THE DUCK-BILLED FOUNTAINFISH:

A Bit of a Ghost Story

“Which hotel do you think is going to be yours, Monty?” my father asked me.

I looked out the car window at the junk heaps that some people call hotels and resorts. My kid brother, sitting in the back next to me, had his eyes fixed on something inside his head. Typical. He probably didn’t even know we were on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Before I could spot anything I even remotely liked, father drove by a real howler.

“How about the one that?” I asked. “It looks like a wedding cake that got thrown in the bridegroom’s face.”

“Nope,” said father.

“They should pay us just for looking at it,” said my mother.

“Where’s the water?” my brother asked.

I was startled that he spoke at all. We all were. I think those were his first words he’d uttered since we left the house up north.

“The Gulf of Mexico is all around here,” said Dad.

We were taking a highway down from Tampa that goes right along the Gulf of Mexico, so my father was right, but it was true that we hadn’t actually seen the Gulf for a while with all the high rises and hotels blocking the way.

“Is it hibernating?” asked my brother.

“The Gulf of Mexico doesn’t hibernate,” I explained to my brother. “As usual, you’re being as logical as an orange peel covered with peanut butter.”

Then a golf course carved out of the sea of buildings opened up a glimpse of the water. Next to the golf course, a huge building, curved in the shape of a tidal wave, rose up before us.

“Is that it?” I asked, scarcely believing that the swooping building wasn’t collapsing before my eyes.

“Do you like it?” asked my father

He looked like he’d just about dropped his teeth.

“I’ll let you know when I’ve tried their room service,” I answered.

“If you get sick from eating three dozen spare ribs in ten minutes, don’t blame the management,” my mother advised me.

“It takes me fifteen minutes to eat that many,” I answered back.

Imagine my shock when my father actually turned into that hotel’s driveway, bringing me face to face with the steel-frame tidal wave and the white cursive letters that read The Breezy Pelican along its facade. Not a very good name grammatically, I thought to myself. Maybe the air is breezy, but since when is a pelican breezy? I know that’s picky, but I can’t help it if I’m so intelligent I have to keep thinking all the time. Looking up, I took in the monstrous pelican that rode the crest of tidal wave that looked like it was about to swoop down and terrorize the west coast of Florida. That would make an awesome blockbuster movie. I decided rename this architectural monstrosity The Tidal Wave Hotel.

“Uh—you’ll have to decide by tomorrow morning whether or not this—er—hotel will make a satisfactory birthday present for you,” said father.

I gulped. I hoped that was a joke, but I was afraid it wasn’t.

“If this won’t do,” mother added, looking at the hotel doubtfully, “we can buy you one of the Sarasota keys instead.”

Now, I’m used to getting birthday presents too big to wrap up and put on the breakfast table, but a hotel like this was enough to make me as speechless as my brother for a minute. Although the hotel was too absurd for words, I could see that it had to be worth a lot of money, and presumably it would make a lot of money for me if I became its new owner. You might think that a twelve-year-old boy is a bit young to own a hotel, but I wouldn’t be running it or anything if my parents bought it for my birthday present. It would just be an investment like the stocks in my trust fund that other people would take care of for me.

“Do I get the golf course, too?” I asked, trying to sound casual and not too greedy.

 “Yep,” said Dad as he turned the car into the circular driveway. “Golf course comes with the hotel.”

Four bellhops swooped down on us and opened the car doors before we even came to a full stop at the grand entrance. We stepped out into the Gulf breeze that felt so much better than the winter we had left behind in St. Paul. A well-tanned man with a mustache and a frantic smile rushed up to my father with his hand outstretched.. I assumed he was the owner who was trying to sell the place. A stunning lady with bright eyes followed on the man’s heels. The man’s light gray suit and the woman’s pale flowing dress made me wonder how they dressed up for a formal dinner. Good thing I was wearing a good pair of slacks and one of my nicest shirts with an alligator sewn on the pocket.

“Mister Bendorik, I presume,” said the owner as he grabbed my father’s hand.

“Mister McGutcheon, I presume,” said father. “Call me Dom. This is my wife, Suzy.”

“So glad to meet you,” said Mr. Mcgutcheon as he snagged my mother’s hand and gave it a good squeeze. “Call me Dan. To my right is the pride and joy of the Sunshine State, Caroline McGutcheon.”

When the Sunshine State’s Pride and Joy smiled, I felt like marrying her, even though she had to be thirty years older than me. I stood up straight next to my parents, waiting for my turn to be introduced, the way I’ve been trained. My brother slouched with his hands in pockets, and inspected the pelican’s image imprinted in the driveway. That’s the way he’s trained himself to behave.

“This is my son, Monty, the birthday boy,” said my father proudly as he laid his heavy hand on my shoulder.

I smiled graciously and shook hands with the McGutcheons. I could see by the way they looked at me that already they thought I was charming, even though I hadn’t even started to pour on my many reserves of charm. It was enough to make me think I could get the hotel for free if I asked nicely enough and didn’t tell them what I thought of the architecture.

“How old are you gong to be tomorrow?” asked Mr. McGutcheon.

“Twelve,” I replied.

“How many girls’ hearts have you broken, Monty?” Mrs. McGutcheon asked me.

“I’ve lost count,” I said with my most gracious smile.

That’s the truth. Almost all the girls at school are wild about me, especially the ones who pretend they don’t like me.

“I’m sure I’d break my heart over you, if Dan would let me,” said Mrs. McGutcheon with a coy smile.

“Is that your other boy?” asked Mr. McGutcheon with a nod at my brother.

“That’s Jason,” said father without looking his way.

My brother didn’t interrupt his communing with a slender palm tree to look up at the mention of his name.

“He’s our pet cat,” mother explained. “He doesn’t come when you call him.”

