Friday's Harbor (7 page)

“Yeah. Shug’s mama was killed and baby girl lost an eye. She was just a little bitty thing, too.”

“So what part of that was a mistake?”

“Miz Biedelman had an old elephant, Reyna, when shug first got here. She took real good care of her, too. Not many people knew about old Reyna—that was before Havenside was a zoo. She died a little over a year after shug got here. Miz Biedelman knew Hannah would be alone after that, at least where elephants were concerned. Said more than once that what she’d done was irresponsible.”

“So she hired you as a companion.”

“Yes, ma’am, she did.”

“So Hannah wasn’t alone.”

“Well, I guess you could say that.”

Neva interrupted, touching Ivy on the arm. “Excuse me, but Gabriel’s going to put Friday through a session, and I want to watch up close, so I’m going around to the other side.”

“A session?”

“A workout session. Think of it as physical therapy.”

“Is he up to that?” Ivy asked, surprised.

“Gabriel?”

Ivy smiled. “Him, too, but no, the whale.”

“I’m sure Gabriel will go easy on him, but it’s important to keep him moving so his lungs stay clear, especially since his immune system’s compromised.”

“Ah,” said Ivy. She watched for a couple of minutes as Neva circled the pool. Then she said to Sam, “She seems like a very nice young woman.”

“She is,” said Sam. “Saved shug, even though it ruined her career.”

They both watched as, across the pool, Gabriel gave a hand signal and Friday swam slowly away to circle the perimeter. When Friday reached him again, Gabriel blew a high tweet on a whistle and tossed a few fish into the whale’s open mouth.

Ivy regarded Sam. “Do you think you’ll help out here? Only occasionally, I hope. After all, you’re a carefree retiree now.”

Sam cut his old eyes at her shrewdly. “I’m an old man with diabetes and free time, is what I am.”

“You’re better now, aren’t you?”

“Mama makes sure I behave myself. I’ll tell you what, though. It sure would be good to have a doughnut from time to time,” he said wistfully and then brightened. “We send a twenty-five-dollar Dunkin’ Donuts gift card down to shug every month.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t meet her before she left,” said Ivy. “To tell you the truth, the only thing I really know about elephants firsthand is that at a certain point in time, their feet made dandy wastebaskets. My uncle had one in his study.”

Sam blanched.

“Of course, they didn’t know any better. In fact, I think he shot that elephant on a safari way back around 1912 or so. But here’s justice for you—he lost his own foot in World War I. No bad deeds go unpunished or whatever the hell that saying is.”

“No good deed,” said Gabriel, who’d finished working with Friday and come around the pool to their side.

“I like mine better,” said Ivy, and then to Sam, “Anyway, this whale’s going to need someone just as much as Hannah did, if he’s going to be alone here for the rest of his life.”

Neva had joined them, too, and now said, “You don’t know that.”

“Tell that to him,” Ivy said, inclining her head toward Gabriel. “He seems to think so.” He’d stressed that to both Truman and Ivy at their first meeting in Friday Harbor, and had been reiterating it periodically ever since.

The others looked at Gabriel expectantly. Gabriel just shrugged. “If no other facility wanted to take him on because of possible disease transmission, they certainly won’t send one of their whales here as a companion.”

“What about a rehab animal?”

“How many rehabbed, wild killer whales can you name that are in captivity?”

Ivy looked at Neva, Neva looked at Ivy, and Sam looked from one to the other.

“None, is how many,” said Gabriel.

“Why is that?” Neva asked.

Gabriel shrugged. “Just doesn’t happen. Even if they’re injured they can probably still hunt until they either recover or die. They only come up on beaches if they’re going to drown, and even so no one’s going to see it. Plus the cost of bringing in an injured adult whale is astronomical. No one’s going to do it.”

“Well,” said Ivy. “So much for
that
discussion.” She hauled from her tote a long, circular knitting needle and a length of completed afghan in a Fair Isle pattern. “Do you think he’s okay up here?” she asked Gabriel, gesturing to Julio Iglesias, who was still picking his way prissily around the perimeter of the pool, keeping well back from the four-inch-deep wet walk.

