Lily And The Octopus Part 16

And that's when I wake up gasping for air.

I turn immediately to Lily, who is sound asleep. Her face is perfect, unmolested by violence. She is not the octopus. She could never betray me. It's not possible, it's not in her to do so. And yet the dream was so real, as if it were foreshadowing gloom. She looks so beautiful, so calm. I force myself to shake the feeling, but not before whispering, "Please don't ever die."

Which is an impossible request of any living thing.

There's a wetness by my side and I'm immediately afraid that the octopus is back, but the culprit this time is me, or more accurately the now empty scotch bottle I find by my side. I reach to wipe my eyes awake but miss and hit my nose.

That's when I realize I'm drunk.

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but never too deep.

And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep.

I don't know the rhyme or why that's in my head, or who said it or where it's from. Kipling? It doesn't matter. I just have the overwhelming feeling I'm breaking rules. Laws. Edicts. Things meant to be followed. Things not meant to be broken. Forces not meant to be tested.

Complete darkness falls over our quarters as the moon pa.s.ses behind a cloud. As are we. Behind a cloud. We've lost sight of the journey, our purpose in being here. We are hunters, and the night is for hunting. And here we are drunk and asleep. If the octopus were to strike now, we would be easy prey. Pathetic. Ripe for the killing. How did this happen? How did I allow it to be?

I look at my sleeping love and silently beg her forgiveness. What have I gotten us into? She doesn't need this. She doesn't want this. She doesn't understand revenge. And while I prefer to think of our voyage as an offensive maneuver, there's no denying that's partly what this is. Revenge. You weighed anchor in our waters, now we sail deeply in yours.

I stumble out of bed in the way drunk people do, clumsily and with great kerfuffle. I stand up too tall and bang my head on the ceiling. I trip over the empty scotch bottle and it sends red ball scooting across the floor with a clang. Quickly I pick up the bottle to silence it. I look at Lily. If anything will wake her, it's the sound of red ball roaring alive to play and bouncing against the clapboard. Yet she sleeps soundly through it, a sign of our thorough depletion.

I climb the few steps up to the deck and let the night breeze wash over me. I inhale it deeply. The stars I can see number in the thousands; thousands more hang behind the clouds. The boat sways and I nearly lose my balance, so I lie flat on the deck and look up. I am so very small. Physically small, but also petty. Why am I driven more by revenge than by forgiveness?

I think about all the people I need to forgive.

Jeffrey? We loved each other, and yet love alone was not enough. Did he throw it all away with his indiscretions? Or was I never available enough in the relationship to keep his eye from wandering. In the end we were probably equally neglectful of what we had. So why was there so much anger when it was time to walk away?

My mother for not saying she loves me? We're too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they don't have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about. And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine. This is suddenly funny to me, ridiculously selfish, and I laugh and the outburst is startling. I lie still as the sound launches skyward like a rocket, reaches the stratosphere, then quietly falls back to earth in the form of a quote I once read: Yours is by far the harder lot, but mine is happening to me. In this moment, I miss my mother.

The octopus? Does he merit my forgiveness? Was he just doing what octopuses do? Would I blame the lioness for taking down the gazelle? Or should I blame the ecosystem-the creation of a world where flesh is food?

The worst of my scorn and derision has always been reserved for me. But what did I do to deserve it, really? Allowed a relationship to fail? Permitted the octopus to come? Tolerated depression without fighting back? Dragged Lily and myself out to sea?

And suddenly I want to turn the boat around. I ache for home; grieve for it as if it were gone. But it's not gone, it's just far away. Waiting for us. What are we doing? We're adrift in the middle of nowhere, and it's only a matter of time before we run out of food. Why? All I have to do is turn the boat around. Point the compa.s.s east instead of west. There are tears in my eyes. It's what I want. For me. For us.

But I don't.

Some things are unforgivable. My problem is the opposite of mankind's: not having gone into battle often enough, not having waged enough war. I've always shied from confrontation, more often than not backing down from a fight. Quarreling has always felt silly, bordering on the ridiculous. War, after all, was something that happened to faraway people in faraway places. Not something that is sparked by an eight-armed invasion of your own front lines.

