Chapter 6

Over the next several months we perfected alt the behaviors. It was now simply a question of drill, of not allowing the porpoises to get away with fuzzy performances. Canales instituted a grading system. We could let the animals slide to A–, sometimes in extreme cases to B, but we were never to give them any more slack than that. The show had to be tight, perfect, when it counted.

I stood on the pulpit, my whistle around my neck, my hands at my sides in the neutral position. They waited for me to move those hands. I twirled my fingers, they spiraled, dancing. I pointed to the far corner of the pool with my right hand; Sammy disappeared for a few seconds and came up in the middle doing his spectacular back flip. I pointed to the other corner; Wanda did her less than spectacular front flip. Then I pointed in both directions at once, and they both torpedoed to opposite corners of the pool, shimmied up into the air and, propelled by their flukes, walked across the water and passed one another like two folk dancers. Perfect. A plus.

Sara and Canales practiced the script over the p.a. system.

“What’s that you say, Sammy?” Canales would read into the mike. “You don’t want to do your high jump?” Sammy shook his head back and forth, making his naaaa sound. “Well, you’d better think again, young man. A lot of people paid good money to see you do it. What’s that? You don’t care? Let Wanda do it? Sam, I’m surprised at you.”

And so it went, the porpoises responding to Canales’ hand signals, completely innocent of any understanding of the insipid dialogue.

“You try it, Jeff.”

“I can’t say that shit.”

“Hey, man, I put a lot of thought into this script. You might have some consideration.”

“Seriously,” I said, “isn’t it enough that they can do all the behaviors? Why don’t we just leave it at that? I mean, people are coming to see the porpoises, not how clever we are.”

“You mean no narration at all?”

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“Haven’t you ever seen an animal act?” Canales said. “It’s all showmanship. People don’t give a shit about seeing the porpoises. They want to see what we can do with them. I mean, what did you think you were doing all this time? Did you think you were a scientist or something, studying their natural behavior? If you can come up with a better script, fine, but don’t pretend you’re not a huckster, okay?”

I saw he was right. None of it made any difference to the porpoises, and that was what counted. I fell in line. There was a different rhythm now with the human commentary in the background, and when we drilled the porpoises without the script their behaviors seemed curiously disembodied, like a ballet performed without music.

“Can’t you enunciate a little more?” Canales would correct as I mumbled through the script. “Didn’t you tell me you were in a movie once?”

Only by close attention to the porpoises could I get through it. I saw how they acted without embarrassment, and I learned my part of the performance as earnestly as they had learned theirs. The spiel went through my head day and night, and there came a point when it passed into nonmeaning, became a kind of mantra, so that we acted even more in concordance, the three of us leaving the tricks and the cheap jokes and performing some elaborate, cryptic dance together on another plane.

We taught Sammy how to pick us up for the Arion number, taught him to slide beneath our legs so that we were sitting just behind his dorsal fin. With practice we were able to stay astride just by locking our feet beneath him, so our hands were free to play the “lute,” which turned out to be a plastic ukulele.

Sara finished her song and recorded it with a band so that she could lip-sync it during the show as it was played back over the p.a. The effect was dreadful, the lag between her mouthing and the amplified voice reminding me of a dubbed movie. And the song itself was a genuine oddity, backed by a steel guitar (played, I assumed, by her true love) and an attempt by the drummer at tom-toms. A lilting Indian dirge, sung by a pretty, strung-out woman in a loincloth bikini:

My heart belongs to someone

Who lives beneath the sea

My heart it will be broken

If he does not set me free

He may be just a porpoise

But that’s all right with me

I’d rather love a porpoise

Than live in mis-ur-ee

Oh darling come to me across

The waters of the bay

Let me get upon your back

And we will sail away.

Far across the ocean

To some distant shore

Where me and my porpoise

Will be happy evermore

At the end of the song Canales or I would give the appropriate signal, Sammy and Wanda would position themselves for Sara to step on their backs, we would say “and so the princess, etc.,” and off the whole entourage would sail into the sunset. Never mind that a real Karankawa maiden would have been naked, tattooed, malnourished, and glistening with alligator grease—the first time I saw it straight through I was, to my great surprise, touched.