What my parents don’t know is that my brother is not a cat; he is a mutant. The story I’m telling you will prove it. I call him Mute for short. Believe it or not, he answers when I call him that. Maybe that’s because nobody else ever calls him. With his thin face slightly askew and dull eyes, he doesn’t knock out middle-aged women the way I do. He’s better at making people look the other way. My parents have gotten really good at that.

The bellhops unloaded the car and piled our suitcases on the trolley while the McGutcheons gave us a long spiel about why the Breezy Pelican is the best hotel in Florida. It was enough to make me wonder what was wrong with the place that they had to talk it up so much. One bellhop slipped into the car behind to wheel to park it. I noticed there weren’t many other cars in the lot. That was enough to make me wonder, since this was the height of the tourist season. My parents and the McGutcheons followed the bellhops into the lobby. As usual, Mute was hanging back. Something that nobody else cares about had caught his attention—I couldn’t tell what.

“MUTE!” I called.

“I heard you.”

But Mute didn’t stop looking at whatever he was looking at. He would be languishing at the Humane Society after being picked up as a stray animal many times over if I didn’t keep an eye out for him.

“What is it this time?” I asked him.

“Stuff,” he said with a shrug.

He stood still as a statue longer than any statue can stand still without shifting its feet. His eyes were fixed on something but nothing visible to me was worth staring at for that long. I waited impatiently until Mute finally looked to the doorway and seemed ready to follow me inside. The hotel lobby made me think I’d stepped into a jungle scene on a stage set. Potted palms dwarfed navy blue upholstered chairs and couches that looked more like thrones than furniture meant for humans to sit in. Maybe that’s why they were all empty. Either that, or there just weren’t any people. To top everything off, a fountain erupted out of the white marble floor and flowed over statues of dolphins leaping about in the water.

Mr. McGutcheon was talking up a storm about all the landscape engineering he’d done to give the hotel a good foundation, build up the beach, and lay out the golf course. As he talked, I kept an eye on Mute to make sure he didn’t get lost in the artificial jungle. If I left that up to our parents, he would never make it up to our room. As usual, Mute was being his normal inscrutable self. Ever since I learned that word from my vocabulary list at school, I’ve been thinking about how mysterious, incomprehensible, and enigmatic (another new word), and inscrutable, my brother is. But this time, Mute was being more inscrutable than was usual, even his standards. Not only was he ignoring all of the plants that were there, he was examining something that wasn’t there, and even touching it delicately with his fingers.

I opened my mouth to call Mute when someone, grabbed me by the wrist. I thought it was my mother, or maybe Mrs. McGutcheon, but it couldn’t be. My parents and the McGutcheons were talking nonstop under a humongous palm tree quite a distance from me. That’s when I started to get scared and wonder why my brother had been staring at. I slowly turned my head and saw an odd-looking plant, white as death, practically in my face. It was this plant that had with wrapped itself around my wrist with one of its bony branches. I tried to shake it off, but I couldn’t. The strange was, the branch felt more like some kind of energy field than a physical branch or skeleton. Worse, I could see through the dead tree to the rest of the lobby. I hoped I hadn’t fallen into Mute’s dream world, a bad place for sure. The skeleton-like tree hardly fit into the design of the lobby, even allowing for the fact that the interior decorator of this place was totally bananas. I wasn’t going to keep that guy long if I got the hotel for my birthday present. Again, I slowly tried to ease my wrist away from the branch, but the branch pulled it back. I took a deep breath to convince myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. I don’t scare easily, but this was beyond being creepy, even for a kid whose all the creepy things ever created on videos. I reached over with my other hand to pull my hand away from the branch, but it only tightened its grip like the old crone who caught Hansel nibbling on her house. I spent another minute or two desperately trying to think of how to negotiate with a ghostly tree branch without thinking of anything. And I can almost think of something no matter what happens. While I was still thinking, another hand slipped over mine and gently lifted the branch off my wrist. It was Mute. A second later, the tree was gone.

“Come on, Monty!” my father called out, “we’re going up to our suite.”

Mute didn’t seem to hear father. He hardly ever does. He was already absorbed in something else I couldn’t see, something I sure didn’t want to see.

“Come on, Mute,” I said softly, as I gave his hand a gentle tug with my wrist.

“I’m coming.”

******

Mute and I got a humongous room, but that was nothing compared to the master bedroom our parents got. Their bathroom alone was larger than Mute’s bedroom back home and almost as big as mine. The lounge was so big you could have put a space ship in it. Mute and I had our own TV & VCR so if one or both of us didn’t like what was showing in the lounge, we could watch something else in here. We even had our own mini-refrigerator and bar. Unfortunately, Father was a spoilsport who wouldn’t let me to take any drinks because the hotel could get into trouble for selling to a minor, but he promised me a nip of scotch after dinner to help celebrate my birthday.

Mute already had his books and things scattered all over his bed, the night stand and the floor. His stuffed squirrel lay against the pillow with his iPod next to it. His laptop was open at the other end of the bed where he was hunched over, typing away at something that no real human being would ever understand. If it wasn’t for me, Mute wouldn’t have the iPod or the computer, or even the books. They are all hand-me-downs that I gave him out of the goodness of my heart. I like things neater than Mute does, but neither pleading nor threatening nor bruising Mute has gotten him to change his ways.

Lots of people comment on how well Mute and I get along. That’s true in the sense that I haven’t strangled Mute—yet. I think the reason I haven’t strangled him is because it wouldn’t be a fair fight and I don’t like to fight dirty unless I have to. Nothing is a fair fight with Mute. He can’t compete at anything and doesn’t want to besides. I have brains, athletic ability, common sense, good looks, and social skills. Mute has none of the above. When father hit me with the shocker of buying me a hotel for my birthday, I looked at Mute for signs of jealousy, but I didn’t see any. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s been disinherited from the day of his birth. Or, if he does care, he doesn’t show it.

