The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

  They didn’t ask a single question about the squid. They simply couldn’t get past their amazement that I was on the same segment with the judge, as if there’d been some sort of mistaken-identity screwup.

  As expected, my father eventually dwelled on how tiny I looked on TV. It was obvious where he was headed, seeing how, unfortunately, it was the first of July. He asked me to slip off my shoes and stand in front of the broom closet. As usual, I started to sweat. Most kids were measured a few times a year. For me, it was the first of every month.

  My father was obsessed with height. He was five five and wished he were six one, preferably six four. He was so height-oriented he respected people just for being tall, as if their elevation were some refinement or survival skill he lacked. It wasn’t just the crap that women crave tall men. He was convinced people listen more carefully if you’re tall, that tall men get better jobs, better pay and loom over crowds like gods. Plus, tall men dunk basketballs, and what could possibly top that?

  You need to understand this about me: I loved being small and undanged. (My fifth-, sixth- and seventh-grade pictures were nearly identical.) Tall kids stepped into rooms and people expected them to deliver speeches. I could hide in daylight, and there were advantages to having my brain so close to my feet. I could scramble up trees and jump off low roofs. I was so small there was little that could go wrong. The only catch was I felt guilty for stunting my own growth after reading that kids grow the most in their sleep.

  I fluffed my hair and stood so straight I felt vertebrae separating. I lifted my chin and snuck undetectable air beneath my heels. If my father could scratch a pencil line a quarter-inch above the last one it spun him into such a great mood that the house throbbed with his goodwill; the tuna was awesome, my mother was gorgeous and I was the perfect kid. But on this night he argued gently with my mother over whether the hardback balancing on my skull was level, then darkened the pencil line from the prior month, leading to a final wince and bourbon-tuna exhale. I’d grown just a third of an inch during the prior thirteen months. I was stuck at four eight and seven-sixteenths.

  I later overheard them debating which side of the family deserved credit for my brains, singling out smart uncles, cousins and grandmas. At one point, Dad observed, “He’s always been really smart for his size.” Then my mother reminded him for the second time that week that she’d been on her way to med school before she’d inexplicably hitched up with him.

  I’d seen it building inside her, this troubling investigation into the sequence of events that stranded her in a tiny, stilted house with an unambitious baseball fanatic who still barhopped with his high school pals—the three Dons—and cried during Academy Awards speeches. (My mother had little use for sentimentality. Our family photos stayed in shoe boxes, and Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy stopped showing up once I turned seven.) Maybe, I thought, her pathetic job at the state personnel department was what disappointed her most.

  Or maybe it was me.

  My father treated her increasingly frequent rants as comical interludes. And she could be funny in a breathless, sarcastic way, but it was easy to sort the humor from the anger. She talked faster and her lips paled whenever she was furious.

  The truth is my father saw what he wanted to see, and if he could find a way around a showdown he’d take it. I rarely heard him state an opinion or suggestion that led to an argument. There was a hesitancy about him that snowballed around my mother. He started watching Mariners games with the sound off so they wouldn’t annoy her. He’d stand behind the couch, with an aluminum bat in his hands, sizing up the pitcher. Then he’d swing as the tiny ball darted across our twenty-one-inch screen, or rather he’d check-swing or half-swing, unsure to the end whether to commit.

  The tide was all the way out again, and the flats stunk in a way that always made me uneasy. My mother hated our house; the winter mold, the fall spiders and, worst of all, the summer stink of the flats whenever sun-rotted seaweed drummed up too much hydrogen sulfide, which probably explained my nightmares in which the tide stayed out for days until every living creature on the flats baked, died and stank in the heat, driving my mother to scream that we needed to move.

  Eventually, I overheard my father circle back to how tiny I looked on television. “He’s still not growing,” he whined. “It’s getting embarrassing.”

  CHAPTER 5

  T WO DAYS LATER, the low tide was a minus-three, and when the water dropped a yard lower than usual in Chatham Cove additional football fields of mud, gravel and sea life unfurled, tripling our chances of seeing something unusual or finding large clams.

  See, Professor Kramer had helped me get a specimen collector’s agreement and a commercial clamming license from the state. So if I found marketable clams I sold them to the owner of the Saigon Secret. And when it came to digging up the largest, most deeply burrowed clams around, I usually called on the long arms of Kenny Phelps.

  Phelps was a month younger and a head taller than me with a lazy swagger and long brown bangs that hid his right eye whenever he looked down. “Fuck-you bangs” is what he called them. His favorite pastime was air guitar, but unlike the rest of us, he took it seriously. When he mimicked Hendrix, for example, he’d flip over his imaginary guitar and play it upside down and left-handed. Another thing about him: He was a slacker. His philosophy was that the best jobs involved the least amount of work. His favorite scam? Going door to door offering to clean roofs and gutters in the fall. The beauty of it, he explained, was that homeowners couldn’t watch him work. If he said it took two hours then it took two hours, even if one and a half were spent huddled near the chimney puffing Kent Menthol 100s he stole from his mother. And Phelps was clever with a cigarette. He loved to pop off large smoke rings, then squeeze three little ones right through them whenever he had an audience. The only thing screwing up his bad-boy act was his long, friendly smile that came so easily he could’ve held it for those old, slow cameras and still looked natural.

