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Sixteen

 

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Dedication to G.W.G."

 

Shaughnessy applauded. Ariel cheered. I grinned, bowed, and clambered aboard the boat. Not that I'd be able to tell if there was any hull damage from the fall, but it wouldn't hurt to look. Everything seemed all right, though.

Aboard were two large coils of rope. Ariel made me take a third from another boat and Shaughnessy helped me carry it to the Lady. I didn't ask what they were for, though I had my suspicions.

The breeze cooled as night fell, and we brought our gear aboard. Shaughnessy tied us securely to the dock for the night. I went to the cabin and fell upon the sofabed. Shaughnessy and Ariel could do what the hell they wanted—I was going to sleep.

 

* * *

 

I awoke to gurgling noises and Ariel's insistent prodding. "Come on, get up," she urged. "The tide's going out." I was disoriented: the sea sounds and faint rocking motion were unfamiliar. My hand went automatically for Fred. I clasped air and remembered that I had left it by the backpack on deck the night before.

"Pete," said Ariel again. She had to crane her head in the cabin to keep from hitting the ceiling with her horn. Only her head and neck were in the little room; her body wouldn't fit through the door. "Wind and tide are in our favor," she continued. "We've got to put to sea."

"I don' wanna go to school," I muttered to her blurry image, and stepped past her and onto the deck. Early morning yellows lanced my eyes.

"Good morning," said Shaughnessy cheerfully. She sat against the bulkhead, wearing a yellow tanktop and cut-off jeans. "I found these in the cabin," she explained to my raised eyebrow. "There were a few other things, but they didn't fit."

Shaughnessy and I lowered the Lady's dinghy into the water—which sounds pretty suggestive, I admit—and I settled myself slowly into the little rowboat, keeping my weight in the center, picked up the oars, and held them over my head threateningly. "Where's me faithful cutlass Fred?" I bellowed. "Tie the scurvy dog to the yardarm! Hoist the Jolly Roger! Arrrh!"

"Oh, Captain," called Ariel, "don't you think we'd better cast off first?"

"You have in fact anticipated my next command—cast off!"

Shaughnessy pushed us off and the Lady moved slowly from the dock. Shaughnessy scrambled aboard.

We maneuvered the Lady by kedging. Once we had her away from the dock and able to head out to open sea, we took one coil of rope and tied it to a bow cleat, passing the end through the ring in the stern of the dinghy. I lowered myself back into the little rowboat, positioned myself, and began rowing. After twenty seconds the Lady began to move toward me, and I began rowing away until the connecting rope went taut. Shaughnessy waved encouragingly. I gritted my teeth and began to put some muscle into it. Towing a forty-foot boat with oars and a dinghy isn't impossible.

Being possible doesn't make it easy. I felt every ounce of her twenty thousand pounds on the blades of the oars as I strained to keep us at our snail's pace. Humphrey Bogart and the African Queen. I was beginning to appreciate why the boat was named Lady Woof.

Ariel stood on the bow to provide moral support. Ah, she was a sight! Standing nobly behind the rail, horn catching the light, wind rippling her mane, land so very gradually receding behind her.

Around ten-thirty I shipped oars and forced my hands to unclench. They felt as if they were burning off. I stuck them in the cool water and screamed. Burning salt water dripped from my hands and ran down my forearms. The Lady was beside me, her momentum having carried her a little farther. I grabbed her rail and stifled a cry: the metal was searing cold-hot, as if I'd grabbed dry ice. I straddled the rail, swung my other leg over, and fell on my ass. I lay back until I was looking at the sky, lacking the strength to get up, right forearm shielding my eyes from the sun. An unmistakably-shaped blot appeared above me and I smiled tiredly at Ariel. "Well, so far so good. What now, Skipper?"

 

* * *

 

The three lengths of thick, strong hemp sank lazily into the water and began to lag behind Lady Woof. Ariel had had me tie the three coils of rope into huge nooses, tie their other ends to the two T-shaped metal cleats in front, one rope on the left and two on the right, and toss them overboard. We'd been drifting out to sea for an hour but were hardly making progress. We were still well within sight of land, so I was at least sure of our direction. The sun was almost straight overhead. I watched the three ropes slanting beneath the Lady. "Well," I said, leaning back to prop myself up on one elbow, the other hand holding onto a bright metal cleat, "now we just wait for three good Samaritan killer whales to wander into the nooses and pull us merrily on our way, right?" I squinted at Ariel. She'd spent most of the last hour deep in thought, focusing her concentration. This was the only time I'd interrupted her; watching the three ropes trail languidly along made my curiosity itch. "Actually," she said, "I'm hoping for humpbacks. But killer whales would do."

