Are You Seeing Me? Page 9

  Clinton Muckler grunts for the first time in a long time. He gives a small flick of his head, like he’s trying to shoo a fly that’s landed on his nose. “I’m real sorry for your loss.”

  He takes off his sunglasses, places them in a case lying next to the steering wheel.

  “Takin’ care of your sister—that’s a real good reason to wanna prove Ogopogo’s real. Almost makes me hope the good ol’ boy’ll come up into the light an’ make it happen.”

  THE GOOD OL’ BOY NEVER MADE it happen.

  When we return to the dock, I have taken eighty-one photographs. None of them contains Canada’s most famous mythical sea animal.

  “You disappointed?” asks Justine, holding my shoulders. I answered this already. Clinton Muckler asked the question when we stepped back onto the dock, just after he shook my hand and just before he started Kathleen Rita’s engine and motored away. I told him no. I was prepared to give an explanation, but he didn’t ask for one.

  He grunted, wiped his forehead, said he was glad. “Best customers I ever had shouldn’ go away feelin’ cheated,” he added.

  Justine wants an explanation though. I close my eyelids to slits so that her face is blurry. “Ogopogo was close the whole time,” I say. “I knew he was there, near the surface. Maybe even peeking out of the lake every now and then, just to see what we were doing. He is a curious creature. But he is also smart.” A ladybug lands on the collar of Jus’s shirt. I am thankful—I can look at it but still appear focused. “If I’d seen him, it would’ve been because he let me. Because he had a good reason for me to see him.”

  “Ogopogo was there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You felt it.”

  “Yes.”

  Justine glances at the camera hanging from my wrist. “So if Ogopogo had let you see him, if he had a good reason…Would you have taken a picture?”

  I give three big shakes of the head. “I would’ve just watched. No lie. I would’ve told him he was safe with me.” I take my sister’s wrists, lower her arms down to her sides and grab hold of the middle, ring and pinkie fingers of her right hand. “I’ll do something else amazing.”

  Justine scans my face, studying every different part, as if she’s inspecting a car-detailing job. “You’re already amazing,” she says.

  “Shut the hell up!” I reply.

  “No. You’re amazing!”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  “Okay, then. You’re a dickhead!”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  We perform Dad’s pity laugh—the one he said he stole from George McFly in Back to the Future—then have a proper giggle. When it’s done, Jus hugs me. I am pleased to find her hair smells like tea-tree oil even though we are far from home. Her voice is muffled by my shoulder. “What you said about taking care of me—that was very sweet.”

  “I meant it.”

  “Yes. You did.” She gives me a hard squeeze, then steps back, her hands holding mine. “You want a couple more minutes at the water before we head back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait at that bench over there.”

  She walks off and I turn to view Ogopogo’s backyard one final time. The colors have changed since this morning. Everything is darker, as if the water has soaked into the landscape. Homing in on Rattlesnake Island, I think about the modern equipment being used in searches—the thermal imaging and the Remote Operating Vehicle and the sonar. Will the people chasing Ogopogo ever get proof? Will they ever believe what Clinton Muckler already knows? What I know? It’s doubtful. The chasers are like Captain Ahab—they’re not doing it for the right reasons. And even if they found the creature and caught him in a net and brought him onto land and put him in a zoo, and the story was seen on TV and the Internet and then they made a movie called Ogopogo Is All Up in Your Face—even if all that happened, I think there would still be people who would say it was a lie because they didn’t understand and were afraid.

  My imagination is taking over. I am actually hearing a sonar sound: beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep… BEEP. And there’s a voice that follows the end of the beeps. An upset voice. I turn my head and realize it’s not my imagination and it isn’t sonar.

  “HOW MANY TIMES DO WE have to have this conversation? Seriously, I can’t believe we’re doing this again… AAAARGH!”

  Her shout is a punch on the jaw, a kick to the guts. She stomps the ground with her right foot. The earth shifts.

