Chapter 5

When I woke up just after dawn my head ached violently and my teeth were rattling with cold. The porpoises were asleep, and for a long moment I did not move, simply lay there and watched them rising slowly and unconsciously to the surface for breath.

I stood up, bundling the sleeping bag around me, and took another pill. The porpoises woke immediately and began swimming on their backs with their pectorals out of the water. I had Wanda come over to me so I could check out the wound near her spiracle. There was a bruise there now, but I was confident the injury wasn’t serious. I wasn’t so sure about her psychological condition—she moved about the pool sluggishly and spent a lot of time on the bottom. Sammy was unmarked and more than anything else seemed relieved, grateful that we had saved him.

When I began to open the gate to leave, Wanda leaped high out of the water and began squeaking indignantly.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

I went to my car and looked at my forehead in the rear-view mirror. The swelling had not gone down, but I drove over to a restaurant anyway and had breakfast, keeping my head turned toward the window so it would not offend anyone. A parade of shrimpers was cruising out from the jetties into the Gulf, and a big excursion boat was headed that way too, out to the snapper banks where its few patrons would fish with electric reels.

At home I put a fresh ice pack on my head and phoned Canales.

“I was just on my way over to see them,” he said.

“I think they’re doing pretty good. I stayed there last night.”

“That was dumb.”

“I don’t care, I didn’t think they should be alone.”

“How’s your head?”

“No fractures, no concussion. It just looks ridiculous.”

“Jesus, I’d like to get those bastards. I’m so irritated I can’t sit still.”

“I’m going to sleep,” I said. “I’ll come over when I get up.”

“Don’t worry. We’re not going to work them for a few days. I’m going to go over later this morning and rent us a security guard. You sure you’re all right?”

“Fine.”

“That was dumb, sleeping out in the cold like that. I have to hand it to you, though, you’re dedicated.”

“Don’t tell Mr. Granger I did that. Lectures just make my head hurt worse.”

But then Mr. Granger himself called as soon as I had hung up with Canales. I told him that I had slept soundly all night in my own bed, that I was much better, and that I was going back to sleep.

I fell into a mild, dizzy sleep, and when I woke in the late afternoon my head felt better and the swelling had gone down somewhat. I put on my coat and walked outside. It was warm now, though the sky was still gray. It seemed to me the cold weather of the night before had been something I had imagined.

At the pool I met Mr. Hillson, the security guard, an old man who giggled when he talked and whose dentures shook when he giggled. His gun was made out of heavy plastic, molded in one piece with his holster. On the other side of his vinyl utility belt he carried a plastic billy club. A shield-shaped patch on his sleeve said “Island Security Agency.”

“Gollee,” he said, looking down into the pool, “I’d hate to fall in there with them sharks.”

“We’ve got a problem,” Canales told me. “Wanda won’t eat.”

I called her over to me. She came up to the dock and laid her beak in my hands. Sammy tried to nudge her away and take her place.

“Let me try,” I said, and Canales handed me a few smelt. I grazed one of them across her closed mouth but she broke off from me and sank. Sammy opened his mouth. I tossed the fish into his throat.

“We’ll give her till day after tomorrow,” Canales said. “Then well have to force it down.”

“We can’t do that. She’s had enough trauma as it is.”

“Well, then she dies, Jeff.”

“What if we let her go?”

“Come on. How long do you think she’d last in the wild? Talk about trauma. Besides, we’ve got a lot invested in her.”

So two days later, when she still had not eaten, we had to force-feed her. We were able to coax her into doing her beaching behavior, and before she had a chance to fall back into the water I sat on her back, just behind the dorsal. She tried to throw me off, but then she calmed down. Sammy swam warily in the water behind me and once beached himself next to her so that I had to shove him back into the pool.

Sara was rubbing water onto Wanda’s forehead, a useless calming gesture. I watched as Canales took a fish in one hand and pried open Wanda’s jaws with the other, using his closed fist to hold them open as he shoved the arm with the fish down Wanda’s throat up to its biceps. Straddling her, I could feel her muscles reacting against the arm. When the fish caught in her stomach Wanda gagged and thrashed, but the food stayed down.

“Jesus!” Sara said.

I looked away, out to the Gulf.

“It’s either this or she starves,” Canales told me.

“I’m not saying anything.”

He fed her three more fish that way. On the fourth something went wrong. The body beneath me spasmed, nearly throwing me off, and the fleshy lip of the spiracle snapped open and did not close.

“What happened?” I shouted at Canales.

His hand was deep inside her, feeling for the fish.

“She must have thrown it up. It must be lodged somewhere in her throat.”

He kept probing with his hand. The lip of the spiracle tried to open and close, but was able to make only gasping sounds.

“I can’t find it,” he said. “Get off her! Hurry!”

As I rolled off, Canales rose up onto his knees, closed both hands into a double fist, and brought them down hard in front of the dorsal fin. There was a deep, hollow sound, and then the blowhole sucked in air again. Canales opened Wanda’s mouth, took the fish out, and fell back on the ramp.

