Chapter 9

Canales and Sara drove up as I was unlocking the gate, but they sat for a long time in the cab of his pickup, not speaking. I went in alone and began the day’s chores while they had it out. While I cut up the fish, set out the props, and went over yesterday’s charts, the porpoises followed me with their eyes just above the waterline, like crocodiles.

Canales finally came in alone.

“Forget about Sara for today,” he said, putting his whistle lanyard on over his shark’s necklace. “She’s on strike. We’ll cut her part.” We heard the truck peel out on the oyster shell road.

“Bitch!” Canales said under his breath.

I didn’t ask him for any details.

“Mr. Granger’s in the hospital,” I said.

Canales looked up from the chart he was studying. “No shit?” he said gravely.

“He had a heart attack last night in Corpus. Mary Katherine and I were with him.”

“What sort of shape is he in?”

“I’m not sure. He’s stable right now. But he’s pretty old.”

“He’ll hang in there.”

“I suppose.”

Canales sat down on the dock. Sammy leapt out of the water and splashed him, but he did not react.

“Guess who I talked to on the phone last night?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Bill Mason.”

“What did he want?”

“He was basically just checking out the scene down here. He needs some new stock for Sea Park. He says the porpoises in Florida are getting too wary, so he’s going to bring his catch boat to Texas. But here’s the big news: I told him about Sammy, what a great porpoise he is, and he wants to come down and check him out.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a talent scout. He’s making a porpoise movie. He thinks the time is ripe for a new Flipper.”

“You think he’d want Sammy?”

“No question. The animal is perfect. He’s adaptable, he’s sharp as a whip—a hell of a lot smarter than that porpoise they used for Flipper—and he doesn’t have a scar on his body. Mason said the only other porpoise he’s found that was worth considering was chewed all to hell around the flukes. Anyway, he’s flying in tomorrow afternoon. He’s bringing his boat up too.”

“What about Wanda?”

“He’d probably take her off our hands at the same time. Farm her out to the petting pool at Sea Park. Or maybe some zoo where they just keep porpoises as exhibits, where she wouldn’t have to do any tricks.”

“I don’t know if Mr. Granger would want to sell them.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing. Mason’s buddies at the Marine Mammal Commission told him there’s going to be another barrage of bureaucratic bullshit. New minimum standards. Larger pools, holding tanks, salinity standards, resident vets. They’re trying to shut down the small businessman. They’ll send some asshole inspector out here who doesn’t know the difference between a porpoise and a jellyfish, and he’ll take one look at our pool and ask us how we control the water temperature and we’re finished.”

“But this is seawater. It doesn’t need to be controlled.”

“These are bureaucrats!”

“Maybe we can convince Mr. Granger to meet the new standards.”

“Come on, Jeff, we’re talking about very big bucks here. Maybe Dude could get the money up, but I don’t think the whole project excites him much anymore. Besides, there’s a lot more in it for you and me if we just let the thing die peacefully. Sammy’s going to need trainers, we’re the logical choices. We can write that into the deal with no trouble at all.

“Listen,” he went on. “If and when Mason makes an offer, it’ll make a difference if we present it to Dude together. I think I can jew Mason up pretty high—my theory is that Sammy would be like a movie star, a hot property, right? And what do movie stars get paid? Millions of dollars. Robert Redford, that guy lifts his little finger he gets seven figures. It shouldn’t be any different with Sammy. Dude could stand to make a lot of money on this, but he’s going to want your opinion.”

“Let’s wait till he’s better,” I said.

“All right, but these deals can move fast.”

I nodded, but some part of me was already beginning to panic. Whatever happened it seemed that I would lose them.

We did the first show of the day, rearranging the behaviors to cover for Sara’s absence. Wanda did a backward rather than a forward flip, a deviation the audience was not aware of. But I saw Canales at the pulpit, fuming, plotting revenge. I told him after the show that he had made his hand signal in such a vague manner that it was impossible for Wanda to know which behavior it meant, especially when we were working out of sequence. He cooled down a little, but was a long way from taking the blame.

