Chapter 7

She came alone to the Porpoise Circus several days later, after the final show while I was feeding Sammy and Wanda the remainder of their fish.

I was not surprised to see her, and she made no excuse for being there. She simply said hello and stood out of the way as I went about my business. The porpoises rolled their heads slightly to the side to get a look at her, making their contented clicking sounds while they fed.

“We’re almost through,” I told her, feeling strangely unhurried. “We’ve got to finish cleaning out the bleachers and then lock up.”

She nodded casually. “Don’t rush.”

Canales came out of the shed and began gathering up the props. I introduced him to her, and she forthrightly offered her hand.

“You’re the girl who hates us, right?”

She only shrugged, not knowing how to answer.

“Well anyway,” Canales said, “it’s nice to meet you.”

When he left she bent down by the pool and put her hand tentatively out to Sammy. He nuzzled her palm with his beak.

“He wants you to shove him down into the water,” I said. “He gets a big charge out of that for some reason. Just take your hand and grab his beak and push him in.”

She shoved him into the water. He came up again like a buoy, his eyes closed and a look of bliss on his face.

“You going to lock up, Jeff?” Canales asked me. He looked at Mary Katherine suspiciously.

“Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“We’ve got to rein Wanda in on that front flip. She’s starting to slacken up again.”

“I’ll work on it in the morning.”

Canales left. Mary Katherine played with the porpoises a few minutes more before I suggested we leave too. She stood behind me while I locked the gate, and then without discussing it we began to walk toward the jetties. She said nothing for a while and I kept silent too, thinking that she wanted the initiative.

Finally she spoke. “I guess I want to apologize. Because I was so sarcastic the other day. I was mad, and I still am, but I felt bad about stereotyping you like that. You seemed a little more sensitive than I wanted to admit, so I apologize. Of course the fact that you are sensitive sort of compounds the crime.”

“Maybe I’m not as sensitive as you think.”

“Maybe not. Probably not. God, I can’t keep from insulting you. So,” she said, broadly changing the subject, “how did you like the movies the other night?”

I smirked. She smirked too.

“That man you were with, the one who kept snoring. Was that Dude Granger?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. He seemed reasonably harmless.”

“He’s as harmless as anybody,” I said. “You had him wrong in your letter. It hurt his feelings.”

“I was angry,” she explained.

“I know.”

“Don’t act so indulgent toward me. I’m not retracting anything.”

“Do you really think it’s necessary,” I asked her, “for us to keep up this adversary relationship?”

“No,” she said, “as long as we realize that we are adversaries, I guess it doesn’t make much difference how we treat one another.”

“Common courtesy,” I suggested.

She smiled.

“Tell me about that guy you were with.”

“Why?”

I didn’t answer. She knew why.

“He’s my ex-husband. He lives here, he’s a roofing contractor. Sometimes he takes Nat and me out.”

We reached the jetties and climbed up the skirt of granite boulders to the walkway.

“Would you like to walk out to the end?” I asked.

She nodded and we walked until the pathway ran out and we had to pick our way across the boulders. The jetty extended perhaps a quarter mile into the Gulf. On the other side of the Aransas Pass, behind the opposite jetty, we could see the white sand beach of St. Joseph Island, inaccessible and undeveloped.

When we had reached the end we sat down on the boulders just out of range of the spindrift. Mary Katherine stretched out her legs. She was wearing brown corduroy jeans neatly ironed and stained with salt.

“Do you really think your dolphins are happy?” she asked me. It was not a challenge. It was simply something she wanted to know.

“Yes. I’m not saying it makes everything all right, but I think they’re happy now. They had some rough times at first.”

“It’s just a matter of time before they die,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? Last year at Sea Park they lost twenty-two dolphins and three pilot whales in two weeks.”

“We’ve got better conditions here. We’ve got natural seawater.”

“That doesn’t matter. They’re very vulnerable in captivity. They can catch viruses from people.”