“We almost lost her,” he said.

“Can we let her go back into the pool?” I asked.

“Yeah, I doubt if we did much for her appetite.”

When she hit the water Wanda went straight for the bottom. Sammy went after her.

“Well,” Canales said, “we can scratch the beaching behavior. She’ll never do that again for us.”

“I don’t blame her,” Sara said.

I walked over to the bleachers and sat down. My head and my heart were both pounding.

“Will we have to do that again?” I asked.

“If she won’t eat,” Canales said. “I don’t look forward to it, either.”

But the next day she did eat, and stayed near the surface almost the whole day. It was as if she had simply resolved to put her life into order again. She would not come near the ramp, though, and we were careful not to give any indication we expected her there ever again. We were just grateful to her for being alive.

We gave the porpoises a week off from training. At the end of that time my head was back to its normal shape, and Sammy was so bored we could not get him to stop after he had finished the first series of behaviors.

But there was an element missing in Wanda’s performances. It was not simply her refusal to beach herself or to swim near the ramp. She had no enthusiasm for the rest of her behaviors, either, though she went through them willingly enough. She worked for fish now. Her affection toward us had not altered, but I could see she no longer associated us with everything that mattered to her. There was a part of herself she did not give to us anymore.

These are human interpretations. I don’t know what Wanda felt, or if after the beating she had sufficient reserves of trust to feel anything. Her intellectual powers, as we perceived them, were still minimal. She still depended on Sammy’s mastery of a behavior to pave her own acceptance of it; and her allegiance to Canales, who was short-tempered now himself and tended to shout at her and stamp his foot—“No! Bad girl!”—became increasingly tenuous. She began to rely on me even more than she relied on Sammy, who had evolved beyond her and was pleasing us more and more with every session.

Sammy had found the heart of the race. I believe he actually understood something of human wit, he worked so hard to make us happy; and the night of the beating he had learned something about human cruelty as well and had passed it effortlessly into his fund of knowledge. He was opening up to us; there was something about his strange form that began to seem explicable, familiar. The mystery was raveling away, and underneath it we saw a brilliant porpoise on the make.

It was Wanda I worried about. When I entered the water with her and she swam by so that I could grab her fin and swim with her around the pool, I knew there was some secret knowledge about herself she was trying to pass on to me. I could read it in the way she moved, see it in the immutable expression of her face, and hear it in the squeaking and clicking sounds she made for me. I would hook my finger through the hole in her dorsal and look up at the sky as she pulled me along, with Sammy indulgently following. At those times I could feel, even in the hard muscular thrust of Wanda’s flukes beneath me, a delicacy that would not survive.

Sara by now was very proficient at the Roman Chariot Ride. She moved across the pool like a Cypress Gardens water skier.

“Smile more,” Canales told her every day, and she would break into a cold grin as she undulated across the surface. She was regressing from a thirty-year-old waitress to a teenage surf bunny secure in the romance of her job.

“We’ve got to start putting this program together,” she insisted. “I mean I’ve got to have some motivation when I’m riding across the pool. What’s the point of all these behaviors?”

“We’ve got months to work on that,” Canales told her.

“This is show business,” she said. “You’re supposed to start months ahead. I mean, the humans need rehearsals too!”

So over the weekend she and Canales developed a “concept.”

“See,” Canales told me, “we’ll start out with the standard lecture about how porpoises aren’t fish, et cetera. Then we’ll talk about how they evolved from land animals. And that’s where we’ll put in the beaching, say something like Sammy’s always had a hankering to try life on the dry land himself. Then we’ll say, as long as he was at it, he figured he’d find out what it was like to fly, and that’s where we’ll put in all the leaps and shit. Okay, we’ve got all that out of the way. Then we’ll talk about ancient legends, like that guy Arion? The one with the lute? That the porpoise saved, right? One of us’ll do that. We’ll fall in the water and Sammy’ll come up under us and take us on his back and Wanda’ll swim up and hand us a lute. And we’ll ride around playing that for a while.

“Okay, then we have Sara’s part.” He put his hands out as if he were a movie director framing a scene. “There’s this beautiful Karankawa maiden.”

“Come on.”

“Really. The legend of this beautiful Karankawa maiden. She’s in love with this porpoise. She’s pining away like crazy. We’ll put Sara in the water with Sammy, dancing, and maybe we can work out a kissing behavior too. We’ll talk over the p.a. about how this Karankawa maiden got saved when the rest of her people were all wiped out and how she was carried away to Porpoise City or someplace on their backs. That’s where the Roman Chariot Ride comes in. That’s the finale.”

“There’s no legend like that,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that? For Christ’s sake, a legend is something you make up, isn’t it?”

“It gives the show a narrative element,” Sara said calmly.

“And she’s going to write a song, too,” Canales said.

“I was thinking maybe I could record it,” Sara explained, “and sell little forty-fives of it after the show.”

“It’s fine with me,” I said.

