Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
Chapter 15~16
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Song for Your Supper
Amy picked the whale. It had been a stressful morning for her, and Quinn wanted to convey his complete confidence in her, so he handed over the headphones and took directions as they narrowed down which of their whales was actually the singer.
"Wait a second," Amy said. "Shut down the engine."
And then she did something that Quinn had seen no one do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the point of being full-blown bat shit. Amy hung over the side by her knees and put her head in the water. After about thirty seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of seawater all over the boat, then pointed north.
"He's over there."
"That doesn't work, you know," said Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that humans didn't have directional hearing underwater. He was just gently trying to remind her.
"Go that way. That's where our whale is."
"Okay, there may indeed be a singer over there, but you didn't locate him by hearing him."
She just stood there next to him - dripping on his feet, the console, the field notes - looking at him.
"Okay, I'm going." He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. "Tell me when I get there."
A couple of minutes later Amy signaled for him to cut the engine, and she was hanging over the side with her head in the water while the boat was still coasting.
"Well, this is just stupid," Nate said while Amy was submerged.
Amy dedunked long enough to say, "I heard that."
"Looks like you're bobbing for whales, is what it looks like."
"Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."
"You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C. that used to watch fish all day."
"That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."
"Six hundred yards? You're sure?"
"Give or take fifty."
"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."
" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"
"I'm not going to need to know that."
"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).
Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.
Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface - pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"
If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.
Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak and lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert - don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it - then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"
"It's a date," said Quinn.
"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"
"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"
"Hmmm, let me think about it..."
She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."
"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."
"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."
"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.
"Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."
"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.
"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and - »
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the channel would be thirty to fifty feet down - this guy was at about seven. Nate kept having to pull up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.
"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.
Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.
One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great tail peduncle arched high into the air.
"Looks like he's going to do it," Nate said.
"Ready," Amy said.
The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an edge view instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like black letters on the underside of the tail.
"You get that? You get that?"
"I got what there was. He didn't present very well." Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the dive, maybe eight frames.
"Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black... uh, stripes?" Quinn whipped off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt.
"Stripes? Nate, I didn't see anything but edge through the camera."
"Damn it!"
"Look, he fluked. Maybe he will again."
"That's not the point."
"It's not?"
"Get up on the bow, see if you can find him."
Amy stood on the bow and directed Quinn. When she dropped her arm, he killed the engine. And there was the whale, hanging there, singing, his tail not ten feet under the water. They weren't a hundred yards off the wind line, and the boat was drifting away from the whale faster than it had before. They'd be over it for only a minute or so. This close to the wind line, they'd probably lose him the next time he came up. Nate was not going to finish this day wondering if he was having hallucinations again. "Amy, hand me my mask and flippers from the bow cabinet, would you?"
"You're going in the water?"
"Yes."
"But you never go in the water."
"I'm going in the water." Nate opened a plastic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to make sure it was loaded.
"You're not a water guy."
"See if there's a weight belt in there, too."
"Clay says you're not a water guy. You're a boat guy."
"I'm going to get an ID photo from under his tail. If he's going to be accommodating enough to stay this close to the surface, I'm going to go get the photo."
"Can you do that?"
"Why not?"
She handed him a belt weighted with ten pounds of lead, and Nate buckled it around his hips. He pulled on the mask and fins, then sat on the gunwale with his back to the water. "You're going to drift off of me. I'm not going to try to swim to catch you, so come back and get me. Wait till I wave. I don't want you to start the engine until I'm sure I have the picture. Keep recording until you come get me."
" 'Kay." Amy's mouth was sort of hanging open as if she'd just been slapped.
"This is no big deal."
"Right. You want me to do it? It's my fault I didn't get the shot last time."
"Not your fault. The shot wasn't there. See ya."
Quinn put the snorkel in his mouth and rolled backward off the boat. At seventy-five degrees, the water was still cold enough to knock the breath out of him. He floated to the surface and tried to take controlled breaths until his system adjusted.
The whale was close, only a hundred or so feet away. The song reverberated in Nate's ribs as he kicked over to it. This had to be the "bite me" whale. Even if he'd somehow been wrong about there actually being letters, there were certainly some strange markings on this animal's tail. And there was more than that, too, if he could prove to himself that this was the same animal. It would mean that the whale had stayed in the general area of the Au'au Channel for over three weeks, which was fairly unusual. Of course, conclusions weren't reached from that lack of data. It could simply be that they hadn't computerized the catalog of Hawaiian ID photos the way they had in Alaska. And without the first picture there'd be no proof that this was the same animal, but Quinn would know. He would know. That had become the impetus of this silly mission, not just proving that he wasn't hallucinating. He was a man of science, of facts, of reason. He didn't need to prove he was sane.
I'm out of my mind, he thought. He'd never even heard of anyone trying to do an ID photo underwater.
The animal was perfectly motionless, a great swath of gray in a field of infinite blue. But Quinn thought he saw movement on the far side of the whale. He lifted his head out of the water and looked back at the boat. Amy gave him a thumbs-up. He took a deep breath and made his dive to take the photo.
If he'd been wearing tanks, he might have let the weight belt take him down slowly, but he knew he'd be able to stay down for only forty to sixty seconds, so he went headfirst, kicking hard until he was down twenty or so feet. Then he leveled off, holding the camera in front of him, and looked up at the underside of the whale's tail.