The only real problem I have with Mute is that he puts a monkey wrench into my social life. I don’t mean I give up time hanging out with my friends because of him. Mute is a loner, so he doesn’t need me to spend time with him. It’s just that some of my friends are the sort who like to amuse themselves by knocking an oddball kid about. My parents never tell me to watch out for Mute. They probably wouldn’t notice if he didn’t come home some day because he was thrown in a lake with weights about his feet. But I know enough about what kids are like to know that Mute is defenseless and somebody has to protect him from the savages in who plague our school systems. That means anybody who tries to mess with Mute learns real fast that they’d better find another hobby. Not even my friends get away with hassling Mute. To make matters worse, it turns out that I can’t stand it if any of my friends pick on somebody else, either. I think of Mute and find myself standing up for any whiney shrimp who is the designated goat for the day. When you’re talented and well-built, you can get away with this sort of thing without losing too many friends. When people ask me why I look after a brother like Mute, I say I don’t know. But I do know why I do it. If I don’t look after Mute, nobody will.

I was still unpacking when I heard a sharp squeal my parents’ bedroom. It was my mother. I sort of froze, thinking about the ghost-tree that grabbed me in the lobby, and hoped something of the sort hadn’t happened to mother. But after a minute or two, I heard my father chuckle and decided it had to be okay. I looked at Mute to see if it registered with him. Mute didn’t look up from his computer screen, so I assumed it didn’t.

When I’d finished unpacking and had everything in its place, I looked out the picture window and drank in the view of the Gulf. An osprey glided effortlessly through the blue sky on currents of wind. Then a pale, flickering light close to the window caught my attention. As the light came closer to the window, it started to look like a feathered monster that belonged in a Star Trek movie. When I realized it was on a collision course with the window, I jerked my head out of the way. The fluttery thing flew through the window, scratched my cheek, and headed straight for Mute. My brother stopped punching the computer keys and looked up at at the flickering silvery thing as if was expecting it. For a moment I panicked, wondering how I could protect Mute from something I didn’t understand, but I need not have worried. Mute lifted his right arm and the flickering thing landed on his wrist like a falcon returning to its falconer. As it landed, it materialized into the shape of a phantom osprey, maybe an ancestor of the osprey I was just looking at. Mute looked intently at the phantom osprey, as if he was listening to something the ghostly bird was telling him, then he frowned horribly. This was too spooky for me to look at. I turned my face back to the window and looked out at the water and then at the giant palms scattered hither and yon. I kept an eye out for more ospreys but didn’t see any. Not until I heard the keys clicking again on Mute’s laptop keyboard did I look back into the room. Mute looking like his normal self, surfing the Net like a fisherman. I thought of asking him what that was all about but then decided I didn’t want to know.

*********

I was trying hard to keep my eye on the ball as I drew back my golf club to drive the ball to kingdom come.

“Move your hips back,” my father urged me before I could swing.

“Okay.”

Trouble is, you concentrate on one thing like keeping your eye on the ball, you forget about keeping your hips back. Anc vice versa. The interruption meant I had to start over and concentrate harder. It payed off with a loud crack of the wood hitting the ball and a soaring line drive down the fairway. My parents applauded.

“You’ll win the Master’s some day at this rate,” said my mother.

“Not against Tiger Woods I won’t,” I replied, but I was pleased with myself nonetheless.

“See you further down,” said father as he and mother slipped into their golf cart.

“Okay.”

That left me with Mute. He’s never in a hurry to get on with his golf game. Not that he has much of one. He took a vigorous swing and missed.

“Keep your eye on the ball,” I reminded him.

“Okay.”

Dad doesn’t bother to teach him how to play because he knows Mute won’t listen. As usual, I’m the only one who tries to tell him anything. Being a merciful older brother, I didn’t count whiffs in Mute’s score. If I did, I’d need a calculator to add it up. The tee we were hitting off of was right next to the beach. That gave me a nice view of the water to look at while I waited for Mute to hit the ball far enough to be worth getting into our golf cart. I learned a long time ago that getting mad at Mute only makes things worse and results in Mute taking longer than ever to accomplish anything. So, I’ve learned to enjoy the view wherever we are. Unfortunately, the beach below the golf course was a real bust. The concrete break wall that defends the golf course from the tide hems in the beach so much that I felt claustrophobic when the McGutcheons took us for a walk along it. At each end of the property, there was a high wall to make sure that nobody at the Breezy Pelican strayed on to the next hotel’s space, or vice versa. Mr. McGutcheon proudly explained to us how he created the beach himself out of scrub brush. During that little walk, Mute lagged behind, as usual, lost in his own little world where he shook hands with invisible creatures and picked up little treasures nobody else can see.

Mute hit a dribbler that went about a dozen feet. Quite a drive for him, actually. He sauntered up to the ball to try again. It was a good thing the golf course was amazingly deserted for this time of year. I know by experience that most people aren’t as patient with Mute as I am, and I have the let them move on ahead of us. I switched back to watching the scenery while I waited. From the angle I had on the Tidal Wave Hotel, the shape of the building looked more ridiculous than it did from the road. The back side of it facing the water looked more like an osprey buckling against the wind than a tidal wave. The double-sided pelican on the roof looked as innocent as a cartoon character one minute, but then looked like a monstrous prehistoric creature in search of a victim the next.

