Chapter 2

The story that my father had been “saved” by porpoises was something I had come to regard in recent years as a piece of family apocrypha. Perhaps this was because, with my parents dead, there was no one left to tell it to me. As a child I had of course believed it wholly. Long before the public infatuation with porpoises began, the creatures were in my mind, as benevolent and watchful as guardian angels.

My father never told the story directly, and his forbearance seemed to add to its credibility. He sat by indulgently as my mother, who was prone to romanticism and misinformation, repeated it nearly every night for years after that first sighting on the ferry. I think she was consciously trying to provide me with a personal myth and that my father understood this and decided not to interfere. As the facts grew more tenuous and evocative each time my mother presented them, he must have seen the patterns of a legacy, a family trust. He let it ride.

The event itself was probably commonplace. My father was a fighter pilot in New Guinea during the war, flying an odd plane with a double fuselage that looked like two insects mating in air. Once during an aerial skirmish he was forced to bail out over the open ocean, and it was three days and nights before he was found. He had a small inflatable raft and a few days’ worth of emergency rations, and was probably not in any great physical danger so long as the seas remained calm, which they did. But something got to him, almost immediately. His mind froze with terror and loneliness. As a working seaman—he had been a shrimper before the war and would be after—he could no more have afforded to contemplate the infinite purposeless ocean than to stare unprotected at the sun. But parachuting down to it, in shock from the battle and the loss of his plane, he had mislaid his defenses and now faced it whole. Within hours he was seeing mirages: there on the horizon was the Nueces Hotel, where the nurse he had just met—my mother—had booked them a room that looked out on the tame water of Corpus Christi Bay. The water came right up to the lobby—he had only to paddle a hundred yards, step out of the raft, and sign the register. But of course the hotel receded, and the bay itself followed, detaching itself from the ocean the way the moon had once torn away from the earth. He was alone again.

On the second day they came to him. They must have been a different species—Pacific bottlenoses, or spinners—and they came no doubt out of simple curiosity and stayed because of social instinct. He did not get out and ride on their backs—if he had entered the water with them at all they would probably have left. But they stayed with him for a day and a night, occasionally nuzzling the raft, buoying it up with their backs in the manner in which they support the injured and distressed of their own species. They were warm and living, and they stayed with him, turning his void benevolent.

By the time I was born, the incident—I think probably even the war itself—was a dream to him. But it was rooted quiescently in his consciousness, and my mother was always ready to draw it to the surface. She had been a Kansas debutante from a small musty town. I remember visiting there, seeing a great-grandmother who impressed me as hardly anything more than a composite of ancient odors and knickknacks. Everything in her world had the same forlorn value: footstools, slipcovers, brittle sheet music, the prairie itself under a winter sky.

My parents married just after the war, and my mother came to live in Port Aransas. I used to think of her looking out at that gray water for the first time, at the slimy twitching things her husband pulled forth from it to make a living for them. She never liked the ocean—it was like a nightmare version of Kansas, a prairie that would not bear one’s weight. I think she clung to my father’s simple adventure because she wanted to believe that something existed beneath the surface of that water that was capable of treating her with kindness.

My father, as I said, never talked about it. He was a taciturn, reverent man who believed in a hybrid Catholicism of his own invention that he never inflicted upon his family. He sat in his glossy armchair, diligently reading As a Man Thinketh or a biography of the Curé d’Ars, but I remember understanding, at a very early age, that his true religion was elsewhere. It was a sort of totemism, and came into evidence every time he saw a porpoise, whereupon he became rapt and silent, as if what he saw rising out of the water was the gracious shape of his own happiness.

When I was old enough he would take me out on his shrimp boat for brief one- or two-day runs. I saw the open ocean, which was vast, blank, and horrifying. That my father could detect life there at all amazed me; I believed him to have a form of genius. He would haul up, on still, warm nights when the deck was lit by an arc lamp against the suffocating darkness, mounds of throbbing sea creatures: crabs, sea slugs, ribbonfish, flounder, an occasional shark snapping witlessly at the air; all of this studded into a pile of shrimp that seemed sometimes as tall as I was. My father and the rig man would pull on heavy gloves, sit on the deck, and decapitate handfuls of shrimp with the idle finesse of crocheting women.

Later I would lie in my tiny bunk and listen to them speak in Spanish in the wheelhouse, gossiping with other shrimpers on the radio. After a while my father would come in and wake me, handing me a Dramamine and a glass of water, and then lie down in the bunk below me and snore in pitch with the heaving of the boat until he woke again a few hours later and rose like a sleepwalker to check the try nets.

In the morning there would be porpoises, ocean-going porpoises with sprigs of seaweed festooning their dorsal fins. I remember dimly an unfamiliar species—small, mahogany-colored, speckled like fawns. We scraped the trash fish overboard through a hole in the gunwale, and I saw the porpoises’ faces through the clear water, the tentative courtly way in which they took the fish into their jaws.

My father died when I was seven. The porpoises had not saved him for long. He had a heart attack and lay for almost two weeks in an enduring coma. Mr. Granger took me to see him early on, before he began to waste away. It was nearly Easter, and my mother was sitting by the bed holding a bundle of fresh palm fronds as if they were a bouquet that my father, rousing himself from his coma, had just handed her. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his body rocking back and forth so evenly, with such a regular cadence, that I thought for a moment he was not sick at all, had in fact recovered and was performing calisthenics to regain his strength. Then he grunted, and his body lurched out of its rhythm for a moment, and I knew he was lost to us. I imagined the coma as a separate physical environment, like the idyllic woodland scene I saw when I peered through the peephole of a hollow Easter egg. I hoped my father was happy there. Both my mother and Mr. Granger wanted me to try to speak to him, but I refused, seeing that he did not want to be disturbed.

