I headed back to the dinette table to get a start on the sand evidence but I was interrupted by a knock at the door, the door that led to the motel parking lot.
I opened the door and found Doug Tolliver looking grim as the sea.
***
Tolliver said, “Got a call from Jorge at Morro Marine half an hour ago.”
We invited him inside.
“No time,” he said. “I'd like you to come with me—we've got another one.”
Walter moved to the kitchen counter to pick up the car keys.
“I’ll drive.” Tolliver shot a look at the grease-stained bag sitting near the keys. “Don’t even think about bringing those donuts in my car. Fair warning—I’m a neatnik.”
CHAPTER 3
It was a modest boat with a squat cabin up front and an open deck behind, a boat that sat its passengers down low to the water. Maybe that’s why it was named Sea Spray.
I couldn't get a close look at the stern rub rail but, as Captain Sandy Keasling was saying, the scrapes weren't going anywhere. She was. She had a boatload of paying passengers and should have been at sea five minutes ago.
Tolliver was unmoved. “I understand you found the spots this morning, Sandy.”
“Yep. And then I called Jorge and made an appointment to get a new rail installed. This weekend. Your friends can check it out then.”
“My consultants need to see it sooner.”
“Christ Doug, I’ve got a schedule to keep. How about the end of the day?”
“They’re here now.”
A deckhand on the boat yelled for Keasling. She shouted back, “Two minutes.”
The Sea Spray was docked in the narrow channel we’d seen yesterday afternoon. This morning’s fog was thin enough that I could get the lay of the land. The channel was narrow, littered with boats at anchor, squeezed between the waterfront and the long sandspit across from the docks. Southward, the sandspit grew into giant dunes and the channel swelled into a full-grown bay. Northward, the channel led to the mouth of the harbor and then out to sea.
Captain Keasling looked at her watch.
Walter spoke. “Do you know when the damage occurred?”
“No idea,” she said. “I was tightening a loose screw on the dive platform and saw the spots up on the rail. Wouldn’t have noticed them otherwise.”
I asked, “Have you noticed any unusual...turbulence...out there?”
She yanked down her ball cap, bushing out blond hair that had the orange tint of a bad dye job. Popeye the Sailor Man was stitched on the ball cap. “It’s the ocean.”
Tolliver asked, “You follow the same route every trip, Sandy?”
“More or less. I head for where the whales are reported.”
“Any chance you went out Saturday night?”
“Can’t see whales at night, Doug. It’s a daytime gig.”
“I didn’t ask if you went night whale-watching.”
She held Tolliver’s look. “I don’t go out at night. Period.”
“You and Robbie Donie have any disagreements recently?”
“Not since we were kids.”
“Come on, Sandy.”
“Doug, you’re not seriously asking if I had anything to do with Robbie going missing.”
“I’m asking if you two clashed recently.”
“We don’t socialize.”
“Come on, Sandy. You share the same waterfront. You run across one another.”
“Like ships passing in the night.” She gave Tolliver a dolphin smile.
“Sandy, my folks need to see those spots on your boat.”
She glanced at the boat, at the deckhand glued to the rail, at the passengers shifting, rising. She turned back to Tolliver. “How about this—I got an afternoon trip but I’ll give your folks the two hours in between. That do it?”
Tolliver looked to Walter and me.
We nodded. Good enough.
Tolliver considered. “Sandy, your normal route goes out to Birdshit Rock, that right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So the Outcast and the Sea Spray both got dinged on something and since you say you’ve only been running your normal route, might be worth my geologists’ while to come along and see if there’s something on that shallow reef around Birdshit that’s dinging up boats.”
She stared.
“Since we have a couple of hours to kill,” Tolliver added.
She shrugged. “Twenty bucks a ticket. Your money.” She jerked a thumb at the little kiosk office and went aboard her boat.
“What do you think?” Tolliver asked Walter and me.
Made sense.
We rushed to buy tickets.
***
So we were going whale watching.
Walter grew a smile.
I got a Dramamine from the heavyset man on the bench seat next to me.
As we waited for Keasling to do whatever she did in the wheelhouse, I glanced at the next dock over, at the rack of bright-colored kayaks. That was my kind of boat.
The kayak shop proprietor—Captain Kayak, as the sign on his little office advertised—was stacking paddles. Despite the chill morning fog, he wore flip-flops and shorts and T-shirt and his arms and legs were sun-browned and lean, muscles corded like ropes. The main event, though, was his hair, which spiked up high and was colored deep green. He caught me staring. He stared back. He stood like a statue, a bronzed waterman with kelp-green hair showing the whale watchers just what he thought of us. Not much, it seemed. And then he scooped up a can that was sitting on top of a bucket and lifted it in a salute. Bud Light.
Nine o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud.
“Welcome aboard!” Captain Keasling came out of the wheelhouse. She had a voice that needed no amplification. “If you’re here to go see whales, be advised we’ve got some bird watchers with us and so we’ll be spending some extra time where the birds like to hang out. The bird watchers are paying the same as you whale people so we’re gonna set a course to satisfy all the paying customers. Any problems with that, talk to the deckhand. My name is Sandy Keasling and I’m your captain and I’ve got a course to steer. That’s why I’m at the pointy end of the boat.”