When some time went by without hearing the clunk of wood hitting the ball, I stifled my impatience and looked out at the water. The sunlight was shimmering on the gulf, bright enough to blind me. I blinked my eyes and looked away, but I still saw the light float out of the water and move across the grass right toward me. Not wanting any more scars, I braced myself for a fight. The trouble was that I couldn’t figure out what was coming at me. First I thought it was a dolphin. Then I thought it was a walrus, but it had no tusks; just the dumb-looking face a walrus has. Then I saw terrible scars on the animal’s side and I was afraid it was attacking me for giving it those scars. I threw up my hands to fend the thing off, but a small hand stuck itself in the way at the last minute. Needless to say, it was Mute. He petted the creature on its snout, and looked kind of sad at what the ghostly animal seemed to be telling him. Then the image faded and Mute went back to his golf ball without my having to remind him and gave the ball a good swing. This time he hit a pretty decent drive, one worth getting into the cart for.

“Good work,” I said. “You’re getting to be a pro.”

“Who’s going to pay to see me?” Mute asked.

We both knew the answer to that. Mute and I climbed into the golf cart and I drove off. I thought of asking Mute about the phantom animal but thought better of it. Up ahead, I saw my father hit a hard line drive that soared up to the green. Then, suddenly, a huge white tree reared up. The ball hit the phantom tree right smack in the middle and dropped straight down on the fair way. Mute laughed. That was a minor miracle. He hardly ever laughs at anything. My father didn’t think it was funny. He swore up quite a storm with some words my mother would have slapped me silly if I used them. I would have thought it funny enough to laugh my head off if I wasn’t so scared about dead trees popping out of nowhere and doing things to our golf game.

*******

Back in our room, Mute was struggling to tie his tie in time for dinner, which was rapidly approaching. It was a pathetic. I was already dressed and spruced up to the hilt. I buried my nose in the book I was reading while I waited for Mute, but he’s so pathetic even when I don’t look at him that I decided to end the agony by intervening. If I didn’t, I’d be embarrassed for him all evening by Mute’s ridiculous appearance. Mom fusses over the smallest wrinkle in my suit, but she never notices what Mute looks like.

I know it sounds like I’m knocking my parents when I say things like this. I don’t like doing that, but I can’t tell this story without telling you how they treat Mute. They know something is wrong with him, but they don’t know what. Every time his teachers tell my parents to have him checked out, they say they will, but they never do. I think they don’t really want to know what’s wrong with him because if they find out, they’ll feel they have to do something about it, and that something they have to do about it will inconvenience their lives. As it is, my parents cope with Mute by pretending that he was never born. I don’t blame them. I try to solve problems by ignoring them, too, but that never works for me, so I’ve learned to do something about them. Like come up to Mute from behind while he’s staring dumbly in front of the dresser mirror.

“Need some help?” I asked.

“Okay.”

Mute never asks for help, but he always accepts it when I offer it. I did the job from behind because that’s easier than trying to reverse everything in my mind from in front. That also gives me the chance to see how sharp I looked in my light brown suit with its crest on the left pocket.

“Did you see what I saw on the golf course?” I asked Mute.

“Maybe,” was Mute’s helpful answer.

When I finished tying Mute’s tie, I noticed that the part in his hair wasn’t straight—it never is—so I picked up Mute’s comb and went to work on that.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“A manatee.”

I felt like beating myself on the head when Mute said that. Of course that strange ghostly animal was a manatee! Good thing I didn’t let on that I didn’t recognize it. Manatees are a bit like walruses without the tusks and they’re water mammals like dolphins. Mute and I had seen Snooty, the famous Manatee up in Bradenton, a couple of days ago and there was no question that the wispy animal I saw on the golf course looked like Snooty. I’ve heard of manatees getting killed by motorboats and the manatee ghost I’d seen sure looked like it had been done in that way.

“But manatees don’t swim in the air across golf courses,” I said.

“This one does.”

I could tell from the look in Mute’s face that he was perfectly serious. Worse, he looked perfectly sane. I picked up Mute’s suit coat and put it on him. It. It’s a nice, light-green coat that makes Mute’s shoulders look broader than they really are. Of course, Mute wouldn’t have this nice a coat if I wasn’t on hand at the store to help mother pick it out for him.

“Why would a manatee swim across a golf course?” I asked.

“Mr. McGutcheon took all the manatee’s food away when he built the beach,” Mute answered.

 “Monty!” mother yelled from outside the door. “Time to go!”

“Coming!” I yelled back.

“How do you know that?” I asked Mute. “Did a little manatee tell you?”

“Yes,” Mute replied.

His eyes stared back at me from the mirror with a firm, fierce look I’d rarely seen before. When Mute means business, even I duck out of the way.

*******

“I have a little something for the most glamorous birthday boy I’ve ever seen,” Caroline McGutcheon announced to me at the dinner table.

She insisted that I call her Caroline, so that’s what I’m calling her from now on. She placed a little package, beautifully wrapped and tied with a silvery ribbon, in front of me. Dan McGutcheon beamed at me from across the table where he sat next to my mother. He told me to call him Dan. My father was sitting between Caroline and my mother to give us as much of a male-female alternation as we could manage with the six of us. That left Mute next to me. The view of the gulf with the sun setting over the water was more breathtaking than I can say. I love Florida sunsets. With a less than full dining room, it was easy to get a good view of things. I opened the present and found a little gold pin with an enameled pelican, the pelican logo for the Breezy Pelican Hotel.

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“May I see it?” mother asked.

“Sure.”

I passed the pin across to her and she put on her best “Oh, Wow” act for Caroline’s benefit.

“This is beautiful, Caroline. I’m sure Monty will want to wear it all the time to remind him of his hotel in the south.”

“I trust this isn’t a bribe to get Monty to hire you and Dan as the hotel managers,” said my father with his good-natured smile.

“Don’t worry about that,” said Dan. “Caroline and I plan to retire from the Breezy Pelican Hotel as soon as the transfer of property is arranged. If our current manager doesn’t stay on, I’ll help you find another one before I go.”

