Chapter 4

Canales was right: for three days the porpoises would not take the dead fish. Each time it was offered, though, there was a barely detectable change in Sammy’s attitude. By the second day he nudged the fish slightly with his beak, and when another was thrown in several hours later he actually took it into his mouth and spit it out.

“Tomorrow he’ll go all the way,” Canales said, skimming the fish out. And the next day Sammy took a herring in his mouth, thrashed his head back and forth very slowly, and let the fish fall back into his gullet. Canales blew his whistle to reinforce the act.

“Good boy!”

He threw another fish out. The porpoise regarded it tentatively, then ate it as well. While this was going on Wanda remained, as usual, on the bottom of the pool. Once or twice, though, she rose near Sammy and regarded him curiously before going back down.

“How long will it take with her?” I asked Canales.

“I doubt if she’ll hold out for more than a couple of days. You can tell she’s already interested.”

“What if she doesn’t eat at all?”

“We’ll force-feed her. But I don’t think we have to worry. She’s dumb. She doesn’t have any ideas of her own, so whatever Sammy’s doing is what she’s going to pick up on.”

She came up the next day and nuzzled Sammy as he was taking his fish. I detected a coyness in this act, but I knew she was hungry, repulsed, afraid, a dozen things that the deportment of her body could not show us. It was as if she were demanding something from Sammy, some explanation as to why he was eating the dead fish. She did not seem to equate it with sustenance. Finally, though, she understood, and took a piece of smelt into her mouth and dove to the bottom with it.

Over the next week the porpoises grew more active, though they still stayed in the middle of the pool and though Wanda remained for the most part on the bottom, rising only to breathe or to feed. She made me think of the dolphin in the book I had checked out of the library—the one with the narrow beak that rooted in the mud of the Ganges. I would stand on the dock, placing myself deliberately in her line of vision when she surfaced. I wanted her to see me, to acknowledge me the way she had the night I had gone into the pool with them. But I was only another object on the dock, another fixture above the waterline, like a buoy or a lighthouse.

“The next step,” Canales said, “is to get them to eat out of our hands. We’ll keep dropping the fish a little closer to the edge of the pool, closer to us. Soon they’ll get the idea that they can swim over and pick it up and there’s nothing to be afraid of. Then we’ve got them. Then they trust us.”

So we taught them to trust us. Over time they swam up to our hands, which held the fish, and lifted their eyes above the surface, so that when they took the food they were watching us. We blew our whistles, then, to let them know they had done the right thing, and they slipped below the surface and were instantly swallowed up by the muddy water.

For three weeks we worked on these preliminaries, coaxing them into understanding our position, conditioning them to the objects—our open palms, the bright red target ball, our human forms themselves—that it was necessary for them to recognize if they were to evolve into the perfect state we had imagined for them.

This was a good time. I would wake each morning from a dream that was tamer and more rational than the reality I knew existed at the pool. Very quickly they came to love us, and at the first sight of us each morning they would leap in high, precise arcs from the water, an astonishing, improbable welcome that left me dizzy.

The adjustments I made to their company were very subtle. For the first week I could tell the porpoises apart only by the obvious external markings—Wanda’s dorsal hole, her propeller scar and smaller size, Sammy’s unspoiled surface and heft. It was an intellectual process, searching for the signs. But gradually I became less reliant on the field marks. It was a matter of conditioning myself to quit looking for human reactions to be displayed on cetacean faces. I became fluent in understanding a broad range of emotions that had no apparent outlet in the porpoises’ bodies. I thought I understood them as they understood one another, through a kind of constant internal readout.

Sometimes, though, human and porpoise seemed to coincide in their expressions. I was convinced there were moments that the famous fixed smile really aspired to be just that. Besides the eyes, that smile was the great standard of the porpoise face, and it was surprisingly expressive. Its rigidity, I discovered, was as much an illusion as its constant attitude of mirth. If the smile did not actually change (and there were days when I thought it did), it nevertheless managed to convey moods that, through much trial and error, I was able to read. The mouth drew its expression from the eyes, the way the bay on any given day was influenced by the color of the sky. Yet it was not the eyes one looked at, it was the mouth. Sometimes its downward curve seemed less severe, extending almost playfully along the head to the pinprick that marked the ears. At other times the mouth was set in that quavering way in which humans smile just before they are about to break into tears.

Fear was the simplest emotion to spot. It arose in the porpoises less frequently now, occurring only for a moment when we introduced something—a prop, a ball, the red target on a longer pole—into the pool. At those moments I would see, directly in their eyes, a glimpse of that terror that had been there on the day of their capture. The whites would engorge, overwhelming the soft brown irises.

They remained skittish about outright physical contact with us, even after they had learned to take fish from our hands. As they approached us to touch their beaks to our palms (for our palms were their true target, for which the red ball was merely a substitute), they went through a whole physical repertoire of longing, hesitation, anxiety, afraid of what we would do to them if they came too near.

It became plain very early that Sammy was exceptional at anything we wanted him to do. There was a clarity of purpose in his every move, as if every one of our requests were something he had already conceived in his own mind.

