The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (4 page)

“Jesus, everything’s leaking,” Dorée grumbled. “What
is
this?” She pushed tomatoes and eggplant around on her plate, then shoved it away. “I said vegetarian, not inedible. What else is there?”

“Georgita drink any water?” Bodine asked. “She gets dehydrated, she could be in bad shape.”

“I made her drink some this morning, with sugar in it.—That’s all I made, Tehiyah,” Sara said. Resisting the urge to shove her head down into it.

“Well, I can’t eat it. How about some risotto? With a salad?”

Sara made herself count. One. Two. Three. Then said as evenly as she could, “I’m sorry, Tehiyah. I’m an ethologist, not a gourmet chef. As a matter of fact, wasn’t it your turn to make lunch?”

Dorée took a small bite. “God,” she muttered.

“It’s good,” Eddi said. “I like it, Sara. Mick?”

“Better than MREs and sand,” Bodine said. A stock phrase they got to hear at almost every meal.

The boat soared over a swell, and each diner clutched his or her plate with one hand and the bench seat with the other. When they crashed down the whole craft quivered, and smoking sauce spattered from the bowls. Sara’s tailbone ached where she’d already bruised it. Spray rattled topside. From behind the curtain of her sleeping nook Georgita coughed like a dying fawn.

“Tapioca for dessert,” Sara said brightly, smiling around.

“God. I hate fucking tapioca.”

“Sounds good, Sara.”

“Better than MRE cookies.”

“I’m sorry if I’m cranky, but I didn’t get a wink of sleep. It’s colder than an agent’s heart,” Dorée muttered. “The rest of you out here, at least you have each other’s body heat.”

“Well, this
is
the Antarctic,” Sara observed.

Dorée ignored her. “Perrault? Hey, Dru?”

“
Comment?
What is it?” A hollow voice from below. From offstage, like the ghost in
Hamlet
.

“I’m
freezing
. Can’t we turn the heaters on?”

Bodine frowned. “The heaters aft take electricity. But there’s only so much capacity in the batteries, unless the engines are running.”

“I didn’t ask you. I asked the captain.”

“He’s right,” Perrault said from beneath them. “We have oil heaters, too. One aft, one forward. But I’m not turning them on until we truly need them.” Blows echoed, as if he were forging iron. Four heavy strokes. A pause. Then four more.

“Fine.” Dorée shrugged. “Turn the generator on. Or the engines, or whatever. It’d be different if you hadn’t left all my warm stuff on the fucking pier.”

“Sorry. An oversight.”

“Oversight, my ass! You saw my bags sitting there. My people were yelling. You just kept going.”

“There are crew jackets.” Eddi pointed a fork at the locker.

“Blue’s not my color, honey.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Bodine muttered.

“What? What did you say?”

“I said, you need to suck it up, babe.”

“Fuck you. I’m used to roughing it. I filmed in fucking Ghana! I can suck it up fine. What I don’t like is freezing my ass off for no reason.”

Eddi said, “If you’d rather sleep up forward, you can have my spot.”

“Oh, so you want my room? I’ve seen that dog’s bed you made. Foam rubber and rags. Like a street person.”

Sara filled her mouth with ratatouille to keep silent. This, after Eddi had given up her own bunk for the useless wraith-woman Dorée had insisted on bringing as a personal servant? “This isn’t a pleasure cruise, Tehiyah,” she observed.

“Well, no shit! Sure hasn’t been so far.”

“We’re out here to save whales from being slaughtered,” Bodine said. “You need to man up and stop whining.”

Silence fell, broken only by a worried
hmm
from Eddi. Dorée glared across the table at Bodine. “What … did … you …
say
?”

“We’re not here to coddle you.” He wolfed another heaped spoonful. “You should listen to yourself. ‘Blue’s not my color,’” he mimicked. “‘The rest of you have body heat.’ Why’d you come on this voyage, anyway? Just for a photo op with Free Willy?”

“I believe deeply in this cause,” Dorée gritted out, every muscle tensed in her long slender neck. The lovely face changed. Suddenly the eyes of a vengeful demon burned out from a twisted, frightening mask. The others dropped their forks; Sara shivered. “If you think I don’t, then ask yourself why I bothered with this expedition. Who secured the funding? Got you this boat? Okay, I feel sorry for you, G.I. Joe. Without legs and all. But I don’t overlook rudeness. Jules-Louis will hear about you insulting me.”

