We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. . .They are not our brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life. . .
HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House
IT WAS DECEMBER, and Santa Claus was in the air. Ricou and I used to jog around the lake for exercise early in the mornings before it got hot. It’s beautiful then, a time for clearing the head. Sometimes we said nothing, just jogged. But usually we chatted about the dolphins and upcoming plans. Usually Ricou talked, I listened. Ricou was waiting for final word on the upcoming series. He was almost certain that we had it, but final word hadn’t come down. The deal was between Ivan Tors, an independent producer, and Wometco Enterprises, Inc., which owned the Miami Seaquarium. For use of the facilities at the Seaquarium, and for five dolphins (Susie and her four backups), the Seaquarium would receive screen credit and would own Flipper. The deal also included me as dolphin trainer. In effect, I would be the liaison between the Seaquarium and MGM.
We jogged on around the little lake, stopped, and caught our breath. Ricou put his hands on his hips and gazed across the bay, the rosy dawn splashed with shades of pink, touches of a nameless yellow, and a copper-orange beyond belief. The air, descending on us like a magic spell, was spiked with the dangerous scents of distant Caribbean jungles. Ricou, poised as if on a mountaintop, drank it in and sighed, then turned to me and wiped the sweat from his face with a towel. “If this comes through, Ric, your biggest job will be the four new dolphins.” He smiled. “You know what we need.” He tossed the towel to me, and I caught it. “Do what you can with them.”
I nodded. Ricou wanted me to train them so that they could fill in for Susie. A master of preproduction planning, Ricou had decided that four extra dolphins would cover most contingencies. The cost? Very little compared with the cost of not having Flipper available.
Ricou never preached to me about money; he didn’t need to. I was always intensely aware of the cost—not only of things, but also of time. Ricou did not have to tell me that he did not want a hundred people standing around waiting for a dolphin to follow the script.
He told me to get the dolphins used to having lots of people around. Susie is a veteran, he said. She’s used to the crowds and the noise. Or she used to be. Who knows now? One morning bright and early, the trucks will come, he said, and the movie people will pull up, pile out, and go to work. It’s noisy, people rushing about, lots of confusion. The camera operators, sound men, directors, and actors, specialists in a hundred technical aspects of making movies, suddenly would all descend on this peaceful little lake and expect Flipper to do her tricks.
Then all eyes would be focused on me.
“Maybe I’ll have some news later,” he said as he left.
That morning, a cold front came through. Wind, rain, then suddenly it was forty degrees! In Miami, that’s freezing. But it was my job to be with Susie and the others. Hot or cold, they had to be fed and looked after. Late that afternoon, I was wearing my wet suit, a quarter-inch of black neoprene, with booties and a hat, floating in an inner tube while Susie played around. Ricou, wearing a dark red windbreaker, came down from the front office. “How’s she doing?” he yelled, walking out on the floating dock. He grinned, and I knew the papers were signed.
“OK!” I yelled back, paddling over.
“It’s all set,” he said. “The series is on. I’m going home to play Santa Claus for the holidays.” Ricou hadn’t been home in ages. Now that Flipper would become a series, he could relax with his family.
I nodded. “OK.”
“I’ll take my vacation, too,” he said. He dug his hands into his pockets and let his shoulders sag a little. “I need to recharge my batteries.”
I nodded and splashed some water just to see what would happen. Susie, cavorting around, nuzzled me.
Ricou gave me a lopsided grin. “Aren’t you cold in there?”
“Cold?” I shook my head. “No. I’m freezing.”
He snorted.
A shiver went along my spine, and my jaw chattered uncontrollably. “Susie likes company,” I said, “cold or not.”
Ricou grinned. “And Susie gets what Susie wants?”
“Always.”
“Then I would say, Ric, that Susie has got you well trained.”
We both chuckled. It was a joke but also not a joke, as we both knew.
“Want some advice?” he asked me suddenly.
I was surprised. Ricou seemed solemn. I had never seen him like that before. “Sure,” I said.
“Don’t get attached to them.” He was serious.
“You mean Susie?” Almost on cue, Susie popped up in front of me, grinning.
“Susie, yes. And all of them.”
“I’ll try not to,” I said.
“That’s good,” he shook his head, “because this won’t last forever.”
“I know.” I splashed the water, and it made a thousand ripples.
He looked around as if for a final time. “If I had any doubts that you could handle things here—”
“Don’t worry about it. This is the easiest job I ever had.”
Ricou nodded. “You’ll be alone.” He shot me a look to see if I reacted. I didn’t. “Think you can start training the other four while I’m gone?”
“I’ll give it a shot.” I shrugged like it was all in a day’s work. “How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know, exactly.” A sailboat went by, and we both studied it a minute. The late-afternoon sun backlighted the sails in an interesting way. He turned back to me. “But I’ll be in touch, OK? Just do what you can with ’em. And by the way, Ric, Merry Christmas.”