When the pin got around to Mute, he studied it carefully with a horrible frown. It was almost enough to make me think he was getting jealous of me for once.

“There are no pelicans around here,” said Mute as he handed the pin back to me.

“Well, that’s an astute observation, young man,” said Dan with a strained smile. “As you can see, we made up for the deficiency of pelicans in our neighborhood with our logo.”

“There are pelicans all up and down the coast,” added Caroline, her smile as strained as her husband’s. “You don’t have to go far to see one.”

“Farther and farther,” Mute muttered.

“That’s enough, Jason,” father sternly cautioned Mute.

“I’m so sorry,” my mother apologized to the McGutcheons, “Jason gets that way every now and then. He’ll be okay when he gets his escargots.”

I pinned the pelican to the lapel of my suit coat to help smooth things over. A scuffling sound caught my attention and I looked behind me. A couple was fanatically moving their things to another free table while the Maitre D’ scurried after them. Mute looked over at them and smirked ever so slightly. Dan and Caroline showed some alarm, but quickly forced themselves to pretend nothing was happening.

“How did your golf game go?” asked Dan, obviously drawing our attention away from the couple that was moving.

“Pretty well for the most part,” my father replied. “Monty got two birdies, I got one, but I got a bogie on a hole that needs some better landscaping.”

“Do you mean to say you were challenged just a little too much?” Dan asked father.

He was looking a little too coy about this for my tastes.

“I mean to say that it is not usual to plant a tree right in front of a green,” said my father.

“At which hole did you have this difficulty?” asked Dan.

“Uh—the sixth,” my father answered.

Dan put on an act of seeming to think this over.

“Usually it’s a tree near the fourth hole that people complain about,” said Dan.

“I still don’t think it was a tree you hit,” said my mother. “I think it was the wind. It was whipping up pretty good at times.

Mute started to laugh up his sleeve. When father turned an angry look his way, I did some smirking too to cover up for Mute.

“You think that’s funny, don’t you?” my father asked irritably.

“Well,” I replied, “you taught me enough new words to fill my vocabulary list for a whole week.”

That brought down the house and put an end to any further arguments about phantom trees or sudden gusts of wind on the golf course. I have to say that my comment made me worry more rather than less about trees or birds sneaking in to our corner of the dining room. After all, I had a theory about why that other couple moved from their first table so suddenly. From time to time I sneaked a look at them and, every time, I caught them casting furtive glances back to the table they’d fled. This little drama wasn’t lost on Mute, either, and he did not disguise his amusement over it.

The dinner was everything a birthday dinner should be. While my brother had escargots for his appetizer (he would) I had a nice shrimp cocktail. My entree, of course, was a filet mignon, medium rare, with tons of mushrooms. Once the McGutcheons promised not to notice, my father poured a little wine into my glass to help me celebrate in an age-appropriate way. By the time I was halfway through my steak, I had pretty well forgotten about ghostly trees and animals when my mother let out a yelp, just like the one I heard earlier in our suite.

“What’s the matter, Dearie?” Dan asked her.

I saw the problem right away and I didn’t know if I should laugh or run away. Mute started to smirk, then stopped himself.

“Uh—your potted plant seems to be a little close to the table,” said my mother, her voice not quite steady.

That was an understatement. A slender, bony tree branch of an ash-white tree was slithering over mother’s shoulder and snaking down toward her plate. The tree was big enough to be a tidal wave in itself. That is to say, it was much too big to be a potted plant, even in this potty hotel.

“Nothing to worry about, Suzy,” said Dan in that tone of voice that tells you there’s lots to worry about. “I’ll have the plant moved right away. Reinaldo!”

My mother wasn’t about to wait that long. She pushed herself out of her chair and hopped over to father. The Maitre D’, came running.

“What can I do for you, honored ones?” he asked.

“Can you move our potted plant just a little bit?” Dan asked, trying to sound casual, but sounding all the more tense as a result.

“I’m so sorry,” said Reinaldo, who obviously had a lot of practice at this sort of thing, “yes, by all means. I will move the plant away from you.”

“I—I’d rather we moved to another table,” said mother.

“No problem,” said the Maitre D’ with an exaggerated smile. “One stroke of my magic wand and all your food and drinks will appear on another lovely table faster than I can say the magic words.”

“No,” said Mute, his voice soft, but firm.

When he said that, Mute was standing by the ghostly tree and gently stroking one of its branches.

“What do you mean, No?” mother asked, astonished that Mute had spoken a second time at the same meal.

“I want to stay here,” said Mute. “The tree will move over next to me and it won’t hurt you. If we run away, it might chase us.”

“I don’t think trees usually chase after people,” said Caroline in her most gracious tone, one that told me that some trees in the Tidal Wave Hotel were not so usual.

“I’d rather move,” said mother.

“Don’t,” said Mute.

“Jason,” said father, “you heard your mother.”

“I heard her. I vote we stay.”

“I vote we move,” said mother.

“I vote we move, father echoed.

All eyes shifted over to me. I wasn’t too keen on eating with a hostile tree looking over my shoulder, but I don’t like to cross Mute when he gets this way. Besides, I was getting tired of seeing Mute get outvoted all the time.

“I vote we stay,” I said.

Deadlock. In our family, a deadlock usually means we stick to the status quo, but a birthday vote counts extra, so Mute and I won. My parents couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. But I’d cast my vote and I wasn’t going to back down. The McGutcheons and the Maitre D’ shook their heads. True to Mute’s word, the tree had moved over between me and Mute but closer to Mute than to me, fortunately. Doubtfully, mother sat down at her place. Once she’d had another bite or two of her lamb, she seemed to forget about the tree. I was a little nervous about the tree myself, but I trusted Mute’s promise, and his promise proved good. The tree never hassled me, and it faded away before very long.