I think my mother would have packed me up and taken me back to Kansas after the funeral had it not been for Mr. Granger. I remember him in those years—he was middle-aged, in his prime, and the eccentricity and sentimentality that must always have seemed outlandish and suspect before had found its place. At least it seemed so to me. He was wholly appropriate and credible. Somehow he possessed the hard-won, white-tuxedo authority of a George Sanders, but there was not a worldly or cynical trace in it. He fascinated me. I enjoyed watching people—friends of my parents—meeting him for the first time. They were hardly able at first to keep from giggling at his high voice, his strange clothes, his undisguised fretfulness about everything, but then something in his manner would snare them, draw them in, so that by the end of the evening they were flattered by his smallest attention.

My father’s death broke his heart, and afterward he remained solicitous of my mother, maintaining an odd asexual deportment that over the years I came to recognize was not suspect in any sense. He found a crew for the Rapture and put his personal accountant in charge of our affairs, so that by the time of my mother’s death the boat was clear and the house nearly so, and from their sale I had more than enough money to finance the dissolute years of my college education. He was the benevolent proof my mother had once looked for in that empty seascape, and though I sensed his vulnerability was greater even than mine, that a seven-year-old’s grief was healing faster than his, I counted on him and clung skittishly to his presence.

I’ve never been clear about how he came into our lives in the first place. He was at least twenty years older than my parents, and must have seen them less as friends than as godchildren. Apparently he had no family of his own, and for much of his early manhood had wandered in Argentina—he called it “The Argentine”—roughnecking for oil companies, riding muleback for weeks along primitive trails. When he returned to America he settled in Corpus Christi, because it was a pretty city and, besides, it was where his ship docked. This was long before the seawall was built, when the shorefront was nothing but an abrupt mud beach set out before the business district. He lived there for a while in a bayfront hotel, and then one day crossed over to Port Aransas. There were no roads across the bay then, just railroad tracks suspended on pilings above the water over which a kind of bus traveled. The hurricane that had passed through six months before had left almost nothing of Port Aransas—most of the houses were gone and the few people living on the island, including my father’s family, had pitched tents next to their boats. With his roughneck money Mr. Granger opened a bait house, had a sign painted that said “Tarpon Capitol of the World,” and gradually nursed the town back into existence. With more prescience than acumen he began buying into oil leases as well, and by the time Roosevelt came down to Port Aransas to fish he was a rich man. He was rowed out to the presidential yacht for a drink.

He never married. Perhaps he was homosexual, but if he was I doubt that it was a trait he ever consciously revealed to himself. I believe he lived his whole life as chastely as a priest. Perhaps that was at the root of his devotion to my parents, the long habit of pure, worshipful love. His selection of them was not arbitrary, but I doubt if it was destined either. They were a pleasant young couple whom he saw often fishing together off the pier, two people so kind and unremarkable his half-century of reclusiveness had broken down before them.

My father’s death pulled Mr. Granger and me closer to my mother, but over time not that much closer to one another. We became two planets circling the same sun in different orbits, and when she died, unexpectedly and very quickly, of complications arising from a hysterectomy, we both spun off into space. This was when Mr. Granger began to prepare for the boom. He saw the tourist industry spiraling wildly, like a hurricane, along the great curve of the entire Gulf Coast, and he believed that it was only a matter of time before it centered along the sloshy bays and lagoons of Texas. To some extent his vision worked, and to accommodate it he altered the face of Port Aransas like a boy tinkering with a model railroad layout, building a yacht club and a bank and a little shopping mall with a billowy concrete awning that an architect had told him “stood for” the flight of sea gulls. And people came, but it was not a boom. It was not Florida—you could be certain of that by simply looking out over the muddy water, at the tar-stained beaches where the surfers rode the paltry breakers but more often sat on the beach dreaming of real waves, waxing their boards and sprinkling meat tenderizer on their man-of-war wounds. Still Mr. Granger counted on the boom and prepared for it without avarice or guile, like a host preparing his house for special guests.

A few months after my mother’s death, when I had graduated from high school, I left the coast, I thought, for good. I left with a strange bitter fascination over my orphanhood, feeling like an astronaut who had just dropped the booster stage of his rocket and was silently heading toward a deep and alluring space. I relegated my sorrow to a backwater of the imagination, a place I knew I would never want to visit again in physical fact. I bought a brand-new Chevy II and a backseat clothes rack and a dozen paisley shirts which had been recommended to me by a clerk as “what the kids are wearing.” I spent a summer in Austin, virtually alone, living in an expensive off-campus apartment and spending my days at Barton Springs reading whatever books the Kids Were Reading. It was a long, critical season. When it was over I went to the university, began my gradual dishevelment from paisley to army surplus, paid my roommates’ rent, financed a band called Crude Dude and the Scissor Kickers, was suckered into a brown rice diet for two weeks, and in a few years received a notice from the university in the mail. I had apparently graduated with a degree in anthropology and could have a diploma if I paid a forty-dollar library fine.