There it was, in big, sans-serif, spray-paint-like letters: BITE ME! He nearly forgot to take the picture. How could this possibly be? Had the animal somehow been caught in a net when it was younger and marked by a sardonic fisherman before being released? Was it one of those animals that had swum up a river and got stranded, then been rescued by an army of fish-and-game people?
He centered the tail in the viewfinder and hit the shutter. Advanced the film and shot again. Then he needed to breathe. He turned and kicked to the surface, but again he saw the dark shape moving near the whale. Remora, he thought. Although it looked too big to be one of the parasite fish that often attached themselves to whales.
At the surface he looked back down at the singer, near the left pec where he'd seen the movement. The animal was doing ribbits. Quinn smiled around his snorkel, took three deep breaths, held, then dove again.
This time, before he could get the camera up, he saw the movement of a dark fin on the far side of the whale, and he squinted to see deep into the blue distance. Blue-water willies, was how he'd always thought of it. The feeling you get when you realize that something big and carnivorous could come at you from any direction, then you start looking for gray missiles in the blue, like looking for a malevolent face to appear at a dark window.
Then the whale moved. The wash of the tail pushed Quinn back, but he maintained his bearings and started toward the surface, trying to keep his eye on the animal. The whale turned around in little more than its own length and shot toward Nate. He kicked laterally, trying to move to one side or another, then up, so he'd be tossed over the top of the animal rather than under it as it came up, because it was definitely going to bump him.
He looked back beyond his fins as he kicked and saw the whale adjust its direction to keep coming toward him. Nate kicked once for the surface, then looked back again to see the animal's enormous mouth opening beneath him. No, this can't be happening, he thought.
The panic rising in his chest demanded air, but it was as if the entire ocean had opened up a hole behind him, and he wasn't going to make it to the surface. The whale came halfway out of the water as it scooped him up, and Nate saw sky, and white water, and baleen fringing the upper jaw above - all of it framed by the huge trapezoid that was the whale's open mouth. Then he felt the whale sinking back, and he saw the baleen close over him. He rolled into a ball, hoping not to be crushed by the jaws, hoping to be spit out as a horrible dining mistake. But then the great tongue came forward, warm and rough, driving him against the baleen plates - it was like being smashed into a wrought-iron fence by a wet Nerf Volkswagen. He could feel the baleen ripping the skin on his back as the tongue covered him, pressing the seawater out around him as it would strain krill, then crushing him until the last of the air exploded from his body and he blacked out.
PART TWO
Jonah's People
Men really need sea monsters in their personal oceans.
For the ocean, deep and black in the depths,
is like the low dark levels of our minds in which
the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise
up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea.
- JOHN STEINBECK
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Shoes Off in the Whale!
"Shoes off in the whale!" a male voice said out of the dark.
Quinn could see nothing. His entire body ached like, well, like it had been chewed. He crawled to his hands and knees on what felt like wet latex. He reached down and felt for his feet. He still had his flippers on, and logic protested through his confusion. "I'm not wearing shoes. These are fins."
"Shoes off in the whale! And don't try and make a break for the anus."
Two things that, if asked about an hour earlier, Nate might have said with conviction he'd never hear in a lifetime of conversation.
"What?" Quinn said, squinting into the dark. He realized that he was still wearing his dive mask and reached up to push it back.
"I'll bet he didn't bring the pastrami on rye I asked for either, did he?" came the voice.
Shapes began to define themselves in the darkness, and Nate saw a face not a foot away from his. He gasped and pulled away from it, for although it seemed to be examining him with great interest, the face was not human.
Clay Demodocus was known throughout the world as one of the calmest, most level-tempered, most generous and considerate individuals in the entire milieu of marine biology. His reputation preceded him when he went on assignment, and people took it for granted that he would remain amiable throughout a long voyage in cramped quarters, as well as efficient in his own work, respectful of the work of others, and cool-headed in an emergency. Because he often had to subjugate himself to the head researcher on any given assignment, Clay did not indulge in ego battles and testosterone-slinging contests with researchers or crew. None of these qualities were evident when he went over the desk of the Coast Guard commandant and stopped only inches from head-butting the tall, athletic-looking officer. "You call this search off now and I'll see to it that your name is remembered for all time in concert with Adolf Eichmann and Vlad the Impaler. Nathan Quinn is a legend in his field, and every time there's a documentary on whales on the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic, or Animal Planet, or PBS, or the fucking Cartoon Channel, I'll see to it that your name is mentioned right after Nate's as the man who left him out there. You'll be the official Coast Guard pariah for the next hundred years. This will be the Coast Guard's My Lai. Every time a kid drowns, your name will be mentioned - nay, every time someone gets a soaker, the name of Commodore Whateveryournameis shall be brought forth and your effigy burned in the streets and your head stuck on a pole, lipsticked, and marched around school yards, forever. And all because you're too goddamned lamebrained to put a couple of helicopters into the air to find my friend. Is that what you want?"
Clay had strong views on loyalty.
The commodore had been in the Coast Guard for most of his adult life, spending the majority of his time and energy either rescuing people or training others to do so, and as a result he was taken aback more than somewhat by Clay's tirade. He looked across his office to where Kona and Amy stood by the door, looking nearly as haggard as he felt. The surfer looked at him and shook his head sadly.
"It's been three days, Mr. Demodocus. In open water with no life preserver? You're not a tourist - you know the odds. If he were alive, he'd have drifted far out of where we're able to patrol by now anyway. We're doing no fewer than ten rescues a day on Maui. I can't have our helicopters out to sea when there's just no chance."