A half hour before the one o’clock show the phone in the shed rang. I answered it—it was Sara, in tears, asking for Canales.

“Can you take the next show by yourself?” he asked me when he had hung up.

“Sure.”

“She’s playing suicide threat again. I have to pretend she’s serious and talk her out of it.”

“You’re sure she’s not?”

“Someday she might be, but it’s sure as hell not going to be over me. Listen, just do the tricks, just your basic behaviors. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

Mary Katherine and Nat took their seats on the bleachers without coming up to say hello. The one o’clock performance was the best attended of the day—the bleachers were filled with middle-aged women from Corpus, children with their mothers, a few surfers and junkies trying to give off an impression of superiority.

At one o’clock, as usual, I picked up a bucket of fish in each hand and walked to the end of the pulpit and set them down. I took the microphone and clipped it around my neck. Below me the two porpoises kept their eyes fixed on my hands.

I opened my mouth to say “Ladies and gentlemen . . .” but as it turned out I did not speak. Instead I stood there for a moment enjoying the silence from the bleachers. I looked at Mary Katherine, at the eager confusion in her eyes, and then took off the microphone and tossed it back onto the dock.

When I let my hands drop to my sides the porpoises positioned themselves beneath them, the tips of their beaks on a direct line with the tips of my index fingers. I felt their presence there as a power, a stored-up power I had never before thought to use, but when I looked down into the water, at their blunt faces staring back at me, I saw they thought of themselves as accomplices. My silence and the stillness of my hands stirred their imaginations, and they waited with conspiratorial patience for me to direct them.

Not saying a word to the audience, I sent Wanda and Sammy into their opening leap. Without human patter behind it the leap seemed to unfold slowly, lyrically. The audience sat there with their cameras half-raised as the two beasts crossed at the apex of their jump, their pectoral fins seeming to support them for a moment like two sets of stubby, primitive wings.

When the animals returned to the water (with the splashless precision of human divers) the audience did not applaud, no more than they would have applauded a creature they had surprised in the woods. Still, I felt that I had them, that I had caught their attention.

I gave Sammy and Wanda their fish openly, twice as much as they usually received. Wanda rolled over and looked up at me, and I saw myself, the pulpit, and a great arc of blue sky reflected in her eye. I made another sign and the two porpoises lunged forward, dropped beneath the surface, and rose up at opposite corners of the pool, balancing on their tails. I heard a slight gasp from the audience as the porpoises walked backward across the pool, their bodies shivering with the effort of balance. At the end of the behavior I did not even bother to blow my whistle. They knew they had earned their fish, and they understood what I wanted from them—precision, silence, grace.

I worked them in sequence so that they could anticipate me, be confident about what was coming next. My hands moved through the air, the animals took off through the water leaping, waving their fins, beaching themselves, moving to the progression they followed three times a day, the progression that was the only thing they knew anymore, the only hold they had secured in the world of their captors. But now for the first time I felt they believed in their behaviors, that their training had superseded their awareness, and that they were approaching the semiconscious realm of human art.

We entered that realm together. The three of us knew something the audience did not. At the end of the show—though properly speaking there had been no show and it had not ended, since Wanda and Sammy continued to run through their behaviors, and I simply left the pulpit—a few of the spectators asked for their money back at the ticket booth. None of them came up to me, none of the women who usually wanted to know where they could get a porpoise—“Well, do pet stores carry them, or what?”—as a gag gift for their husband, none of the kids with their endless questions about sharks or their pleas that I take them on as apprentices.

But one kid did come down to the pool. He gazed at the porpoises with a blank, flushed look and then simply dived into the water.

“Stevie!” his mother screamed. She stood quaking at the edge of the pool, convinced that the porpoises would eat her son.