Then came the era’s prescribed postgraduate year of homesteading in Arkansas. There were six of us, living on twelve acres secured by the last of my fortune, and we nursed our communal fervor with great care, always speaking to one another in low, soothing voices, moving about dreamily and simpering with feigned contentment. We built a two-story shack, in whose kitchen we began to cook fewer and fewer lentils and more Kraft Dinners. During the days we sat on the crude porch, eating Ritz crackers and watching our twelve acres accumulate with old car parts. We grew so paranoid of our neighbors we pulled up our subsistence crop of marijuana, and we all sank into despair if our subscription copy of Time was a day late. One of the women became pregnant, and the baby was of course born in the house, with the aid of a midhusband, who wore an instrument on his head that gave him a sort of gnostic demeanor. He was paid in mescaline. The baby gave us something to watch. The father would sit with her in the loft, letting her play with his skimpy beard, singing “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez . . .” while the rest of us gazed upward, charmed and disturbed. Later someone’s parents sent an old TV on the bus. We hooked it up to a generator and started out watching just the news and an occasional episode of Dragnet, but when we began to sit around watching daytime TV, taking turns holding the antenna for better reception, I admitted to myself finally it was not working at all.

“I’m leaving,” I told the girl I had drawn in the communal lottery, as we sat along the bank of the creek accumulating ticks and watching a water moccasin sidle into a den on the other side.

“I suppose,” she said condescendingly, “you have to do what’s right for you.”

So I accepted a long-standing invitation to visit friends in Santa Fe. I wanted away from the gloomy Ozarks as I had wanted away from the gloomy Texas coast. I found a job in a little bookstore off the plaza and rented my own little adobe house and every morning ate blue corn tortillas for breakfast. In winter we would load ourselves into a van and drive to the Jemez mountains, where we would sit down naked in hot springs beneath aspens whose pale bark seemed moonlit even in daytime.

Living alone, I grew fastidious and thrifty, and during the course of several years became a solid citizen of the Santa Fe subculture. The place suited me, and in all my time there I only left it once, when a friend who had forsaken skiing convinced me to go along with him on a package diving tour to Belize. I had not thought about salt water in years, but as soon as the suggestion was made I was helplessly caught up in it. In high school I had done some diving along the Port Aransas jetties on those rare days when the clear water came close into shore and hovered like a cloud over the pass, but it had still been muggy coastal diving, and since I lived now high above sea level, in sharp air and light, I wanted to experience water with a concomitant purity. We boarded a plane in Albuquerque with a group of earnest young sportsmen and flew over Texas, across that painful stretch of coast into the clarity of the Caribbean. The water was as pure as the air of the Sangre de Christos, and had a strange desert warmth. I passed a simple vacation there, in another element, and went back to Santa Fe unchanged.

A year or so after Mr. Granger’s visit I quit my job in the bookstore. I had fallen in with film people by then and could count on periodic work in whatever training films or commercials were in production. Usually I was the grip or assistant production manager, but once I landed the role of the villainous trucker who causes a four-car smashup in the highway safety film Defensive Driving or Death—The Choice Is Yours!

Then a big cocaine dealer moved into town and said he wanted to get into the exploitation market. He had a script, which he had written himself in a Oaxaca motel room, called Bigfoot Stalks! and seventy-five thousand dollars to spend on its production. I was offered the role of Bigfoot because in the past I had demonstrated such versatility and because I was reasonably tall. They paid me six hundred dollars up front and promised another six hundred when the film was finished, plus one-half of a percent of profits, which I was assured I would never see if the film was a success because of all the “Hollywood rip-off types” who would litigate the money into their own pockets. But I would see my name in the credits—“And introducing Jeff Dowling as Bigfoot”—and I was told there would surely be a sequel, which would be more of a character study of Bigfoot than the original, and thus would give me a chance at stardom.

So every day for two months I climbed into a dank costume that shed all over the marginal actresses I was called upon to dismember. Since I was frequently required to pounce from boulders onto innocent young couples’ picnic lunches I outfitted the Bigfeet themselves with size thirteen Dr. Scholl’s foot pads.

I began to fall in love with the seamstress who constantly attended me. “Hold still,” she would say with a mouthful of pins while I stood before her in my costume, shy and hulking. At other times she would speak to me soothingly, as to a captive bear, and I would respond with the rapture of an animal in love.

Out of costume I did not seem to mean quite as much to her, but she moved in with me just the same. It was pleasant. We would sit in the bathtub and look out a small window across a stretch of undeveloped desert at the blue-tinctured mountain skyline, with Sandia Peak looming there like a beached whale. Between us at such moments there was some tentative and disinterested talk of marriage, an event that would be timed with the simultaneous premiere of Bigfoot Stalks! at every drive-in theater in the country.

One night Mr. Granger called, after a particularly arduous day in which we had spent eleven hours shooting my death on the “miraculous” spiral stairway that, according to legend, an uncommunicative carpenter who looked suspiciously like St. Joseph had built without charge and in defiance of the laws of gravity for the destitute nuns of a local church. (We used a replica—the nuns wouldn’t let a man in a gorilla suit desecrate the real thing. The set designer said it wasn’t miraculous anyway.)

“It’s your grandmother or somebody,” the Seamstress said, handing me the receiver. I said hello and heard Mr. Granger babbling about porpoises.

