The Highest Tide: A Novel

by Jim Lynch

  It sounded like a lousy idea to me, but she laughed so hard her head snapped back, her cigarette cherry grazing and blackening the slanted ceiling. I didn’t care if she burned down the neighborhood as long as she didn’t leave.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after clearing her throat three times. “I’m really quite stoned right now.”

  I nodded knowingly, as if I were about to roll a few joints myself.

  “You’re inspiring, Miles.” She watched smoke gather along the ceiling. “You don’t lose focus. Stay that way, okay? My life is a wreck. I made more bad decisions last night than most people make in a year.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Really? Well, I drank half a bottle of Jose, jumped off the Fremont Bridge, then took some Ecstasy and had sloppy sex with some couple I hope like hell I never see again. After all that, I spent almost a night’s pay on a cab ride home, and the poor guy had to pull over twice for me to puke.” Her eyes were greener and glassier than usual. She held her head back so they wouldn’t overflow. “I’m a wreck.”

  “No you’re not,” I mumbled, scrambling to reassemble what she’d just told me.

  She tried to laugh, but nothing came out. “That wasn’t very convincing, Miles, but thanks for trying.” She lay back, thighs wiggling, one boot on the floor, the other on my bed, sloughing dirt onto my comforter. “The hell with talking about me. Fuck me. I came to congratulate you. So tell me some of the cool stuff you’ve learned lately.”

  I considered showing her the sunflower star in the aquarium, but didn’t want her to move. Fuck me? I could look right between her legs without her noticing, which didn’t feel fair to her or me. It was hard to hold a decent thought in my head.

  I wanted to tell her that my parents were acting like strangers again, and ask her why her mother left and how long it took to get used to that. Most of all I wanted to tell her how sick Florence was—it was getting harder for her to feed herself—without breaking promises. But this is what I said: “You know how most sea life tries to blend in with the scenery? Well, the decorator crabs go so far as to attach kelp, sea lettuce and eel grass to the pointy parts of their shells. I’ve seen them do it. They’re like kids dressing up for an imaginary ball.” I couldn’t tell if she was listening. She tapped her foot on the floor, as if waiting for her turn to sing. “Some sea horses look so much like floating plants you would never think they were animals at all,” I added, “unless you spotted their eyes or noticed their tiny fins suspending them like hummingbird wings.” I forced myself to look away from her breasts, cradled like water balloons near her collar. “But the best blender of all,” I said, “might be the peacock flounder.” She stretched both arms over her head until her T-shirt rode up her belly and the black rose sprang into view, the stem disappearing down the front of beltless Levi’s. “It looks pretty much like any other flounder, but I saw this show where they placed a chessboard on the bottom of an aquarium, then dropped a peacock flounder onto it. Its eyes popped up like periscopes and checked out the board colors. Then, in a few seconds, you could see its body start to change. See, its eyes told its skin cells which pigments to produce, and they did it just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Well, it wasn’t right away, and it wasn’t a perfect match, but this beige bottom fish turned into a black-and-white checkered flounder right before my eyes.”

  Her eyes closed and she yawned long enough for me to count three fillings on her bottom molars. There was no way she was still listening. Her upright knee swung in and out. To music in her head? She stopped wiggling and her breathing amplified. “Octopuses change colors when they mate,” I whispered. “Their colors change with their emotions. So”—I ad-libbed this part—“the more intense the lovemaking the more spectacular their color changes.” Her lips fell apart. She was definitely asleep. “And nobody takes much notice of barnacles,” I added, “but you should see them mate. They’ve got these amazingly long penises that they unroll and arc out of their shells in search of willing mates.”

  She lifted her head and eyed me over her water balloons. “You hitting on me, Miles?” She followed that with a noisy laugh.

  I wished she wouldn’t have found it quite so hilarious, and I hoped what tickled her wasn’t the notion that I’d have to be built like a barnacle to have a chance with her. But I was so happy to be laughing with her in my very own room that it didn’t matter what she was thinking.

