The Highest Tide (16 page)
I took a break from their relentless friendliness by resting my eyes on the next mud bar and a shimmering rectangle swaying along the tide line. It didn’t look like an oarfish at first, but the more it shimmered and the more I studied its length, the more it looked like the same long silver creature I still couldn’t shake from my mind.
I walked toward it, without excusing myself, and was almost upon it before I gave up. The light on the ripples, and the way it lurked an inch beneath the surface had been enough to trick me. It was nothing more than a five-foot-long four-by-four, which wasn’t unusual at all, especially with all the waterfront construction past the college and along Sunset Estates. Yet it definitely wasn’t new lumber. It was actually remarkably weathered with strange faded designs on one end. As I got closer, I saw they looked like those angular characters above Chinese restaurants. A souvenir, I suspected, that someone had carted home from the coast then lost off their dock. When I picked it up, though, it was obvious that wasn’t the case.
Two men splashed out to help carry it back while the others continued rescuing jellies. A murmur spread, then they all eyed this weird, waterlogged post.
I tried to hide my excitement, but heard myself talking fast and loud about the odds against it showing up in Skookumchuck Bay. I explained how the coasts of Washington and Canada are separated by the fifteen-mile-wide mouth of the Stait of Juan de Fuca, and how Asian debris occasionally shoots that gap, but rarely, if ever, corkscrews all the way down the entire eighty-mile fjord to our southern bays.
“How do you know someone didn’t bring it home from the coast?” Carolyn asked.
I pointed at the gooseneck barnacles stuck to its backside. “These guys cling to stuff that floats in the ocean. That’s what they do. I’ve never seen them in the bay before, or anywhere around here. And they’re still healthy, which means they probably haven’t been out of the water until now.”
“It’s a street sign!” one of them cried. “It’s an old Japanese street sign!”
After a long pause in which we all stared at that post and its odd, angular markings, Carolyn said: “You found it for a reason, Miles, didn’t you? Just as you found the squid and those other discoveries. You’ve been
selected
, haven’t you?”
What
was
guiding me to everything? My subconscious? Something from above? And, if so, what if there’d been a mistake? What if the wrong person had been
selected?
A heron squawked past right then, as if to say it couldn’t wait to flap out of earshot of such nonsense.
I
T WAS PHELPS
’
S
“brilliant idea.” That’s all he’d say about it other than to instruct me to meet him at the Heron bridge with my bike. I hadn’t seen him since he’d nearly drowned, so I didn’t care what he had planned and didn’t ask questions.
We glided through flickering daylight, the wind bending pines as we coasted across the Fourth Street Bridge, everything lodging in my mind; the girls smirking out passenger windows at us, Phelps humorously oversized for his bike, his brown hair flying behind him like a torn flag, Mount Rainier an enormous boulder in the sky on one side, the wounded capitol looming on the other, and beneath them both, the largest ship I’d ever seen docked in Olympia, a red and black freighter two blocks long and taller than half of downtown.
I’d read how Puget Sound was created by glaciers thousands of feet thick that advanced and retreated from Canada to Olympia again and again, dredging bays and carving passages over ten thousand years. I could almost picture it if I squinted, but it was much easier to visualize a tidal wave—maybe half the size of that two-hundred-footer that whacked Alaska—roaring down the Sound’s main trunk, squeezing through the Narrows, then rolling up Budd Inlet, a cliff of angry water shattering downtown windows and splashing up against the capitol with kelp and jellyfish flying everywhere.
We pedaled through Sylvester Park, then toward the Sound, the sidewalks uncommonly busy, the horny wind lifting skirts high enough to turn Phelps’s head. I looked away when I saw one of the three Dons pop out red-faced from the Eastside Tavern, and ducked when I saw my mother’s friend Alice on the same sidewalk with her brat kid I used to have to entertain. People were just out strolling, but it seemed like more was happening, or about to happen. Phelps kept flashing his maniac smile as if we were getting away with something.
Earthquake wreckage still cluttered taped-off sidewalks, but most of the damage involved old brick facings of buildings nobody wept over. I was enjoying the motion, not even thinking about where we were headed. If Phelps had turned around and pedaled home, I still would have considered his idea brilliant, but it was clear he had something else in mind.
