Chapter 3

In my motel room on the bay I wrote a letter that night to the Seamstress, telling her I missed her, which I did. “It’s no myth about the porpoise’s intelligence,” I wrote, then wondered if she was even aware of the myth. She was not unintelligent, she simply had a habit of ignoring information. During the height of my infatuation with the Seamstress I had of course seen this trait in a positive light, thinking of her withdrawal from the world of knowledge as saintly and charming.

But now I wanted someone to talk to, and after eleven years’ absence no one came to mind. My high-school friends were grown up now, like me. They were teaching at the local junior college, or running their fathers’ businesses—indeed, when I turned on the tube I saw one of them standing woodenly in a leisure suit before a roomful of sofas. Perhaps a few of them had conformed to the archetype of their generation—gone to the war and died, or been paralyzed, or come home whole; or ducked out from it all, bought land in British Columbia, formed a band, lingered for ten years in graduate school. I would have been surprised if they were not all back now, their blood having cried out in the end for the sultry air of the coast that had bred them like mosquitoes.

There was no torpor anywhere like it. My sojourn in New Mexico, in that clean air, had been a long, depraved hit of some illicit gas. Now I was back on the coast, moving with effort through the heavy, sluggish, barely breathable atmosphere. It had claimed me too. I was coming down from my high.

I looked out the window of the little stucco tourist cottage, at the black void of the bay, and considered walking down the bluff to the shore. But I remembered the muddy beach, the fount of stagnant air that would be there, the tiny waves, the shore littered with milk cartons and bleach bottles and dead cabbageheads.

But it could be a pretty basin of water. On a clear day the sky would reflect itself there and the water, if impenetrable, would be a dazzling blue, and the city itself—its skyline and seawall—would seem a model of tranquillity, reduced and placid, like a diorama in which tiny plastic people bustle about with earnestness and security.

I finished the letter to the Seamstress on that note, on that image of blue sky. It was not late—only ten o’clock—so I got into my car and drove down Ocean Drive past the T-heads, the docks where the excursion boats and yachts were moored. I saw a sign for a bank, with a grinning porpoise as its logo. There was another porpoise on the sign of a seafood restaurant, and there was a Blue Dolphin motel now that featured the animal standing upright on its flukes, wearing a butler’s costume and smiling.

I ended up at a place called the Lonesome Coyote, which I had heard mentioned as a tolerable establishment with live music. I had my hand stamped with the word “Friday” and went inside. A cosmic cowboy band in high pointed straw hats and snuff tins in their breast pockets were whining a song called “Cocaine Cowgirl.” In the middle of a steel solo the lead guitarist took his hand off the frets of his instrument and guzzled half a quart of beer.

“Heeeeeeeeeee yowwwwwwwwww!!” the crowd called back in admiration. They were mostly young pimply kids wearing the same sorts of rodeo hats the band wore, or else ten-gallon felt numbers with hatbands made of pop tops. They held their girl friends by the back of the neck, as if they were handling rattlesnakes, and the girls stood patiently beneath this grip, their clean simple smiles and glazed eyes shining in the dim light.

The cowboy tradition was a recent innovation, a cultural graft from the Texas heartland, and it seemed out of place on the coast. But I was in a mood to be indulgent toward it and decided to stay as long as I had a beer in my hand.

I wandered outside to the yellow light of the patio. Here the patrons seemed a little older—my contemporaries. I even recognized an old classmate. We looked at each other briefly, severely, he said “How you doin’?” and I said “Fine.”

I was not very surprised to find Canales here. He was sitting by himself at a spool table, trying to roll his coaster around its circumference.

“Hello,” I said.

He slid the coaster under his beer. “Hey, sit down, man! Don’t worry, you won’t be cutting in on any action. Can you believe this town? There’s not a chick here over statutory age. I was getting so antsy earlier I almost decided to drive all the way to Austin. But I figured I better stay close because of the porpoises.”

“They’re fine. I checked on them.”

“Good,” he said, and sipped his beer. “How’s your stingaree wound?”

“Better.”

“That was fun today, wasn’t it? Catching those porpoises?”

I shrugged. I pointed with my longneck beer at the shark’s tooth hanging at Canales’ throat.

“You catch that yourself?”