  An instant later she looked sad again, as if her laughter and sorrow were separated by a week of trouble. “I was accepted at the University of North Carolina’s music program,” she said suddenly. “I picked it because it was so far away, but I don’t know if that’s such a great idea anymore.”

  “Fire ants,” I said, desperately. “There are tons of fire ants in the Carolinas. They climb your legs and bite the hell out of you. And the jellyfish all sting. Every one of them. They blind people all the time.”

  She sniffled, stood and pinch-pulled her jeans toward her knees. “What’s the hurry?” she sang, then grazed my forearm with surprisingly callused fingertips. The grin she left me with was sisterly and sympathetic, but my mind found a way to make it provocative.

  I had my way with the bedsheet and comforter, the pillows and the mattress, all of which smelled of her soap and smoke. The first time I was rough, the second time gentle and sweet before breaking that effort off and feeling like the biggest fool in the history of fools as I headed into a shower that lasted so long I had plenty of time to contemplate how to save Angie Stegner’s life.

  Chapter 13

  Pansing showed up first. He had arms the color of old pennies and a smile so quick it was easy to miss. He studied the geoduck from three angles and carefully set it in an iced cooler, then jammed thirty-two manilas and nine butter clams in there with it.

  He rarely talked or made eye contact. He’d study my paperwork that detailed where and when I found the shellfish, then crosscheck all that with the state’s water-quality log for the Chatham Cove area. Then he’d roll and smoke a cigarette on the beach, which for some reason always relaxed me.

  Until this afternoon I’d puzzled over why Pansing bothered to do business with me. It felt like a favor. Talcott Seafoods could deliver far more clams and oysters than Secret Saigon could ever serve. Plus, Pansing owned and managed his restaurant, yet came personally and swiftly every time I called—even for just one geoduck.

  On this day he smoked two cigarettes, apparently so he’d have enough time to tell me how his family had walked from the southeast corner of Cambodia all the way to Thailand.

  “We walk at night, in line, very straight line.” He chopped invisible vegetables with his cigarette to show me how straight the line was. “Always my mother lead, so if we hit land mine we just lose a woman.” He shook his head. “Crazy.”

  I tried to picture marching through a dark forest with my mother guiding us through mine fields. It was beyond crazy.

  Pansing said the home he left behind was within a mile of a large bay where he fished with his father. “Much bigger than yours, but sometimes calm like this too.” Then he explained how hard it had been for him to understand, as a boy, why they had to leave that beautiful bay to live in a stinking refugee camp where his mother died of something that sounded like dung fever. “It’s still hard to think about.”

  “My parents are getting divorced,” I said. It was the first time I’d said the words aloud so I didn’t realize they’d sting. “I heard them talking.”

  Pansing said he was sorry, but he didn’t mean it the way most people would. He was apologizing for telling me too much, for getting so personal he’d cut me open too. But what caught my breath wasn’t that my parents were splitting, but rather the realization that the chances were good that I would have to say good-bye to my bay too.

  He smashed his second cigarette before its time, then winced or smiled, it was impossible to tell which, and handed me a perfect twenty and a crisp ten and told me to keep the change.

  An hour later
, a baby-blue El Camino clattered down our driveway with its muffler rattling, and I braced for B.J., mumbling my tough-guy lines as he wheeled up.

  I’d called the big aquariums, but they couldn’t send anyone for days. I feared the nudibranch wouldn’t last, and the tank was way too small to hold the sunflower any longer, so I’d reluctantly left a message on B.J.’s machine.

  I didn’t get his name from Professor Kramer. B.J. found me. All he ever said about it was that he had friends in the market for saltwater exotics and knew the Tacoma aquarium folks too. I didn’t even know his real name. Just B.J.

  He unfolded from his smoking car with bushy sideburns and pillow-creased cheeks. He called himself a drywaller once, but I doubted he worked at all, though he had huge hands that looked like worn-out canvas gloves.