“Here’s the thing, Jeff. They’ve got one of these places up in Galveston. A big one. But there’s not another trained porpoise on the whole coast. People in Corpus don’t want to go two hundred miles to see something like this, but they’ll sure as hell drive across the bay!

“Now, I’ve got a man here to run it, used to work at Sea Park out there in California. He needs an assistant, and I talked him into giving you a try. Jeff, it would be perfect. You could come home.”

I could come home. For a moment I half believed it, as if the only thing that had kept me away for all these years was the lack of an opportunity to train porpoises.

“I don’t see how I could leave everything here,” I said.

“Oh, sure you can! You think it over. You do that for me and then call me collect tomorrow night. You have the number?”

“Yes.” I had memorized it as a little boy. My parents had told me, Call Mr. Granger if you need something and you can’t find us.

“Jeff,” he said before hanging up, “I know what these animals meant to your father.”

But I could not get a fix on what these animals meant to me. I could not, for a moment, bring them clearly into my mind. I was used to that other beast, the mythical terrestrial one in whose skin I had lived for two months. It was the porpoises that seemed mythical now.

“You’re not seriously considering this?” the Seamstress asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus, you really are. I’m going to the kitchen and meditate. Let me know if you decide to do something ridiculous.”

Fifteen minutes later I broke her off in mid-mantra. She scowled, unlotused her legs, and climbed down from the kitchen table.

“So you’re going down there? To Walla Walla, or whatever?”

“Corpus Christi.”

“Whatever.”

I looked at her handsome, indifferent face.

“You don’t mind that much,” I said.

“I don’t understand, that’s all.”

“I just want to go home. It might not be for long.”

“You never seemed particularly homesick before.”

“I know,” I admitted. But some new element had been introduced. I was a little mystified, and sad because I knew that the cordial relationship between the Seamstress and me could not bear the weight of this new longing.

I wanted to go home. It was not the porpoise training—that was just a job offer, an excuse to resettle. No, I thought it might be the porpoises themselves. The idea of those creatures was suddenly vibrant in my mind. There had been spells of nostalgia before, but I had ridden them out. This was different, graver. A channel had opened up through which I could see into that part of myself that never came to light anymore, the part that was not isolated and imperturbable but deeply in need of some half-forgotten form of human contact. It was the porpoises. They were mediums, restoring to me the voices of my parents, the texture of that forsaken past. If I was skeptical about the old family saga of my father’s rescue, I was helpless against its power. It was mine, an heirloom I had to go home to claim.

“Okay,” the Seamstress said. “You have my blessing, for what it’s worth.”

By leaving before the filming was completed I forfeited my percentage of the profits, but I didn’t have that much faith in the film anyway. The director said there was no problem with my leaving. Only incidental footage was left to be shot—extreme close-ups and long shots—for which anyone could wear the Bigfoot suit.

“Hey,” he said, “remember, it’ll be playing soon at a theater near you.”

I sold my books, gave away my eight place settings of plastic dishware, a few albums, a few sweaters I never wore. All the rest of my belongings fit into the trunk of my car.

“I’ll come down to see you,” the Seamstress said. The house was now hers and a friend’s, a weaver, who moped about the living room looking for a place to put her loom as we said good-by.

“I know you will,” I answered, and muttered, not entirely for form’s sake, or for nostalgia, but because I wanted to believe it, “I love you.” For once she had the tact to say it back. I kissed her face, and it was clear she would not come down to see me on the humid coast of Texas. She could not make the passage—she would implode as soon as she hit the flatland.

By the time we reached Port Aransas the wound in my ankle was merely a nuisance, a throbbing discomfort that underlay the rest of my perceptions. Despite Mr. Granger’s frantic insistence when we docked I refused to see a doctor—the pain seemed to have a very clear and reasonable course to run that I did not want to interfere with.

The porpoise pool was formed by a sort of dock that extended from shore and enclosed about a quarter-acre of water just off the ship channel. It was ten feet deep—having been dredged and shored up against the beach side—and water flowed freely through a chain-link fence that formed the underwater borders of the pool. On the mud floor Canales had installed a false bottom, a submerged grate attached by ropes to pulleys by which we could haul the porpoises out of the water if the need arose.

Above the waterline the facility was still under construction, a jumble of raw unweathered lumber which two carpenters at the moment were transforming into bleachers. They had already finished the high fence that bordered the pool on three sides, and I noticed they had constructed a huge wooden arc to go over the main gate, an arc that read, so far only in penciled outline, DUDE GRANGER’S PORPOISE CIRCUS.

We tied off at the far end of the dock, and it was no great effort to roll the porpoises into slings, transport them across a few feet of planking, and lower them gently into the pool.

They swam rapidly around the perimeter, the female traveling close to the larger male, her beak resting beneath his pectoral fin. Gradually they quit circling and came to the center of the pool. They expelled their breath in a way that seemed to me as plain as a human sigh and sank beneath the surface. They rose again, of course, over and over, but did not stray anymore from the center of the pool.

We stood there and watched them, and the carpenters came down from their unfinished bleachers and watched them too.

The bodies of the porpoises seemed to have changed in shade. They were no longer the glistening deep gray color they had been from a distance. Now they were as muted and cloudy as the water in which they swam. Bringing them in on the boat I had noticed the pinkish cast of their stomachs, the veins standing out there through a layer of blubber that had seemed oddly translucent. And across the upper parts of their bodies I had noticed faint streams of a very pale gray where the lifelong flow of water across their bodies had marked them.