“It seems to me they have problems in the wild too,” I said. “Sharks, for instance. Or those mass strandings, or tuna fishermen or killer whales. None of that sounds particularly idyllic.”

“No.”

“What happened to Wanda’s calf?”

“I don’t know. It was probably premature. I did an autopsy once on a little calf I found washed up on the beach. It was no more than a few days old. You could still see its fetal folds. It died of malnutrition.”

I turned and looked out to the Gulf. There were whitecaps breaking over the bar. A part of me knew that I was making excuses, that I was justifying myself now just so I could hold onto Sammy and Wanda.

“Why did you come to see me today?” I asked her.

She lay back on one of the boulders, watching the seawater surge beneath it. She seemed very relaxed.

“I suppose I wanted to see what kind of a person you were.”

“I won’t pressure you for any conclusions.”

“You’re pretty confused, aren’t you? About things in general?”

“I’m learning.”

“There aren’t that many tortured souls like you in the dolphin business. Mostly it’s just the basic macho types. Surf bunnies. People who are after a good tan.”

“It’s time for dinner. Would you like to eat with me?”

“Thank you. I’m eating at home with Nat.”

“So this is the extent of our association.”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being coy or what.”

“It’s just that I have a certain hostility toward you.”

“I know that. What else?”

She stood up and started walking toward shore. We were halfway down the jetty before she spoke.

“I’m not saying you couldn’t come over and have dinner with us.”

I said okay.

“We can walk down to the pier,” she said. “My house is back in the dunes a little way from there.”

We walked close enough to each other along the beach for our arms to brush occasionally. The sand was studded with pieces of sand dollars, and I walked along in my habitual beachcomber’s stoop, searching for a whole one.

“I shouldn’t have lectured you,” she said. “In a way I envy you, being so close to them.”

Her house was weathered and stood upright on pilings. There were the standard marine ornaments—life preservers, seine floats, ski ropes—along the outside stairway.

“This is Molly,” Mary Katherine said, introducing me to a girl in her early twenties who was sitting on a sofa in the living room reading to Nat and holding a sleeping baby against her hip with her free hand. Nat, in greeting his mother, woke the baby. It shrieked for a moment and then calmed down, hiccoughing, the pulse on the top of its head beating. Molly lifted her T-shirt and let the baby nurse. She had a very young, very pleasant face.

“Molly and I are each other’s baby-sitters. We’re both at school here. She’s studying pinfish.”

“Pinfish,” Molly repeated, giving the word an ironic lilt.

“You can leave if you want, Molly,” Mary Katherine said. “Do you want me to watch Joshua tomorrow?”

“Maybe. If Bob comes through with the Willie Nelson tickets. There’s another one of those Dylan rumors, so they may be hard to get. The latest is he’s buying a beach house here.”

“Great,” Mary Katherine said.

We stood around politely while Molly finished nursing her baby. Then she tucked her breast back under her shirt, kissed Nat on the forehead, and left with Joshua strapped to her back.

“Do you remember Jeff from the dolphin show?” Mary Katherine asked Nat. The boy nodded without speaking. He left the room and came back with a little plastic porpoise which he handed to me in silence.

“Wow,” I said, turning the porpoise over in my hands, “that’s really neat.”

“Captain Nemo gave it to me,” he said. “See, I was underwater and I was swimming around with Triangle Fin and then Captain Nemo, he said if I wanted—”

“Nat,” Mary Katherine broke in, “Jeff can’t listen to that right now.”

“I don’t mind.”

“No, really. It’s a very long story. As long as he wants to make it.”

“Who’s Triangle Fin?”

“One of my dolphins,” she said. “A big bull. He has a low, triangular fin, like a grampus. I give them names like that. Wanda was Hole Fin, for example.”

“What about Sammy?”

“He was too perfect. There was nothing special about him, so I probably never even noticed him in the wild.”

Nat was standing by my chair, leaning against my shoulder and looking down at the plastic porpoise I still held in my hands. I gave it back and reflexively put a hand on his shoulders—it spanned almost the entire breadth of the boy’s back.

