Are You Seeing Me? (12 page)

MY SISTER KNOWS I LIKE to give expert ear bashings about Ogopogo. Today, for eight hours, it is my ear being bashed. We travel partway up the 135-kilometer lake, seeing places where the creature has been spotted. It’s exciting building a catalog of pictures in my mind and on Justine’s digital camera. I snap all the stops: the place of the first recorded sighting by a white person—Mrs. Susan Allison—in 1872; the path of the Miller and Marten couples’ motorboat, which the monster followed for three minutes in 1959; the 2004 location of John Casorso’s houseboat when it was shaken up by a strange disturbance, leading to fifteen minutes of video footage and an article in the local newspaper.

Clinton Muckler is an excellent guide, adding interesting information to the facts I have learned through my own research. He talks about the famous 1978 eyewitness account of a man named Bill Steciuk. (I am familiar with his website and his title of “Legend Hunter.” I also know he is trying to gain proof of the monster with modern equipment such as sonar and thermal imaging.) Clinton says the sighting was actually shared by twenty other motorists who, like Mr. Steciuk, had stopped on the west side of the Kelowna Bridge. He also mentions that the crowd watched the monster swimming around for nearly one minute.

Just as interesting as the extra information is its effect on Clinton Muckler. He speaks clearly and at an even pace. There are very few grunts or long pauses. He answers questions without needing to concentrate. Expert ear-bashing has the same effect on him as it does on me—it makes us calm and comfortable. It helps lessen the brain hassles in activities like going to the shopping center or standing in line at a restaurant or being a passenger on a crowded bus. Late in the day, Clinton Muckler talks about his own close encounters. No lie, he’s had
seventeen
sightings in all, each one in and around Rattlesnake Island, visible to the town of Peachland. It is believed that Ogopogo lives in the Squally Point caves below our boat.

“Have you ever filmed or photographed any of them?” asks Jus.

“Nope,” Clinton replies, shrugging his shoulders. “I know what I know. Don’ need a video to tell me that. Don’ need to show anythin’ to the rest o’ the world either. What other people think is up to them.” He turns to me and points to the camera hanging over my wrist. “How ’bout you, Perry? You wanna capture the beast on film? Become a big-time celebrity, like the ones I see in
Soap Opera Weekly
?”

The question is unexpected, and the answer is not simple. Immediately, my heart jumps and my palms begin to sweat. I scrunch fists for a few seconds, curl toes inside my runners.

“Before my father died,” I say, “I told him I would take care of Justine. I promised I would do something amazing one day so he wouldn’t have to worry about us. I have a few ideas. One is to take the first proper photograph of the Loch Ness Monster and sell it to Yahoo! When I return home to Brisbane, I am going to live in the Fair Go Community Village, so I don’t think we’ll be going to Scotland anytime soon.”

“I see. So, Ogopogo would be just as good, yeah?”

“He’s not as well known, but I think proof of his existence would be worth a lot of money.”

Clinton Muckler nods. He leans against the side rail of the
Kathleen Rita
and scratches his unshaven chin. “If you don’ mind me askin’…When did your daddy pass?”

I don’t mind. The answer is a date—an easy fact to recall. And if I picture it circled on a calendar, I don’t think so much about Dad being sick in bed or crying at night or the funeral where his body was burned to ashes and scattered over Rainbow Beach. “Twenty-ninth of September, 2008.”

“Just before our eighteenth birthdays,” adds Justine.

The quiver in her voice is a light slap across my face. She takes my hand, and I release the breath held in my chest.

Clinton Muckler grunts for the first time in a long time. He gives a small flick of his head, like he’s trying to shoo a fly that’s landed on his nose. “I’m real sorry for your loss.”

He takes off his sunglasses, places them in a case lying next to the steering wheel.

“Takin’ care of your sister—that’s a real good reason to wanna prove Ogopogo’s real. Almost makes me hope the good ol’ boy’ll come up into the light an’ make it happen.”

THE GOOD OL’ BOY NEVER MADE it happen.

When we return to the dock, I have taken eighty-one photographs. None of them contains Canada’s most famous mythical sea animal.

“You disappointed?” asks Justine, holding my shoulders. I answered this already. Clinton Muckler asked the question when we stepped back onto the dock, just after he shook my hand and just before he started
Kathleen Rita
’s engine and motored away. I told him no. I was prepared to give an explanation, but he didn’t ask for one.

He grunted, wiped his forehead, said he was glad. “Best customers I ever had shouldn’ go away feelin’ cheated,” he added.

Justine wants an explanation though. I close my eyelids to slits so that her face is blurry. “Ogopogo was close the whole time,” I say. “I knew he was there, near the surface. Maybe even peeking out of the lake every now and then, just to see what we were doing. He is a curious creature. But he is also smart.” A ladybug lands on the collar of Jus’s shirt. I am thankful—I can look at it but still appear focused. “If I’d seen him, it would’ve been because he let me. Because he had a good reason for me to see him.”

“Ogopogo was there?”

“Yes.”

“You felt it.”

“Yes.”

Justine glances at the camera hanging from my wrist. “So if Ogopogo had let you see him, if he had a good reason…Would you have taken a picture?”

I give three big shakes of the head. “I would’ve just watched. No lie. I would’ve told him he was safe with me.” I take my sister’s wrists, lower her arms down to her sides and grab hold of the middle, ring and pinkie fingers of her right hand. “I’ll do something else amazing.”

