The Highest Tide (13 page)

Even the weatherman loved that crap.

I waited for my parents’ response, hoping I wouldn’t puke up my share of the tuna loaf in the meantime.

Amazingly, they didn’t lecture me again about sneaking out at night or badger me about how much I was pocketing from my collections or ask any of the other questions for which I’d rehearsed answers.

My father pointed out that while I might be the smallest kid around, I apparently had a bigger brain than anyone working for the state, which sent a quiver across my mother’s forehead. Then he asked nobody in particular how it was that the only thing he knew beans about was baseball and beer when his son somehow knew stuff big-shot professors and fancy-pants scientists didn’t? He sipped a flat beer, his face stuck in a lopsided grin that made me wonder if he’d had a stroke. “You realize how many people might have seen that broadcast?” he asked. “The Seattle area has what, Helen, a million people?”

“But it was just on in Olympia,” I said.

They laughed and told me that Channel 7 was a Seattle station.

It creeped me out to think of all those strange eyeballs looking at me and our bay up close like that. I felt that odd sense of loss and betrayal you feel when you see a bad movie of a book you loved.

Mom told me that I amazed her, but it looked like I troubled her. She reached for my shoulder, but didn’t quite touch it. “What do you want from us, Miles?”

When I hesitated, she said, “I mean what can we do to help?” Her nose twitched, and I knew she smelled the rising bay through the floorboards.

The phone rang. She ordered Dad to ignore it.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Are you challenged in school?”

“Sometimes.”

“Should we look into getting you into a private school?”

“I’m
fine.
”

The machine picked up, and some work friend of hers babbled about how her “boy wonder” looked like a miniature Michael J. Fox.

“You want to try to get an internship with Talcott Seafoods?” Mom asked, then sneezed.

The phone sounded again.

“Billy Eckert lives next door to one of the Talcott brothers,” Dad blurted. “I could talk to him about it.”

“I’m all right. Really.”

“You need us to take you to the library more ofien?’’ Mom pressed. “You need money for books?”

The answering machine kicked on again, and Aunt Janet asked in her party voice who the heck would have thought that her little nephew would be the family’s first television star.

“Come on, Miles,” Dad urged. “We had no idea you were getting so damn smart about all this. We really had no . . . If you’ve already found your gift, son, let us help.”

I probably should’ve felt flattered, but instead it stung that it took some mannequin on some crappy television program to make my own parents realize I might be somewhat special.

“For God’s sake,” Mom persisted, “there must be something—even if it just makes us feel better. A bigger aquarium?”

“NO,” I said. “Just . . .”

Dad froze mid-sip. I heard the tide settling beneath us.

“Yes?” Mom whispered. “What is it? Anything.”

What did I truly want? A twelve-foot Lund with a red stripe and a six-horse Evinrude so that I could take Angie Stegner out for a boat ride. I also wanted a dog.

“Just stick together,” I said, louder than I’d intended, “and don’t move out of this house.”

That left them speechless as the phone begged for more attention and I slipped outside to the bay where the tide brimmed so high and smooth it looked like pale green Jell-0.

CHAPTER 16

T
HE JUDGE AND
I were cleaning and sorting his oysters, discarding the dead, crating the mature ones, reorganizing the young and playing our roles, him talking authoritatively with his French-horn voice, me sunburning and listening along with the gulls, the herons, the nudists and the rest of creation.

“Well, we now know that Angie is as bipolar as they come,” he suddenly volunteered. “See, it’s all about chemicals, Miles. That’s all we really are upstairs, as much as we’d like to think there’s all this magic going on up here.”

Bipolar?
Was he telling me that she was crazy?

“The only way to manage something like that is with more chemicals,” the judge continued. “It’s not hard to figure out what somebody needs, but the catch is
they
have to take it. And you can’t
make
Angela Rosemary Stegner do anything. Least I’ve never been able to. My three boys combined were easier than her. I don’t know if that says something about boys and girls or something about me.”

