The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

  Professor Kramer was my favorite adult. When he took Mrs. Halverson’s class on a field trip, I asked so many questions he invited me to his lab. That’s where he showed me all the plants and animals that live in a thimble of seawater, creatures the size of pepper flakes feeding on even tinier plants. And I was hooked. He also taught me how to collect specimens, gave me a microscope, a twenty-gallon aquarium and, ultimately, the names and numbers of people who would buy whatever I gathered. He wasn’t a god like Rachel Carson, but someone with the right information in his head, which looked normal enough except for his kinky hair, which rose straight up from his scalp then flowered like the heads of those red tube worms that cling to dock pilings.

  Once the professor arrived, I lost control of everything. The night I’d had to myself had surrendered to a bright morning that exposed the entire hourglass bay, pinched at its waist by the nearby Spencer Spit, which kept the Mud Bay Tavern, six rental cabins and the eastern end of the Heron Street Bridge just above the high water mark. And my discovery was definitely no longer mine.

  Even in daylight, the squid didn’t look real. It came off like a unicorn or a jack lope or some other fantasy creature—an oversized octopus mixed with the back end of a porpoise or some other torpedo-shaped mammal. But what I couldn’t get over was how powerful and durable it looked. Its blotchy-purple skin reminded me of the thick rubber used for wet suits, and I noticed how the suckers along the inside of its ten arms shrank to the size of dimes near the tips.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Professor Kramer muttered after he’d walked around it twice. Most of the rescuers were unwilling to get very close. They winced and cussed as if it stank, which it didn’t. We all watched the professor examine and measure its head, its siphon, its arms and its nine-and-a-half-inch eyes, mumbling technical terms into a tiny recorder. What was clear to me was he didn’t have the slightest idea how to check its vitals or keep it alive. Finally, I couldn’t resist asking the obvious.

  He replied, without looking up: “It’s as dead as it’s gonna get, Miles.”

  Still, the rescuers continued pouring buckets of water on it, as if putting out a fire. “Who said it was still breathing?” one of them demanded.

  The professor one-eyed me. “What did draw you out here in the dark, Miles?”

  “I heard it.”

  “What’d you hear?”

  “Breathing.” I knew they were all staring at me now, but all I could see were tall silhouettes and the oversized sun flickering behind them. I looked away to where cedars and firs cascaded to the beach like long summer dresses.

  “You woke up and came out here because you heard something breathing?” the pushy rescuer asked.

  “Well, it squealed or something. It made some loud noise, and I put on my boots and came out here.”

  It was one of those moments when your face can’t back up your mouth. I hoped none of them knew enough about beached squid to know whether they could squeal or make noises that could wake up a kid a few hundred yards away. What had I heard? A snort or a sigh? Did I imagine it altogether? Would an autopsy prove I was a liar, that it had been dead for seven hours?

  Luckily, everyone forgot about me as a KING 5 van rolled onto the Heron bridge with its crew popping out military style. The rescuers resumed dumping buckets of seawater on the squid. At least they had a role. I didn’t even know where to stand as the television team splashed across the mud, and a short lady with hair that wind couldn’t rustle slipped to her knee and let loose a gasp topped only by the noise she made when she got close enough to see the squid’s huge cloudy-black eye. That’s when she turned around and puked on the mud. Four young mallards suddenly flapped in single file overhead, laughing at us. A grouchy blue heron glided by to give us hell too.

  Time hopped around on me, but soon almost everyone was on the mud, including my parents, whom I’d never seen that far out on the flats before. My mother stayed as far away from the squid as possible without standing in water. My father kept checking his watch to make sure he wasn’t late for his early shift at the brewery. From a distance they looked alike, short and rounded in identical sweat jackets, but they stood paces apart, like neighbors who didn’t get along.

  A cheerful Judge Stegner arrived with two hot thermoses, as if it were a scheduled event he’d agreed to host. He also brought a flotilla of inflatable rafts and canoes, thinking ahead as usual, considering the flats we’d all crossed were sinking.

