Shallcross: The Underwater Panthers, page 20
The number of different birds in this place arrested him. The farm was on the coastal flyway for the great north to south migration. One of the abutting properties belonged to a respected ornithologist, and he would come over and walk with Arquette’s father. Aubrey would go with them sometimes. Both men knew every bird, even the little brown ones that looked alike called little-brown-jobs.
In front of his horse a kingbird was fanning his wings over a spot in the grass. The unusual bird hovered two feet off the ground like a harrier jet to make the bugs fly up from the wind its wings made, then the stationary flier would snatch them out of the air. Aubrey had never seen that bird in Florida, and he had never seen the Halloween looking black and orange orioles, those harlequins with hanging nests that looked like a great hairy gland. All of that each day and the clean ocean air stoned him gone-blind.
This time of year, the monarch butterflies had come into the hay fields from the north. They would be laying their eggs under the milkweed leaves and continue their long migration south to Mexico. Hard to believe, he thought, that a fragile butterfly could do that kind of distance—more wonder, more “slip away.” Clarence Carter, I always loved your song, he said to himself.
The walls were farmer walls, stacked loose with no regard for flush tops or mortar. They reminded him of rock candy—the gravel-size sugar nuggets that came in see-through boxes when he was a boy. In New England, the walls were reported to number thousands of miles over the countryside. Some were hidden in the woods like Mayan ruins among the new growth timber, shrub and big trees that had swallowed so many farms after the end of the agricultural revolution a hundred years ago.
Deer could jump the walls with ease. Sometimes one would drag a leg and knock off a top rock. Aubrey always got off his horse and put them back out of respect, while he imagined the ghosts of long-dead men breaking their backs to build them. But it was the smell of things in the north, the strong histamine in the grass, the boreal petrichors in the soil, so different from the tropics, along with a crammed energy in the plant life, growing as fast as the deer and livestock could swallow it in the short season. It was hot in July, but one had to remember, this was cold country, and the nine inch nails of a coming winter stalked every living thing.
He was told the bird migration would start south again as early as July 23rd, or right after the last tiger lily blooms. More birds in the fields were appearing in flocks, fraying apart then coming together and peeling off one way or the other with the fish school look. Purple finch, goldfinch, groups of chipping sparrows, squadrons of starlings, and yellow-eyed crows flew up in front of him, and it made him slip away.
In Arquette’s house there were beautiful antique vitrines—small glass silos from the nineteenth century with congeries of stuffed birds to please the eye, but also to teach the Victorian children their names back then. They reminded Aubrey of the displays in his old house, the house he and Christaine were not living in because of the attempted murder by Carlos, Christaine’s ex-husband. Now the house in Florida just sat alone, up the shell rock road from where they lived. He could see the dioramas of Florida wildlife he had designed behind glass in the living room walls—mounted sand hill cranes, raccoons, armadillos with colorful murals behind them and mirrors in the floor to imitate the wetlands that surrounded the place. And there was the mannequin of Little Alex from A Clockwork Orange, and one diorama of his favorite western with a standing Johnny Yuma, from the T.V. show The Rebel.
Carlos assaulted both of them in that house, but it was Carlos that died there. Aubrey saw it all again—he was tied to a pillar in the bedroom, bloody. He remembered what Trip told him about hearing ampersands &&&&&&& when he was falling. Tied to that pillar, Aubrey had the same experience—time was dragged down in pieces. He heard the word “and” between the second hand clicks somewhere on a clock—&,&,&,&,&,&.
Carlos had grabbed his gun after Christaine plunged the hat pin she held into his eye, causing him to seizure. He fired the pistol out of control at the walls, until one bullet ricocheted and hit Aubrey in the head. He shook that same head in the field today trying to clear it of the memory. He thought about what Reve the Gypsy lady told him again—one chamber of the heart should be the trash can. This was a memory he did not want, but he did miss his old home and what he had made of it, and hoped Christaine would want to go back and live there one day. Aubrey knew the place was an extension of him—he was the two-story manifestation of what that unusual house was up the stairs—that architectural land ship, hanging in huge, round poles with a circular slide that came down from the second story into the living room.