I sat up.

Ariel rose unsteadily, trying to compensate for the boat's hardly noticeable pitching. She had a keen sense of balance but seemed quite out of her element at sea. She stepped cautiously to her left and looked out over the rail. "I need to get closer to the water."

"Whatever for?"

"I need to touch it."

"Oh. Of course." I stood. "Whatever you say, Cap'n Skipper Ma'am. How do you propose to do that? Jump overboard? Can you swim? Could you get back on board? Or would you rather I leaned the whole boat a little—my arm muscles ought to be capable of that by now."

She glanced back at me. "Don't try to make me feel guilty. It won't work."

"What are we doing?" asked Shaughnessy. She'd snatched the Coppertone from my backpack and was greasing herself liberally.

I shrugged. "'Ours is not to reason why . . . .'"

"Quiet," snapped Ariel. She craned her powerful neck forward to look at the water and dipped her horn. Flash: it caught sunlight. Shaughnessy squinted just before I did. Ariel was thoughtful a minute. I tried to picture her pursing her lips. "Get a bucket and some rope," she ordered.

"Aye-aye, sarr." I fetched a bucket from the cabin and a length of line from my backpack. She ordered me to tie the line to the bucket, lower it into the water, and bring it up full. I complied and held the bucket of seawater before her. "Set it down," she said. Her eyes narrowed in concentration, and she lowered her head until the first six inches of her horn were immersed in the bucket.

Landward was a flock of seagulls, their greedy cries reaching us like the sound of a hundred rusty gates swinging in the distance.

A muscle rippled in Ariel's neck. It spread to her shoulder like a small wake in a silken pond. She closed her eyes tighter and let out a long, silvery breath. She raised her head. "There," she said. A few drops of salt water dripped from her horn; a few more traced an incomplete spiral down its length.

I looked into the bucket. It still looked like seawater to me. "'There' what?"

"That ought to do it. Just toss it overboard."

I eyed her doubtfully, but picked up the bucket and emptied it over the side.

The gulls stopped crying. For a few seconds everything—the sea, the wind, the birds—was silent and still. Then it passed and the gulls resumed their searching, hungry calls.

Ariel walked gingerly back to the center of the deck and lowered herself to it, front legs and bottom-most rear leg tucked delicately. A reddish-gold glimmer of sunlight traced the graceful length of her right hind leg, becoming reflected magma at the hoof. "Well," she said in answer to our unspoken but obvious next question, "now we wait."

"For humpback whales." Shaughnessy was skeptical.

Ariel regarded her blankly. "We'll see when they get here."

I sat on deck with my back against the curving bulkhead. "Pass the Coppertone," I said. Shaughnessy tossed me the brown plastic bottle. Tan, Don't Burn! Right. I squeezed a healthy glop onto my left hand, rubbed both hands together, and spread the stuff over my face. It felt cool at least. Ten minutes later Shaughnessy shielded her eyes from the sun and looked out on the water. "Something's coming," she announced. "No, correct that—a bunch of somethings."

Ariel got up carefully. I shaded my eyes and squinted in the direction Shaughnessy was looking. Bright flashes, a half-dozen, now a dozen, now nine, leaping in silver arcs from the water. "Dolphins!" I grinned at Ariel. "Dolphins!"

"Hmph. The call was for whales, but this might do."

They jumped from the water in well-timed groups, performing intricate maneuvers that made the best Olympic-level divers look palsied. Shaughnessy grinned, too, looking all of eight years old. Then they were by the Lady and we could hear the razzing noise of their playful chatter. They moved like shadows through the water, gliding gray torpedo shapes that left almost no wake. One nudged a trailing rope playfully with its snout. Ariel watched it a few seconds, then—I found out later—called to it. The call was ultrasonic, above the normal human hearing range. Though she stood in the center of the boat, she was large, and it must have seen her. "Seen" is the wrong word; I later discovered a dolphin has terrible eyesight. More correctly, it perceived her with its echolocational ability—a sense no human being can quite imagine, as it is alien to our physiology. It must have signaled its comrades, for when Ariel "spoke" to it, it stopped playing with the rope, shook its head from side to side, and dove below the surface with a flip of its tail. The rest did likewise. The water was calm again, as if they'd never been there. The gulls cried in the distance.