“Damn right,” he said. “At Bob Hall pier. A nine-foot tiger. Caught it on this big Penn reel I have about the size of your head.”

“I never did any shark fishing myself,” I said. “A friend of mine used to swim bait out.”

“Hey, I swim my own bait out. Rump roast. USDA choice.”

Canales shifted his weight in his chair, smiling to himself, and laid his coaster over the hole in the middle of the spool table. There was something likable about him, some irony or savvy that was discernible only in his relations with himself. I had known others like him in high school, Mexican-Americans who had bailed out of their heritage before it became fashionable, who had become smooth and anglicized, ending up perhaps as anchormen on Midwestern TV stations where their names were mispronounced, styling their hair, winning disco contests, while their hermanos down south walked about humorlessly in brown berets and sunglasses, staffing community action centers where kids were shown slide shows about the dangers of sniffing paint.

He turned to signal a waitress and I saw the stern classic Indian profile, a simple characteristic that gave him a stronger alliance to this country than I could claim.

“No,” he was saying, “this town is really dead. Did you grow up here too?”

“In Port Aransas.”

“I imagine that’s even worse. You know what we used to do for kicks? We’d steal bowling balls from Buccaneer Bowl and go up to the Harbor Bridge about two in the morning when there wasn’t much traffic and just let them loose. They’d roll all the way to Portland.”

I smiled and nodded. A tall, snaky woman in antique clothes came over, and Canales ordered a pitcher from her. She brought it a few minutes later. She had an odd, weary attractiveness, and I was not surprised when Canales tried to get her to sit down.

“I’m working” she insisted, though she kept her smile and her spacy, flirtatious manner.

“You’re talking to a man who’s had his head inside the mouth of a killer whale,” Canales told her.

“Sure.”

“Jeff will back me up on this, won’t you?”

“I might as well,” I said.

“We’re porpoise trainers,” Canales told her.

“I’m really thrilled,” she said. She was holding her empty serving tray against her hip, swaying back and forth good-naturedly.

“Sit down then,” Canales repeated.

“Maybe later.” She drifted away.

“What is the deal with this town?” he said.

I shrugged. Dancers were spilling out onto the patio floor. The music had softened to hard-core country lullabies:

Don’t know whyyyyyyy

Ah feel so lonesome

Don’t know whyyyyyyy

Ah feel so blue

A breeze swept across the patio, a cool salt breeze, the barest sign of autumn.

Canales filled our glasses from the pitcher and leaned back in his chair and looked up at the moon.

“Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

“About her?”

“Anything.”

“You haven’t taught me about training the porpoises yet.”

“You’ll pick it up.”

“How long will it be before they’re trained?”

“Depends on the animals. Some porpoises are dumber than others. In six months, if they’re not absolute cretins, we’ll have them doing coordinated high bows, tail walks, all that shit.”

“Mr. Granger says you have a lot of experience.”

“Yeah,” he said frankly, “I do. I was head trainer for a while at Sea Park before I started free-lancing. That was when Bill Mason was curator. You ever see his show?”

I nodded. I remembered a scene from Adventures with Animals in which Bill Mason was dragged across the Brazilian pampas holding the tail of a giant armadillo.

“What do you mean, free-lancing?” I asked.

“I went on the road with this porpoise I had. Barney. Took him around to shopping centers all over the country for about two years. It was an unbelievable hassle. I had this collapsible Plexiglas tank that I’d haul around with me in the bus. I’d keep Barney right behind the driver’s seat when we were traveling. He had a little pool about the size of a coffin with an automatic sprinkler system to keep his skin from drying out. I’d be driving that bus, popping uppers and stopping every four hours to give ol’ Barn some vitamins or medicine or whatever. Then I’d pull into town and of course nothing would be ready. The shopping center director was supposed to have eight guys there to set up the pool, that was part of the contract, but they were never there. So Barney had to sit in his little pool for another day, and then I’d have to neutralize and salinate the water before we could let him in. That made him happy, getting into that big pool again.

“I’ll tell you, that was so weird. The whole thing. I was never away from him for two years, not for a minute. It was like being married to him. Some nights I’d be driving along about four in the morning, trying to make Saginaw or Eugene or wherever, with maybe a blizzard outside, and I’d pull over to check on Barney. And I’d just get weirded out, looking down at that creature. He could have been from outer space, you know? It was like I was dreaming the whole thing. Then I’d see him watching me through the Plexiglas and start wondering what was going on in his mind. I know everything there is to know about porpoises—I could take the fuckers apart and put them back together piece by piece—but sometime I would just like to know what’s going on in their heads.”