"What about tide maps, currents?" Clay pleaded. "Can't we try to predict which way he might have drifted? Narrow the search area."
The commodore had to look away from Clay when he answered. The first thing the surfer kid with the uneven dreadlocks had said when they'd come into his office was "Sucks to be you." And right now the commodore couldn't have agreed more. He'd lost friends at sea; he understood. "I'm sorry," he said.
Clay sighed heavily, and his shoulders sagged. Amy came forward and took him by the arm. "Let's go home, Clay."
Clay nodded and allowed himself to be led out of the commodore's office.
As they made their way across the parking lot to Clay's truck Kona said, "That was amazing, Clay."
"Throwing a fit? Yeah, I'm proud of that, especially since it worked so well."
"Why didn't you say anything about the whale eating Nate?" In the three days since Quinn had disappeared, Kona had forgotten to speak brophonics and Rasta talk almost completely, and now he just sounded like a kid from New Jersey with a "whoa, dude" surfer accent.
"Whales don't eat people, Kona," Clay said. "You know better."
"I know what I saw," Amy said.
Clay stopped and stepped away from both of them. "Look, if you're going to do this stuff, you have to be practical. I believe that you saw what you say you saw, but nothing about it helps. First, a humpback's throat is only about a foot in diameter. They couldn't swallow a human if they wanted to. So if the whale did scoop up Nate, then there's a good chance he was spit out very quickly. Second, if I told that story to everyone else, either they'd think you were being hysterical or, if they believed you, they'd assume that Nate had been drowned immediately, and there wouldn't have been a search. I believe you, kid, but don't think anyone else will."
"So what now?" Kona asked.
Clay looked at the two of them, standing there like abandoned puppies, and he pushed aside his own grief. "We finish Nate's work. We do this work, we carry on. Right now I've got to go up the mountain and see the Old Broad. Nate was like a son to her."
"You haven't told her?" Amy asked.
Clay shook his head. "Why would I? I haven't given up on Nate. I've seen too much. Last year they thought they'd lost one of the black-coral divers. The boat came back to where they'd sent him down, and he was gone. A week later he called from Molokai for them to come get him. He'd swum over and had been so busy partying he'd forgotten to call.
"Doesn't sound like Nate," Kona said. "He told me that he hated fun."
"Still, it would be wrong not to let the Old Broad know what's happened," Amy said.
Clay patted them each on the back. "Intrepid," he said.
As he drove up the volcano, Clay tried to formulate some gentle way of breaking the news to the Old Broad. Since his mother had passed away, Clay had taken the bearing of bad news very seriously - so seriously, in fact, that he usually let someone else do the bearing. He'd been in Antarctica on assignment for National Science, snowed in at the naval weather station for six months when his mother, still in Greece, had gone missing. She was seventy-five, and the villagers knew she couldn't have gone far, yet, search as they might, they did not find her for three days. Finally her location was revealed by her ripening odor. They found her dead in an olive tree, where she had climbed to do some pruning. Clay's older brothers, Hektor and Sidor, would not hold the funeral without Clay, the baby, yet they knew their brother would be completely out of touch for months. "He is the rich American," came the ouzo-besotted lament. "He should take care of Mama. Perhaps he will even fly us to America for the funeral." And so the two brothers, having inherited their mother's weakness for alcohol and their father's bad judgment, packed the remains of Mother Demodocus in an olive barrel, filled the barrel with the preserving brine, and shipped it off to their rich younger brother's house in San Diego. The problem was, in their grief (or perhaps it was their stupor) they forgot to send a letter, leave a message, or, for that matter, put a packing label on the barrel, so months later, when Clay returned to find the barrel on his porch, he broke into it thinking he was about to enjoy a delicious snack of kala-mata olives from home. It was not the way to find out about his mother's death, and it engendered in Clay very strong views about loyalty and the bearing of bad news.
I will do this right, he thought as he pulled into the Old Broad's driveway. There's no reason for this to be a shock.
There were cats and crystals everywhere. The Old Broad led him through the house and had him sit in a wicker emperor's chair that looked out over the channel while she fetched some mango iced tea for them. The house could have been designed by Gauguin and landscaped by Rousseau. It was small, just five rooms and a carport, but it sat on twenty acres of fruit-salad jungle: banana trees, mango, lemon, tangerine, orange, papaya, and coconut palm, as well as a florist's dream of orchids and other tropical flowers. The Old Broad had cultivated a low, soft grass under all the trees that was like a golf-course green over sponge cake. The house was made almost entirely of dark koa wood, nut brown and with black grain running through it, polished to a smooth satin and as hard as ebony. There was a high-peaked galvanized-tin roof with a vented tower in the center to draw heat out the top and cool air in from under the wide eaves that surrounded the whole house. There were no windows, just open sliding walls. You could look through any part of the house to the other and see the tropical garden. The Old Broad's telescope and «big-eye» binoculars stood on steel and concrete mountings in front of where Clay sat, looking very much out of place: the artillery of science planted in paradise. At Clay's feet a skinny cat happily crunched the legs off a scorpion.
The Old Broad handed Clay a tall, icy glass and sat in another emperor's chair beside him. She was barefoot and wore a flowered caftan and a yellow-and-red hibiscus blossom in her hair that was half the size of her face. She had probably been a dish back around the time of Lincoln, Clay thought.
"It's so nice to see you, Clay. I don't get many visitors. Not that I'm lonely, you know. I have the cats and the whales to talk to. But that's not like having one of my boys to visit with."