The rest of my birthday dinner went according to plan. At dessert time, the Maitre D’ brought a three-story cake with twelve blazing candles on it. Everybody sang Happy Birthday. Mute sang a thrilling descant. Believe it or not, he can really sing. I made a strange wish—that the ghostly trees and animals would find rest—and blew out all the candles. After I’d eaten a couple pieces of cake with lots of chocolate fudge ice cream, several more presents popped up on the table. One of them was an extraordinarily fine first baseman’s glove, the sort that can snare line drives from half a mile away. The other presents were books: a history of the early Greeks, a biography of Albert Einstein, and a science fiction novel. All good choices. A bit later, while my parents and the McGutcheons were whooping it up so much that they didn’t notice, Mute reached over and placed something in front of me. It was a little shell shaped a bit like a tiny butterfly. I picked it up carefully to take a closer look. It was a coquina shell with a pretty brown and yellow plaid design. I hadn’t seen any coquinas on the beech, and it didn’t look store-bought. I wondered if the shell had been invisible until Mute picked it up. I smiled at Mute and put it in my shirt pocket, underneath the pelican. Mute smiled back at me, looking like the nicest boy in the world.

***********

It was past midnight when I tiptoed into my bedroom, gingerly trying to keep my balance. True to his promise, father had served me a scotch and water, though that had to last me as long as the two or three scotches father served himself. Once he’d talked Mother and Mute to retire for the evening, father popped a video into the VCR that I really wasn’t supposed to see at my age. All of that should have been fun, but when your father encourages you to be naughty, it isn’t as much fun as doing the same stuff with your friends. By the end of the movie and my scotch and water, I was pronounced a qualified man, but I could hardly stand on my two feet, and I really didn’t feel all that great.

In the darkness of the bedroom my courage almost evaporated. The random patches of light looked like ghostly monsters flitting all round my bed. I hadn’t seen things like that since I was five years old. I pinned myself against the door, petrified, until my eyes adjusted to the dark and the monsters finally looked like the patches of light I knew they were. I stumbled across the room, undressed, found my pajamas, and slipped them on. I landed on my bed and just lay there, my head swimming. I was starting to understand why most grownups don’t believe in letting children drink scotch. At last, I got myself under the covers and prepared for a long, drunken sleep.

But I couldn’t fall asleep. Drowsy as I was, my body kept on racing. I might just as well have downed six cups of coffee for a nightcap. My head was throbbing. Worst of all, little birds and sea monsters and leafless trees started to parade across the ceiling. I turned over and closed my eyes, but the parade only got worse inside my own head. Every little rustle outside made me pop my eyes open to make sure an osprey wasn’t flying around the room or a manatee wasn’t swimming over my bed. After a while, I decided I was better off laying on my back and keeping my eyes open. The parade got boring when the little beasties could no longer fool me into thinking they were real. I thought surely boredom would bring on sleep, but it didn’t. My body kept on racing.

When a swirling disc of pale light appeared in the window, I assumed it was just my imagination again thanks to the scotch I shouldn’t have been drinking. When the swirling disc of pale light floated right over my bed, I began to think I needed another scotch to knock me right for a couple of days. When the swirling light split up and smaller bits of light flickered around the larger one, I thought I must be asleep after all and was about to have the dream of my life. When the larger light took on the shape of a pair of ponderous wings and a baggy beak grew out of its head so that it looked just like the pelican on the pin Caroline gave me, I thought I was just getting carried away with my dreams of owning the Breezy Pelican. The ghostly pelican winged its awkward way around the room while the smaller lights, like dozens of stars orbiting a sun, circles the bird. When the pelican and the stars turned back in my direction and flew low over my bed. I stupidly thought it was nice of my imagination to come up with something a little more entertaining than the repetitious parade it had given me before. But when something cold and slimy brushed my chin, I wiggled away. That was not my imagination! I snapped upright in my bed. The pelican flew to the corner and then turned back in my direction again. Now, its eyes flashed a fiery red like a werewolf’s. The smaller, starrier, pieces of light swam in the air like little fish. That’s because they were little fish. So that’s where the slimy feeling came from! The fish swarmed all around my head and the pelican closed in on me like an avenging angel. I threw my hands over my face just in time. I took a couple of sharp jabs on my knuckles and the slimy fish slid over my wrists. When a nerve-wracking minute or two passed without anything else attacking me, I peeked between two fingers and saw the pelican overhead diving at the starry fish. It scooped one of the ghostly fish in its pouch and then landed on Mute’s bed. As for Mute, he was sitting up, absorbed in watching the show. The red faded from the pelican’s eyes and the fish made a circle around the pelican and Mute like a group of small children gathering to hear a story. I braced myself to defend Mute from an attack by the pelican and the fish, but they showed no signs that they were going to try and hurt them. For his part, Mute looked like he was listening to something the pelican was telling him, something I couldn’t hear, of course.

“What did you say is coming?” Mute whispered to the pelican. “You don’t know what it is?”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I tensed up again and looked to the window. The moon was full and in just the right position to shine straight into our room. Then the moonlight got all distorted and its beam splintered into streaks and sparks. A spinning ball of silver plunged through our window so fast, it was all I could do to flatten myself back on my bed as it swam overhead. As if it were a reflection of the moon gone mad, this new apparition exploded silvery sparks as it darted about the room like a shark closing in on its prey. It had to be at least twenty feed long, and a long paddle on its snout made it look like a swordfish with the sword flattened. When it faced me, I saw that it had no eyes, no face. But eyes or no eyes, it knew where I was and it speeded straight for my head like a torpedo. I grabbed at it to wrestle it to my bed, but a bruising whack on my shoulders scotched that. I let out a little cry before I could stop myself. The monster turned around in the corner of the room and charged at Mute. I stood up on the bed to fight the monster and defend Mute with my life, but the monster flattened me on my bed before it even reached me. Desperately, I tried to push myself up, but a blow to head knocked me down again. That’s no fun when you have a hangover. By this time, I was seeing stars, or something, but I had to protect Mute as long as I had an ounce of strength left I forced myself up to my knees just as the monster came for Mute again. I flung my arms at the sea monster, but something grabbed my wrist and pushed me back down on the bed and held me there. It was Mute. Never before in his life had he been strong enough to do something like that to me.