“As long as he doesn’t fall in. We might want to find a flotation vest for him, though, just in case.”

“Oh, he has a very healthy respect for the water,” Ivy said. “He fell off a dock once and scared the living shit out of both of us. I was thinking more along the lines of whether our little boy might eat him.”

“Is he a fish?” Gabriel asked.

“No.”

“Does he look or sound like a fish?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no reason to think Friday would eat him.
Play
with him, yes; eat him, no.”

“Play with him how, exactly?” Ivy said.

“Don’t know. It might be fun to find out, though.” Gabriel gave her a wicked smile. Ivy whacked him on the arm with her knitting needle.

T
RUMAN CAME BACK
to the pool top in the afternoon, telling himself he was legitimately responsible for checking on things, but the fact was, if he could have justified it he’d have spent the whole workday watching the goings-on at the killer whale pool instead of revising budget projections for an upcoming executive committee meeting. Harriet Saul had him well-trained: during her tenure if he was gone from his desk for more than fifteen minutes she’d get on the radio, hunt him down, and insist that he come back. Once, when he’d committed the sin of talking for twenty minutes with the zoo’s sloth keeper about a new animal that had just arrived, she had not only run him to ground, she’d lectured him about spending his time doing something that wasn’t related to his job. “During work hours you belong here, not wandering around the zoo,” she’d concluded. “From now on I want you to tell Brenda where you’re going when you leave your desk so I can find you.”

Now he crested the pool top in time to hear Gabriel say to Neva, “You ready?”

“Tah-dah!” Neva Supermanned her hoodie to reveal a brand-new wet suit underneath, at the same time shucking off her waterproof bib overalls. They both greeted Truman, and then Neva asked, “So what do you want me to do?”

“Just sit on the side, for starters. Let him initiate the relationship.”

“Is it safe?” Truman asked.

“It’s fine,” said Neva.

“It’s fine,” said Gabriel.

“Just don’t let him, you know, eat her. Okay?” Truman told Gabriel. “No eating.”

“C’mon—he’s a pussycat,” said Gabriel.

“That sounds like someone’s epitaph.” Truman readily acknowledged that one of his less attractive qualities was that he was perpetually preparing for loss. Every day he imagined the biopic that would be his life, with a dolorous voice-over saying something like
What had begun as just another ordinary day would end with the terrible knowledge that the one he loved most was gone forever.
The imagined cause of the fatality was an ever-changing multiple-choice question: car accident, sudden brain hemorrhage, random gunshot, serial killer, flesh-eating bacteria, hit-and-run driver, and now a new one, killer whale. He’d never trusted anything good to last.

He turned and walked away, bravely resisting the powerful urge to look back.

N
EVA LOWERED HERSELF
until she was sitting on the wet walk eight feet away from Friday, who had continued to watch everything, his chin resting on the edge of the pool.

“Splash your hand in the water a little. He’ll come over,” Gabriel said, using his foot to nudge the steel bucket closer to her. “Then reward him when he does.”

Neva did as instructed, and, sure enough, Friday swam right over to her. She tossed a fish into his open mouth and he swallowed it. “Go ahead and scratch him,” Gabriel suggested. “Use your fingernails and really dig.”

Friday narrowed his eyes with bliss as Neva described circles in his skin with her fingernails, leaving tracks in the remaining film of zinc oxide, getting black skin cells under her nails. His blowhole opened, he exhaled loudly, and then his blowhole clapped shut again. Little gobs of mucous fell around her like rain. “Ooh, snot. Is that normal?” she asked Gabriel.

“No. It’s probably from the pollution down in Bogotá. We’ll keep an eye on it. Why don’t you go ahead and get in the water with him.”

Neva slipped into pool, yipping involuntarily as the frigid water splashed her neck and face. Gabriel had asked the zoo’s water-quality staff to keep the temperature as close to forty degrees as possible—roughly the temperature of the North Atlantic. Gabriel grinned wickedly. “Just wait until it gets inside your wet suit.”

“God,” said Neva. “Do you get used to it?”

“A little. Not really.”

Friday, meanwhile, had taken off for the far side of the pool. Neva laughed. “Could he possibly get any farther away from me?”