Oh, jeez, Clay thought. One of her boys. Oh, jeez. He had to tell her. He knew he had to tell her. He had come up here to tell her, and he was going to tell her, and that was that. "This is excellent tea, Elizabeth. Mango, you say?"
"That's right. Just a little bit of mint. Now, what is it you needed to talk to me about?"
"And ice? I think the coldness makes it, gives it a fantastic, uh..."
"Temperature? Yes, ice is an essential ingredient in iced tea, Clay. Thus the name."
Sarcasm is so ugly on the aged, thought Clay. No one likes a sarcastic oldster. He said, "Iced tea, you mean?" Oh, this is just going to kill her, he thought.
"If this is about a new boat, Clay, don't be shy. I know how you loved that boat, and we'll get you another one. I'm just not sure we can go for one quite that nice. My investments haven't been doing well the last couple of years."
"No, no, it's not the boat. The boat was insured. It's Nate."
"And how is Nathan? I hope he's handling his little infatuation with your new researcher with a bit of dignity. He was wearing it on his sleeve that night at the sanctuary. You'd think a man as smart as Nathan would have better control over his impulses."
"Nate had a thing for Amy?" Clay was going to tell her, really. He was just working up to it.
"You said 'had, " said the Old Broad. "You said Nate 'had' a thing for Amy."
"Elizabeth, there's been an accident. Three days ago Nate went into the water to get a better look at a singer, and... well, we haven't been able to find him." Clay put down his tea so he could catch the old woman should she faint. "I'm very sorry."
"Oh, that. Yes, I heard about that. Nate's fine, Clay. The whale told me."
And here Clay found himself balancing on another dilemma. Should he let her have her belief, no matter how crazy it might be, or should he dash her spirits to earth with the truth?
Although Nate had found Elizabeth's eccentricities irritating, Clay had always liked her insistence that the whales spoke to her. He wished it were true. He scooted to the edge of his chair and took her hand in his.
"Elizabeth, I don't think you understand what I'm saying - »
"He took the pastrami and rye, right? He said he would."
"Um, that's not exactly pertinent. He's been gone for three days, and they were right at the wind line toward Molokai when he was lost. Rough sea. He's probably gone, Elizabeth."
"Well, of course he's gone, Clay. You'll just have to carry on until he gets back." Now she patted his hand. "He did take the sandwich, right? The whale was very specific."
"Elizabeth! You're not listening to me. This is not about the whales singing to you through the trees. Nate is gone!"
"Don't you shout at me, Clay Demodocus. I'm trying to comfort you. And it wasn't a song through the trees. What do you think? I'm some crazy old woman? The whale called on the phone."
"Oh, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I don't know how to do this»
"More tea?" asked the Old Broad.
As Clay made the long drive down the volcano and back to Papa Lani, he tried to fight letting his spirits rise. The Old Broad was completely convinced that Nathan Quinn was just fine and dandy, although she could give no reason other than to say that the whale, after ordering a pastrami on rye, had told her that everything would be all right.
"And how did you know it was the whale on the phone?" asked Clay.
"Well, he told me that's who he was."
"And it was a male voice?"
"Well, it would be. He's a singer, isn't he?"
She'd gone on like that, reassuring him, encouraging him to go back to work, dismissing any guilt or grief, until he was almost to the gates of the compound before he remembered.
"She's a total loony!" he said to himself, as if he just needed to hear the words, to feel their truth. Nothing is all right. Nate's dead.
Clair would be sleeping at her house tonight, and although it was late, Clay could not make himself go to sleep. Instead he went to the office, knowing that nothing in the world could eat up time like editing video. He attached a digital video camera to his computer and turned on the recently replaced giant monitor. Blue filled the screen, and then he could sense the motion of descent, but there was only a faint hiss of his breathing, not the usual fusillade of bubbles from a regulator. This was the rebreather footage, from the day he had almost drowned. He'd completely forgotten about it. The breath-holder's tail came into frame.
Clay's first instincts had been right. This was great footage of a breath-holder - the best they'd ever recorded. As he passed the tail, the genital slit came into view, and he could tell that they were dealing with a male. There were black marks on the underside of the tail, but the view was still edge on, and he couldn't make out their shape. He heard a faint kazoo sound in the background and ran back the tape, with the sound turned up.
This time his breath sounded like a bull snorting before a charge, the kazoo sound, louder now, like a voice through wax paper. He ran back the tape again and cranked the sound all the way up, bringing down the high frequency to kill some of the hiss. Definitely voices.
"There's someone outside, Captain."
"Does he have my sandwich with him?"
"He's close, Captain, really close. Too close."
Then the tail came down, and there was a deafening thud. The picture jerked in a half dozen directions, then settled as tiny bubbles passed by the lens in a field of blue. The lens caught a shot of Clay's fin as he sank, and then it was just blue and the occasional shot of the lanyard that secured the camera to his wrist.
Clay ran the tape back again, confirmed the voices, then set it to dub onto the computer hard drive so he could manipulate the audio in a waveform, the way they did with sound recordings. Even though he was sure what was on the tape, he couldn't figure out how it could possibly have gotten there. Only five minutes of watching little progress bars move across the monitor, and he could stand the suspense no longer. He smiled to himself, because now was the time he would have gone to Nate, as he had so many times before, to help him figure out exactly what it was they were hearing or looking at, but Nate was gone. He checked his watch, and, deciding that it wasn't too insanely late, he headed across the compound to get Amy.
