Nothing had happened for a long time. Turner was quiet. Turner was fish-and-chip specials at The Seaside Diner. Turner was population 5,000 and smelled of salt and damp, plus the algae smeared along the beaches like soggy hair clumps pulled from drains. Turner, almost always February – cold rain, cold wind – except when the daytrippers come, all sunglasses and pale bellies and floral-print shorts, and then Turner is June July August, yellow months.

Nothing had happened around here since the Aphrodite sank, lost all five men beneath the gray waves. That was ten years ago. And the last exciting thing before that was Jim McDonald getting done-in, shot through the brain and tossed off Crown Point, 200 feet of air, then smack, a nice mess of a breakfast for the gulls. And that was something like eons ago, as in before I can hardly remember.

So there’s the Aphrodite, so there’s splatty Jim McDonald, so there’s the flush of the yellow months, and then…well, nothing really. And aside from Dad going see ya, adios, finding escape between the legs of some whorish bartender named Mona, I was bored stiff, I was picking my toenails, Turner was in the middle of a big spell of nothing. So when the whale washed up on Beverly Beach, things changed and that was just what I needed.

I was on break and spooning into a cup of chowder some blue-hair had wasted, left half-full on table five along with a perfectly good hunk of garlic toast, when old Mr. Russell, he walks in and the door says jingle and he says, “Whale’s washed up down on Bev’ly Beach.” He was in a real state, eyes wild as though he had invented something, all out of breath with cheeks getting swollen and sunken according to his lungs. There were maybe five customers, all locals, and, pow, they were out of there like in the cartoons, ghost-gone with a cloud of dust in their wake. They just left their chow – forget the bill, forget Sundee brunch at The Seaside, we got a goldang whale to see. Out the door they went with a jingle, one lady even leaving her purse.

And what does Mary do – she’s my boss and has warts – well, she shrugs at me and says, “Let’s go, troops,” and off we were then, not even bothering to punch out.


It was one of those nasty March days, no rain, but cold as balls with the wind tunneling into your ear so you got to cover it with your hand. We parked behind the dunes, a file of cars behind us, the whole town it looked like. Me, with no jacket, I’ve got my arms pretzeled and am chattery teeth the moment I step out of Mary’s car. The sand finds its way into my shoes, and I step around the dunes and, pow, a wind full of stink slaps me so hard I’m dizzy. I don’t know. When I think about how bad it was, it makes me want to give up swimming – all those whales polluting the water, smelly black missiles of the deep.

Turner was everywhere. People taking pictures, petting the whale skin, walking around and leaving craters in the sand, hands on hips and heads nodding as though this was to be expected, sure, while the poor humpback – that’s what they later called it on the news – it just lay there. It was the size of maybe five vans. It was colored like gunmetal, deep gray, almost black, except for its chalky corduroy underside. It didn’t do anything exciting. It didn’t struggle or do alligator rolls or anything. Every once in a while its blowhole would let out a little wet fart, like the last bit of water in a drain, but I wouldn’t call that exciting.

I could hardly see. My eyes leaked all over my cheeks from the garbage-in-the-sun odor, but I got real close to the whale. I got right up next to it. It had warts all over, just like boss Mary. The tide was coming in and the sea was foaming around my feet. Maybe the waves will take you back out, I thought. What’s wrong with you, you poor big fish? Dying of stink, maybe, stinked to a slow and miserable death?

Even though I knew the reek would cling to me through many handwashings, I couldn’t resist – I reached out my fingers and touched. It felt like those P.E. wrestling mats. Then it moved. The skin split open beneath my palm as if I held a key and a great inky eye peered back. I thought I saw something there, maybe a spark of recognition, something deep and smart. Its eyeball was bigger than my head and I could see myself in it, my reflection warped and kind of funny like when you look into the back of clean spoon. It was the saddest thing I ever saw, that whale eye, all teary like it knew it was done for, like it missed its whale friends and wished it could have some more years with them, playing pranks on the other sea creatures and sucking down gallons of kelp or whatever. Then the eye closed and I think it died.


On the news that night, which I watched with Mom and little Graham during supper, the big city news reporter wore this fancy neon windbreaker that couldn’t hide how nice her boobs were. I could tell from the way her nose kept twitching she was as keen for the whale’s perfume as me. In the background people waved. There’s Joe Simpson, I said, and if Dad had been there, if Dad had been chewing on his meatloaf and watching TV, he would have just grunted and gone on with his meal. Before he left with whorish Mona, he was a fisherman, which means his skin was cracked and brown, which means he wasn’t easily impressed and didn’t like to talk much. Off he went and who knows where? Not me. On vacation, or so Mom says.

On the TV, the reportress was interviewing this marine biologist with a beard – just like Dad’s – who enjoyed long pauses between words and moved his hands when he talked. When she asked him how would they get rid of the whale, he smiled and looked at her boobs and said, “Ka-boom!”