He left, waving a final good-bye. Suddenly, I shuddered. The cold. I had been in the water too long. My fingers were shriveled up. I had the feeling that something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I paddled over to the dock, pulled myself up, and then pulled in the inner tube. “I’ll see you later, Susie. But I’ve had it for today.”
I was shivering. I went in and took a long, hot shower, rubbed myself down with a rough towel, and put on my Levis, my sweatshirt, and Top-Siders with wool socks, which was practically my winter uniform. Then I drove home, which was a motel-efficiency near the Miami Seaquarium. Ricou wanted me always to be within a few minutes of the dolphins. What a life! I thought. Living in a motel on Key Biscayne during the height of the season, driving a rental car of my own choice, having an expense account to buy anything I wanted to for Susie. In the navy, I’d hardly dared to dream of such a life as this. I sighed deeply, went to the refrigerator, and opened the freezer, and there, arrayed in frosty rows, was a vast selection of TV dinners. I chose one and scraped off the frost. Haddock. “No,” I thought. “I’ve had it with haddock.” I put it back and got another one: creamed chicken. I put it in the oven and turned on the heat, then walked into the living room and flipped on the TV. If I was going to be in the business, I’d better know what it was all about. The news was on, and I switched the dial quickly, looking for Sea Hunt, Jacques Cousteau, or—ah!—Lassie. Lassie is like Flipper, or vice versa, and both are like Mickey Mouse, all of them more an idea than a real animal. I watched the show unfold not for the entertainment but to see how they did things. I’d heard somewhere that Rudd Weatherwax, a Hollywood animal trainer, had seven dogs named Lassie. He didn’t use the same dog all the time. They were specialized. Some were good jumpers, some were relatively unafraid of fire or falling, some were trained to attack the bad guys, and so on.
When we caught the other four dolphins as backups for Susie, Ricou asked me what I was going to name them. Naming is the trainer’s prerogative. I had the right to name them anything I wanted to. “Let’s just name them all Flipper,” I suggested flippantly. “That’s certainly the simplest and probably the cleverest as well.” Ricou didn’t say anything, but I knew that he didn’t go for it. Only Ricou and I could tell one dolphin from another anyway, I argued, and the dolphins never knew their own names, so why not? For a while, we did call them Flipper 1, Flipper 2, and so on, and it worked reasonably well, but then one day Ricou said he wanted to name one of them Kathy, for the wife of his friend Leon Benson, a director who had helped him in the business.
I don’t know why this seemed like a challenge to me. “Which one do you want me to name Kathy?” I asked him.
He gave a shrug. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, but I think it does matter. There could be problems.”
“For example?”
“For example, if you want Kathy to be Flipper No. 1, then Flipper 2 would be the first of the numbered dolphins. And that doesn’t make sense. It would make more sense, I think, if Flipper 2 became Flipper 1, Flipper 3 became Flipper 2, and—”
“OK, OK. What is this,” he said, “a new Abbott and Costello routine? Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
I thought I detected a testy note in his voice. “You don’t want me to call them numbers, do you? Why not?”
“I don’t care, Ric. I don’t care at all. It seems a little impersonal, that’s all, but if you want to, I don’t really care. Call them anything you want. What do you want to call them?”
“Call them a cab.” I said. “Or let’s call them all Susie.” I laughed in a silly way. “Yes. That’s it! Then when they ask me if they’re working with Susie today, I’ll tell them it’s Susie today, Susie tomorrow, and always Susie.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ricou said. “You’re not taking this seriously.”
“Not taking this seriously! That’s a ridiculous thing to say. It’s all ridiculous! What ridiculous names do you want to call them?”
“Call them anything.” Ricou said with a show of exasperation, “anything at all. I don’t care.” We were at the lake, I floating on a surfboard and he on the dock. He turned on his heel, retreating. “Except for one thing,” he threw over his shoulder, “Don’t call them late for dinner.” Besides Susie and Kathy, the other three were finally named Patty, Scottie, and Squirt.
Lassie was running across a field to warn of fire or something like that. I yawned. Sometimes, when I got back to the motel, I fell asleep almost at once. It was a mistake to lie down when I first got home. It was a mistake even to close my eyes. They felt puffed up right now. If I closed my eyes, I would certainly fall asleep, and I would not wake up till the middle of the night. I would be starving. That had happened more than once. Now I ate first, or put the TV dinner in the oven to cook. That was supposed to keep me awake, but once I fell asleep anyway, waking up early in the morning, a cosmic snow on the tube, my TV dinner burned to a crisp, the peas shriveled up like BBs. Tonight was different. How strange and on edge I felt. Was it connected with Ricou’s leaving? It wasn’t the responsibility, was it? I got up and flipped the dial again, looking for Sea Hunt. I got a kick out of seeing Ricou Browning’s name in the credits. Would mine be there one day? What a strange, exciting world I was in suddenly. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but it didn’t matter; I knew it was in the right direction. Except tonight, something was clearly askew.
I began to fill out the Flipper log automatically. Times, tricks, food—and then it hit me! Food!