"What'd you do, insult it?" I asked.

"Him. No. Wait."

All at once they sprang from the water, a precise circle of two dozen dolphins diving for air. Simultaneously, they executed a complete backflip with a half twist. I could hardly distinguish the splashes; they were so well timed it sounded like one big splash, and again the water was still.

"What just happened?" I asked.

"I said hello," said Ariel. "They said hi back."

"Oh."

Presently they surfaced again, blowing air in bull snorts from the top of their heads, frolicking, nudging one another like elementary school kids at recess. The leader separated himself from the group. He rolled left, looking up at us with his dark and intelligent right eye. His mouth was molded in a natural, friendly smile. He raised his right flipper, almost as if in greeting, and slapped down hard. A jet of water hit Shaughnessy in the face. She brought a hand to her eyes, sputtering. The dolphin let out a Donald Duck-ish exclamation and dove beneath the surface.

"They love to play," said Ariel.

"Noticed that, did you?" asked Shaughnessy, drying her face with the tail of her shirt. She saw me regarding her with a too-innocent smile, looked down, and tugged her shirt back down to her waist.

I laughed and turned to Ariel, who wasn't laughing. "You know they can't pull this boat all the way to New York," I said, changing the subject.

"I know. But they're great messengers."

"How do you know? You never saw the ocean before yesterday."

"We're birds of a feather, so to speak. We understand each other. There's a lot more to it than that, but it goes beyond words. We're . . . friends. Allies."

"How is it you can talk to them?"

"Language is language. Now be quiet; I need to talk with the bull some more."

I stood out of the way and watched while Ariel palavered with the dolphin. It was a silent, five-minute exchange. Ariel turned away at the end of it and the bull submerged to join his herd.

"So what's the story?" I asked.

"They're checking the area. Be patient."

Fifteen minutes later I saw it and nearly shit my pants. Beneath the water a shadow moved toward the Lady Woof. It looked like a frigging submarine. It broke surface a hundred yards from us, slapped its huge tail on the water, and dove again.

"A humpback whale!" Shaughnessy shouted in delight.

"Ariel, that thing's bigger than this boat!"

"Yes. Beautiful, isn't it? There ought to be one or two more on the way. We should make good time."

My jaw ached; I shut my mouth.

The leviathan circled and came at us from beneath and behind. I tensed, waiting for the impact, but none came. It was an effort to fight the urge to shut my eyes. I compromised and held a tight squint. It was hard to accept the reality of a living thing bigger than our forty-foot boat. Oh, sure, the dragon had been bigger—but we'd been on our element, on dry land, at the time. The sea was alien territory to me.

One of the trailing ropes began to swing forward. I watched as the blue-gray shadow sped silently ahead of us, almost creating the illusion that the sun was setting alarmingly fast and our shadow was lengthening before us. Then the rope grew taut and my knees buckled as we surged forward.

"Thar she blows!" yelled Shaughnessy, and it was true. A white geyser shot up from the whale.

My heart pounded wildly. I was frightened and exhilarated at the same time. "Your friends seem to have connections in high places," I said.

Ariel said nothing. Instead she inclined her horn to the sea. I looked. Out beyond the humpback pulling us along, two more leviathan shapes broke surface with Brobdingnagian majesty.

 

* * *

 

Night at sea. There were few clouds and the stars were a riot of varying magnitudes. Ahead the phosphorescent shapes of three humpback whales pulled us onward. We must have been doing five or six miles an hour. I'm not sure what that is in knots. They seemed to be able to maintain that speed almost indefinitely, though occasionally one would back out of its noose and swim freely. The dolphin herd remained with us, their silvery shapes speeding about the Lady.

Ariel had spoken to the leader for a long time after we were under way. She came back to me after an hour and a half of conversation. She seemed disturbed, but when I asked her what was wrong she only stared through me dazedly and said, "They're very . . . different . . . from you," and that was all.

