Chapter 10

David’s boat was a broad, heavyset Arkansas Traveler, with a homemade cabin and a red fiberglass deck that had faded to a rose color.

“It’s a little old but it’s a good boat,” he said, helping me hook the trailer up to the hitch. “Keep it as long as you want. All weekend if you need it.”

“Thanks,” I said. We shook hands. David was obviously enjoying the whole scene, conferring upon me the mantle of responsibility both for his boat and for his ex-wife.

It was a calm day and we took the boat about a mile out into the Gulf. We caught three kingfish. We saw them writhing forty feet below the surface, gleaming in the steely blue water like creatures trapped in ice. When they were on the deck I dispatched them with a short club from David’s tackle box and then cleaned them as we came back in. The entrails came out in one long neat train. I tossed them overboard along with the heads and then washed the split carcass in seawater. Nat stood in the center of the boat, wearing his lifejacket, watching in silence until I noticed that the swells were up and that he was seasick.

He recovered once we were within the protection of the jetties, and fell asleep as soon as he was home. I built a fire in a little grill below the house, filleted one of the kingfish, and cooked half of it over a piece of aluminum foil. We ate with our fingers directly from the grill. It was as I remembered it: firm, a little dry.

“Do you like it?” I asked Mary Katherine.

She nodded, her mouth full.

I left her early in the evening. I wanted to check on the porpoises and then drive into Corpus to see Mr. Granger. When they saw me come through the gate Wanda and Sammy rose up from the water like missiles, and I felt a great relief I had not been expecting, as if I were a parent who had seen a child hit by a car and had come home to his own children to find them safe.

Canales had left a note. Both animals had botched the last show and so were four pounds short for their feeding, which I was to make up. And I was to treat Wanda’s fungus, which had reoccurred in an isolated patch on her gums.

I had her open her mouth and swabbed the purple ointment inside. Sammy tried to grab the applicator and managed to spill half the bottle of medicine into the water. I fed them their fish, throwing whole smelt into their open mouths and rubbing their ventral sides with my feet while they made their clicking sounds and blew bubbles with their spiracles. When I left they began their usual commotion, leaping high into the air and landing on their backs.

But I locked the gate between us and drove into Corpus. Mr. Granger had regained some of his color. He was still pale, but diffused beneath his skin there was a faint rosy tincture of health. Someone had brought him a tiny glass seashell, a paperweight, that Mr. Granger glanced at as he talked to me. It caught the fading light like a prism.

“Mando came by with that Bill Mason today,” he said. “Hell of a nice fella.”

“Did he make you an offer?”

“Roundabout. He said he didn’t think it was appropriate to discuss business while I was sick, but that he wanted me to think about fifty thousand dollars. We’ve got ourselves a valuable property there, Jeff. I told him I’d give him an answer in a week, after I’d talked to you. You still against it?”

“Yes.”

“He as much as offered you a job, too, working with Sammy. You and Mando. Training him for the movie. I told him you had some acting experience.”

“Thanks.” I laughed. “Really, thank you for not selling right away.”

“Well, I won’t pretend I’m not tempted to take him up on it. But I’m with you—I’d just rather get out of the whole thing. It was a mistake, that’s all there is to it. Just a mistake.”

I sat with him for another half hour. He didn’t seem to want to talk much.

“Should I turn on the TV?” I asked him.

He shook his head and looked out the window.

“I always thought the bayfront was so pretty,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how it’s changed since I first came here. The water used to be clearer. I think all that dredging muddied it up.”

He was silent for a long time. “I’m not much company,” he said. He started to cry a little.

“It’s all right.”

“I’m just an old blabberpuss.”

“No, you’re not. You’re tired. And you’re doped up.”

“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “I do feel like I’m dragging a little.”

“Once you’re out of here you’ll be back to normal,” I said. “You’re just worn out.”

He fell asleep like a child. I tiptoed out of his room and drove back to Port Aransas. At Mary Katherine’s house Nat answered the door in his pajamas.

“I’ve got to go to bed,” he told me.

I stood outside his room while Mary Katherine tucked him in. I could hear them whispering to each other.

“He wants to say good night to you,” she said when she came out of the room. I went in and sat on the edge of Nat’s bed.

“Good night,” I said, not knowing what I was supposed to do or say.

“Are you going to be here all night?”

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“How are you feeling? You’re not still sick at your stomach, are you?”

“No,” he said, “I’m all right now.” He looked up at me, wanting something.

I did not know what to say to him. I kissed him good night.

“When I was Nat’s age,” I told Mary Katherine after he had gone to sleep, “I thought that I could change into anybody I wanted. I could become Donald Duck if I wanted to, actually be Donald Duck. I’d walk down the street with my mother, holding her hand, and tell myself, ‘I have the power to become Donald Duck!’”

“Did you ever try it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Knowing I had the power seemed enough.”

“That’s the first secret thing about yourself you’ve ever told me,” she said.