The waitress slunk by again, giving Canales a friendly smile as she passed.

“Anyway,” he went on, “he died. Of course. One day the tank gave out. I wasn’t paying enough attention, and the assholes who were helping me set it up left out a couple of bolts on one of the panels. Barney was whipping around the edge of the pool, building up speed for his high bow, then the whole thing falls apart, he flies out of the tank like a torpedo and goes right through the J. C. Penney window.

“The thing was, he wasn’t even hurt physically. But he couldn’t handle the trauma. He just checked out. That night the SPCA and the TV stations and kids with tears in their eyes were all outside the bus yelling abuse at me while I sat in there trying to convince Barney to stay alive. You ever seen a porpoise die of a heart attack?”

“No.”

“Their tail just sort of lurches up and they go ‘Uhhh!’ and their blowhole stays open. It’s very quiet, very fast. I’ve seen it happen a lot—hell, at Sea Park we’d lose five or six a year at least. You don’t hear about that.”

“You didn’t tell me about the mortality rate before,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ve got primo conditions. We’ve got open water so we don’t have to screw around with chemicals and salt. Plus, like I told you, I’m no vet, but I’m a good porpoise mechanic. I’m not going to blow this one. The Marine Mammal Commission is breathing down my neck after the scene with Barney. They wouldn’t even give me a capture permit. I had to have Mason step in and sponsor me.”

Canales finished his beer and poured another one from the pitcher. Talking about Barney had made him gloomy. The waitress came over again, her purse slung over her shoulder, and sat down.

“My name’s Sara,” she said.

Canales introduced us. “I figured you’d be drawn irresistibly to us,” he said.

“I want to hear about the killer whale. That’s like a big shark, isn’t it?”

“Worse,” Canales said.

“So what was your head doing in its mouth?”

“Waiting to get bitten off.”

He told her about Karluk the Killer Whale and Finny the Sea Lion, who had to be threatened with a baseball bat to perform, and about the emperor penguins he had once trained that would simply shut down and die if somebody looked at them cross-eyed.

“Well,” she said in a deadpan voice, rolling her empty beer glass between her palms, “it sounds like a pretty interesting life all right.”

“You could say that.” Canales grinned. He was very effective with her, and I thought perhaps that animal training had given him an edge that way. He had a sure perception of gesture—he knew by the way a creature regarded him what it was trying to get away with, what it was dying to offer.

“I better go,” I said, noticing their shoulders were touching. “I want to get there early in the morning.”

“Don’t leave yet,” Canales said.

“Yeah,” Sara murmured without interest.

“No, really.”

“Well, I’ll see you in Port A. Tomorrow we’ll try to get them to eat something.”

I wondered if I should tell him about swimming with them. I decided not to. He extended his hand, fingers up, offering a power handshake. I could see a small tattoo distorted by the cordage of his forearm, a porpoise jumping through a heart. Out of equanimity I offered my hand to Sara, in the old courtly way.

I walked back through the bar. There was a different band now, with a female fiddle player who stomped her boot on the floor in a becoming manner. I watched her for a while, until the set was over and she came to the bar. She was my age and had a harsh, pretty face. She looked at me very frankly, and I made a sort of half-nod in her direction before I left. I was a man with responsibilities.

The next morning I was awakened by the sunrise over the bay. I watched it for a while from the picture window of the motel, then checked out and ate breakfast at a little cafe on Ocean Drive my father had sometimes taken me to. A half hour later I was driving off the ferry into Port Aransas. No one was at the pool. I unlocked the gate and went inside. The porpoises were swimming in opposite directions, exhaling in loud resonant gusts that made their bodies sound perfectly hollow. When I came closer they moved away from the perimeter of the pool and stayed in the center, lifting only their backs when they breached.

It was not difficult to tell them apart. The female was smaller, and there was the hole in her dorsal fin and the scar tissue behind where someone’s propeller had struck her. The male, though, was in perfect condition—he seemed wary but not alarmed. Neither of them showed any interest in reviving whatever it was that had taken place among the three of us the evening before. The female dropped out of sight now for long periods—two or three minutes—before surfacing again in the precise center of the pool.

