“
You
also found that giant squid?”
“Uh-huh.”
I thought she was going to squeal. She had one of those faces that would be perfect to hang out with if you were deaf. She wanted to know where my parents were and seemed even more delighted when I told her they were at work. Her eyes ransacked the house. Then I took her outside and showed her my room. She kneeled to scribble Rachel Carson titles and the names of the marine books stacked next to my bed. From my angle, I could see down her unbuttoned shirt to her lacy bra and the upper bulge of mid-sized boobs. I felt obliged to look, knowing Phelps would have swallowed three jellyfish for the view. I showed her my aquarium and talked about my collection business. Her head bopped as if listening to her favorite song.
I assumed this all fascinated her the way it consumed me, that I’d found someone who—on impact—shared the obsession. After struggling to enlighten Phelps, I was thrilled to find a pretty lady who not only seemed to understand my excitement but even
took notes
on what
I
said. She urged me to continue yakking as we strolled toward the bay, then snapped pictures of me, her camera clicking madly as if she’d confused me with some jeans model.
“Act like you’re collecting stuff,” she directed from behind the lens.
I glanced around. “At high tide?”
“Don’t you collect stuff at high tide too?”
“Not really.”
“Well, just look like you are.”
Some kids are terrific pretenders. I wasn’t wired that way, but if you saw the photo you know I squatted and picked up your basic heart cockle shell and puzzled over it as if it were a riddle.
“What’s that, Miles?” she asked, while the clicking continued.
A clam shell,” I said.
“
Really?
What kind of clam?”
She squatted with the camera to her face and her blouse sagging open. I resisted looking again and glanced nervously about to make sure there wasn’t someone kneeling behind me so that I’d trip onto my back at the slightest tap to my chest. Phelps, it won’t surprise you, loved that gag. But there was nobody out there but us. And as my eyes swept across the bay she caught the image that landed in the newspaper of me holding that stupid cockle, gazing out on the water as if I were about to spot another ragfish, giant squid or perhaps a few dozen blue whales.
The truth is I thought all this would roll into a paragraph deep inside the newspaper somewhere, but then she abruptly demanded Professor Kramer’s and my parents’ work numbers. She also informed me that she intended to talk to Judge Stegner and even Phelps.
“What for?” The incoming current was delivering a kelp or trash wad behind her.
She frowned impatiently. “If I’m gonna write a story about you, I need to talk to people who know you, right?”
“I thought the story was about the ragfish.”
She laughed. This lady showed every card. “It’s just a little story about the boy who keeps finding cool stuff in the Sound.”
“What kind of a story?”
“A good one. A good little one.”
I nodded, but I was confused. She put her camera away and glanced toward her car.
“The next good low is at eleven-eighteen tomorrow,” I said desperately, “if you want me to show you around.” I felt like I was losing a friend.
“I’d love to,” she said, though her face told me that wasn’t close to true. “But I doubt I’ll be able to make that.” She eyed her tiny wristwatch. “Are you considered small for your age, Miles?”
“Are you considered rude for yours?” It just popped out.
She stepped back as if I’d fired a spitball at her forehead, then laughed a one-note laugh, a comic-strip
ha!
“Touche,” she said.
Suddenly she was thanking me and pumping my hand in her long hot fingers as if I’d agreed to weed her garden for free.
She then ran-walked to her tiny car and drove off, her tires spitting gravel.
I waded to my hips to see what had drifted in behind her. Tiny barnacles had claimed almost every inch of it so it wasn’t until I twirled it around that I realized it was a hockey glove.
A baseball glove would have made a lot more sense. I didn’t know anyone who played hockey. Plus, the glove was stiff as wood and amazingly heavy. I studied it for a long while, wondering if it meant something.
My mother’s hands shook as she read the paper.
Sometimes her pulse alone could do that, shaking her bones with each beat. My father never shook, but he usually stunk. If it wasn’t Old Spice it was Mennen’s or Scope. And if it wasn’t those it was BO, tuna breath, Crown Royal or a mixture of the above. This morning his breath smelled like an aquarium that hadn’t been cleaned in a month. He was reading over Mom’s shoulder, telling her to
wait, wait, wait
before she turned the page.