  “You know something bad is going to happen, do you? How do you know, Marc? Tell me…Oh, you just know, do you? You’ve got her all figured out—”

  Cracks.

  “No, you’re not protecting me. This is all about you, Marc. You and this ridiculous don’t-mess-with-my-woman thing you’ve got going on…”

  My legs give and I tip forward, hand holding my stomach. Splotches appear in front of my eyes, like wasted bugs on a windshield. Justine’s pained voice keeps coming, piling onto my neck and shoulders, buckling my knees.

  “You know what? This is too much for me to handle right now. It really is. This trip, the appointment, Perry’s move when we get back—I don’t need the extra aggravation. I’m sorry…”

  Her words are flying objects now, random and dangerous. They are spears hurled into my brain. They are the crazy legs of evil John attacking at will, and I am Jackie Chan, drunk and helpless and suffering. I wonder if they’ll ever end. I don’t wonder for long.

  “What am I saying? I’m saying if you love me, Marc, you’ll leave me alone. That’s what I need…How long? For the rest of this trip…When we get back? Right now, I have no clue. I really don’t. All I know is this cannot continue. We need a break, starting now…”

  I don’t want to hear this. But it was spoken, so it can’t be taken back. Justine and Marc—it’s over. No more. He is gone and my sister is by herself. She is alone, without a soul mate.

  The consequences rush toward me like a death squad of ninjas, throwing grenades at my head.

  BANG!

  If she holds on to you…

  BANG!

  …she won’t let go.

  BANG!

  It’s not fair to her.

  BANG!

  She would never be free.

  Another beep. My sister’s crying is quiet. She’s trying to stop it from coming out, trying to catch it in her belly and in her throat. She can’t hide it. Not from me. Her shaky breaths and tiny sobs grip me, rip me. Pain stretches every cell in my body. I am splitting into two and into four and into eight. I am a jigsaw puzzle. Any second now I will be caught by the wind and scattered across the ground. I wait and wait. I stay on all fours. Something is holding me in place, stopping me from falling through the earth. Something powerful. My body is seismic, but I can lift my head and focus on the lake.

  Ogopogo is everything I imagined. His body is a perfect prehistoric design—smooth and sleek, shinier than a brand-new quarter. He moves quickly and easily, dipping and rolling without disturbing the surface. At some angles, his scaly skin changes to the same blue-green of the lake, making him seem more like a ghost than a living animal. Four times, he looks up at the cloudless sky and its fading light. Does he want to fly like the brown hawk high above? Then he turns toward me. The air is still. The distance between us is a stone’s throw.

  I know Jus is still upset, but that knowledge is wrapped in a bubble floating over my head. The pain is now outside my body. Ogopogo watches, his horselike head swaying. His face is lined and scarred; his gray eyes are even. I think he is calm. I think he trusts me. After twenty seconds, maybe thirty, he lifts higher out of the water, as if obeying a command to stand and salute. He shudders and flicks his huge spike of a tail. A long rope of spray drenches the dock. Several fat droplets hit the ground in front of me. Ignoring the tremor in my hand, I reach forward and touch the wet patches. They feel alive; an electric current runs through them, or maybe the pulses of a tsunami from a hundred years ago. I lift my fingers and touch my lips and tongue. Tingly t
hreads fill my mouth and throat. They stitch together and spread through my whole body until there is a frosty blanket covering the pain.

  I can think now. I can dig the ninjas’ shrapnel out of my skin, line them up on the ground, view them as a problem to solve. Almost immediately, the answer rises high and flicks its tail.

  Set her free.

  Perry Richter saves the day—that is the future.

  And the future is now.

  No lie.

  I look toward Ogopogo one final time, hoping to whisper a thank-you. He is no longer there. The splashes on the dock have dried up. The surface of the lake is a sheet of glass. The hawk still circles above.

  Jus’s grief is a feather. I fall forward onto my stomach.

  I START PLANNING DURING OUR journey to Seattle.

