The Highest Tide: A Novel

by Jim Lynch

  She looked to see if I was enjoying this. She’d definitely been crying. I glared at Frankie, and he smiled warmly back. He was such an effortless Marlboro man he made me feel like a circus midget.

  “You play?” she asked politely.

  “A little,” Phelps said.

  “Air guitar,” I clarified, mimicking his lip scowl and frantic fingering.

  “Fuck yourself, Miles. My brother has a Gibson,” he bragged. “An electric.”

  “He lets you play it?” she asked.

  “Not when he’s around.” Phelps smiled so broadly Angie laughed.

  “Help yourselves to the food,” she told us, “before the old folks gobble it all up.”

  I saw a crowd in sun hats, flowered dresses and slacks the color of Easter eggs. “I don’t think we’re dressed right.”

  She glanced at our mud-splattered shorts. “You’re perfect. It’s summertime.” She went back to rubbing Lizzy until the dog’s foot twitched like an outboard engine about to turn over.

  We strolled off, and when I looked back I caught Angie crying, which reminded me of what my mother had called her a month earlier when Angie waded bare-legged in front of our house. I was the only one who could see her tears, but before I could point them out my mother asked my father if he didn’t have anything better to do than ogle that crazy dundula. It was a word my Croatian grandmother passed down. I didn’t ask what it meant and I didn’t say anything to anyone a week later when I saw Angie pacing the crown of the Stegner roof, which was so steep slipping meant dying.

  I led Phelps toward the long white food table where people huddled around Judge Norman Stegner as if he were passing out money.

  “It’s my oyster man!” he announced once he spotted me.

  Gray heads spun—I heard gristle pop in some old neck—their eyes flailing above mine, then dropping to find me. Oyster man? The judge is such a kidder.

  I recognized one of them from the newspaper or television as the judge thrust his clean, strong hand at me.

  There was nothing imposing about Judge Stegner other than his voice. He was chinless and bird-chested with dull forgettable eyes and thin, seagull-white hair, but his voice made everyone else’s sound like a squeaky clarinet they were still learning how to play. I looked for Phelps, but he’d already abandoned me for food. The judge introduced me by my full name—just in case there were any Irish genealogy buffs in the mix—and explained that I oversaw the very oyster farm from which they were feasting.

  They hummed on cue, but that was just the setup for wherever he was headed. The judge was like that. He never rushed, but he was always going somewhere. “This is the young man who found the giant squid. Tell them, Miles.”

  I pointed to where it beached. “I heard it,” I said softly, “and went to see what it was.”

  “Speak up, Miles,” the judge boomed. “Just talk about it.”

  There was no quick way out. I widened my stance in the grass. “Well, I expected to find a sick whale or sea lion or something else stuck high on the mud.”

  One of the ladies blurted out that she’d seen me on television. It killed me to watch a deviled egg go in and out of her tiny mouth while she shared that.

  “It’s not as if things don’t get stranded down here,” I continued. “A minke and even a gray whale got confused once. The tide leaves pretty fast and goes all the way out. And to tell you the truth, I still wasn’t sure what it was when I got as close as I was willing to get, but then I saw the long tentacles with those big suckers and then that huge eye and I knew.”

  Goose bumps covered me—some stories tighten their hold on me the more I tell them—and the grown-ups leaned in, just in case this was all building to something remarkable they could share with their most interesting friends. I watched them clean their teeth with their tongues, their eyes on me as if I were an exotic discovery myself. A lady with a heavy gold necklace winced as though the subject burned her belly, but the judge beamed as if I were riding a unicycle. “You’re looking at the next Jacques Cousteau.” It sounded as irrefutable as any court order, and everyone marveled at the notion. Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become than what you are.

  “How big was the eye?” inquired a tall, crooked man, guiding a cracker between yellow teeth.

  “As big as your face,” I said.

  The man stopped chewing. Someone laughed, a lady tittered, then the judge described the morning media crush and his role as water taxi, historian and waiter, milking riotous laughter out of every inflated detail. I left the instant their eyes lost me, and found Phelps cross-legged in the grass with greasy lips, slogging through a mound of chicken wings.