  Another van arrived, then another and still another. The entire bridge filled with shiny white news vans, their satellite dishes telescoping into the new sky. The judge greeted and shuttled them to our shrinking island of mud. I’d never seen so many people who looked like mannequins before, or so many so afraid of a dead animal. Soon they competed to see who could ask Professor Kramer the loudest question. Finally, he asked them to be quiet and just listen to him for a few minutes.

  “It’s too soon to be certain,” he said, “but it appears that this squid is too big to be a Moroteuthis robusta, the large Pacific squid that occasionally washes up on Washington beaches. No, this indeed appears to be an Architeuthis, better known as simply the giant squid.” He spelled Architeuthis for them, then said, “Unofficially, this one measures out at thirty-seven feet from the top of its mantle to the end of its longest tentacle. That would not only make it a bona fide Architeuthis but perhaps the biggest one ever found in the Pacific and one of the largest found anywhere in years.”

  The professor’s voice always changed slightly when he lectured, but this was different. This was the sound of bottled excitement, as if he were strugglingto resist shouting. “What astonishes me at this point is that the giant squid is a deep-ocean creature,” he continued. “How this one wound up down here in shallow South Sound in such amazingly good condition is . . .”He hesitated, searching for the perfect words. “A mystery of colossal proportions.”

  The air pressure changed after he said all that. Granted, this revelation involved a beached squid, not a moon landing or a Kennedy assassination, but anyone who was on the mud that morning when the professor put that marooned creature into perspective felt as if they were witnessing a moment that mattered.

  He then explained that the giant squid is the world’s largest invertebrate with the biggest eyes of any earthling. “Little is known about the giant squid because it has never been studied in its own habitat. We don’t even know what colors it comes in, although it can probably change hues on a whim.” He took a breath before predicting that scientists from across the nation would likely rush to study this specimen.

  One of the ponytailed rescuers filled the lull that followed with a rant about pollutants endangering mammals in the Sound, which I suspected had little to do with this wrong-way squid. The judge then spontaneously interjected the history and geology of the bay with the authority of someone describing how he built his house. I tired of listening to everybody and was trying to figure out how to get a ride to shore without my parents when I heard the question resurface as to who found the squid.

  Professor Kramer said my name, somehow spotted me and smiled warmly, as if the squid were my gift to him. Cameras swiveled toward me.

  “What did you see, Miles?” asked the mannequin who’d puked earlier.

  “The same thing you’re seeing,” I said, “except that I think it was breathing.”

  “Please speak up, Miles,” she said in a voice so designed to relax me it alarmed me. “So, it was alive, Miles?”

  “It made a noise.” I wished people would stop saying my name. I turned to Professor Kramer, hoping he would take over, but his eyes were on the squid.

  “Did you have any idea what it was?” she asked.

  I squinted. “Well, I could tell it was a cephalopod, and as soon as I saw the eye, I was sure it was a squid and probably a giant.”

  More people and equipment crowded me, blocking the low sun. I could see the urgency and excitement in their faces, which scared me all the more.

  �
��You called it a ‘sifla-what’?” she asked.

  I could already discuss phyla, hydroids, mollusks and crustaceans as easily as most kids chatted about bands and movies. The catch was nobody my age was interested in hearing any of it. Neither were my parents. So it churned inside me like a secret language and whenever it slipped out, people bug-eyed me like I’d shifted into Portuguese. “A cephalopod,” I corrected, “which basically means its arms spring from its head.”

  “Was it dark when you came out here?” she asked.

  “The moon was bright and I had a headlamp.”

  This struck them as astounding. People kneeled in front of me. Four microphones crowded my chin.

  “Did it actually wake you up, Miles?”

  See how people put you in a position where you have to lie or get in trouble? I tried to find my mother’s puffy eyes. “I was kinda already awake.”

  “So you heard it and came out to see what it was?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All by yourself?”

  That’s the sort of crap you hear when you’re tiny for your age. I didn’t respond, hoping the cameras and the microphones would go to someone else.