He looked up, face reddening, as if lifting something much heavier than oysters. “I was having lunch last Thursday with Judge Crosby, and we were arguing again over whether judges should be elected or appointed when Angie waltzed in. Crosby gave her a look like she was some street kid panhandling for bus money even though she gave him a smile that should’ve floored him. ‘Saw you through the window, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Just thought I’d say hello.’ I was so flustered by how gorgeous and poised she looked at that moment that all I could come up with was, Thanks.’ She laughed the way she does and everyone stared, but she couldn’t have cared less what anyone thought. She bent down to kiss my forehead the way she used to before bed, then waltzed back out as Crosby leaned across the table and asked, ‘So when’re you gonna spring for an eyebrow ring, Norman?’ as if she’d embarrassed me, as if I felt anything but gratitude.”

The judge picked up another oyster, turned it over in his rubber gloves, then looked at me so intensely I glanced away, straight into the pulsing late-morning sun, and burned my eyelids trying to piece together what he was saying and why. I was used to adults spilling oddly intimate stories around me, as if I were too small to gossip, but this was unusual, even for the chatty judge.

“All she has to do is take her medicine and we can all move forward, but I know fill well that she mixes Clozaril and the other one with whatever she’s into that week. Part of me wants to know everything, of course. Another part doesn’t. The problem with Angie is that making smart choices bores the hell out of her. I imagine you heard she passed out during one of her performances?”

“NO,” I lied.

The judge removed his sunglasses and methodically cleaned each lens with the bottom hem of his paint-speckled T-shirt. He looked so ordinary when he wasn’t talking, his small cloudy eyes recessed in a fleshy chinless face. His jawline started out fine, I noticed, then lost its way. He wasn’t fat, just unfinished.

He half-smiled, then crouched in his rolled-down rubber boots with four oysters that he surgically pried open. He displayed the raw, glistening globs on their shells in the mud, set perfectly equidistant, before nodding at me to begin.

I hated raw oysters, but ate them countless times with the judge. Always two oysters staged momentously in the mud like some grand sacrifice to Poseidon. It was a thrill he assumed I shared—eating his oysters, by God, straight from the bay. I threw those slippery blobs down, chewing as little as possible, trying not to squirm or wince as they slid into place so easily it felt as if they might slide right out of me. I studied the insides of the shells for pearls, but found only miniature purple murals.

“Good?” the judge asked.

“Tasty,” I said.

Before I could figure out how to ask him if he was warning me that Angie was psycho, he was on to something else.

“Friendships can ruin you,” he announced.

I smirked unconvincingly, assuming it was some witty aside about our oyster ritual.

“You have to be careful who you help,” he said, “even when acting on principle.”

He must have seen my bafflement, because he then loudly confided that he’d aggressively persuaded his fellow judges on a property-rights case that involved a college buddy by the name of Luther Stevens.

“Good for you,” I said.

He liked that. I could play the judge even when I had no idea what he was talking about.

“No.” He grinned bitterly. “Good for Luther, not for me. Loyalty and principle can come back around on you all gussied up as scandal—especially if you’re running for reelection.”

I was so lost I avoided eye contact. Again, I wanted to ask about Angie, but by the time I picked the words and readied my throat he thanked me for visiting Florence so often.

That struck me as beyond peculiar. Why was he
thanking
me? I’d rarely heard the judge mention her, and I never saw him at her cabin—although Florence often brought him up. Then it hit me: If he knew how often I visited, then he knew all about her condition, right? I felt the way I imagined people feel after confession. I couldn’t wait for the judge to tell me that she had the wrong doctor or was taking the wrong medicine, and that he’d straighten it all out by the weekend.

“She really should be in a nursing home already,” the judge half-hollered.

It took me a moment to find my voice. “Really?”

“Oh yes. I spoke with her neurologist last month. There’s nothing more he can give her. It’s dangerous for her to be alone, and it only gets worse.”

“She doesn’t want to go to a home,” I whispered.

“Who does?” he bellowed.

I think that was the moment I stopped admiring Judge Stegner.

“Want to know something about that woman?” he asked, as we shuttled six buckets of oysters to his boat.

“Okay.”

“Fifly years ago I considered her the most beautiful woman I’d seen in person. A young Sophia Loren had nothing on her.” He raised his right hand. “I swear.”