A couple of days before the grand opening Canales took Sara to Mexico. She wanted a hammock and a pair of tire-tread sandals and a purse made out of an armadillo. Canales just wanted a break. While they were gone I ran the porpoises through their behaviors without the script, moving my hands like a bullfighter and feeling that animal mass and form rumble through the wake.

A man came through the gate, an old gray lanky man in a black shapeless suit and a fresh haircut that made his huge ears look like two birds that had just been flushed from a thicket. He shook hands distractedly. His name was Miles Randolph.

“The columnist from the Corpus paper,” he said. “Civic events column? It’s called ‘Around the Coastal Bend.’”

I pretended I knew his column and that he was famous.

“These are the porpoises, huh?” he asked. Sammy was by the dock, his head still, looking the columnist in the eye. Randolph took out a pencil and began writing in a spiral pad that said on the cover PROFESSIONAL REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK.

“Your name again?” he said.

“Jeff Dowling.” It made me uneasy to see him writing it down.

“How long have you been working these animals?”

“Six months or so.”

“And you’re opening this Saturday,” he asked rhetorically.

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me about them. They as smart as you hear?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked up from his notebook and looked at me sternly.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve got some idea. They as smart as a dog, a cat, what?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Well, are they stupid?”

I threw each of the porpoises a fish.

“No,” I said, “they’re not stupid.”

Randolph put up the pad and walked over to the edge of the pool. I could see Sammy opening his mouth, taking in water. It was evident that he was going to squirt him if he came closer. The columnist must have sensed this. He kept his distance and took out his pad again.

“What do they weigh?”

“Four or five hundred pounds.”

“What do you feed them?”

“Fish.”

“How much?”

“Fourteen pounds a day.”

“Lot of fish.”

“For us.”

He walked around the pool a little more, inspecting the porpoises the way he might have inspected a used car.

“What kind of tricks can they do?”

“The usual porpoise tricks.”

He laughed. “Maybe it’s my imagination, but you don’t seem real excited about these animals. You say you’ve been around them six months but you can’t tell me if they’re any smarter than a dog or a cat. Hell, son, all I’m trying to do is put your place here in the paper. Dude Granger’s an old friend of mine. Now, I’ll tell you what. I read somewhere that porpoises are smarter than people. You tell me if that’s true or not.”

“Well,” I said, “they’re just as smart as they need to be. I don’t feel like I’m in any sort of competition with them, so I’ve never tried to measure my intelligence against theirs.”

“But theirs might win?”

“It might.”

He gave me a sober look. “Tell me something. If they’re so smart, don’t you feel sort of guilty keeping them locked up like this?”

“A little,” I said.

“Hmmmm,” he said. He picked up the volleyball. “They play with this?”

“Yeah,” I said, “go ahead and throw it to them.”

The ball landed in the middle of the pool. Neither Sammy nor Wanda went near it.

“They have their moods,” I said.

He stayed around a little longer, trying to get me to open up. I was feeling not just unsociable but a little cruel. For no particular reason I wanted the man off the scent, I did not want to read about Wanda and Sammy in “Around the Coastal Bend.” But I woke up early the next morning and bought a paper anyway at the restaurant where I had breakfast. The article was on the front page of the second section, under a picture of Miles Randolph so grainy that his ugliness was even more apparent than in real life. It was lame chamber of commerce stuff:

Who would have thought that Flipper could be found in our own backyard, so to speak? Not many people know it, but the porpoises that citizens of the coastal bend frequently spot cavorting in the bays and ship channels are more properly known as Atlantic Bottle-nosed Dolphins, and are the same cute little fellows whose antics have delighted patrons of marine parks for years.

Well, over in Port Aransas Dude Granger has decided that he might as well make use of one of that area’s natural resources, so this Saturday marks the grand opening of Dude Granger’s Porpoise Circus.