“I have some fish,” Mary Katherine said, “lots of it. David—my ex-husband—fishes a lot and he’s always bringing over what he can’t eat. I’ve got some fresh flounder and some snapper, I think. Any preferences?”

“I don’t know. Flounder sounds good.”

“Fine.” She began to rummage in her refrigerator.

“I’ll be right back!” Nat told me, and ran at full steam into another part of the house.

I went into the kitchen. There were little plastic magnets on the refrigerator shaped like fruits and vegetables.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“I can do everything. Make yourself at home.”

Nat came running back in to show me the Adventure People, an extended family group with movable joints that he held in his open palms. The Adventure People were apparently on safari, judging from the gorillas and lions and cages that nestled with them in Nat’s hands.

“I asked my parents not to give him war toys,” Mary Katherine said, “so they give him this thing, with wild animals in cages.”

Nat handed me the animals and the Adventure People a piece at a time, offering them for my appraisal.

“All right, honey,” Mary Katherine told him. “Go play in your room now. Jeff and I want to talk.”

Nat went to his room without complaint.

“I really didn’t mind,” I said.

“He knows how to play by himself,” she said. She was slicing bell pepper to garnish the two flounder, which lay in a baking dish, their flesh neatly scored.

She looked down at them intently for a moment, at the ugly mouths and great gill slashes.

“Do you mind if I take the heads off?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“David says if you’re going to eat meat you should know exactly what you’re eating, you should always have it in mind. I suppose I agree with him.”

“Take the heads off,” I said.

There were gig marks on the flounder. I imagined this David character stalking through the marsh at night holding a lantern in one hand and a triton in the other, the mud sucking off his tennis shoes. It was a good place for him, I decided.

She put the fish into the oven and then began to make the salad. I watched her slice a cucumber and an onion, finding myself attracted by the simple ritual. It had been a while since I had seen that.

We ate on the porch, our view of the surf spoiled slightly by an uneven row of houses built perilously close to the beach.

“First good hurricane ought to clear those out,” I said, “then you’ll have a view.”

“Maybe. My landlord tells me this place stood up through Carla and Celia both without a scratch.”

It was cool on the balcony, an ocean breeze threading its way through the dense static air. I looked back inside through the sliding glass door and noticed a wall decorated with un-framed eight-by-ten photographs of leaping porpoises.

“You take those yourself?”

“Most of them. There’s a darkroom at the school where a friend did the printing.”

There was another easy silence. I told her I liked her boy, who was still playing in his room, having eaten before we came home.

“Nat’s a pretty good kid. He puts up with a lot.”

“What’s his father like?”

“David? He’s just a standard hippie with a certain amount of charm. Less and less charm as the years roll by, actually. I’ll tell you an embarrassing secret.”

“What?”

“Guess what ‘Nat’ is short for?”

“Nathaniel?”

“Natural Bridge. I’m not kidding. David’s pantheist phase. I think he was on acid and saw this huge billboard for Natural Bridge Caverns up in New Braunfels. He may have even gone on the tour, I don’t know. The thing is, it really didn’t seem so silly at the time. Of course I suppose you could say that about the last ten years in general.

“Anyway, poor Nat’s stuck with it, and it’s my fault as much as David’s. I was smitten too, in my way.”

She smiled in a strange conspiratorial way.

“Did you like your flounder?”

“Delicious.”

“How about some ice cream? Or would you rather smoke some dope?”

“Let’s do both.”

I watched her roll the joint; she made it seem a simple down-home skill, like the preparation of the salad had been. The marijuana itself did not affect me—it was the ice cream afterward that made me high, high enough to look at her plainly, without embarrassment. I saw her broad shoulders, bared by a sleeveless T-shirt, deeply tanned and peeling; the hollow at the base of her neck, the unwavering set of her eyes.

She told me of her girlhood in Oklahoma City. In the zoo there had been an elephant, Judy, born on the same day in the same year as Mary Katherine. She used to place peanuts in each of the elephant’s nostrils and watch them soar up to the mouth. She was very conscious of Judy’s regard for her—it was courtly and restrained, and it broke her heart.

