They Were Dolphins, Chapter 3 part III

The brothers crossed the parking lot and entered the grocery store. The idea of petty larceny weighed heavily on their minds so their actions were studiously carefree and devil-may-care. Even the simple act of going through the turnstiles to the store was fraught with danger in their minds.

The boys stopped in front of the toy section and examined all the cowboy guns, skipping ropes, plastic balls, rubber balls, blowing bubbles, canned slime, canned slime and eyeballs, egg putty, and fake money. The boy dolphin seized upon a toy kite that would be great fun to play in the park. It was sure to provide hours of distraction.

The boy had his brother watch up and down the aisle for any adults. He stuffed the plastic bag containing the kit kit down his shorts and covered the top half with his shirt. The kite reached from his shoulder to his thigh, and was very difficult to hide. After a few test walks, the boy found that he could walk more normally and could actually hide the kite better by shifting the top half of the kite under his armpit.

The boy sent his brother ahead of him to walk slowly and block any adults from getting suspicious. They walked slowly and calmly, stopping every few feet to see how interesting something looked. The closer they got to the exit, the more dangerous the mission became. The boy held his arm rigidly still like some kind of automaton. This kept the kite from shifting, but it also made him walk like he had a deformity.

As they neared the checkout registers, the panic and fear mounted. Every pair of eyes in the entire store seemed trained on the two boys as they meandered by. The urge to run was excruciating, but the boy fought through it. Several times, an adult seemed to cough or sneeze or call out and the boy would hop almost out of his skin.

The tension to reach the automatic doors just past the charcoal and firewood was nerve wracking. The boy was thankful he kept his arm rigid, else he would have been wringing his hands like a Rubik’s cube solver. Just past the doors, and on the freedom of the pavement, the two boys took off running. They were sure someone was chasing them, hot on their tails to catch them by the necks.

They darted around the corner of the building and hid behind a tree. Panting for a bit, they struck off as far into the brush as possible to the safety of the street. The boys were delirious with adrenaline, and were skip-running down the street toward the park. They were criminals on the loose and living a life of terrible crimes.

They reached the park by the time their excitement had flagged. The boy pulled out the kite and removed the wooden cross-bars and stretched the plastic coloured triangle over the bars. He was disappointed to see that the bag held only a few (perhaps four) metres of string wrapped around a plastic D-ring.

There was a nice breeze at ground level, so the boys tried to fly their kite. Yet, even though they were skilled kite fliers and knew how to pull and release the string to gain altitude, the kite would wobble and spin. Eventually, no matter how they tried, the kite would nose-dive into the earth. This part of the park was a popular spot for kites due to the trade winds, and the boys sought help from some older kids nearby.

The problem was one of a lack of tail for the kite, they were told. The tail provides weight to orient triangular kites upright. The tail also increases drag that flattens and stabilises the kite. One of the older children had a spare home-made tail made out of strips of rags tied together. Serious kite fliers didn’t mess with amateurish triangle kites, and so the boys were free to use it to get their kite flying.

Once the tail was tied to the kite, the boys flew their kite to the end of the string. It was so close, the tail (which was nearly two metres by itself) would drag on the grass when the wind sagged and the kite dipped. The older kids came to the rescue again, letting the boys borrow a roll of string that was nearly one hundred metres long.

With these enhancements, and the boys expert flying, the kite was soon a distant dot against the bright sky. The string rose up magically, curved under the weight of itself, and all but disappearing into the blue and white of the sky. The boys’ spirits were as high as the kite was. The boy decided that if there was a nuclear strike, he would allow the string to pick him up and fly him away to the next town, just past the mountain. Or, at least, farther past the valley.

Suddenly, the string jerked tighter and the boy’s reaction to release more string was too slow. The string went slack and started piling up on the grass. It took several minutes before the string fell back to earth. The kite had broken free, to their dismay. The boys ran out to the end of the string and mourned the loss of their kite. The only evidence that a kite had ever existed was the small red triangle of plastic flap that the string was attached to.

The older children laughed derisively and made fun of the boys. They make derogatory references to the mental capacities of the two boys, their heritage, and threatened to beat them up for losing the tail.

The boys quickly retreated and yelled back that they would chase the kite down. The boy dolphin was faster and had more stamina, so he left his brother behind. He reached the end of the park where the ground sloped down to a ditch filled with high reeds. The boy waded into the high grass, getting scratches and cuts across his legs, torso, and arms. His bare feet were squishing in mud up to his ankles.

