Webster worked at his own station, and did not grin. His hair grew long, folded around him like a pair of wings. When he was on his Harley, it would belly out behind him like a sea anchor. In the lab, he braided it and tied it with a leather thong. He told his students about a prehistoric shrew that only ate the eggs of a certain duck. The shrews waxed so successful, they ate every duck egg before it hatched, until the ducks became extinct.
“White man is the shrew that ate the duck eggs till the ducks were gone,” he said. “Followed by the shrews.”
He didn’t know how to be an Indian. He’d never met one in Connecticut, when he was growing up. He hadn’t even been a Scout, and when he tried to burn his mother’s house down at the age of eight, he had to learn fire-building on his own. Making a pile of trash, giggling and trembling, he fumbled with the match. Cereal boxes did not light, he found, but cigarette packets did. Running to the kitchen, he climbed on the counter and took down a carton of Pall Malls. His mother was in the front part of the house, in her office, but when she was in there with a patient she did not come out. She was a psychiatrist, like his father. When Webster was a baby, they’d put him in a Skinner box, which issued him an M&M each time he fitted an odd-shaped block into its corresponding hole, and did not cry.
His parents built the box to teach him what he’d need to know in life, and planned to write a book on how he did. But before the book was done, his mother packed up Webster and drove off into the night, left his father and the box. Her new house was big and cubic, white paint on old wood. When he lit the mound of shredded cigarettes, red packages, and crinkly wrappers, yellow flames shot up and lit the trash, exploded to the eaves, and scorched a wide black triangle of clean white wall. His mother sent him to a specialist in infantile aggression, who watched him while he played with dolls and toy houses.
“Eeeeyaaakoouum,” he’d say and make the boy doll kamikaze-dive into the house.
The last time he went east, his mother watched him, eyes merry over the rim of her martini.
“When did you develop this Indian fantasy?” she said.
He didn’t try to argue. She must have known about his father’s family. They’d lived in Maine three hundred years, and where else would those settlers get their brides? “Jane” or “Rose” they wrote in the family Bible, no last name. They married off their children to the farm next door, where the story was the same: behind the official family tree, a long line of Penobscot or Mohican braves. Native Americans had six hundred languages, but only one blood group, Type O, which Webster shared. His father hadn’t even had to shave, his brown skin smooth. He must have plucked the few hairs that grew, the way the Indians did, though Webster’d never asked him while he could. His father had married two more times and had several other children, some of whom Webster had met. After the third divorce, on his sailboat off the coast of Maine, his father had put a bullet through the back of his own throat. Drunk, his mother said, though Webster did not suppose she really knew.
Near Berkeley, on the California coast, Miwok had been living just a century before, but now they were all dead, leaving nothing but some piles of clam shells from which even the smell had gone. Once they had had a village in Bolinas, near the reef where Webster did research. He got up at three A.M. and rode from Berkeley in freezing fog to catch a minus tide, when just enough of slippery rock was out that he could crawl and slither half a mile from shore in icy spray, dip his sample jars, and capture a few grams of plankton. Returning as the tide came in, he might plunge to his neck, jars at arm’s length above his head, eyes on the next comber that could sweep him off. The reef was huge, long ragged ribs of rock sheltering Bolinas Bay. Miwok had caught fish here in their basket nets for about ten thousand years, and nothing much had happened since to ruin it. It was the biggest, cleanest intertidal zone in North America.
He found a boathouse in Bolinas he could rent. It was on a weathered pier, gray and splintered from salt air, its pilings sunk in the lagoon, a shallow estuary three miles long. The boathouse had no heat, a cold-water shower, and, since the lagoon was just a wide place in the San Andreas Fault, any night the earth might open wide and take it down. But it had water all around, and snowy egrets waded past, while harbor seals hauled out to sunbathe on the sand. Across the lagoon a mountain rose two thousand feet, dark green and silent in yellow light: Tamalpais, sleeping princess to the Miwok. Farther inland you could see her, a curved hip, a sloping flank, her head thrown back and one breast raised, the fire tower on top like a hard nipple. Bolinas would be somewhere between her thighs.
