Florence, Oregon

by Jan Carson

A cop is trying to shift everyone off the beach. “Get a move on fellas,” he says. “Quickly now. It’s not safe here.” 

He wears both thumbs hooked into his belt, arms forming handles against his torso. You look at the shape of him shadowed against the bright, winter sky and that teapot song from years ago comes scuttling into your head. “Here’s my handle. Here’s my spout. Pick me up and pour me out.” You can’t help yourself. You smile right up into the cop’s big, flaccid face. He glares back. He looks as if he’d raise his foot and kick you if he could, the same way you’d lay into a mangey pup. 

You’re used to this. Men cannot abide you smiling. They don’t even like you looking at them. You’ve practiced your smile a thousand times in the mirror. The barest slip of curled lip. Crinkled eyes. Just enough tooth to appear earnest. You can’t see any difference between your mouth and the other fellas’ folding up in mirth. But, most men seem to know. They don’t want you near them or even looking. They do not want you brushing against them in the coffee line. The cop is squaring his chest and upping his voice now, angling his hipped gun so you can see he’s packing heat. He’s trying to look authoritative, like a cop he’s seen on some television show. You think he looks daft, like a cartoon of himself. 

Still, you’d swap places if you could. Just to stand as he is standing: legs spread, boots half-buried in the sand, shoulders raised as if to say, “I have every right to stand here on this beach.”

Most people are ignoring the cop. They are taking photos. Each flash flusters the seagulls who’ve settled close to the corpse. They rise suddenly, hover and seconds later return to earth like plastic bags caught in the circling breeze. People are shuffling slowly round the edge of it, handkerchiefs and coat sleeves held against their noses to muffle the stench; a putrid smell, like raw meat gone off. Some people are touching it. You watch them raise their hands and run a finger down its dark, grey belly. You imagine it is cold and slimy, but you could be wrong. You touched a snake once and couldn’t believe how dry its skin was, closer in feel to fingernail than flesh.

“Touch it, Johnny,” yells Frank. 

He shoulder barges you so you stumble in the sand. You only just avoid falling face first into it. You catch your vomit just before it leaves your mouth, swallow it down and smile as if you’re having a great old time. All the other fellas are watching. They expect you to go after Frank now, to wrestle him down or pitch some choice words in his direction. Bastard. Wanker. Asshole. You don’t. You can’t. You know exactly how you should be, but your whole body is stiff. It will not bend to meet the moment. 

Now the cop has found a megaphone. He is screeching at certai static individuals, threatening arrest and other unlikely consequences. It isn’t what he says but the sheer shrill of him tinning against the Pacific wind which drives everyone off the beach. Into the sand dunes they go, seventy or so otherwise unrelated individuals, single file against the wind. They gather together in tight clusters about a quarter of a mile from the corpse. Families. Fishermen. Groups of young people raising their woolly shoulders for an extra inch of heat. Everyone’s heard about the whale. Everyone’s curious.

You stand with the other fellas, shivering in your sheepskin jacket, trying to keep the shake of yourself still. Frank is not shivering. Neither is Tom. Andy is not shivering, even though he’s out in nothing but a plaid shirt. You wonder what it would feel like to put your arm around his checked shoulders and share your own small heat, the smoke and fresh sweat smell of him coming off on your jacket. Then tomorrow, when you wake, the same smell, diminished, but still present on your pillow. You wonder the same thing about Tom and Frank. You’ve no specific interest in any one of them, only the broad need to be warmer, to be not so always by yourself. 

In the past you’ve tried with girls, hoping the press of flesh against stranger flesh would be enough to still your need. It has never been enough. You’ve found yourself on sofas and spare room beds with perfectly nice girls – Caroline, Melanie, two different kinds of Lorraine – and wondered how you arrived at this strange place. You’ve stroked and tongued, excavated various summer blouses, yet never once managed to be anything but absent, circling the farthest edge of yourself. This is my hand, you’ve thought, and it is cupped around a breast. This is my mouth, moving against another mouth. But, it is not your mouth or your hands, or even your eyes, looking. You don’t know who is inside you, staring out.

The girls don’t seem to notice. Or perhaps they do. You’ve seen the way they look down the side of your kissing face as if they are imagining someone else’s tongue slugging around their mouth, someone else’s cold hands, grasping. Afterwards, when you drive them home, they say, “Thank you. I had a lovely time,” and close the car door gently like a dry cheek kiss. They are too polite to say anything honest. Or maybe they don’t have the word for exactly how you are different from the other fellas. You think this word will be ‘gay’ but you’re not sure yet. Sometimes you speak the shape of it, standing in front of the bathroom mirror. You watch your reflected self, noting the way your jaw shoots out and comes neatly back together. Your lips and your pale, yellow teeth. You have not yet let the sound of this word out. You haven’t dared.