In all professional respects, Wanda was a problem. She was shy and slow, and continued to hug the bottom of the pool as if it were the only thing in her new universe she could believe in. She would, Canales predicted, be barely adequate as a foil for Sammy during a performance. Even Sammy seemed exasperated by her timidity. She got in his way and dogged his progress with us. In time his confidence seduced her away from the bottom and from the safety zone of the center of the pool, but any progress she made was simply an effort to keep up with him. He was growing away from her, and she was afraid.

I did not think of her as stupid. The first time she pressed her beak against my palm I felt that the act was an end in itself, the sign of a covenant, whereas for Sammy it had simply been another base to touch. When she swam up to me and hesitated, I thought of the human quality of reserve. She withheld a part of herself from every activity, and I found that admirable at the same time the professional side of me found it exasperating.

It is an odd experience, to fall truly in love with an animal. It is off the scales. There is no way to assess what is happening, no way to take your own emotions seriously, no release short of perversion. It was not the sort of love that required release, but I won’t pretend it wasn’t, in its way, sensual. One cannot love the gray, bulbous, taut-slick form of a porpoise and not enter some trackless territory of physical longing.

As a boy I had dogs. I worried for their safety and enjoyed their company, but I did not stay awake at night thinking of them. I would not simply put down my fork at a meal and daydream until my food became cold, as I did frequently now.

This infatuation came as a surprise to me, and I was not sure I welcomed it. At the end of the day I could still see and feel and hear them, my hands would still be stinging from contact with the cold salt sheen of their bodies. When I closed my eyes I would see their open mouths, each small perfect tooth, the strange tongue that seemed to be rooted at the front of the jaw, the hard bony beak pocked with tiny dents that were like the pattern in a carpet.

It was all much more a part of me than I was prepared to admit. I told myself it wasn’t “love,” that it was nothing more than what anyone feels after a day of work, the shoe salesman who cannot close his eyes without having to watch an automatic recapitulation of each shoe he placed on each foot. But a shoe salesman doesn’t hunger for that kind of vision, he doesn’t lie in his bed at night waiting for it to begin. I did. A part of my world fell away during those weeks. I swooned.

We did not enter the water with them again for a long time. What we did now was all work and drill and maintenance. At some point our teaching them to trust us became teaching them to perform. My hand was, in truth, a target now, what they must watch and live for; my voice was a police whistle that they heard when they made some gesture that pleased me. Canales drew graphs and had them Xeroxed, and bought two clipboards. We worked on basic behaviors—high bows, tail walks, “singing”—and after each of our three daily sessions we would note on the charts the rate of progress, the amount of fish consumed, overall disposition.

Wanda wanted desperately to please us, Sammy to please himself, and I to be made explicable to them both. I was not comfortable being an object of confusion to another creature, I wanted my motivations and intentions to be plain to them. I felt increasingly as if I did not belong to an authentic species but to some alien race that had been put onto the earth without cause, and cursed with the desire to explain its presence.

It was an anthropocentric conceit I could not help trying to overcome in an anthropocentric way. This was a trap Canales did not fall into. We were the “bosses,” the porpoises had to do what we told them. It was a simple and not entirely graceless attitude, and in practice I could not help but adopt it. During the training sessions I worked close to the bone, learned to be explicit about basic things. If when Wanda went over the bar, she grazed her belly across it, if she did not raise her body far enough out of the water for her tail walks, I had to correct these things by withholding her reward, leaving her in confusion about what she had done wrong until she tried it again and happened to get it right.

“What we need is a theme,” Canales told me one day. “Something to hold all the behaviors together. Pirates, Porpoise University, shit like that. When I was on the road with Barney we had this Laurel and Hardy type thing. I’d be the straight man. I’d say something dorky and Barney would jump up out of the tank and splash me. It worked pretty well. We need to come up with something like that.

“We also need a sexy chick. She’d fall in the pool and pretend to be drowning and Sammy would rescue her, and then Wanda could pretend to be jealous. Or she could get in and dance with him. Ever seen a girl dance with a porpoise?”

“No.”

“It’s kind of cute. Ballroom dancing. I’ll talk to Dude about getting a girl on the payroll.”

The carpenters came and built, to Canales’ specifications, a kind of pulpit on the far end of the dock. We climbed up onto this structure and onto a metal ladder that rose high over the pool. Leaning forward at the top of the ladder we were able to hold our props—the bar, or hoop, or the red target ball on the end of a pole—twelve feet above the surface of the water. The porpoises were nowhere near that height yet. Looking down at the impenetrable sheet of water, I felt it unrealistic to expect that the animals would ever make it up there.

But the training was so incremental the improbable was accomplished almost unnoticeably. We brought them up inch by inch through the hoop or across the bar. With the target we led them higher out of the water each day and shaped their high leaps and acrobatics by blowing the whistle at every new apogee they reached.

Usually they would consume their daily ration of fish as rewards, though when they did badly much of it would be withheld and given to them at the end of the day in one dose.