He cantered his horse again. The morning air went through his thin shirt and felt like menthol on his skin. The barn swallows followed as always—swirls circling his horse, feeding off what it kicked up in the grass, amazing him with their acrobatics. Some went clockwise around him, some counterclockwise, never running into each other, banking turns and impossible drops like top gun fighter pilots—all these creatures of the field, these hunter-gatherers like we were once, when anthropologists say as a people we were the happiest. We just moved around in groups and ate like the deer and the birds do; we didn’t stay in one place and worry if it was going to rain and save our crops, we just went where the food and the weather was.
There were times he wished he had been born three hundred years ago and hunted for his food, wore furs and plumes and lived closer with the animal kingdom. Not now. Not even imaginable. We’ve killed most of them, he thought.
His horse turned his head, slowed and put his ears up. Aubrey saw Arquette come out of the woods on another horse. Arquette waved, then put his horse in a canter and quickly caught up to where Aubrey was.
“Good morning old friend,” Aubrey said.
“Isn’t it though. I was thinking, I should ride more.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Oh yeah … Ha, remember the ‘Oh yeahs’ we used to do? Like the ones in that Lina Wurtmuller movie, Seven Beauties. Still remember any of them?”
“Think I do by God,” Aubrey said.
“I was lying in bed one night. I saw us all sitting around that corner table at the Blue Goose in the old days and we were doing ‘Oh yeahs,’” Arquette said in the deep baritone voice of the movie it came from.
“So let me hear one.”
“Okay … For those who know there’s a mass extinction every twenty-four million years. Oh yeah! ... You do one Aubrey.”
“For those who know it’s been twenty-four million years since the last mass extinction. Oh yeah!”
“For those who think backgammon is another form of wasting time. Oh yeah!”
“For those who think the sound of a big truck’s jake brake is the good sound of coming down. Oh yeah!”
“For lesbians who hate men, but still dress like them. Oh yeah!”
“For those who think they live in the real world instead of Fort America. Oh yeah!”
“For those who think getting hit by lightning will make you a tree top lover. Oh yeah!”
“For those who dress well, but have a yellow tooth in front. Oh yeah!”
“For men who kiss swamp angels that turn into mosquitoes. Oh yeah!”
“Hey, that was The Junior’s ‘Oh yeah,’ when he was going out with that girl, Thimble Taylor. She was a tiny girl.” Aubrey laughed. “He called her a swamp angel from Okeechobee, and he said she turned into a bloody mosquito on him.”
“How about this one? For those who fart underwater, and try to bite the bubbles. Oh yeah!”
“Oh lord, that was Punky’s line. I miss Punky, and I really miss The Junior.”
“I know, Aubrey. The Junior was your best friend. Talk about irony. After all he lived through in Vietnam, he gets bitten by a poisonous snake in someone’s living room.”
“True magazine. That was irony. And we lost Punky when he rolled his dump truck. I was driving home and saw the blue lights the night Punky got his ticket exploded out on US-1. I was there right after it happened. In fact, I was there when the snake bit The Junior. He was dancing around the living room at Henry’s drunk, with the snake in his hands like a fool, and put it too close to his face. He was teasing it, sticking his tongue in and out at the snake and the snake timed it perfectly and bit him on the end of his tongue.”
“I remember Aubrey.”
“It was awful. It was a coral snake for Christ’s sake. The deadliest kind. I held on to him in the back of Henry’s truck on the way to the hospital, but he died in my arms before we got there.”
“I’m sorry Aubrey. I know how close you were.”
“Yeah, since we were little kids … So just one more, oh yeah.”
“Okay.”
“For Half Track the gone-minded from the Harris Ranch, who might be the only sane person left in the world. OH YEAH!” the two men said in unison.