A Song for Your Supper
Amy picked the whale. It had been a stressful morning for her, and Quinn wanted to convey his complete confidence in her, so he handed over the headphones and took directions as they narrowed down which of their whales was actually the singer.
"Wait a second," Amy said. "Shut down the engine."
And then she did something that Quinn had seen no one do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the point of being full-blown bat shit. Amy hung over the side by her knees and put her head in the water. After about thirty seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of seawater all over the boat, then pointed north.
"He's over there."
"That doesn't work, you know," said Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that humans didn't have directional hearing underwater. He was just gently trying to remind her.
"Go that way. That's where our whale is."
"Okay, there may indeed be a singer over there, but you didn't locate him by hearing him."
She just stood there next to him - dripping on his feet, the console, the field notes - looking at him.
"Okay, I'm going." He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. "Tell me when I get there."
A couple of minutes later Amy signaled for him to cut the engine, and she was hanging over the side with her head in the water while the boat was still coasting.
"Well, this is just stupid," Nate said while Amy was submerged.
Amy dedunked long enough to say, "I heard that."
"Looks like you're bobbing for whales, is what it looks like."
"Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."
"You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C. that used to watch fish all day."
"That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."
"Six hundred yards? You're sure?"
"Give or take fifty."
"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."
" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"
"I'm not going to need to know that."
"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).
Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.
Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface - pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"
If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.
Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak and lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert - don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it - then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"
"It's a date," said Quinn.
"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"
"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"
"Hmmm, let me think about it..."
She's so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."
"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."
"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."
"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.
"Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."
"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.
"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and - »
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the channel would be thirty to fifty feet down - this guy was at about seven. Nate kept having to pull up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.
"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.
Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.
One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great tail peduncle arched high into the air.
"Looks like he's going to do it," Nate said.
"Ready," Amy said.
The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an edge view instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like black letters on the underside of the tail.
"You get that? You get that?"
"I got what there was. He didn't present very well." Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the dive, maybe eight frames.
"Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black... uh, stripes?" Quinn whipped off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt.
"Stripes? Nate, I didn't see anything but edge through the camera."
"Damn it!"
"Look, he fluked. Maybe he will again."
"That's not the point."
"It's not?"
"Get up on the bow, see if you can find him."
Amy stood on the bow and directed Quinn. When she dropped her arm, he killed the engine. And there was the whale, hanging there, singing, his tail not ten feet under the water. They weren't a hundred yards off the wind line, and the boat was drifting away from the whale faster than it had before. They'd be over it for only a minute or so. This close to the wind line, they'd probably lose him the next time he came up. Nate was not going to finish this day wondering if he was having hallucinations again. "Amy, hand me my mask and flippers from the bow cabinet, would you?"
"You're going in the water?"
"Yes."
"But you never go in the water."
"I'm going in the water." Nate opened a plastic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to make sure it was loaded.
"You're not a water guy."
"See if there's a weight belt in there, too."
"Clay says you're not a water guy. You're a boat guy."
"I'm going to get an ID photo from under his tail. If he's going to be accommodating enough to stay this close to the surface, I'm going to go get the photo."
"Can you do that?"
"Why not?"
She handed him a belt weighted with ten pounds of lead, and Nate buckled it around his hips. He pulled on the mask and fins, then sat on the gunwale with his back to the water. "You're going to drift off of me. I'm not going to try to swim to catch you, so come back and get me. Wait till I wave. I don't want you to start the engine until I'm sure I have the picture. Keep recording until you come get me."
" 'Kay." Amy's mouth was sort of hanging open as if she'd just been slapped.
"This is no big deal."
"Right. You want me to do it? It's my fault I didn't get the shot last time."
"Not your fault. The shot wasn't there. See ya."
Quinn put the snorkel in his mouth and rolled backward off the boat. At seventy-five degrees, the water was still cold enough to knock the breath out of him. He floated to the surface and tried to take controlled breaths until his system adjusted.
The whale was close, only a hundred or so feet away. The song reverberated in Nate's ribs as he kicked over to it. This had to be the "bite me" whale. Even if he'd somehow been wrong about there actually being letters, there were certainly some strange markings on this animal's tail. And there was more than that, too, if he could prove to himself that this was the same animal. It would mean that the whale had stayed in the general area of the Au'au Channel for over three weeks, which was fairly unusual. Of course, conclusions weren't reached from that lack of data. It could simply be that they hadn't computerized the catalog of Hawaiian ID photos the way they had in Alaska. And without the first picture there'd be no proof that this was the same animal, but Quinn would know. He would know. That had become the impetus of this silly mission, not just proving that he wasn't hallucinating. He was a man of science, of facts, of reason. He didn't need to prove he was sane.
I'm out of my mind, he thought. He'd never even heard of anyone trying to do an ID photo underwater.
The animal was perfectly motionless, a great swath of gray in a field of infinite blue. But Quinn thought he saw movement on the far side of the whale. He lifted his head out of the water and looked back at the boat. Amy gave him a thumbs-up. He took a deep breath and made his dive to take the photo.
If he'd been wearing tanks, he might have let the weight belt take him down slowly, but he knew he'd be able to stay down for only forty to sixty seconds, so he went headfirst, kicking hard until he was down twenty or so feet. Then he leveled off, holding the camera in front of him, and looked up at the underside of the whale's tail.