  B.J. was the opposite of Pansing. He always talked me down in price, but I’d promised myself that I would hold the line this time or refuse to sell anything. I told him to wait outside the garage while I grabbed what I had to sell.

  He followed me in anyway.

  The garage was so crammed with tools, spare box springs, bicycles, sleds and leftover lumber it was hard for the two of us to stand next to the aquarium at the same time. I smelled his salami breath as he leaned over me. “Let me get a look here,” he demanded.

  I tried to back up without touching him and tripped over my mother’s bike that she never rode, cutting my forearm on its gear teeth as it crashed to the concrete with me.

  B.J. didn’t look back. “The slug’s been in that bag too long.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, dabbing at blood. “I change the water all the time. Check my records.”

  B.J. never asked to see records. I’d told his answering machine that I had a nudibranch for ten dollars, a sunflower star for fifteen and an unusual mottled star for five. I told him the prices were final.

  “The sunflower’s too big for anyone to want that thing,” he insisted. “It’s a monster.”

  “Fine.” I knew he was bluffing. “So do you want the nudibranch or the blue star?” I tried to sound disinterested.

  “Can’t you see I’m thinking? What’s the rush, Squirt?”

  “Going fishing with my father,” I lied. “He’s inside, getting ready.”

  B.J. snorted. “I’ll do you a favor here. I’ll take all three of them off your hands.”

  I bagged the stars and carried them out with the nudibranch. He stacked them in the bed of his El Camino as if they were sacks of nails.

  “Got something to put them in?” I asked. “It’s pretty hot out.”

  He dangled a twenty in front of me like a dog treat.

  “It’s thirty,” I said, and left the twenty fluttering between us, above his heavy belt buckle, wishing like hell I’d demanded the money up front like I’d practiced. “The price is—”

  “That slug’s fading,” he interrupted, “and you know it. If it dies right away in some asshole’s tank I gotta give him his bills back. And I don’t know who the hell will want that blue star anyway. And, like I said, the sunflower’s too big for my customers so I’ll probably get stuck with that monster if the aquariums don’t need him. Twenty is plenty. That’s a shitload of bubble gum, Little Man.”

  I hoped he couldn’t see my neck muscles twitching. “It’s thirty,” I said. I wanted to say more, but didn’t want to risk squeaking.

  “You’re a stubborn little shit. Has anyone told you that? Tell you what, just so you don’t start blubbering here, we’ll split it. Twenty-five work for you?” He handed me the twenty so he could jam fingers inside a front pocket.

  By the time I took the bill he was patting the last of his pockets and grinning sheepishly. “Guess I owe you five. Cool?”

  It sickened me to watch B.J. the Drywaller roll away with some of my favorite tidal life, but my teeth stopped grinding once I realized I wouldn’t have to see him again.

  For almost a week, summer resumed its regularly scheduled programming. I even talked my parents into playing Trivial Pursuit, thinking maybe board games kept families together, but it just made my father feel stupid and pissed off my mother when I got such easy questions that I won. Florence, meanwhile, kept trying to teach me ridiculous things like how to read tarot cards. Talk about confusing. Every card could mean almost anything. The devil could mean enlightenment or bondage or self-punishment or divorce or about six other possibilities. If I thought about it too hard my mind jammed.

  One day Florence was so stiff I had to help her out of her chair twice, but I didn’t dwell on that or anything other than Angie Stegner who hijacked my thoughts to the point it was getting hard to read.

  I snuck out one night to spy on her window. I studied a corner of her bedroom ceiling for at least twenty minutes before realizing she’d probably left the light on and wasn’t home. What would Judge Stegner have said if he’d caught his oyster man—the next great Cousteau himself—hoping to glimpse his daughter naked?

  I saw a photo of one of the homelier guys you ever want to see in the newspaper the next morning. His name was right there for anyone to mumble, along with a couple sentences that told you nothing about him other than that he was a Level 3 sex offender. How many levels were there? And what level was bedroom peeping? It was easy to imagine a lousy picture of me next to a warning that Miles O’Malley was a Level 9 sex offender who peeped in windows and at weak moments mismatched butts, boobs and faces in reckless fantasies he couldn’t finish. And then, of course, the ominous closer: O’Malley is likely to reoffend.

