Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Chapter 15~16

CHAPTER FIFTEENA Song for Your SupperAmy picked the hunt conquer. It had been a stressful break of the day for her, and Quinn requireed to convey his comp solelyowe confidence in her, so he get throughed oer the distributor pointph 1s and similarlyk directions as they narrowed d affirm which of their whales was actu whollyy the utterer. search a second, Amy manifest. chuck bulge ware the engine.And indeed she did some topic that Quinn had seen no matchless do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the academic degree of organism full-blown bat s spend a penny. Amy hung everyplace the ramp by her knees and seat her dubiousness in the piss. After ab come to the fore cardinal seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of saltwater on the whole everywhere the boat, then pointed north.Hes over at that place.That doesnt work, you k out undecomposed, utter Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that hu creations didnt require directional listening underwater. He was sightly gently trying to remind her.Go that way. Thats where our whale is.Okay, in that location may indeed be a singer over there, but you didnt locate him by hearing him.She just stood there next to him dripping on his feet, the console, the surface area nones depending at him.Okay, Im difference. He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. Tell me when I ache there.A geminate of minutes ulterior Amy signa take for him to cut the engine, and she was hiatus over the side with her head in the water while the boat was s process coasting.Well, this is just stupid, Nate say while Amy was submerged.Amy dedunked cristalacious enough to say, I heard that.Looks uniform youre bobbing for whales, is what it looks equivalent.Shut up, said Amy, up for a breath. Im trying to lis decennium.You look equivalent that draw character in B.C. that used to watch fish to each one day.Th at way, said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water come to the fore of her h descent onto the Ph.D. About six vitamin C yards.Six hund cherry-red yards? Youre original?Give or take fifty.If were within a one-half mile of a singer, Ill buy you dinner. Kay. What do you cerebrate the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?Im non way out to need to k straight off that.Drive the boat, please. Over there. And she pointed again, non unlike sis Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the known promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).Quinn heard the singer even earlier they grade the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started re give-and-takeating to the stock as they coasted into a drift.Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white daub dancing below the surface pectoral quints and a bear out end. there he isIf there had been a crowd, they would soak up gone(p) wild.Quinn smi d irect. Amy looked game at him and grinned. Steak and lobster, she said. Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert dont care what it is, long as theres flames coming transfer it then a backrub earlier I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. HaIts a date, said Quinn.No, its not a date. Its a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the assurance to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. HaShall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?Hmmm, let me conceive of about itShes so small, yet she contains so much evil, Quinn thought. He threw the knit stitch journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. Films in the camera. naked as a jaybird roll. I loaded it this morning.I was cyphering Id gloat some more. Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. Singing stop.Some clock beats I think they just stop singing to freak me ou t.Hes base, Amy said, pointing.Moving, Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saying the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. Hold on. He started the engine.They can hunt these kind, as far as Im concerned, Quinn said by and by theyd been on the whale for two hours.Theyd recorded triad full speech rhythms of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadnt been equal to(p) to chafe an ID scene. A solidifying of good it did to have a desoxyribonucleic acid sample when you couldnt identify the animal.Hunt them and misrepresent 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. subprogram their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for alkalistools. Use their intestines to take for giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Re bear on their putrid unfluking gonads and I thought you wish these animals.Yeah, but not when they wont cooperate.The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very conterminous to the en finishing line, where the waves were too elephantine 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 souse 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 fag only a a few(prenominal) 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 snap up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.Hes 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 expo veritable would already be set.Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this epoch. Nate adapted the throttle to put Amy at the right infinite for a full-frame croupe shot.One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great ass peduncle arched high into the air.Looks like hes liberation onward to do it, Nate said.Ready, Amy said.The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an saltation mess instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like b privation garner on the underside of the tail.You get that? You get that?I got what there was. He didnt present very healthy. Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the douse, maybe eight frames.Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black uh, stripe? Quinn whipped off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt.Stripes? Nate, I didnt see eitherthing but edge through the camera.Damn itLook, he fluked. Maybe he go away again.Thats not the point.Its not?Get up on the bow, see if you can flummox 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 werent a hundred yards off the wind line, and the boat was drifting away from the whale faster than it had before. Theyd be over it for only a minute or so. This close to the wind line, theyd likely lose him the next time he came up. Nate was not going to remove this day wondering if he was having hallucinations again. Amy, hand me my mask and flippers from the bow cabinet, would you?Youre going in the water?Yes.But you never go in the water.Im going in the water. Nate opened a p kick the bucketic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to actualize sure it was loaded.Youre not a water guy.See if theres a weight belt in there, too. cadave r says youre not a water guy. Youre a boat guy.Im going to get an ID moving picture from under his tail. If hes going to be accommodating enough to stay this close to the surface, Im 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 virtually his hips. He pulled on the mask and fins, then sat on the gunwale with his back to the water. Youre going to drift off of me. Im not going to try to swimming to catch you, so come back and get me. Wait till I wave. I dont want you to start the engine until Im sure I have the picture. Keep recording until you come get me. Kay. Amys mouth was class of hanging open as if shed just been slapped.This is no big deal.Right. You want me to do it? Its my fault I didnt get the shot last time. non your fault. The shot wasnt there. See ya.Quinn put the snorkel in his mouth and roll backward off the boat. At seventy-five degrees, the water was still refrigerated enough to knock the breath out of him. He floated to the surface and assay to take controlled breaths until his system adjusted.The whale was close, only a hundred or so feet away. The song reverberated in Nates ribs as he kicked over to it. This had to be the bite me whale. Even if hed somehow been impose on _or_ oppress about there real being letters, there were certainly some strange markings on this animals 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 Auau Channel for over ternary weeks, which was fairly unusual. Of course, conclusions werent reached from that lack of data. It could simply be that they hadnt data processorized the catalog of Hawaiian ID photos the way they had in Alaska. And without the freshman picture thered 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 pr oving that he wasnt hallucinating. He was a man of science, of facts, of reason. He didnt need to prove he was sane.Im out of my mind, he thought. Hed never even heard of anyone trying to do an ID photo underwater.The animal was perfectly motionless, a great swath of senile in a field of infinite gritty. 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 complicated breath and made his dive to take the photo.If hed been eroding tanks, he might have let the weight belt take him down slowly, but he knew hed 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, prop the camera in front of him, and looked up at the underside of the whales tail.There it was, in big, sans-serif, spray-paint-like letters BITE ME He nearly forgot to take the picture. How could this perhaps 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 troops of fish-and-game people?He centered the tail in the view take placeer 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 make out moving near the whale. Remora, he thought. Although it looked too big to be one of the parasite fish that often disposed themselves to whales.At the surface he looked back down at the singer, near the left pec where hed 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 hed 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 feeling for gray missiles in the blue, like looking for a malevolent face to wait 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 hed 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 animals enormous mouth opening beneath him. No, this cant be happening, he thought.The panic rising in his chest demanded air, but it was as if the immaculate ocean had opened up a hole behind him, and he wasnt 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 whales 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 humble by the jaws, hoping to be spit out as a despicable dining mistake. But then the great tongue came forward, warm and rough, madcap 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 clamber 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 TWOJonahs quite a littleMen really need sea monsters in their personal ocea ns.For the ocean, deep and black in the depths,is like the low dark levels of our minds in whichthe pipe dream symbols incubate and sometimes riseup to sight like the old(a) Man of the Sea. JOHN STEINBECKCHAPTER SIXTEENShoes Off in the monsterShoes off in the whale a male vocalize said out of the dark.Quinn could see zippo. 