  I grabbed some sourdough and four grilled oysters and handed Phelps a napkin, so I could stomach looking at him, then led him to the edge of the bay.

  “That Frankie Marx seems cool,” he said, watching me.

  “He’s a moron.” I shoved bread into my mouth. “There’s nothing real about him.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  His tone assured me I’d already blown my secret. I’d never wanted him to know the first thing about Angie. And I didn’t know what I’d do if he started boasting about how many bathrobes he could hang on her rack.

  I eyed the meandering line of flotsam left high on the sand from the last high tide. Professor Kramer knew people who studied tidal lines to forecast changes in ocean currents and sea life. I just saw it as the Sound’s equivalent of a lint catcher. From forty feet, I made out a spindled collection of seaweed, kelp, broken shells, seagull feathers, crab pinchers and salmon bones.

  I was finishing my third oyster when I saw Lizzy loose, sniffing along the waterfront on my folks’ property, which I assumed meant that Angie and Frankie were making out so dang hard they’d lost track of their dog. I figured Lizzy would go no farther than the city-owned blackberry tangle on the far side of our land. Not even cats ventured into that barbed jungle. The prickly vines were as fat as lamp poles and growing at a horror-movie pace. If I hadn’t kept snipping them back, they would’ve already overwhelmed the garage and barred my windows. I heard Lizzy bark, then saw her chase a truck on the stubby two-lane bridge the news vans clogged that morning when the squid showed up. The truck was hauling a white tool trailer that Lizzy apparently hadn’t noticed because after she quit chasing, she veered behind the truck just enough for the trailer to thump, spin and flip her over the low railing.

  I rose and sprinted across our property and slogged through driftwood slop in front of the blackberries before I heard Angie and Frankie yelling, Lizzy! I kept my eyes on her splash, but didn’t see any movement beyond the initial ripples. It was mid-tide, which meant there was five feet of water beneath the middle of the bridge—enough to dive if I had to.

  When I got halfway across the bridge, I saw that she was actually only a few feet from shore, yet she wasn’t on the surface or the bottom, but rather suspended sideways, as if cast in ice. I wheezed across the bridge, splashed knee-deep into mud and kelp and pulled her ashore with one hand on her collar and the other around her chest until I could drag her high enough in the mud to keep her head above water. She didn’t respond to back slaps. I fanned her snout and felt no air, so I cupped her nose in my hands and blew three strong puffs into her. Nothing happened. I panted, then tried again, sealing her snout with my lips this time, and puffed hard. Still nothing. I could hear Phelps’s breathing by then and Angie’s hollers and the distant clatter and drone of the Stegner party. I forced air into Lizzy once more and felt her resist. She then shook herself from my lap, wobbled, fell down, puked water, panted and whimpered before getting back up, shaking herself again, whining some more and lying on her stomach, chest heaving, tongue dangling.

  I felt queasy and wiped my mouth. It didn’t taste great. My throat burned with oyster burps. I splashed my face, but it still took a few moments before I wanted to stand. Then Angie and phony Frankie were there with wild eyes, shuttling between Lizzy and me, Phelps telling, retelling and
exaggerating everything. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Frankie kept moaning. I saw the Stegner party crowd the waterfront to eyeball us too, piecing together what they’d seen and hadn’t seen. Listen to people at times like these, and it’s amazing police get accurate accounts of anything.

  I couldn’t tell if Angie was proud of me or feared me. I shrugged an instant before she hugged me so that she pinned my shoulders to my ears and squeezed. It apparently didn’t matter to her that I was soaked and muddy with dog slobber on my face. Frankie interrupted the hug to thank me again. “You’re welcome,” I said faintly, “but I didn’t do it for you.” I avoided Angie’s eyes as she let go, and soon it was just me and Phelps wringing out my shirt.

  “I’m starting to understand you, Miles.”