“It’s okay, Monty,” Mute whispered.

I wasn’t so sure about that, but I was too befuddled not to trust my brother. Mute rose up on his knees and put his hands out for the sea monster. After the things that had happened in the last twelve hours, it should not have surprised me that the monster floated up to Mute and came to a stop with its long snout a few inches from Mute’s nose and its tail swishing against the door. This was quite a switch to have Mute protecting me from something. If my head wasn’t aching as much as it was, I might have been upset about that, but I had decided that Mute was as good at handling ghosts as I was at handling bullies. The moonlight reflected off fish’s ghost so brightly that it looked like a fountain of silvery water. Its paddle wasn’t really a flattened sword, but a long bill like a duck-billed platypus. I sure hoped Mute could keep it from whacking me with that again. Even with this good a look at the fish, I saw no eyes; the fish was blind. I guessed it lived too deep in the ocean to have any use for eyes. But what would bring a ghost of a fish from that deep into my hotel bedroom?

“I’m so sorry,” Mute whispered to the sea monster as he stroked its sparkling scales.

The pelican hopped over to my bed and perched itself on Mute’s knee while the fish flickered around all of us like a circle of stars.

“You poor thing,” Mute consoled the fish’s ghost, “I’m so sorry. Monty’s your friend, too. It’s okay. I know Monty’s your friend. He is good. Don’t hurt him; he’s your friend. He will do what you’re asking for. I know he will.”

Leave it to Mute to make promises for me like that, but under the circumstances, I wasn’t about to complain. This was the first time I’d ever heard Mute say I was good. Somehow, that meant a lot more to me than I would ever have thought it could. As Mute stroked the strange fish’s head, the moonlight streaming in lit up Mute’s face with the same expression he has when he’s serving at the altar.

“What is this thing?” I asked.

“She’s not a thing,” Mute reproved me, “she’s a fish. She’s the last one of her kind, and she’s dead. The junk we put in the ocean killed her before anybody ever saw her or any of her kind. So, nobody ever gave them a name.”

“They’re extinct?” I asked, choking more than I thought I would at the thought of a whole species of fish going extinct.

“They are all extinct, except for this ghost,” Mute confirmed. “The only thing you can do for her and all the others who died is give them a name.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Please, Monty. I know you can give her the best name an extinct fish ever had.”

Mute might be the most pathetic kid brother any boy ever had, but there were times when I wouldn’t turn him down for all the hotels in Florida. This was one of them. I looked at the fish again. Its silvery scales shining in the moonlight looked like a fountain. The long duck-bill was too distinctive not to be remembered. Before I new it, the name came to my lips.

“I christen you the duck-billed fountainfish.”

“Perfect,” Mute whispered.

No sooner said, then a pair of eyes appeared in the face of the silver duck-billed fountainfish and she looked at me with the same look I get from Mute when he thinks I’ve done the right thing.

“Some day we’ll meet all of the duck-billed fountainfish in Heaven,” Mute whispered, “and you will be their best friend of all.”

The thing about Mute is that every time he mentions Heaven, he sounds like he’s just paid it a visit. The duck-billed fountainfish’s eyes became very bright. The pelican and the fish surrounding it sparkled like a vision of Heaven. Then they vanished, leaving us with just the moonlight.

“I wish we still had them here on earth, too,” I whispered back.

“Me too.”

**********

The next morning, I was sitting in a plush black chair that almost swallowed me in Dan McGutcheon’s office. Mute’s chair was a bottomless pit. Windows on both sides gave us a spectacular view of the Gulf to the west and a less spectacular view of a high-rise to the south. It’s the kind of office that makes you look and feel important, even if all you do is play solitaire all day. All I would have to do was say the word and this office would be mine. Caroline sat at an angle to her husband’s desk. My parents flanked my brother and me..

“I have the papers all ready for you to sign if you are ready to finalize the deal on behalf of your birthday boy,” Dan McGutcheon announced with an anxious smile.

My father turned to face me.

“How about it, Monty?”

My head was still pounding from the scotch father served me My head could hardly have felt cloudier than if I had the flu real bad, thanks to the scotch my father had served me. On top of that, my back ached from the bruises the ghost of the last duck-billed fountainfish had given me before Mute convinced her I was a friend. The waffles I had at breakfast tasted great at the time, but they weren’t resting so well in my stomach by this time. More to the point, I didn’t know what I wanted for my birthday anymore. Hardly able to sleep, I’d stayed up all night trying to make up my mind what I wanted and what I would say, and I still didn’t know.

“The name of the hotel isn’t grammatical,” I said, although that was beside the point. I was only buying myself a little more time while I worked myself up to more substantial matters. “Pelicans aren’t breezy.”

Both Dan and Caroline gave me their patented frozen smiles.

“Well, there’s no problem with changing the name to something more grammatical,” said Dan.

“The architecture is pretty kinky,” is the next thing I said. “It looks like a tidal wave swooping down on the whole Sunshine State.”

That froze the McGutcheons’ smiles at a temperature several degrees below zero. Both my parents gave me restless looks.