I spent the rest of the evening skimming through her cetacean books, coming again and again to the grisly whaling pictures, the mass strandings, the dolphins in coffin-sized Plexiglas tanks with electrodes implanted into their brains. Mary Katherine sat on the other side of the room, watching Jacques Cousteau.

When it was late we walked out onto the porch. Mary Katherine wriggled out of her corduroy jeans and the blouse she was wearing. She stood there, naked, leaning against the rail.

I touched her skin, the salt rime that covered it.

“Donald Duck.” She laughed. “What is that called, the transmigration of souls?”

“Something like that,” I said. We made love and slept and dreamt, and though I forgot my dreams they were with me all the next day, sweet and unapproachable. It was a good day: the porpoises performed well, we ate another kingfish, and the drive into Corpus was smooth and relaxing.

I took a child’s pleasure in riding the hospital elevator, an amazing conveyance I resolved to appreciate more in the future. I passed the nurses’ station on my way down to Mr. Granger’s room, and immediately one of the nurses came running down the corridor after me. She touched me on the arm and told me Mr. Granger was dead.

She used the word “expired.” “Mr. Granger expired a little while ago.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked at her. She was young, with a puffy face and a bad complexion. I had the strangest urge to comfort her.

“You may go in if you like.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to go in but I didn’t know what else to do. The glass seashell was still on the windowsill. Some of the cards had fallen to the floor. His arm must have flung spasmodically across the sill and then dropped to the side of the bed, where it rested now, or rather lay with its inert weight, the fingers of the hand gnarled like a root system.

Dr. Rush was there, speaking to an intern in a very low, casual tone.

“They shouldn’t have let you in yet,” he said. “I thought they knew better.” He put his hand on my shoulder, a touch so familiar and dreadful a chill dappled my spine.

“He had a massive coronary. Just a few minutes ago. It’s something that happens.”

The intern looked at me sorrowfully. He was younger than I was, with big basset-hound eyes and a full beard.

I looked down at Mr. Granger, thinking of those words, “massive coronary,” and almost felt the force that had thrown him back onto the bed where he lay now as still as the heavy air outside. I saw the teeth in his open mouth, where all the life that had been in his body seemed compacted, waiting for final release. No breath came or went, nothing hovered there. The stillness frightened me, that and the blue, the actual blue of the skin. How would they get that out?

“Why don’t you go sit down in the waiting room?” Rush said to me. “You really shouldn’t be here now, they shouldn’t have let you in. Wait around for a while and we’ll have a talk.”

I wandered down to the lounge at the end of the hall and sat on an overplush institutional sofa. A spasmodic charge of grief took hold of my body, forcing open my tear ducts and causing me to cramp forward on the couch. Then, abruptly, I had control again.

The same nurse came up to me, sounding very contrite.

“Would you like a cup of coffee? I could get you some coffee.”

“I don’t think so. Thank you.”

“I’m very sorry. I thought he was . . . prepared. I shouldn’t have let you go in.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

There was a pay phone on the opposite wall. I put in some change and dialed Mary Katherine’s number. The operator came on and told me it was long distance, even though I could look out the window across the dark empty bay and almost see the lights of Port Aransas. I put in my quarters and Molly answered the phone. Mary Katherine was working at school, she said, transcribing a backlog of data. “You can probably call her there.”

“No, I’ll see her at home in the morning.”

But I was desperate to talk to someone, to move, to shake off the still, infected air that seemed to cling to me. I went down to the lobby, changed a dollar, and came back up and called Canales.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Well . . . shit, I don’t know what to say, man.”

“It was a massive coronary,” I said, using the words that Rush had given me.

“Look, is there anything I should do?”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t had much of a chance to think yet. I might not be in tomorrow.”

“Sure thing. And don’t worry about the animals. I’ll take good care of them.”

When I hung up the phone and turned around I saw Miles Randolph, the columnist, sitting on the couch, his shoulders hunched forward so that the collar of his shapeless gray suit rode high on the back of his neck. He was slung so low in the couch it looked as if he would never be able to get up, but he sprang to his feet as soon as he saw me.

“Hell of a thing,” he said, shaking my hand. “Dude was an old friend of mine, you know.”

“You told me,” I said.

“I’ll give him one hell of an obit.”

“That’s good.”

“Still got that porpoise thing over there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I sure liked those porpoises. They’re almost human, aren’t they?”

He went on with his hard-bitten, cheery nonsense. He was one of those people who are energized by death. He began a string of anecdotes about Mr. Granger that Rush mercifully cut short when he joined us. Randolph shook his hand, called him “Doc.”

“Well, it’s a sad thing,” Rush said. “But I’d say he lived a pretty full life.”

“That’s the truth,” Randolph said.

The elevator doors opened. The couple I had seen earlier, the Dawsons, came out and walked up urgently to Rush. It was the wife who spoke. The husband stood behind her, mute and unreadable.

“Can we see him?” she asked.

“In a minute,” Rush said.

“Was anyone with him?”