I’d already read the story twice, once at the mailbox and once on the way back to the house. That newspaper lady cast me as the local Tom Sawyer who spent his summers finding beach treasures with his buddy Huck Phelps. Professor Kramer called me a gifted child with an “insatiable interest in marine life” and called the squid and the ragfish two of South Sound’s biggest finds ever. Then Judge Stegner called me the most knowledgeable and reliable youngster he’d ever hired to oversee his oyster farm. And my loyal pal Phelps had this to say about me: “He’s a freak. He’s a decent enough guy, but he’s a total freak when it comes to sea life.”
There also were things I said, or that the lady claimed I said, that left me thirsty and dizzy, imagining the little article yellowing over time, lining people’s drawers like some cold historical document. I pictured all that before reluctantly handing the paper to my mother, feeling the way you feel when you have too many blankets on your bed and your fever turns from cold to hot. I knew bad things would come of that story, but on that morning I couldn’t get past the opening line. It was such a daring lie it left me mute.
“The beach talks to Miles O’Malley.”
I didn’t tell her that! I spoke to her for almost two hours and never said anything about any beach saying boo to me! Where’d she get that? Kids already thought of me as the science dork. I needed them to think I conversed with sand?
I waited for my parents to question me about it, to ask whether I was psycho, but they somehow read right over it. What pissed Mom off was the description of our house as “a modest old cabin that looks like it’s about to collapse into the bay.”
“She’s saying we’re poor, Sean!”
“Where does she say
that?
” Dad’s eyes were bloodshot. It took him forever to read the sentence. Maybe he read it a few times. “Sounds “bout right,” he said, then returned to where he was in the story until Mom leaned away from his breath again and tried to rile him by repeating the line that said, “Miles’s father, Sean O’Malley, works at the brewery.” “She doesn’t mention that you’re a shift manager, does she?”
My father grunted, then shrugged. When people asked him what he did, he’d say he made beer, leaving my mother to boast about the twenty-six people beneath him. He plodded to the end of the story and looked at me, not with pride or shame, but wonder. “You got all these books beside your bed, and you’ve read most of them at least twice?”
He kept saying, wow, which didn’t help me gauge much until the phone chirped repeatedly, and they heard from four thrilled friends. Suddenly my mother was poaching eggs the way I liked them and calling me “our boy genius.” I liked the
our
part. How finding some ugly fish could help keep my parents together didn’t make sense, but I hadn’t seen my mother so happy since Judge Stegner told her she was one of the most informed citizens he knew. My father, though, looked as if he’d bonked his head. He tailed me into the garage for the first time in months and stared at my writhing, half-full aquarium, his bulging eyes lingering on that orange nudibranch.
After my folks left for work the next wave of calls hit. Reporters for the
Tacoma News Tribune
, the
Seattle Times
and three other newspapers tried to coax me into inviting them out to
just talk
. I had nothing to say. I called that reporter from the
Olympian
who’d left her little card on our table. She answered before it completed one full ring.
“This is Miles.”
“Front-page Miles? What’s up?”
“I never said the beach talks to me.”
She laughed a short
ha!
“
I
said that. You didn’t say that. That was my way, you know, of getting across how well you understand the beach.”
“Makes me sound crazy. I mean I hear the clams squirt, which tells me maybe they’re nervous, and I hear the tide drain through gravel, which tells me it’s going out instead of sloshing in, and there’s the sound of crabs skittering and barnacles clicking their shells shut, but the beach isn’t saying, ‘Hey Mies, what’s hap-penin’?’”
She laughed another hurried
ha!
as if there were no time for full laughs anymore. “It makes you sound smart, not crazy. Everyone who reads newspapers knows that only the sentences I put quote marks around are things people actually said. The rest is what
I’m
saying, Miles, based on what I observed.”
She was obviously trying to weasel out of it, but I didn’t feel right trying to make her feel guilty either. Some people won’t admit they screwed up no matter how many chances you give them. “Low tide is in two hours,” I said, “if you really want to see what’s out there.”
“What?” She sounded like a different person. “Sorry. Gotta go. Call ya later.”