“It’s going to take time,” Gabriel said. “But he’s a pretty social guy, so I’m betting he’ll be in your pocket by the end of the week.” He went to a fiberglass chest lashed to the pool railing, pulled out a scrub brush, and tossed it to her. “In the meantime, you might as well be useful.”

Neva began scrubbing the light growth of algae that had already started growing on the wet walk. “Is there anything in particular you want to do with him today?”

“Get a blood sample. That’s it. Mostly what I want him to do is eat and work some of the kinks out of his muscles. We’re taking his food up to two hundred twenty-five pounds. Double what he was getting in Bogotá.”

“Where are we taking the sample from?”

“His flukes.”

“Really?” Neva said skeptically. “How does that work?”

“Piece of cake. You just ask him to roll over and put his tail on the wet walk.”

Half an hour later, after Neva had been repeatedly spurned, she climbed out of the water and Gabriel called Friday to the side of the pool, fed him a couple of herring, and then asked him via a hand signal to roll over. When Friday complied, Gabriel pulled his flukes into place, laying one on the wet walk, where it was supported, then stooped down, swabbed a spot with alcohol, and inserted a hypodermic needle into the road map of veins. Friday didn’t even flinch. When he was done Gabriel blew a shrill blast on his whistle to signal to Friday that he’d done what he’d been asked to do, and slapped his flukes affectionately. Friday rolled over and put his chin on the side of the pool, and Gabriel fed him half a bucket of fish.

“Get back in,” he suggested to Neva. “He may be in a more playful mood now.”

For the next hour—until she was shivering uncontrollably—Neva alternated between scrubbing algae and water play, floating on her back or paddling around, trying to project a safe but come-hither attitude. Friday continued to keep his distance, dozing on the far side of the pool.

“Okay, c’mon out,” Gabriel finally said. “That was a good start.”

Neva climbed out of the pool, her teeth chattering.

“Can you feel your hands?” Gabriel asked.

“Not for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Excellent,” said Gabriel, grinning. “Welcome to the world of marine mammal care. Go on down and sit in the shower until you stop shivering.”

Neva thought nothing had ever felt better than sitting in the locker room’s huge shower on the teak bench Gabriel had had the foresight to order, letting hot water cascade over her, and allowing her mind to wander. She had known some extraordinary zookeepers in her career, men and women who had invested their hearts as well as their backs and minds, spending day after low-paying day in all kinds of settings and the worst kinds of weather. Her ex-husband, Howard, had described what she did as slopping the hogs and shoveling shit, and in a narrow view of the profession he was right. But he’d left out the passion that elevated their work to one continuous, arduous act of love. Neva had seen that passion in Sam as plain as day when he had worked with Hannah; now, she saw the same quality in Gabriel, amplified manyfold. Gabriel was also calm to the core, focused, reassuring, wordlessly eloquent. He would be an excellent mentor.

And what he couldn’t teach her, she suspected Friday would.

O
N THE POOL
top late that afternoon, Gabriel put on flippers, dive weights, a mask, oxygen tank, and regulator. This would be his first dive; he was going to clean feces, dropped fish, and algae from the bottom of the pool. It was slow and tedious work, like vacuuming a ballroom with a Dustbuster. And cold; very, very cold.

From the middle of the pool, Friday watched with keen interest as Gabriel slipped into the water, and when he went under, Friday went, too, following him down, staying just out of reach. Gabriel ignored him: he intended to set a precedent during this dive. People without scuba gear were in the water to interact with him, but the presence of tanks and masks meant that business was at hand.

Gabriel pulled the clumsy vacuum hose out of a sump on the bottom of the pool’s south end, struggling with the heavy grate and the hose that bloomed into a huge arc overhead. Even with exertion, his breathing was easy and regular; he had been diving for twenty-two years, in all kinds of conditions and with all kinds of animals. Still, what he had told Sam was true: an animal looking for fun could be just as dangerous as one who meant you harm. He had developed a sixth sense about his animals’ whereabouts whenever he was in the water. He worked steadily, slipping into a lovely Zen state. Friday watched raptly from a distance for five minutes before coming closer, until he hovered head down directly above Gabriel. Then, with exquisite politeness, he rested his chin on Gabriel’s shoulder. Gabriel reached back to touch him in gentle acknowledgment, and they finished the vacuuming together, man and whale moving in companionable slo-mo along the bottom of the pool.