  Phelps wanted me to pay him by the hour, including a half-hour lunch and two fifteen-minute smoke breaks every three hours. His stepdad was big in the electricians’ union, and Phelps liked to throw union standards and slogans at me. I offered him half of whatever we earned, which was nothing some days, days he likened to slavery. Why’d I put up with him? I wasn’t superchummy with anyone my age. My best friend was old Florence, and she never left her cabin and was getting sicker by the week. Phelps was convenient. He was the closest kid to the bay, so summers tossed us together. Plus, his gangly arms and long, strong fingers were built for clamming.

  We started out studying the little chimney holes in the mud through which clams siphoned and spat seawater, hunting for the telltale signs of the mighty geoduck. Most of those huge clams—pronounced gooey-duck for some reason—lived farther out in the bay, but there were still plenty of exposed burrows if the tide fell low enough and you knew where to look.

  As usual, we were the only ones out there. Most clammers and beachcombers headed north to rockier shores where tidal life was supposedly more abundant even though our southern bays endured the biggest tidal swings in the West, with water levels fluctuating as much as twenty feet in six hours. Still, South Sound had a reputation for mass-producing sand dollars and little else. The people behind those theories apparently never spent any time on Chatham Cove. The assumption was the Squaxins owned it, but actually just a slice of the flats belonged to the tribe, which was pointed out to me by Judge Stegner, who owned a slice himself. The state owned the rest, and from what I could tell, Chatham and the shoals north of it gathered new species of stars, snails, crabs, worms or jellies on a weekly basis—not that Phelps noticed.

  while we searched for figure-eight depressions, he updated me on Wendy Pratto’s breasts. He’d seen her in Safeway and swore her hooters were already a size bigger than they were the last day of school. “I’m guessing they’re thirty-four Cs, now,” he said authoritatively.

  He stooped, pinched loose a tip
of root-beer-colored kelp, chewed it to shreds then spat it out. He’d initially tried to con me into paying him to taste beach life, then did it to amuse himself. It became a habit. He nibbled on sea lettuce and eel grass. He ate baby shrimp and manilas straight from the shell. I saw him corner and catch a baby sculpin in a tide pool and swallow that one-inch fish whole. He gave me the latest on Christy Decker’s chest too, claiming he’d seen it rise from the YMCA pool with nipples he could’ve hung his bathrobe on.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t notice the same girls, but to me they were as remote and two-dimensional as movie stars. If I couldn’t talk to them, they didn’t enter my fantasies. I could talk to Angie Stegner—even if I didn’t always make sense.

  The pale two-thirds moon still hung in the sky, and for some reason I chose that moment to inform Phelps that Rachel Carson believed the moon was originally a glob of earth that ripped loose from the bottom of the Pacific and spun into the sky while the planet was still cooling.

  “She also said the gravitational pull from the moon causes friction that is gradually slowing the earth’s spin. So while it now takes twenty-four hours for it to rotate, it will eventually take fifty times that long. You imagine living in a world that has the equivalent of fifty straight days of light followed by fifty days of darkness?”

  Phelps glared up at me from our clam ditch through those hck-you bangs. “You’re a freak,” he said. “Why don’t you use all your homo-reading to study something of value to us?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the G-spot.”

  “The what?”

  “The G-spot, Squid Boy.” Phelps popped out a Kent, clutched it between the least dirty of his fingers and lit it. “It’s the button inside women that drives them wild.” He mumbled around his cigarette like a gangster. “Once we find out where it’s at, we’re in.”

  I was baffled. I’d never heard about any secret control panel inside women.

  “Let’s see your fingers,” Phelps said.

  I reluctantly stuck out my hand. He frowned. “I think they’re too short.”

  “For what?”

  “To reach the button. My brother says you need a finger that’s at least two and a half inches long. Either that or you’ve gotta get your pecker to bend upwards.”

  I thought about my pecker. If anything it bent slightly to the left. “How’re you supposed to do that?”

  He glared at me as if I were his slowest student. “Concentration,” he said knowingly.

  “You’re full of crap,” I said. “Your brother is messing with you again.”

  “Whatever you say, Squid Boy.”

  “I say, keep digging.”

  The G-spot? It definitely hadn’t come up in sex ed. In fact, there was nothing sexy about sex ed. All I got from it was the unsettling understanding that my life was a ridiculous long shot. First, my mother had to be flattered by my father while waiting impatiently for meatball subs at Meconi’s. Then one particular sperm cell of his eighteen zillion sperm cells had to elude whatever goalie—my father’s term—they were using. (I’d overheard my mother call me “an accident’’ at least seven times.) Then that blind, microscopic sperm of his had to find and crack that one particular moody egg of hers during that vague window of time it was available without later getting aborted by some bald, distracted doctor who was thinking about the Mariners’ bullpen at the time. What were the odds? I was a fluke in a classroom full of flukes on a planet overpopulated by flukes.

  A while later, I caught Phelps glancing at the moon, the closest thing to a cloud up there. “When did Rachel Carson write all that stuff?” he asked.