“That’s to show there’s no hard feelings,” Canales explained. “That tomorrow we start over. A lot of trainers use starvation techniques, but not me. I have respect for these animals.”

When we left at night Sammy and Wanda would swim with us to the edge of the pool and follow us with their eyes as we left the compound. As we locked the gate we could hear their whistles, their worried splashing, as if they feared they could not survive for even a night without some form of human guidance. Canales and I fell into the habit of going out for a beer a few nights a week and then afterward making a final check on the porpoises to make sure they were calm. On these occasions he would lecture me on some fine point of training, and I would nod my head soberly and patiently.

I knew that I was a good trainer, that I was a better trainer in fact than Canales was. I was less temperamental, my hand signals were clearer, it did not upset me when the porpoises did something wrong.

Canales at times reminded me of my high-school football coach—“No, no, no, son! Do it again!” Porpoise training was merely a craft for him in which the medium happened to be living creatures.

But his knowledge of porpoises was sound. He had read all the books I had recently been plowing through, read them more carefully than I would have guessed, and his assessment of the literature, what was worthwhile and what merely trendy, I found to be generally accurate.

“Don’t talk to me about that asshole Cousteau,” he would say over his beer. “All that sanctimonious crap. Read his early books, the ones where he goes out and harpoons porpoises. And those Sierra Club creeps. The cetacean brain is ten times larger than the human brain.’ They’ll believe anything that makes humans out to be second rate. They don’t care about porpoises, they’re just using them to put down the human race. Sure, porpoises are smart. But if they’re smarter than us how come they’re not teaching us tricks?”

Some evenings I would stop by Mr. Granger’s room at the Tarpon Inn and watch television with him until it was time to go to sleep. He sat there in an almost reverential silence, accepting everything that appeared on the tube. The bionics, the “relevant” sitcoms in which families gave and suffered abuse, the endless procession of archetypes—psychotic detectives, dopey women, sidekicks, prescient sheepdogs living among families of insipid moppets—all this evidence of the nation’s diseased vision he took at face value, in innocence. He would sometimes laugh softly along with the off-key, computer-enhanced laughtracks, and turn to me as if for confirmation that what he saw there on the TV was really funny. I would smile reassuringly.

More often I went straight home and read about cetaceans from a big coffee-table book I had bought in Corpus with the proceeds from Mr. Granger’s extravagant paychecks. I read Moby Dick again, this time watching out for the interests of the prey, those cousins of Wanda and Sammy that were so unutterably monstrous and strange I could barely stand to think about them.

I worried that I was becoming too withdrawn, had inherited that vague, attenuated manner by which my father had maintained his distance from the world and which I had always admired. It was a condition that for most of my life I had cultivated a little, so that I was secretly pleased when teachers would take me aside and say, “Don’t be so shy!”; “Pay more attention to what is going on around you!” But now the state had seized me, there was no artifice in it, and there were times when I wanted away from it. My father could walk around nearly in a trance and one still felt attuned to him, drawn to him; he was not self-absorbed in his isolation, as I felt I was becoming.

So I decided to rally, to make an effort, to turn my thoughts away on occasion from warm-blooded sea creatures to members of my own species. One night I called the Seamstress.

“Oh,” she said calmly. “Hi.”

I told her about the porpoises. I could hear her inhaling a joint over the phone.

“What about the movie?” I asked.

“They’ve finished editing. I think it’s going to be released sometime next fall. We all had a big party the other night and Richard—that’s the guy that replaced you—shook hands with the mayor. Wearing the suit, you know.”

I let a pause sag into the wires between us.

“Well, listen,” she said, “I don’t want to run this up on you.”

“No.”

“Keep up the good work with the fish.”

“They’re mammals, like you.”

“Oh, I may be going to the Coast. The West Coast, not whatever coast you’re on. This guy Richard’s moving there. He’s got a job in the Baba Ram Dass cassette library. I might ride along in his U-Haul. Just for the ride.”

“I bet.”

“Nothing like that.”

“I bet.”

“Was there something you expected of me?” the Seamstress asked.

I had to admit there wasn’t.

“Well, I better go. It was sweet of you to call. I sort of miss you. That’s as honestly as I can put it. I think about you sometimes. I’d like to keep in touch, I really would.”

“I’ll be here,” I said. “You have the address. I’ll be getting a listing. Give me a call.”

“For sure,” she said.

In the grocery store the next day I ran into someone who claimed he had been to high school with me. His name was Mark, he was rather short and fastidious-looking, and when I tried to remember him in school I could not dispel an image of the full-grown man before me sitting attentively in a wooden desk.

Mark invited me to dinner at the condominium he and his wife managed near the beach. I didn’t know what to do but accept, so the next night I was sitting with them in their living room, looking out a picture window at the offshore rigs and eating snack crackers from a tray. Mark and I didn’t talk much, having discovered that we did not belong to the same circles in school or, indeed, to the same grade. We simply went over the list of homeroom teachers, refreshing our memories about their neuroses and eccentricities, and then talked about our respective businesses.

