by Win Blevins
Meadowlark squatted, reached into the water, and picked up a star-shaped something.
Sam flinched. “That thing might bite, or sting, or …”
Meadowlark laughed out loud. The creature was the size of her hand, and it had five fingers, or arms, or spurs, or whatever they were. On top it was a hard, orange, spiky shell. On the underside it was as peculiar a creature as Sam had ever seen, fish-belly color, with long, open grooves running out the arms—these arms actually seemed to be hollow!
Meadowlark held it up and cried, “A fish star!”
“Starfish,” said a male voice.
Sam whirled. He didn’t know whether he was more startled by hearing any voice or by hearing English. He eased his hand to the wooden handle of his knife.
“Easy,” said the stranger, grinning. “I’m a friend.”
Sam looked for Coy. The little coyote was far down the beach, playing.
The stranger was an elderly man, gleaming white of beard and hair, very tan, and from his accent American. He carried a bucket and short-handled shovel. “Are you new to the ocean?”
“First time we’ve ever seen it.”
“Sometimes it seems like I’ve seen nothing else,” said the old fellow. He stuck out a hand. “Robert Cameron, able-bodied seaman, a hand of merchantmen my entire life, until I retired. Call me Robber.”
Sam shook the hand.
“That starfish won’t hurt you,” Robber said. He reached out. Meadowlark hesitated and then gave it to him.
“Charmer, ain’t she? I’ve seen these fellows small as a thumbnail and I’ve seen them two feet across. They’re a wonder. Unlike you or me, they can break off an arm, or get it eaten off, and grow a new one. These tiny feet on the underside—see these?—they can cling to any rock, no matter how steep. That hole here, that’s the mouth. Darned if I know how these creatures make babies.” He looked at it lingeringly and set it back in the tide pool.
“Want me to show you what else is in here?”
Meadowlark thought each tide pool was a miracle, and this beach held many, many more miracles, more universes than she could ever explore.
Robber pointed out some blue-gray-green creatures called anemones, six of them.
“Very funny, very ugly,” Meadowlark cried.
“They look like round globs of gray mud,” said Sam.
Meadowlark touched one with a finger and cried out in alarm and laughed at herself. The thing was squishy.
“The round hole at the top,” said Robber, “is its mouth. Since there’s almost no water here, right now the mouth is closed. But that mouth has tentacles that …”
For Meadowlark he explained what a tentacle is, and said, “We’ve got to see one that’s open.”
He splashed out into thigh-deep water, bucket in one hand and shovel in the other. Meadowlark was quick behind him, emerald cloth dress or no, and Sam reluctantly behind her. Soon Robber found what he was looking for.
Meadowlark gasped. It looked like a huge flower in brilliant pink. Long, slender pink tendrils floated gently in the water.
“Like petals,” she exclaimed.
“Beautiful, ain’t it?” Then, with a change of mood, “It’s the most beautiful things that hurt you.”
Sam thought better of asking what he meant.
Robber went on, “if those slender tongues, if they catch something, they paralyze it. Then they put it in their mouth.”
“Do they have bones?” asked Meadowlark.
“No bones. Squish all the way through.”
“How do they make more anemones?”
“That’s a mystery to me. Let’s get back to the tide pools,” said Robber.
They did.
“Are they rooted?”
Robber fingered another anemone gently. It closed its mouth. “No, they’re not rooted—they’re animals, not plants. They have a kind of disk at the bottom that holds fast to a rock, or something else hard. In fact, look here.”
Robber fished around with his shovel and picked up a strange little object with the tip and dropped it into his bucket. It was a shelled creature with long, jointed legs, the front legs pincers. Meadowlark stuck a finger toward it and it jumped—sideways.
“Oooh,” she cried out.
“A hermit crab,” said Robber.
She stuck the finger back.
This time the crab pinched her.
“Ow!” She stuck her finger in her mouth, laughing.
“Look what’s on his back,” said Robber.