There it was, in big, sans-serif, spray-paint-like letters: BITE ME! He nearly forgot to take the picture. How could this possibly be? Had the animal somehow been caught in a net when it was younger and marked by a sardonic fisherman before being released? Was it one of those animals that had swum up a river and got stranded, then been rescued by an army of fish-and-game people?
He centered the tail in the viewfinder and hit the shutter. Advanced the film and shot again. Then he needed to breathe. He turned and kicked to the surface, but again he saw the dark shape moving near the whale. Remora, he thought. Although it looked too big to be one of the parasite fish that often attached themselves to whales.
At the surface he looked back down at the singer, near the left pec where he'd seen the movement. The animal was doing ribbits. Quinn smiled around his snorkel, took three deep breaths, held, then dove again.
This time, before he could get the camera up, he saw the movement of a dark fin on the far side of the whale, and he squinted to see deep into the blue distance. Blue-water willies, was how he'd always thought of it. The feeling you get when you realize that something big and carnivorous could come at you from any direction, then you start looking for gray missiles in the blue, like looking for a malevolent face to appear at a dark window.
Then the whale moved. The wash of the tail pushed Quinn back, but he maintained his bearings and started toward the surface, trying to keep his eye on the animal. The whale turned around in little more than its own length and shot toward Nate. He kicked laterally, trying to move to one side or another, then up, so he'd be tossed over the top of the animal rather than under it as it came up, because it was definitely going to bump him.
He looked back beyond his fins as he kicked and saw the whale adjust its direction to keep coming toward him. Nate kicked once for the surface, then looked back again to see the animal's enormous mouth opening beneath him. No, this can't be happening, he thought.
The panic rising in his chest demanded air, but it was as if the entire ocean had opened up a hole behind him, and he wasn't going to make it to the surface. The whale came halfway out of the water as it scooped him up, and Nate saw sky, and white water, and baleen fringing the upper jaw above - all of it framed by the huge trapezoid that was the whale's open mouth. Then he felt the whale sinking back, and he saw the baleen close over him. He rolled into a ball, hoping not to be crushed by the jaws, hoping to be spit out as a horrible dining mistake. But then the great tongue came forward, warm and rough, driving him against the baleen plates - it was like being smashed into a wrought-iron fence by a wet Nerf Volkswagen. He could feel the baleen ripping the skin on his back as the tongue covered him, pressing the seawater out around him as it would strain krill, then crushing him until the last of the air exploded from his body and he blacked out.
PART TWO
Jonah's People
Men really need sea monsters in their personal oceans.
For the ocean, deep and black in the depths,
is like the low dark levels of our minds in which
the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise
up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea.
- JOHN STEINBECK
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Shoes Off in the Whale!
"Shoes off in the whale!" a male voice said out of the dark.
Quinn could see nothing. His entire body ached like, well, like it had been chewed. He crawled to his hands and knees on what felt like wet latex. He reached down and felt for his feet. He still had his flippers on, and logic protested through his confusion. "I'm not wearing shoes. These are fins."
"Shoes off in the whale! And don't try and make a break for the anus."
Two things that, if asked about an hour earlier, Nate might have said with conviction he'd never hear in a lifetime of conversation.
"What?" Quinn said, squinting into the dark. He realized that he was still wearing his dive mask and reached up to push it back.
"I'll bet he didn't bring the pastrami on rye I asked for either, did he?" came the voice.
Shapes began to define themselves in the darkness, and Nate saw a face not a foot away from his. He gasped and pulled away from it, for although it seemed to be examining him with great interest, the face was not human.
Clay Demodocus was known throughout the world as one of the calmest, most level-tempered, most generous and considerate individuals in the entire milieu of marine biology. His reputation preceded him when he went on assignment, and people took it for granted that he would remain amiable throughout a long voyage in cramped quarters, as well as efficient in his own work, respectful of the work of others, and cool-headed in an emergency. Because he often had to subjugate himself to the head researcher on any given assignment, Clay did not indulge in ego battles and testosterone-slinging contests with researchers or crew. None of these qualities were evident when he went over the desk of the Coast Guard commandant and stopped only inches from head-butting the tall, athletic-looking officer. "You call this search off now and I'll see to it that your name is remembered for all time in concert with Adolf Eichmann and Vlad the Impaler. Nathan Quinn is a legend in his field, and every time there's a documentary on whales on the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic, or Animal Planet, or PBS, or the fucking Cartoon Channel, I'll see to it that your name is mentioned right after Nate's as the man who left him out there. You'll be the official Coast Guard pariah for the next hundred years. This will be the Coast Guard's My Lai. Every time a kid drowns, your name will be mentioned - nay, every time someone gets a soaker, the name of Commodore Whateveryournameis shall be brought forth and your effigy burned in the streets and your head stuck on a pole, lipsticked, and marched around school yards, forever. And all because you're too goddamned lamebrained to put a couple of helicopters into the air to find my friend. Is that what you want?"
Clay had strong views on loyalty.
The commodore had been in the Coast Guard for most of his adult life, spending the majority of his time and energy either rescuing people or training others to do so, and as a result he was taken aback more than somewhat by Clay's tirade. He looked across his office to where Kona and Amy stood by the door, looking nearly as haggard as he felt. The surfer looked at him and shook his head sadly.
"It's been three days, Mr. Demodocus. In open water with no life preserver? You're not a tourist - you know the odds. If he were alive, he'd have drifted far out of where we're able to patrol by now anyway. We're doing no fewer than ten rescues a day on Maui. I can't have our helicopters out to sea when there's just no chance."