The mammals were busily rehearsing when I dropped by yesterday and talked with Jeff Dowling, assistant porpoise trainer.

“These animals weigh anywhere from four to five hundred pounds and eat fourteen pounds of fish daily,” he said, as Sammy and Wanda, the two “stars” of the show, looked on. Dowling admitted he suspected the porpoises were “smart” but stopped short of saying they are as intelligent as human beings. Let’s hope not!

Still, Dowling says he feels a “little” guilty about keeping such delightful creatures in captivity, though Armando Canales, the head trainer, said over the phone, “I have to work for a living, you have to work for a living, why shouldn’t they?”

Sara Wade, the pretty female member of the “porpoise team,” said, “It’s no different from anything else.”

The first performance of the Porpoise Circus is scheduled for Saturday at 10 AM in Port Aransas. Admission is $2.50 for adults, $1.25 for children. . . .

I was early to work that day. Sammy and Wanda were so excited by this I could not calm them down. Sammy threw me the volleyball, I threw it back far across the pool, and he was underneath it when it hit the water. Wanda swam up next to him, wanting the ball, yet seemingly lacking in any knowledge of how to take possession of it. Something besides my early arrival excited them. I could sense their awareness that something was impending, that six months of senseless drill was coming to a climax.

Sammy was so worked up he even threw the ball to Sara when she and Canales arrived. She tossed it listlessly back, and the porpoise did not pursue the game any further.

“You see the paper today?” Canales said. “We got some free publicity.”

“When did he talk to you?” I asked. “I thought you were gone.”

“He called last night just when we got in. He said he thought you were a little weird.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “How was Laredo?”

“This guy tried to sell us a pig’s head,” Sara said. “That was sort of gross. The rest of it was okay.”

Mr. Granger came at midmorning with an armload of newspapers.

“We’re going to have to start a scrapbook,” he said.

He stayed while we ran through a full dress rehearsal. Sara wore her loincloth, Canales and I our matching surfers’ trunks.

The rehearsal went well. The tape of Sara’s song did not start on time, so she was stranded for a moment in a field of static, but we could correct that easily enough.

“More feeling,” Canales instructed as I was doing the opening rap, so I made it as broad as I could stand.

“I’ve got a big surprise,” Mr. Granger said after the rehearsal. “Tomorrow is not just opening day for the Porpoise Circus, it’s also the first day of the season for the Crow’s Nest. Guess what I’ve got lined up?”

“The Flipper movies,” I remembered.

“A double feature.”

“Gee”—Canales almost sneered—“that’s really great.”

“I thought it’d be interesting to compare our porpoises to theirs,” Mr. Granger said. “Maybe we can pick up some pointers.”

“We’ll be there,” I told him.

In the next morning’s paper there was a letter to the editor. A headline above the letter read “Statement of Porpoise,” and the staff artist had supplied a cartoon as well—a group of porpoises rising up out of the water with angry looks on their faces and holding placards that read “Equal Rights” and “Freedom Now.” The letter was rather long and was punctuated by a series of dots that suggested it had been substantially cut:

I am deeply offended by your writer’s smug assessment of dolphins as “cute little fellows” and by what amounts to a free advertisement for an institution whose sole reason for existence is the exploitation for human profit of creatures whose awareness and sensitivity are every bit the equal of our own. . . .

I hope that those who go to see this “porpoise circus” will realize what a corrupt and demeaning institution it is. One is hardly surprised at Dude Granger’s lack of any feeling for his fellow creatures. The man who has “developed” one of the loveliest spots on the Texas coast into an extended shopping mall is probably incapable of seeing dolphins as anything but another commodity. But I wonder how Jeff Dowling, the trainer who admits he feels “guilty” about what he is doing to the dolphins, can live with his conscience. . . .

Dolphins—these are not porpoises—have emotions and modes of feeling we are only just beginning to appreciate. . . .