When she was twelve she saw a picture of a dolphin in Life magazine and began to cry. She wrote fan letters to John Lilly, begging to become his apprentice. When she saw her first dolphins, on a family vacation to Galveston, she had to turn away, she was touched in such a fundamental, debilitating way.

I told her the story of my father’s “rescue,” taking pains to let her know I only half-believed it. She listened very seriously. She had taken a long time to eat her ice cream, and it had melted now.

“That’s marvelous,” she said. “Do you believe it?”

“It seems more probable to me than those stories of porpoises saving drowning sailors, pushing them to shore, that sort of thing. I don’t disbelieve it.”

“I’d like to talk to your father.”

“He’s been dead for years.”

“Oh.”

Nat came in, pretending to need help with his pajamas, and his mother went back with him to the bedroom to put him to sleep. I looked around the living room and inspected her bookshelves. Man and Dolphin, The Mind of the Dolphin, Dolphins, Mind in the Waters, The Porpoise Watcher, The Whale, Whales and Dolphins. All hardback. There were other books as well—natural food cookbooks, college editions of the classics, various field guides and thick paperback potboilers so swollen with water damage I surmised she took them out with her on her boat.

She came back into the living room while I was still browsing and sat on the couch and watched me. She looked tired.

“Nat asleep?”

“On his way, anyway.”

“Do you mind me rifling through your books?”

“No, of course not.”

“I’ve read most of these,” I said, indicating the books about cetaceans. “Not the real technical ones, though. I guess I’m still a layman.”

“Most of the scientists miss the point anyway.”

“You’re a scientist,” I reminded her.

“That’s just my disguise. That’s my way of being around dolphins.”

“I’m in disguise too,” I said.

“I know.”

I stood there, holding a book, looking at her. We were both still high. I felt pleasantly awkward around her.

“I’m not completely acceptable to you yet, am I?” I asked.

“It might take a while. I don’t understand you.”

“I just feel some connection between us. I know it’s premature to say that.”

“It’s a circumstantial connection. Us both working with dolphins. It’s probably best not to get carried away.”

“What about David?”

“That’s not it. It’s just me.”

She leaned her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. I wanted to walk over and sit next to her but I felt detached and almost serene. There was no hurry.

“Thank you for dinner,” I said.

“I enjoyed having you over,” she answered, very properly.

“Do you ever let people come out with you in your boat?”

“Nobody’s ever mentioned wanting to. Except Nat. I take him out sometimes.”

“I’d like to.”

“It can be boring.”

“I’d like to see what you do.”

“All right. Do you have a day off?”

“I can always switch with Canales for a couple of shows. How about Friday?”

“I usually get started around six.”

“I’ll buy you breakfast,” I said. “We could meet at the restaurant.”

“Okay.” She got up and began to clear the table, scraping the flounder bones into a trash bag.

“I’ll help you with that.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll see you Friday. Let’s make it five thirty.”

“Good night,” I told her.

“This is all against my better judgment,” she said.

It was still dark when we met at the restaurant. We took a booth beneath a stuffed, glossy tarpon. She was wearing an old sweater and boat shoes, and she piled her equipment—a camera, tape recorder, clipboard—onto the table. She was very alert and seemed to be delighted by the fact that I was still half asleep.

The fact was I had not slept all night. I had been afraid, like an adolescent on the eve of his first date, that if I fell asleep I might not wake up on time. My interest in seeing her at work, at watching the wild porpoises in the bay through her knowledgeable eye, produced a pleasant subsidiary excitement, but mainly I just wanted to see her again.

She told me about her thesis. It was a kind of demographic survey of the porpoise population along a forty-mile stretch of inland waters. There were thirty-two individuals she could recognize simply by a glance at their dorsal fins and many more she could identify from photographs.