Canales showed up a little later, driving a pickup load of fish, frozen blocks of smelt and herring which we carried into a big meat locker in the little shed that had been built beneath the bleachers.

“I think the female’s a little morose,” I told him when we had finished with the fish.

“Yeah, look at her. She’s going straight for the bottom. That’s a bad sign.”

“Why?”

“She’s a sulker. Or she’s dumb, or high-strung. The other one might bring her along. God, he’s a prize. Look at the way he’s swimming—clockwise. That’s excellent. Most porpoises’ll swim counterclockwise.”

“Why does that make a difference?”

“You train a porpoise by using its natural behavior. If you like the way it moves—zap!—you reinforce that. What we have here is an animal that has already essentially trained himself to swim opposite his partner. It’ll be no problem at all to teach them to jump over a bar from opposite directions. It’s all very natural.”

So we sat and watched the porpoises a little longer. Canales was looking for usable motion, something that could be incorporated into what he termed not a “trick” but a “behavior.” I was looking for something else. I watched them to convince myself that they were real, but I had no success. I could not believe in them, but there they were anyway—odd, plaintive almost shapeless. Wild things, wild animals dredged up from the sea.

“Now we’ll see if they’ll eat,” Canales said. He went over to the meat locker and took out two frozen herring, which he thawed somewhat beneath the water faucet.

“Of course they won’t eat. I know that already. But you’ve got to let them know it’s available.”

He threw a fish out into the center of the pool. The female sank immediately to the bottom. The male shied away as well, but he was not frightened.

“Come on, you guys,” Canales said. He turned to me. “You have to keep talking to them. That’s one of the ways they get to know you.”

I nodded. He went to the shed and came back with one of those long-handled nets used to skim fallen leaves from swimming pools.

“One more chance,” he said to the porpoises. “Thirty more seconds.”

They did not take the fish.

“Okay, you blew it. Too bad.”

Canales skimmed the fish out of the pool with the net. “You’ve got to let them know it’s not going to be there forever,” he said. “They’re on our schedule now, and they’ll just have to realize it.”

“How long will that take?”

“The male, I’d say three days. The female won’t have enough sense ever to take it by herself. She’ll just watch him and finally she’ll catch on. They have a big adjustment to make, you can’t really blame them. Porpoises in the wild won’t eat dead fish—it’s like you or me eating carrion. They have to be pretty hungry before they’ll accept it. Once they do, though, they’re under control.”

Sara showed up at the gate a little later. Canales had invited her, and I could see from the offhand way he greeted her that they were already lurching toward intimacy.

“You really weren’t kidding,” she said, leaning down to the pool. “Oh, they’re so cute. Poor things.”

The male lifted an eye just above the waterline and looked at her for a moment.

“What are you going to call them?” Sara asked. She dangled her polished nails in the water and spoke under her breath, “C’mere, boy! Here, boy!”

“I don’t know,” Canales answered. “Squeaky, Porky, Flippy, Flappy, whatever. You have any ideas, Jeff?”

I looked down at the porpoises, unable to think of anything to call them.

“We could call the little one Peewee and the big male Smiley,” Canales suggested.

“How original,” Sara said.

“All right then,” Canales said, “we could call the male Charlie. No, that’s that tuna’s name.”

“I have an Aunt Wanda,” Sara said. “I’ve always liked that name.”

Canales considered for a moment, and then nodded decisively. “Okay. Wanda for the female. Does your aunt have a husband?”

“Lloyd.”

“That’s no good. You can’t name a porpoise Lloyd. What about Sam? Or Sammy, that’s better. Jeff?”

I shrugged.

“Wanda and Sammy,” Sara said quietly, watching them.

She left soon after the christening, after a very broad display of eye contact with Canales that left no doubt as to her disposition for the evening.

Canales and I did little for the rest of the day except observe the porpoises, watching for reinforceable behavior. He lectured me about the philosophy of animal training, how it was a process of shaping, containing, a sculptural process, the pairing away of great blocks of irrelevant natural behavior and shaping the material that was left.

“You’ll see when we start with them,” he said.

