Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

Chapter 5~6

 
CHAPTER FIVE
Hey, Buddy,
Why the Big Brain?
The next morning the four of them stood in a row on the front of the old Pioneer Hotel, looking across the Lahaina Harbor at the whitecaps in the channel. Wind was whipping the palm trees. Down by the breakwater two little girls were trying to surf waves whose faces were bumpy with wind chop and whose curls blew back over the crests like the hair of a sprinter.
"It could calm down," Amy said. She was standing next to Kona, thinking, This guy's pecs are so cut you could stick business cards under them and they'd stay. And my, is he tan. Where Amy came from, no one was tan, and she hadn't been in Hawaii long enough to realize that a good tan was just a function of showing up.
"Supposed to stay like this for the next three days," Nate said. As disappointed as he appeared to be, he was extraordinarily relieved that they wouldn't be going out this morning. He had a rogue hangover, and his eyes were bloodred behind his sunglasses. Self-loathing had set in, and he thought, My life's work is shit, and if we went out there today and I didn't spend the morning retching over the side, I'd be tempted to drown myself. He would rather have been thinking about whales, which is what he usually thought about. Then he noticed Amy sneaking glances at Kona's bare chest and felt even worse.
"Ya, mon. Kona can spark up a spliff and calm down that bumpy brine for all me new science dreadies. We can take the boat no matter what the wind be," Kona said. He was thinking, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but I really want to get out there with the whales.
"Breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks," Clay said. He was thinking, We'll have breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks.
None of them moved. They just stood there, looking out at the blowout channel. Occasionally a whale would blow, and the mist would run over the water like a frightened ghost.
"I'm buying," Clay said.
And they all headed up Front Street to Longee's restaurant, a two-story gray-and-white building, done in a New England architecture with shiplap siding and huge open windows that looked across Front Street, over the stone seawall, and out onto the Au' au Channel. By way of a shirt, Kona slipped on a tattered Nautica windbreaker he'd had knotted around his waist.
"You do a lot of sailing?" Amy asked, nodding to the Nautica logo. She intended the remark as dig, a return for Kona's saying, "And who be this snowy biscuit?" when they'd first met. At the time Amy had just introduced herself, but in retrospect she realized that she should probably have taken some offense to being called both snowy and a biscuit  -  those things were objectifying, right?
"Shark bait kit, me Snowy Biscuit," Kona answered, meaning that the windbreaker had come from a tourist. The Paia surfing community on the North Shore, from which Kona had recently come, had an economy based entirely on petty theft, mostly smash-and-grabs from rental cars.
As the host led them through the crowded dining room to a table by the windows, Clay leaned over Amy's shoulder and whispered, "A biscuit is a good thing."
"I knew that," Amy whispered back. "Like a tomato, right?"
"Heads up," Clay said, just as Amy plowed into a khaki package of balding ambition known as Jon Thomas Fuller, CEO of Hawaii Whale Inc., a nonprofit corporation with assets in the tens of millions that disguised itself as a research organization. Fuller had pushed his chair back to intercept Amy.
"Jon Thomas!" Clay smiled and reached around the flustered Amy to shake Fuller's hand. Fuller ignored Clay and took Amy by the waist, steadying her. "Hey, hey, there," Fuller said. "If you wanted to meet me, all you had to do was introduce yourself."
Amy grabbed his wrists and guided his hands to the table in front of him, then stepped back. "Hi, I'm Amy Earhart."
"I know who you are," said Fuller, standing now. He was only a little taller than Arny, very tan and very lean, with a hawk nose and a receding hairline like a knife. "What I don't know is why you haven't come to see me about a job."
Meanwhile, Nate, who had been thinking about whale song, had taken his seat, opened a menu, ordered coffee, and completely missed the fact that he was alone at the table. He looked up to see Jon Thomas Fuller holding his assistant by the waist. He dropped his menu and headed back to the site of the intercept.
"Well, partly"  -  Amy smiled at the three young women sitting at Fuller's table  -  "partly because I have some self-respect"  -  she curtsied  -  "and partly because you're a louse and a jamoke."
Fuller's dazzling grin dropped a level of magnitude. The women at his table, all dressed in khaki safari wear to approximate the Discovery Channel ideal of what a scientist should look like, made great shows of looking elsewhere, wiping their mouths, sipping water  -  not noticing their boss getting verbally bitch-slapped by a vicious research pixie.
"Nate," Fuller said, noticing that Nate had joined the group, "I heard about the break-in at your place. Nothing important missing, I hope."
"We're fine. Lost some recordings," Nate said.
"Ah, well, good. A lot of lowlifes on this island now." Fuller looked at Kona.
