The Highest Tide: A Novel

by Jim Lynch

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked, without breaking eye contact with her.

  “Behind my brother’s Car & Drivers.”

  “Is she a singer?”

  Phelps laughed. “What’s it matter?”

  “I just wondered if she’s an actress or a singer or someone we might know. I just like to know who I’m looking at is all.”

  “Yeah?” He laughed again. “Then check this babe out. Maybe you’ll recognize her.” He flipped quickly through pages. It was mostly words, but there were plenty of little pictures too. He opened to some girl in a pair of cutoffs that had fallen to her knees somehow. She displayed her breasts in her hands as if selling apples. Above the photo were the words: GIRL NEXT-DOOR.

  “Recognize her?” Phelps baited.

  My mind scrambled. “No.”

  “She’s the girl next-door.” He winked.

  “Next-door to who?” I started sweating.

  “To somebody. You think beautiful naked women don’t have neighbors?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. She looked as if her breasts felt so good she couldn’t keep her own hands off them. Phelps explained that she no doubt benefited from airbrushing, some photographic trickery his brother told him about that covered up zits, mosquito bites and birthmarks. “They can even change lips, smiles, eye colors and nipple sizes,” he said authoritatively.

  “I know,” I said, tired of feeling ignorant.

  He flipped, fingers twitching, through the pages for something else. Suddenly there were tiny pictures of women showing me their privates and coaxing me to have my way with them. At least that’s what the captions shouted. Their phone numbers were right there too. I couldn’t believe it. You could apparently call them right up if you had the guts.

  I backed up, overwhelmed. I’d seen Playboy foldouts. I’d studied every photo in Sports Illustrated’s bikini issue, but I’d never seen women’s privates laid out right next to their phone numbers before.

  Phelps laughed. “What’s up? You don’t like looking at naked women?”

  “I’m not their doctor,” I said. It was one of the stupidest things I could have said to someone like Phelps.

  He laughed himself sideways, then said, “Bet you’d like to be Angie’s doctor.”

  My slap caught him mid-blink, rocking on his heels, and knocked him back over his knobby knees onto the beach with his brother’s sicko magazine clutched above his chest so—God forbid—it wouldn’t get wet.

  It all happened too fast to even explain it to myself, and before Phelps could call me a “fuckin’ freak” for a second time I heard the cameraman and saw the lady who’d asked me all those questions about the squid the morning I found it.

  They talked loudly as they stumbled over the barnacled rocks toward us, oblivious to how far their voices carried.

  “Ah crap,” I said. “It’s television people.”

  “Good.” Phelps climbed onto his feet. “They can film me kicking the shit out of you.” But it was obvious he didn’t have it in him. Who wants to be caught on TV whupping someone half their size?

  The lady shouted my name and waved hello as if we were cousins.

  “She’s cute,” Phelps declared, from fifty yards.

  When she got close enough she extended her hand toward me. I tried to shake it, but got caught between a real shake and a fingers-only lady shake. She checked her hand for mud and found some. “You remember me, Miles?”

  The puking mannequin, I thought, and nodded. My goal was to say nothing, but what if that didn’t matter? What if she started speaking for me the way the newspaper lady had?

  She wasn’t as foxy as Phelps claimed either. Her eyes were so far apart she looked like a hammerhead shark. She said a whole bunch of crap I missed until she mentioned that during the squid morning, I’d said that perhaps the earth was trying to tell us something.

  Phelps smothered a laugh.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” I mumbled.

  “Why not? We all thought it was so provocative at the time, in a smart way. And now, in light of the ratfish you found, well—”

  “Ragfish. I don’t have any proof of that.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the earth trying to tell us anything.” I resumed my effort to not appear to be listening to the beach, the water, the sky or anything but her.

  “Well, how do you explain it then, Miles?”

  “I don’t. I just see what I see.”

  “Great. Great! Could we follow you around out here, seeing what you see?”