He moved in books and a microscope, a sleeping bag and camp stove. He sold his motorcycle, bought an old, dented, metal canoe, some Navajo blankets, and two pairs of moccasins. He gave up white man’s time, the telephone and news, hamburgers and pizza, everything that came in plastic, and throwing out the trash. Miwok had pulled salmon from the streams, hunted antelope and grizzly bear. They ate six kinds of acorns, barnacles, sea urchins, bees, and the occasional army worm. Now the salmon, grizzlies, antelope were gone, and the coast for miles around was national park, everything down to the army worms protected under federal law. Webster bought some sacks of beans and rice, and a book on edible plants.
He learned to paddle the canoe in the lagoon, where it was calm. Soon he could ride through the channel, past surfers on the bay, and out to open ocean, where big swells hissed through claustrophobic beds of kelp, and harbor seals came up to stare at him. Bobbing along the reef, he dragged plankton nets to fill his jars and watched the water on the rocks, waiting for it to rise. He had to paddle back in through the channel with the tide. It came out like river rapids, no way to get back in until it turned again. He could have bought a tide chart, but Miwok hadn’t needed them. The lowest tide was later every day, and he could time it by the orange poppies that furled shut as the sun declined, even in fog. Then skunks began to ripple through the grass like long-haired caterpillars. Finally the deer came out to browse. He didn’t need a clock.
He took his samples, put them onto slides. Aurelia aurita he was tracking now, the moon jellyfish, through its peculiar plankton forms. Starting from a single cell, it grew to a fat many-legged worm, took root as a plantlike polyp, then became a swimming star, until one day its legs arced back and joined, turning its body inside out to make a medusa the size of a pinpoint.
No one had ever seen the second change, when the polyp left the rock, shaped itself into a star—and he hadn’t seen it either, but so what? Some secrets nature clearly planned to keep, like why Aurelia had to seem four different animals. Numbers had plummeted in recent years, and guys on grants from power companies liked to say that ocean populations varied in natural cycles, nothing to cause concern. Webster planned to prove them wrong and write a searing article about global warming, oil spills, pesticides. White man, turn back, he’d say. His only grant was from a group of old ladies who liked to lie in front of logging trucks. Netting plankton, he ran gentle tests and put them back into the water without hurting them.
The days shrank, dark and short. Rain came, thudded on the boathouse roof like gray arrows. Waves smashed at the mouth of the lagoon, too big for a canoe. Webster sat inside the cold boathouse, while icy tide lapped just under the floor. He couldn’t work, and he was tired of beans and rice. He’d gather food, that’s what he’d do. He set off hiking, plant book in his hand.
After four miles of pastureland, uphill in rain, he reached a fir forest, tangy with humus smells, and not a leaf of miner’s lettuce anywhere. He found a spring with watercress, and ate a few handfuls. All right, he’d had his greens. Packing more for later, he still felt hollow as an old snail shell.
Searching, he found a dead log with a rash of mushrooms, fragile neon-orange bells that did not look edible. Color like that on a frog meant it was deadly to the touch. How did Miwok decide which to eat? Someone dies, and then you know. He kept looking.
At the foot of a fir tree, he found two succulent white caps, so fat and crisp he had
to pluck one out. Brushing off the dirt, he smelled it—and took a bite. The taste was nutlike with a hint of loam. He could feel the trees around him, suddenly, how tall they were and still. Spitting the pulp into his palm, he wiped his hand off on a fern.
Next day, wolfish with hunger, he hitched over the mountain in the rain and bought a mushroom guide. Twenty-three kinds of tan mushrooms were poisonous, fifteen yellow, nine orange, eighteen brown. Most would make you vomit, some showed you God. One green and three clean white ones destroyed the human liver and put you in the ground.
“Welcome to the dock,” his landlady said, bringing him lasagna in aluminum. Webster wrapped his hands around it, still hot. He had never smelled anything so good.
“Thank you,” he gasped.
She gave him a steady smile. She was a sexy forty-five, with red hair, eyes that could look eager, bitter, eager in a flash. Her house leaned close to his, and on warm days she liked to lie out topless on her balcony, yards from his bed.