Meadowlark and Sam bumped heads slightly as they both bent to look, and smiled sideways at each other.
“See?”
“A tiny anemone!” said Sam.
“Exactly! Hermit crabs and anemones usually live together, and most crabs carry an anemone or two on their backs.”
“A saddle horse for the ocean,” said Sam. Then, “Look at that, eight legs.”
“Speaking of ocean horse,” said Robber, “let’s look over here.”
They splashed in shallow water or mucked in sand, boulder to boulder, tide pool to tide pool. Robber didn’t say what he was looking for until …
“There!”
In a deep pool Meadowlark saw a purple-looking plant with a bunch of daggers sticking up, like an ocean cactus.
“Mildly poisonous,” said Robber. “But don’t look at the sea urchin, look at what’s holding on to it.”
Meadowlark gasped out loud. A small creature with a head like a horse’s was clinging to the sea urchin with its … tail?
Robber laughed. “A sea horse.”
“The head is like a horse,” said Sam, “but the tail is like a monkey.”
“Exactly. What a confused critter!”
Robber slipped on a glove and wiggled the spine of the sea urchin. The sea horse let go and …
“Is that the way it swims?” said Meadowlark. It inched its way forward upright and very slowly. There were whirring motions around its body.
“It has that armor, the ridges you see running around its body, and it has fins.”
“Totally mixed up,” said Sam, “horse and monkey, fins and armor.”
They spent perhaps an hour playing in the tide pools, all three of them.
Suddenly Robber suggested, “Want to eat with me? I came down here to dig clams.”
“Sure.”
Sam whistled at Coy—the coyote was getting too far away.
It turned out that digging soft-shell clams when the tide was out was dead easy. Even Meadowlark took her turn at the shovel. While they worked, Sam and Meadowlark found out that Robber had abandoned ship here—“Where in the world will you find a climate so sweet as California?” he asked. He was unmarried—“I had a woman in every port in the world”—and had no family of any kind.
When the bucket was almost full of clams, Robber said, “One more thing. Nothing better with clams than a few abalone.”
He led them out to the rocky point. At a low cliff edge, where the water was perhaps six feet deep, he dove in and started prying abalone off the rock with his butcher’s knife. From the look of it, getting them off the rock was hard work. Robber would pop to the surface, get a breath, and go back to it. Eventually he would give one to Meadowlark and go back down. He took six.
Meadowlark made a face. To her they looked like giant half snails.
At last, Coy skittering alongside, they followed Robber up the small creek to a one-room cabin. In front of it Robber lit a fire, put a big pan of water on, and set to pounding the abalone like hell. He pounded and pounded.
Coy stayed well back. He seemed to have an aversion to both clams and abalones.
When Meadowlark asked for something to do, he pointed out some wild onions she could pick and wash in the creek.
“Doesn’t Don Cesar object to you living here?” Sam asked.
“Not his land,” said Robber. “The Mexican government is probably waiting for some other nabob they want to give this piece of God’s good green earth to. It’s one of the fi
nest pieces on the planet.”
While the water was coming to a boil, Robber told them about the creatures of the deeps of the ocean. According to him dolphins were the most lovable of animals, because they jumped free of the water and played around your boat and always seemed to be smiling.
“This is a seafood stew I’m making here,” he declared, “clams, chopped abalone, and onions.
“The nasty critters are the sharks.” Robber picked up a stick and drew one in the sand, so Meadowlark would know one if she ever saw that dorsal fin cutting through the waves. “I like to catch sand sharks and eat them. Getting even with shark-kind.”
Sam laughed at that expression.
“Whales are the largest animals in the world, I’m pretty sure. In my whaling days, I saw things….
“When you see a sperm whale pull a boat full of men through the water faster than a horse can run, and do that even with harpoons in his back—you know that’s some hunk of animal.”
Robber’s favorite ocean-dwellers, though, were the octopus and the squid. He made a giant drawing of an octopus in front of the fire. “This one,” he said, “can be as small as a joint of your finger. Or, believe it or not, as long as three horses hitched one behind the other.” He gave them a look of amazement.