We turned down a surprisingly noisy alley where music was bursting out of somewhere. I followed Phelps behind First American to a green Dumpster where we chained our bikes together. Then we strode, wobbly legged, thighs sizzling, toward the sound of crashing drums. As we got closer, he finally revealed that his brother had told him that The Sisterhood was the easiest club to sneak into. “The back-door bouncer is a head case,” he said, “and the place gets so loud and packed it’s a free-for-all.”
I said the obvious before we went any farther. “I can’t fake twenty-one. I don’t even look thirteen.”
“Nobody will even see you, Squid Boy. That’s your advantage.” He handed me a black hat with a Rolling Stones tongue on it, then instructed me to follow at his left heel like an obedient dog. I adjusted the hat to its smallest setting, then pulled it as low as it would go without blinding me.
Phelps waited for a cluster of loud older kids to make their move, then squeezed behind them once one of them got stopped by some thick-chested guy. I followed, and we somehow jackknifed past everyone through the far side of the door while the bouncer checked invisible hand stamps with a tiny flashlight. And suddenly there were too many people and too much noise in a place way too small to handle it.
Thick bluish smoke swirled beneath ceiling fans that looked as if they were about to wobble fi-ee. The noise made more sense inside, but it was more violent and personal too, the bass guitar rattling my ribs. People wiggled and swayed in place, all staring in the same direction. Nobody was sitting, and nobody was covering their ears but me. Phelps pulled me closer to the noise, slithering toward the front where the stink of spilled beer and cigarettes thickened. Some woman wailed above the bass and the drums. I couldn’t make out a word.
I tried to keep up, but people fell back onto me twice, knocking me over once, all without ever seeing me. Still, I kept following, peeking through the tangle of shoulders, breasts and elbows for a glimpse, trying to see everything I could before I either got crushed or plucked out of there. It helped that everyone’s eyes were above me. The crappy part was I was at armpit level, and there was a whole lot of BO that didn’t seem to bother anyone else. Everyone was touching or almost touching. It reminded me of the awkward moment when I had opened the wrong door and saw thirty greasy middle school wrestlers panting and grunting on a thick maroon mat in a windowless room where the only air must have been recycled fourteen thousand times through the same noses and mouths. This was worse. Not as sweaty, but hotter and darker and so smoky my nose stung. Plus, the music
hurt
. Still, everyone pressed forward, as if they couldn’t quite hear it, as if they wanted to
feel
it.
Phelps grabbed my arm and snaked closer to the stage until there were just these three girls short enough for him to see over. Everyone half-danced, facing forward, moving disjointedly, as if to different songs. When the girls in front separated enough to give me a brief view of the stage my lips went numb.
Angie was wearing that same striped dress she wore when I saw her perform outside in the spring. Her hair was spiked and tossed, eyes closed, neck glistening. Her new eyebrow ring was neon green.
Phelps lunged into my view and yelled, “Gotcha!”
Maybe I should’ve guessed what was up, but Phelps was easy to underestimate. The posters outside hadn’t said anything about L.O.C.O. or Angie Stegner, and I still didn’t recognize most of her songs. But there she was, head cocked, her heavy boots set wider than her shoulders, her dress bunching high on tanned thighs. She suddenly screeched the way people screech when they jump off a high dive. Then her hairy drummer ended his frantic banging at the same time her bass quit throbbing through speakers that were as tall as me.
The applause was pretty loud, I guess, but it was nothing compared to the music. I waited for Angie to shout something like, “What’s up, Olympia!” But she didn’t say anything. She waited for the applause to fade, then casually asked if we’d noticed her new screech. “A baby barn owl taught me that one the other night,” she told us. “It was the cutest damn thing.” She ripped another impression of it, then coughed and laughed into the microphone, which made everyone laugh. It felt like an invasion of my privacy to hear my favorite laugh shared with all these clammy people, as if someone had split open my head and passed my fantasies around like breath mints.