“You know,” she said, “you could use my stove if you wanted, or my shower. I have lots of hot water. My door is never locked.”
Webster glanced away. The last woman he’d lived with had also slept with his best friend, and a great many unnecessary things had happened then. He’d smashed his hand against a wall and hit a joist. A bone had broken through the skin, and by the time they got him to the hospital, his best friend and Dana had agreed that it was really Webster’s fault. He had apologized and cleaned his blood off the wall. Sure, he met women now, and sometimes one of them had made him want to try again. But it never worked out right. He would always want too much, or she would, and the other would tell lies. On the whole, it seemed wiser to just apologize to any woman he met and let it go at that. If he forgot, he had his hand to remind him, two of the knuckles flat for life. He felt them creaking as he clutched the burning foil.
“I’m sorry. I’m sort of starved. Mind if I just go eat this now?”
She gave him a bitter-eager grin, and he scuttled into the boathouse, guilty but too hungry to care.
The lasagna warmed his whole body, out to the fingerprints. It was gone before he thought about the foil. Foil was trash, and how much more had already been shed, plastic wrap around the cheese, Styrofoam under the meat?
Grimly, he scrubbed it flat, spread it on his lab table where he would see it glinting every day. It was the last trash he was ever going to make. He had to eat, that much was clear. But wasn’t there some way to do it without despoiling the world?
An old rod hung dusty on the boathouse wall, and he got it down, took the reel apart. He found plastic line in tide-pools, combed it out, and learned to splice it so it held. Miwok had felled redwood trees with sharp rocks, split them into planks with elk antler, and built their own houses. They had made needles out of bone and sewn clothes from hides of animals they killed with pointed sticks. Webster’d never felled so much as a sapling, and his flannel shirts and jeans came from cotton mills. But he could maybe do this one thing. Searching the beach, he found a hook and a plastic jar for worms. Patching the stock with driftwood, he oiled the reel with grease from his own skin, until it ran out smooth and stopped on command.
The first time he jammed a worm onto the hook, he flinched. The worm arched and tried to flee, its delicate mucosa burst, cloaca pierced. How did Miwok snap the spines of fish, cut out beating elk hearts, rip off skin? He cast the worm off the dock, so he wouldn’t have to look at it.
Two minutes later, when he hauled the hook back in, the worm had been sucked off by the tide. He’d have to find a better spot. Hiking to the nearest beach, he jammed another worm on, flinched, and flung it out into the surf. Waves rushed at him, dark green, simmering with rain, and whisked the hook clean every time.
One morning, he woke to a strange sound and realized the rain had stopped. The lid of clouds broke open, revealing slots of blue. Tide rushed out through the channel, swollen with rainwater, brown. Now was his chance. The tide would take him past the waves, nothing to strip his hook, and he’d have a chance at bigger fish, yellowtail, lingcod, bass. Two feet, three feet long or more, cooked on a spit over a driftwood fire, until the skin curled black and crackling.
Knees weak at the thought, he dug new worms and packed his rod. As he let down the canoe, stepped in, the current seized it, spun it toward the mouth of the lagoon. With a shock, he felt the icy water through the metal boat. Even close to the lagoon, it felt like snow.
Waves sprang up, bigger than they looked from shore. He had to paddle hard to make the tops before they broke. No one else was out, not a boat or a surfer or even a gull. Thin silver sunlight glinted on the water, as wind flattened swaths of ocean miles across. White clouds scudded fast enough to watch. By the time he reached the reef, his shins ached with cold in the stiff blue jeans.
He passed the longest spine, narrow black rock beneath the waterline. Out of the shelter of the reef, waves whipped by him, fast as thought, twice as big as any normal day. Surging up and down, showered with cold spray, he paddled till the swells rolled by and did not break. Aiming for the kelp beds past the reef, where the big fish would be, he propped the paddle in his armpit, tried to steady the canoe, while he fumbled for a worm, fingers trembling.