They looked across the field. There was someone running. They couldn’t make out who it was because the fog had moved back in, but whoever they were, they looked young and male with no shirt, and they were sprinting. As the figure approached a corner in the stone walls, the two men thought it would turn, but instead the figure jumped the wall like a deer and cleared the top by at least a foot. And when the long dark hair flew up behind it in the mist, Aubrey and Arquette saw it was Yuchee, the runner, getting smaller and smaller, disappearing into the fog again until he was gone.
“All hands on this deck!” Osip hollered in Russian to the crews of the two fishing boats moored side by side on the Westport River.
When the crew of the Anastasia and Marina had assembled, Sean came up from below. “We have all been here for some months now fishing in these waters,” he said in Russian. Some of you have learned a certain amount of English, so you could talk to the girls at the Shamrock Bar.” The crew laughed.
Sean switched to English. “So now I will speak English to you tonight and if you don’t understand, you can raise your hand.” One man did.
“Oh come one Anton, I know you speak it.” Anton laughed.
“So, here is my proposition to you. We were one of the first to see this white whale. I say it belongs to us. We have invested our time and my uncle Fyodor’s money to take care of it, and I say it is ours.” The crew all nodded. They knew what was coming.
“If we take this whale with us to the Baltic, and I sell it for one million, what, two million, my uncle and I will give the crew ten percent of that to divide evenly among you.” One man raised his hand.
“Yes Val,”
“Do this make us have to give money to the crew of Svetlana?”
“No. It only involves our two boats, the Anastasia and the Marina here in the Westport River, we are the ones who will take all the risk of getting the whale out of the river to the Svetlana offshore for transport.” The men all nodded to each other.
“So this is the plan.” There was a table placed between Sean and the men. The men moved in closer, and Sean used a pencil as a pointer on a large sheet of paper that showed the layout of the cove and position of their boats.
As Sean talked solely in Russian now, he told them that they were going to do this when the moonlight was gone on a dark night next week. The plan was to put four scuba divers in the water with the whale, and two men on the jet skis they had onboard. Each diver would have a gaff pole to poke the whale in the direction it needed to go. That direction would be into the outer seine net after they removed the first net Dr. Murphy had strung across the cove. Then the jet skis would encircle the whale and help draw the seine net in to the side of the Marina. They would put Dr. Murphy’s net back so that he would think the whale jumped over it and out of the cove into the river. The Anastasia would then take the whale to the Westport inlet and out to the Svetlana offshore.
It would be done under the guise that the whale had jumped the cove’s net and got away. Then the crew would say they recaptured the whale in international waters and it legally now belonged to them. “Thank you very much.”
Sean ended the discussion, and told them to be ready next week. He went below to his private cabin, looked in the bathroom mirror and had to turn away. It bothered him, the whole thing. It was theft and he knew it was a theft. Not a venial, but a mortal sin. There never was any right to take the whale as he had presented it to the crew. But then he couldn’t let them—or his uncle Fyodor in New York down. He looked in the mirror again and he could see his mother shaking her head at him. He reached up and touched the grouse-foot pin on his lapel, the one he and his mother wore to keep each other safe. He was worried the plan could be cursed, just like Ahab’s plan to kill Moby Dick was cursed. Now he was the agonist—the one in pain.
Offshore this night, the big seagull and Horatio cranked turns and sailed around in the moonlight. Unfortunately, he and his gull were not sitting in the rigging of the Anastasia listening to the Russian’s plans. Horatio had gotten bored night after night straining to hear foreign conversations, and decided to take the night off from spying since the moon was so bright you could tan.
On the Deer Track Farm, all were happy with the summer weather as the month of August moved in. It felt like the best weather in Florida during the winter when it was seventy-eight degrees. The summer corn had come in too, the kind they called “butter and sugar” corn, and that’s what it tasted like, along with the Yankee tomatoes that had a flavor from the mineral-rich soil undeniably theirs. Aubrey thought he had never tasted tomatoes like that.
The Murphy girls came over and helped dig potatoes and pick pole beans from the tripod sassafras uprights, and everyone got together and ate baked striped bass for the evening entre, since it was now in season. Afterwards they went to the fire circle and watched the moon come up like a gibbous lantern with a reddish tinge.