“There aren’t as many dolphins around here as it sometimes appears,” she told me, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “I think maybe a little over two hundred in all. Those are inland dolphins. How many there are in the Gulf I don’t know. What’s interesting is that they seem to be distinct groups of animals. You never see inland dolphins out very far in the Gulf, and Gulf dolphins seem to have very set inland limits.”

We finished our breakfast and drove down to the university docks. We lined her boat out of a shed and into the canal. It was a Boston Whaler, the same kind of boat we had used to catch the porpoises last October. And the day was similar—the perfectly calm sheet of water, the early-morning air that seemed to rest like a heavy gas in my lungs, the overwhelming corrosive scent of dead fish and salt.

When we got into the boat Mary Katherine put her camera and tape recorder into a watertight plastic bucket. I sat in the bow while she started the motor and we moved toward the channel, leaving behind a blue cloud of gasoline fumes and a smooth clear wake.

“Sit wherever you want,” she said. “There isn’t much choice.”

I remained where I was and looked back at her. The sun was up now. She squinted against it and smiled and took off her sweater. Underneath she was wearing a T-shirt, and I could see beneath that the outline of her bathing suit.

We came out just below the jetties. A cormorant flew beside us, keeping the pace.

“We’re going to head up the channel almost to the end of the jetties,” Mary Katherine shouted above the motor. “Then we’ll go back down and around Harbor Island.”

I nodded and looked ahead to the mouth of the jetties. Fishermen were already out, littering the space around them with cut bait, trash fish, coils of leader. The water was a pale gray-green, though far out past the jetties I could see its modulation into clear blue.

Mary Katherine said something into the microphone of the tape recorder and set it back into the bucket. A fisherman waved at us, and I waved back, remembering the serenity of early morning fishing with my father, the way each shrimp curled so poignantly to the shape of my hook.

Neither of us had sighted any porpoises by the time we reached the open Gulf. Mary Katherine spoke into the microphone again and turned the boat around. We ran inland for another hundred yards before she pointed off to the south.

“Over there,” she shouted. “By the tide gauge.”

Four fins broke the water. One of them was low, stunted, symmetrical. I had seen it before.

“Triangle Fin?” I asked.

She nodded. “And part of his herd.” She spoke into the microphone again.

The porpoises were feeding. Mary Katherine kept her distance and took out the camera, but she could not get a decent shot. The porpoises picked up and moved west.

“They’re headed up Lydia Ann,” she said. “We might as well follow them.”

She swung the skiff out of the main pass and into the narrow side channel between St. Joseph and Harbor Island. On its lee side St. Joseph was carpeted with a flock of white pelicans that our approach disturbed into flight. We passed the wreck of a World War II freighter and, further down the channel, the old Lydia Ann lighthouse that was in the background of the postcard on my wall.

The porpoises had disappeared. It was warmer now, and Mary Katherine took off her shirt. She looked lithe and fit in her bathing suit, the light blue material flaring out against her tan.

We rounded the northern curve of Harbor Island and skirted the intracoastal. It took us another forty minutes to reach the main channel again and begin closing our circle around the irregular hulk of the island. During that time we saw no more fins. We kept our silence, the little boat gliding smoothly across the placid surface.

We passed a series of rotted piers, the legacy of a failed resort development. Years ago someone had taken a few backwater acres and laced it with canals and every sort of marina trapping, but no one had ever built a house there. Now only the piers were left and the canals, which once had had a clean surgical precision but whose banks had softened and grown over with grass.

“There,” Mary Katherine said, pointing to a large pod a hundred yards ahead of us. They were feeding, rocking up and down in the water without moving forward. As we approached them they did not swim away; they seemed instead to be moving toward the boat from both sides of the channel.

“You’re going to get the special treatment.”

“What’s that?”

“Watch.”

I thought for a moment that the boat had struck a reef. All of a sudden the water looked very shallow and stippled, and it took me a moment to realize that it was filled with living things. Porpoises. Dolphins. There could have been several dozen swimming with the boat, escorting us, so close it seemed they were trying to lift the small Boston Whaler on their backs. I leaned over the bow and the tip of a dorsal grazed my chin.