  “How old are you, Miles?”

  “Almost fourteen.” I heard people murmuring, repeating the number.

  “Why do you think this deep-ocean creature, this ‘giant squid,’ as Professor Kramer calls it, ended up in this little bay by your house?”

  That’s when I said what I said. It was a throwaway line, the sort of thing I’d heard fancy-smart people say on television when asked impossible questions. I could blame it on exhaustion, but there was a part of me that believed it. AU of that doesn’t much matter, though, because I said it: “Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something.”

  They liked that a lot. A kid says something like that, and people go ahhh. Offer a plausible scientific explanation and they yawn. Dip into the mystical, especially if you appear to be an unsullied, clearheaded child, and they want to write a song about you.

  CHAPTER 3

  A NGIE STEGNER ALMOST slept through it all. By the time she rose, all she saw was the squid sprawled on bright silver tarps on a flat trailer above the boat ramp next to the tavern. She moseyed around it once and laughed at the sky, as if the squid were a joke from above, then sauntered back across the bridge toward our side of the bay with me at her hip.

  My parents had rushed to work after giving me more looks that assured me I had some explaining ahead of me. I didn’t care about that or anything. I was dizzy with sleepiness, and Angie had her arm around me, bracing me, as if she could tell I might collapse. I milked it, walking as slowly as I could, trying to fur in my mind the leafy smell of her hair and the weight and warmth of her long tanned arm draped across my shoulders. I considered asking her if we should try to get old Florence out to see the squid before it got hauled to the lab, but I knew what an ordeal that would entail and didn’t want to share Angie with anyone.

  I think my fixation with Angie started when she read Goodnight Moon to me, back before I stored much in my head beyond emotion. She babysat me so much in the early years she smelled like family, but it was hard to keep up with her moods and changes. When she turned eighteen she cut her hair to chin length and had a black rose tattooed to her stomach. She also pierced her eyebrow with a silver hoop, which made her look as if some fisherman had hooked her once but she got away. She chewed her nails, rarely washed her hair and wore baggy cargo pants, trying everything imaginable to hide her beauty. It didn’t fool me. I found it difficult to think around her. Even breathing got complicated.

  Angie sang in a band called “L.O.C.O.” You couldn’t call it for some reason. I’d seen her perform just once, at an outdoor concert in Sylvester Park. She wore a horizontally striped red and pink dress that fell to the middle of her thighs, and she sang—whispered and screamed, actually—some song about charming devils and two-faced angels. It went on and on as if she were afraid to stop. It was just her and this drummer with too much hair and thick, crablike forearms. She played bass and howled, bobbing her head just enough to swing her hair while her frantic drummer turned into a sweat sprinkler. The music spooked me but literally moved others. People didn’t dance so much as vibrate to it, shaking across the grass as if it were an involuntary act. And Angie was getting famous, in part because she occasionally fainted during shows, which provided rich gossip for those of us huddled around the bay. I overheard my mother asking her friends what it would mean for the judge now that his only daughter had “gone public” with her craziness. When I heard about Angie’s faintings I had just one thought: I wanted to figure out how to catch her the next time.

  Angie asked better questions than the others had, and I didn’t mind telling her everything I knew and a few things I made up. When I finally pried my eyes off her, I noticed the tide climbing all the way back up, which somehow always relieved me, especially when it came up higher than usual, mirrored the sky and slowed time.

  After I finished telling Angie everything, I started over again with the moment that interested her the most—when it was just me, the moon and the squid-hoping she wouldn’t leave me while I climbed inside a huge hammock my mother brought back from Mexico long before I was born.

  Angie not only didn’t leave, she swung the hammock by nudging her stomach into my hip. I looked up into her green eyes and her connect-the-dot freckles. I was close enough to hear her stomach gurgle. Offered a moment to be stuck in, I might have chosen that one. Against my will, I drifted. Sleep was like that with me. It only came uninvited.