They should not be kidnapped and made to perform as clowns in “circuses.” That sort of thing is degrading to dolphins and humans alike.

Mary Katherine Severin
Port Aransas

I knew who she was. The woman in the boat who had been spying on us all winter. All right, I thought, here it is.

Mr. Granger called. “Jeff, is what this woman is saying about me true?”

“No,” I said, “she’s just looking for a villain. She doesn’t even know you.”

“She says I have a lack of feeling for my fellow creatures. You know that’s not true. Anyway, they seem happy now, don’t they?”

“I think they really are.”

“Maybe we should call them dolphins from now on.”

“I doubt if it would make that much difference.”

“I just want to be accurate is all.” He paused. I could hear his deep, therapeutic breathing over the phone. “Well,” he said, “I’m too old to worry about what people think of me. I’ll see you today at the first show. Are you nervous?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m real proud of you, Jeff. I know everything’ll work out fine.”

But I was nervous, more nervous than I had been when I went before the cameras the first time as Bigfoot. I put on my trunks, the T-shirt that said TRAINER, slipped my toes between the rubber thongs of my sandals, and set out for the compound.

We had put the finishing touches on it just a week earlier. The banner arced over the gate now, a leaping porpoise on either side. The wall of the compound was painted inside and out a cerulean blue that contrasted sharply with the muddy water of the pool and the drab vista across the channel to Harbor Island. Painted against this blue background were mermaids, starfish, seaweed, sand dollars, a waterbabies’ seascape.

“All right,” Canales told me, “I’ll m.c. the first show. You do the Arion bit, okay? Then you’ll take the second one.” He was jumpy, he had a new haircut, and I could smell the hair spray that kept his hair from reacting to the breeze.

Sara sat inside the shed, holding her arms against her body as if she were chilled.

“I’m always like this before I go on,” she explained. “They say if you’re not scared your performance will be worthless.”

I took some fish out of the freezer, held them under the faucet, sliced each one neatly into three bits, and threw them into the bucket as Sara sat on her folding chair, silently mouthing the words to her song.

“You’re sure you know when to start the tape?” she asked me.

“Uh-huh.”

“Right after Mando says ‘Long ago in this part of the world.

“I know.”

People began arriving a half hour beforehand. I watched them from the door of the shed, the Port Aransas summer trade—a preview of it anyway. A lot of them were kids, wearing T-shirts with iron-on transfers of TV idols or current catch phrases. Before taking their seats in the bleachers the patrons stood on the dock and looked down at Sammy and Wanda. Sammy cruised up and down, parading before them. He even turned over on his back and waved hello with his pecs. The audience thought it charming.

Wanda stayed mostly at the bottom. “God, she’s dumb,” Canales said. “I just hope she doesn’t blow it for us.”

I saw a preadolescent boy raise an imaginary rifle to his shoulder, close one eye, and aim and fire at Wanda when she surfaced. His index finger moved, and he mimed a recoil.

The show went fairly well. Canales went out onto the pulpit and looped his microphone around his neck and began his recitation.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the very first performance of Dude Granger’s Porpoise Circus. Now, the animals you will see performing before you today are Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins, which we commonly call porpoises. One thing we would like to point out is that they are mammals—they do nurse their young and maintain a constant body temperature.

“Now I would like to introduce them to you individually. Sammy, would you please take a bow for our guests?”

Very few of them could have noticed the hand signal that sent Sammy on his high introductory leap. Canales tossed him his reward with so much sleight-of-hand that the illusion of Sammy’s working only for fun was not disturbed. There were some pleased sighs from the audience, some applause, and I was unprepared for how well the dispassionate behaviors of the porpoises meshed with the audience reaction.

The applause excited Sammy, but he kept to the program. Wanda did her bow next, not so high or so smooth, but Canales and I looked at each other with relief when she left the water at all.

It all went so well that I found myself with the odd hope that something would happen to subvert it, that Wanda would stray out of line, refuse to cooperate, that Sammy would leap with all his might over the dock into the open water on the other side. There was my role, the patient, infinitely patient saboteur.