Sammy and Wanda huddled on the far side of the pool, their eyes above the water, watching the boy swim toward them in a good, even crawl despite the weight of his clothes. For the mother’s benefit I jumped in and grabbed him by the waist before he reached them. This did not seem to interrupt his stroke—he kept swimming as if I were a temporary obstacle he could simply shake off. Then suddenly he went limp and let me pull him out of the water. He sat on the dock, his eyes still on the porpoises. He was shaking.

“I’m sorry,” he told me.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. His mother led him away, both of them dazed.

Mary Katherine came over, holding Nat by the shoulders.

“Poor kid,” she said.

She went into the shed and brought me a towel. By this time most of the audience was gone, except for a few people who lingered around the ticket booth, trying to understand what had just taken place.

“That was a lovely performance,” Mary Katherine said. “Was that for our benefit?”

“For mine.”

“Maybe I love you.”

“Sure you do.”

Sammy and Wanda were watching us. Nat squatted down and put his hand on Wanda’s beak, then Sammy nosed her out of the way and rose a little out of the water.

“He wants you to pet him,” I told Nat. “On his head.”

“He feels funny.”

Sammy opened his mouth and Nat ran his fingers fearlessly along the teeth.

“Jeff?” Mary Katherine said.

“He won’t bite him.”

The two animals spun vertically in the water, their eyes closed, languishing in Nat’s attention.

“Can you come over tonight?” Mary Katherine asked me.

“I wanted to hang around the phone in case Rush calls. Why don’t you come to my place?”

“I’d have to bring you-know-who.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “We’ll have a quiet evening at home.”

“Very quiet.”

Rush called me about six. He said that Mr. Granger was still in intensive care but would be moved and allowed visitors the next day.

I lay on the bed and fell asleep as I waited for Mary Katherine. When I opened my eyes I saw Nat looking down into my face, his tiny nostrils almost translucent in the light from the lamp on the nightstand.

“Your door was unlocked,” Mary Katherine said, “and you never heard us knock, apparently, so we just came in. Are you sure you’re awake?”

“Sure. Hi, Nat.”

He turned his face away and smiled.

“How’s Mr. Granger?” Mary Katherine asked.

“Better. He can have visitors tomorrow.”

“I knew he’d be all right,” she said with satisfaction. She was sorting through several white bags she had deposited on the bureau.

“We stopped at Custard’s Last Stand. Have you eaten?”

It took me a moment to remember. “No.”

“I got you a cheeseburger. With everything?”

“Fine. Thank you.”

“And a Dr Pepper.”

The three of us sat on the bed eating our hamburgers. I put two quarters into the vibrator to show Nat how it worked, and we sat there with the mattress drumming beneath us.

“You live here?” Nat asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“But how come you don’t live in a house?”

“This is sort of a house,” I said. Then, to Mary Katherine, “I heard some news today.”

She knew all about Mason.

“He was in the oceanarium thing from the ground floor,” she said. “Before that I think he made horror movies. There’s no telling how many dolphins that man has killed in the course of his career. Have you ever seen Adventures with Animals? Cute, isn’t it? He traps these animals in Kuala Lumpur or someplace and flies them to his “studio habitat” in Florida and films the adventures there. God knows what happens to them after he’s through.”

“How would he treat Sammy?”

“Like a star. But he’d dump Wanda someplace.”

“Canales says we’re through anyway. The Commission is clamping down on places like ours.”

“That’s possible. They come out with stricter minimum standards every month. If you get closed down the dolphins’ll probably get auctioned off. Guess who’ll be top bidder. Either way you lose them.”

“Unless we let them go.”

“Would you?”

“I’d have to be driven to that.”

“We’d need to plan it very carefully. You can’t just let them out. They’re dependent on us. We’d have to acclimatize them back to the wild.”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I said. “Let’s watch TV or something.”