Chapter 5

T
HE DAY AFTER
Friday’s arrival, the zoo’s executive committee began exerting increasing pressure on Truman to open the killer whale viewing gallery to the public. Adding urgency was the fact that the previous quarter’s attendance figures had been even worse than they’d projected.

“Hell,” the board president, Dink Schuler, declared at the executive committee meeting. “There’s a ton of money to be made here. This fish is a star.”

“Mammal,” Truman said mildly.

“What?”

“He’s a mammal, not a fish.”

“I don’t care if he has wings and can fly. All I know is, when I went to Rotary yesterday, people were jumping all over me about when we plan to open up. Money, money, money—the hospitality industry guys are drooling all over themselves about the out-of-town business we’ll bring in, and chamber’s mentioned several times that they’re willing to give us the front cover of their brochure the next time they reprint it. Oh, and get this—a couple of guys were visiting from Tacoma and they said, over there, there’s a rumor that the whale actually died a few hours after he got here and we’re hiding it by handing out canned footage to the TV guys instead of even letting them in to shoot their own.”

“That’s crazy,” said Truman, appalled.

“Sure, it’s bullshit, but what I’m saying is, keeping the guy off-limits could turn into a PR problem.”

Truman was also taking flak from visitors who knew full well that the killer whale they were hearing about on the evening news was
right there;
from the zoo grounds they could see staff working with him on the pool top. So when the executive committee meeting ended, Truman called Gabriel and explained the situation. “Do you see any downside to opening the gallery tomorrow?”

“Not as long as he’s still doing well—actually, having people in the gallery will give him some stimulation. I’m assuming that we can shut the gallery down if he gets into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Oh, nothing in particular. Death, say.”

“Is he still that frail?” Truman asked with some alarm.

“No, but you still have to have protocols in place for how to deal with it. I’m just saying.”

“Oh,” said Truman. “Whew.”

Over the phone he could hear Gabriel snort with amusement. “Man, you really need to lighten up.”

“I know, I know. Then let’s open the gallery tomorrow. That’ll give us the chance for the maximum number of visitors over the weekend.”

“Fine by me,” said Gabriel.

So Truman called Dink Schuler to confirm that the gallery would open tomorrow; and Dink called the mayor of Bladenham and the president of the chamber of commerce and the county commissioners and a long list of other VIPs; by which time Truman had called Martin Choi, the reporter at the
Bladenham News-Tribune
who had been so instrumental, if unwittingly, in manipulating Harriet Saul into releasing Hannah to the Pachyderm Sanctuary in California, who called his radio buddy, who put the information out, which was picked up by the regional wire service; which prompted Dink to call Truman to pull together a ribbon-cutting ceremony; at which point Truman called Ivy, who, thanks to the vast experience she and her money had had with this sort of event, helped Truman plan a speech and photo opportunity with the additional input of Lavinia and Matthew, who strongly recommended that Truman not only invite Martin Choi, but include him in the ceremony as “one of our most important community partners” because, as Matthew put it, “Son, he’s an idiot, which means we can’t overestimate his strategic value if we need him down the road.”

M
EANWHILE, ANIMAL COMMUNICATOR
Libertine sat in her camp chair by the side of the street next to the killer whale pool. For the second full day Friday maintained his silence, which perplexed her. She was certain he’d been the one to summon her, but it was clear he’d withdrawn from her now. Did he want her there at all, or had he solved whatever problem he’d intended to bring to her? In that case, her work here was done. She never forced herself on any animal, but made herself available as its agent, leaving it to the animal to make use of her if it chose to. Though she had no doubt that it had been Friday who’d summoned her from Orcas Island, now she was at a loss.

At three o’clock she had just decided to take a walk—she was probably at risk for deep-vein thrombosis, with all the sitting she was doing—when a pleasant-looking man wearing zoo apparel came through a gate to her side of the chain-link fence and said, “Is there anything we can help you with?”