But this, with the octopus, this is war. Guerrilla war. I can't feel self-conscious about it. I can't be chastened before the battle begins. We are soldiers now, like it or not. As such, we need to be alert, awake, and on guard. And we need to continue plowing west.

All of this is sobering. I rise again to confront the night-this time my feet are steady, and I remember to sway into the pitch of the boat.

Remember the night is for hunting.

I walk to the deckhouse and flip on the echo sounder. It whirrs to life, transmitting its sound pulses on cue. I chuckle. Three weeks ago I didn't know how to do any of this and now it's second nature. I wait for any hydroacoustic data that might signal the presence of our prey, but the pulses return little more than the depth of the trench below.

I know the octopus is out there. I move to the ship's edge and grab the boat by the stern. "You hear me? I know you're out there!" I yell. My voice is swallowed by the murky night; the only echo is in my head.

I check the data one more time before turning off the sounder. Nothing. Instead, I find a pen and some paper in the deckhouse and scrawl my ominous warning. I KNOW YOU'RE OUT THERE. I cram the message into the empty scotch bottle and screw the lid back on tightly. With all my might I hurl it into the darkness.

I do not hear it land.

The Squall Three days later when the storm begins, it comes without mercy or warning or forgiveness. I have just enough time to secure Lily's harness over her life jacket and anchor her to Fishful Thinking's wheel before we take the brunt of it. It is a fight to keep the bow of the boat heading into the gale. Lily vomits twice outside the deckhouse and asks for chicken and rice. I barely have time to explain how impossible a request that is while I scramble to weigh down our charts and maps and do my best to secure the trawls. The sky blackens so completely I forget that it isn't night; the falling rain hits like ice picks, every drop a skin-piercing sting. The boat takes on water until the engine sputters and quits. The waves crash hard over the sides of the boat, and Lily fights to keep her nose above the sudden onboard surf. I try bailing with a tackle bucket, but all of my efforts seem futile. The storm is going to rage.

There's nothing to do except pitch into the surf; at least with my hands free of the wheel I can focus my attention on bailing and keeping Lily afloat. In the back of my mind I think we might capsize, yet I have no choice but to banish those thoughts. Survival dictates absolute focus.

Lily shivers on her tether, and I crawl to lift her out of the water and onto a low shelf in the deckhouse. I don't want to put her atop her usual perch on the stool; the center of gravity is too high and I worry about her falling.

"Stay here!" She can barely hear me over the wind.

She nods her understanding and I return to bailing.

As if on cue the hail begins, hitting the deck with rhythmic applause. I thought nothing would hurt like the driving rain, but I was wrong-I can actually feel my body bruising. A forty-knot wind gust drives the hail and the rain every which way and visibility drops to nothing. I scramble for the cover of the deckhouse to be by Lily's side.

I! DO! NOT! LIKE! THIS! STORM! I'M! SCARED!

I huddle close to her for warmth. The wind shrieks across Fishful Thinking's deck like a coven of angry witches. The gusts actually seem to flatten the seas, and the rocking calms just enough to keep me from vomiting, too. The water washing aboard over the sides seems to slow, and we drift, taking the wind and the seas a few degrees abaft the bow.

"I don't like being wet." Lily shakes as best she can in my grip and a wriggle moves through her whole body like a wave until it has been released from the very tip of her tail.

"I know you don't." I tell her a story to calm her. "When you were a puppy you wouldn't even go out in the rain at all. I bought you a little raincoat and everything, but you would have none of it. One night it rained very hard, and I was determined to get you to pee. I didn't want to crawl into a warm, dry bed only to have to take you outside again in the middle of the rainy night. You were being stubborn in not peeing, and I was being stubborn in not going back inside until you did, and we were each trying to outstubborn the other."

"How did we resolve that?"

"I found a small overhang with some dry gravel underneath and eventually you relented." I remember the satisfaction of victory, and how short-lived it would be in our relationship. "It was the first and last time you ever really gave in to me."

Lily seems to enjoy the story, and for a brief moment as we focus on each other the storm melts away. But it is in this sudden calm that I fear the octopus may strike, and once again I am shivering and clambering for direction. I spent so long thinking of the octopus as my only enemy, I hadn't dreamed of him double-teaming me with as mighty a foe as the sea. I realize how foolish it all sounds, how nave, underestimating the ocean. This could be the end of us both.