“Here,” Mary Katherine said. She took a face mask from the bucket and tossed it to me. “Put this on. I’ve got a little tow bar rigged up to the boat. We’ll take turns pulling each other.”

She cut the motor. The porpoises disappeared as smoothly as a subsiding wave.

“They’re still here,” she said. Her voice sounded stark and direct without the background noise of the motor. She threw a wooden bar over the stern. It was attached to the boat by two pieces of yellow ski rope.

“Go ahead and get in,” she said. “Stay back from the propeller.”

I slid off the stern and untangled the ropes and swam out with the bar to the end of their length. The mask was an old Volt, the kind they sell in drugstores, but it sealed well enough on my face, and looking into the water I could see that anything better would be useless in the murk. I felt the slightest tinge of panic, thinking of all the lower forms of saltwater life I did not wish to encounter.

When I was ready I signaled to Mary Katherine and she started the motor and slipped it into gear. The bar began to drag me forward. For a moment I could see nothing but the blue gasoline cloud above the surface and, when I put my head underwater, the white froth stirred up by the propeller.

Very soon, though, the turbulence grew orderly, forming into a wake that passed on either side of me.

Suddenly the channel was alive. To each side I could make out the great shapes that the dense water did not reveal so much as imply, as if the porpoises were nothing more than clusters of water molecules. One of the shapes made a parallel swerve toward me, regarded me briefly with its eyes, and then thrust itself upward and broke through the filmy ceiling above us.

After that the others drew in to look at me, close enough so that I could see the face of each, the slightest gradients of expression there. I rose with them for breath, and caught a glimpse of Mary Katherine at the stern. She was looking down at me, amused. I descended again. It seemed to me that I was in their charge, that they were racing somewhere, toward some goal, and were taking pains to see I was not left behind. I could feel the shudder of each stroke of their flukes, but somehow our passage through the water together was as effortless as it was urgent. I rose to breathe easily, without forethought, when I was ready.

“My turn!” Mary Katherine called. She helped me into the boat; there was something startling about the touch of her hands on my bare wet back. She dropped her cutoffs and put the mask on, her upper lip splayed by the hard rubber skirt, her eyes isolated and magnified behind the glass.

When she had gone over the side I saw how the porpoises dropped back from the bow of the boat and fell in with her, swimming very close, even touching her from time to time. All that I saw of her when her head was beneath the water was her bathing suit, a blue lolling presence with a consort of odd, gray, snorting beasts.

After a short time she signaled me to turn off the motor and swam to the side of the boat. I helped her over the sharp gunwale. She lay there for a moment with the mask perched on her forehead, the droplets of salt water drying up one by one in the hollow of her throat.

She smiled. “I told you you were going to get the special treatment.”

The porpoises were gone, far up the channel now. I started the motor again and led us slowly toward the university docks. Mary Katherine dried herself in the sunlight of the bow. When we got back we unloaded her white bucket and checked the boat in on a clipboard hanging in the shed. I sat on a gasoline can, watching her put her clothes back on. There was a strange, forlorn intimacy between us.

“You look sort of upset,” she said, briskly buttoning up the cutoffs.

“When we caught Wanda and Sammy we were using two Boston Whalers just like this one. I remember we were chasing them, and all of a sudden they turned around and swam back toward us. I couldn’t figure out why. Now I realize they may have thought it was you.”

“That could be.” She was concerned. There was a hurt look in her eyes. I didn’t understand at first that it was meant for me and not for the porpoises.

“Would you like some tea? I have some in my office.”

The corridors of the marine science building were peopled with lanky graduate students with scraggly beards and buck teeth. They all seemed to know her. To reach her office we passed through a lab in which a man in a white coat was placing tiny fish at the crest of a wooden watercourse and charting their descent. He looked up from his clipboard and nodded at Mary Katherine.