  I looked around self-consciously, then down at her brand-new rubber boots. “We’re just digging clams and looking for things.”

  “Excellent!” She finally introduced the camera guy. He grunted hello, the camera braced on his shoulder, flexing his knees as if preparing to fart or throw a shot put.

  I hadn’t noticed that I’d agreed to anything, that I’d said anything at all, but she and the cameraman followed us out toward the tideline where Phelps spontaneously transformed into the most inspired and informed clammer I’d ever seen.

  “See the keyhole shape?” He pointed to a tiny hole in the mud. “A butter clam will be about eight inches down right here.” He zeroed in with his shovel, digging near the clam in a few dramatic strokes, then scraping gently with the shovel’s edge until he spotted the fat gray mollusk. He popped the clam onto the shovel and dropped it triumphantly into the bucket without ever touching it with his hands. The TV people gawked at the clam, its pale meat bulging between its shells, then at Phelps. He winked the only eye they could see.

  I wandered along the receding tidal line, hearing Phelps blabber on, hoping they would get sick of listening to him and leave. When I found a geoduck siphon, though, I reluctantly called him over. He was really the hero this time. He shoveled valiantly, sweat bubbling across his forehead, as the hole backfilled with water. When he sprawled chest down in the mud and long-armed that geoduck out, the lady laughed in odd throaty bursts. I knew Phelps would do it, but I didn’t want to see it so I turned and stomped off. A few seconds later I heard him whinny like a stallion.

  They lost track of me then, which I liked, because I saw more when nobody else was around. But soon she was at my side again, asking what I was looking for. “Sea stars mostly,” I said, “but anything unusual.”

  I wished she’d leave, but I couldn’t resist pointing out the barnacles waving nets in the shallows like Southern women fanning themselves. “They’re catching tiny plants and animals, then pulling them inside their shells to eat. See?”

  She mumbled something about them being hard “to shoot,” then walked so close to me her perfume made it hard to concentrate. Some perfume pushes you away or makes you sneeze. This stuff made me feel flattered to be near it.

  “Even barnacles interest you?” she asked.

  “If it wasn’t for them, we probably wouldn’t exist,” I told her.

  Her mouth popped open, but no words fell out. I kept walking, drawing her into ankle-deep water. I pointed out the differences between the black-clawed mud crab, the flat porcelain crab and the green shore crab. She asked me to pick one up, but the cameraman was shadowing us, and I didn’t want another phony image of me holding something I didn’t collect.

  “You hear that crunching sound?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re killing sand dollars.”

  She winced.

  “Walk over here,” I said.

  Mildly embarrassed, she followed gingerly. The cameraman grunted, then yawned.

  “What do you think that is?” I asked.

  She followed my pointing finger. “Part of a rubber tire?”

  “Nope.”

  “An old toilet plunger?”

  “Nope. A few thousand moon snail eggs.” I explained how moon snails mix eggs with sand and mucus and spin the casings off their large round bodies and discard them along the beach in such haphazard fashion that well-intentioned beachcombers often bag them as li
tter.

  While boring her with that, I suddenly saw what looked like a live, creeping, multitentacled rendition of the sun.

  It was almost the size of a manhole cover and crawling back toward the water as fast as any sea star could possibly move, inching over the sand, a reddish-brown shimmering mass with all twenty-two legs engaged. The TV lady gasped. The cameraman swore.

  “What’s it doing here?” she asked, as Phelps came over and blurted a couple fucks.

  “Feasting on clams,” I speculated. “Divers are the only ones who usually see sunflower stars, especially big ones like this, but apparently this guy was too busy eating and lost track of time or didn’t think the water would go this far out.”