So Sara worked at night on the song and designed her costume, a sort of loincloth bikini. Her new enthusiasm, though, did not extend to the porpoises. She regarded them as props, or in her more sentimental moments as childlike helpmates, She had not, from the first, felt anything toward them, an attitude I could not understand. Canales, at least, had a sort of burnt-out reverence. He treated the porpoises the way he treated his truck, with regular maintenance and an appropriate, reserved affection for their existence.

But Sara was beyond even the illusion of emotion. She was one of those people for whom an animal is simply an adjunct to human life, not really worth noticing. She could never tell the porpoises apart with any proficiency, and her highest praise of them was that they were cute. Yet her indifference to animals made her no less vulnerable to human emotions. Despite the steel guitar player, she was clearly in love with Canales, and she clung to him most of the day like some bothersome plant whose tendrils he could never shake off.

When we were in the shed together, thawing fish under the water tap or cutting them up to stretch the day’s ration, Sara confided in me as if she were bestowing a favor. Canales didn’t talk when they went home, she said. He just sat there and watched TV. She felt like he was not serious in the slightest. He pointed out other women to her he thought were attractive. Sometimes he would ask her to stay home while he went into Corpus. He once threw a full ice cube tray at her.

After recounting this to me she would stand, brush the fish scales off her lap, and go out and kiss Canales and try to sneak her hand inside his pants. He would scowl and make her rehearse the chariot ride again. She was very competent at that by now. She could ride around the pool on the porpoises’ backs and step onto the dock as if she were stepping off an escalator, walking off with such indifference that she had to be reminded to throw the animals a fish. Wanda and Sammy returned her indifference, and I thought if there was one sure thing about Canales and Sara’s relationship, it was the fact that it was not blessed by the porpoises.

Most of the behaviors were down by Christmas. We were still increasing the heights of the poles and hoops, still working to coordinate their leaps with each other’s, and we had a long way to go in perfecting the tail walk from either side of the pool, but there was no question we would be ready well in advance of the April opening.

On Christmas Eve Mr. Granger arranged to have a party at the pool. He wanted the porpoises to be in on it. It was, fortunately, a warm day, and he set up tables on the dock and brought eight times as many tamales as we could eat (made by the family in Refugio that made his clothes) and several gallons of eggnog. Mr. Granger wore a bow tie shaped like a holly leaf, with electric red and green lights that blinked in sequence. He set up a small tree on the pulpit and stood up there and toasted each one of us—Sara, Canales, me, Mr. Hillson (whose services we had not required for a month, but who was invited anyway). Mr. Granger was also careful to include Wanda and Sammy in his toasts. The porpoises lay in the water beneath him, making their clicking sounds and watching his hands. We were all embarrassed and pleased.

“To my family,” Mr. Granger said, raising his eggnog glass. “And I want you to know that includes all of you and especially my two friends down here. I never thought I’d have a porpoise for a relative, but it just goes to show.”

We drank to that, that it went to show. Mr. Granger passed out elaborate gifts. “Mementoes,” he said, “of our enterprise.” Mine was a watch, engraved on the back with a porpoise leaping from the water and the words “To Jeff Dowling from Dude Granger, in deep appreciation for our friendship.”

I knew better than to argue that it was too much. I had done that before when Mr. Granger had given me another expensive gift, and I had seen the disappointment and fear on his face. This time I said “Thank you” as simply as I could.

“Now,” he said, “I have Something for Sammy and Wanda.” He unwrapped a volleyball and threw it into the pool. The porpoises swam away from it, as they always did from something strange, but gradually they came back beneath it, and in two or three minutes were playing catch with us.

Christmas Day itself was cold and overcast. I woke up early and walked down to the pool to check on the porpoises and play ball with them for a while, then I went back home and read. Mr. Granger had left the night before for one of those inconceivably vast ranches along the border, for a Christmas to which he had been pledged for two years. Canales called and invited me over to watch football. I told him there were friends in Corpus I had to see.

I went to the grocery store and bought a very small turkey and a paperback copy of The Joy of Cooking, then went home and read what to do. Stuffing looked too complicated, but the actual roasting of the turkey seemed simple enough.

The bird turned out all right, and I mashed a potato with a fork and heated up some green beans to go with it. I had only a pocket knife to carve the turkey, so I just tore the meat off with my hands and sat there with a paper plate on my knees watching football with the sound off. I noticed how the silence seemed to impel the players to their collisions, as if it were all rehearsed, each tackle and block an immutable, predestined thing.

I did my best not to think about Christmas with my parents, or even with friends in Santa Fe, where the season had always seemed more immediate than it did on the coast, with piñon logs in the fireplace and windows framed with real frost, an effect achieved from an aerosol can during my childhood in Port Aransas.

I did remarkably well in not thinking too much about these things. I looked up to the postcard tacked to the wall, curling upward under the influence of the gas heater, and wished—for the first time—that I was a porpoise, with no holidays to celebrate, living outside human understanding in the continuum of the ocean.