In midafternoon he tried to feed them again and elicited no response, though it was somehow evident that the male—Sammy—was interested. Perhaps it was the still, wary manner in which he let his body hover on the surface near the fish. I could sense the alarm and desire that the half-frozen herring excited deep in his imagination. Wanda, however, stayed submerged, and on her rare trips to the surface came up at Sammy’s side.

Before we left for the day we performed an experiment.

“Get down below the bleachers where they can’t see us,” Canales said. “When I tell you, we’ll raise our heads and take a look.”

We stayed hidden for half a minute, and then when Canales indicated peered over the bleachers. The porpoises’ heads were raised high out of the water, up to their ventral fins. They were spinning slowly along the axis of their bodies, as if levitating. They were looking for us.

“The fuckers are fascinated by us,” Canales said.

I went to the Salt Sea to claim my room. Lois wasn’t there—she was already at the theater, popping popcorn and threading the film—but her nephew, a bloated middle-aged man named Buster, was minding the office. He gave me a key and told me to make myself at home. The room was clean and bare, with a little kitchenette and an old black and white TV. Above the bed there was a painting of the surf, the kind that brings good prices in shopping-mall art galleries because of the illusion of the sun penetrating the swells. For a moment I wished I had brought a picture of the Seamstress to hang on the wall beside it, a picture of her in her oversize backpack, smiling on some mountain trail.

I unpacked my few possessions: two pairs of corduroy jeans, a few shirts, my huaraches and tennis shoes, underwear, socks, diving equipment. I shoved the backpack that had contained all of this under the bed. Now I was settled. I walked to the store and bought provisions. At a postcard rack by the checkout counter I found a picture of a porpoise leaping clear from the water with a lighthouse in the background. The porpoise looked heavy, pregnant.

“The antics of the porpoise,” the back of the card read, “are an endless source of amusement for residents and visitors alike in colorful Port Aransas, Texas.”

I threw the postcard into my shopping cart. On the way home I stopped at the library just as it was closing and checked out the only book they had about whales and dolphins. Back in my room I heated a can of soup, tacked the postcard against the far wall where I could see it from the bed, and then leafed through the book. There were pictures of flensed carcasses on whaling ships, of hundreds of pilot whales butchered in an inlet. Dozens of species of dolphins and porpoises were represented, some looking, with their blunt snouts, like primordial fish, others with long thin birds’ beaks rooting blindly in the mud of the Ganges River.

Finally I came across Tursiops truncatus, the Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin, soaring through a fiery hoop.

“In general,” the book said, “toothed cetaceans with beaks are known as dolphins, those without as porpoises. The Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin, familiar to patrons of oceanaria all over the world, is properly a dolphin, but is also widely known as a porpoise.”

I stared at the pictures for a long time, at the pretty girls in bikinis swimming with the porpoises—or dolphins—and the strange bliss on the animals’ faces, as if all that mattered to them was to be loved by human beings. I read through a chapter on echo location and understood that, conceivably, they could see into one another, that despite all the experiments humans had made to understand their language, the porpoises themselves communicated almost unconsciously, knowing one another’s condition, intentions, fears, all in one persistent wave of awareness.

When it grew dark I took a walk, past the surfing shops, the bars, the Catholic church, the bait stands, the rows of charter boats, and the frames on the docks on which people hoisted their sailfish and tarpon and—once, and the image was persistent and troubling—a porpoise.

I walked out onto the big fishing pier, all the way to the transverse that stood above the farthest breakers. The pier was littered with trash fish, hardheads and gafftops, their razor-sharp dorsals erect and vengeful. Old women in bonnets and tennis shoes were casting out into the darkness, and at the transverse the shark fishermen tended their great reels in silence beneath the arc lamps. At their feet lay the milky body of a five-foot hammerhead shark, a fringe of dark, frothy blood around its mouth where the jaws had been cut out. The shark was still synaptically alive, and it moved the strange beam of its head from side to side irryhthmically. I watched it without emotion: it was just one more unimaginable shape the black ocean had given up to the land.

The Crow’s Nest was showing The Green Slime, with Robert Horton and Richard Jaeckel. I thought perhaps Mr. Granger might be inside watching it—he went to the movies often, indiscriminately—but when I walked by the Tarpon Inn I saw him out in front, swaying on a porch swing directly beneath a bare yellow light bulb. He was looking out toward the ship channel and did not notice me until I spoke to him, whereupon he stood up and gave me a funny little bow. He was holding a strange drink in his hand, a foamy lime concoction that made me think of the movie at the Crow’s Nest.