  Yet aside from the Angie distraction, it was starting to feel like the summers before it, with long, anonymous, and forgettable, but nearly perfect days away from stuffy classrooms, sloppy joes and the puke in the halls that the janitors covered with maroon sand that stank even worse than puke.

  It wasn’t easy talking Phelps into his first night run. His stepdad slept so lightly not even his brother risked sneaking out, but there was skinny Kenny Phelps waiting for me on Chatham Cove, shivering next to his bucket with an already dimming flashlight.

  He had none of his daylight swagger. In fact, he looked spooked. The night beach can do that to anyone who isn’t drunk or oblivious. Instead of the comforting banter of bickering gulls and scavenging crows there is the whoosh of bats and the screech of owls. Even the subtle scraping of a mid-sized hermit crab dragging its shell across grains of sand can sound menacing. I once crouched on Chatham Cove for fifteen minutes after spotting a huge Doberman just above the high tide line. It still scared me long after I figured out it was driftwood.

  Phelps didn’t regain any of his cockiness until he’d plucked a dozen butter clams from the dark sand and I’d granted him his union-mandated smoke break. I joined him, and he was feeling so good by then he didn’t razz me about not inhaling. He even indulged my futile effort to get him to see the bullfight I saw in the moon.

  “So when’s that Channel Seven babe airing her thing on us?” he asked.

  “Hard to tell with these things.” I was suddenly a media expert. “Hopefully never.”

  “Fuck that! I was awesome that day.” Phelps’s teeth were the color of the moon.

  I was thrilled Channel 7 hadn’t run anything, which I considered the result of my erasing their three phone messages. The thought of talking to the mannequin again turned my belly into needles, especially after the call I got from Professor Kramer. He asked what I knew about the new crabs at Whiskey Point and the seaweed in Flapjack Bay that she’d questioned him about. After I told him, he’d sighed and said, “Well, do you see how you kind of made me and the state look foolish, Miles?”

  My heart took off. “Didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” I squeaked.

  “Well, Miles, you certainly know about invasives and the havoc they can cause.”

  I really didn’t, and after I stammered a response I could tell he felt guilty for cornering me. He then explained what Chinese mitten crabs can do to cliffs and what that same strange seaweed did to the Mediterranean. H
is long explanation was designed to let me know everything was okay between us but it rattled me even more, and I cowered until he updated me on the squid and said a doctor named Stanley Glover was flying out from the Smithsonian to help study it. “We need a working name for her, and seeing how you found it, we thought—”

  “Rachel,” I said instantly. “Call her Rachel.”

  We found another cluster of butter clams in the dark and tossed in a few hefty horse clams, which work in chowders and eventually don’t taste like rubber bands if they’re shredded and boiled long enough with onions and potatoes. Once our buckets were two-thirds full, I rewarded Phelps with another smoke break and a news flash: “I checked out a book on the G-spot.”

  “From the library?”

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed. “You got balls for a pipsqueak. You tell ‘em it was for your mother?”

  “Nope. Mixed it in with books on mollusks and cephalopods.”

  Phelps snorted. “So what’s the title?”

  “The G-Spot.”

  “Clever. How many pages?”

  “One hundred and eighty-five.”

  “Well?”

  “Read it last night.”

  “You read it in one night?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So it was good?”

  “It was strange.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s about women who go through life without ever getting that one spot rubbed just right or any number of other complicated things that go wrong.”

  Phelps digested that. “So where’s the spot?”

  I told him.

  He nodded knowingly. “What else?”

  “Well, it kind of grossed me out.”

  He laughed. “How could any of that gross out anyone but a homo?”

  I let that go. “It was kind of like reading about how to fix a dream car that you don’t have yet. Know what I mean? You don’t really want to know how complicated and difficult it is to keep it running before you’re even old enough to drive.”