"What about tide maps, currents?" Clay pleaded. "Can't we try to predict which way he might have drifted? Narrow the search area."
The commodore had to look away from Clay when he answered. The first thing the surfer kid with the uneven dreadlocks had said when they'd come into his office was "Sucks to be you." And right now the commodore couldn't have agreed more. He'd lost friends at sea; he understood. "I'm sorry," he said.
Clay sighed heavily, and his shoulders sagged. Amy came forward and took him by the arm. "Let's go home, Clay."
Clay nodded and allowed himself to be led out of the commodore's office.
As they made their way across the parking lot to Clay's truck Kona said, "That was amazing, Clay."
"Throwing a fit? Yeah, I'm proud of that, especially since it worked so well."
"Why didn't you say anything about the whale eating Nate?" In the three days since Quinn had disappeared, Kona had forgotten to speak brophonics and Rasta talk almost completely, and now he just sounded like a kid from New Jersey with a "whoa, dude" surfer accent.
"Whales don't eat people, Kona," Clay said. "You know better."
"I know what I saw," Amy said.
Clay stopped and stepped away from both of them. "Look, if you're going to do this stuff, you have to be practical. I believe that you saw what you say you saw, but nothing about it helps. First, a humpback's throat is only about a foot in diameter. They couldn't swallow a human if they wanted to. So if the whale did scoop up Nate, then there's a good chance he was spit out very quickly. Second, if I told that story to everyone else, either they'd think you were being hysterical or, if they believed you, they'd assume that Nate had been drowned immediately, and there wouldn't have been a search. I believe you, kid, but don't think anyone else will."
"So what now?" Kona asked.
Clay looked at the two of them, standing there like abandoned puppies, and he pushed aside his own grief. "We finish Nate's work. We do this work, we carry on. Right now I've got to go up the mountain and see the Old Broad. Nate was like a son to her."
"You haven't told her?" Amy asked.
Clay shook his head. "Why would I? I haven't given up on Nate. I've seen too much. Last year they thought they'd lost one of the black-coral divers. The boat came back to where they'd sent him down, and he was gone. A week later he called from Molokai for them to come get him. He'd swum over and had been so busy partying he'd forgotten to call.
"Doesn't sound like Nate," Kona said. "He told me that he hated fun."
"Still, it would be wrong not to let the Old Broad know what's happened," Amy said.
Clay patted them each on the back. "Intrepid," he said.
As he drove up the volcano, Clay tried to formulate some gentle way of breaking the news to the Old Broad. Since his mother had passed away, Clay had taken the bearing of bad news very seriously - so seriously, in fact, that he usually let someone else do the bearing. He'd been in Antarctica on assignment for National Science, snowed in at the naval weather station for six months when his mother, still in Greece, had gone missing. She was seventy-five, and the villagers knew she couldn't have gone far, yet, search as they might, they did not find her for three days. Finally her location was revealed by her ripening odor. They found her dead in an olive tree, where she had climbed to do some pruning. Clay's older brothers, Hektor and Sidor, would not hold the funeral without Clay, the baby, yet they knew their brother would be completely out of touch for months. "He is the rich American," came the ouzo-besotted lament. "He should take care of Mama. Perhaps he will even fly us to America for the funeral." And so the two brothers, having inherited their mother's weakness for alcohol and their father's bad judgment, packed the remains of Mother Demodocus in an olive barrel, filled the barrel with the preserving brine, and shipped it off to their rich younger brother's house in San Diego. The problem was, in their grief (or perhaps it was their stupor) they forgot to send a letter, leave a message, or, for that matter, put a packing label on the barrel, so months later, when Clay returned to find the barrel on his porch, he broke into it thinking he was about to enjoy a delicious snack of kala-mata olives from home. It was not the way to find out about his mother's death, and it engendered in Clay very strong views about loyalty and the bearing of bad news.
I will do this right, he thought as he pulled into the Old Broad's driveway. There's no reason for this to be a shock.
There were cats and crystals everywhere. The Old Broad led him through the house and had him sit in a wicker emperor's chair that looked out over the channel while she fetched some mango iced tea for them. The house could have been designed by Gauguin and landscaped by Rousseau. It was small, just five rooms and a carport, but it sat on twenty acres of fruit-salad jungle: banana trees, mango, lemon, tangerine, orange, papaya, and coconut palm, as well as a florist's dream of orchids and other tropical flowers. The Old Broad had cultivated a low, soft grass under all the trees that was like a golf-course green over sponge cake. The house was made almost entirely of dark koa wood, nut brown and with black grain running through it, polished to a smooth satin and as hard as ebony. There was a high-peaked galvanized-tin roof with a vented tower in the center to draw heat out the top and cool air in from under the wide eaves that surrounded the whole house. There were no windows, just open sliding walls. You could look through any part of the house to the other and see the tropical garden. The Old Broad's telescope and «big-eye» binoculars stood on steel and concrete mountings in front of where Clay sat, looking very much out of place: the artillery of science planted in paradise. At Clay's feet a skinny cat happily crunched the legs off a scorpion.
The Old Broad handed Clay a tall, icy glass and sat in another emperor's chair beside him. She was barefoot and wore a flowered caftan and a yellow-and-red hibiscus blossom in her hair that was half the size of her face. She had probably been a dish back around the time of Lincoln, Clay thought.
"It's so nice to see you, Clay. I don't get many visitors. Not that I'm lonely, you know. I have the cats and the whales to talk to. But that's not like having one of my boys to visit with."