I tried to picture the face that went with a name like Sophia Loren while wondering where she or Florence fit into the judge’s confusing lecture. Was he commiserating with my crush on his daughter? Was he warning me about her insanity and temporary beauty? Had he seen me peeping at her window?

Someone like Rachel Carson came straight at you and told you exactly what she wanted you to know in the clearest language imaginable. The judge surprised you with statements, then waited for you to connect the dots. I gave up trying to see his point and offered mine: “I’ll help you with Angie.”

The judge tilted his head, as if draining water from an ear, started a laugh, then smothered it. It was clear I’d misread him. There was no master plan, no collective message behind his midday ramblings. He’d just been babbling like anyone else who’d lost his footing.

“You are something else, young man,” he told me. “Something else, indeed.”

“Well, the offer stands,” I said, and turned toward the boat so he wouldn’t see the emotion twirling inside me.

The judge let me steer the Boston Whaler back toward Skookumchuck Bay. He stood upright the whole way, balancing himself with three fingers on the steering column as yet another show of his faith in me. The tide was still low. If I accidentally hit one of the ever-changing sandbars or a half-submerged log he’d vault into the suds at thirty miles an hour.

Mallards, gulls and Canada geese flapped clumsily from our path as the judge and I strained to see Evergreen’s five nude bathers—four bony men and one lumpy woman—sizzling like sausage links within twenty-five yards of where I’d found that ragfish.

It suddenly occurred to me that the judge would know exactly how fast divorces happen and who decides where the kids live and under what conditions judges insist that couples stay together, but I would’ve had to shout the questions over the howling outboard and I couldn’t imagine doing that.

The bay’s only hint of business, as usual, was the old, wind-peeled Mud Bay Tavern. Any renovation required bringing it up to code, the judge had explained, which was impossible seeing how there were no sewer lines that far west of downtown. So, year after year the tavern remained the same, without even a change in its two fading signs—one that said
CHICKEN AND STEAKS
, the other that just said
EAT
—or its fifty-five-year-old septic field buried in soil too soggy to absorb the sewage of more than a couple small families. Yet the tavern still somehow hosted overflow
Monday Night Football
crowds and the entire membership of the Bad Dogs, a motorcycle gang that showed up the first Thursday afternoon of every month for shuffleboard and clam chowder, which explained the fourteen Harleys lined up in front.

What distracted me, though, were the two pickups parked in the back gravel lot. They appeared to be moving, not backward or forward, but bucking on their shocks. By the time I glanced at the motorcycles again, they were toppling into each other in an avalanche of glinting chrome.

I started attempting to point all this out to the judge when I saw the telephone lines undulating like whips and steel light posts swaying like rubber tubes. “Judge!” I slowed the boat and pointed wildly at the tavern as it began its own left-right shimmy and spat leathered longhairs out its front door. The trucks continued bouncing so wildly we heard their shocks groan. The judge saw my stricken confusion, grabbed the wheel and explained in one word what was happening.

You can’t feel an earthquake when you’re on water unless it’s big enough to trigger a freak wave, but even then you might not think
earthquake
unless you could see what I was seeing.

I pointed at the wobbling Heron bridge, the shaking tree limbs, the dinghies rubbing against the tavern’s tiny floating dock. Dogs barked, the sky fluttered with agitated birds and someone shouted instructions across the bay. The next thing I saw made me think the earth was coming apart for real: Mud fountains sprang out of the tavern parking lot and out of the sidewalk leading to the bridge. This all carried on for what felt like five minutes. The experts later said the whole thing lasted thirty-four seconds.

“Florence!” I shouted once the trembling stopped.

The judge sped toward her cabin, picking a reckless route through the shallows. I braced for impact, but said nothing, even after the prop struck the mud twice. As we passed my house, I noticed that our front stilts appeared to still be doing their job. Amazingly, nothing looked out of place. The judge’s house loomed as impressively as ever on the knoll. Even Florence’s rickety cabin was still in its spot when we beached the Whaler and jogged toward it across thousands of broken shells.