Mary Katherine kicked off her sandals and swung her legs onto the bed.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s just sit here and watch Charlie’s Angels. That’ll clear our heads.”

“I’ll turn it on,” Nat volunteered.

On one station there was a middle-aged detective, one of those character actors who had paid his dues for so long that he had finally been given a toupee and a show of his own. I had Nat change the channel. Starsky and Hutch were questioning a hooker. Their jacket collars were turned up; in the next scene they had changed into different jackets, but their collars were still turned up. On the third channel a disco band was lip-syncing its latest twelve-minute hit.

“Enough?” Mary Katherine asked.

“Enough?” Nat echoed, his hand on the knob.

“Go ahead,” I said. He pressed the button and the picture fell away into the vortex.

And so we whiled away the evening, as a family might. Nat had brought a few storybooks, and I held him in my lap and listened as he read. They were old dog-eared 25¢ Golden Books—Mary Katherine’s—and I remembered one of them from my own childhood, a grumpy beaver’s surprise birthday party, at which he discovered his woodland friends truly loved him. Nat ran his finger along each sentence, but it was clear he was not so much reading as reciting. He had committed the story to memory long before. I looked down at the myopic beaver about to blow out the candles on his cake and remembered the mystical resonance of my own childhood, the shimmy and shake of possibility, my mother bustling around the house singing

You’ll find that you’re

In the Ro-to-gra-vure

and every perception of mine rallying around the words, investing them with the deepest secrets of existence.

Later we walked back up to Custard’s Last Stand for some ice cream. We sat in the little dining room, vaguely aware of the languid, self-absorbed Jackson Browne music that seeped out of the p.a. system.

Mary Katherine looked up at me. “I called David today. He has a good-sized boat. I thought someday this week we could borrow it and go out into the Gulf.”

“I’d feel funny about borrowing his boat.”

“It used to be half mine. As far as he’s concerned it still is. He doesn’t get jealous. We could fish. When was the last time you went fishing?”

“In high school.”

“It’s a good boat. There’s no radio or anything, but if it’s a nice day we could go out a couple of miles without worrying.”

I felt secure enough in her affections to agree. I thought how good barbecued kingfish would taste. “The king of fish, the kingfish,” Mr. Granger used to say.

We agreed to go out the day after tomorrow. Canales owed me a day off.

“Would you like to do that, Nat?” Mary Katherine asked. The boy nodded as he revolved his ice cream cone around his tongue.

“Would you like to stay at Jeff’s tonight?”

“I guess so,” he said warily.

Nat went to sleep early, instantly, and we put him in the center of the double bed and got in on either side of him—leaving our underwear on—and kissed each other good night across his body.

“Do you mind this?” she whispered. “Should we have stayed home?”

“I’m glad you came,” I said, and fell asleep with the boy’s light snoring in my ear.

“I really appreciate you covering for me,” Canales told me the next morning. Sara was with him. They treated each other with icy courtesy and me with elaborate warmth.

“You look nice today,” Sara said. “Did you get a haircut or something?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you look nice anyway.”

It was a normal day. I climbed the pulpit when it was my turn to m.c. and did the routine straight. The porpoises responded well enough—no doubt to the audience they seemed joyful and impulsive, but to my eye they were solemn, formal, their gestures as practiced and dispassionate as those of a priest at daily mass. I knew they had been expecting something from me today, more wild improvisation, but I simply loomed above them and sent them on their errands.

Bill Mason was there for the last show. He stood with two of his assistants by the ticket booth, dressed in his tailored jeans outfit. He was a bigger man than he seemed on TV, his bald head neat and evenly tanned, his beard sun-bleached. A few people recognized him on the way out, and it was a while before he could extract himself from their attentions and come over. When Canales introduced us, Mason put his hand out resolutely, but the shake itself was limp; it suggested a moody, reserved power.