The surfer grinned. "Shoots, brah, you make me blush."
Fuller grinned. "How you doing, Kona?"
"All cool runnings, brah. Bwana Fuller got his evil on?"
There were neck-snapping double takes all around. Fuller nodded, then looked back at Quinn. "Anything we can do, Nate? There are a lot of our song recordings for sale in the shops, if those will help out. You guys get professional discount. We're all in this together."
"Thanks," Nate said just as Fuller sat down, then turned his back on all of them and resumed eating his breakfast, dismissing them. The women at the table looked embarrassed.
"Breakfast?" Clay said. He herded his team to their table.
They ordered and drank coffee in silence, each looking out across the street to the ocean, avoiding eye contact until Fuller and his group had left.
Nate turned to Amy. "A jamoke? What are you, living in a Cagney movie?"
"Who is that guy?" Amy asked. She snapped the corner off a piece of toast with more violence than was really necessary.
"What's a jamoke?" Kona asked.
"It's a flavor of ice cream, right?" Clay said.
Nate looked at Kona. "How do you know Fuller?" Nate held up his ringer and shot a cautionary glare, the now understood signal for no Rasta/pidgin/bullshit.
"I worked the Jet Ski concession for him at Kaanapali."
Nate looked to Clay, as if to say, You knew this?
"Who is that guy?" Amy asked.
"He's the head of Hawaii Whale," Clay said. "Commerce masquerading as science. They use their permit to get three sixty-five-foot tourist boats right up next to the whales."
"That guy is a scientist?"
"He has a Ph.D. in biology, but I wouldn't call him a scientist. Those women he was with are his naturalists. I guess today was even too windy for them to go out. He's got shops all over the island  -  sells whale crap, nonprofit. Hawaii Whale was the only research group to oppose the Jet Ski ban during whale season."
"Because Fuller had money in the Jet Ski business," Nate added.
"I made six bucks an hour," Kona said.
"Nate's work was instrumental in getting the Jet Ski parasail ban done," Clay said. "Fuller doesn't like us."
"The sanctuary may take his research permit next," said Nate. "What science they do is bad science."
"And he blames you for that?" Amy asked.
"I  -  we have done the most behavioral stuff as it relates to sound in these waters. The sanctuary gave us some money to find out if the high-frequency noise from Jet Skis and parasail boats affected the behavior of the whales. We concluded that it did. Fuller didn't like it. It cost him."
"He's going to build a dolphin swim park, up La Perouse Bay way," Kona said.
"What?" Nate said.
"What?" said Clay.
"A swim-with-the-dolphins park?" said Amy.
"Ya, mon. Let you come from Ohio and get in the water with them bottlenose fellahs for two hundred dollar."
"You guys didn't know about this?" Amy was looking at Clay. He always seemed to know everything that was going on in the whale world.
"First I've heard of it, but they're not going to let him do it without some studies." He looked to Nate. "Are they?"
"It'll never happen if he loses his research permit," Nate said. "There'll be a review."
"And you'll be on the review board?" asked Amy.
"Nate's name would solidify it," Clay said. "They'll ask him."
"Not you?" Kona asked.
"I'm just the photographer." Clay looked out at the whitecaps in the channel. "Doesn't look like we'll be getting out today. Finish your breakfast, and then we'll go pay your rent."
Nate looked at Clay quizzically.
"I can't give him money," Clay said. "He'll just smoke it. I'm going to go pay his rent."
"Truth." Kona nodded.
"You don't still work for Fuller, do you, Kona?" Nate asked.
"Nate!" Amy admonished.
"Well, he was there when I found the office ransacked."
"Leave him alone," Amy said. "He's too cute to be bad."
"Truth," said Kona. "Sistah Biscuit speak nothin' but the truth. I be massive cute."
Clay set a stack of bills on the table. "By the way, Nate, you have a lecture at the sanctuary on Tuesday. Four days. You and Amy might want to use the downtime to put something together."
Nate felt as if he'd been smacked. "Four days? There's nothing there. It was all on those hard drives."
"Like I said, you might want to use the downtime."
CHAPTER SIX
Whale Wahine
As a biologist, Nate had a tendency to draw analogies between human behavior and animal behavior  -  probably a little more often than was strictly healthy. For instance, as he considered his attraction to Amy, he wondered why it had to be so complex. Why there had to be so many subtleties to the human mating ritual. Why can't we be more like common squid? he thought. The male squid simply swims up to the female squid, hands her a neat package of sperm, she tucks it under her mantle at her leisure, and they go on their separate ways, their duty to the species done. Simple, elegant, no nuance...
Nate held the paper cup out to Amy. "I poured some coffee for you."