She turned on a light switch in a room just off the lab. A fluorescent fixture overhead blinked tentatively and then flooded the small cubicle with light. On one wall there was a computer rendering of a porpoise. Her desk was six inches deep in monographs and manuscripts. She cleared a space and sat down.

“What do you do in here?” I asked.

She plugged in a hot plate. “Transcribe my data. Make little charts. All the clinical stuff I have to do. If I had it my way I’d just drop all that and go out everyday and watch them, but that’s not the way it’s done. What kind of tea do you want?”

She had scooped a handful of Celestial Seasonings teabags out of the desk drawer. I chose peppermint.

“I’ll have to borrow an extra cup from the kitchen. If the water looks like it’s going to boil over, you better unplug it.”

While she was gone I stared dutifully at the beat-up saucepan she had filled with water. I heard the scientist in the lab say, under his breath and with no apparent irony, “Eureka!” I peeked around the corner and saw him holding a dead fish in front of his eyes by its tail fins.

Mary Katherine came back with my cup and fixed the tea. She cleared more ground on her desk and drew her knees up.

“What are you going to do when you’re finished here?” I asked.

“Try to get somebody to fund me so I can keep on doing the same thing. Maybe write a book for the university press. The Vicissitudes of Tursiops Truncatus in the Texas Gulf Coast. Something like that, I don’t know. Something dull.”

“That wasn’t dull, what we did this morning.”

“No.” She played with the keys of her typewriter. “All in all I think I have a better job than you do.”

“Meaning it leaves you with a clean conscience.”

“I think you enjoy your bad conscience,” she said. “It gives you some sort of edge.”

I had to laugh a little. Beneath the fluorescent light her eyes were a strong green.

“You think I’m sentimental,” she challenged.

“Who knows?”

“But it has nothing to do with sentimentality, with the fact that dolphins happen to be cute. It goes beyond that.”

“Where does it go?” I asked, wanting to know, wanting to go there too.

“It depends on how mystical you want to get. I think primitive civilizations were onto it. There were bear people, toad people, crayfish people. We’re dolphin people, you and I.”

“Totems. Freud said totemism is a form of patricide.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t remember. I remember not believing him.”

“You and I know what a simple thing it is. It’s a simple emotion. Believing in the existence of other beings, that’s all it is.”

There had been a few people like her in New Mexico, devotees of one animal cult or another, people who bought records of coyote yelps and played them all night when the moon was full. Wanting to be Indians, to be one with Owl and Snake and Chuckwalla. But I could see she was already one, the choice had never been there for her to make.

She unplugged the hot plate. “I better get to work,” she said, but she did not get to work. She must have dropped off the desk with a volition toward me I did not notice at the time, because kissing her was a very smooth motion, an easy passage through the air that separated us.

“The inevitable,” she said, her face now in my shoulder. I looked down at the top of her head.

“It wasn’t so inevitable,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to sound fatalistic. I don’t mind it happening, not at all.”

She looked pensively off to the side, to the computer portrait, the dolphin rising from a sea spray formed from vagrant letters, like alphabet soup.

“Where will you be tonight?” I asked.

“Home. No, wait. I’m switching off baby-sitting with Molly. I’ll be at her house. You could come over there, but it would be pretty hectic. Why don’t we see each other tomorrow night? Molly could keep Nat. We could have dinner.”

I agreed. I could wait that long.

“Jeff,” she whispered, “I’ll help you let them go.”

It was not a dare, it was the promise of an alliance. I held her for a long moment, in silence, then kissed her good-by.

The crowd for the ten o’clock performance was filing out the gate when I arrived at the compound. It was a sparse crowd, with only a few hangers-on pestering Canales with the usual questions, which he answered grudgingly.

“You can have it,” he told me when they were gone.

“Wanda refuses to do her back flip, hits the bar every time on the high jump, gets in Sammy’s way when he’s building up speed for his big leap. Stupid fucking animal. She better watch her step or she’s on her way to the glue factory.”

Sara went into the shed, got an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer, and sat by the edge of the pool rubbing the porpoises with her feet.