“Aubrey,” Arquette’s father said, “I was told you are a singer and play guitar. Won’t you entertain us with one tonight?”
“After one more drink.”
“Yay,” the circle responded.
Drayton went to the cottage and got the guitar for his father. “This is a song I wrote for the love of my life, Christaine. Who by the way, is one hell of a writer, and has had many things published.” Aubrey began to strum, until he dropped down to a final bar and came on with his amatory piece:
Christaine she’s an artist,
From the jewelry-worded world.
She makes flying lines from diamonds.
Sells ‘em to the book-head girls.
She stands like a priestess,
A vendor on the street.
People buy her silver chains,
Just so her kid can eat.
She pulled my heart from my chest
from fifty-five feet away,
And it never came back to stay.
‘Cause I believe in the fire,
Like the movie Jerry Maguire.
And I believe you sustain,
The heat of the love you exchange.
So I’ll blow on the flame while I rock your frame.
I love you Christaine.
Aubrey sang three more verses of the personal romantic piece, and then he handed his guitar to Drayton, who had been singing and playing since he was ten. Drayton sang an old song from 1962, called “Venus in Blue Jeans,” and he looked right at Sharon at least four times. Then he picked out some blues, and everybody took turns making up versus and singing along. That was the night Drayton melted Sharon like any man or boy with a guitar, a voice, or a horse, has forever.
~
The week was playing out for Horatio. He wrote sometimes for hours, imagining his artistic long hand style was printed out in this older style font you are reading now, with no indentation paragraphs and bearing the colophon of some publisher from the days he was once a living man.
While flying the night sky over the ocean he had decided to leave his seagull. It was time for him to have the ultimate experience of his life as a slipper, one that he could never have had when he was a man back in 1851. He was going to land on the back of the baby whale, a baby white whale, no less—oh hear the angels sing! And then he was going to slip from his gull to the whale through the blowhole and go into its brain to live like slippers do. He had done this a few times before with mature whales, but never a whale calf. Now he could experience what it would be like to live with a youngster and be there through all the stages of a whale’s life. His Nautilus would be the whale, another living submarine just like The Dragon was for Captain Nemo, who in human lifetime had been the prolific Jules Vern.
On Wednesday, Horatio had done it. He landed the gull on the back of the whale and successfully made the transfer through the breath, and now he sat in the brain of the pelagic wonder. He would wander from chamber to chamber in the whale’s brain like any slipper can, and then, of course, he was most delighted when he sat in the eye and watched the underwater world go by.
Horatio had told his longtime friend, Metacom, what he planned to do the day before. He asked Metacom not to say anything to anybody for a while, until he was used to the whale and the whale was used to him. Around the cove the young cetacean would circle, and Horatio would ride in her eyes listening to her young vocabulary, practicing and suggesting to the creature she do this and that, in an inner voice the whale could have thought was her own—something a slipper is very accomplished in, especially with humans. Horatio by now knew a lot of the whale’s language, and was amazed how much she sounded like a human teenager. That is how he knew she was restless in the small cove, and wanted to get out. And there was a sadness too, one she held over the loss of her mother—humpback whale mothers and calves practice frequent touching and affection, and the calves can stay with their mothers for as long as one year.
The brain of a whale is very similar to a human’s, something a slipper is used to navigating. A slipper can make themselves the size of a group of cells in there if they want to, so they can travel from one area of the brain to another on the various neuronal roads. On that scale, the size of the brain is like the size of a whole country to them, with miles of circuitry and geography. There are mountains in the parietal and occipital lobes, and jungles in the Wernicke’s area, making it difficult sometimes to fathom the cartography of the place. So Horatio had a lot of exploring and observations to perform to fructify his knowledge of her and her thoughts. He had lived in a human or two in his time, but his last host, the seagull, presented him only with a simple brain—same stripe as flying a glider, pulling levers and pushing pedals.