"I'm all coffeed out, thanks," said Amy.
Nate set the cup down on the desk next to his own. He sat in front of the computer. Amy was perched on a high stool to his left going through the hardbound field journals covering the last four years. "Are you going to be able to put together a lecture out of this?" she asked.
Nate rubbed his temples. Despite a handful of aspirin and six cups of coffee, his head was still throbbing. "A lecture? About what?"
"Well, what were you planning to do a talk on before the office was ransacked? Maybe we can reconstruct it from the field notes and memory."
"I don't have that good a memory."
"Yes you do, you just need some mnemonics, which we have here in the field notes."
Her expression was as open and hopeful as a child's. She waited for something from him, just a word to set her searching for what he needed. The problem was, what he needed right now was not going to be found in biology field notes. He needed answers of another kind. It bothered him that Fuller had known about the break-in at the compound. It was too soon for him to have found out. It also bothered him that anyone could hold him in the sort of disdain that Fuller obviously did. Nate had been born and raised in British Columbia, and Canadians hate, above all things, to offend. It was part of the national consciousness. "Be polite" was an unwritten, unspoken rule, but ingrained into the psyche of an entire country. (Of course, as with any rule, there were exceptions: parts of Quebec, where people maintained the "dismissive to the point of confrontation, with subsequent surrender" mind-set of the French; and hockey, in which any Canadian may, with impunity, slam, pummel, elbow, smack, punch, body-check, and beat the shit out of, with sticks, any other human being, punctuated by profanities, name-calling, questioning parentage, and accusations of bestiality, usually  -  coincidentally  -  in French.) Nate was neither French-Canadian nor much of a hockey player, so the idea of having invoked enmity enough in someone to have that person ruin his research... He was mortified by it.
"Amy," he said, having spaced out and returned to the room in a matter of seconds, he hoped, "is there something that I'm missing about our work? Is there something in the data that I'm not seeing?"
Amy assumed the pose of Rodin's The Thinker on her stool, her chin teed up on her hand, her brow furrowed into moguls of earnest contemplation. "Well, Dr. Quinn, I would be able to answer that if you had shared the data with me, but since I only know what I've collected or what I've analyzed personally, I'd have to say, scientifically speaking, beats me."
"Thanks," Nate said. He smiled in spite of himself.
"You said there was something there that you were close to finding. In the song, I mean. What is it?"
"Well, if I knew that, it would be found, wouldn't it?"
"You must suspect. You have to have a theory. Tell me, and let's apply the data to the theory. I'm willing to do the work, reconstruct the data, but you've got to trust me."
"No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while."
"So you don't really have a theory?"
"Clueless."
"You lying bag of fish heads."
"I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?"
"I'm not getting paid."
"See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact."
"So fire me." No longer The Thinker, Amy had taken on the aspect of a dark and evil elf.
"I think they're communicating," Nate said.
"Of course they're communicating, you maroon. You think they're singing because they like the sound of their own voices?"
"There's more to it than that."
"Well, tell me!"
"Who calls someone a maroon? What the hell is maroon?"
"It's a mook with a Ph.D. Don't change the subject."
"It doesn't matter. Without the acoustic data I can't even show you what I was thinking. Besides, I'm not sure that my cognitive powers aren't breaking down."
"Meaning what?"
Meaning that I'm starting to see things, he thought. Meaning that despite the fact that you're yelling at me, I really want to grab you and kiss you, he thought. Oh, I am so fucked, he thought. "Meaning I'm still a little hungover. I'm sorry. Let's see what we can put together from the notes."
Amy slipped off the stool and gathered the field journals in her arms.
"Where are you going?" Nate said. Had he somehow offended her?
"We have four days to put together a lecture. I'm going to go to my cabin and do it."
"How? On what?"
"I'm thinking, 'Humpbacks: Our Wet and Wondrous Pals of the Deep  -  »
"There's going to be a lot of researchers there. Biologists  -  " Nate interrupted.
" - and Why We Should Poke Them with Sticks. »
"Better," Nate said.
"I got it covered," she said, and she walked out.
For some reason he felt hopeful. Excited. Just for a second. Then, after he'd watched her walk out, a wave of melancholy swept over him and for the thirtieth time that day he regretted that he hadn't just become a pharmacist, or a charter captain, or something that made you feel more alive, like a pirate.
The old broad lived on a volcano and believed that the whales talked to her. She called about noon, and Nate knew it was her before he even answered. He knew, because she always called when it was too windy to go out.
"Nathan, why aren't you out in the channel?" the Old Broad said.
"Hello, Elizabeth, how are you today?"
"Don't change the subject. They told me that they want to talk to you. Today. Why aren't you out there?"
