They Were Dolphins, Chapter 3, part I

The next day was a Saturday. The boy and his brother woke up at nearly the same time and threaded their way through the human wreckage of bodies strewn in the hallway and the living room. The boys went into the kitchen and made mayonnaise and mustard sandwiches. They referred to the pieces of bread as “wiches” rather than “sand” wiches, which they do not like.

They wandered out the back door to avoid the living room and explored the back yard. The yard was not kempt and the wild grass was tall. There were several disused pieces of wood and building materials on one side. The boys found a favourite play thing of theirs: a huge 2.000 litre fish tank. It was empty and stood taller than the boys and the back was painted blue. The acrylic surface was dirty and scratched, but the boys still envision fish swimming in the murky depths.

The boy dolphin got an idea and enlisted his brother to help. They took a hose from a pile of ropes and cloth in the garage and attached it to a faucet next to the house. They ran the end of the hose to the fish tank. After a lot of effort wasted and great difficulty, they realised they could not get the host into the tank. The boy’s brother found a broken wooden chair and brought it over to stand next to the tank. They worked together to strain and struggle with the host until it was hanging inside the empty tank.

The boys turned on the water to fill the tank and left.

They walked by the side of the house and turned right toward the park instead of left, which would have taken them toward the school. Up a small incline in the street, they turned left to go down the hill a bit of a ways until they came to a bridge over a stream. This was a different bridge than the one near the school, but it was the same stream that ran along the valley floor.

They paused over the middle of the stream and gathered pebbles laying on the sidewalk and toss them into the stream. The boy dolphin told his brother that he would like to run away forever and go live in the ocean. He doesn’t explain that he is a dolphin, just said that he wanted to live in the ocean. His brother listened and nodded in agreement. He pointed to the park and made swimming motions with his arms. There was a public pool on the other side of the park and they went over there.

As they walked along, the boy dolphin regretted not jumping from the bridge to kill himself. It would have been a good ending to his life and worthy of mention in the newspapers. The rational part of his brain understood that he wouldn’t actually die from a fall at that height, especially into water, but that doesn’t deter him from relishing the idea.

When they reached the gated entrance to the pool, the boys met some other classmates from school. They greeted each other raucously. One requirement of swimming in the pool was that the children had to take a shower before entering the pool. The boys stripped to their underwear and joined a “campfire”, their word for a process whereby they turned a shower spigot’s hot water on full blast and let it splash on the tile floor. The water was too hot to stand directly in it, but the indirect splashes would be nice and toasty to sit in front of. They gathered around the water campfire just in a circle and told stories, just like a real campfire.

The boy dolphin told the group a story of a dog that was lonely and scared, running down a beach. It was all alone in the world and it was looking up and down the strand for a friend. The dog had walked and run so far that it had no idea where it came from or where it was going. Eventually the dog dug a hole big enough to lay down in. The dog curled up in this hole and decided that it was so lonely and afraid that it would just fall asleep and never wake up.

A kind girl came by on the beach and saw the dog. She reached out to help the dog but it was scared and it tried to bite and bark at the girl. However, the girl persisted at being friendly to the dog and even handed the dog some bologna the girl had in her pocket. The dog wolfed down the meat and felt better. It even began to get up and wag its tail. The girl had to leave, however, and the dog watched her walk off. Even though she was laughing and waving as she left, the dog knew she would never be back.

The group that were listening to the story grew bored and most of the boys left. The hot water from the showerhead was running out and was no longer warming the circle. With a shrug, the boy dolphin and the remaining two boys and his brother left the campfire to go swimming.

They boys swam in the shallow end because they were not yet brave enough to venture into the deeper water. The boy dolphin felt secretly guilty about swimming for two reasons. First, he was supposed to be a good swimmer but it was obvious he was not. When he would finally implement his plan of living in the ocean as a dolphin, he would have to be a much better swimmer than he was. Second, he was deathly afraid of things under the water. Several times he would have an irrational fear about something swimming past his legs and he would move as quickly as he could to cling to the concrete edge of the pool.

