CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was a long walk, the hike to the sea elephants. I imagined my father avoiding eye contact with tattooed skinheads on his way back from breakfast. I imagined the locker-room echoes of the jail. I wished I could send him a mental picture of the scrub jay chattering in the cypress.

“You haven’t reviewed the larger implications of this sort of activity,” I was saying, talk as a kind of game I play to keep my mind busy. Maybe I wanted to keep convincing Rowan that I was as smart as his traveling debutante, the one who won prizes in calculus.

“Like what?” Rowan played along, placid as a horse.

The Beals are under contract with Microsoft to expand the Sounds of Nature software. I could easily perceive the fun it would be for a kid in the inner city to double-click on the cow icon and hear a cow moo. But what would happen if the Beals failed to get a sound bite of a killdeer, a bird that lives in the flat marshes in the Bay Area? As a result, when Microsoft decided to issue the next edition of their encyclopedia, the company would omit mention of the killdeer altogether.

The menu of creatures offered would be limited to the animals who had made the Top One Hundred. And animals that didn’t make any noise at all, the hermit crab, the lawn moth, would be absolutely overlooked. Rowan agreed that this was very true and a real deficiency in the whole idea of sound-replicated nature.

“You’re creating a skewed universe,” I said.

His eyelashes were blond in the sunlight.

I added, “I’m not annoying you, am I?”

He laughed.

“Carry on,” said Mr. Beal approaching from behind, upbeat but impatient, an army officer wishing the army was all male.

Sea elephants smell funny, even at a distance. They smell like decay, rotting chicken skin, garbage left too long under the sink. They didn’t smell bad individually. We nearly stumbled on a living sofa, a finned mammal with doe-like eyes, and she nosed the air in our direction with an air of drowsy courtesy. But the crowd of male sea elephants elbowing up and down the beach in the distance needed to have its locker-room cleaned.

I knew that once the microphones were in place, conversation would enter a cease-fire, so I asked, keeping my voice low, “What would you do if your father got arrested?”

“There isn’t much you can do,” said Rowan.

“How would you feel?”

“My father gets arrested every now and then,” said Rowan.

Somehow I had forgotten this, misfiled it in a part of my mind. I could not associate the Beals with criminal conduct.

“The government trucks carry radioactive isotopes,” Rowan said. “Right through the streets. They go past schools and Laundromats where they could have an accident. Bend a fender and spill plutonium all over the intersection. My father gets together with a Sierra Club spin-off, a group called Atomic Abstinence. They picket the nuclear research lab in Livermore, the Port of Oakland.” Rowan shrugged: Parents, what can you do?

I hate coming out with such a bare question. “He’s been in jail?” I asked, keeping my voice down, Mr. Beal intent on untangling his earphones.

“Overnight, once or twice. When it comes to sentencing, the judge orders him to do community service. He goes around playing the voices of the carnivores for school kids.”

“It’s important for children to learn all about hunting and killing,” I said. What I wanted to say was, Doesn’t it bother you?

“Dad says he looks pretty good,” said Rowan lightly, “in a county jail jumpsuit.”

He must have read the trouble in my eyes. Rowan put his arm around me, enclosing me. “Don’t worry, Bonnie.”

I wanted to joke: Okay, whatever you say.

“Your dad didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, his lips at my ear. Sometimes I’m self-conscious about my earring hole, thinking I should go back to wearing jewelry.

“The courts make all kinds of blunders,” Rowan was saying. “During one of my dad’s protests the cops arrested a mailman, gathered him in with the protesters. He was just following his route, delivering mail.”

I managed a creaking what-do-you-know laugh.

“The law is really stupid, Bonnie.”

Maybe Rowan didn’t realize that if the courts could make tiny mistakes, they could also make a really gigantic one and put an innocent man in prison.

“If it’s all right with you two,” said Mr. Beal, in a half-whisper. Worry lines had appeared in his forehead, the equipment all set up, the digital recorder he had bought in Japan. This was a new Mr. Beal, one I had not seen, the pro at work, and I was almost relieved to see how impatient he was, eager to get Rowan in place with the microphones. I had wondered if the Beals communicated perfectly with each other, every blessed minute.

Rowan put a finger to his lips but motioned me to come on. I tiptoed by Mr. Beal, sure he would snap something at the two of us. But Mr. Beal had that otherworldly expression people wear when they are listening through earphones, and Rowan and I took our places just ahead, on the ridge of a dune.

I had not been aware of any danger, but now I put my hand to my chest.

My body perceived the threat. Not just my eyes and ears. My entire nervous system tingled. Sea elephants basked just a few meters away. Most of the animals were in an advanced state of molt, tattered fur lofting and spinning from their bulk. The blown tatters of skin felt artificial, like nylon. I tucked a triangle of fur into the hand pockets of my sweatshirt. I would show it to Dad. I would bring my father here, soon, next week.

He would love the massive athleticism of the young males, each the size of a Buick, crashing through the surf, plundering the sand, heaving upslope. Almost every individual hulk rose up from time to time to spar with a neighbor. Each sea elephant had a boxing-glove-size swelling on his nose, and he punched and blocked with this single fist. Sparring partners ascended together, rising high from the crusty sand, and their mutual weight would send them toppling, crashing into the sea foam.

Dad would admire the way Rowan sat, eyes narrowed, catching every belch and chuckle, perched on the ridge, holding the microphones aloft on a glittering aluminum T. He looked my way and lifted his eyebrows: Quite a noise.

I rolled my eyes in agreement, like I was used to this. When I looked back at Mr. Beal he flashed me encouragement with his eyes. We were trespassing, I knew, stealing something, close to these massive animals so we could lift their voices from the air. We did no harm, but I felt the hush of a thief.

The sound was guttural, tenor and bass, growling, yammering, and sometimes one elephant seal would roar. It was the kind of thunder that must have awakened people in villages centuries ago, wide-eyed, gasping: Was it only a dream?