  “Early nineteen-fifties.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Her late forties.”

  “When’d she die?”

  “Nineteen sixty-four.”

  “What of?”

  “Breast cancer.”

  “How many books she write?”

  “Four. All best sellers. She was the one who warned us that if we keep spraying poisons on fields we’ll stop hearing birds in the spring.”

  “How many kids she have?”

  “None. Never married.”

  “You know everything about her, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything for a couple beats. “I know she was brave and brilliant.”

  “Know what I know?” Phelps couldn’t control his smile. “I know you’re in love with a spinster who’s been dead for decades.”

  “Keep digging.”

  Phelps eventually dug up a seven-pound geoduck that would convert into three and a half bucks for each of us. If you haven’t seen a geoduck before you’d be astonished. They’re not the clams you know. Their shells are ridiculously undersized. Even when contracted, their necks hang way out. Think of bodybuilders in Speedos, or as Professor Kramer himself put it, there’s no getting around their resemblance to horse dicks.

  When I helped the professor explain the tidal flats to third-graders it was always hard to get them past the giggles to make them understand that as silly as geoducks look, they possess one of the most durable designs on earth. They bury themselves two feet deep in sand, then shove their oversized necks up through the sea floor where they can comfortably inhale plankton and spit out waste for a century or more. By the time I’d tell them that the biggest ones swell to twenty pounds and live up to 150 years without ever having to move, I’d be talking to myself.

  The tide was returning quicker than I’d expected, sneaking up on me the way it did when my mind drifted. So instead of digging flooding burrows, I waded, hunting for anything the big aquariums might want, wishing I’d started searching earlier instead of wasting time trying to educate someone as thickheaded as Phelps.

  I told him to help me turn rocks before they submerged, hoping to find baby octopus, reminding him to put the rocks back exactly the way he found them. A few minutes later, I saw five toothpick-legged sandpipers scissor-stepping across the flats in such choreographed precision I half-expected them to start twirling canes and whistling in unison. Then I heard Phelps shriek.

  By the time I looked his way, he was already tripping backward onto compact sand. That part wasn’t unusual. Phelps rarely went a day without hurting himself. Who else broke his collarbone bowling or sprained his neck sneezing? But this time he was reeling and screeching, as if chased. “It snapped at me!”

  I knew what he’d seen before I got to the rock he’d flipped.

  Midshipmen rank among the Sound’s creepiest bottom fish. Their bodies are mostly heads, and their heads are mostly eyes and teeth. And for whatever reason, the females rise up from the dark canyons to drop their eggs beneath rocks in the shallows. The males then guard the eggs until they hatch, and if you startle them they’ll show you their piranha like teeth. After this daddy showed me his, I saw tiny eggs adhered to the underside of the upturned rock and the baby midshipmen spinning inside them, their metallic stripes creating a sparkling light show. I waved Phelps over.

  He stood hesitantly behind me as the flashing babies popped from their eggs and splashed into two inches of water where they huddled against their father’s belly. Then the tumult passed and they all became so still, the babies seemingly disappearing, the father blending into the rocks.

  “Now that,” Phelps whispered, “is amazing.”

  “Look around.” I held out my hands, as if catching rain.

  CHAPTER 6

  W HEN WE GOT back to my house with one geoduck, thirty-two manila and eight butter clams, we heard voices, laughter and music echoing from the Stegner house.

  The Stegners technically lived next door, but their house loomed on a knoll a quarter mile away and was unlike any other home on the bay. Nothing about its design hinted that it began as a Methodist church, but something about its posture, the way it faced sunrise and occupied the highest bump of lowlands ringing the west flank of the bay, made it easy to see how some people might pick it as a place to chat with God. Yet it was hard to imagine that it had
ever belonged to anyone but the Stegners. It fit their stature and high expectations, at least it had when the judge was still married and Angie’s three older Eagle Scout brothers were still around. Still, both times my mother stepped inside she swore she heard a Methodist choir.

  We found Angie beneath the willow near our property line sharing a cigarette with Frankie Marx. Frankie was always friendly to me, but I hated him anyway. He was obnoxiously handsome, and I didn’t trust anyone who made looking cool seem that easy. So, of course, I was determined to save Angie from him, but I couldn’t resist Lizzy, his hyper chocolate Lab, who got up, tongue dangling, to greet us.

  Angie whistled Lizzy back into the grass, then stroked her belly. I’d never seen her touch phony Frankie, but I saw her cuddle with that dog often enough to envy it. I asked her about the party.

  “It’s the big old oyster feed for Dad’s richest contributors,” she said, without looking up. Her eyelids were so heavy it looked as if she were hiding.

  I nodded, but I didn’t know what she meant other than that being a state supreme court judge was something like being a mayor or a governor. After an awkward lull, it occurred to Phelps that she was the same Angie his brother raved about. “I hear you play an awesome bass,” he said.

  “Yeah?” She grinned.

  “Cool,” Phelps told her.

  “You think so?” She blew a cone of smoke at the sky. “Wouldn’t it be cooler if I played lead guitar?”

  “Yeah, but bass is cool too.”

  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.