I sat down on the first row of bleachers, aware of the poison remaining in my system. It seemed to have gone to work now in beneficial ways, providing me with a keen visceral happiness rooted in a sense of dislocation, the calm security of shock.

Mr. Granger paid off the high-school kids—a hundred dollars each—and shook hands ceremoniously with each of them. They wandered off, out the front gate of the compound, without looking back at the creatures they had hauled out of the bay.

One of the carpenters stood at the side of the pool, retying his ponytail as he watched the porpoises.

“They as smart as people say?” he asked Canales.

“Sure,” Canales said.

“Now I know they’re not fish. I read that. What are they, reptiles?”

A look of professional disgust came over Canales’ face. He unzipped his wetsuit and began to squirm out of it.

“Mammals,” he said.

The carpenter snapped his fingers, chiding himself for not remembering. Canales pulled off his wetsuit and let it fall onto the dock. Underneath he wore a pair of surfer’s trunks, with the wax pocket in front. There was a pale line between his toes where the strap of his rubber thongs had screened out the sun. He reminded me of boys I had known who worked on the big fishing boats out in the bay and whose job it was to remove hardheads from the lines of squeamish tourists and smack the fishes’ skulls against the railing—boys who seemed to have no home or family, who probably passed their shore time as mascots in the rough bars on North Beach, and whose arrogance toward everything that surrounded them had always inspired me.

I took off my own wetsuit and pulled on my Bigfoot promotional T-shirt in its place. The carpenters went back to work. The noise they made did not seem to disturb the porpoises, but Mr. Granger sent them home anyway, telling them to come back in several days when the animals were better adjusted. When they were gone Mr. Granger and Canales and I sat around the dock for a long time without speaking, looking down at the creatures in the water. They surfaced continually in the center of the pool, exhaling with a sharpness that bordered on distress, the way a poor swimmer will pull up from a crawl and gasp for air before moving on again.

“What we should do now,” Canales said, without lifting his eyes from the porpoises, “is go get us some lunch. I’ll come back and check on them tonight—I’ve got some errands to run in Corpus—but for now the best thing is to keep out of their way, give them a chance to adjust.”

But he didn’t move. He kept staring at them.

“I think we could have done better than that female. She’s pretty dinged up. I don’t mind that myself, but people see scars on them and they think you’re torturing them or something. The male’s good, though. Christ, he’s perfect.”

We left the compound and walked down the oyster-shell road to the Marlin Spike, the restaurant Mr. Granger owned near the ferry landing. It was a classy coastal restaurant, meaning it served mostly frozen cod from the North Atlantic at inflated prices. A hostess came drifting across the plush red carpet. She was wearing a sailor’s hat. She said, “Ahoy.”

“Ahoy,” Mr. Granger answered. The restaurant was almost empty. The only other diners were a middle-aged couple—the man wearing a blue blazer, boat shoes, and a gold-braided skipper’s hat he held under the table in his lap and seemed ashamed of. The woman was very thin and pale, and wore a chic boating outfit that looked like a pair of pajamas. So much for the boom.

The hostess seated us at a picture window that looked out at the ship channel. The two ferryboats passed one another like awkward beasts in an inconclusive mating ritual. Canales put his finger casually on the glass, pointing at a spot in the channel where a small pod of porpoises were swimming back and forth.

“That’s not feeding or mating behavior. They’re trying to figure out what the deal is with their buddies over in the pool.”

I looked over at Mr. Granger. There was no emotion apparent on his face, but I thought I saw something anyway—a film of sadness, like the faint passage of water across flowstone.

“Ahoy,” the waitress said.

“Ahoy, honey,” Mr. Granger said back to her. We all ordered Bloody Marys and fried shrimp. A dapper little man in a leisure suit sat down at a piano beneath a mounted tarpon and began a medley of movie themes.

“You boys like this restaurant?” Mr. Granger asked Canales and me. We both nodded obediently.

“There are more people here at night. A lot of young folks, too, you’d be surprised. This town has needed a nice place to eat for a long time.”

“Wait’ll we get these animals working,” Canales said. “This whole place is going to take off at once.”

Mr. Granger smiled, somewhat indulgently I thought. When his shrimp came he ate each one absently and arranged the tails in a semicircular pattern on his plate.

“How’s your ankle now?” Canales asked me.

“Fine,” I said, bending down to scratch it.

“I’ve never been stung by anything myself. Just bitten. I knew a guy, he was collecting shells or coral or something on the Great Barrier Reef, picked up a stonefish”—Canales snapped his fingers—“dead in thirty minutes. Phenomenal.”

He threw his last shrimp tail onto the plate and leaned back in the booth. “Well, I’m satisfied. We did a good morning’s work and had us a good lunch. I think we’ve got two pretty decent animals, all in all. They don’t seem to be real tense. A lot of porpoises, those little Mediterranean jobs, they’ll just pine away right before your eyes. But old Tursiops, they’re built to last.

“Like I say, we’ll just let them alone the rest of the day. I’ll be back from Corpus late tonight and I’ll check on them then.” He looked at me. “If you want to drop in on them before dark and make a few reassuring noises I’m sure they’d appreciate it. Just don’t spook them, and remember to keep the gate locked.”

I nodded, and then the three of us filed out, Mr. Granger stopping to shake hands with the piano player and to talk for a moment with the cashier. He bought us each a chocolate-covered mint.