Now he did a drawing of an octopus as long as a man, most of it being eight tentacles dangling behind. “These tentacles have suckers on the bottom, and if the octopus catches anything, he never lets go.”
Merriment played in his eyes. “He pulls you up into his mouth, which is at his bottom.” Robber nodded in that direction. “That’s where his tentacles join his head, and that’s where he does”—Robber made a comical expression—“his eating.
“Now, here’s the best part. When the octopus feels threatened, he squirts out a cloud of black ink, and while you’re blind, he runs like hell.”
The squid was similar, and just as small, but got even bigger. “This sailor has seen some,” Robber said, “that must have been fifty feet long. They have ten tentacles instead of eight.
“Know my favorite strange one of all? Jellyfish.”
“Jellyfish,” said Sam. Then he explained to Meadowlark what jelly is.
“Sure enough. They come in swarms, either thousands and thousands or none at all. Mostly they come at night, rise up from the deeps. They have lots of different shapes, but most of them look like the tops of mushrooms. On the sides they have these hangy-downs, things like strings that follow them. Actual, these are tentacles, and help catch food.
“Here’s what I really like. Some of them, there in the dark, they glow.”
Sam and Meadowlark stared at him.
“Glow, yes, they do. The ocean is dark,” said Robber. “Think about it, farther down you go, the farther you get from sunlight. A hundred feet down looks like twilight. A thousand feet down, night. Ten thousand feet down, a darkness you nor I can’t ever imagine.
“But up through the darkness come the jellyfish, glowing mushrooms trailing thin streams of light. The white ones look like half moons, glowing.”
Meadowlark cut off an exclamation with a hand over her mouth.
“They swim through the incredible blackness, and they glow like lamps. Glow, I say …”
Meadowlark knew it for a delicious dream:
She felt herself caressed by the gentle eddies of an ocean infinitely deep, as deep as her own mind and the mind of all consciousness. She undulated through the warm waters, slowly, her black hair waving behind her like the tendrils of an exotic undersea plant. Suspended in the depth, suspended in light, she nuanced her way forward.
Though she didn’t feel that she moved, she swam through great columns of light, thick as trees. These trees were ethereal. She passed her hand through a column and looked in amazement at the glow of her skin.
In every direction, like downy thistles before a breeze, swam many-colored fish. Some were deep purple with yellow patches brighter than sunlight. Some were a rash of orange; some a scatter of green, others a luminous blue, or a hammered bronze. She turned in the water, and turned and turned, embracing them all with her eyes.
She swam a little toward the edge of this sunny area, swam toward where the columns of light faded in the darkness, and were almost lost. Here there stirred black shapes, shapes small and graceful, like flags blowing in a wind; shapes that darted like knife blades; shapes the size of sailing ships, cutting the water swiftly as any prow. The water out there, she felt sure, was cold.
She looked for the half-moons—she was sure half moons floated out there somewhere, glowing in the darkness. She turned her body in every direction, she shot her eyes this way and that, but she saw no half-moons.
Her heart ached a little.
Suddenly she was afraid. Then she thought, How am I breathing underwater? What am I breathing underwater?
Instantly the sea surged into her mouth, down her windpipe, into her lungs.
Meadowlark gagged. She stopped breathing. She gasped desperately for breath, and knew that she would find breath if she could find calm.
An idea seized her. She turned and swam back toward the brightest sunlight. In the light she relaxed. Then she told herself to breathe. If you breathe, the water will be air. If you breathe, you will live.
She sucked in—was it water, was it air? Either way, it filled her lungs with life. Ecstatic, she breathed deep again. Her body relaxed. The water again felt warm, friendly, balming.
She reached the brightest stretch in the sunny ocean that surrounded her, and bathed in its pleasures. She drifted into a school of lilac-and-red fish and was delighted at their sudden flight, this way and that, with sudden stops, then further rushes. They streaked the water with scarlet, then dotted it, then streaked it again.