  “Yeah?” I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand until my lips numbed. I watched a heron glide over the bay and felt as if I were doing the exact same thing. I looked down to improve my bearings. Sea lettuce never looked so brilliant. I picked up the first peach-colored scallop shell I ever saw and watched a massive red jellyfish pulse on by like a bloody heart dragging four-foot tentacles.

  “You love dead spinsters,” Phelps said, “and truck-chasing dogs.”

  Words couldn’t dent my mood. I’d stopped something bad from happening. What else could I accomplish if I just paid attention? A long eel or worm undulated under the bridge, then vanished.

  The material was too rich for Phelps to let it go. “I can’t even get you to engage in a healthy discussion about Christy Decker’s rack.” He found a baby shrimp burrowed in the mud next to his foot, rinsed it and tossed it back like a vitamin. “Then the next thing I know you’re making out with a chocolate Lab.”

  I shrugged and looked around for a soft place to lie down.

  Chapter 7

  I couldn’t sleep. What terrific sleepers never understand is that sleeping isn’t optional or something you talk yourself into. You can either do it or you can’t. So I stayed up skimming a book called The Erotic Ocean in which some scientist kept noticing, with Phelps-like single-mindedness, all the mating going on in the shallows, including these incredibly horny sea urchins who decorated moonlit water with red eggs and white sperm. This was the same night that I overheard my parents discussing divorce, or rather my mother discussing it and my father grunting.

  It would have been easier if it had been the sort of soon-to-be-regretted shouting match grown-ups have when they just want to win an argument and don’t care if they’re right or wrong and apologize later for being jerks. What I overheard during my aborted midnight peanut butter run was my mother’s practical assessment of the pros and cons of it, as if she were debating whether to fly to Las Vegas or remodel the kitchen.

  Instead of waiting for the birds to whistle me to sleep, I slipped out just before sunrise beneath a copper sky. You may wonder how I came and went so easily. Part of it was that I lived above the garage. The other part was that my folks never really wanted to be parents. I overheard that too. It’s not that there wasn’t love. There just wasn’t supervision.

  The bay was as calm as a waiting bath, which always startled me because I’d witnessed its bullying winds and violent waves to the point where it seemed miraculous to find trees and houses still standing some mornings. But by July it was hard to remember the bay’s tantrums, with the water liquid silver, just V-wakes of ducks and crescents of kelp dimpling its surface. And when the tide brimmed a foot higher than normal, as it did that windless morning, the water hovered above its borders the way a perfect milkshake hovers above the rim of your glass.

  I knew there probably wouldn’t be anything to collect, but there might be something to see. If you watched the bay often enough you eventually saw the inexplicable. I once saw a healthy eagle with a five-foot wingspan dive for fish and never resurface. I saw a winter duck—a red-breasted merganser—ride on the head of a seal for a full minute. I watched a snapping shrimp swing a claw at a sculpin twice its size and knock it unconscious. And more than once I watched surface water bulge and ripple, as if pushed by whales, yet with nothing behind or beneath it, with the water so clear and empty I could see the bottom. It took me a long time to learn to keep such moments to myself. Nobody has anywhere to file them, including me.

  I paddled through high water into the first direct sunlight as two pigeon guillemots blundered across the bay like a comedy team looking for fish, flapping furiously, the two of them barely able to keep their crayon-red feet aloft. A western gull whirled past too, followed by a hummingbird that defied physics with its helicopter-like gift for hovering.

  Skookumchuck Bay taught me distance and direction. A mile across at its widest and exactly two miles long, the bay sat north-south lengthwise, turning deeper and sandier the farther north you paddled to Penrose Point. Across from Penrose was the old oyster-packing plant that died long before I was born, yet remained as a time capsule for the inlet’s early days because nobody ever bothered to tear it down or haul away the discarded oyster shells piled up like mountains of poker chips taller than me. Another half mile farther south was the old Mud Bay Tavern and the rickety cabins facing the fat bottom of the bay where steep forests had always covered its eastern flank, and cattle and horses had always browsed the broad, flat fields behind the eleven houses strewn along its western shore. As the judge liked to say, the bay hadn’t changed in sixty years, which was probably why everyone was so astonished when they heard about the plans to construct a gated neighborhood of million-dollar mansions along its southeastern rim. I’d heard the whining chain saws and the rumbling cement mixers since spring, but until this clear morning I hadn’t paddled close enough to make out the new, swimming-pool-sized foundations or the fake fountain centerpiece of Sunset Estates.