  I missed her first few words, then caught the ones that said boys try too hard to please her. When she paused over that, I said, “That’s real common.” I told her how the three-spined stickleback, a homely rockfish, dances wildly to try to attract a mate. “It’s way over the top,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe it. The male toadfish is even more ridiculous. When he wants to mate he vibrates his bladder muscles so fast they make a humming sound that’s so loud it can annoy people on houseboats.”

  She showed me her teeth. Who knows if I would have become so obsessed with marine life if what I’d learned and found hadn’t made Angie Stegner smile.

  I drifted again until her black rose bumped my hip and she volunteered that she still hadn’t met a boy—or man—who sought love that lasted more than one night. I had no idea what she meant, but I didn’t want to sound naive so I offered the first insight that popped to mind even though it was nothing more than a bumper-sticker slogan I’d puzzled over.

  “Eat oysters,” I whispered. “Love longer.”

  Her giggle was the last thing I recall from that morning.

  CHAPTER 4

  T HE NEWS CHANNELS all had something on the squid. Most of them played it as yet another quirky news flash out of Olympia. They obviously didn’t know what to make of it, other than to repeat its dimensions—thirty-seven feet and 923 pounds—then shifi into phony chitchat about whether the squid was placed there by Republicans or Democrats and whether it would make people queasy about swimming in the Sound. Their footage of the squid itself was brief, as if they worried it might haunt people.

  Channel 7 was the only one that went beyond snippets.

  I’d never seen anyone I knew on television other than Judge Stegner, so I was surprised by how little Professor Kramer resembled himself. He looked pale, almost criminal, his collar askew, his hair reckless. Then the camera panned to some kid who came up to the professor’s bicep and looked a whole lot like me, staring at the squid, orange hair fluttering, the high camera angle reducing me to one of Charlie Brown’s big-headed sidekicks.

  Suddenly my peeling nose was bigger than life in front of me. I looked into the camera the way a baby does, as if I didn’t realize it was really on me, which was the truth.

  “Little Miles O’Malley says the squid was alive when he happened upon it in the dark early this morning,” the TV said. “If so, this would be among the first and only times anyone has seen a gia
nt squid alive. Repeated efforts by marine scientists to study the elusive creatures in the wild have failed.”

  Then I stared straight out of our TV at myself. “It was breathing,” I said, as if describing my run-in with an alien. The camera zoomed in on one of the squid’s eyes before fading to the studio where a cheerful lady gushed, “Wow! Miles will never forget that!”

  The weatherman, who’d mastered the ability to simultaneously smile and speak, promised his forecast was next, then stranded me with a commercial that left me with the confusing impression that waterskiing was somehow safer and more fun with Tampax. I waited for the phone to bark, the door to collapse, the house to be surrounded by hecklers. But nothing happened.

  Once my pulse slowed, I felt relieved that they hadn’t shown me saying the earth was trying to “tell us something.” Then it hit me: I was on television! So what if I looked like a mumbling dwarf! Then I panicked again, dwelling on their choice of words. If so . . . In other words, this Miles O’Malley is an unreliable child who claims he saw the squid alive. If so was code for we all know this kid was lying or imagining things. I wondered again if I’d really heard it breathing at all. The evidence would be there in Professor Kramer’s report, wouldn’t it? Then what would happen? I’d be sent to a reformatory school for liars—that’s what.

  My parents didn’t see the five o’clock news, but they heard about it and huddled around the television at five before eleven with their late dinner of leftover tuna loaf and brass-colored cocktails.

  They were so startled by the attention their boy was getting that they didn’t even question my lie that the squid’s death moans pulled me from bed. Dad, however, made sure I understood—while showing me a mouthful of ground tuna—how easy it was to get stuck in the mud, something he knew nothing about. That’s what parenting looked like to me then, tuning in just often enough to warn your kids about things that they knew more about than you did. Mom scolded me for wearing the same green army shorts evey damn day, then cut me a half-smile the way she did right before she’d say she had no idea where I came from, which always left me wondering, if not from you, then who?