Why did Zachary and now Adam care about Leo and me? Me, Leo’s girlfriend? Day before yesterday, I’d have been outraged.
“Are you?” Adam prodded.
“He’s my friend,” I said carefully. “But not my boyfriend. I don’t know him that well.”
“Don’t you? Last night he surely looked at you the way someone looks at his girlfriend.”
“Adam, I never even really talked to Leo till yesterday. We see the Rodneys when we come to visit Grandfather, the way we see lots of other people on the Island. Leo and I never had a conversation till he talked about his father dying, when we walked on the beach yesterday. I think maybe we can really be friends. But I’m not anybody’s girlfriend.”
“And what about Zachary?” Adam bent down and started unlacing his sneakers. His hair fell across his eyes.
“Zachary—I guess what I think I have to do with Zachary is give him a chance, the way we said last night.” About Zachary, I wasn’t ready to say anything more than that.
Adam looked up at me and grinned as he unlaced his other sneaker. “Friends. Friends are what make the world go round for me.” He stood up, tying his already knotted laces together and hanging his sneakers about his neck. “John says you’re a pretty good swimmer.”
“I won’t win any races, but I’m good at long distance. I mean, I can swim on and on forever as long as there isn’t any rush.”
“Long distance is what I want from you, not speed. When I asked you to come to the lab this morning, I wasn’t sure how much I was—but now I think you—” And then he stopped.
He stopped for so long, and stood there on the beach, sneakers dangling about his neck, hands dropped by his sides, not moving, that finally I spoke to break the silence. “Another thing about dolphins not having hands—they can’t take a gun or a harpoon and kill.”
“Yah.” A brief silence. “And here’s another mystery: the dolphin’s brain is forty percent larger than ours and just as complex.”
I figured we were going to go swimming, so I kicked off my sandals. “How much of the brain does the dolphin use? We use only a tiny portion of ours.”
“Vicky.”
I waited.
“Would you like to meet a dolphin?”
“You mean like Una and Nini?”
“I mean out at sea. Like the one you saw yesterday.”
“Well—sure.”
“You wouldn’t be afraid?” He was looking at me, hard.
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t pretend with him. “I don’t think so—but—well, meeting a dolphin except in a pen never occurred to me.”
“Will you swim out with me and try? If you’re afraid, you can swim back. And he may not come, anyhow. I mean, this is something entirely new in my experiment with Basil.”
“Basil?”
Suddenly his voice was brisk and business-like. He pointed to a large rock behind us, bigger than my rock in Grandfather’s cove. “Basil’s the dolphin who’s my chief project this summer. There’s your dressing room. Go behind the rock and put on your bathing suit. Then swim out and join me, but stay a few yards behind. I’m going to call Basil. He’s a little bigger than Una and Nini, but don’t let that worry you.” He started to run toward the surf, then turned and called back, “The tide’s coming in now and, anyhow, this is the safest bay on the Island.” Then he splashed into the water.
It didn’t take me long to change. I stood for a moment behind the shelter of the rock, feeling the fierce strength of the sun, and at the same time feeling cold because of what Adam had told me we were going to do. To calm myself I turned around slowly, looking, smelling, hearing. There was no steep cliff behind this cove, but a series of white rolling dunes, shadowed by pale beach grasses and the dark green of sea grapes. Above me sea gulls were whirling and mewling against the blue. The wind moved in the grasses and echoed the sound of waves moving gently into shore. I could see Adam swimming out, but there was no dark body leaping joyfully on the horizon, such as I had seen the day before with Leo. Adam had said it—Basil—might not come.
Did I want it to?
I walked slowly toward the water’s edge. Adam’s shorts and shirt and sneakers lay in a little clump on the sand. I moved past them and splashed through the shallow waves.
It was one thing to toss fish to Una and Nini, smiling at me from their pen—and I hadn’t been exactly comfortable about that—and another to meet a dolphin face to face in the open sea.