Suddenly the water underneath him dropped away, and he looked up to see a green wall gleaming in the sun. Too late to turn and reach the top, he flailed, rose, popped out into air on the back side, and crashed into the trough. The next one loomed above him right away, and it was bigger, broke before he reached the top, swamped him with frigid foam. Kneeling in icy water to his thighs, another green train on the way, he tried to turn the boat, but it was like maneuvering a pool. Waves came at him one-two-three, feathering along the tops, blocked all view of land when they had passed. Numb hands cupped, he tried to sluice the water out, while he gripped the rod between his knees. Giving up, he turned around the reef and started back, canoe half filled and riding low.
Somehow clouds had sealed the sky, and rain began to pock the swells. The canoe didn’t seem to move. At last he could see the inlet to the lagoon. Watching the waves, he picked what seemed to be the smallest set and nosed toward shore, hoping they would push him in.
The first wave lifted the canoe and shrugged it off, with a quick slap that almost knocked him overboard. The next one drew it higher, hung it almost vertical. The bow slid and dove straight in. Metal shone under gray water, as the wave and the canoe rolled over him.
He had the vest off by the time his head was out, and the moccasins. His hair dragged around him, sweatshirt heavy as a shroud. He peeled it off, skin so numb the water felt almost warm. Jeans clutched his thighs and knees, a straitjacket each time he kicked. No way to get them off.
The canoe had disappeared, the rod and reel with it. Scanning for them, treading over waves, he felt himself drift. Something pulled him up a wavefront, out to sea. The beach was no more than a quarter mile away. He could see it dimly through the rain. Aiming for it, he applied himself to freestyle for a while, and lifted his head. He hadn’t moved. In fact, he’d drifted farther out. Sighting on the mountain, he could see his motion now, southwest, the way the tide left the lagoon. Of course, it was still running out. He had come back too soon. A merry raft of driftwood chips bobbed toward him, passed, and jetted out to sea.
All right. The thing to do with rips was not to resist them. Go with them, swim their way, until they let you go. The trouble was, he couldn’t feel his bones any longer. When he raised his head, something shifted in it like a ton of sand. His heart raced in trills, like birdsong. Hypothermia. Soon he’d start to chatter, unable to think.
Floating, he looked down and let his limbs trail like a jellyfish. The water below was blackish-green, opaque as rock, and huge. Surfers sometimes disappeared. Their boards washed in, crescent bites incised, three feet wide. The favorite food of great white sharks was harbor seals—but their eyesight wasn’t keen. A surfboard, a harbor seal, a guy in jeans all looked pretty much the same. The s
maller chunks would sink, feed the chub and then the crabs. As crabshit he’d feed the phytoplankton, then the zooplankton that ate them, and so on till a cell of him in some seabass fillet became a man again.
A huge wave lifted him, and he jerked his head up, snorted a noseful of water. He was still alive. Joining the bottom of the food chain was more difficult than he’d supposed.
He looked around as swells rolled fast through rain. Cresting one, he tried to see the beach. Instead, he saw a silver prow, below the surface of a wave. Deep under water, wallowing. The next wave lifted it a little less. How many more before it sank, and rusted, turned to trash, his trash, on the biggest, cleanest intertidal reef in North America?
“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, no, no, no.”
Thrashing across the water, he seized the gunwales, tried to haul it up. Diving, he got beneath it, shoved. It was heavy as a safe and did not move.
A tsunami arrived, rolled over it, and he went with it, fingers clamped onto the metal, though he couldn’t see it anymore. He was over, under it, but holding on. If it was going to the bottom, so was he. It was going to the bottom. Casual as a whale’s fluke, the canoe flicked up and slammed his teeth. Pain shot to his toes. His sight went white, and he let go.
A long time later, sloshing in the break, a wave delivered him onto the beach. He could feel the hard sand underneath him, and the waves as they ran up his legs, withdrew, surged up again.
Somewhere his canoe was settling and crushing life forms near the reef. He wasn’t going to think about it yet. He’d think about it in the spring, when the storms left and wild-flowers came up. It didn’t mean he’d have to be a white man now, eat all the duck eggs till the ducks were gone. It didn’t mean that jellyfish would die so he could have a hair dryer, cheeseburgers in Styrofoam. He could come back, search every square inch of the bay. It might take a while. But it was-n’t over yet. Crawling out, he sprawled, an X on sand, and marked the spot.
Angels Go Naked Page 7