She didn’t call back, of course, until her cutesy fable about little Mies O’Malley took a more dramatic turn.
“S
o WHAT’S THE
beach saying to you right now?” Phelps asked, straight-faced as a priest.
“Shut up.” I’d been blushing for hours. “You’re the
freak
. You’re a tit freak. You know that?”
“Who’s denying that? You’re upset about me telling that lady you’re
freak?
That’s why you’re all Mr. Moody? You should be proud of being a freak, Miles. Look at the attention it’s getting ya.”
“Oh yeah. It’s terrific.”
“Shhhh!” Phelps said. “I think the beach just said something. Shhh.”
“Quit it.”
“Shush. There . . . It said it again.” His voice lowered and he did a convincing job of not moving his lips: “’
I can’t wait for the goddamn motherfucking tide to come back in
.”’
He laughed until he lost his balance and his breath, which made him look so pathetic I almost joined him.
We were on Chatham Cove again, with a minus-two to ourselves, the sun frying me the way July did even when it was cloudy. Phelps had no such problems, being, as he put it, tall, dark and irresistible. Whenever I’d start to think I was actually tanning he’d stick his mahogany arm alongside mine and whistle—further proof I’d be chickless long h e r he scored.
When we broke for lunch, I worried about Florence. I’d made her lunch six of the past eight days. Just tuna sandwiches and grapes, but from what I could tell if I didn’t make it, she went without it. I thought of her waiting in her chair for me, and it struck me that in the span of a week I’d gone from feeling proud when I made her lunch to feeling guilty when I didn’t.
Phelps interrupted my guilt to tell me that he’d brought another educational treat for me. I braced for another
Godfather
reading that would make me feel like a hopeless dwarf, but this time it was a magazine called
Variations
that was no bigger than a
TV Guide
. The woman on the cover showed me her tongue and breasts.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, without breaking eye contact with her.
“Behind my brother’s Car & Drivers.”
“Is she a singer?”
Phelps laughed. “What’s it matter?”
“I just wondered if she’s an actress or a singer or someone we might know. I just like to know who I’m looking at is all.”
“Yeah?” He laughed again. “Then check this babe out. Maybe you’ll recognize her.” He flipped quickly through pages. It was mostly words, but there were plenty of little pictures too. He opened to some girl in a pair of cutoffs that had fallen to her knees somehow. She displayed her breasts in her hands as if selling apples. Above the photo were the words: GIRL NEXT-DOOR.
“Recognize her?’’ Phelps baited.
My mind scrambled. “No.”
“She’s the girl next-door.” He winked.
“Next-door to who?” I started sweating.
“To
somebody
. You think beautiful naked women don’t have neighbors?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. She looked as if her breasts felt so good she couldn’t keep her own hands off them. Phelps explained that she no doubt benefited from airbrushing, some photographic trickery his brother told him about that covered up zits, mosquito bites and birthmarks. “They can even change lips, smiles, eye colors and nipple sizes,” he said authoritatively.
“I know,” I said, tired of feeling ignorant.
He flipped, fingers twitching, through the pages for something else. Suddenly there were tiny pictures of women showing me their privates and coaxing me to have my way with them. At least that’s what the captions shouted. Their phone numbers were right there too. I couldn’t believe it. You could apparently call them right up if you had the guts.
I backed up, overwhelmed. I’d seen
Playboy
foldouts. I’d studied every photo in
Sports Illustrated
’s bikini issue, but I’d never seen women’s privates laid out right next to their phone numbers before.
Phelps laughed. “What’s up? You don’t like looking at naked women?”
“I’m not their doctor,” I said. It was one of the stupidest things I could have said to someone like Phelps.
He laughed himself sideways, then said, “Bet you’d like to be Angie’s doctor.”
My slap caught him mid-blink, rocking on his heels, and knocked him back over his knobby knees onto the beach with his brother’s sicko magazine clutched above his chest so—God forbid—it wouldn’t get wet.
It all happened too fast to even explain it to myself, and before Phelps could call me a “fuckin’ freak” for a second time I heard the cameraman and saw the lady who’d asked me all those questions about the squid the morning I found it.