Then it was Monday and after school I dropped by the elementary to pick up Graham, as usual. He hadn’t seen the whale yet but was itching for a peek, so I says, sure, let’s go, kid. I had to head over to the diner soon, dinner shift, but there was plenty of time for a field trip.

Poor Graham, he’s positive Dad’s on vacation – that’s what Mom tells him and I haven’t the heart to say otherwise.

We walked. It wasn’t but two miles and the day was gray but fine. We got to Beverly Beach and saw a pair of dirt bikes pitched against the dunes, but no cars, which I thought strange. Graham was all for ignoring the path, wanting instead to storm the beach like soldiers.

When we pulled ourselves up and over, crawling and gripping dune grass with our fists, I realized no one was around on account of the stink, which had worsened times ten, times twenty even. On the summit of the dune, we both just about lost our lunches and Graham, he made quite a show of it, rolling around with his hands over his nose making barf sounds and laughing.

When we finally got ourselves under control, pitching sweatshirt tents over our noses to muffle that raw-chicken-doused-with-a-rainstorm-of-vinegar smell, we noticed the boys with baseball bats.

Homerun-style swings, wump wap thap, they were beating the piss out of the poor dead whale. Graham and I, we just stood there, spying. Fifth or sixth graders, they looked familiar. One of them took a swing at the white corduroy part of the whale – I guess you could call it its chin – and half the bat disappeared, having torn open a dark gash.

Boy, did they love that! They were howling like a regular pair of monkeys. Evil monkeys. The other kid moved in on the flipper and wap wap wap, took around ten hits before the thing kind of broke, collapsed in its middle.

I set off down the dune, my sneakers clumsy and slow in the sand, and started screaming. I put my hands in the air and my mouth unhinged as far as it would go. I didn’t scream anything in particular – I just made noise, kind of like a siren. Those two kids, one look at me and, pow, they were gone.

I breathed heavy with my hands on my knees. My nostrils must have gone numb because I hardly even noticed the stink. Graham, you gotta love the kid, he comes up and takes my hand and asks if I’m okay. Ha! I do like the fathers do on TV and ruffle his hair.

Well, what do you know, Graham, someone left us a bat. Left in the sand like a piece of driftwood, it was all gory, plastered with blubber juice and chunks of meat. I picked it up and used it like a cane, proper and English-like. The tide was out, so we had ourselves a little inspection tour and circled the whale – yes, yes, see here now, guvnah, looks like this whale’s a bit green about the gills, harrumph – Graham looking very scientific with his hands folded behind his back and me with my Sluggerville cane. I pointed to the barnacles that sprouted all over its skin and said, whale pimples. Graham didn’t get that. He walked up and crinkled his eyebrows and asked if that’s what killed the whale. I said, hardly, and did the hair ruffle thing again.

A few more minutes and Graham ran off to hunt for sand dollars and peek in the tide pools, see if any baby sharks got left behind. Me, I stuck with the whale, watching until Graham’s back was turned – then, in a flash of muscle, I turned the cane back into a bat, whipped it right smack into the whale’s eye. It made a sound like hard-boiled egg on concrete. Then, between the wrinkled folds of its eyelid, this blackberry jelly goop slid out like tears. It dripped down and beaded the sand.

I turned around and looked at the dunes. But there was no one there to howl at me like a siren, no one there to tell me to stop. I imagined what Dad would have done – had he been around, that is. Probably sat up there on top the dune, staring into the ocean with his cap pulled low. Why don’t you come down, Graham would have asked him, and he would have said, Seen plenty of dead fish before.


My family, we watch a lot of TV, mainly the shoot-em-ups, but I’ve got no problem with the occasional nature show so long as a snake’s trying to swallow a rat or whatever. So here we are, planted on the couch, me and Graham and Mom, Mom smoking one right after the other – it’s no wonder her teeth look like butter.

Flip, flip, I’ve been in charge of the remote ever since Dad split for who knows where, flip, and what do you know, a whale show! Can you believe it, I said, and Mom she just sucked her smoke, but Graham was right there with me, nodding and smiling. What a coincidence, I just couldn’t get over it, a whale show, to think that it was happening right now, for us, it seemed a miracle, as though God had come down to make it just so.

We learned that a whale is not a fish. I already knew that much, but I’m sure Graham appreciated them saying so. We learned that they are among the most behaviorally complex of animals. Practically smart as humans, I said, and remembered the look in its eye before it went to whale heaven.

It was an hour-long show and I got a real kick out of how the whales were always so chatty with their underwater language, which sounded like yodeling. I made a note to myself – when the yellow months make the water warm, I’ll try my hand at this underwater yodeling business, see if I could call any more whales to Turner.

What I liked best was how they hung around each other like a regular family. There wasn’t a whale out there that didn’t have a wife or a son or at least a buddy, and there wasn’t a chance in hell they’d abandon each other – otherwise who knows what could happen out there in the big blue sea. Whales, they stuck together.

