TO CATCH A WHALE by Salvatore Difalco

My mother had warned me not to stare at the sun, so I stared at my mangled feet as I made my way between the reeking rows of sunflowers, the air yellow with pollen, the high sun searing my head. The memory begins in that field and almost ends on the porch of grizzled neighbour Jasper in denim overalls drinking over-sweetened lemonade and babbling about chess. Jasper was reputed to be smart, but perhaps unbalanced. I’d had little dealings with him in the past and he struck me as an innocuous eccentric, in no way dangerous or perverse. His avid chess playing affirmed his status as more of an old weirdo nerd than something more sinister. I didn’t know how to play chess that well so I tried to talk about other things—baseball or tractors for instance—but he wouldn’t stop talking about chess.

“The Sicilian’s a double-edged opening,” he said, “and an excellent attacking system for both white and black. Are you familiar with the Sicilian?“ he asked.

“I am Sicilian,” I said, as though this mattered. “Both my parents are from there.”

Jasper eyed me, sucked his teeth and spat. His face reminded me of the countryside of southern France, his eyes the blue of its summer skies, where I’d visited as a youth, due to the proximity of my Aunt Teresa’s country home in northern Italy. Aunt Teresa came to be up north there because she married a man from the Piedmont region who spoke an incomprehensible Italian dialect that sounded more like the dialect spoken in southern France. I asked Jasper if he’d ever been to southern France and he said that he’d never been beyond our county.

“You never had the bug to travel?” I asked.

“Simon,” he said, “a man comes to realize that all the best things in this life are right in front of him. Now do you want to play some chess or not? I’m trying to nail down the Rossolimo variation of the Sicilian and I wouldn’t mind tuning up a punching bag to get my timing down. By the way,” he added, “Simon’s not a very Sicilian name, is it?”

I explained that I’d been named after an uncle who died in the Second World War.

“Was he Sicilian?” Jasper asked.

“I guess.” I didn’t explain to Jasper that my name was actually spelled Simone, with an e on the end, or that my uncle had died in Russia.

Jasper chewed on a blade of grass and squinted at the field of drooping sunflowers. “What d’ya think?” he said.

A hint of slyness in his tone alarmed me. “What do you mean, what do I think?”

“Wanna see something mind-boggling?”

“Where?” I said. Here it comes, I thought, the pervert about to show his hand.

“Out there,” he said, waving his flattened hand.

I pointed to my bare feet.

He blinked. “Where’re your dang shoes?”

I waved my hand and said, “I lost them out there.”

“What kind of fool loses his shoes?” he said, shaking his head. “You’re gonna need a shitload of Band-Aids, son.” I asked him what he was going to show me. “Never mind,” he said. “You’d best get home and tend to those blisters.” I asked him again what he was going to show me. “Well”, he said, “you won’t believe me, but there’s a whale out there, hiding in the sunflowers.”

I shook my head. “Nah,” I said, wondering if he had spiked his lemonade with booze or something more colorful or if this was some kind of distraction or lure. Who the hell would believe there was a whale in the field? A victim. If he tried anything I was prepared to beat the crap out of him.

“I swear on my mother’s eyes,” he said, “there’s a whale out there.”

Tried of this, I said, “Listen, thanks for the lemonade, but I better split.”

“You think I’m nuts,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ll take you to it right now. Five minutes over yonder. I’ll lend you my bear claw slippers, they’ll keep your feet nice, no worries.”

Knowing that such a thing was not only impossible, but perhaps an expression of mental illness, I decided to take Jasper up on his offer and see what he had to show me. The slippers, to my chagrin, seemed made of actual bear feet, the razor sharp claws intact, but they proved surprisingly comfortable and did not in the least exacerbate my blisters.

I followed Jasper, who moved swiftly for a man his age, through the dense sighing rows of sunflowers, yellow pollen dusting his shoulders and mine. I could barely see over the lolling massive heads of the sunflowers, but did not expect under any circumstances to see something as enormous as a whale looming ahead.

“This is crazy,” I said.

“Crazy how? If I tell you there’s a whale out here, I mean a whale, the real deal. I’m not using the term whale metaphorically or as a code word for something else, maybe something kinky or funky, you know. I’m a straight shooter.”

“A straight shooter, eh? So tell me, how a fricken whale ends up in a sunflower field, there isn’t an ocean for miles?”

“That’s right,” Jasper said with a vacant smile, “there isn’t an ocean for miles.”

Salvatore Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada. He can be contacted at sammydifalco@gmail.com