  I turned and paddled hard to the north, trying to feel the way I thought I should feel about overhearing my parents’ divorce chat. When I was six, my mother challenged me, in front of my cousins, to go one whole day without crying. I’d rarely cried since. Maybe that was part of it. The other part was it was hard for me to feel fear or sadness at dawn on that bay, especially when I knew the sun wouldn’t set for another fifteen hours and thirty-two minutes, and the water was so clear I could see coon-stripe shrimp in the eelgrass near the tavern and the bottomless bed of white clam shells pooled across the sunken tip of Penrose Point.

  Those shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light.

  “You were put here to do great things,” Florence assured me after I dropped into her rocker and faced her later that morning.

  It was a typical Florence line that I assumed she tossed to all of her friends the way others say “have a great day.” But she hit me with it after a week in which I’d found a giant squid and brought a dog back from the dead. It wasn’t that I was starting to feel that I actually had some higher calling, it’s that I’d begun to feel as though I’d received a bigger role than I’d auditioned for.

  Florence lived on the other side of the Stegners in a steel-roofed summer cabin similar to ours, but smaller. And while half of ours stood on stilts, hers rested entirely on six-by-sixes, and the ten highest tides of the year washed completely beneath her, leaving about two feet of air between her floorboards and the suds, kelp and jellyfish. When the stink of low tide blew inside her drafty cabin it overpowered the musty odor of old hardbacks and, more recently, the faint whiff of urine.

  Florence had lived alone since her sister died a decade earlier, and she’d been on the bay since 1938, which made her its senior resident, not counting some of the clams who might’ve been there twice as long. Angie once told me Florence used to babysit the judge, and he’d recently turned sixty-eight, so that tells you how old she was even if she wouldn’t give out a number.

  On this day, I found her with an inch-long forehead gash like boxers get along the seams of their eyebrows. I knew she had some cruel variation of Parkinson�
�s. She’d shown me the paperwork, but I was slow to understand what it was doing to her. I just knew that she seemed stiffer almost every time I saw her, and at some point she’d started shuffling instead of walking. She’d rock her shoulders to loosen her feet, then she’d baby-step toward the kitchen as if crossing a wet log. And when you shuffle, I learned, you eventually fall.

  Her old friend Yvonne shopped for her, so she didn’t need to go out, but even her stairless cabin had turned treacherous. This was the second time within a month that I’d found her trying to mend a head wound with butterfly Band-Aids. She downplayed it, as usual, but I insisted she ice it, and she finally agreed once I pointed out that the swelling drew attention to an otherwise perfectly disguised wound.

  I’d visited Florence at least weekly for the past three years, in part because she increasingly seemed like the person most like me. She was almost as short and skinny but with huge bottom-fish eyes, as if she were designed to read in the dark, which suited her seeing how her gloomy home overflowed with books to the point stacks had to be moved to offer seats to more than one visitor. The clutter also added to the assumption that she was nuts. Most people didn’t know what else to call someone who called herself a psychic. My mother did. She called Florence a crazy witch.

  She used to have a tiny upstairs office off Franklin Street, where her sign—PALM READINGS, TAROT READINGS AND OTHER PSYCHIC PREDICTIONS—always struck me as far more irresistible than the nearby insurance, restaurant or clothing storefronts, yet there was never anyone inside but her. The worst part of it was that her reputation was that of a psychic who was always wrong.

  At least that was her rep, my mother explained, after Florence began testifying at hearings against housing developments, off-ramps and roundabouts based on her intuitions about safety. She even argued that the proposed Capitale Apartments shouldn’t be constructed near Capitol Lake because the building would be vulnerable to a future earthquake. Not surprisingly, it was built anyway and had endured thirteen years and a few regional quakes without so much as a ceiling crack.