BLOUACH!
It wasn’t an orca, after all. It was a huge sea lion, rolling big, panicky black eyes at us. It had been chased by the orcas, and maybe circled back. It went BLOUACH again, slapped its tail, and plunged back down, the water boiling up between us.
We held our breath and braced for the orcas to come back. But they didn’t come. I figured they were still stalking the sea lion, or something else just as big and juicy.
Later we saw their spouts off to the south, like plumes of mist.
“Wow!” Willie said. “That was a Steller’s sea lion. I bet it weighed 1,500 pounds! And they’re rarely at sea this time of year!”
“Okay, biology class is over,” Cassidy said. “When do we hit the beach?”
We beached an hour later on the sheltered leeward side of a small, rocky island. It was dense with dark spruce and Sitka cedar scented the air.
We hauled our kayaks far up the sand, above the tide line piled with seaweed. Lisa and I wanted to go exploring, but, as ever, we had chores to do.
Set up camp. Gather firewood. We worked quickly so we’d have time to run off on our own.
On the windward side of the island, Lisa and I explored the most beautiful tide pools I’d ever seen. Colorful starfish stuck to the rocks as if glued there, and sea anemones waved exotic flowery tendrils—sticky to the touch, as they closed on our fingers.
Sure enough, we weren’t alone for long. Cassidy came hunkering through the scrub, right out to our tide pool. Followed by Roger, Willie, and Dad.
“Really?” I said. They just couldn’t get that maybe we’d like to be alone sometimes. Just hanging out. Having fun.
Cassidy sloshed in and pried a large mussel from a boulder. Then he pulled what Dad called the “bivalve” shells apart to expose the glistening meat. He bared his teeth as if he were about to eat it raw.
“Yum!” said Lisa. “But you’re supposed to steam or boil them till they open, dumbwit!”
“Stop fooling around, Cassidy,” Willie said. “Mussels are on the menu tonight!”
I jumped up on a rock and flexed my bicep. “I got muscles!” I punned.
Nobody laughed. I think at least two people groaned.
Including Lisa, rolling her eyes.
Willie came scampering back with a bucket, and we all chipped in, prying mussels from the wet rocks for dinner.
That evening we ate another great Wild Man Willie special: fresh mussels steamed with garlic and scallions and lemon juice, all poured over linguini, and sea salted and peppered to taste.
“What, no raw mussels for you, Cassidy?” asked Lisa.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “I’d rather eat snot!”
“Gross!” Lisa said, but she laughed. And I almost did, too.
As our cook fire sizzled and snapped, we watched the sinking sun set a fleet of thin clouds afire, like blazing ships in a sea of blue.
“Willie?” I said. “You said kayakers have gone missing, but nobody knows why. You think it’s got anything to do with . . . you know . . . smugglers?”
“Smugglers, maybe. Or killer whales. Or freak waves. Who knows? But smugglers . . . they don’t want nothin’ to do with us if we have nothin’ to do with them,” Willie said, dead serious.
“You’re trippin’, Aaron,” Cassidy said. “You got smugglers on your mind! What you need to watch out for is GIANT OCTOPUSES!” Suddenly Cassidy threw a heavy arm around my neck, locked me in a chokehold, and rubbed my skull with his knuckles.
He pulled his grip tighter. Air shut off to my lungs, and my eyes watered. I grabbed his wrist and yanked. He finally let go, and I gasped for breath.
“What’s gotten into you?” Willie snapped. His eyes burned like embers in the dusk.
“It’s cool,” I said, but it wasn’t. I was shaking and my Adam’s apple felt like it was crushed. I wanted to strike back at Cassidy, but it really wasn’t in my nature. I just simmered in silence, trying to recall the other Cassidy. The hero beneath the mask. But it was hard.
“Sometimes you’re so immature, Cassidy,” Lisa said. “Seriously.” He just stared at her. As usual, you couldn’t read what was going on behind those steely eyes, and it was scary.
“Okay, so, who wants to hear a joke?” said Roger. Not waiting for an answer, he said, “A termite goes into a bar and says, ‘Is the bar tender here?’”
Everybody laughed, except me. “I don’t get it,” I said.
And then I did. “Oh, the termite asks if the bar is tender here, because termites eat wood! And the wood is tend—”
Cassidy pushed me over into the sand. Then he yanked me back up and brushed the sand off me and said, “I got a better one. An orca goes into a bar and asks, ‘Is the bartender here?’ Then it eats him. CHOMP!” Now Cassidy made like he was going bite my head off.
Willie jumped up and reminded us we had dishes to wash before it got too dark. (Since he did the cooking, he didn’t have to wash dishes. That was the idea, anyway.)
“That’s whack, Willie! Wash your own dishes and I’ll wash mine,” Cassidy said, flinging sand.
Willie glared; it looked like his face would burst.
“I can wash the dishes, no sweat,” Dad said. I couldn’t believe it. Last year Dad and Cassidy were always in each other’s faces, at each other’s throats. I remembered the time Cassidy even knocked him down. Now here was Dad, standing up for him. It was bewildering. And it made me angry.
Cassidy grinned. “I’m good, man. No worries.”
We gathered the dirty silverware and plates—Cassidy too—and scrubbed them in a patch of sand near the water. Nobody said anything. I was still steaming. I knew he was just a jokester, but it gets old. It gets old.
Finally I said, “’Night,” and started back to our tent. I wanted to be with Lisa, but not with Cassidy around. It burned me up; I literally felt hot, though it was a cool evening.
I brushed my teeth and wiped sand off my feet, and by the time I crawled into our tent, the crescent moon had set and the sky was packed with stars, so close it felt like you could fling out a net and catch them like fish.
Dad was still up chewing the fat with Roger and Willie by the dying fire. I wondered, with a pang, what Lisa and Cassidy were doing. They were always giving each other a hard time, but I guessed it was just a kind of flirting, really. I wished I had an easier time with girls. With Lisa, anyway. Last year, by the end of our trip, we were getting along real great. It was cool between us. We could just hang out and be ourselves. We trusted each other.
We liked each other.
I closed my eyes, and Lisa’s image burned a hole in my mind.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
I woke at dawn to the sound of gunshots thundering and echoing between the islands, cracking the morning wide open.
Dad and I sat bolt upright in our sleeping bags. The thumping of my heart in my ears almost drowned it out.
But not quite.