  Justine doesn’t do much other than drive, just as she didn’t do much other than watch TV last night. She wears sunglasses all day, even when we’re inside. On the road, she keeps the car’s satellite radio tuned to the “Nineties on Nine” station. When she does speak, it’s a quote from the classics she likes to read:

  “It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

  “Know your own happiness. Want for nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name: Call it hope.”

  “Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant…A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can…”

  At the United States border crossing, she sniffles, blows her nose. When the officer asks if she’s okay, Justine blames it on allergies. The officer gives a pretend smile and tells us to enjoy our stay. Passing the Tulalip Resort, Justine swears and bangs her hands five times on the steering wheel. Near Seattle’s big stadiums—Safeco Field for baseball and CenturyLink Field for football—she pulls off her rubber band and throws it out the window. I don’t mind the lack of conversation or social interaction. They’re great during an adventure, but this is no longer an adventure. This is a rescue, like the one following the 1993 Los Angeles earthquake, when a street sweeper was pulled out of the collapsed Northridge Center and its six-meter-high pancake stack of a car park.

  To set my sister free, I must make her afraid. Not for a week or a day, just for a few hours. It won’t be pretty, especially after her freak-out over the swimming note at the Pacifica West Hotel. I can see her reaction. Panic will appear on her face: lines on her forehead, big eyes, color in her cheeks and neck, incisor teeth biting into the bottom lip. Her heart will pound. Her breathing will be shorter, quicker. Her stomach will be full of butterflies. Her mind and her feet will race.

  It won’t be a simple procedure for me, either. I will be very nervous. Alone in a large American city, wandering streets only seen before on a map, having to talk to total strangers with TV accents. It will unnerve me for sure. But I will find solutions to any problems that come up because I won’t have my sister to rely on. I will be Master Disaster, brave and strong.

  I have two possible options—the visit to Bruce Lee’s grave on Saturday and the visit to Pike Place Fish Market on Sunday. So the next day I do my homework on both, scoping out the locations, listing surrounding landmarks, studying routes to the closest police station. Twice during the evening Jus asks me what I’m up to. I tell her I am investigating the twin tragedies of Bruce Lee’s death and his son Brandon Lee’s death and the claim by some people that there is a curse on the family name.

  “Wonderful subject,” she says with a voice I know is sarcastic. “Lives snuffed out just when they were getting started.”

  She sighs. She’s doing that now instead of quoting her classics. A small flutter sometimes appears in her right eyelid. If she were feeling better, she would remember I’m not hardcore into Bruce Lee. I like his movie Enter the Dragon, and I like that he was an inspiration for the teenage Jackie Chan when they filmed Fist of Fury, and I think his unfortunate death from a cerebral edema is an interesting first-aid mystery. And there is no doubt he was super fit and an amazing martial artist. But there are negative things about Bruce Lee too. He only ever made one good movie. He didn’t do movies in English. He didn’t make jokes—he wasn’t funny in the slightest. In fact, he looked either serious or angry pretty much all the time. Jus knows where I stand on Bruce Lee. If she were feeling better, she would suspect I was researching something else, something I didn’t want her to know about.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, DRIVING TO Lakeview Cemetery, I decide I will make my sister afraid during the visit to Pike Place tomorrow. When we arrive at Lot 276—the location of Bruce and Brandon Lee’s graves—I know for sure I made the right choice. Looking around Lakeview, a number of factors would’ve created problems. The crowd is small. The cemetery has a lot of open space, with the headstones providing the only decent cover. And because it is a place of sadness and silence, there is not much noise or activity to be a distraction.

  On the way back to the car, Justine asks me what I thought of it. I tell her the graves were very well maintained, the marble shone, and all the flowers were fresh rather than withered. And, no lie, I thought there would be more Asian people present.

  “Great. It was a disappointment.”

  “No, it was different. Quiet and open and not very crowded.”

  She folds her arms. “I thought you’d prefer it that way?”

  I shrug, knowing on this day, nothing could be further from the truth.