“Look,” says Frank, raising his voice against the wind. “They’re setting the dynamite.” 

He passes the binoculars round the group. You wait your turn. You are always last. If it is an activity requiring three participants, you will not even be included. By the time the binoculars get to you they are lukewarm from being handled. You press them against your eyes, relishing the extra blush of heat. At first you see only smudged black. The your eyes adjust to the lens. You see sand dunes. Grey sky. Tom’s face so close it is only a soft, peached blur. You pass your own hand in front of the lens. It is bloody pink and glowing slightly, like sliced meat held up to the light.

“I am full of blood,” you think and the thought of all that warm redness swishing round your chest makes the air rush to your head. You are all of a sudden lighter than you should be. You think you might faint. There is nothing to lean on in a sand dune, nothing but grass and people, and you know they won’t hold your weight.

You swallow the dizziness down and turn to face the beach, squinting through the sea grass as you pan the length of the corpse. You note its blunt nose and bloated belly. Its large Y-shaped tail and the swished hollow this tail has left in the sand. Without water you forget you are looking at a whale. It’s only a heavy looking interruption in the sand: a kind of naturally occurring rock. You cannot imagine it light enough to float suddenly to the surface and spout. You can’t imagine it swimming. You can tell it is dead, even from this distance. There is a difference between a thing which is not moving and a thing which cannot move. 

The coastguards are gathering on the whale’s northern side to dig holes and shove sticks of dynamite deep into the ground. They are hoping the explosion will solve the bulk of the problem, leaving the seagulls to deal with those small pieces of blubber which might linger afterwards. Earlier you heard the chief coastguard explain this to a news reporter, up from Portland to cover the story. The reporter’s hands twitched at the word explosion, then quickly pocketed themselves. Professionalism, he was trying to say, with his sharply pressed slacks and tie, his good shoes now ruined by the sand. Professionalism, and something about being from a more sophisticated place. But you could tell his mouth was itching to shout “boom.” 

An older man asks to borrow the binoculars. You pass them to him, hand accidentally grazing gloved hand.

“I’ve seen whales beached before,” he says, “but never a beast this size. They’ll be lucky to shift the half of it tonight.”

“Really, Sir?” you say. “Sure looks like a heck of a lot of dynamite to me.”

“We’ll see, son,” he says and hands the binoculars back to you, smiling. 

You smile back. Just a little smile. Closed lips. No teeth. The old man does not curl away. He doesn’t even flinch. You wish there was a way to thank him for his kindness. You could offer a cigarette or a piece of gum. This would be entirely appropriate. This would not involve the crossing of a line. But you don’t smoke and you’ve left your gum in the glove compartment, next to the maps. So you smile again –the same cautious lip twitch – and return to the other fellas. You can’t risk stretching a good moment thin. 

Everyone is watching the beach and the whale, which will, any second now, be consumed by a dreadful force. 

All seventy of you are leaning forwards and also back, faces preceding heels by a good half foot. From above you must look like so many sheaves of corn, wind bent in one smooth direction. You are every single one, flinching. The flinch is a tightness in your shoulders, a dry click at the back of your throat, a constant stuttering blink caught in the fold of your eye like an unending loop of Morse code. Any second now there will be an explosion. And it isn’t the bright flare of it you fear, or even the force of air rushing up the beach and into the dunes. It is the noise. The noise is a truth you have been all your life wanting and very much avoiding. You look at the men and occasional women grouped around you. You wonder if they are also afraid, if there are loud noises stuck in their throats too. If they sometimes need to roar. And can’t.

Most of the bystanders are locals. It’s too late in the season for holidaymakers though a few curious individuals have driven from the next town over just so they can say they were here. You imagine them, weeks from now, whiskey tumblers in hand, recounting the incident at dinner parties and corporate mixers. “Magnificent creature,” they’ll say. “It’s a shame to see it come to such a sorry end.” You cannot imagine yourself there, next to them, laughing in a suit. Even years from now, when you will have reached the age of thirty or forty. You cannot picture yourself anything but awkward, standing in a corner by the drinks table, spearing olives and insipid cheddar cubes, feeling your hands turn clammy against your glass.

Then the whale explodes. 