“Goddamn, you boys have done good with that porpoise,” he said. “You weren’t fooling me, were you, Mando?” He went over to the side of the pool and bent down. Sammy presented his pectoral fin to be scratched. Wanda stayed away.

“Any health problems?” Mason asked.

“Not so far,” Canales said. “Of course we shot them up with antibiotics as soon as we caught them. Wanda has a mild case of rot over by her right ear but Sammy hasn’t caught it.”

Mason stood up. “That’s a fine animal. There’s not a mark on him. You can barely even see the waterlines.”

“He’s about the best I’ve seen,” Canales agreed. “A joy to work with.”

“Well, let’s all go run up my expense account,” Mason said. “You fellas know a good restaurant in this Corpus Christi place?”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to bow out,” I said. “I’ve got to go by the hospital to see Mr. Granger.”

“That’s the man who owns this animal?”

“That’s right.”

“He coming along okay?”

“I think so. He’s still pretty sick.”

“You tell him to get well. I might want to be doing some horse-trading with him.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

“Well, Jeff,” Mason said, “I’m sure sorry you can’t come along, but I’ll catch up to you later. We’re going to be here awhile rounding up a few porpi in some of these bays you got here.”

I shook his hand again and drove to the ferry, not bothering to get out of my car as it crossed the channel. Looking out through the window, I was relieved for some reason that no “porpi” were visible in the water. When the ferry landed I was not aware of it until a man in a Day-Glo orange hat leaned across the hood and clapped his hands sharply in front of my windshield, then held up for my inspection the wooden wedges he had pulled from beneath my tires.

The hospital elevator that took me to Mr. Granger’s floor let me out at a panoramic window that looked out over the bay. It was dusk. The T-heads rested placidly on the water, gleaming with the white and orange excursion boats and the big sloops tied up to the yacht club docks. The water supported it all, a liquid plain. Above the seawall, along the curve of the bay, the office buildings rose above the bluffs. Once it had all been a sandbar where the Karankawas gathered to dig roots and hunt game in their ignorant, indolent, starving way. I asked myself, when I saw a fin break water at the bow of one of the excursion boats (lit up now against the dusk, with a few couples dancing on the upper deck), if none of this were here, if I were standing now on a sandbar starving and naked, what creature I might invoke to help stave off the special loneliness of my race. Surely that, that thing so far out in the water that showed nothing of itself except for that one fin, but whose benevolence was an innate belief in my savage mind, a constant like the warmth of the sun.

That would have been my totem. It had been my totem, until I dragged it ashore and demanded that it recognize me. I did not believe Freud. Totemism was not patricide, it was the opposite: a way I thought I could invoke my dead father, a way to put myself again into the range of his influence. But I had not been abiding by the spirit of the covenant; I had been using the porpoises, trying to force information from them. It seemed necessary now to restore them to what they had been before: powerful, shapeless specks on the water.

A man and a woman were just leaving Mr. Granger’s room as I approached it. We passed in the hall, and the woman gave me a slight nod, as if she thought she should know me. They were no more than a year or two older than me, but they were both dressed very tastefully and maturely.

“Did you meet the Dawsons?” Mr. Granger asked me. “They were just here. They’re a fine young couple. Brad and Ella.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Brad’s my lawyer now, ever since his father died. Crab-meat Dawson. Famous criminal lawyer.”

I saw that other people besides the Dawsons had come to see him. The windowsill of the hospital room was covered with cards and flowers. Mr. Granger was reclined in the bed, and he was wearing one of his peculiar sport coats over the pale green hospital gown. His face was bloated—the cortisone, I guessed—so that his features were even more indefinite than usual. The only remaining reference point was the thick glasses whose unornamented wire frames cut into the swollen bridge of his nose.

“You shouldn’t have come all this way to see me, Jeff,” he said. His speech was a little slurred. I could see he was doped up. “I’d have been coming to see you in another couple days. Damn, I’m so embarrassed about this whole thing.”

“You look good,” I said.

