squid

THOMAS KEEPING, 12, of Belleoram, knew he was being foolish when, at school, he publicly proclaimed the founding of the “Giant Squid Club,” of which he would be Founding President and Chief Scientific Officer, and he felt doubly foolish when the only other student to sign up was Cyril Savoury, then in his second year in grade two, unable to concentrate at all and with a lazy eye that wandered into orbits never seen before by any of the ophthalmologists in St. John’s, a boy who could nevertheless sign his own name over and over and over again in a cursive script of mediaeval precision; Thomas Keeping declared that Cyril Savoury was Goodwill Ambassador for the Giant Squid Club, and every Friday and Saturday night throughout the spring the two lone members would pitch their canvas tent down by the barasway, under the shadow of the rockface Iron Skull, and build a small fire, and wait for the blowing of the whales and the slap of their bodies as they rose, exhausted, nearly drowned, and Cyril and Thomas could see, even at midnight, the scars left by tentacles suction-cupped into blackened flesh, and they could see deep cuts from the beak of the giant squid oozing whale blood into the slithered brine, but that was as close as the Founding President and the Goodwill Ambassador ever came to the giant squid, this circumstantial evidence of submarine battles, of tentacled arms clamped over the jaws of the leviathan, force pulling them both down into depths where the pressure said: let go.