Then Lily points with her nose off the bow where a shadow emerges from the darkness and fog.

LOOK! LOOK! LOOK!.

The shadow becomes a shape and the shape becomes a ship and hope washes over me in a way I would have thought impossible just minutes before. Is it possible we are not alone out here after all? I sound Fishful Thinking's horn to announce our presence. Foremost in my mind is avoiding a collision. I sound the horn again, and again every ten seconds until we're answered by the quiet bellowing of the other ship, which is closer than the horn's blast would suggest, most of her yell swallowed by the wind.

The other ship is a deep-sea yacht, and by the way it approaches, steadily and with purpose, it seems it still has the use of both its engines. I step out of the deckhouse and wave my arms furiously, signaling our inability to steer. The yacht approaches slowly, skillfully, eventually pulling up beside us before she cuts her engines.

After a beat, a man appears holding a coil of rope.

"Ahoy!" he yells.

"Ahoy there!" I reply. Water belches between us, wetting me with spray, but I don't care-I'm just so overwhelmed and relieved that out of nowhere help has arrived.

The man tosses the rope and it lands with a thud at my feet. I grab the end and pull us together, tying the lariat to a large cleat on the deck with a poor man's imitation of a sailor's knot, keeping us as close to the yacht as the side trawl will allow.

"Some storm." The man looks drier and more put together than I must, but he is weathered and scraggly, too. He's bald, with a round head, his skin almost bluish from the cold. Judging by our distance from sh.o.r.e, he has been at sea awhile.

"She was a rager," I say. And then, almost as an afterthought, "You think that was the worst of it?" I brace myself for the answer. If it's not, I don't know what will become of us.

The man smiles. A dog's bark pierces the wind and I look back at Lily, but she shivers in silence. A golden retriever emerges from the yacht's cabin, tail wagging. "Lost your engines, eh? Why don't you come aboard. We'll have what the whalers used to call a gam."

I remember gams from reading Moby-d.i.c.k. When two ships would meet at sea, they would drop anchor and whaleboats would ferry the crews of each to the other ship to exchange gossip and news. I look toward Lily. She seems unnerved, and I wonder why. It's not like her to be so still in the presence of another dog.

"Sounds good to me. May I bring my first mate?" I indicate Lily.

"Goldie here insists." The man pats his dog on the head, and I lift Lily and hold her close so that she feels safe. I grab the last bottle of scotch from the deckhouse, thinking it rude to come aboard empty-handed. There's only a swig or two left, but it will more than do.

The seas are instantly calmer aboard the st.u.r.dier boat. The yacht is named Owe Too, and is newer than Fishful Thinking. The cabin is warm and inviting, and while not overwhelmingly large, it seems absolutely palatial when compared to our deckhouse. The man pulls some towels out of a closet and tosses them to me. I undo Lily from her life preserver and gently rub her dry. She noses up to Goldie while I dry myself. Goldie sniffs her hindquarters in return and Lily relaxes in the dryness of Owe Too's shelter. The overwhelming relief of seeing another person, and another dog, brings the feeling of tears to my eyes even though none appear. I'm too dehydrated and too shocked to actually cry.

"Goldie, why don't you take your friend to your special place in the hull." The man whistles and snaps and Goldie motions to Lily to follow, and they disappear through a small door together. "Wasted s.p.a.ce under there, so I hollowed it out for Goldie. The enclosed nature gives her a safe place in the vast expanse of sea. I thought us captains could speak while I fix us something to eat."

I raise what's left of the scotch as an offering. The man smiles and pushes two gla.s.ses toward me.

He heats a stew for us, and chicken and rice for the dogs. Lily is going to be ecstatic. As he works I tell him our story. I tell him about the octopus's arrival, the vet's diagnosis, and all we've been through-the octopus's sudden disappearance, chartering Fishful Thinking, the details of our hunt. He listens intently, interrupting only twice to ask me to clarify a point. When I finish we are both quiet for a moment.

"Do you think you'll be able to kill this octopus?"