At first there is no noise. The sand goes feathering up in a wide fountain. The shape of this is a kind of soft, inverted pyramid. A cloud of smoke envelops the sky, blood red and blond where the beach has come away with the whale. You can’t see through this cloud to the ocean beyond. You can’t see whether the corpse is still present or 3, 2, 1 vanished like some mad magician’s trick. You can’t keep from staring, marvelling at the silence and the bloody colours, the way the dynamite has turned the entire beach into a canvas, the shocked seagulls rising en masse like individual rain drops returning to the clouds.

Then the noise catches up with you. 

A dull thud which lands in your ears and also the pit of your stomach. Which drives your heels deeper into the sand and thunders through your groin, bidding every part of your body retreat. You look at the other fellas. Tom is covering his ears. Frank is also covering his. Andy has toppled backwards into the sea grass. The white soles of his sneakers hover just above the sand like a pair of speech marks, cupping their own surprise. Andy is trying to cover his ears. His hands scrabble round his head as if they have forgotten where an ear should be and what it should feel like when touched. His face is without any kind of expression. Not even shock. All the people standing round you are blank as unspoilt paper. You wonder if your own face is also empty. You lift a hand to your mouth, feel the parched stiffness of your lower lip, bitten by the wind, the way your jaw is hanging open like a trap. You close your mouth. 

Then the blood begins to fall. 

Not just blood but flesh also, and long, slathering sections of intestine still wet from the whale’s inside. Propelled by momentum the heaviest sections drop first. They fall from the sky like a shower of lost meteorites: fist-sized hunks and bloody lumps, some as big as a child’s head. One, then two, then seven, eight, nine, two dozen blubbered chunks slamming into the sand so hard they leave craters. Clud. Clud. Clud. Each impact makes a wet thud sound. People jump at the first cludded impact. They turn to catch the second. After three, they begin to bolt towards the car park and the road beyond. They roof their arms above their heads as if they are being attacked from above. Their feet will not take them straight. In and out of the sea grass they go like creatures crazing in the headlights. 

You do not move. The whale parts drop all round you. It is like you are standing in the middle of the meat counter at Fred Meyer’s. A tooth-coloured fragment of bone -rib most likely- spears itself into the sand, just a half foot from your toe. You don’t want to look at it directly, but you don’t move away either. In the distance you hear the first windscreen shatter under impact. Just behind you and to the left a girl begins to scream and doesn’t stop. The noise comes out of her in short, breathless pants. The other fellas have all bolted but you don’t move. You don’t think about moving. You don’t think about not moving either. You just stand there, looking up at the sky, waiting for the end of it all.

Then the blood really begins to fall.

A plague of it. A cloud of bloody spit. It skips the dunes and goes soaring past at low cloud level. You hear it hissing overhead. It goes spsssssss as it passes as if it is a host of tiny insects, swarming. You could raise a hand and catch it if you wanted. One arm. One hand. You could come away red. Marked by this moment as everyone else will be marked. It wouldn’t take much, only a slight movement on your part. But you don’t. You can’t. Your whole body is stuck. And then it is too late. The blood has passed you by. It is too late to say, “Look at me, covered in little bits of exploded whale. Look at me just the same as all the other fellas.” 

All the other fellas are waiting for you in the car park. They are red. They are dripping. They are swiping at their wet faces with balled up Kleenex, only moving the blood from one bit of skin to another, leaving slick marks on their skin like brush strokes lining in paint. Andy runs his hand through the front of his hair. His hand comes away red. His hair stays up in a smooth wave. Soon it will begin to crust. You imagine him later in the shower. Shampooing and rinsing and repeating the cycle three or four times at least. Not feeling entirely clean. You only let yourself imagine his naked feet, the black hairs curling on each toe, the pinkish water, like raspberry Kool Aid, swirling round the plughole.

“Jesus,” he says, his teeth chitter-chattering so fast you can barely make the words out. “What the Hell just happened?”

“Whale,” says Tom, almost choking on his own voice.

“Boom,” says Johnny, throwing his arms up like a Southern Baptist.

“Jesus,” says Tom. And then they are all at the same time laughing and falling over and trying to roll each other into the bloody puddles in a way that says I will cry about this later, when there’s no one there to see.

“The whale’s still there,” you say. “The dynamite didn’t work. Most of it didn’t explode.”

But the other fellas aren’t listening. And the car park is full of other bloody people who are not listening. They are wiping at themselves with picnic rugs, rubbing the worst of it off in the sand. They are placing carrier bags on car seats so the upholstery won’t be ruined. They are already wondering how they will tell this story to their wives and their children. They are not noticing you, on the edge of the car park, so white, so clean it is like you have never been touched.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), a micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. This story was first published in Channel Issue 1. www.jancarson.co.uk