Justine scans my face, studying every different part, as if she’s inspecting a car-detailing job. “You’re already amazing,” she says.

“Shut the hell up!” I reply.

“No. You’re amazing!”

“Shut the hell up!”

“Okay, then. You’re a dickhead!”

“Shut the hell up!”

We perform Dad’s pity laugh—the one he said he stole from George McFly in
Back to the Future
—then have a proper giggle. When it’s done, Jus hugs me. I am pleased to find her hair smells like tea-tree oil even though we are far from home. Her voice is muffled by my shoulder. “What you said about taking care of me—that was very sweet.”

“I meant it.”

“Yes. You did.” She gives me a hard squeeze, then steps back, her hands holding mine. “You want a couple more minutes at the water before we head back?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll wait at that bench over there.”

She walks off and I turn to view Ogopogo’s backyard one final time. The colors have changed since this morning. Everything is darker, as if the water has soaked into the landscape. Homing in on Rattlesnake Island, I think about the modern equipment being used in searches—the thermal imaging and the Remote Operating Vehicle and the sonar. Will the people chasing Ogopogo ever get proof? Will they ever believe what Clinton Muckler already knows? What
I
know? It’s doubtful. The chasers are like Captain Ahab—they’re not doing it for the right reasons. And even if they found the creature and caught him in a net and brought him onto land and put him in a zoo, and the story was seen on TV and the Internet and then they made a movie called
Ogopogo Is All Up in Your Face
—even if all that happened, I think there would still be people who would say it was a lie because they didn’t understand and were afraid.

My imagination is taking over. I am actually hearing a sonar sound:
beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep… BEEP
. And there’s a voice that follows the end of the beeps. An upset voice. I turn my head and realize it’s not my imagination and it isn’t sonar.

“HOW MANY TIMES DO WE have to have this conversation? Seriously, I can’t believe we’re doing this again… AAAARGH!”

Her shout is a punch on the jaw, a kick to the guts. She stomps the ground with her right foot. The earth shifts.

“You know something bad is going to happen, do you? How do you know, Marc? Tell me…Oh, you just
know
, do you? You’ve got her all figured out—”

Cracks.

“No, you’re
not
protecting me. This is all about
you
, Marc. You and this
ridiculous
don’t-mess-with-my-woman thing you’ve got going on…”

My legs give and I tip forward, hand holding my stomach. Splotches appear in front of my eyes, like wasted bugs on a windshield. Justine’s pained voice keeps coming, piling onto my neck and shoulders, buckling my knees.

“You know what? This is too much for me to handle right now. It really is. This trip, the appointment, Perry’s move when we get back—I don’t need the extra aggravation. I’m sorry…”

Her words are flying objects now, random and dangerous. They are spears hurled into my brain. They are the crazy legs of evil John attacking at will, and I am Jackie Chan, drunk and helpless and suffering. I wonder if they’ll ever end. I don’t wonder for long.

“What am I saying? I’m saying if you
love
me, Marc, you’ll leave me alone. That’s what I need…How long? For the rest of this trip…When we get back? Right now, I have no clue. I really don’t. All I know is this cannot continue. We need a break, starting now…”

I don’t want to hear this. But it was spoken, so it can’t be taken back. Justine and Marc—it’s over. No more. He is gone and my sister is by herself. She is alone, without a soul mate.

The consequences rush toward me like a death squad of ninjas, throwing grenades at my head.

BANG!

If she holds on to you
…

BANG!

…
she won’t let go.

BANG!

It’s not fair to her.

BANG!

She would never be free.

Another beep. My sister’s crying is quiet. She’s trying to stop it from coming out, trying to catch it in her belly and in her throat. She can’t hide it. Not from me. Her shaky breaths and tiny sobs grip me, rip me. Pain stretches every cell in my body. I am splitting into two and into four and into eight. I am a jigsaw puzzle. Any second now I will be caught by the wind and scattered across the ground. I wait and wait. I stay on all fours. Something is holding me in place, stopping me from falling through the earth. Something powerful. My body is seismic, but I can lift my head and focus on the lake.

Ogopogo is everything I imagined. His body is a perfect prehistoric design—smooth and sleek, shinier than a brand-new quarter. He moves quickly and easily, dipping and rolling without disturbing the surface. At some angles, his scaly skin changes to the same blue-green of the lake, making him seem more like a ghost than a living animal. Four times, he looks up at the cloudless sky and its fading light. Does he want to fly like the brown hawk high above? Then he turns toward me. The air is still. The distance between us is a stone’s throw.

I know Jus is still upset, but that knowledge is wrapped in a bubble floating over my head. The pain is now outside my body. Ogopogo watches, his horselike head swaying. His face is lined and scarred; his gray eyes are even. I think he is calm. I think he trusts me. After twenty seconds, maybe thirty, he lifts higher out of the water, as if obeying a command to stand and salute. He shudders and flicks his huge spike of a tail. A long rope of spray drenches the dock. Several fat droplets hit the ground in front of me. Ignoring the tremor in my hand, I reach forward and touch the wet patches. They feel alive; an electric current runs through them, or maybe the pulses of a tsunami from a hundred years ago. I lift my fingers and touch my lips and tongue. Tingly threads fill my mouth and throat. They stitch together and spread through my whole body until there is a frosty blanket covering the pain.