“But Monty,” said Carol, “the architect for this hotel won first prize for this design.”

“I’d hate to see the buildings built by the losers,” I said.

“Well, it will be hard to change the architecture of the place,” said Dan.

“You don’t have to like the architecture to take in the money,” said father.

“You don’t have as many guests for this time in the season,” I said, getting closer to the point.

“That’s a very astute observation, young man,” said Dan. “It shows you’re always thinking. The thing is, business is a bit slow all over, the economy being what it is. It will pick up again soon. It always does. And then business will be better than ever.”

“And a little young blood—especially such gorgeous young blood as yours, Monty—will surely help,” added Caroline.

“THIS HOTEL IS HAUNTED,” Mute announced for all the world to hear.

Although he had spoken softly, we could all hear the capital letters. With his light gray t-shirt against the black chair that engulfed him, Mute himself looked like a ghost emerging from the depths. With my head floating the way it was, I could easily imagine a whole army of trees, birds, manatees, and duck-billed fountainfish invading the office at any time. Four pairs of adult eyes narrowed on my brother, and my parents were going into overdrive trying to figure out how to handle Mute and get back to business.

“This is a pretty new hotel to be harboring ghosts,” said an obviously troubled Dan McGutcheon.

“Ghosts are usually murder victims who haven’t gotten a proper burial or whose killers haven’t been brought to justice,” said Caroline, “and we haven’t had any murders at this hotel. Dan and I can vouch for that.”

“The ghosts were murdered,” said Mute, “they didn’t get proper burials, and they didn’t get justice.”

“Jason, that’s enough!” said father in dictatorial mode.

The McGutcheons looked at each other, obviously puzzled beyond belief.

“Can you—uh—describe some of these—uh—these people who were murdered?” Dan McGutcheon stammered.

“Trees—fish—birds—pelicans—manatees,” Mute replied.

“Jason!” father warned.

“And the last duck-billed fountainfish,” I added.

“What—are—duck-billed—fountainfish?” asked Caroline, so open-mouthed I don’t know how she said the words.

“They were silver fish with duck-like bills whose silver scales looked like fountains in the moonlight,” I answered.

“Never heard of them,” Dan scoffed.

“You killed them all before any human being ever saw them,” I charged.

“Monty!” mother cried. “You’re getting as bad as Jason!”

“What is wrong with my brother?” I asked.

Silence. My stomach felt as if an osprey had grabbed my guts in its claws. Both my parents gave me looks that told me that whatever was wrong with Mute was obvious and we would not talk about it.

“Are you saying you don’t want this hotel as your birthday present after all?” father asked.

Clearly I had him puzzled beyond words. I puzzled beyond words myself. This wasn’t the kind of decision I liked being faced with when while recovering from my first hangover and a bombardment of ghostly beasts from the ocean. Mute stared at the floor.

“If you buy me this hotel, I will tear it down, and turn the property into a nature preserve,” I announced.

The curve of Mute’s smile made me feel good about the gasps and poisoned looks I got from everybody else. I knew how everybody was going to vote, and it was my birthday.

*********

But my birthday privilege was not strong enough to overcome my father’s business sense. We walked out of Mr. McGutcheon’s office, packed the car, and drove away. I was afraid that the fiasco at the hotel had scotched our Florida vacation and we’d be flying back up north to the lovely Minnesota winter we’d run away from. But father has lots of connections and he managed to book a bungalow south of Venice that nobody else would have found at the last minute during Florida’s Season. This put us in an area that isn’t built up quite so much as it is further north, and our vacation got to be a lot more fun.

I have to hand it to my parents. They treated me pretty decently, considering how I badly I embarrassed them in front of the McGutcheons. They both looked like their lives had just fallen apart and they had to hurry up and pick up the pieces. As for Mute, he was walking tall in a way I’d never seen him do before, and he started looking up to me like I was some kind of saint. My parents talked up a lot of storms on their cell phones. Mute took me for walks along the strip of beach the developers had left near our bungalow. Through Mute’s eyes I saw a lot more shells and shark’s teeth than I would have seen on my own. We kept looking for duck-billed fountainfish, but we knew we’d never find any, and we didn’t.

After we’d been at this bungalow two or three days, our parents loaded Mute and me into the car and took us on a drive down the coast a little ways. I winced at some of the buildings we passed and thought of the poor manatees. Father stopped the car in front of a chain-link fence that secured a piece of land that wasn’t developed. He unlocked the gate, drove the car down a dirt road, then had us all hop out. My mother had that kind of look she has when she or my father are hiding something up their sleeves. It was a scruffy bit of land, but it was still land. A pelican flew low over the water, then splashed and skimmed the surface before rising again with a fish in its beak. A couple more pelicans standing in the shallow water preened themselves. There wasn’t a beach that would be good for swimming, but there was lots of vegetation to feed any manatees still left in the area. The duck-billed fountainfish would have loved it, if there were any. Mute’s eyes got wider by the minute as he investigated every square inch of territory.

“Monty, do you like this place?” my father asked.

“Yea.”

“Uh—this parcel of land has gotten a pretty high bid from a developer.”

I felt a door slam inside.

“Oh.”

“A conservation group has been trying to raise enough money to match the bid, but they aren’t coming close,” said mother.

The door inside me slammed again.

“Oh.”

“If this parcel of land will do for a birthday present,” my father went on, “I can outbid the developer.”

That jerked a couple of tears out of me. Mute’s hand came out of nowhere and squeezed mine.

“It’ll do,” I sobbed.

Maybe it was the way my tears blurred my vision, maybe it was the magic of Mute’s eyes, but as I looked out on to the Gulf, the shimmer of light on the water looked an awful lot like a duck-billed fountainfish dancing on the waves.