Eddi broke the silence with, “Tehiyah … wasn’t that Francine, in
Last Rites
?”

“Ha-ha.” The demonic snarl faded. “Absolutely, Eddi. Score one for you.”

“Hey! You guys leave us any food?” Madsen appeared at the companionway, the ears of his silly hound cap dangling jesterlike. Sara knew now he wasn’t Norwegian or Swedish, as she’d first thought, but Danish. Close, anyway.

“Nah, we ate it all,” Bodine yelled back.

“We’d like to get relieved.”

Sara sighed, and looked around for her jacket.

*   *   *

Perrault insisted everyone wear what he called “mustang suits” whenever they went topside. The bulky waterproof one-pieces were a tiger-lily red-orange, with harness points and silver reflective tape. They were insulated and had flotation cells. The zippers, which started at the crotch, were supposed to be watertight. Sara’s was extremely hard to zip without jamming. She felt like the Michelin Woman as she bent over to tug on heavy dark blue insulated boots over three pair of socks. She was sweating by the time she climbed the companionway.

She blinked, clinging to a coaming as the wind punched and rocked her. It howled each time
Anemone
heaved on immense black seas, then sank to a whisper as the boat dropped. The bellied-out sail was driving them at a tearing speed that threw out great curving sheets of clear water to either side. She’d never have believed a sailboat could rocket along like this. Madsen was back by the wheel, though it was the self-steerer, a windvane that controlled a micro rudder, that was keeping them on course at the moment.

Quill motioned her and Eddi in toward him, then bent so his wartlike nose was only inches from theirs. His black beard stuck out in tufts from the hood, with little eyes staring balefully out above it. “Keep your safety lines secured,” he shouted. “Those suits won’t save you. Remember, go in the water here, you’re helpless in sixty seconds. Dead in five minutes.”

She nodded. Not that they needed the warning. One glance at the roaring emptiness all around was enough to make her heart sink. They hadn’t spotted another ship or boat since leaving Argentina. Only those incredibly dark seas, gigantic up close, as they were about to break, then smaller and smaller as they marched off to the jagged horizon. The face of each was wrinkled and furrowed like an old woman’s. The sun was a refrigerator-bulb gleam through a frosted scrim of cloud. The wind generator was a whining, vibrating blur. A thin glaze of water coated every winch, line, and surface. At least it wasn’t frozen. The air was chilly, but not yet cold enough to freeze the moisture in Quill’s beard. The sun glittered off the passing waves as from tilted mirrors of black glass.

“Bloody boo’tiful weather,” he shouted. “Hardly any seas. We made two hundred and twenty miles noon to noon. You’re steering between one twenty and one thirty. One reef in the main. Wind’s between twenty-two and twenty-five, gusting thirty. I know we haven’t seen anybody for a while, but keep one eye on your radar and the other to weather. If you make a squall bearing down, or fog, or another ship, call Dru. Hear anything on channel sixteen, call Dru. If the boat starts to feel strange, or the steering goes—”

“Call Dru,” Eddi chimed in.

Quill eyed her morosely. Just like that, Sara knew why he seemed so familiar. She’d met a tame boar hog once, on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, with that exact expression. The hog had been named Paul Mitchell, for the way his bristles stuck up in unruly spikes. The memory made her smile.

Surprising her, Quill smiled back. “Okay, girls, all yours.—Lars, boy, let’s eat.”

When they were alone together Eddi hunched into a small seat back by the wheel. Sara balanced an arm’s length farther forward, where she could see around the straining sail. Hardly any seas? Right. She kept pressing the lid back down on the panic she’d felt from the moment they’d left land behind. If this was “boo’tiful,” what would it be like farther south?

She stood for a time flexing her knees against the leap and crash of the boat, staggering drunkenly when she misjudged. Glad once again not to be seasick. She eyed the colored speckle of the radar screen; glanced aloft to see the little antenna still sweeping around, the French tricolor still flapping angrily. At last she edged aft and wedged in beside Auer. The seats were cramped, with hardly any legroom. A remnant of
Anemone
’s racing pedigree, probably. “We staying on course?”

“Right where Jamie said.” Eddi was staring at the self-steering. Her bare hands were burrowed into the pockets of the orange suit; her sailing gloves lay on the deck. “Wish I could figure out how this thing works.”

“It’s not electrical, anyway.”

Eddi grinned. “Yeah, that’s good.”