“Well, Jeff, let’s hear about those porpoises,” he said, just after finishing an account of the Byzantine negotiations that led up to the closing of a motel he had recently purchased.

His wife was a busy woman who was always sweeping up crumbs with her hands and refilling drinks and trying to perk up the conversation from her station in the kitchen. She had decorated the living room with Hummel figurines and pastel wallpaper and throw pillows and sprayed it with some delicate and insubstantial scent that made the air seem bad.

They had no children, just a high-strung dog of some exotic breed that seemed to drain their energy and keep them barely within the range of civility to one another. She had bought the dog as part of her decorating scheme, had envisioned it sleeping in the little wicker basket in the corner, bundled up with its squeak toys. But the dog merely ran over the furniture, snorting and drooling and humping the legs of the guests. She said she wanted to get rid of it, to find it a place in the country where it would be happy, but Mark had developed an affection for it and would not let her. He stroked the short knotted hide behind its ears while it waved its hind leg and dribbled urine on the carpet. There was something pathetic and honorable in his alliance with the animal.

“I mean we have an obligation to the goddamn dog,” he said.

“Maybe if we have to keep him,” his wife said to me, “you could help us to train him.”

I did my best, but it was impossible to hold the dog’s attention. I hoped that my failure would somehow dampen our relationship, but Mark called me regularly, inviting me to dinner, and I accepted whenever there was no way out of it. Once he asked if I would mind if there was “a fourth,” and I said of course not before I realized what he meant. They had gotten a recent divorcee for me, a big-boned woman who kept lighting cigarettes with kitchen matches and smothering the room in sulfur fumes as we watched TV. I had to volunteer to take her home, and when I declined to come into her house she touched my forearm and whispered, “I understand.”

They didn’t call me after that, but in a few days I ran into another classmate, one that I remembered. His name was Overturf—he had never gone by his first name—and he had changed little since high school. He was still lean and sly, seasoned by a decade of drug abuse. I remembered him as slightly brilliant, an impression he still managed to give off though much of his intensity was gone and he seemed irretrievably mellowed.

Overturf owned land in Port Aransas and lived there most of the week, but his business was in Corpus. He mowed lawns there, or rather was at the head of a lawn-mowing empire; he himself mowed only one day a week. He said he made $50,000 a year and invited me over on his day on to see how. I was vaguely interested and took him up on the invitation the next time I felt like taking a day off from my own work.

Overturf had a big pickup with a double cab in which he drove around town picking up his six-man crew. Those that couldn’t fit in the cab sat in the bed, which was loaded with dirt and brush and greasy lawn mowers and edgers. They drove around from lawn to lawn and put in a fourteen-hour day. I watched them for a few hours, stupefied. Their average time for a lawn was four minutes, and Overturf had contracted for blocks and blocks of flat residential yards. They mowed sixty yards a day.

“There’s no secret to it,” he told me as we watched his minions swarming over the grass, actually running behind their mowers. “Used to be a yardman was somebody who’d poke around on his hands and knees all day and get maybe three or four dollars for it. If he was lucky the maid would bring him out a sandwich at noon. I’ve just upgraded the profession a little bit. Streamlined it. I tell all my customers ‘No flower beds, no leaf bags, no trimming around the flagstones.’ We’re professionals.”

When the yardmen were through with a block they passed around hip flasks, slapped each other on the back, and called each other “Hoss,” then whooped and loaded their machines onto the bed of the truck. One of them was a woman, and she seemed amused to be a part of these male bonding rituals and took obvious pride in keeping up with the work. She seemed bright and self-assured and unattached. I liked to watch her leg muscles working as she pushed her mower, the concentrated set of her features under her straw hat.

Her name was Irene. I invited her on a whim to the Yardmen’s Ball, the annual black-tie rite Overturf had told me about that celebrated the end of the season. The affair was held at a private club and there must have been nearly a hundred yardmen there in tuxedos, representing various lawn-mowing factions throughout the city. Overturf gave a speech, and there was a kind of parody of the Academy Awards, in which miniature gilded lawn mowers were awarded, and after that a formal dance that soon degenerated into a drunken brawl.

Irene and I left early, but when we were alone she turned vague; she seemed uncertain about how to deal with a man beyond the mores of camaraderie, genuinely puzzled as to what I could possibly want from her. I kissed her, knowing it was hopeless. She looked at me as if I were very strange.

It took me a few days to get over that, as if I had indeed committed some grave blunder, had been mistaken all along about the way the world worked. I returned to my work, morose, confused. It took the porpoises to draw me out of this mood; I gave them my full attention, no longer distracted by attempts at human intercourse, and began to feel secure again, and concentrated, and not alone.

The first norther did not come until early November. The wind fanned the languid water of the channel and blew down the few remaining tents in the state park. The last of the tourists went away, and the summer people taped their sliding glass doors and picture windows, applied their security decals there, and went back to the Midwest or to West Texas. The surfers appeared now in wetsuit tops. They stood on the beach most of the day examining the waves and walking up and down like shorebirds. Mr. Granger closed down the Crow’s Nest for the winter.