"You know why I'm not out there, Elizabeth. It's too windy. You can see the whitecaps as well as I can." From the slope of Haleakala, the Old Broad watched the activity in the channel with a two-hundred-power celestial telescope and a pair of "big eyes" binoculars that looked like stereo bazookas on precision mounts that were anchored into a ton of concrete.
"Well, they're upset that you're not out there. That's why I called."
"And I appreciate your calling, Elizabeth, but I'm in the middle of something."
Nate hoped he didn't sound too rude. The Old Broad meant well. And they, in a way, were all at the mercy of her generosity, for although she had «donated» the Papa Lani compound, she hadn't exactly signed it over to them. They were in a sort of permanent lease situation. Elizabeth Robinson was, however, very generous and very kindhearted indeed, even if she was a total loon.
"Nathan, I am not a total loon," she said.
Oh yes you are, he thought. "I know you're not," he said. "But I really have to get some work done today."
"What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him.
"I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days." Why, why had he told her? Why? Now she'd rattle down the mountain in her ancient Mercedes that looked like a Nazi staff car, sit in the audience, and ask all the questions that she knew in advance he couldn't answer.
"That shouldn't be hard. You've done that before, what, twenty times?"
"Yes, but someone broke in to the compound yesterday, Elizabeth. All my notes, the tapes, the analysis  -  it's all destroyed."
There was silence on the line for a moment. Nate could hear the Old Broad breathing. Finally, "I'm really sorry, Nathan. Is everyone all right?"
"Yes, it happened while we were out working."
"Is there anything I can do? I mean, I can't send much, but if  -  "
"No, we're all right. It's just a lot of work that I have to start over." The Old Broad might have been loaded at one time, and she certainly would be again if she sold the land where Papa Lani stood, but Nate didn't think that she had a lot of money to spare after the last bear market. Even if she did, this wasn't a problem that could be solved with cash.
"Well, then, you get back to work, but try to get out tomorrow. There's a big male out there who told me he wants you to bring him a hot pastrami on rye."
Nate grinned and almost snorted into the phone. "Elizabeth, you know they don't eat while they're in these waters."
"I'm just relaying the message, Nathan. Don't you snicker at me. He's a big male, broad, like he just came down from Alaska  -  frankly, I don't know why he'd be hungry, he's as big as a house. But anyway, Swiss and hot English mustard, he was very clear about that. He has very unusual markings on his flukes. I couldn't see them from here, but he says you'll know him."
Nate felt his face go numb with something approximating shock. "Elizabeth  - »
"Call if you need anything, Nathan. My love to Clay. Aloha."
Nathan Quinn let the phone slip from his fingers, then zombie-stumbled out of the office and back to his own cabin, where he decided he was going to nap and keep napping until he woke up to a world that wasn't so irritatingly weird.
Right on the edge of a dream where he was gleefully steering a sixty-foot cabin cruiser up Second Street in downtown Seattle, plowing aside slow-moving vehicles while Amy, clad in a silver bikini and looking uncharacteristically tan, stood in the bow and waved to people who had come to the windows of their second-story offices to marvel at the freedom and power of the Mighty Quinn  -  right on the edge of a perfect dream, Clay burst into the room. Talking.
"Kona's moving into cabin six."
"Get some lines in the water, Amy," Nate said from the drears of morpheum opus. "We're coming up on Pike's Place Market, and there's fish to be had."
Clay waited, not quite smiling, not quite not, while Nate sat up and rubbed sleep from his eyes. "Driving a boat on the street?" Clay said, nodding. All skippers had that dream.
"Seattle," said Nate. "The Zodiac lives in cabin six."
"We haven't used the Zodiac in ten years, it won't hold air." Clay went to the closet that acted as a divider between the living/sleeping area and the kitchen. He pulled down a stack of sheets, then towels. "You wouldn't believe how they had this kid living, Nate. It was a tin industrial building, out by the airport. Twenty, thirty of them, in little stalls with cots and not enough room to swing a dead cat. The wiring was extension cords draped over the tops of the stalls. Six hundred a month for that."
Nate shrugged. "So? We lived that way the first couple of years. It's what you do. We might need cabin six for something. Storage or something."
"Nope," said Clay. "That place was a sweat box and a fire hazard. He's not living there. He's our guy."
"But Clay, he's only been with us for a day. He's probably a criminal."
"He's our guy," said Clay, and that was that. Clay had very strong views on loyalty. If Clay had decided that Kona was their guy, he was their guy.
"Okay," said Nate, feeling as if he had just invited the Medusa in for a sandwich. "The Old Broad called."
"How is she?"
"Still nuts."
"How're you?"
"Getting there."