  I reached down with both hands and gingerly flipped it over, its thousands of tiny, suction-cup feet glimmering. I set it back upright and pointed out the light-sensitive eyes on the tips of each of its legs. “Sunflowers are the world’s biggest sea stars. So it’s quite possible we’re looking at one of the largest stars on the planet.” I explained that sunflowers are the grizzlies of the tidal flats. “Other sea life freaks when they smell them coming. Sea cucumbers inchworm out of their way, cockles start hopping and sand dollars bury themselves way faster than usual.” I measured the star, studied its colors, ran a finger across its spiny back.

  “Why do you think you found it, Miles?” she asked.

  I started to answer, then caught myself.

  “Why is it that you always seem to find amazing things in these bays?” she persisted. I noticed the silver microphone in her hand and looked past her into the camera.

  “Because I’m always looking,” I said, “and there are so many things to see.”

  “But you keep seeing things that people shouldn’t normally be able to see, right?”

  “The unusual becomes routine if you spend enough time out here.” I couldn’t stop myself. “Like those new crabs with the hairy pinchers at Whiskey Point: I never saw them until about five weeks ago. Now they’re everywhere out there. There’s also this new seaweed that’s taken over Flapjack Bay to the point that it’s hard to find almost anything else out there anymore.”

  I told her more about all that as a large eagle dove behind her toward the water before aborting its attack and gliding across the beach. Eagles have a way of making all other birds look underdressed.

  “So, maybe,” she said tentatively, “like you said the other day when you found that squid, maybe the earth is trying to tell us something. And if so, what do you think it’s saying?”

  I hesitated. “It’s probably saying, ‘Pay attention.’”

  “Is that a problem, Miles, that people don’t pay attention?”

  I stopped myself, and heard Phelps mutter, “Here you go again.”

  “I didn’t say there was a problem. Rachel Carson said the more people learn about the ocean the less likely they are to harm it.”

  “Who’s Rachel Carson?”

  Phelps giggled behind me. “She’s a genius,” I said.

  “A dead one,” Phelps added.

  She tried to keep me talking, but I was done. I said I was tired, which was true, but it was more than that. I wanted all this to stop.

  “What do you think needs to be done, Miles?”

  I took a long breath, then said, “I think I need to get this big star into my aquarium already. Could you maybe give us a lift?”

  Of course she could. She put her arm around me the way Angie had, but there wasn’t anything about it worth storing. Her perfume suddenly smelled like it was trying too hard, its odor so out of place on the mud it frightened me.

  Chapter 12

  Luckily there was nobody waiting for me at home, so I slept. It was more like a coma.

  Griping gulls and squawking herons couldn’t stir me, neither could the sporadic Heron bridge traffic or the distant kazoo of Highway 101. Even the buzz and rumble of saws, hammers and trucks in Sunset Estates wasn’t up to it. I slept until I’d had enough, then woke gradually, absently studying a dust swirl that reminded me of the fish mobile that rotated above my crib. My first word, according to my mother, was fish. Make of that what you will. I closed my eyes and images swirled. The strongest ones involved Angie and that Girl Next-Door. I merged the two and it worked temporarily while I began having my way with my bedsheets, but then the television mannequin’s face hopped onto Next-Door’s body and jarred me almost completely awake. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep Angie’s face in the mix, felt guilty for involving it in the first place and unfaithful as hell for attaching it to some other body. I also didn’t feel terrific about using Florence’s dreaming-while-awake trick for such sick purposes. So I was more confused than aroused when I heard the musical knock on my door, which was so loose at the latch it rattled with each tap.

  Why hadn’t I heard someone climb the steps? My mother was the only one who ventured up, but it was too early for her, wasn’t it? Everything borderline sexy about the prior moment was long gone. I yanked on shorts and prayed that whoever it was—God help me if it was Phelps—hadn’t peeked through the window.

  I opened the door and there stood half-lidded Angie Stegner, her lips sliding into an exhausted smile. “There’s my media darling,” she said, glancing down at my naked chest.

  It was the first time Angie had come to my room when she wasn’t babysitting, which meant it had been at least three years. She laughed at the heaps of books and socks and underpants, then swaggered in, smelling like cigarettes and soap, and sat on my rumpled bed with her knees apart.