I came to work early in the mornings and stood on the pulpit in the cold wind, watching the gray shapes below me following my hands. Three or four times a week a small skiff cruised by the dock, guided by a woman in a bright-blue waterproof parka, the same woman I had seen that first night at the Crow’s Nest with her little boy. Sometimes, when I was out of her sight and she thought I could not see her either, she let the motor idle about twenty-five yards out and looked at the pool through binoculars.

When the norther had blown itself out the mild weather it left behind had an edge to it, a vague wintry drift. I read in the paper that the first whooping cranes of the year had arrived at the wildlife refuge, fifty-one of them.

“Take a good look at those birds,” my father had told me when I was a boy and we had taken the excursion boat out to see them. “There won’t be any of those left when you grow up.”

The cranes picked their way through the marsh that day, oblivious to the boat. Their white plumage seared itself into my memory, as something lost and unredeemable. But here they were again, still wintering in the same place, still breeding and replenishing themselves.

The training began to accelerate. There would come a point in the tedious step-by-step process at which Sammy would see the object we had in mind and work toward it directly. By the middle of November he could walk across the pool on his tail and perform a nearly complete frontal flip.

Wanda, of course, came along more slowly, but once she understood what it was Sammy was doing she seemed eager to imitate it. She was not well coordinated, and it seemed to me she was less than single-minded about the whole enterprise, unable to think in terms of simple leaps and twirls that must be attained. There was something more she wanted to understand.

I thought of them like this, as conscious beings grappling earnestly all day long with the problems we presented them. Surely it could not have been easy making sense of us, and I found pleasure in my work at that point where man and porpoise both stopped trying, and achieved something together. It might be a simple wave of a pectoral fin, the most uncomplicated of all our behaviors, that drew us together and held us for a long moment in some special sanctum before everything grew distorted again and unnatural.

Of all the behaviors the one that was most pivotal was beaching. A very gradual ramp had been constructed at one corner of the pool, and very slowly, using the target, we began to coax the porpoises out of the water. It was a classical progression, but it took even Sammy a long time to come all the way out and lie there helpless on the ramp with the weight of his body bearing down on him.

“It’s definitely a weird thing for them,” Canales said. “A porpoise does not beach himself unless there’s something really haywire somewhere. It’s the one position where they’re totally vulnerable.”

Once Sammy had been drawn out of the water onto the ramp he invented his own variation, swimming around the pool for speed and then lunging out of the water and sliding on his belly along the ramp so that he almost collided with us as he took his fish. Wanda hauled herself up in the old painstaking way we had taught her, rising out of the water by a surge of her flukes and dropping onto the ramp, staying exposed just long enough for me to toss the fish into the open trough of her mouth. If I was not immediately forthcoming with the fish she would leave anyway, and all my efforts to get her to stay longer were fruitless.

“We’d better write that in as a joke,” Canales decided. “Think of some funny reason why she jumps right back in the water.”

“How about terror?”

“Yeah, that’s really funny. I can tell you’ve got a bright future in this business. Seriously, though,” Canales said, “we do need a girl in the show. Somebody we could teach the ropes to. She could be an assistant. Then one of us could have an occasional day off.”

“Fine with me,” I said.

“Do you care who it is? I mean, she obviously can’t be a pig, right? Just some reasonably pretty, fairly bright girl.”

“You’ve got somebody in mind. Sara, right?”

“She doesn’t really get off on waitressing that much. She’s been sort of asking me to help her scout out her career opportunities.”

So Sara quit her job at the Lonesome Coyote and came to work soon after. For the first few days she wandered around the perimeter of the dock, looking bored while Canales and I worked the animals. They grew used to her and would let her rub them behind the pectorals, but her presence did not excite them in the slightest. We taught her the hand signals—the counterclockwise spiral that meant a front flip, the outspread arms that signaled the coordinated tail walk. I took her up to the pulpit and showed her how to draw the porpoises in with her hands until they were stationed directly beneath each open palm, their heads out of the water watching for the signal that would tell them what to do.

She had a rather glum interest in it all, an overall mood that seemed totally dependent on how Canales treated her off duty. They were living together in a little ground-level house behind the dunes, a pleasant place whose plastic wood-grain paneling Canales had covered with his mementoes. There were pictures of Karluk the Killer Whale and assorted porpoises, of a pilot whale and a sea lion. A large part of the living room was taken up by Sara’s stereo system, with which she rendered down an impressive collection of progressive country albums.

She had recently, at age thirty, developed an ambition to become a singer in that genre. She had a wan, not unpleasant voice, which she attributed to good living. She ate no meat and made chocolate chip cookies out of carob and whole wheat and honey, which Canales and I nibbled on politely.

Sara had had three abortions, and spoke of them so frequently I began to understand they had had some sort of therapeutic value for her. But she loved children, she said, it had just never been the right time for her. She needed the right man to have children with. Besides, she might have to go on the road someday soon. And then there was the basic ethical question involved in raising a child in a world that was nothing less than a carcinogenic hothouse.