They introduced me as Arion. I feigned a fall into the pool and felt the sea beast between my legs, heard his grunts as if he were chiding me for not giving as much of myself to the show as he was. And there was Wanda, with a plastic ukulele in her beak, pressing it upon me. Here, take this. I took it from her mouth, and she sank in the murky water.

Sammy swam slowly and rhythmically, as he had been taught, and I merged with the rhythm and stayed astride. I played my two ukulele chords as we paraded in front of the bleachers, which were filled with a hundred pairs of hands fanning back and forth, creating a sound I recognized as applause. There were smiles behind the hands, children and old men and women, smiling their goodwill, their envy. I noticed the woman I had seen so often spying on us from her boat in the channel. She was sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers, holding a little boy in her lap. When I passed by she regarded me very soberly and looked away when I met her eyes.

I watched her from the door of the shed for the rest of the performance. She kept a hard grip on her son’s shoulders, as if to keep him from enjoying himself, but when the porpoises took Sara upon their backs I could see that beneath her disgust she was entranced. She looked down, self-consciously shook her head, and made a half-hearted attempt to keep the boy from applauding.

There was so much cooing and applause when it was over Sammy and Wanda were filled with an unfocused energy, which they released by an indiscriminate replay of their behaviors. Half the audience came down to the pool before leaving, and Sammy and Wanda eyed the people with new interest, impressed by their potential for appreciation.

A dozen children assaulted me with questions about the porpoises’ diet and their relationships with sharks, and I had to patrol the edge of the pool to keep kids from putting their hands into the water.

The woman and the boy had not yet left. They were standing on the other side of the pool, staring at the porpoises. I started over to them, stealthily, pretending to inspect the water. A kid was following me, pleading.

“I’ll work for nothing. I’ll cut up the fish. I’ll do anything!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “We don’t need any help. And we can’t have anybody else around.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the insurance.”

“But I don’t need insurance!”

“That’s not it, it’s real complicated. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t I just touch them?”

“No.” I was watching the woman. She was starting to leave.

“How come?”

“Because,” I said, realizing that this was one of the things I had vowed as an adult never to say to a child, “because if I let you I’ll have to let everybody.”

The boy said, almost under his breath, “No you won’t.”

“Look,” I said, “I’d really like to let you. I just can’t. I really can’t.”

He muttered “Okay” and went away sulking.

They were standing at the gate now, hesitating. I don’t think she realized how intensely she was looking at me, because when I walked up to her she recoiled slightly and regarded me with a wry, puzzled expression. I just stood there, bewildered and embarrassed.

“I had the impression you wanted to talk to me,” I said.

“No,” she said firmly. She looked slightly amused; her green eyes contrasted in an odd, provocative way with the deep tan of her face. “Why did you think that?”

“You wrote the letter to the editor.”

She nodded.

“So I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Not really. I was just here to see which of my dolphins had ended up in your clutches. That one there—Wanda, is that what you call her?—I’d been observing her for almost a year before she”—she said the word coldly—“disappeared. She was always easy to pick out by that hole in her dorsal. She had a calf that died last April.”

She gave me a reproachful look, as if I were responsible. I looked down at Wanda, who was swimming near me, away from the crowd of kids who were trying to touch her, and thought how little I knew about her and how much I resented this new information.

The woman watched her too. “How did you know it was me who wrote the letter?”

“I’ve seen you out in the channel all winter, watching us. You seemed very interested in porpoises. And—I don’t know—the name seemed to fit. Mary Katherine, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

I told her my name.

“I know. I guessed your identity too.”

“What sort of work are you doing?”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like we were colleagues or something. I’m working on a master’s thesis, trying to get some sort of fix on the dolphin population around here.”

The boy was sitting against her shins. She grabbed his hands and hefted him up to a standing position, from which he obstinately collapsed.

“Come on, Nat,” she said, hauling him up again. “We’ve got to go.”