“Come on up and I’ll fix you one of these,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I’m not real sure what you’d call it. Some kind of daiquiri, I think. I invented it years ago, before you were born.”

He led me up the broad outside stairway to the second floor, then opened the door to his room and stood aside as I passed through.

“You haven’t been here for a long time.”

“Not since I was eight or nine.”

“It hasn’t changed much. A few years ago I had it painted. Then I had this little icebox brought up, so now I’m pretty self-sufficient. Of course I never did cook here anyway. I’ll go out for a sandwich if I get hungry, over to the Marlin Spike or the Dairy Queen. Sometimes I’ll drive over to Corpus and have a shrimp cocktail at the Petroleum Club.”

Mr. Granger took a can of limeade out of the little refrigerator and poured it into a blender near the sink. I sat down in his rocking chair, remembering the room, the smell of old linoleum and after-shave, its aura of desperate, heartbreaking tidiness. It was as anonymous as the room I had been given at the Salt Sea. When I had first come up here, as a boy, it had astounded me because I had known that Mr. Granger was rich, and had assumed that wealth was something that sought its own level, that people as a rule lived and behaved in ways that were bounded by what they could and could not afford. Seeing the place where he lived had drastically altered my perception of Mr. Granger—he seemed for the first time a powerful being, a force in my parents’ lives. The room exuded sadness, loss, but there was no hint of dereliction in it, no trace of someone out of control. I felt now, as I had when I was a boy, privileged to be here.

A great musty pile of prewar National Geographics sat at the foot of Mr. Granger’s bed, which was neatly made and covered with an ancient bedspread, patterned with llamas and parrots, that he had brought back from South America as a young man. On one wall there was a fishing map of the inland waters of our part of the coast, and next to it a photograph of my parents in the wheelhouse of the Rapture, holding me up to the camera.

Mr. Granger handed me my drink. “You want to wait till it settles down a little bit before you drink it. You’ve got vodka in there, and limeade, and just a touch of root beer concentrate.”

We both sat there, silently watching the drink deflate.

“It’s not bad,” I said when I took a sip.

“I used to make it for your folks.”

I creaked away in the rocking chair. I felt very comfortable.

“Did you know we named the porpoises today?” I asked.

“That’s what Mando told me.”

“We named them Wanda and Sammy.”

“Those seem like good names. He says you’re working out fine.”

“I was reading a book tonight. It seems that they’re really not porpoises. Strictly speaking, they’re dolphins.”

“Do you think that’s what we should call them?” He looked concerned.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“We want to be correct.”

“I think it’s probably simpler to call them by the name everyone already knows.”

“That’s a good point, Jeff.” He set his drink on the nightstand and studied it for a moment. Then he took off his glasses, his old wire frames, with the motion of someone unwinding a bandage from his head. When they were off and he was wiping them with a paper he’d taken out of his wallet, the exposed flesh around his eyes looked like the dead white skin that might have been hidden under a bandage. It seemed painful for him to have the glasses off, as if the sallow light of the room stung his eyes like salt water. He squinted against it, but there was still no focus to his face.

When he put his glasses back on he looked over at me and pretended to be shocked.

“When’s the last time you cleaned your glasses?”

I laughed. “Years ago.”

“They look like the windshield of a car that’s been out on a dry caliche road. Hand them over here.”

When I took them off and passed them across to him, the room lapsed into a familiar, comfortable blur. I watched Mr. Granger’s fuzzy hands, nearly indistinguishable from the white lens paper they held, busily working over my glasses.

“This paper is made specially for eyeglasses,” he lectured. “I buy it by the case, carry it around with me every place I go. Now,” he said, handing the glasses back, “try that.”

I put them on and the room snapped back into a clean, precise order. The quality of light had changed.

“Now I’m going to give you some of these,” he said. He opened a drawer and pulled out a dozen of the little packets and poured them into my hand. I knew it would do no good to protest, so I stuffed them as well as I could into the pockets of my jeans.

Mr. Granger sat back on the bed and crossed his knees.

“You use those,” he said. “Don’t just throw them away.”

I nodded indulgently. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

“Are you glad you came down?” he asked.