One day we all brought our wetsuits (Sara had one from her surfing days) and entered the pool with the porpoises. They avoided us at first, Wanda taking up her old position at the bottom of the pool. But then very quickly they grew delirious with excitement and began to swim with us, allowing us to be towed on their dorsal fins and gently raking us up and down the legs with their teeth.

“You better watch out for that,” Canales told Sara. “That’s foreplay.”

“It’s more than I get from you,” she said.

Every day after that there was a free period during which we went in with them. Canales wanted the porpoises to get used to us being in the water. He especially wanted them to feel at ease with Sara, because she was needed for what he called the Roman Chariot Ride, a behavior in which she was to stand with one foot on each porpoise and ride around the pool.

The trick took a long time to set up. Sara practiced her balance while Canales and I accustomed the porpoises to the double bridle they would have to wear to support her. Then began a delicate round of negotiations so that the porpoises would tolerate her standing on their backs. It was not easy convincing them; each step of the behavior had to be laid down with extreme care, as if we were building a house of cards.

Finally Sara and the porpoises were able to manage a trip around two sides of the pool, an event comparable in our minds to the first flight of the Wright Brothers. Mr. Granger was there, and it was when Sara tried to acknowledge his applause with a wave that she fell off. But while it lasted it was a riveting vision, a classical one: the girl borne across the water on the backs of two creatures that had risen from the gloomy depths to her aid. I remembered the day we had captured them, how improbable it had seemed then that they would ever rouse themselves in the slightest from their fear and shock. I was proud of them, and proud and ashamed of myself, aware of a nagging reserve that had, over the months, become less and less insistent. All I knew was that when Sara fell off, and Canales and I blew our whistles in congratulation so that the porpoises knew they had done it right at last, they did not swim over to Canales though he held out the fish that was their reward. They came to me.

By the end of that day the behavior was perfected. Sara and Canales left early. I stayed behind to give the porpoises the balance of the day’s fish (plus a little extra) and to put some salve on a fungus Wanda was developing behind her right pec. The two of them leaned their heads against the dock and opened their mouths and made the creaking sound from their spiracles that I had learned long ago was a sound of contentment, expectation. I placed the small stiff fish, a handful at a time, into the open mouths and watched them disappear down the porpoises’ narrow throats.

They were still excited from the day’s success when it was time for me to go, and they did everything they could, from their element, to keep me there. They splashed me on the way out, and Wanda did her uncoordinated front flip and swam on her back waving good-by as if she knew the gesture, out of context, would charm me into staying. When I was outside the gate I waited a long moment until their splashing and squeaking had finally wound down, and then I went home.

I heated a can of chili on the stove and spent most of the evening reading about famous dolphins and porpoises—Pelorus Jack, Opo, a dozen dolphins who voluntarily came in from the sea to swim with children on the beach. All the stories ended in the deaths of the animals. All true animal stories do.

On the Tonight Show a man wearing a bush jacket was holding a leash to which a lemur was attached. The lemur was climbing around on Johnny Carson’s shoulders with a strange, otherworldly delicacy that suggested the creature was weightless. Carson looked at the camera and gritted his teeth as the thing paced behind his neck. The man in the bush jacket, whom I recognized as Bill Mason, the famous wildlife entrepreneur and Canales’ former boss, was chuckling and saying, “Now, Johnny, just be calm.” Then the lemur’s face stared at the camera also, and those great bug eyes were the only thing on the screen with integrity.

“I saw your friend on Johnny Carson,” I told Canales when he came over near midnight to get a beer.

“Mason? Yeah, he’s on there all the time. He’s such a hot shit I can’t stand it.”

We went to a shrimpers’ bar near the bait stand and sat at a booth by a window that overlooked the channel. A few commercial craft moved in silence across the dark water. Canales put a quarter into the table jukebox and punched a Willie Nelson song. He waited until it came on to collapse against the vinyl.

“That was damn good today,” he said. “Sara and those porpoises. Tomorrow I think you and me ought to try it in case she gets sick or quits or something. That way one of us can still do the behavior. Course it won’t be the same with a guy, but it’s still an interesting trick.”

I nodded, and we listened to the song.

“You think Sara’s working out okay?” Canales asked.

“Sure.”

“She’s talking about going up to Austin. There’s some band there she thinks might need a girl singer. You ever heard her sing?”

“Just a little. At work.”

“She’s awful. She’s sort of a sad case, you know? Delusions of grandeur.”

“You think she’ll leave?”

“Probably not. There’s this guy she’s in love with.”

“Not you?”

“No, I’m the guy she lives with. She’s in love with this steel guitar player who’s so stoned all the time he can’t even remember his name. She’s a masochist.”

Canales finished his longneck and ordered another. It was hot in the bar, and he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves very carefully. He held up his hand.

“See what she gave me?”

It was a ring shaped like a porpoise. He took it off and twirled it around in front of his face.