“I’m not sorry about that letter,” she told me. “I don’t mean to sound rude.”

“Maybe we could talk sometime.”

“Because we have so much in common?”

“I don’t know. I’d just like to talk.”

“I’ll give it some thought,” she said. She led the boy out the gate, guiding him by a light brush of his hair.

In the shed Sara and Canales were smoking a joint and Mr. Granger was holding a frozen smelt in his hand, turning it over and over, trying not to notice them.

“You were all brilliant,” he said when I came in. “I’m so proud of you.”

Sara handed me the joint, but I waved it off. She took another hit and passed it back to Canales.

“It went smooth,” he said with his lungs full. “I can’t deny that. Pretty good crowd too, for the very first show.”

Mr. Granger smiled and set the fish down carefully on the edge of the freezer. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got some business now, but I’ll see you all tonight at the Crow’s Nest.”

“The Crow’s Nest?” Canales asked.

“The Flipper movies,” I said.

“Oh sure. You bet.”

I walked Mr. Granger out to the gate. He stood for a moment and looked up at the string of triangular plastic flags snapping in the breeze.

“I don’t know about you, Jeff, but I have a real feeling of accomplishment. I don’t know anymore whether it was right or wrong to catch those porpoises in the first place, but by God we haven’t let them go to waste, have we? We’ve done something with them!”

For the next show Canales and I switched roles. It was my turn to provide the spiel, and I spun it out fairly well, without a hint of revulsion. By the four o’clock show the porpoises were full and were performing rather sluggishly, though this was not a fault the audience would have noticed. But I could sense the slight lag between a hand signal and the animals’ response to it. It was merely cause and effect now, an intellectual exercise.

It was apparent that the porpoises could sense the wider arena in which their actions took place. The applause, that great sensory mass that hung over the surface of the water like a cloud, obviously stirred them, provided them with a pleasurable and very alien form of reinforcement.

I fed them the remaining day’s fish after the third show. They swam up to the dock and rested their heads there side by side as I tossed the smelt and herring into their open jaws. I put my hand into their mouths and scratched their tongues, then ran my palm along the ratchety edge of their teeth. They were subdued, content, maybe a little sleepy.

“Let’s all go get drunk,” Sara said. “I’m so uptight I can’t stand it. I think I heard somebody laughing at me during the second show.”

“You were amazing,” Canales said. “All of us were real pros. Especially the porpoises.”

“Then let’s all go get drunk,” Sara repeated.

“Mr. Granger sort of expects us at the Crow’s Nest,” I said.

“Christ almighty,” Canales said. “The man is just too weird!”

“I need a night out,” Sara said, looking severely at Canales. “A real night out.”

“I’ll put in an appearance for all of us,” I volunteered.

Mr. Granger was standing in the lobby of the Crow’s Nest, passing out coupons good for a half-price admission to the porpoise show. I told him that Sara and Canales had stopped off for a beer and would probably be along later, then helped him pass out the coupons until the feature started.

The theater was packed. It always was, I remembered, on the first night of the season. When we had taken our seats I saw Mary Katherine Severin walking down the aisle with her boy. The boy’s hand was held by a tall thin guy, older than me, with a blond ponytail that reached almost to the small of his back. The three of them found seats near the front. Her escort put his arms back to retie his ponytail, and I could make out his stringy biceps in silhouette against the screen, which was illuminated by now with a faded cartoon in which a little gnome jumped about a landscape of popcorn, candy, and soft drinks, intoning repeatedly in a deep, raspy voice, “Snack bar!”

The film broke twice during the credits, but held up well enough after that. There they were—Luke Halpin, Chuck Connors, Flipper bounding up out of the water and making noises like Porky Pig. He was a perfect bathtub toy—the fixed smile masked every cetacean emotion, every behavior not rooted in an obsessive desire for human approval.