Outside Canales went on ahead, and as Mr. Granger and I walked back toward town he passed us in his pickup on his way to the ferry.

“Do you like him?” Mr. Granger asked me.

“In a way.”

“Well, Jeff, he knows his business. He’s damn smart. He had a friend out in California he wanted me to hire, but I kept on about you. I knew you’d catch on right away, and you’re a kind person, I know that about you. And that’s the sort of person you need to work with porpoises.”

I looked down at the ground, at Mr. Granger’s white shoes as they emerged in cadence from beneath his long suit coat. I did not feel entirely like a kind person. I was troubled by the violence and confusion I had brought into the porpoises’ lives.

“I’ve got to see a man in Tivoli about a lease this afternoon,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll hang around here. Drop in on the porpoises later, like Canales said.”

“Where are you staying?”

“In Corpus.”

“You go over to the Salt Sea and tell Lois I said to give you a room. No sense in you having to drive back and forth thirty miles every day.”

I promised to do that. I had stayed in Corpus deliberately, these first few nights, to make my homecoming as gradual as possible. But now when Mr. Granger left for Tivoli I walked all over town in a nostalgic stupor, breathing in the salt air, which was so sharp I felt a mild sting high in my nasal cavities.

I strolled out to the end of the jetties, a half mile out into the Gulf. A wind came up, and I stood there exposed and shivering, almost engulfed by the spindrift created by the granite boulders. A long time ago I had gone diving at this spot, at the mouth of the jetties, and seen a school of manta rays above my head. They had blocked the sunlight, which spilled over the edges of their wings, making them look beveled and radiant. It seemed to me, as they coasted leisurely above me, that they were imprinted with some great purpose, that they were on their way somewhere, drawn along by a dim and hypnotic longing.

The water was not so clear now as it had been that day, but a hundred yards farther off I could see it growing bluer, shaking off the mud and dusky effluents of the inland water. Out in that clarity the great sandbar lay submerged, like some quiescent sea monster, guarding the only natural pass through the barrier islands for a hundred miles.

A Spanish explorer named Pineda, charting the great curve of the Gulf coast for the first time, discovered the pass in 1519. He had been plying along the coast for months, dispensing names to inlets and rivers according to the liturgical calendar, and his discovery of the big sluggish bay that lay beyond the pass fell on the feast day of Corpus Christi.

He had a few skirmishes with the Indians here, the Karankawas, a starving, capricious, unappeasable people who took an occasional porpoise for food from their dugout canoes but who seem to have subsisted mainly on insects and prickly pears and yaupon tea. Over the next three centuries they massacred, not without cause, Spanish, French, and Anglo colonists. They were no good at alliances. They believed that what they dreamed must immediately be put into action, and in the end their imagination and inflexibility finished them. At Boy Scout campfires we used to hear about how Stephen F. Austin’s colonists had killed all but a dozen of the whole Karankawa nation, and how these survivors—stark naked, very tall, their lips and nipples pierced with reeds and their bodies smeared with alligator grease—plowed through the surf on Padre Island in a few canoes and headed out to sea, where they disappeared forever.

Pineda, in discovering Corpus Christi Bay, had kept his ship well off the bar that guarded the pass, but in the future others were less prudent. Scores of ships foundered there over the next few centuries, until finally some enterprising settler—an ancestor of mine—hired himself out as a bar pilot, guiding the ships around the barrier in his lighter and helping to salvage those few ships that did not make use of his services. There were several bar pilots in my family and a few schooner captains as well, who sailed across the primeval bay loaded with timber, lime, fruit, or railroad iron to be transported to the mule trains on the mainland.

I stood at the end of the jetty, feeling that slight heritage, and watched the open Gulf as it was subsumed into the calm water of the bay. I felt in balance, a creature of the littoral.

Leaving the jetties, I went to see our old house. It was still there, high up on its stilts, having withstood two severe hurricanes since my departure. I went blank looking at it—it was strangely unevocative. My memories of the house seemed distant and formal. The dunes that once surrounded it had been blown back by the hurricanes and resettled several hundred yards inland, so that my old home looked exposed and weakened.

Someone else had it now. The new owners had enclosed the porch in some sort of corrugated green plastic, their bright blue Volkswagen Rabbit an alien presence in the garage below the house where I used to clean shells, soaking them in Borax until the hermit crabs crawled out to die.

The house once had an unimpeded view of the ocean; my parents and I used to watch TV and see beyond it through the big picture window to the surf, pale as an afterimage in the moonlight. That view was spoiled now by dozens of houses that had seized upon the homely necessities of island architecture and turned it into a style. There were ranch houses and chalets raised up on stilts, and rambling mansions with elevators.

That was part of the boom. Then there were the condominiums, the McDonald’s going up in the center of town for which Mr. Granger owned the franchise. It was all his doing, but he was as innocent a despoiler as the hurricane that could one day level all he had built.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my car driving down the beach all the way to the national seashore, swerving the wheel so that my tires would pop the man-of-war sacs littering the shoreline. By the time I got back to the porpoise circus it was almost dusk. Before I unlocked the gate I stood outside for a moment, smelling the fragrance of unpainted lumber and listening to the creatures inside, the gentle wash of sound they made in the pool, followed by their hard, explosive breaths.

I opened the trunk of my car and rummaged around my still unpacked belongings until I found my face mask. Then I went inside. The animals lifted their heads out of the water just enough for their eyes to rise above the surface and see me. I sat down on an unfinished bleacher seat and wondered what they saw: a human being, a land creature watching them with a vague air of sorrow and apology they would not be able to read.