  “Congratulations,” she said, glancing again at my blushing torso.

  “For what?” I asked. “I was just doing some push-ups and leg lifts. Getting in shape for wrestling next year. I might turn out, you know, if I feel like it. I mean, they want me to, but I don’t know. The coach is kind of a freak and I’ve got lots of other options.”

  I read somewhere that people unconsciously hold their breath when they lie, which explains why I felt so dizzy. If I’d kept talking I might have passed out.

  She studied me with squinting eyes and a cockeyed grin, then lifted her butt and straightened the sheets beneath her. “So, how’d you turn your latest discovery into a front-page story, Smarty-pants?”

  “I didn’t want that.”

  “No?”

  “It’s embarrassing.” My mouth dried to the point my lips stuck to each other. “I don’t hear the beach talking to me, okay?”

  She giggled. “All’s I know is newspapers always tell us how shitty everything is. Then all of a sudden there’s this sweet story about my Miles.”

  I considered telling her about Channel 7, and how I feared I’d told them too much too, but her head was rocking from ear to ear on my pillow, and her jeaned knees wobbled back and forth until I noticed the dark patch up higher, where she came together.

  “Miles.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I smoke in here?”

  “I do it all the time.”

  “Why? It’s one of the stupidest things you could do.” She tapped one out.

  “I agree,” I said. “I don’t do it often.”

  That cracked her up, but even when she laughed at me there was still no place I’d rather be.

  When I recall Angie’s babysitting, I see her jumping herself in checkers, or barking so convincingly that the Ericksons’ spaniels flip out. Or I see us crawling across her lawn, pretending we’re rock climbing, with me yelling, On belay?—the only lingo I know—until she loses it. We used to roam along the flats where Angie was the first to spend more than impatient moments with me. She taught me which birds passed through when, showed me how to estimate the age of clams by counting the rings on their shells, and during one autumn explained the boomerang life cycle of salmon. She was skinny as a ballerina back then, with a face overrun by freckles and a shiny tangle of hair that had never been cut. I was a first-grader, strapped into an adult life vest in the bow of her canoe, watching her paddle us toward the acrobatic s
almon that had invaded our bay. She said they were jumping like crazy to loosen their egg sacks. Then she told me that the same big fish had all left McKenzie Creek three years ago as pinky-sized babies, and had toured the ocean until it occurred to them it was time to swim all the way home to spawn and die in the exact same creek they were hatched. “How do you think they found their way back without a map, Miles?” I was speechless and overwhelmed. The closer we drifted to the leaping salmon the more battered and scary they looked, scarred and discolored, skin sluffing off their sides. Two landed close enough to make Angie swear. Then another broke the surface, surged toward the middle of our canoe, leaped again and rammed into fiberglass. I clutched the shuddering rails. “Watch where you’re going!” she shouted at the fish, then laughed so hard my ears rang.

  Angie watched her smoke curl into my ceiling. “Tell me something, Miles: What do you think of my songs?”

  The question was so unexpected my mind jammed. “I love them,” I said. The truth was she sang so hard it worried me. Her voice reminded me of a siren. “I think the words are very cool,” I added.

  She coughed out another cloud. “Don’t try to please me, Miles. Please don’t ever just try to please me. My world is over-fucking-loaded with people who try to please me.”

  I didn’t know what to say next.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear your favorite lyric.”

  “I like the sound of your voice,” I said. “The words are kind of hard for me to make out.”

  “Now there’s my honest Miles. The words aren’t about sweet boys like you anyway. I write about bad men and gullible women. I write about revenge and disillusionment, about people who see death as an option.”

  That froze me. “I can’t understand that,” I said. “I mean, what’s the hurry?”

  “Hey!” She brightened. “Now there’s a line. That’s as good of a reason to stick around as any. ‘What’s the hurry?’ Let’s write that song, Miles.”