I answer truthfully. "I think I will enjoy it."

My response hangs awkwardly in the air.

"You know, yacht derives from the Dutch word jacht. Translated literally it means the hunt."

I nod as if this isn't new information, but it is. Even after three weeks at sea, my knowledge of boating is limited. The man serves us two bowls of hot stew and it is, in this moment, the best thing I have ever tasted. Salted fish and tomatoes and parsnips and other root vegetables. He puts the chicken and rice in two bowls on the floor and whistles for the dogs, who come running.

CHICKEN! AND! RICE! LOOK! I! GOT! CHICKEN! AND! RICE!.

For Lily, it's Christmas morning. She is just as excited as I am. Her initial hesitance to come aboard has now fully abated. She wastes no time marveling to Goldie about how chicken and rice is her favorite, choosing to show her instead by sticking her whole face in the bowl of warm mush.

"This far out at sea. No one else around. Would it be correct to say, then, that you are on a hunt of your own?" I ask.

The man hesitates before saying, "Perhaps."

"And what are you hunting, if you don't mind me asking?" The man looks at me as if perhaps I've overstepped my bounds, and I look back at him without blinking. The silence becomes too much. "If we're just talking. Captain to captain."

"We're just talking," he confirms, before answering. "What is anyone hunting for? Peace. Solace. Meaning." Then, after a pause, "Spoils."

"Spoils?" The word strikes me as odd. Like the spoils of war?

The man shrugs.

We eat our stew and the Owe Too rises and falls over a big wave and we both brace ourselves against the table, afraid that the squall has turned back in our direction. After a moment of relative stillness, it seems the wave was an aberration.

"You know, I may have seen your octopus," the man says.

I drop my fork and the tines strike my bowl with a clang. "You have?"

"Not three days ago. Goldie and I were enjoying the sunset when off the starboard side there was a slick reflection that sparkled differently off the water than the last of the sun. I looked more closely and I swear I could see an eye watching us. The eye blinked once before Goldie caught a whiff of him and started barking. The thing swam closer, eyeing Goldie, and I grabbed her collar and held her close. The whole experience was over in a matter of seconds, but it was unnerving. As it approached our ship it sank beneath the surface and I never saw it come up again."

The hairs stand up on the back of my neck and we both reach for our tipple. My gut was correct.

We are close.

I notice the man has a Magic 8 Ball on the shelf beside the table. The kind I had as a kid. I reach for it.

"Do you mind?"

The man nods his permission. I cup the black ball with two hands and ask my question aloud. "Will I ever catch up with the octopus?" I give the ball a good shake before turning it over.

Signs point to yes.

"There you have it," the man says as he smiles a crooked smile. "The 8 Ball never lies." He clears his dish and reaches for mine. "More?"

Before I can say yes, Lily starts to growl. I look up, afraid that her love of chicken and rice has emboldened Lily to challenge Goldie for the bigger dog's share. But their dishes are empty, and Goldie is nowhere to be seen.

Lily is growling at the man.

"Lily! That's not nice. He made you chicken and rice! Where's Goldie? Say thank you to our hosts."

GOLDIE! IS! A! FISH!.

"What? What are you talking about? Goldie is a dog, like you."

Her growling continues, low and guttural. It's a noise I've only heard her make once before, when we were on a walk back home in Los Angeles one night and a coyote ambled across our path.

I'm becoming increasingly alarmed.

"Don't worry," the man says. "The storm has her on high alert. That's a good dog you have there." He sets the dishes near the sink. "Would be a shame if anything happened to her."

His every word exacerbates the situation, and things escalate quickly. Lily is gnashing what teeth she has left in her old age, and she crouches low, ready to attack.

"Lily?" This time I don't scold. This time I know better. This time I trust my dog.

I turn to the man. "How did you come to name the Owe Too?"

He answers without hesitation. "I owe too much on the t.i.tle."

Owe Too.

Lily's barking is now out of control. Goldie is a fish? I look around for the retriever, but there is no sign of her. I can barely gather my thoughts over the racket, but I force myself to think fast.

Owe Too.

What do you see, Lily, that I do not?

Owe too.

Oh, to . . . Oh to what?