Libertine pushed herself out of her chair and staggered as she found that one of her feet was asleep. “Will you be putting the killer whale on exhibit anytime soon?”

“Friday.”

“Yes, Friday. Do you know when you’ll let people see him?”

“No, I meant
on
Friday—tomorrow. You’ll able to see Friday on Friday. My god, it’s like a bad Abbot and Costello routine. Who’s on first?”

“What?”

“No, what’s on second. Who’s on first?”

They both started laughing. “I’m sorry,” said the man, rubbing his face. “It’s been a long couple of days.”

“I’m sure.”

“I noticed you were here yesterday, too.”

“I came down from Orcas Island when I heard you were going to be bringing him up.”

“Do you know him somehow?”

“No,” said Libertine, not quite truthfully. “I’ve just heard a lot about him.”

“Really? Such as?”

“Mainly, that he deserves a lot of breaks.”

“No kidding,” said the man, holding out his hand. “I’m Truman Levy.”

“Libertine Adagio.” For now she decided to leave it at that.

A
CROSS TOWN,
B
LADENHAM
News-Tribune
reporter Martin Choi was scratching around for a new story angle. The killer whale’s arrival was all well and good, but he’d gotten the same story as everyone else, and that wasn’t good enough. If you were to know just one thing about him, Martin Choi would tell you, it should be his unwavering ambition. Firmly believing that upper-level journalism classes were unnecessary—that in fact, they stifled a young reporter’s unique voice—he’d come to the
Bladenham News-Tribune
four years ago, fresh from an introductory journalism class at the community college. His current plan was to become an online feature writer for the Huffington Post. He used to dream of becoming an investigative reporter for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
but he saw all too clearly now that paper-and-ink newspapers were doomed to become nothing but a headline or two, a couple of advertorials, and a bunch of grocery store ads and True Value Hardware supplements. He had more on the ball than that—a lot more. He was a hard-nosed reporter waiting for the story that would blast him out of this rat pit town and into cyberfame.

He’d been trying to reach Truman Levy all morning, unsuccessfully. Martin was pretty sure Truman was avoiding him. If Harriet Saul had still been around, he’d have been in like Flynn; she’d never said as much, but he knew she’d had a crush on him, and justifiably—he’d stood on the front steps of Havenside three years ago and declared her a hero, blowing the lid off her secret intention of relocating Hannah to a sanctuary in California. In fact, he’d parlayed that great moment into his current title, Lead Feature Writer, which now ran beside his byline. Sure, he still wrote marriage and birth announcements, but he’d drawn the line at obituaries. Everyone knew obituary writing was a dead-end job. (And he’d come up with that amazing pun
on the fly
while outlining his demands to his editor. That was the kind of nimble wit he had.)

Truman Levy, on the other hand, was a tougher nut, and now a brand-new lawyer to boot, which meant he wasn’t going to go for the easy, hand-in-glove relationship that local newspapers and nonprofit organizations so often shared. No, he’d need to find another angle on this Friday business that was his own.

Then he’d gotten the phone call from none other than Truman himself about the ribbon-cutting at the whale pool the next morning. Who said good things didn’t go to those who waited, or whatever the hell that saying was? His life was charmed; this was just another sign of it.

W
HEN
T
RUMAN LOOKED
out his office window the next morning he saw a line leading all the way to the main parking lot and disappearing around a corner of the gift shop—more visitors than the zoo hosted during an average peak-season weekend. And the zoo wouldn’t even be open for another half hour.

Acting fast, he had his IT guy add to the zoo’s Web site basic information about Friday, the hours during which the public could see him, and a link to accept donations. He asked Brenda to create a Facebook page and a Twitter account on Friday’s behalf. Then he instructed security to take down the ribbon for the noon ribbon-cutting ceremony so visitors could get into the gallery immediately, and asked the two front gate employees to open early and capture guests’ zip codes—which, in the first two hours, included people from as far away as San Diego and Calgary. The Web site crashed under the weight of nearly a quarter of a million hits per hour, and children showed up with jars of pennies and crumpled dollar bills from the tooth fairy. When the day’s mail arrived it included an avalanche of greeting cards, hand-scrawled good wishes, and checks—lots and lots of checks.