I dove through an approaching wave and started to swim. I had managed to pick up a fish from the bucket in my bare hands and toss it to a dolphin. I could manage to look at a dolphin in the ocean just as well as I could look at Una and Nini in the pen, couldn’t I? Adam had said to stay several yards behind him. I needn’t get close.
I swam. As I neared Adam I could hear him making funny blowing sounds, something like air going slowly out of a balloon, and it was something like the sound I’d heard from Una and Nini. He was treading water, and I began to tread water, too, staying well behind him. He kept on making balloon sounds, and then he began a strange whistle. There was something magnetic about it. His face had its illuminated look, and I was so busy paying attention to him that I was taken completely by surprise when a great grey body rose in a swift arc just a few yards behind him, showing the pale pink of its belly, and disappeared into the sea. Then it surfaced, and there was a dolphin half out of the water, beaming at Adam, who swam swiftly toward it. The creature exuded friendliness. But I stayed where I was, a good distance away, treading water, while my heart thumped with excitement and fear. What would I do if that great animal stopped smiling and came at me?
Basil, I reassured myself. Adam said his name was Basil, and just the fact that he had a name made him less frightening. He was swimming around Adam in swift circles, and the long, sleek body seemed to be quivering with delight, much as Mr. Rochester’s entire bulk trembles with joy when we come home after leaving him alone for an hour or so. My heart was still banging, but I was less afraid.
Adam put his arm around Basil with the same affectionate fearlessness with which Rob put his arm around the big Great Dane, and Basil rubbed close against Adam. I would like to have somebody, animal or human, feel about me like that. Not in the least subservient, but total.
For a few moments Adam and Basil swam together. Then the dolphin leapt above the surface, throwing spume in every direction so that I got showered, dove down and surfaced again, not far from me. I trod water furiously. I had not expected Basil to come so close. I had thought that I would be an observer only.
“He’s curious about you,” Adam said in a calm, quiet voice. “Don’t be afraid of him, Vicky. He won’t hurt you.”
—How do you know? I wanted to ask.—He’s still a wild creature. Suppose I frighten him? Suppose I don’t have the right smell?
“Don’t be afraid,” Adam said again. “Touch him. Gently but firmly. Dolphins have extremely delicate skin, but once he realizes you won’t hurt him, he’ll make friends.”
I wasn’t going to say so to Adam, but I wasn’t about to make the first move.
Basil nosed tentatively toward me, smiling benignly. Do dolphins ever frown? Very gently, he butted against me.
And suddenly I was not afraid. As clearly as though the dolphin had spoken to me, I understood that he wanted me to pet him. And I was, as clearly as I can express something that is really unexpressible, out on the other side of fear. I reached out and touched the top of his head, gently patting, then stroking. As I stroked, the eyes, one on each side of his beaming mouth, closed. He wriggled closer to me, and I kept on stroking.
Adam dove down, almost like a dolphin, and came up on the other side of Basil and me, shaking water from his head and wearing an expression of delight, and, I thought, of surprise. “He likes you. I thought he might.”
I nearly asked, ‘What would you have done if he hadn’t?’ But Basil gave a wriggle that seemed to say, Go on stroking me, so I decided to save all questions till later.
“Tell me what he feels like to you,” Adam urged.
How can anybody describe the feel of a dolphin? “Something strange, alien,” I murmured, “like touching a creature from a different planet—and yet completely familiar, too, as though I’ve always known what a dolphin feels like. Do you suppose there are planets which are all water, and no land, and only dolphins and fish and no people?”
“Very likely.” Adam was leaning back in the water, comfortably, almost as though he were sitting in a rocking chair. “Go on. What else does he feel like?”
I kept on stroking. “Like—like a balloon, but a balloon filled with something much heavier than air.”
“What else? Anything familiar?”
“Like—like a wet inner tube, the kind kids use when they’re learning to swim. And—and—what he feels most like is polished pewter, only pewter is rigid. Like resilient pewter.”