Susie hadn’t eaten all day. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but she had just played with the food I gave her. This occasionally happens with dolphins. Nobody knows why, but one day every month or two, they simply don’t want any food. Usually, it means nothing. The next day, they’re hungry again and make up for not having eaten. But not eating is also the first sign of getting sick. And if they go for two days without eating, you may have a sick dolphin. Then you start doing whatever you can think of to snap them back. Would something happen to Susie the first day Ricou was gone? I had his phone number in Ocala. At what point should I call him? If Susie got sick now, would this fabulous lifestyle of mine end?
I threw on my bathrobe, hopped in the car, and roared down the highway to the Seaquarium. It was three minutes away; I think it took me about two minutes to get there. I went through the back gate and pulled up at Flipper’s Lake, swung out of the car, and half-ran toward the dock, then stopped. The moon was nearly full. I scanned the lake. There she was, in the middle. I went out on the floating dock, leaned down, and slapped the water. She swam over to me.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I said. Suddenly, I knew exactly what to do. “Hold on a minute,” I said. I stood up, my bathrobe flapping, and snapped my fingers. “Yes. That’s it!” I walked quickly to the fish house, went into the freezer, hardly noticed that my teeth were chattering again, and picked out a specially plump Spanish mackerel. “If this doesn’t work. . .” I muttered. I left the thought unfinished because it would work—it had to work—and in a moment or two I had fixed the fish just the way Susie liked it. I cut off the fish’s head and tail, gutted it in a stroke, and in a flash of the knife I had denuded it of fins. Then I held the carcass in the palm of my hands. It was fat and succulent. I held it up to the light. “Beautiful,” I said. Then I lovingly placed it in my yellow bucket and walked proudly back to the lake. “This is it, Susie,” I said as I walked down the dock. She was waiting, eyeing me with amusement. I got down on my knees at the end of the dock. I smiled as I removed this most appealing of mackerels from the yellow bucket and presented it to her as if it were a jeweled bracelet. “For you, dear Susie.” Her eyes brightened momentarily. She took it in her mouth. “Go ahead,” I said. “It’s good, baby, the way you like it.”
I’ve never looked at myself at times like this, when I’m caught up in the moment. But looking back on it now, I think I must have merged two contradictory feelings, one that I could make a miracle if I chose to, the other that I was completely at the mercy of this whimsical being.
Susie tossed the fish up like a toy. Still kneeling at the end of the floating dock, I implored her, “Please! Please don’t play games with me.”
She bobbed her head, and I got the feeling that I was being scanned by sonar waves. Was she trying to tell me something?
“If we could talk,” I said, “what would you tell me, Susie? That you’re sick? No, I don’t think you’re sick. Would you tell me that you realize Ricou is going, that you and I are a team now?” I considered this for a moment. “That’s possible,” I said finally. “Or you might want to tell me something entirely different. That you’re not happy here, that you’ve had second thoughts, that being a star is not what it’s cracked up to be, and you want to go back to the sea.”
She bobbed her head, smiling as always, as if to make me think she was reading my mind and agreeing. If so, she knew what I really wanted her to do. I wanted her to eat. She picked up the fish, and I thought for a moment she would swallow it just to oblige me, but she didn’t; she tossed it high in the air, and down it came with a splash.
“Let me tell you something more,” I said, still on my knees to her. “This is bigger than both of us.” I glanced up at the sky. It was black but with ten thousand blinking stars. “If you put things in perspective, Susie, what we’ve got here is big—but not cosmically big. I mean it’s not like the world was going to end, right? It’s just a TV series, after all. It will affect your whole future, of course, and mine, Ricou’s future and the jobs of hundreds of people—that’s all, plus hundreds more back in Hollywood, the editors and writers and promoters and investors, so it gets into the thousands, probably, and don’t forget the people who love you, Susie. To them, you are Flipper. Could you let all those people down? No, Susie, you cannot let us down. You cannot turn your back on love, on the love of millions of people, on the thousands of people who need you to make a buck, or on Ricou and—and me, Susie, me!” I reached down and picked up the fish that I had prepared so beautifully and that was now sinking slowly like a piece of trash. Angrily, I shook it at Susie and yelled, “You cannot turn your back on this fish!”
She took the fish in her mouth. “Good girl,” I purred. Then she flipped it up with a toss of her head again, and it splashed back into the water.
I stood up and glared down at her. “You know, Susie, you’ve really never had it so good. Look at this. Your own lake. All the attention in the world. Playthings. Food—anything you want to eat. Anything at all!” I slapped the water, she came over, and I leaned down and rubbed the top of her head. “But don’t take all this for granted.” A sudden chill went up my spine, and I shivered. “There are four others back there, waiting for their chance. They can be Flipper as well as you. Maybe better. In fact, Susie, I’ve been meaning to tell you something, that there have been some complaints about you. Sometimes you play a little rough. The tail. Watch it. Know what I mean?” I stood up and dusted my hands. “Yes, damn it, Susie, you better shape the hell up, or you’re out!”
I stomped off the dock without looking back. I have no idea if she ever ate that fish. But at least we both knew who was really boss.