 

* * *

 

Ariel had gone to sleep. The summoning spell had exhausted her and she retired early from the conversation. I stayed up and Shaughnessy talked to me about dolphins—they'd been the subject of a morphological report she'd written in college. After a while she realized I was no longer listening.

"Am I boring you?"

"Huh? Oh, no; I'm listening. I just . . . have a lot on my mind." I stared at my hands.

We were silent a long time.

"You've been with Ariel a long time, haven't you?" she finally asked. She looked at me steadily. There's something about moonlight and what it does to a woman's face, her eyes.

"Almost two years."

"You two act like partners. Listening to you talk is like watching a ping-pong match. It has that . . . that interplay you see in people who are lifelong friends, who've been roommates for a long time."

"Partners." I tasted the word. "Yeah, we're partners. Familiars is the proper term. A friendship . . . ." I shook my head, looking at the pale form of Ariel lying on the foredeck ahead, at her mild, comfortable glow, so much like the dolphins swimming around us. "It goes deeper than that, Shaughnessy."

She looked at the deck. A dolphin broke surface beside the boat, its back a silver crescent as it curled into the water with a small splash. The motion startled Shaughnessy and she jumped.

This is where she jumps toward me and I reach out to hold her protectively, I thought. And I look into her eyes, awkwardly for a moment, and we start to separate, but instead we pull closer together . . . . It would have happened like that in the movies. But it wasn't a movie, and she just smiled a brief smile, an apology for jumping, with a small duck of her head. Was I disappointed? I didn't know.

"I like it here," I said, much too loudly. I took an exaggerated, deep breath. "The sea air—it's fresh, it's invigorating, it's . . . . Old Spice." I laughed.

"Please, I'd almost managed to forget about TV commercials."

I smiled and it faded away quickly. So did the conversation, again.

A cry came from the sea ahead of us. A mournful, echoing thing, the ghost of a dead baby calling for its mother. My heart leapt. "What's that?" I tried to keep my voice calm.

"One of the whales. They do that. Sometimes sailors in old wooden sailing ships could hear them at night. The shape of the hull acted like a kind of amplifier to make the cries echo inside"

I shivered. "It's eerie."

"Yes. I think it's beautiful, too—the way some kinds of books are wistful and leave you sad and wondering, but they're beautiful, too." She leaned toward me.

The kiss was short. Just long enough for me to feel her warmth next to me, to want it to go on longer. The muscles in my shoulders and arms tightened, and I felt strangely stiff and wooden, liking it but reluctant.

We broke apart. Her eyes opened after mine; the lids lifted slowly, darkened by the moonlight. Somehow it separated her lashes from each other, made them distinct. She started to lean toward me again. I turned away. "We—we'd better get some sleep," I said, glad the darkness hid the flush I felt creeping up my neck to my ears.

"Yeah." Her voice was flat. "Big day tomorrow." She glanced at Ariel, who stirred restlessly. "Good night," she said. She stepped carefully past Ariel and into the cabin, where she had claimed the sofabed. I moved to the stern, watching the thin wake trail behind us, seeing the stars, listening to the mournful sobs of the whale. My ears were ringing. The night had a strange, surreal quality to it, as if suddenly it was something I could grab with both hands. I felt I could rip the fabric of reality in half, crumple it up, throw it away, and look at the blackness behind it. I looked straight out and tried to find where the horizon met the sky. I gave up when my eyes found nothing to focus on.

I fell asleep to the cries of the whale song.

 

* * *

 

On the morning of our third day at sea Ariel let me sleep late. I got up and stretched, interlacing my fingers and turning my hands palm outward, yawning. "What time is it?" I asked. Force of habit; I never really cared what time it was.

"Eleven-thirty."

I twisted my upper body and vertebrae popped. "We should have grabbed George's watch from him before he left."

"I wonder if he's all right."

"I'm sure he is. He ought to be home by now; it's been almost two weeks. Where's Shaughnessy?"

"Swimming."

I looked ahead. Silver streaked the water; apparently the dolphins were going to escort us all the way to New York "There's no way she can swim this fast. She'll be left behind."

"She'll be fine. Look—here she comes."