It occurred to him that he might have underestimated the effect this animal could have on the entire zoo.

He decided to walk through the zoo grounds, joining a tidal wave of visitors who were skipping all the other exhibits in favor of Friday’s pool. Halfway there he caught up with a young couple with two tow-headed boys wearing S
HAMU
sweatshirts and tugging at their hands to make them go faster. “They’re both just crazy about killer whales,” the woman told Truman ruefully. “We’ve already taken them to SeaWorld twice, and he’s only eight.” She indicated the older boy. “When I told them we were going to get to see a killer whale right here at home, I thought they’d pop they were so excited.”

“Are you from Bladenham?”

“Well, Tacoma, which is a heck of a lot closer than San Diego. We promised the boys we’d buy a zoo membership so they can come as often as they want. I home school them, and I’d already planned a unit on marine mammals, so this is just perfect. You’re not planning on getting any more, by any chance?”

“No,” said Truman. “I think we’ll have our hands full just with Friday.”

The boys, who’d never stopped tugging on her hands, said in unison, “Mom, come
on
!” As soon as they got near the doors to the viewing gallery they sprinted ahead, calling over their shoulders, “Hurry up! Come on, come on, we’re going to miss him,” as though the animal could come and go from the pool at will.

Truman slipped into the gallery behind them, staying on an elevated walkway at the back so he could see the visitors as well as the whale. A frisson of anticipation pulsed through the gallery like an electrical charge. When at last Friday made a single sluggish pass-by, a deafening cheer rang out.

W
HEN
M
ARTIN
C
HOI
finally got inside the viewing gallery after waiting in line for twenty freaking minutes—he could have invoked journalistic privilege, but he decided to maintain his anonymity to preserve the integrity of his story—he arrived to find four empty windows. Water, water, water; no whale. He asked a woman standing next to him what the hell. “If you look up there,” she told him, pointing, “you can just barely see his tail flukes.”

She was right—he could see them hanging down in the water. Once he’d pressed his way through the crowd to stand directly in front of the window and look up, he could see not only the flukes but the whale’s whole undercarriage.

“Hey, is he dead?” someone called from the crowd. “Because I don’t see him breathing or nothing. I heard he might die.”

A murmur of concern rippled through the two hundred or so people in the gallery.

“Nah, he’s been like that for an hour,” someone else said. “If you watch for a while, you’ll see him take a breath. Then he just lays there. He could be dying, but they’re not going to tell you that. You’ll just read it in the paper one day.”

A child started wailing, “Don’t let him die, Mommy, don’t let him die!”

The cry was instantly taken up by other children throughout the gallery. Martin turned to face the crowd, both arms raised as though to invoke a benediction, and said, “Don’t worry—I’m a reporter. I’ll get to the bottom of this and run it in Monday’s
News-Tribune
.” Given that today was only Friday he knew how lame that sounded, but what else could he do?

“So
is
he dead?” a woman at the back of the gallery demanded. “Or what?”

“He’s not dead,” said a quiet voice at Martin Choi’s elbow. “He’s not even dying. He’s just tired. It was a long trip from Colombia to here.”

Martin looked down upon a pink-nosed, frowsy-haired little woman standing beside him. He was lucky he’d even heard her. Feeling his whale-death exposé slipping away, he said, “How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“How?”

The woman sighed. “He told me.”

“He
told
you? Who told you, the whale?”

“The whale, Friday. Yes.”

“No shit. You talk to whales?”

“Not all whales, no, just the ones who approach me. I don’t talk to them, exactly. I communicate with them.”

Martin could feel his heart rate increase and his palms get damp. Here,
just like that,
might be the story of a lifetime, his ticket out. “I thought his name was Viernes.”

“
Viernes
means Friday in Spanish,” said the woman.

“Oh, yeah? How come they named him that?”

“I assume he was captured on a Friday.”

“And you know that how?”

“I don’t. It’s a guess.”

Suddenly the flukes above them kicked, the whale heaved into motion, and the gallery erupted.

“Someone’s feeding him,” said the woman beside him.

“You can see that?” Martin said, peering up into the water. All he could see was the killer whale’s belly on the far side of the pool. “How can you see that?”