Voyage of the Peapod by Steve Himmer

Ever since reading that novel the whole city read at the same time, the boy had imagined what he might do, how he himself might behave if trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger. "I'd tame the tiger," the boy told his friend. "I'd fashion a whip from fishing nets and detach the whistle from my life preserver and for my tiger tamer's chair I'd use a..."

"That sounds like a lion tamer," said his friend. "And what if there wasn't a fishing net or life preserver or chair in the boat? There weren't any of those in the novel."

The boy's friend had read the novel, too, during those summer months when its blue cover peeked from each commuter's bag. Giant flags of the book flew from lampposts along the city's best streets, and each Sunday the newspaper's magazine section profiled someone in the city who was reading it, telling their fellow citizens who they were, where they read, what remarkable life had delivered them to those weeks of shared reading and how reading the book was changing that life.

The boy told another friend, later, "I'll be naked, without any water or food. I'm going to have a vision quest."

"I didn't know you were Native," that friend replied.

"I'm not," the boy said, "but I saw a show on TV so I pretty much know how they work. I think a vision quest is just what I need."

The boy found it harder than expected to rent a lifeboat. Most of the city's waterborne rescues were made by the harbormaster in his motorboat. The few lifeboats remaining in town were on display at the maritime museum or else in the lobbies of nautically-themed office buildings downtown, and none of those could be rented or borrowed or easily stolen.

At last, he found a boat called a "peapod" for hire. It was long enough to hold a boy and a tiger, and more or less the shape he imagined a lifeboat should have, despite the lack of gravitas in its name. The peapod's owner, a lobster boat captain who was hardly grizzled or growling or barnacle-crusted, asked whether the boy wanted the mast and the sail and how many oars and what were his plans for the boat, anyway.

"No oars and no sail," the boy answered, to which the captain raised one of his eyebrows. And when the boy said he'd be sharing the boat with a tiger, that it was to be his vision quest, the captain reminded the boy his security deposit would not be returned if the tiger's claws scratched up the hull. The boy asked whether the captain had read the book, too, but the mariner only whistled while counting the boy's crisp, bank-fresh notes.

The tiger was even harder to come by. There were only two in the city, and both of those were in zoos. The boy checked the schedules for all the traveling circuses he could think of, but none were coming to town. Circuses hardly ever came to the city because each time they did they drew more protesters than enthusiasts of lion-taming and monkeys riding bicycles on elephants' backs. The boy, who had been to his share of circus protests, almost regretted his passion for animal rights now that he needed a tiger so he could commune with the natural world.

In the end, he paid a hunter to cage a cougar, and even that wasn't cheap -- he'd budgeted what he thought was a big chunk of money for tiger expenses, and spent most of it on the inferior cat. The rest went to an artist hired to paint tiger stripes, and to a veterinary student whose tranquilizers let the artist work safely and let the boy drive the cat across town and kept it asleep until the boat was offshore.

The boy's destination wasn't specific, just far enough out to sea that land fell from sight. The captain threw in haulage for free with the hired peapod, and once the horizon was the same slate expanse in all directions he detached the tow rope and received a bundle of clothes the boy had stripped off. Then he swung his bow toward the first string of lobster pots he'd pull that morning and in a few minutes was beyond the boy's view.

And all that remained was the tiger that wasn't a tiger, and the lifeboat not quite a lifeboat, and the boy.

The tiger still slept, curled in the bow like a house cat on a couch, and the boy waited for something important to happen. To pass the time he imagined the dreams of the tiger: virulent, vivid dreams of dashing and darting and pouncing from branches above. Dreams of ravishing tigresses and lionesses alike and perhaps even human women who wandered too far off the trail. Of cross-species connection with a boy like himself, a boy the tiger had been waiting to share his tigerness with, with the vision to understand what it is to be Tiger.

Dreams of dreaming tigers so enraptured the boy that he fell asleep on a bulkhead, and while he slept the tide washed his boat back to shore. The tiger awoke and sprang over the gunwale, a bit seasick but no worse for wear, and wandered away on the sand leaving deep tracks that lasted just minutes. And when the boy emerged from his visions he was alone in the boat though surrounded by seagulls, and a cold breeze off the water brushed his body the same shade of blue as the cover of a novel the whole city had read.

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Steve Himmer blogs as Tawny Grammer. His works has appeared in various places including Pindeldyboz, MonkeyBicycle, and more. Read it, concerned reader. Read it all.