The German-speaking couple on the bench opposite us spoke to the deckhand.
The deckhand hurried to the captain. She leaned in close to listen. She was taller, big-boned, seaworthy-looking in her black fleece pants and cobalt blue windbreaker. The deckhand, a slight young man, looked as though he’d blow away in a strong wind. But he dressed in seaworthy black-and-blue like his captain and stood the slightly swaying deck with ease. Instead of a Popeye ball cap he wore a red knit beanie.
Captain Keasling straightened and addressed us again. “My associate here implores you all to have faith. Everybody gonna be happy. Birds! Whales! Trip of a lifetime!” She went into the cabin and took her captain’s chair.
The German couple settled back in.
The deckhand cast off the mooring lines.
The engine grumbled and we pulled away from the dock.
The green-haired man on the next dock watched us go.
The Sea Spray chugged out into the channel, threading between pretty boats at anchor and docks jutting from the shop-and-restaurant-lined shore. We passed a large wharf and the boats tied up there were not pretty but big muscular working vessels with winches and nets and cables, full of men and women in slick suits tending to business. The last pier we passed was marked Harbor Patrol.
Robbie Donie’s Outcast no longer sat at the end of the pier.
Tolliver noticed me noticing. “Already moved her.”
The Sea Spray turned left, following the bend in the channel toward the mouth of the harbor, and Captain Keasling’s voice boomed out, “You bird watchers watch for peregrine falcons nesting over there on Morro Rock.”
I saw no falcons but the giant rock held my eye. I’d glimpsed its fog-shrouded shape yesterday from the Harbor Patrol pier. Today, the shroud had thinned to a filmy veil and I
could see more of the geology. The Rock hulked up at least five hundred feet like a sentinel guarding the harbor, waves crashing its seaward side. It was as chasmed and weathered as Walter’s face. “Rhyodacite?” I hazarded.
Walter nodded. “Volcanic plug.”
Tolliver said, “Postcard landmark.”
Completing the postcard was a pocket beach at the foot of Morro Rock, on the sheltered harbor side. A hardy swimmer braved the water.
I shivered.
We passed through the channel that squeezed between Morro Rock and the sandspit. The water, which had been nearly flat inside the protected harbor, now showed off its oceanic DNA. It turned blue-gray, undulating in the fog. It swelled and troughed and our captain gunned her engine and the Sea Spray leapt ahead like a child at play.
Tolliver headed to the wheelhouse to check the captain’s GPS track log.
“How’s your stomach?” Walter asked.
I flipped a hand.
Ahead, a flock of soot-black birds took off from the water, long necks stretched like arrows. A tiny gray-haired woman called out “cormorant!” and her companion bent his gray head to mark his notebook. The boat slowed almost to a stop as the cormorants rose in slick formation. And then another bird pierced the fog, gawky, huge pouched beak leading like a probe.
The deckhand pointed. “Pelican!”
“Thanks, hawkeye,” the heavyset man next to me said. He held up his notebook. “Now show me something I haven’t seen.”
I said, “You’re a bird watcher? It’s a bird. It’s endearing. What’s not to like?”
The deckhand cast me a shy smile. He approached, hesitated, then said, “I know a poem.” He cleared his throat. “A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill will hold more than his belly can. He can take...take...” He halted, glancing uneasily at the heavyset man.
Walter took up the rhyme. “He can take in his beak, food enough for a week, but I’m damned if I see how the hell-he-can.”
The deckhand said, “That’s it! You know it!”
“I know a few poems.” Walter smiled.
I said, “It's a great poem.”
The deckhand beamed. His wide smile and large brown eyes dominated a thin face. He pulled off his red beanie and bobbed his head. His hair was a close-cropped cap, brown and sleek as a seal’s.
“Lanny.” Captain Keasling approached. “I need you on watch. Go find us some whales.”
The deckhand—Lanny—put his beanie back on and whispered to me, “She lets me drive sometimes but now I’m a whale spotter.” He headed for an empty place at the railing.
Keasling eyed us. “My boatman bother you?”
“No,” I said, surprised, “he’s sweet.”
“Candy’s sweet,” she said, and headed back to the pointy end of the boat.
I wasn’t sure I caught her drift. Had I just been reprimanded? For what? Maybe it was some reverse macho thing—female boat captain has to be tough and the last thing she needs is a ‘sweet’ boatman. Or maybe she was still chafed about fitting Walter and me into her schedule. About Tolliver’s questions.
Walter said, “Nothing wrong with candy.”
The birds disappeared and the passengers settled back and the Sea Spray accelerated again.