“Not at the time, no.” She looked down and then directly up at me. She had a pretty, edgy face, discreetly made up.

“You’re Jeff?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Ella.” She offered her hand forthrightly and then introduced her husband, Brad, who leaned forward from behind her and gave me a firm, fleshy handshake.

“We’re the Dawsons,” Ella added.

“He told me about you,” I said. I introduced them to Randolph, simply out of form, and he began a monologue about how “newspapermen” see a lot of death. Rush went back down to the room and returned a few moments later.

“You can go in now if you want,” he said.

Ella looked at me. “Are you coming?”

“Not right now.”

“Will you wait for us?”

“Of course.”

Randolph went with them uninvited into the room. Rush stayed with me.

“Jeff,” he said, “I’ve got to be going. I’m damn sorry. I think you and I have seen a little too much of each other under these circumstances.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You go home and get some sleep. Will you be able to? I could get you something.”

“No, I’m fine. I feel all right.”

The Dawsons came out, Ella unabashedly in tears, her husband’s face red and puffy.

“Shall we have a cup of coffee?” she suggested.

“Thank you,” Randolph said, including himself in the invitation, “but I’ve got to go write this up.”

The three of us went down to the coffee shop. Instead of a cup of coffee, I ordered a hamburger and a chocolate malt.

“That sounds good,” Brad said. “I’ll have that too.”

Ella, through her sorrow, gave a little conspiratorial smile and ordered a hamburger for herself.

“How are your porpoises?” she asked me.

“Fine.”

“He talked so much about them. And about you.”

I smiled and looked at the two of them sitting together on the other side of the booth, their faces flushed with grief. I liked them very much and saw how Mr. Granger had been drawn to them. They must have filled the same role for him that my parents had.

“He was so sweet to us,” Ella said. “We didn’t really know him that well until a few years ago; he was just a client that Brad had sort of inherited from his father. Then our baby boy died. The infant death syndrome. Dude just appeared one day and asked if there was anything he could do and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He helped us through the worst part. He kept us together really, individually and as a marriage.”

Brad nodded and looked away toward the grill where our hamburgers were cooking.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure exactly what I was sorry about.

“We all have our crosses,” she said.

“Do you mind,” she asked, “I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but would you mind if Brad and I handled the funeral? Apparently there’s no one except for the three of us to be consulted, and we owe him so much.”

“I don’t mind at all. I could help out with expenses.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I’d like to, though. A little, anyway.”

When the food came Brad picked up his hamburger but could not seem to take a bite of it. He put it back down on his plate and started to cry.

“I just wish somebody could have been with him,” he said.

Ella put her hand on his thigh.

“Please, eat,” he told me.

I did as he said. I could have eaten two more hamburgers, but I got up to leave instead.

“Leave us your number,” Ella said. “We’ll call you tomorrow about the funeral.”

Brad took a notebook out of the inside pocket of his sport coat. It was the same sort of gilt-edged notebook that Mr. Granger had carried. He wrote the number down and then stood to shake my hand.

“I’m glad we finally met you,” Ella said.

I drove back to Port Aransas, easing out of the shock and into the warm hold of pure sorrow. I had to stop at the office of the Salt Sea and tell Lois. She turned the sound off the TV but left the picture on, so that while she cried silently and ground her teeth I watched a harsh, no-nonsense announcer standing by a mountain of tires, and then a woman singer on the To-night Show prancing about absurdly, in silence, with her dress slit up to her thigh.

I waited a long time, listening to Lois cry, not knowing what to do.

“Will you be all right?” I asked finally.

“Oh, sure, honey. Don’t you worry about me. I was just so sure he was going to get well, is all.”

The phone was ringing when I got back to my room.

“I’ve been calling you,” Mary Katherine said. “Molly said you sounded upset.”

“Mr. Granger died.”

“Oh, darling. I’ll come over. Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

She showed up twenty minutes later with a bottle of wine and a little baggie of marijuana.

“I’m here all night,” she said. “Molly’s going to stay over with Nat.”

“You don’t have to do that. Besides, you need to get up early.”

“I can take a day off,” she said.

We sat on the floor and drank the wine. It was some sort of expensive wine. The marijuana was prime too—David had given it to her. It formed a hazy corolla around my skull, a new layer of brain.

“I don’t know what to say about it,” she said.

“Whatever comes into your head.”

“I guess I’m upset too.”

I sat back against the wall and rested my hand on a gas jet. Mary Katherine got up to open the window. As she sat on the floor opposite me I saw her as a porpoise might have, as an impulse felt deep in the body, at that place below the abdomen that a Taos guru had once pointed out to me as the stable center of the body. I felt her there, and it seemed almost pointless to reach out and touch her, but I did anyway.

“Let’s go to sleep,” she said. “You need to.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“You’re almost out as it is. Come on, get up.”

“They had to sedate me when my parents died,” I said. “Both times. I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning thinking everything was all right.”

“Hey. You’re grown up now, remember?”