Angie turned around to drink something, leaving us staring at the back of her dress that had such narrow stripes it seemed to move on its own. Some guy screamed, “Angie, I love you!” More people laughed, then yipped and hooted rodeo-style. I was hoping the music would start again before anyone noticed us, or someone else confessed their love. I looked around for phony Frankie, but I couldn’t make out a face. Every second the music didn’t play felt like our last. How long could it take to spot two thirteen-year-olds? At least they hadn’t turned on the lights. A stink rose up. I held my breath, but it intensified and lingered. There was no escaping the deadliest fart in the history of farts. Rotting sea lions smelled better. The worst muddy, low-tide stink was refreshing compared to this. But nobody cussed, muttered, screamed or even covered their noses, as if getting dunked in the old fart tank was just part of the whole rock ‘n’ roll ritual.
My stage view vanished with the return of the beer-spilling boyfriends of the girls in front of us. And that’s when I overheard some guy behind me asking who brought their “fucking kid brother.” When one of them tapped my shoulder I ignored it. Then I heard somebody whisper that maybe I was a “tiny chick” or a “dwarf,” which sent them into nose-snorting giggles.
Luckily, the next song came almost right on top of the last. It just felt like a month. The problem was I no longer had a view of anything but the wide denim backs of the annoying boyfriends. This time, I could tell, the drummer was singing. He and Angie took turns banging out rhythms and he kept saying
pass out
every ten seconds or so. There were no other words. Just
pass out
. People howled. It was the song they’d been waiting for. The couples in front of us squatted and the stage opened up better than ever. Angie struggled to keep her eyes open. Her swaying seemed excessive.
Pass out
. I noticed Phelps chatting with a woman crouched to his right, and by the time I looked back to Angie I’d lost sight of her in the tangle as the couples rose again, smelling like what I assumed was pot. I overheard Phelps asking that crouching woman if he could have some of her secondhand smoke. The song throbbed on.
Pass out
. I had no idea where it was going or if it would ever end, and I couldn’t find an angle to see more than flashes of Angie. I focused on the thud of her bass, hoping to learn something about her from it, but there was too much going on. I watched that woman rise next to Phelps, grab his chin and cover his lips with hers, as if performing CPR. It lasted a long, long time. I had time to think seventeen thoughts and feel everything from fear to jealousy before smoke leaked out of Phelps’s mouth and he started coughing wildly. I wasn’t sure if he’d been assaulted or initiated, but once his smile surfaced I felt nothing but envy. He stuck out his hand for five. I gave it to him hard enough for it to sting, then refocused on the stage until I found an angle to see
my girl
who I told myself was far smarter, cuter and ten times cooler than Phelps’s
dundula
even if she wasn’t filling me with smoky kisses.
Angie studied her strings, her left hand sliding up and down the long neck.
Passout
. The new lighting somehow made her look soaked, like some musical mermaid fresh from the bay. The boyfriends rose in front of me again, and the music seemed louder when I couldn’t see her, because then it was just noise and sweat and another fart that belonged in the Guinness book. Phelps flipped me a thumbs-up because he, of course, was tall enough to still watch Angiejam. He air-guitared her for me in between glances at that girl who’d lit him up. I watched her hug some other guy and blow smoke inside him. Then she hugged a woman. I turned away, overwhelmed, as they kissed too. The gang in front of us crouched to smoke again, but I didn’t like what I saw. Angie was swaying, and not to the beat. She and the drummer were slowing down.
Passss ouuuuut
, he said. Then again, even slower. As the song ended, Angie teetered and the drummer rose, leaning toward her with his hands out. The applause welled, and I started scrambling through the dipshit denim boyfriends toward Angie, not excusing myself, moving through limbs, stench and smoke. Then I heard laughter and I caught a glimpse of her smiling. Soon everyone was busting up, and she said, “Thank youuuuuuuuuuu.” The drummer leaned back, smirking all over himself.
When I turned around and exhaled, some older guy was lecturing Phelps and waving me toward them. Then the thick bouncer barreled toward us, the crowd fanning from him as if he were on fire, as the band kicked in again and Angie’s bass shook my bones and her voice rose above the bedlam. “Life sometimes feels like too much worry,” she yelled. The thick-chested man steered us out with fat hands that had huge rings on every finger. I missed half of Angie’s next line, then heard, “So what’s the hurry?” Once we were completely out the back door I heard her croon, “‘Just give me twenty good reasons to keep onnn livin’.”