The boy was frightened of the sounds of grass swaying and crackling of branches. He feared snakes, crocodiles, and mongooses that could be hiding. The first two were extremely unlikely, but the last certainly was possible. He had heard of children getting attacked by mongooses and having to go to the hospital. He willed himself to push forward and finally reached the other side.

He climbed up and out of the ditch into a residential neighbourhood he was unfamiliar with. He walked down one street, looking for a house that seemed likely to be where the kite might have fallen. He traced the arc of its flight through the air with his arm several times, and tried to gauge where it headed.

He willed it to show up around every corner he passed. He wished for it to appear on someone’s front lawn as he walked. He fervently prayed that he could have a rabbit’s foot so that he could hold onto it for good luck in finding the kite.

The boy saw one house that, from the shape of the roof, and the colours of the house, and the arrangement of the cars in front, he decided was the one where the kite had landed. He saw an adult man in the front yard and timidly asked if the adult had seen a red kite. Amazingly, the adult had seen the kite go by his house and landed in one of his neighbour’s yards, he thought. The boy thanked the man, and the man waved goodbye, calling the boy by name.

The boy jumped with fear and had to control his impulse to flee quickly. He merely nodded and walked farther down the street. The fact that the man knew his name meant that someone was going to tell someone else and someone else was going to tell his mother–for that was how adults spread information, magically–that the boy had stolen a kite and then lost it.

And to make matters worse, the boy realised he had lost his brother as well.

The boy oriented himself by the shapes of the mountain ranges on either side and turned toward the main street to head back to the park. He rushed back and looked for his brother where he had last seen him, along the edge of the park next to the ditch. His brother was not there.

The boy wandered the park in each of the places they frequented: the pool, the showers at the pool, the bridge over the river, the stream under the bridge, a drainage pipe next to the river, and the tennis courts. The boy tried one last place that they played and decided to stay there because it was a good hiding place.

He hid in a skip behind the public lavatories. The skip was full of disgusting refuse and was soaking wet with filth, but it wasn’t too bad of a smell, and besides, it would protect against bombs and radiation. He wept bitterly and hugged his knees inside the skip. He wept for his brother and mother, who were sure to die on his account. He hadn’t been able to protect his brother. And he was responsible for his mother in a way that he could intuit but not understand.

He wept until the grief was gone and the snot in his nose was too unruly to control. By the time he had cleared his nose on his sleeves and stopped crying, it was nearly sunset. The boy timidly stole out of the skip, expecting the world to be over. The park was mostly empty, but that was no surprise due to the hour.

There had been no bombs, no explosions, and no war. He was both relieved and disappointed. He imagined himself the lone survivor of the planet, a dolphin free to live his life in the ocean, free from any ties and responsibilities to the humans who were helping him. It would have been a suitable end to a short, but miserable, life as a human.

The boy made his way back home in the increasing dark so that it was actually night by the time he got there. The lights were on inside the house and the boy stayed outside in the dark in apprehension. He tried to gauge the best time to enter the house, when nobody would be in the living room.

He thought he heard a lull of silence, which was a good sign, and stole into the house. His mom and two other students were at the table in the living room, cutting cat brains on cookie sheets. They were studying anatomy of the brain, and the boy had seen similar scenes of vivisected animals before, so he was not alarmed. His mom didn’t seem upset and the boy was flooded with relief that her friends were there. She wouldn’t yell, scream, and hit him if there were witnesses around. She was also wearing huge aviator glasses which hid the bruise on her face, but looked incredibly strange at night.

There was a haze of smoke in the living room, coupled with a familiar acrid scent. The three women were happy and in giggling moods. The boy took that as a very good sign as well.

Acting as if nothing had happened all day, he said that he was hungry. His mom nodded to the kitchen. She was busy doing her schoolwork and didn’t want to take off her gloves. The boy nodded and went into the kitchen where he found his brother. They looked at each other, and silently agreed not to discuss what had happened that day. The boy could only assume that his brother had explained things in such a way that everything was copacetic.

His brother shared part of the rice, bologna, and Spam with him. It was the most delicious and wonderful meal of all time, and they wolfed the food down in silence together. The sound of running water eventually makes its way into the boy’s consciousness. It takes him a long time to remember the hose that was left running in the fish tank outside.

The two boys rush out in the darkness and scramble to turn off the hose. They can hear water rushing somewhere and dripping into a pool near the basement garage. The boy is able to turn off the water and pull the hose out of the fish tank.