She was happy. She lolled. She spun slowly in the water, her movements languid, her limbs sensuous, her heart soft and light.
Hoof clops outside the tipi.
Coy barked sharply.
Sam grabbed his pistol with one hand and his knife with the other.
The clops drummed up the memory of the last time he’d been surprised in his tipi. In Ruby Hawk Valley, where Sam and Meadowlark had spent their version of a honeymoon, Meadowlark’s relatives and one of her suitors suddenly appeared with weapons pointed. They took Meadowlark back to her family, and marched Sam back to the village as a prisoner.
I damn near lost her forever.
Coy barked harder.
Maybe he remembers too.
So now he got the last peg out of the tipi flap fast and busted out naked and looked up beyond the horses’ heads, each hand raised to fight.
Julia Rubio squealed with laughter.
Flat Dog gave his brother-in-law a severe look—What in hell are you doing?
Sam dived back into the tipi.
When Meadowlark opened the flap for her brother and the señorita, a small fire was started and coffee was brewing. Sam sat fully dressed in the position of host, behind the center fire.
“The others are gone back to the pueblo,” said Flat Dog.
“I am come here with my man,” said Julia. Then she added, “I knew of the instant, this is my man.”
Flat Dog looked a little sheepish but said, “I feel the same way.”
The two pairs of lovers gazed at each other across the low flames, dowsing themselves in the words and their meanings.
Sam and Meadowlark looked at each other. Considering what they’d done, they could hardly criticize anyone else. Sam did wonder why. Flat Dog, you’re kind of striking, tall and rangy like most Crow men, but that face of yours, it’s more comic than handsome, and you don’t have a dollar to your name.
Flat Dog spoke to Meadowlark. “Will you let us use your tipi?”
Meadowlark nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“We will give ourselves to each other and make the bond forever,” said Julia.
I know how that feels.
“We’ll go to the mission,” Sam told Flat Dog. “Bring the tipi back when
you’re ready.”
“Flat Dog will come when my father’s men guess right and find me here,” said Julia. “But we will never be finished, this man and I.”
As they were packing up, Meadowlark said quietly to Sam, “The last two days, looks like they were something big.”
Sam grinned. “She’s a fire-breather, that one.”
Ten
Banished
“This little game will show the advantage of race, subtle but decisive,” said Grumble.
Sumner started to protest but thought better of it. He slipped into some dark shadows.
The others went into the cantina, Abby at a table by herself, Sam, Meadowlark, and Grumble at a table near enough to watch. Coy snuggled up to Sam’s feet, being mannerly. This was the fanciest cantina in town, for the little game required a dupe with some pesos in his purse.
No sign of Flat Dog yet, and not a whisper from the Rubio family.
Abby was gorgeous. Today she wore a royal blue gown and a mint-colored hat, which set off her hennaed hair perfectly. If any observer questioned her wealth and breeding, doubt was banished by the fine brooch she wore, with a gold timepiece encircled by sparkling diamond chips.
Nearby the threesome ordered mescal and a big supper. They were playing the part of ruffians.
Abby’s role was to sip at her brandy and wait, alone. Once in a while she checked her timepiece. When a man or two offered to buy her a drink, she dismissed them with withering glances.
In San Pedro Harbor were two British merchantmen, traders seeking to exchange their manufactured goods for hundreds of rawhide bags of tallow. The captains would do well. Sumner had reported that officers came into this cantina every evening to celebrate their good fortune.
At last a man strode in wearing the outfit of an officer of a merchant ship, plain blue frock coat with billed hat. Sam was tickled at the look Abby gave him. It was a come-hither so delicate, so subtle, that only its object would normally notice.
The officer walked smartly to Abby’s table, bowed, and spoke, doubtless introducing himself.
Abby lit up, eyes dancing—her whole body bubbled a little. Sam looked at Meadowlark, who was smiling and shaking her head. “She’s a wonder,” Sam said softly.