The creature was fundamentally different from Wanda and Sammy, though all three belonged to the same species and shared much the same fate. But there was something about the conditions of the water in which they lived that stamped them, as surely as the environment of an Eskimo distinguishes him from a Watusi. The clarity of the water Flipper thrust himself through took the edge off his appearance. Within ten minutes I was adjusted to the animal’s physical presence, and bored. It was not the story or the acting—I had not expected either to rise above the Lassie level in the first place—it was the way everything about Flipper was revealed, how easily he could be accepted. In the months I had been with Wanda and Sammy there had never been a moment that I could truly believe in them as real beings, as a part of my life. They were an indissoluble clot in my imagination. Most of the audience tonight, I imagined, would go home thinking of a cute fish living in the blue-tinted vistas of the sea, wanting above all else to help a boy in trouble. But I had seen too much, I could not believe the folklore.

Every appearance my porpoises made, each time they came up out of the murky water to take a breath, constituted a revelation. The density of the water assured them of something Flipper did not have, that he could never know about.

I remembered how facile I had been in the New Mexico air, how loose and engaging, how the Seamstress and I were pleased to be with one another, and how that pleasantness was the result, more than anything else, of knowing we were not crucial to one another. I had moved through that air so easily, like Flipper through his brilliant ocean. But here on the coast my passage through the dense air left a nearly tangible wake.

Most of the audience left after the first movie. Mary Katherine took her boy out to the lobby, leaving the guy with the ponytail alone while they bought popcorn. I could see her boy’s sleepy but insistent face as they walked back to their seats. It was plain he was the reason they were staying for the second feature.

Flipper’s New Adventure was even worse. The principals were changed—grade D television actors—and the production values even worse than I expected to see in Bigfoot Stalks! Mr. Granger fell asleep and began to snore, very loudly. I looked away when Mary Katherine turned around to see who it was. His head dropped a few degrees with each snore, so that it looked as if it would fall onto my shoulder. Just before it hit Mr. Granger jerked awake.

“Have I been asleep?” he asked out loud.

“A little,” I whispered.

He was out again in thirty seconds, and during the rest of the movie I had to punch him awake periodically to keep him from snoring, until finally his head fell onto my shoulder and the sounds were muffled. I watched the rest of the movie feeling his breath and the light stubble of his face, tripping on the fumes of his after-shave. When it was over, Mary Katherine gathered her sleeping son into her arms and walked up the aisle with her date holding her by the back of the neck.

She saw me there, with Mr. Granger’s head on my shoulder, and gave me a very frank nod that thrilled me. The guy with her glowered at me rather weakly and followed her up the aisle.

I shook Mr. Granger awake. He looked around and made an odd sputtering sound.

“Well, are you about ready to go?” he asked.

Lois was in the lobby cleaning out the little grease trap on the popcorn machine.

“We had us a good crowd,” she said.

Mr. Granger yawned. “I think the boom is starting,” he said.

I was too agitated to go home. It was not just the tension of opening day that made me so restless; it had something to do as well with the nod Mary Katherine had given me in the theater. The longing that resulted from that gesture was not strictly sexual—it was a broad front, it had the range of an adolescent’s physical yearning, a vague irritating desire whose components cannot be isolated. I just wanted her.

Instead of going back to the Salt Sea, I went to the pool and pulled my sleeping bag out from behind the shed, where I had left it the night of the beating. It smelled of pine needles and encrusted salt. The porpoises were excited to see me, but I lay down in the dark without playing with them, feeling their eyes on me.

“Calm down,” I told them. “You’ve got to learn to calm down.” I closed my eyes. There was a splash and a heavy slithering sound. I turned over and saw that Wanda had pulled herself out of the water and onto the ramp beside me. Her tail was in the air, her mouth open.

I went over and got a fish and laid it gently on her tongue, but she closed her jaws and held the fish between them without swallowing it. I rubbed my hand over her body, over the rough scar tissue of the propeller wound and the smooth, firm skin of her forehead. She laid her head on my knee, with the fish still between her jaws.

“Go back in the water now,” I said in my language, then made the open palm gesture that we could both understand.