“I think so. I’m glad to see you again, and I still think of this as home.”

“It’s in your blood, Jeff. Or in your genes, like they say nowadays.”

“I’m still uneasy, though, about the porpoises. I thought they’d be happy and cuddly and as intelligent as everybody says. But there’s something else there too, something about them that bothers me. I guess I always thought that they’d know who I am and what I wanted from them. But they don’t know anything about me.”

“You know,” Mr. Granger said, going over to the sink to make us another drink, “I’m not as sentimental a man as people think I am. I’ve hunted all sorts of animals—doves, javelinas, deer—on just about every hunting lease in South Texas. I have to, it’s part of the business I’m in. Some clients you play golf with, others you hunt with. We’ll sit up there in those blinds, and right across from us there’ll be an automatic feeder with an electric eye that throws out corn at a certain time of the day so that we’ll know when to start looking for the deer. Then when one of them comes up we’ll unload on him. Usually this man will keep the head if it’s got any kind of rack at all and give the meat to his Mexicans if he happens to think about it. I’ll tell myself that it’s a shame, and that’s all I’ll think about it.” He was silent while the blender was on. “But these porpoises, they’re different. You can’t think of them as animals, can you? Or fish either, of course. I guess I feel a little sorry about what we did to them.”

He brought me my drink. “What I’m saying to you, Jeff, is that if you want to, we’ll let them go tomorrow. I’ll pay off Canales, and that will be that.”

I thought for a long moment, or at least convinced myself that I was thinking, because my answer had been there all along. I did not want to let them go. I wanted them to understand me.

“No,” I said. “Let’s give it a try. At least for a while.”

Mr. Granger brightened. This was what he badly needed to hear. “They’ll be happy, Jeff. They’ll see that we don’t mean them any harm. We just want them to be happy.”

By the time I finished my drink Mr. Granger’s room seemed very warm, with an almost visible shimmer of comfort. I settled back in the chair—it seemed impossible to leave. But in a moment I pulled myself up and said good night.

“Don’t leave so soon.”

“I better, or I won’t be able to move.”

I remembered the night I’d spent here so long ago, on the last night of my father’s illness. I had not understood why I could not sleep in my own house, especially since the next morning was Easter, and I was afraid when Mr. Granger picked me up and brought me back to his room and put me into his bed while he sat in his rocking chair in his pajamas. Most of the night I only pretended to be asleep. When the phone rang I watched Mr. Granger rise from his chair and answer it. He mumbled and sat back down. I drifted in and out of sleep. Once when I woke he was crying, and another time he was shuffling around at the foot of my bed.

In the morning I looked down at the Easter basket he had placed there and I knew that my father was dead. I was very hungry. I asked him if I could eat the foot-high chocolate rabbit in the center of the basket. He said to go ahead. My mother came at midmorning and took me walking on the beach and told me. “I know,” I said, and broke down.

She held me and said, “We’ll have some breakfast, okay?” The thought of breakfast restored me, filled me with hope and happiness. I had never been so hungry in my life.

Now Mr. Granger held open the door, and looking at him, I knew that grief would never be that simple again.

“Sleep well,” he said, “and don’t be such a worrywart.”

I walked home along the main road. A dune buggy sped by me, screeched to a halt, and backed up. A kid pulled himself up on the roll bar and asked—in the Tex-Mex catch phrase, “Kitty combate?”—if I wanted to fight. In the glow from a nearby streetlight I could see the surfing cartoon on his T-shirt, his adolescent scowl. I stood there for a moment and actually deliberated. I had heard of the therapeutic value of a good fight.

“No,” I said finally, “I don’t think so.”

“You pussy!” The kid threw a half-filled beer bottle at me, but his aim was so wild I didn’t even bother to dodge it. It landed on the oyster shell without breaking and the dune buggy peeled out.

At home I stared at the postcard I had bought, the porpoise leaping high in Lydia Ann Channel, seemingly about to give birth. I thought I would dream about it, hung there in the sky, delivering its calf into the open air. But I had another, more disturbing dream instead—my parents in the wheelhouse of the Rapture, their faces glassed over. They were saying something I didn’t understand and pointing to the landscape, to the flat seacoast that trembled and rose up against them, capsizing the boat and drawing it down into its substance.