Oh, jeez, Clay thought. One of her boys. Oh, jeez. He had to tell her. He knew he had to tell her. He had come up here to tell her, and he was going to tell her, and that was that. "This is excellent tea, Elizabeth. Mango, you say?"
"That's right. Just a little bit of mint. Now, what is it you needed to talk to me about?"
"And ice? I think the coldness makes it, gives it a fantastic, uh..."
"Temperature? Yes, ice is an essential ingredient in iced tea, Clay. Thus the name."
Sarcasm is so ugly on the aged, thought Clay. No one likes a sarcastic oldster. He said, "Iced tea, you mean?" Oh, this is just going to kill her, he thought.
"If this is about a new boat, Clay, don't be shy. I know how you loved that boat, and we'll get you another one. I'm just not sure we can go for one quite that nice. My investments haven't been doing well the last couple of years."
"No, no, it's not the boat. The boat was insured. It's Nate."
"And how is Nathan? I hope he's handling his little infatuation with your new researcher with a bit of dignity. He was wearing it on his sleeve that night at the sanctuary. You'd think a man as smart as Nathan would have better control over his impulses."
"Nate had a thing for Amy?" Clay was going to tell her, really. He was just working up to it.
"You said 'had, " said the Old Broad. "You said Nate 'had' a thing for Amy."
"Elizabeth, there's been an accident. Three days ago Nate went into the water to get a better look at a singer, and... well, we haven't been able to find him." Clay put down his tea so he could catch the old woman should she faint. "I'm very sorry."
"Oh, that. Yes, I heard about that. Nate's fine, Clay. The whale told me."
And here Clay found himself balancing on another dilemma. Should he let her have her belief, no matter how crazy it might be, or should he dash her spirits to earth with the truth?
Although Nate had found Elizabeth's eccentricities irritating, Clay had always liked her insistence that the whales spoke to her. He wished it were true. He scooted to the edge of his chair and took her hand in his.
"Elizabeth, I don't think you understand what I'm saying - »
"He took the pastrami and rye, right? He said he would."
"Um, that's not exactly pertinent. He's been gone for three days, and they were right at the wind line toward Molokai when he was lost. Rough sea. He's probably gone, Elizabeth."
"Well, of course he's gone, Clay. You'll just have to carry on until he gets back." Now she patted his hand. "He did take the sandwich, right? The whale was very specific."
"Elizabeth! You're not listening to me. This is not about the whales singing to you through the trees. Nate is gone!"
"Don't you shout at me, Clay Demodocus. I'm trying to comfort you. And it wasn't a song through the trees. What do you think? I'm some crazy old woman? The whale called on the phone."
"Oh, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I don't know how to do this»
"More tea?" asked the Old Broad.
As Clay made the long drive down the volcano and back to Papa Lani, he tried to fight letting his spirits rise. The Old Broad was completely convinced that Nathan Quinn was just fine and dandy, although she could give no reason other than to say that the whale, after ordering a pastrami on rye, had told her that everything would be all right.
"And how did you know it was the whale on the phone?" asked Clay.
"Well, he told me that's who he was."
"And it was a male voice?"
"Well, it would be. He's a singer, isn't he?"
She'd gone on like that, reassuring him, encouraging him to go back to work, dismissing any guilt or grief, until he was almost to the gates of the compound before he remembered.
"She's a total loony!" he said to himself, as if he just needed to hear the words, to feel their truth. Nothing is all right. Nate's dead.
Clair would be sleeping at her house tonight, and although it was late, Clay could not make himself go to sleep. Instead he went to the office, knowing that nothing in the world could eat up time like editing video. He attached a digital video camera to his computer and turned on the recently replaced giant monitor. Blue filled the screen, and then he could sense the motion of descent, but there was only a faint hiss of his breathing, not the usual fusillade of bubbles from a regulator. This was the rebreather footage, from the day he had almost drowned. He'd completely forgotten about it. The breath-holder's tail came into frame.
Clay's first instincts had been right. This was great footage of a breath-holder - the best they'd ever recorded. As he passed the tail, the genital slit came into view, and he could tell that they were dealing with a male. There were black marks on the underside of the tail, but the view was still edge on, and he couldn't make out their shape. He heard a faint kazoo sound in the background and ran back the tape, with the sound turned up.
This time his breath sounded like a bull snorting before a charge, the kazoo sound, louder now, like a voice through wax paper. He ran back the tape again and cranked the sound all the way up, bringing down the high frequency to kill some of the hiss. Definitely voices.
"There's someone outside, Captain."
"Does he have my sandwich with him?"
"He's close, Captain, really close. Too close."
Then the tail came down, and there was a deafening thud. The picture jerked in a half dozen directions, then settled as tiny bubbles passed by the lens in a field of blue. The lens caught a shot of Clay's fin as he sank, and then it was just blue and the occasional shot of the lanyard that secured the camera to his wrist.
Clay ran the tape back again, confirmed the voices, then set it to dub onto the computer hard drive so he could manipulate the audio in a waveform, the way they did with sound recordings. Even though he was sure what was on the tape, he couldn't figure out how it could possibly have gotten there. Only five minutes of watching little progress bars move across the monitor, and he could stand the suspense no longer. He smiled to himself, because now was the time he would have gone to Nate, as he had so many times before, to help him figure out exactly what it was they were hearing or looking at, but Nate was gone. He checked his watch, and, deciding that it wasn't too insanely late, he headed across the compound to get Amy.
