Page 20 - WTP Vol. VI #4

Jedediah (continued from preceding page)
described the humpbacks: “You know, all I ever wanted was to make a film of Moby-Dick,” he grum- bled. “Did I ever tell you? They wouldn’t let me.”
of foam and leather, and the whale was gone for good. Jedediah smiled: “I’ll finish my coffee, now.”
“So, what did you do ‘bout it?”
~
“You should watch my movies; the westerns, first.” He picked up the styrofoam cup, tipped his hat and gestured at the binoculars. “Thanks again for these.” Then, boastfully, and nodding in the di- rection of a bench, “I’ll have ‘em back to you real soon: ‘bout the time it takes to drink my coffee.”
“That man! That damned, despicable man! He all but cleaned me out, Connie, and I will flay his thieving hide!”
~
Jedediah hissed the words from behind clenched teeth; he’d been about to shout, too, but his daughter had raised a firm hand, denying the storm a chance to gather and lash the land.
The gray wood bench was old and moist, a silent sentinel, anchored by a concrete block a couple of yards from the edge of a grassy bluff.
She’d brought with her a stack of documents and a baby son. The child was swaddled snugly, asleep inside a tiny cot upon a busted crab cage below his grandfather’s gun racks and the hunting knives, and between the boxes of spent cartridge shells, the empty beer cans and the crates of whiskey bottles. Jedediah’s trailer was cold from the night before but it was beginning to warm-up now in the mid-day sun. The old man sat erect on a small wood stool, and Connie opposite him, in the broken wicker chair, her arms folded atop the papers heaped upon her lap.
Jedediah sat down, set the coffee by his boots. Nothing would be glimpsed until he stopped
with the trying, he knew that. But with the rims of his eyes pressed into the cold hard rubber, he scanned the sea a few times, squinting, adjusting the focus, cursing and generally doing everything he knew he shouldn’t do. Another sip of coffee. The breathing was too hard, too rapid. “One good breath,” he muttered, catching himself. Then he puckered, sucked the air in, quit the scanning and kept those binoculars steady. He watched the sea roll and ripple, held his breath, let it out, timed it all with the rhythm of the waves. “Gently,” the old man whispered. He uncrossed his legs, shuffled, settled in. “And relax.”
“No charges will be filed against Lochlan Byrne, Papa.” Her voice was clear and resolute, as if she were attempting, involuntarily, to channel the pipsqueak receptionist she’d encountered just that morning at the district-attorney’s office. “Lack of evidence,” she added, and with those three words she did the best she could to convey some sense of finality.
As he pulled the binoculars away from his face, the sea before him lurched and buckled. Seagulls scattered. A geyser burst, and white froth tore across a monumental dome of thick, wet leather; that skin was scarred and barnacled. The whale’s head emerged, and Jedediah watched as the big eyes opened. They were black, bottomless, like windows to another world. The birds screeched, hovering, but there’d be no time to land on the animal’s enormous back. The beast was arching, another geyser exploded and the head plunged as the tail soared then slapped the waves, scatter- ing those hapless gulls a second time. A final fuss
“Lack of evidence?” Jedediah whispered, trying not to waken his grandson. But he couldn’t stifle a wounded laugh, looking about the room, waving a hand toward his mobile home’s tin roof. “Are you serious?”
11
Connie went quiet. There was little more to say. She was exhausted. This day and always she radi- ated weariness, even if it was counterbalanced by a rather stubborn love, resistant to the rigors of the time she’d spent with this very difficult man and enduring of the torments he visited upon all those nearest to him.