I stuck my face into the fog, gazing out at the horizonless sea. The water was glassy gray and I watched, like Lanny, for whales, but the longer I looked the more my eyes played tricks on me, conjuring shapes that melted upon a second look. There were shadowy underwater patches several dozen yards away that could have been kelp, swaying in the currents. I had no idea where we were or what was beneath us but if this was the normal course—more or less—then it was not out of the question that Robbie Donie had steered the Outcast along this route, out to the shallow reef Tolliver had in mind. And if this was the route both boats took when they got dinged, the next question was when? Were they both out in the same patch of water, at the same time? Sometime last Saturday night? In which case, Captain Keasling had lied. In which case, maybe she was an accomplice to a hotshot sport fisher. Or, she was out there for some other reason and found Donie in distress and rescued him. In which case, what did she do with him? Or, she was out in that patch of water another time entirely and whatever dinged Donie’s boat dinged hers. In which case, the phenomenon repeated itself.
I felt a little sick.
The fog thickened. I had to wipe drops of condensation from my eyelashes.
I wondered what it was like to come out here at night—in blackness instead of featureless gray—and fish for huge predators with tentacles. I wondered if Robbie Donie was predator, or prey.
“Whale!”
I looked—the entire boatload of heads turned—to Lanny at the railing near the bow. He jabbed his finger like a jackhammer, then turned to the cabin and shouted, “Sandy! Whale!”
The Sea Spray swerved and slowed and then the engine choked off and the boat nosed down into a drift.
I got on my knees on the bench and faced fully to sea. As if I’d purchased it along with my ticket, excitement stirred. Passengers shifted to the whale side to crowd the rail. Even Doug Tolliver came out of the wheelhouse to have a look.
“See it?” Walter whispered, as though afraid to spook it.
I held my breath. A mountain of humped barnacle-dotted whale rode the water, and then it coolly tipped beneath the surface, flipping its wide tail at the sky. It disappeared. I hoped it would resurface.
The boat rocked gently in the water.
Sweat suddenly bloomed on my forehead. I rocked. The remains of breakfast soured my stomach.
And now the whale did resurface, closer, spouting a mix of ocean spray and oily fish-gut breath.
The stench unmoored me. I slumped over the rail and vomited.
Walter patted my shoulder.
I straightened, slightly less nauseated and monumentally embarrassed.
And then Lanny the boatman was at my side, tugging my arm, and when I turned he pulled a sad face. He carried a blue nylon duffel bag with Sea Spray emblazoned across the top. He unzipped the bag, took out a jar, opened it, thrust it at me. The jar held greenish seeds.
“That’s fennel,” he said. “That will help you. You need to chew them up. Do you want to try?”
Anything. I fished out several seeds and put them in my mouth. Chewed. The taste was licorice. It was good on my tongue. It masked the taste of bile and that unfortunate Mexican omelet. Lanny watched me closely. I took more seeds and managed a smile.
“I collect them myself.” His voice was reedy, pleasing. “I always bring fennel because if people get sick I can help them.”
I swallowed. “You helped. Thanks. I’m feeling better.” I was, a little.
He beamed.
“Big whoop folks,” Captain Keasling’s voice bullhorned, “whale’s gone, show’s over. Now we’re gonna hightail it over to a spot where birds like to hang out so our feather watchers can get their money’s worth. A regular bird convention, you all gonna love it. Those of you on board to see the wildlife.”
She was staring across the boat directly at Lanny and me. I thought, she should be grateful not to have me fouling her deck. A good deed was done here. Real sweet. I returned the jar to Lanny and gave a nod to Captain Keasling.
I get it. I’m not on board to see the wildlife. What do you think I’m going to see?
As we motored through the fog toward the bird convention, my gut steadied and I blessed Lanny a thousand times. I found a rhythm. Stare out at the place where the fog shifted from gray to grayer, call it the horizon, and when my inner ear grew unhappy with that view, look in the other direction. Suck in salty air, pick up lingering taste of fennel, swallow. Repeat.
We saw no more whales but we cut across the path of a large ghostly jellyfish, pearly white and striped with deep purple, its tentacles trailing like the train of a tattered wedding dress, ethereal and beautiful, drawing ooohs and ahhhs from whale watchers and bird watchers alike.
My mind drifted, l
ike the jellyfish.
After a time, I became lost in time and space and did not have to think.
After a time, the water changed. The sea lost is glassy sheen. It began to pucker and riffle and agitate.
We heard them before we saw them. Raucous, shrieking, wings pounding like rain.
And then we penetrated a fog curtain and passed from grayer to less gray, and it was like passing from serenity into a place where life boiled up out of the sea and down from the sky and met in anarchy.
CHAPTER 4
A buzz ran through the Sea Spray, a heady feeling like we had entered a secret place.
Looming up from the sea a few dozen yards from us was a large flat-topped rock, its character screened by fog and swirling birds. Birdshit Rock, I gathered. Birds everywhere, over the rock, over the sea. This was surely the bird convention but it was not what I’d expected, it was somehow set apart from the surrounding ocean. It was somehow off.
I said, to Walter, “Is this right?”
He didn’t answer. He was watching the sky.
The sky was ferocious with birds. Birds swarming, near-colliding, like street gangs jostling for turf. Birds in flocks and lone-ranger birds. Big birds and huge birds. A pelican folded its wings and pointed its beak downward and kamikazied into the water. And then another. And other species, spiraling and diving, bellied down upon the creatures in the sea.
The bird watchers shouted out names. Storm petrel! Sooty shearwater! Sabine’s gull! Black-footed albatross!
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