The boy walked out bravely as deep as he could, and checked the depth markers painted on the side. At 140 centimetres, the boy could no longer keep his mouth above water, even on his tippy-toes. He made a silent vow to someday be able to stride out in the water all the way to 2 metres.

The boy caught sight of a shark from the corner of his eye and made a mad dash to get out of the water. He nearly lost his underwear climbing out in a hurry, but he didn’t care. He got dressed in the locker room and his brother joined him. They decided to leave and walked toward the middle of the park to run around.

There was a brief and sudden shower over the other end of the valley, and a giant rainbow appeared in the morning sun. The boys ran toward the rainbow, which completed a full arc from just beyond the edges of the park on one side to the other. No matter how fast they ran, however, the rainbow would retreat until it was past the park and out of reach.

The boy dolphin had his brother stay where they had run to catch the rainbow while he backed up. Sure enough the rainbow moved toward where his brother was standing. As he backed up far enough for his brother to stand nearly underneath the apparition, the boy waved his arms wildly to indicate that his brother should go to the left to reach the end of the rainbow. It was clear his brother was confused, for when he looked around, he would see the rainbow was way off in the distance. He had no idea what his older brother was waving his arms wildly for.

Disappointed that the rainbow experiment had almost, but not quite, worked out, the brothers headed back home as they were getting peckish and it was getting hotter. They walked back across the bridge and back up the steep road toward their house. One particular house they liked to look at had a Japanese-style garden in the front yard, replete with small pagodas and a koi pond. Next to this house was an abandoned lot, however, and looked like an extension of the back part of the town dump. There was a large pile of twisted and rusting metal stacked on one side.

The boy dolphin stopped his brother and intoned that a large spaceship would fly up from this launching pad right here. He said that the spaceship would fly up and would EXPLODE when it got to here (he pointed in the sky). His brother and he stared into the sky, trying to see past some clouds to observe the spot where the explosion was supposed to take place. The boy made exploding noises with his mouth and his brother joined the festivities by dancing and whooping. Even though they were celebrating, the boy felt strongly that he was not just making up a story, but that he was actually seeing an event that would happen in the future.

They continued on after a while because it was getting even hotter and the air was also quite muggy. When they reached home, they entered the front door and were relieved to see that there weren’t any more bodies lying around the floor. Their mother sat cross legged in a meditation pose on the filthy, stained couch. She brightened when she saw them and hugged them as they ran to greet her. The boy asked if they could play the Puff the Magic Dragon record, their favourite song since it had also recently been a show on television.

Their other lifted the clear plastic cover on the record player. She blew twice, three times, four times on the small vinyl to get rid of any dust. She placed a forty-five RPM adapter in the middle of the record and placed it on the felt-covered platter. The stylus dropped as she operated a lever, then she closed the lid. After a few repetitive scratches, the music started.

The boys danced and twirled with their mother, but she tried to quiet them as they stamped their feet loudly. They would quite down for a few seconds, but then forget themselves and start to stamp and bump into things again. In one particularly powerful spin, the boy dolphin bumped the turntable and the record scratched loudly. The three people laughed loudly at the blunder.

This gaiety was interrupted when the Korean boyfriend stormed out of the bedroom and yelled for quiet. The Korean shoved the off-balance boy dolphin to the ground and took one more step to smack the boy’s mother across the face. She fell to her knees. The Korean ripped the power cord to the turntable and sound systems out of the wall, then stormed back to the room. As he walked past the boy dolphin on the ground, the Korean kicked the boy in the thigh.

After the boyfriend was in the room, the two boys tried to console their other who cried into her hands as quietly as possible. She collapsed so that she sat her thighs. The two boys formed a protective cone around her shoulders, as if trying to save her from something. She suddenly pushed them off and stood unsteadily. She stormed into the bedroom and they boys heard violent screaming, deep yelling, and objects being thrown and hitting the walls. A window broke. The boys looked at each other and rand outside.

There was a large plumeria tree in the front yard of the house and the boys climbed and played in it. From this position, they could not hear or see any fighting, so they quickly forgot about the horrible incident. The boy dolphin climbed to a high branch as dangerously as he dared, and looked across the street. Mia was in the front yard and waved to him.