I wondered what had come of our poor humpback – maybe his warts and stink were too much, maybe he got exiled, or maybe he just felt like taking off on his own and look where that got him – nowhere – dead gull-bait on a cold beach, that’s where.


The last time I saw Dad, he came into the diner with his whore – for dinner, if you can believe it. They had been down at The Sea Hag, where she worked, tossing back the grog. I knew this because of the beery smoky smells floating off them.

They were all cigarettes and laughter the moment they sat down, Dad waving me over to the table, even though it wasn’t my section, and acting like we were the best of pals. Mona, this here’s my son, he said, or something. When she went pleasetameetcha and held out her pale hand for a shake, pink fingernails and all, I let it float there so long and lonely that Dad lost his smile. Show some manners, son, he said real serious-like.

Mary, she’s my boss, she was watching me over by the coffee machines, so I didn’t do what I felt like doing, which was spit or turn over the table or take a steak knife and going slit slit slit across their necks and faces. Instead, I just said nothing, not one word. I looked right into Dad’s seaweedy eyes and there was something there, something like embarrassment mixed with anger. I didn’t say one word – I just crossed my arms and kept staring. His beard moved a little, his forehead full of lines.

Pow, they were out of there. Left their cigarettes smoking in the ashtrays. And that’s the last time I saw him.


Three days after the whale came to Turner, they shoved its guts full of dynamite. Everybody came to watch. They even cancelled school. There were cars for as far as you could see, worse than July 4th weekend, daytrippers up the wazoo.

The dunes looked like anthills with people up and down and up and down, busy with their hotdogs and beers and coolers, all the city folk with sunglasses even though it was overcast, a generally miserable pisser of a day. They chose 2:15 for detonation because that was high tide and they were hoping the waves would clean away some of the Ka-boom mess.

Graham and I got there around noon, the clouds almost raining, misting, making everything damp. The beach was already full, everybody fighting for a spot, folding chairs and fluorescent towels every which way. Flies and sand-fleas hopped and buzzed all over, in spite of the wind, crawling on people’s egg-salad sandwiches and getting in your hair.

The whale was fatter now, bloated. It rested on a bed of explosives, white gummy stuff. Some gulls floated like kites and begged for handouts, others landed on the whale and picked at its skin and went screech same as the rusty hinges on our front door. I saw one prodding at the sunken place where that big black eyeball used to be.

When the marine biologist from TV, the one with the beard, when he and some others pried open the whale’s mouth with a couple of jacks, they must have released some kind of horrible belch gas from its insides, because that marine biologist bent in half and lost a gallon or so of chowdery sauce between his feet. Everybody loved that – the whole beach let out this collective groan, and I laughed while little Graham made his dramatic barf sounds.

A bit later, with the dynamite shoved past the curtains of baleen and down its throat, everything was set to blow. The sheriff and his potbellied deputies, even the mayor, they all waved their hands and hollered in an authoritative sort of way, trying to make us move back. People were reluctant, grumbling and swearing under their breath. One man, a city guy from the look of his khakis and boat shoes, he moved his cooler and chair while gripping a hotdog in his mouth and it waggled between his lips like some weird tongue.

There were so many faces and bodies, more than Turner had ever seen. We stayed at the front of the crowd and I kept my eyes open for Dad, but nope. Then it was 2:15. Ka-boom!

Besides on TV, I had never seen an explosion. I don’t even remember the noise, but my ears hurt for two days afterward. One minute and there’s the whale. Then I blink and guts and flaps of skin are spiraling through the air like bits of charred paper. Oooooh, says the beach, will you look at that, gee whiz, they say.

If only Dad were here to see this, Graham said, his face split by a dopey grin. Yeah. Sure. Then everything seemed to pause, the people, their voices, even the ocean. Gravity decided to take effect. That swirling tornado of whale, it collapsed toward us. The sky starts falling. Wump, a hunk of blubber craters the sand, just a foot away. Slap, what looks like a wet black scarf wraps around this woman’s head. Screams. Some people run, but Graham and I just hunker down into balls, wump and hiss, chunks and blood rain down to patter our backs.

A fire crackled in the middle of the broken shell of the whale, burning among those ribs spread every which way like the legs of some giant pale spider. The waves crash over what’s left of the tail, between the ribs, and we can see the steam blowing about in the salt breeze, beautiful. It was beautiful.

In the end, zero casualties – though the mayor did lose an eye from a hailstone of cartilage and has worn a pirate patch ever since.


We still talk about when the whale came to Turner. The tourists ask about it over coffee and chowder and I tell them I was right there, right in the middle of it all. We talk as if it happened yesterday. It’s good for a laugh, at least. It makes for a better story than old Jim McDonald and his bullet through the brain. Now that’s depressing, in my opinion, like so much else. So we talk and we remember. What else is there to do? Not much. Dad still isn’t back from vacation. And no one else has died or disappeared, so in the mean time, the waves keep slapping the sand and we’ll just keep talking about the whale until the yellow months come along or until something else happens.

Originally published in The Florida Review