“That’s one thing about being a porpoise trainer,” he said. “You accumulate a lot of crap like this. Every Christmas that’s all I get, porpoise paperweights and porpoise salt and pepper shakers.”

Canales talked for another hour, edging closer to bathos with each beer he ordered.

“I should have married Barney. He was the only thing that ever loved me. If queers can get married I don’t see why a guy and porpoise can’t.

“Tell me when I start sounding pathetic,” he said.

“I can take it.”

“No, let’s get out of here. Let’s take a walk.”

We paid our bill and took our customary walk up the road to the porpoise circus. Canales did not talk anymore. I think he sensed what I did: that any fondness we might develop for one another would somehow be shy of real friendship.

We were several hundred yards away from the compound when I heard something—a series of hollow splashes and the faint sound of angry male voices.

“Somebody’s over there,” I said.

“Where?”

“At the pool.”

We stopped to listen. I heard the splashes again, louder this time, and from far away a sound that rooted me to the road with panic, the distress call: thweet—thweet.

“Run!” Canales yelled. Then I was drifting along the dark road as in a dream, my heart beating wildly, Canales’ labored breathing just over my shoulder. And a peculiar sensation, an intense body vision of what I would find when I reached the compound.

In the darkness I saw a big car, a Lincoln, parked by the gate. There was a ladder on the outside of the wall, and without thought I scrambled up it and dropped down onto the top row of bleachers. I heard a splash and then another, this one landing on solid flesh.

“Hey!” Canales screamed, climbing over the wall.

Everything was silent now down at the pool except for the distress calls of the porpoises. It was too dark to see who was there or how many there were.

I started down. I heard footsteps climbing the bleachers.

“Hey,” a voice said. “It’s okay. No harm done.”

The voice was out of range, but I lunged for it anyway and grabbed someone’s pants leg. I pulled myself up to his waist and fell back down the bleachers with him. It seemed to take a long time for us to reach the bottom, alternately falling on top of one another or catching a limb in the troughs between the rows of seats. When we reached the bottom row I lost him.

“Jeff!” Canales yelled, but I didn’t know what he was warning me about until I felt something crack against my forehead. I told myself as I was falling that it must have been a baseball bat, because it sounded like a home run. I was losing consciousness, but I resolved to pitch forward in doing so, and had the good fortune to latch onto my opponent’s belt. This contact revived me, it was a purchase on my own awareness. I held on, feeling my strength recharge. The bat struck me on the back and on the legs, but the guy obviously had no angle to work from. Other footsteps were scrambling up the bleachers toward the ladder.

“Let me loose,” he said, and then added, as if to appeal to my sense of sportsmanship, “Come on.”

I could see him then, a little: a young face, the ubiquitous scowling face of the high-school terrorist. He hit me again and pulled me up with him to the next row of bleachers. I heard the car starting outside the compound. I was losing focus again.

“Let me go, you creep. We didn’t hurt your fucking sharks.”

Rallying, I aimed the bottom side of my fist at the place the words had come from and felt the septum crack and the nose splay beneath it. I struck again, missing this time and scraping the flesh of my palm along a row of teeth. He got loose then, and I grabbed blindly and got an ear in each hand and pulled down hard, expecting them to rip like torn sleeves. He yelled as if they had, but they remained attached. And I got a mean kick in my chest that sent me rolling down the bleachers again. I was out before I hit the bottom.

Perhaps five minutes later I looked up. Canales had found the lights, and the compound was lit up like a football field.

“Christ,” he said. “Are you okay?” He was bleeding from the nose.

I nodded. It hurt.

“I heard them smack you from the other side of the pool. They had baseball bats and two-by-fours, it looked like. There were three of them.”

“What about the porpoises?”

“I think they’re all right. They’re making a big racket. I’m going to call an ambulance, then I’m going to call the pigs.”

“Never mind the ambulance,” I said. “It’s not that bad. I can go anywhere I need to in a car.”

“You haven’t seen yourself. You might have a fractured skull.”

“I doubt it,” I said, though my head was beginning to throb.

“Okay, I’ll just call the police. But do me a favor and don’t move.”

I lay very still and listened to the distress calls of the porpoises beside me in the pool. I could hear the wild porpoises in the channel answering them, but Wanda and Sammy stayed near me, on my side of the pool. They were calling to me.

Turning my head a little, I was able to see them. They both had their faces out of the water, nodding their heads the way they did when they had performed a behavior well and were expecting fish, but I could see the panic in their eyes. Wanda was bleeding near the spiracle, the blood tinting her breath when she exhaled.

“It’s all right,” I said to them. “It’s all right.”

I let my body slide into the pool. The water was shockingly cold, and the salt water that entered the wound on my forehead seemed to flow straight into some central nerve center, the pain was so shrill and cauterizing. Treading water with my feet, I took Wanda into my arms and held her close, in the human way. She lay still, and her breathing became less and less erratic. Underwater Sammy swam against my legs.

“You crazy fucker,” Canales said when he came back from the phone. He had to pull me out; I couldn’t climb onto the dock on my own.