“This tastes like fish,” she said.

“Plus the Indian princess here forgot to rewind her tape recorder so there she was mouthing the song and all you hear is static.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Maybe I better work the porpoises before the next show,” I said.

“That won’t do any good. Wanda’ll just get full that way and shell be even more half-assed than she is now. She didn’t get much to eat the last show. Maybe if she’s hungry shell do all right this time, start thinking about holding up her end of the fucking deal.”

“How much did you hold back?”

“Maybe three pounds. How was your boat ride?”

“Fine.”

“What’s that chick like? Bleeding heart, right?”

“She’s okay.”

“I’m going into Corpus for some R & R. You and Sara can have this chickenshit operation for the rest of the day.”

When he left I went to the freezer and measured out three pounds of herring, thawed it under the tap, and shot it down Wanda’s gullet, tossing Sammy a fish every now and then so he wouldn’t get jealous.

“Are you supposed to do that?” Sara asked.

“I’m not going to work her if she’s three pounds down. I want her to know the slate’s clean.”

“Look at her looking at you. She’s in love with you. She hates Mando.”

“That’s because he hates her.”

“She is really stupid.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Sometimes I think he’s cruel to her.”

“How?”

“I don’t mean like physically cruel. Sometimes he just seems to want to confuse her, you know? Of course he’s that way with me, too, the way he decided just now to go into Corpus. Notice he didn’t ask me if I wanted to go? I’m pretty pissed off, if you want to know.”

“What does he do to her, Sara?”

“Like I said, nothing serious. He just sort of picks on her. When she makes a mistake he seems glad about it. Hell yell at her and stamp his foot and not give her any fish until she gets so worked up she wouldn’t be able to do it right anyway. He just seems to lose his temper more when you’re not around.”

Wanda’s fungus had still not cleared up, so I got the bottle of purple ointment and held out my hand, a signal for her to rise up out of the water to shake it with her flipper. As she hovered there on her tail I swabbed the area behind her ear hole. Sammy performed the same maneuver, not wanting to be left out, and I gave him a little token swipe with the applicator brush.

Wanda performed raggedly during the two afternoon shows, but I could sense her earnestness. It was our failure, not hers. There was something she didn’t get, something we wanted from her that she did not understand. Since Canales was gone we cut out the Arion bit, but Sammy and Wanda carried Sara around the pool without a hitch. The response from the audience was enthusiastic. Mr. Granger was in the bleachers, as he often was now, his face from my perspective on the pulpit as inexpressive as dough. He came down to the pool after the performance, bent down stiffly, and gave Sammy an affectionate cuff on the beak. Sammy opened his jaws, hoping for a fish, throwing his head back so that the roof of his mouth was visible, pink and speckled like an old man’s skin.

“You know that girl?” I said to Mr. Granger. “The one who wrote the letter to the editor? I’ve been seeing her.”

“Socially?”

“I guess. I think she’s kind of sorry about what she wrote about you.”

“That’s good to hear, Jeff. Is she pretty?”

Life could be so simple. “Yeah.”

“What’s her name again?”

“Mary Katherine.”

“Mary Katherine.” He pondered a moment, his hands deep in his suit pockets. “I’ll tell you what, Jeff. Why don’t I take the two of you into Corpus and take you to dinner at the Petroleum Club? How would that be? That’s something nice I could do for you two.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Granger.”

“Aw hell, you’ll have a good time. And I won’t get in your way. When are you going to see her again?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Well, let’s us just go tomorrow night. I’ll make the reservations right now.”

“I’ll have to check with her.”

“No, no,” he said, growing excited. “You leave that to me. I’ll give her a call tonight. The old ogre calling her up. You just give me her phone number and I’ll set it all up.”

“I should call her first, though.”

“Naw, surprise her.”

Why not, I thought. Let her have it. I gave him the number, told him what time she would be back from Molly’s. He copied it down on a little gilt-edged notebook which he put back into one of his many upper pockets and patted with satisfaction.

“This’ll be a real treat,” he said.