The compass swung wildly, but they did seem to be staying more or less on course. Sara cleared her throat. “Those are, you know, great tattoos. D’you get them done in the States?”

“Oh yes. In San Francisco.”

“All those sea animals. So beautiful.”

“They’re all guys I worked with. Each one has a name.”

Sara regarded her with surprise. Remembered to check around the horizon; still empty. Then looked back at her watchmate. “Oh, that’s right—you were a performer. At Sea Universe, right?”

Auer smiled, but without reproach. “They called us trainers, not performers. There at the end, I was filming with El Tigre.”

“Oh really.” Then Sara sat up straight. “El Tigre. The uh, the orca?”

“That’s right.” Eddi hugged herself. Her already-small body seemed to shrink.

“I … think I saw something about that on television. Wasn’t he the one that…”

“Yeah.”

“But surely it wasn’t you he—”

“That was me,” Auer said, looking away.

Sara braced herself against the pitching, flashing on YouTube clips of a huge black-and-white killer whale turning on a petite trainer. The massive orca had whipped the blue pool water into froth. The trainer—this small woman beside her—had tried again and again to escape. Safety divers had tried to distract the beast. It had ignored them, toying with the swimmer like a gigantic cat, gripping and shaking her in its jaws before pulling her beneath the surface. The audience had screamed as the foam turned pink. Somehow, despite her injuries, the swimmer had reached the edge of the pool. But it had caught her again. Dragged her back into the center of the arena and slammed its massive body down on her imploring arms, driving her under. The clip had run for only half a minute, but watching it had seemed to take hours.

“Why—I mean, do you have any idea?”

Auer shrugged. “He loved me. I thought. He could be so sweet. Take your hand in his mouth, lick it with that big soft tongue. Rub up against you like a cat when you were swimming with him.

“But he was weird that day. Like he didn’t want to go onstage. I kept signaling, but he’d just flick his tail and stare at me. Then all at once he, like, went bonkers. Just blind rage. If Cokie—another trainer—if he hadn’t come in after me, I’d have died. I’m sure of that much.” She shook her head. “I’ve never been so terrified. I was ready to die. Totally helpless.”

Sara took a deep breath. “There must’ve been
something
different that day. Some reason he perceived you as a threat, or as a prey animal—”

“No. There was
nothing different
. They said, after, that it was my ponytail. But I
always
wore a ponytail. They said he had high testosterone. That he wanted to mate with me, which is just ridiculous. They don’t attack each other when they mate.

“Tigre knew I wasn’t prey, or his girlfriend. He wasn’t overworked; he’d just had three days off. He was trying to
kill me.
He had murder in his eyes when he kept coming after me.”

Sara tried to slow her breathing. She lifted her head and shaded her gaze around the heaving horizon. Bent to the radar. Nothing. “So you got the tattoos.”

“I got the scars first. Then, when they healed, the body art. I don’t agree with the people who say we should release all the captive whales. If we did, they’d die. They’re not wild anymore. But we shouldn’t capture new ones, or keep breeding them. Anyhow, I never got back in the tank with him. Or any of the other killers.” She laughed breathlessly. “We weren’t allowed to call them that. Just ‘orcas.’ But we knew it could happen. We were like lion tamers. Like Siegfried and Roy. There’s a reason they call them that, you know.”

“They’re apex predators.”

“Like us.” Eddi nodded. “Only we’re like the apex of the apex. At least, so far. And we treat the ones below us … really badly. Don’t you think?”

“I do.” Sara had no trouble agreeing with that.

Auer’s slightly protruding blue eyes were troubled. “And, whatever’s in us that, you know, thinks and feels, well—I don’t even pretend to know what that is. I’m just somebody who takes pictures. But I see it in a whale’s eyes … d’you know what I mean?”

“I think so.” Sara shook herself, surprised at how deep the conversation had suddenly gone. But she
did
know. Had seen it in Arminius’s gaze: a dawning consciousness that had begun to think beyond its immediate needs. An all but human yearning for understanding …

“So where’d you say you were from? Sara?”

“Hmm? Oh … Nantucket.”

“Oh. Right.” Auer looked impressed. “So your family’s got money.”

Sara laughed. “Hardly. My grandfather had a scallop shanty. We all scalloped in the winter.” She made a prying motion with her hands. “Open it, flip the guts into the gut bucket, the meat goes in the sell bucket. But the state shut us down. Health regulations. So we lost the shanty, and then our house.…”