“Terrif!” Adam applauded. “Resilient pewter. I like that. Jeb will appreciate that.” And he added, “When I tell him.”
The dolphin rolled over.
“He likes to have his chest scratched.”
But I already knew why Basil had rolled over. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. And I was no longer in the least afraid. I scratched under Basil’s great jaws, and then a little farther down toward his chest, scratched gently, and something a little gritty, like dolphin dandruff—no, that’s not right; dolphin pollen—came off on my fingers, but when I raised my hand out of the water there was nothing there, and no odor, either.
Basil bumped me, the way Ned butts his hard little head against you when he wants you to go on scratching, so I began again, asking, “What keeps coming off on my fingernails?”
“His skin. As I said, dolphins continually shed skin, and that’s likely another reason they can swim faster than we think they ought to be able to, because they don’t have the skin resistance to water that we do.”
Again I lifted my hand from the water, but I couldn’t see anything, and this time when I stopped scratching, Basil dove down, his great fluke flicking so that again I was drenched in spray, and appeared far beyond us, leaping up in a great and glorious arc before diving down again.
“He’s gone to join his pod,” Adam said.
“Pod?” I was still treading water and feeling more exhilarated than I have ever felt in my life.
“His—community, you might call it. Hey, Vicky, you were terrific. You were so terrific I can hardly believe it. You exceeded my wildest expectations. Let’s swim in. I want to talk.” And he turned and headed for shore.
Leo was a strong swimmer, but Adam’s crawl was tidier. There was almost no splash as he cleaved through the water nearly as cleanly as Basil. I followed, not trying to keep up, but doing the Australian crawl because I like the respite of the scissors kick. And I was happy. Sometimes when you’re happy you don’t realize it till later. But swimming into shore after my meeting with Basil, I was shiningly aware that I was happy.
Adam was doing cartwheels along the edge of the water. My cartwheels are floppy and inelegant, but his were perfect, as tidy as his swimming, and full of joie de vivre. When I splashed out of the water, he landed on his feet, beaming.
He led the way to a low dune in the shelter of a scrubby kind of tree. He spread his towel out in the shade, and we sat. He looked at me with his probing look. “Maybe I was taking a risk in having you meet Basil. I didn’t tell Jeb I was going to do it, because I was positive he’d have told me not to. A dolphin in a pen is one thing; a dolphin in the wild is another. But I trust Basil. I thought he might ignore you completely, but I knew he wouldn’t hurt you. And I did ask John.”
“Has John met Basil?”
“Yes. But Basil’s never stayed with John as long as he did with you—and the very first time, too. He wouldn’t come near John the first few times. Are you sure you’ve never met a dolphin before?”
“Sure I’m sure. We saw the dolphin show at Sea World, and we went to the petting tank, but it was so crowded we couldn’t get near.”
“John thought you might be afraid.”
“I was. Terrified. At first.”
“But you didn’t show it, not for a minute.”
“Well—in a funny way Basil reminded me both of Mr. Rochester and Ned.”
“So at least you’ve always been used to animals?”
“Sure. But none of them’s ever talked to me the way Basil did.” As soon as I said that, I realized how peculiar it sounded.
Adam pounced on it. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. There was no way I could explain. “I just—it was just—I knew he was my friend. I knew—I knew how he wanted me to scratch him. It was as though—oh, Adam, I don’t know!” I felt totally frustrated that I couldn’t put any of what I had felt into reasonable words.
“Have you read much about dolphins?”
“No.”
“Has John talked to you much about them?”
“No. John’s thing has always been space and astrophysics. And this summer he’s talked about starfish some, but he always gets back to cosmology and dimensionless numbers and mass energy and stuff that’s way over my head.”
“How about your hearing?”
“My hearing? It’s okay.”
“I mean, did you hear Basil when you were petting him?”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t remember. It was more like knowing what he wanted than hearing it. Though he was sort of chirruping, wasn’t he?”
