs contrary to all my experience. For some peculiar reason—perhaps some delphinic concept as to the brotherhood of self-conscious intelligence—we seem to be quite important to them, so important that I even believe one of them might rather die himself than see one of us killed.”
“So you would rule out even a self-defense killing bv a dolphin?”
“I think so,” she said, “although I have no facts to point at here. However, what is more important, in terms of your real question, is that they struck me as very undolphinlike killings.”
“How so?”
“I don’t see a dolphin as using his teeth in the way that was described. The way a dolphin is designed, his rostrum—or beak—contains a hundred teeth, and there are eighty-eight in his lower jaw. But if he gets into a fight with, say, a shark or a whale, he does not use them for purposes of biting or slashing. He locks them together, which provides a very rigid structure, and uses his lower jaw, which is considerably undershot, for purposes of ramming his opponent. The anterior of the skull is quite thick and the skull itself sufficiently large to absorb enormous shocks from blows administered in this fashion—and they are tremendous blows, for dolphins have very powerful neck muscles. They are quite capable of killing sharks by battering them to death. So even granting for the sake of argument that a dolphin might have done such a thing, he would not have bitten his victims. He would have bludgeoned them.”
“So why didn’t someone from the Dolphin Institute come out and say that?”
She sighed.
“They did. The news media didn’t even use the statement they gave them. Apparently nobody thought it an important enough story to warrant any sort of follow-up.”
She finally took her eyes off me and stared out over the water. Then, “I believe their indifference to the damage caused by running only the one story is more contemptible even than actual malice,” she finally said.
Acquitted for a moment by her gaze, I lowered myself to sit on the edge of the pier, my feet hanging down over the side. It had been an added discomfort to stand, staring down at her. I joined her in looking out across her harbor.
“Cigarette?” I said.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Mind if I do?”
“Go ahead.”
I lit one, drew on it, thought a moment, then asked, “Any idea as to how the deaths might have occurred?”
“It could have been a shark.”
“But there hasn’t been a shark in the area for years. The ‘walls’—”
She laughed.
“There are any number of ways a shark could have gotten in,” she said. “A shift on the bottom, opening a tunnel or crevice beneath the ‘wall.’ A temporary short circuit in one of the projectors that didn’t get noticed—or a continuing one, with a short somewhere in the monitoring system. For that matter, the frequencies used in the ‘wall’ are supposed to be extremely distressing to many varieties of marine life, but not necessarily fatal. While a shark would normally seek to avoid the ‘wall,’ one could have been driven, forced through by some disturbance, and then found itself trapped inside.”
“That’s a thought,” I said. “Yes…Thank you. You didn’t disappoint me.”
“I would have thought that I had.”
“Why?”
“All that I have done is try to vindicate the dolphins and show that there is possibly a shark inside. You said that you wanted me to tell you something that would make you feel safer in your work.”
I felt uncomfortable again. I had the sudden, irrational feeling that she somehow knew all about me and was playing games at that moment.
“You said that you are familiar with my work,” she said suddenly. “Does that include the two picture books on dolphins?”
“Yes. I enjoyed your text, too.”
“There wasn’t that much of it,” she said, “and it has been several years now. Perhaps it was too whimsical. It has been a long while since I’ve looked at the things I said…
“I thought them admirably suited to the subject—little Zen-like aphorisms for each photograph.”
“Can you recall any?”
“Yes,” I said, one suddenly coming to me, “I remember the shot of the leaping dolphin, where you caught his shadow over the water and had for a caption, ‘In the absence of reflection, what gods…’”
She chuckled briefly.
“For a long while I thought that that one was perhaps too cute. Later, though, as I got to know my subject better, I decided that it was not.”
“I have often wondered as to what sort of religion or religious feelings they might possess,” I said. “It has been a common element among all the tribes of man. It would seem that something along these lines appears whenever a certain level of intelligence is achieved, for purposes of dealing with those things that are still beyond its grasp. I am baffled as to the forms it might take among dolphins, but quite intrigued by the notion. You say you have some ideas on it?”
“I have done a lot of thinking as I watched them,” she said, “attempting to analyze their character in terms of their behavior, their physiology. Are you familiar with the writings of Johan Huizinga?”
“Faintly,” I said. “It has been years since I read Homo Ludens, and it struck me as a rough draft for something he never got to work out completely. But I recall his basic premise as being that culture begins as a sort of sublimation of a play instinct, elements of sacred performances and festal contests continuing for a time in the evolving institutions, perhaps always remaining present at some level—although his analysis stopped short of modern times.”
“Yes,” she said. “The play instinct. Watching them sport about, it has often seemed to me that as well adapted as they are to their environment, there was never a need for dolphins to evolve complex social institutions, so that whatever it was they did possess along those lines was much closer to the earlier situations considered by Huizinga—a life condition filled with an overt indulgence in their version of festal performances and contests.”
“A play-religion?”
“Not quite that simple, though I think that is part of the picture. The problem here lies in language. Huizinga employed the Latin word ludus for a reason. Unlike the Greek language, which had a variety of words for idling, for competing in contests, for passing the time in different fashions, Latin reflected the basic unity of all these things and
summarized them into a single concept by means of the word ludus. The dolphins’ distinctions between play and seriousness are obviously different from our own, just as ours are different from the Greeks’. In our understanding of the meaning of ludus, however, in our ability to realize that we may unify instances of activity from across a broad spectrum of behavior patterns by considering them as a form of play, we have a better basis for conjecture as well as interpretation.”
“And in this manner you have deduced their religion?”
“I haven’t, of course. I only have a few conjectures. You say you have none?”
“Well, if I had to guess, just to pull something out of the air, I would say some form of pantheism—perhaps something akin to the less contemplative forms of Buddhism.”
“Why ’less contemplative’?” she asked.
“All that activity,” I said. “They don’t even really sleep, do they? They have to get topside quite regularly in order to breathe. So they are always moving about. When would they be able to drift beneath the coral equivalent of a bo tree for any period of time?”
“What do you think your mind would be like if you never slept?”
“I find that rather difficult to conceive. But I imagine I would find it quite distressing after a while, unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless I indulged in periodic daydreaming, I suppose.”
“I think that might be the case with dolphins, although with a brain capacity such as they possess I do not feel it need necessarily be a periodic thing.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I think they are sufficiently endowed to do it simultaneously with other thinking, rather than serially.”
“You mean always dreaming a little? Taking their mental vacations, their reveries, sidewise in time as it were?”
“Yes. We do it too, to a limited extent. There is always a little background thinking, a little mental noise going on while we are dealing with whatever thoughts are most pressing in our consciousness. We learn to suppress it, calling this concentration. It is, in one sense, a process of keeping ourselves from dreaming.”
An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology Page 10