“I think they’re okay,” I said.

“Now you’ve probably got pneumonia besides.”

“I don’t remember anything,” I said. “What happened?”

“Just some classic punks. They thought Sammy and Wanda were sharks. They were beating on them from the dock. Stupid porpoises must have swum right up to them at first. They probably got a couple of good licks in then, but I doubt if they could have done much but scare them after that. One of them was on you. I got the fish knife and chased the other two around a little. They all got away in that goddamm Lincoln. I think you clobbered one of them, though.”

“I broke his nose,” I said. “I felt it.”

“You’re lucky if he didn’t break your head. You’ve got a lump there about the size of a baseball.”

The sheriff came and walked around the perimeter of the pool awhile, looking at the porpoises, who cowered in fear at the far end of the pool.

“Probably just some kids,” he said. “You didn’t get their license number?”

“No,” Canales said. “It was a Lincoln.”

“Probably just some rich kids from Corpus out for a little meanness,” he said philosophically. “I’ll have my deputy cruise by for the rest of the night. You might think about getting you a security guard if these fish are that valuable.”

He turned to me. “You want me to call an ambulance for you?”

I shook my head. I was sitting up by this time, holding it, cupping the lump with my hand.

Mr. Granger came through the gate, shook hands on the run with the sheriff, and studied my head with a worried disapproving look.

“I’m taking you to the hospital right now,” he said. “And that’s that.”

“Don’t worry about the animals,” Canales told me. “I’ll stay with them awhile and check them over. I think they’re fine, physically at least. Don’t worry.”

Mr. Granger supported me as I walked to his car. It seemed to take forever, and I was greatly relieved to collapse onto the leather seat of his Seville. He took me home first, and I changed painfully from my wet clothes.

“You need some new clothes,” he told me, tying my shoe for me.

We took the southern route into Corpus, along Padre Island. The big car glided with precision down the road. Mr. Granger was in shirt sleeves, and his hair, which was usually slicked back on his head, stood out a little around his ears.

“Those kids must have been on drugs,” he said. “That’s the only explanation I can think of. You shouldn’t have tried to stop them, you should have just called the police.”

“Sammy and Wanda could have been dead by then,” I said.

“Well, you came within a hair’s breadth of being dead yourself, young man.”

I held my ice pack tighter against the swelling.

“I’m going to forget the whole thing, Jeff. I’m going to let them go and forget the whole thing. It’s just not worth it.”

I looked out at the peaceful, vacant highway and the dark coastal plain indistinguishable from the night sky, and knew I wanted to live here for the rest of my life. I loved the name of this place, some Spanish word sufficiently bastardized to mean nothing now except the land and water that so many different creatures held in common as home: Aransas.

“Is it?” Mr. Granger asked.

“What?”

“Worth it?”

“Let’s talk about it when my head is clearer,” I said.

At the emergency room we found out I did not have a fracture. They cleaned out the wound and gave me some pills for the pain.

“You look pretty ugly with that bump,” the young doctor said, “but you’re perfectly all right.”

On the way out I saw myself in the unlighted window of the coffee shop and looked away, it was so grotesque. The strange mound attached to my forehead reminded me of the bulge found on the heads of certain cetaceans, what my whale book called the “melon.”

Mr. Granger drove me home and insisted on following me into my room and getting me into bed.

“You’ve had a big shock,” he said. “I want you to stay in bed all day tomorrow. I’ll check on you in the morning.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

When he was gone I sat up on the bed and remained motionless until the room stopped swirling around me. I looked at the clock: three thirty. I dug my sleeping bag out of the closet, took the pillow off the bed, and walked out to the car. When I sat down behind the wheel my brain seemed to spin inside its skull like a gyroscope, but it was a short drive on deserted roads to the porpoise circus, and I made it easily enough.

As I was unlatching the gate the sheriffs deputy drove by.

“Just checking,” he said. “You okay?”

I nodded.

“You look a little dazed. That guy really lit into you, didn’t he?”

“Sure did,” I said.

“Well, you never can tell. Maybe we’ll catch them. Won’t make any difference if we do. You take care now.”

When he had driven away I went inside and spread my sleeping bag out on the dock. The two porpoises, sensing I was going to stay with them, calmed down and swam back and forth in front of me. I went over to the freezer, left some fish out to thaw, and took one of the pills I’d been given. Then I climbed into the sleeping bag and fell asleep.

I was awake, though, when the norther blew in. The cold wind rattled the metal supports of the bleachers and whipped up the water of the pool. The stars disappeared behind a front of solid cloud. I snuggled deeper into the sleeping bag, fell asleep again, and was awakened this time not by the cold or the pain but from a sensation of being needed.

I turned my head to the pool and saw the two sleek heads there, like puppets, watching me. I stretched out my hand and touched their beaks, and they moved up and down in the water. For a moment I thought they were going to jump completely out of the water and onto the dock, but they were satisfied just to have me touch them, to reassure them I would not leave them alone.

“Go to sleep,” I told them, “go to sleep now.”