And, indeed, there she was being pulled by a dolphin. I'd half-expected her to be nude, but she still wore the yellow tanktop and cut-offs she'd found on board before we put to sea. She opened her mouth to call out just as the dolphin dove, giving her a mouthful of salt water. She came up coughing and spitting, rubbing her eyes. The dolphin nudged her concernedly, making sure her head stayed above water. "I'm all right!" she complained, but the dolphin hung around to make sure. She stroked it along the side, then grabbed the dorsal fin "Come on in," she called out. "The water's fine!"

I waved back and she tugged on the dolphin. It made a sound like a high-pitched lamb's bleat and raced away, Shaughnessy skimming along behind it. "Looks like fun," I said.

"Yes, it does. I wish I could do it."

I patted her flank. "Poor thing. Must be rough being a unicorn."

"Yeah, well, it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it."

I laughed. "You won't get mad if I go for a swim?"

"Mad?" Her nostrils flared. "Are you kidding? I'd be grateful."

"Okay, I can take a hint."

"Go ahead, have fun, leave me here. See if I care."

"Can't have it both ways." I rummaged through my pack, found my dirty blue shorts rolled up at the bottom, and changed.

I frolicked in the water with the dolphins and Shaughnessy until the sight of an object poking up from the distant sliver of coast made me ask to be brought back to the boat. Shaughnessy followed. Ariel came up to me as I clambered aboard. "Something wrong, Pete?"

"Look landward—see where the land ends, there?" She nodded. "What's that white thing sticking up a little bit?"

She peered forward. "I don't know what you call it. A tall cylinder, tapering toward the top. The topmost section is darker than the rest."

"A lighthouse," I said, and told her what that was. I went dripping back to the cabin and got out the road atlas. My finger traced up the coast until I found the only lighthouse marker corresponding to the lighthouse on the outcropping of land in the distance. The small red print beside my finger read. Sandy Hook Light/National Historical Landmark.

About an inch above that were bold, black letters that spelled out NEW YORK.

 

* * *

 

"Fun time's over, huh?" asked Shaughnessy.

I nodded. "Ariel, are the dolphins staying with us all the way to New York?"

"No. I just talked with the bull. They'll be leaving shortly."

"And the whales?"

"They know where to go."

"Terrific." My voice was heavy.

A few minutes later we said goodbye to the dolphins and the herd turned as one and sped away. We watched, silent and sad, as they sped quickly out of sight.

The whales pulled us on. Land crept closer.

All too soon we weren't on the open sea any longer. Land squeezed in on both sides of us and there was a bridge overhead. Though both shores weren't really all that close, I felt constricted.

And then we were in New York Harbor and I was looking at the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty, all clearly visible. Because pollution had vanished with the Change's advent, the water was clean, no Coke cans, no traces of oily residue, but the water itself was dark.

Shaughnessy and I had changed into dry clothes. The three of us stood on the center of the deck. The three whales plowed along diligently. Farther up rose the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the latter, though my heart wasn't in it. Ariel and Shaughnessy glanced at me curiously. "Tolkien would have loved it," I explained. They said nothing.

Onward . . . .

Governor's Island to our left, the Statue of Liberty to our right. I looked up at the gray-green figure and thought of Charlton Heston scraping at the sand on the beach in the last scene in Planet of the Apes, screaming, "You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you all to hell!"

No, I thought. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Onward . . . .

A few minutes later the three ropes on our prow slackened as the whales backed out of their nooses. Our momentum carried us beside a boat docked on the concrete shore. The Liberty Island Ferry. Miss Liberty was stenciled in white on the prow and stern. The water gurgled as we stopped.

The three whales remained thirty yards away. Ariel dipped her horn in silent thank-you and goodbye. Shaughnessy and I waved as they slipped silently away.

I moored us to the Miss Liberty and helped Shaughnessy on board. Ariel leapt the distance. I'd have accused her of showing off, but it was the easiest way for her to disembark, and I felt too sullen to say anything.

Though the ferry was in water, it was stationary and solidly anchored, and walking on its deck was a whole new experience. When you bounce on a trampoline for even a few minutes you get used to the feeling; your brain adjusts to the ground giving way beneath you. And when you jump onto the ground it jars your teeth because your brain expects it to give and it won't. It was like that.

We walked to the other side of the ferry and down the ramp. We looked at one another before any of us moved from the end of it. Finally I nodded and took a deep breath. I stepped off. Ariel and Shaughnessy followed me onto the concrete dock.

We were in New York.

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