“Well, I feel fine, especially now that I can see people. I tell you, I’m an old man and I should have been prepared for something like this, but I was scared when it happened, I don’t mind telling you. It felt like I was already dead. I just lay there on the floor and looked up at all y’all people, and it was like I was trying to talk and you couldn’t understand a thing I was saying. Like a bad dream.”

“You were very calm. I was impressed with how calm you were.”

“It was probably because I was trying to think of my last words. Maybe I won’t need to for a while yet.

“You know, Jeff,” he said, slurring his speech a little more than he had, “you were one of the reasons I was afraid to die. I would’ve felt like I’d abandoned you. I know I probably never meant all that much to you, but I always felt you’d sort of be like an orphan without me around.”

“I’ve felt that way too,” I said.

Mr. Granger pointed to the shelf. “See that card there? The one with the porpoise on it? See if you can guess who that’s from.”

I took the card down and looked at the engraved picture on the front.

“Go on and read it.”

Inside there was a typeset notation—“Atlantic Bottle-nosed Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus)”—and beneath that a note from Mary Katherine in a neat, ornate handwriting I realized I had not yet encountered.

I’m sorry our evening together was cut short by your illness. I truly enjoyed your company and hope we can resume our friendship when you’re feeling better. Please take care of yourself and do everything the doctor tells you.

Mary Katherine Severin

“Isn’t that sweet?” Mr. Granger said. “She didn’t have to do that.”

I put the card back on the sill. “She likes you.”

“I also got a card from our friend Mando. Read that one too, see what you think of it.”

He indicated a bright yellow oversized card with a cartoon of a man sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet in a tub, a thermometer in his mouth, and a rain cloud over his head. “A little under the weather?” it read. I opened it, not bothering to read the punch line. The note was in a cramped, backward-slanting hand.

Dude,

Sorry to hear you’re not well. Hope this cheers you up. When you’re back on your feet let’s talk some business.

Mando

“What do you suppose he means by ‘business,’ Jeff?”

“You know who Bill Mason is?”

“The TV star?”

“Uh-huh. He wants to buy Sammy. He was down at the pool today. He and Mando are having dinner right now, trying to put a deal together.”

“Why does he want Sammy?”

“To put him in the movies.”

He chuckled a little until he saw I was serious. I told him about how we might be shut down.

“What do you think about all this?” he asked me. He seemed very confused.

“You’ll get a good price for Sammy. Enough to make a profit, probably, on the whole operation. He’ll give you something for Wanda too.”

“That’s not what you think.”

“No, I think we should let them go.”

Mr. Granger laid his head back on his pillow.

“None of this has worked out very well, has it?” he asked.

“It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Look, I’ll be out of here in a week or so, and then you and I’ll straighten this mess out.”

“I imagine Mando will bring Mason to see you tomorrow. He’ll probably have an offer.”

“I won’t take it. We’ll decide about it later. Right now I’m so doped up it hurts my head to think about it. I just feel bad about the whole damn thing.”

I looked out the window. The excursion boat I had seen before was passing beneath the harbor bridge.

“I should have stayed in New Mexico,” I said.

A nurse came in without knocking, placed a paper cup filled to the brim with pills on Mr. Granger’s bed table and stood over him impatiently as he began to swallow them.

“Take three or four together,” she said. “You don’t have to take them one at a time.”

“Miss,” he said, “I have a very small gullet.”

The nurse looked away as Mr. Granger continued with the pills. He lifted each one in his stubby fingers, inspected it, then finally washed it down.

“Visiting hours are now over,” she said to me as if she were announcing the fact over the p.a. system. She seemed to take pleasure in being disagreeably efficient.

“I’ll come back tomorrow night,” I told Mr. Granger. “Don’t worry about anything.”

“Don’t you bother, Jeff,” he said, suddenly very drowsy. “That’s a long drive for you and I’ll be home soon anyway. You just take care of the porpoises.”