Adam had a twig and was drawing triangles in the sand. “When dolphins talk with each other, a great many of their sounds are supersonic, way beyond human range.”
“Like birds?”
“Somewhat. And when Una and Nini are trying to communicate with Jeb they lower their sounds to within human range. Which shows consideration as well as intelligence. I was wondering about your hearing range.”
“I can’t hear birds any better than anybody else, so I guess it’s just normal.”
Adam broke his twig into small pieces. “If I’d been an objective observer this morning, I’d have said that you’d probably been in close contact with dolphins for years. I might even think you were lying to me, if it wasn’t for John.”
“Why would I lie?”
“You wouldn’t,” he assured me. “Let’s dress and I’ll take you along to the cafeteria. The food’s horrendous, but you can’t do much to ruin a hot dog.” He ran swiftly to the hard sand near the water, stood on his head, balanced himself, and began waving his legs in great semaphore Vs.
He gave a little flip and landed on his feet. “Hey, Vicky—you can mention it to John, but I’d rather you didn’t to anybody else.”
I wanted to tell the entire world about my encounter with Basil.
But Adam said, “I’m going to tell Jeb, even if he yells at me after the fact. Basil is my special project for this summer, and Jeb’s pretty well given me free rein. I report to him, but he doesn’t make suggestions. He leaves it all to me.” He grinned. “That’s how I justified not telling him I was going to take you to meet Basil. So, for my project’s sake, I really have to limit Basil to you and John.”
I thought about Suzy, and her passion for animals, and what it would mean to her to stroke a dolphin. And at the same instant I felt a surge of jealousy when I thought Basil might prefer Suzy to me.
“You’re thinking about your sister, aren’t you?” Adam asked.
I looked at him in surprise. “How’d you know?”
“Last night she was pretty obvious about wanting to come over to the lab. After Ynid’s had her baby I’ll bring Suzy over to see all the dolphins in the pens.”
“And Rob.”
“Sure. Rob, too.”
“I was feeling mean about Suzy,” I said. “I didn’t really want to have to share Basil with her. Suzy’s—”
“Suzy’s what?”
“I don’t think I’m an idiot or a freak or anything, but Suzy did better in the Austin gene pool than I
did.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Adam said. “Suzy’s got plenty going for her, you’re right, but it’s all out there, on the surface. I prefer to dig for gold. Let’s go eat. The thing is, Victoria Austin, that I had a hunch you could help me with my dolphin project, and my hunch was more than right.” He turned another cartwheel. “I’m glad you and Basil got along.”
“So’m I.”
The cafeteria was as bad as Adam said.
He looked at me and made a ferocious grimace. “Did I tell you they couldn’t do much to ruin a hot dog? Wrong again. This is pure plastic.”
He was right. “Is this where you eat all the time?”
“Where else? John and I don’t get paid enough even to eat at a hamburger joint. Food is part of our pay check.”
“But John comes home for dinner. Is it this bad in the evening?”
Adam smeared mustard and catsup on his hot dog. “I’m not writing home about the cuisine.”
I looked around at the white-coated people sitting at the tables. Some were reading, some talking intently. Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the food. I didn’t see John. “Adam, how did you get to know Basil? I mean, he didn’t just swim up to you and introduce himself, did he?”
“Getting to know Basil—or at least a bottle-nosed dolphin—was part of my project. Commander Rodney gave me the use of one of the small Coast Guard launches, and I’d go out to sea and then cut the motor and float there. Quite often I’d see dolphins playing at a distance, but they didn’t come near me and I was about to give up and think I’d wasted all that time and energy for nothing. And then one afternoon Basil’s pod came over to investigate.”
I leaned on my elbows. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing much. I talked to them. And then—maybe you’ll think it’s wacky—but I sang to them.”
“What’d you sing?”
“Oh, anything that came into my mind. Folk songs and rock and country—and then I talked to them again, and they made noises at me and then they all dove down and that was that.”
A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4 Page 9