  “PEZ, I DON’T KNOW IF you understand, because I’ve been such a downer lately—if you don’t, I just want to make absolutely sure—the thing with Marc had nothing to do with you.”

  Justine is beside me, her arm looped through mine. Her left leg is tucked in beside my right, hip to ankle, as if preparing for a three-legged race. We are at the Pike Place Fish Market, waiting for the men in the orange overalls—the world-famous fish throwers—to be funny and entertaining. The crowd builds with each minute. The area in front of the counter is packed. A section of cobblestoned street behind is also filling up. There is a lot of noise—people talking loudly, laughing, car engines revving and idling, a faraway siren, a whistle, a man shouting about a passage from the Bible. There is plenty of movement too—mostly slow-walking visitors on the street, looking at the different shops and stalls. Some are quicker, like the ponytailed man on a segway and the older couple wearing matching American-flag tracksuits and riding a tandem bike.

  “You weren’t to blame,” says Jus.

  “Duh,” I reply.

  She laughs and squeezes my arm. She is relieved. I am the opposite of relieved. I am counting breaths and trying to keep them evenly spaced. Normally, humming or squeezing my fists or running my hands up and down my thighs would help settle me. But Justine knows they are my calming behaviors, and even though I have good excuses for feeling anxious—the sounds, close strangers, the smells of fish and candle wax and paint—I want her to think I am handling the situation well.

  I wish she would let go of my arm.

  Justine looks at her watch, makes a sucking noise with her lips. “This show must be kicking off soon, hey?”

  “They don’t do shows,” I reply.

  “What’s that?”

  “I researched Pike Place Fish Market and they don’t do set shows, not like a circus or a theme park. They just serve customers. They make people feel good by being excellent servants.”

  “And through airborne fish.”

  “Of course. That’s what made them well known. That was their mission.” I point to the shop logo, which has an orange banner with the words WORLD FAMOUS written on it. “They achieved that. They now have a different mission—world peace.”

  “World peace?”

  “Yes. It says so on their website.”

  “They want to achieve world peace by tossing a few mullet around?”

  “I don’t think they have mullet. They mainly throw salmon.”

  One of the orange overalls—a thick man with acne scars and a handlebar mustache—laug
hs with a lady wearing very large hoop earrings and a purple Washington Huskies sweater. Looking around the crowd and the passersby, I see Huskies clothing everywhere—T-shirts and tank tops and trackpants. One girl has some very short shorts with WH printed on the bum. I also notice groups of Washington State Cougars fans wearing red. I wish I had college sport merchandise—it would’ve been much easier to blend in.

  Justine looks at her watch again. “We don’t have to stay here long if you don’t want to.”

  I jerk my head, causing my cap to tilt sideways. My breath count starts over.

  “You okay?”

  “I…I am fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “I am fine, Just Jeans.” I give her the widest smile I can manage.

  “Okay, Pez, okay. I believe you,” she says, patting my forearm. “Keep the teeth fillings to yourself.”

  There are a number of places I could make a getaway, but the fish market is the best opportunity. It has the crowd, the noise, and there are excellent escape routes and hideouts close by. And it possesses one special way to make sure Justine’s focus is elsewhere.

  “You’re going to buy a fish so you can catch it, aren’t you?” I ask.

  Jus turns her head and leans back a little.“What…me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought the guys who work in the shop did all the throwing and catching.”

  “No. The customers also do it. Customers like you.”

  Justine pulls a sour-taste face and rubs the back of her neck with her free hand. “I don’t know, Pez. It was hard enough catching a basketball at school, let alone a barramundi.”

  “You don’t have to worry about catching a barramundi, because they don’t have any.”

  “And what the hell are we going to do with the fish when I’ve caught it? We’re driving back to Vancouver this afternoon. Where are we going to store it? In the glove box?”

  “We could buy a cooler bag. Or a small cooler.”

  “Not really the souvenirs I was looking to bring back.”

  “You wouldn’t have to buy it, Justine. I could buy it.”