For a moment longer they stayed close together at the surface in the center of the pool, then each lifted a tail into the air and let it slowly and evenly follow them down into the water.

I took off my T-shirt and entered the pool with them. The water was as cold as a mountain stream, and for a moment, as my feet sank through the grate into the bottom of mud and pulverized oyster shell, I could not catch my breath. I surfaced and swam in a breast stroke to the place I had seen them go under, but they surfaced again on the far side of the pool, raised their flukes in tandem, and submerged again into the murky water where they were lost to me.

Then with a discreet lapping sound they rose from the water about fifteen yards away, close enough for me to smell the stale air they expelled from their spiracles.

I swam back to the dock and picked up my face mask. It was a prescription mask. The two wide circles of glass set into the lens gave the whole thing the appearance of the face of an owl. Putting it on, I always felt transformed, as if the owl’s face brought with it something of an owl’s perception. With my vision restored, the twilight was invested with clarity. The sky had the look of a stained-glass window barely illuminated by evening light. All the way up the ship channel, all the way past the jetties and out into the open Gulf, the water was motionless and taut. An offshore rig on the horizon turned on its lights in the same soundless, delicate way the first evening stars began to appear.

With the mask in place I took a breath, dropped beneath the surface, and swam toward the porpoises on the other side of the pool. The visibility extended maybe eighteen inches—looking back toward my feet I could see no farther than the empty belt loops of my cutoffs. My hands seemed encased in an amber gel. But in this close space I did not feel threatened or predatory. I had the feeling that the trapped air in my lungs would last forever if I used it wisely enough. I did not want to surface, to break the spell for something as trivial as air. I was at home here, in this drab water that would not hold light. Every molecule I passed through seemed a separate, visible thing waiting to be charged, to be filled with information.

At some point I came into their territory. I felt myself moving through a latticework of signals, being tracked and assessed. For the porpoises I existed now as an impulse, a sonar signal.

I rose and took a breath, looking for them on the surface, but they were still submerged. I went down again and swam toward the center of the pool. Then in the dark water the knowledge came to me that they were very close. With a kind of instinct I extended my hand and felt a pectoral fin graze across my open palm, and after that the firm gritty passage of a tail fluke, then finally a cool submarine wake that broke apart over my fingers.

I saw the eye of a porpoise keeling along no more than eight inches in front of my mask. I could make out the tiny hole in the dorsal fin and the long unbroken genital seam when the porpoise performed an abrupt log roll.

My breath was gone now, but I held myself down a little longer, hoping for something like a second wind. The stingray wound, aggravated by the salt water, was hurting again, but the pain was like a voice from far away, a voice nagging at me about something insignificant. As I was about to spring up to the surface I felt another pectoral brush me across the shoulder, a strange, light, deliberate touch, behind which I could sense some effort at trust, reassurance. Suddenly I was on the surface, flooding my lungs with air.

When I climbed back onto the dock the porpoises took up their old station in the center of the pool. I stood for a while, shivering, drying myself with my T-shirt, and watched the moon begin to rise over St. Joseph Island across the channel. I could hear the soft explosion of each breath the porpoises took, and I could hear as well the surf on the beach, the radios of the season’s last campers in the state park, and gusts of music and dialogue from the Crow’s Nest, the open-air theater that Mr. Granger owned down the street.

I got some dry jeans and another shirt from the trunk of my car, brought them back to the pool, and put them on. The moon by this time was high enough to cast a wake on the water, and I could see that as it rose the wake would trip across the jetties.

Though I had a motel room in Corpus, there did not seem to be any place for me to go, so I sat down on the bleachers once again and watched the steady surfacing and sinking of the porpoises, the mist they expelled that was still visible in the dark. They revealed nothing but their backs now, with the dorsal fins that sometimes flagged spiritlessly over to one side. That morning I had set out with Canales not believing that this could be possible, that a creature so shapeless, so large, so un-revealing, could be captured. But now, suddenly, here they were. The porpoises were not furtive, but the water that enveloped and sustained them seemed to do so at least partially from their consent. It was a living cloak that they drew over themselves, that kept them from our sight, that was never meant to be removed.

I did not hear Mr. Granger come in and walk onto the dock in his white crepe-soled shoes, in fact I was not aware of him until he was standing very near me, with his hands deep in his suit pockets, watching the porpoises. He said nothing for a long time, then he squeezed my forearm and said, very softly, without taking his eyes off the porpoises, “By golly.”

We left together soon after that, locking the gate behind us.

“Well,” he said, “how about going to the movie? Remember when I used to take you over to the Crow’s Nest when you were a boy?”

I nodded. “What’s on tonight?”

“Oh, Captain Nemo—something. Captain Nemo and the Underwater City.”

It sounded sufficiently lightweight. I walked with him down to the theater.

“It’s an awful print,” he said on the way. “By the time we get them they’re held together by Scotch tape. Right now I’m working on getting those two Flipper movies, so when we open up the porpoise circus in the spring we can have a double feature over here at the same time.”

I had not been to the Crow’s Nest in eleven years. Though it had been repainted, it had not changed in the slightest. Lois was still behind the popcorn machine. She looked at me with a puzzled expression for a moment, then gave a strange, dry little whoop and came out to hug me. She had not aged so much as mummified, but there was a gnarled strength to her yet. Her husband had died in the 1919 hurricane. She had told me once how she had watched from the house as he hung onto the fence with his fingers, his body flung out like a windsock until finally he tore loose and fluttered away forever.

“I want Jeff to stay at the motel,” Mr. Granger told Lois. “You got a room for him, don’t you?”

She patted my head. “Why sure, honey. I’ll fix you up after the show.”

“I’ll come over tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got a room in Corpus tonight.”

“Whatever you want to do, honey. Y’all gonna see the show?”

“Thought we might,” Mr. Granger said.

“It’s a good one,” Lois said.

The movie was half over when we went inside, and the theater was nearly deserted. Mr. Granger preceded me down the aisle, his popcorn in one hand, asking me at each row in a loud whisper, the way he had done when I was a child, “Is this all right? What do you think?”

I slipped into a row toward the back, sat down, and looked up at the stars. Nothing had changed. The same constellations were there, still framed by the same four walls that had framed them eleven years ago, and the exposed roof caused a breeze, a slightly chilly breeze, to circulate through the theater, imparting an astonishing freshness that I could not remember experiencing since childhood.

Two boys were riding their skateboards down the aisles, producing a ratchety sound that I found soothing. I took my eyes off the movie and watched them glide in the strange hybrid light that the screen and the unimpeded moonlight made.

There were few patrons. Several rows in front of us I noticed the heads of a woman about my age and a small boy who kept turning to her in frustration, demanding an explanation of the plot.

Mr. Granger set his popcorn on the arm of the chair between us, nudged my shoulder repeatedly, and pointed to the box. I grabbed a big handful and watched the movie. How many times had I seen Captain Nemo on this screen, always courtly, benevolent, gifted, but always wrong, fundamentally wrong? This time Nemo was played by Robert Ryan, near the end of his life. His underwater city rested beneath a clear dome that looked like the membrane of a jellyfish. There were the usual comings and goings, the attacks by sharks and moray eels. The people who were Nemo’s prisoners (or “guests,” as he insisted with impeccable courtesy) frolicked in the deep, clean, well-lit ocean until it was necessary to escape, whereupon Nemo blew himself and his city up once again.

Mr. Granger was asleep by the time the feature was over and the previews came on. I woke him up, knowing this was what he came to see when he went to the movies—coming attractions. He had Lois run every trailer available, regardless of whether the movie had been ordered. So we sat and watched scenes from Rome Adventure, The Legend of Boggy Creek, Valley of the Gwangi, and Flipper. A porpoise—a dolphin, they called it—lifted his head out of the water and shook his neckless body so that the animal seemed to be nodding. “Eh—eh—eh—eh,” Flipper said, then swam beneath the surface where an underwater camera followed him, recording the one fixed expression on his face, that of self-knowledge, contentment.

By the time the previews were over Mr. Granger was asleep again and beginning to snore in a low, rasping way, an old man’s snore. When I woke him he looked up at the blank screen with a puzzled expression, unable to understand why there was nothing there.

“Do you want to stay for the beginning?” I asked him.

“No, Jeff. You go ahead. I think I’ll go on home.”

I followed him out. In the lobby the woman and her son were standing at the concession counter.

“I want a Coke,” the boy was telling his mother.

“No,” she said, “you can’t have a Coke.” She held up a thermos. “I brought you some orange juice.”

“I want some popcorn.”

“All right, you can have some popcorn.”

Mr. Granger spoke over the woman’s shoulder to Lois.

“Good night, Lois.”

“Night, Dude. You come see me tomorrow, Jeff.” She handed the little boy his popcorn.

We walked in silence up the road, past the hotel where Mr. Granger lived, toward my car. I watched his shoes glaring in the moonlight. When we came to the pool we both stopped outside the gate and listened, but we could hear nothing—no lapping water, no clicks or whistles.

“They must be asleep,” he whispered. “I wonder how they keep from drowning when they fall asleep.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“You went swimming with them tonight, didn’t you?”

“For a little while.”

He laughed. “I think you have a talent for this business, Jeff.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“You take care of that ankle. If it starts hurting again, you call Dr. Rush. I’m serious.”

“I know,” I said. “Good night.”

I drove onto the ferry. In the perfect moonlight the water of the ship channel was a lithograph gray, and as we crossed over it I could see deep into Corpus Christi Bay, almost as far as the city itself. I could certainly see the aura its lights cast on the southern horizon—the sky was pale there, and the stars, shedding their own light, were lost in the confluence.

In the broad, jagged wake the ferry left behind I noticed a pod of porpoises moving up to ride the bow. I rushed forward and stationed myself where I could watch them when they arrived, but they changed course abruptly. A few moments later I saw them breaching high into the night air, heading out to the Gulf.

When the ferry docked I took the old familiar road that led around the northern hemisphere of the bay, following it until it became a highway, and following the highway until it became a boulevard lined with palm trees. All familiar. The boulevard led through a recently refurbished suburb down onto a sea-level spit of land that gave way in the distance to the lights of the harbor bridge, curving upward from the earth like the spine of some great supine animal.

At the crest of the bridge I could see all the earth and sea I had come home to. Several spoilbanks emerged from the milky darkness of the bay, and one or two sailboats with running lights, but otherwise the bay was featureless, and the lights that fringed it seemed tentative and imperiled. But it was home. I took my foot off the accelerator and glided into the city.