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. Im not wearing shoes. These are fins.Shoes off in the whale And dont try and make a break for the anus.Two things that, if asked about an hour earlier, Nate might have said with conviction hed never hear in a life story 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.Ill bet he didnt bring the pastrami on rye I asked for any, 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. cadaver Demodocus was known throughout the founding as one of the calmest, most level-tempered, most generous and kind 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 stipulation assignment, mud did not indulge in ego battles and testosterone-slinging contests with researchers or crew. no(prenominal) of these qualities were evident when he went over the desk of the Coast confine commandant and stopped only inc hes from head-butting the tall, athletic-looking officer. You call this search off now and Ill see to it that your relieve oneself 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 theres a documentary on whales on the denudation Channel, or National Geographic, or Animal Planet, or PBS, or the roll in the hay Cartoon Channel, Ill see to it that your name is mentioned right after Nates as the man who left him out there. Youll be the official Coast Guard castaway for the next hundred years. This will be the Coast Guards My Lai. Every time a put one across 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 burn in the streets and your head stuck on a pole, lipsticked, and marched around school yards, forever. And all because youre too goddamned lamebrained to put a tally of helicopters into the air to find my friend. Is that what you want? body 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 contribute he was taken aback more than somewhat by Clays tirade. He looked across his office to where Kona and Amy stood by the door, looking nearly as hard up as he felt. The surfer looked at him and shook his head sadly.Its been three age, Mr. Demodocus. In open water with no life preserver? Youre not a tourist you know the odds. If he were alive, hed have drifted far out of where were able to patrol by now anyway. Were doing no fewer than ten rescues a day on Maui. I cant have our helicopters out to sea when theres just no chance.What about tide maps, currents? Clay pleaded. Cant we try to expect which way he might have drifted? Narrow the search area.The commodore had to look away from Clay when he answered. The fir st thing the surfer kid with the uneven dreadlocks had said when theyd come into his office was Sucks to be you. And right now the commodore couldnt have agreed more. Hed lost friends at sea he understood. Im sorry, he said.Clay sighed heavily, and his shoulders sagged. Amy came forward and took him by the arm. Lets go home, Clay.Clay nodded and allowed himself to be led out of the commodores office.As they made their way across the parking lot to Clays truck Kona said, That was amazing, Clay.Throwing a fit? Yeah, Im proud of that, especially since it worked so well.Why didnt you say anything about the whale eating Nate? In the three days since Quinn had disappeared, Kona had bury to speak brophonics and Rasta talk closely completely, and now he just sounded like a kid from New Jersey with a whoa, buster surfer accent.Whales dont eat people, Kona, Clay said. You know go bad.I know what I saw, Amy said.Clay stopped and stepped away from both of them. Look, if youre going to do th is stuff, you have to be practical. I believe that you saw what you say you saw, but nothing about it helps. First, a humpbacks throat is only about a foot in diameter. They couldnt swallow a human if they wanted to. So if the whale did scoop up Nate, then theres a good chance he was spit out very quickly. Second, if I told that story to everyone else, either theyd think you were being hysterical or, if they believed you, theyd assume that Nate had been drowned immediately, and there wouldnt have been a search. I believe you, kid, but dont think anyone else will.So what now? Kona asked.Clay looked at the two of them, standing there like abandoned puppies, and he pushed excursus his own grief. We finish Nates work. We do this work, we carry on. Right now Ive got to go up the mountain and see the honest-to-god blanket(a). Nate was like a son to her.You havent told her? Amy asked.Clay shook his head. Why would I? I havent given up on Nate. Ive seen too much. Last year they thought t heyd lost one of the black-coral divers. The boat came back to where theyd sent him down, and he was gone. A week later he called from Molokai for them to come get him. Hed swum over and had been so busy divergeying hed forgotten to call.Doesnt sound like Nate, Kona said. He told me that he hated fun.Still, it would be wrong not to let the doddery big know whats 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 word to the Old Broad. Since his mother had passed away, Clay had taken the bearing of bad newsworthiness very seriously so seriously, in fact, that he usually let someone else do the bearing. Hed 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 couldnt have gone far, yet, search as they might, they did no t find her for three days. Finally her location was revealed by her ripening odor. They found her loose in an olive tree, where she had climbed to do some pruning. Clays older brothers, Hektor and Sidor, would not chequer 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 acquire their mothers weakness for alcohol and their fathers 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 brothers domicile 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 stony-broke into it thinking he was about to enjoy a delicious insect bite of kala-mata olives from home. It was not the way to find out about his mothers 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 Broads driveway. Theres 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 caning emperors 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 florists 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 ca ke. The house was made roughly entirely of dark koa wood, nut brown and with black grain raceway 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 Broads telescope and big-eye opera glasses 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 Clays feet a skinny cat happily crunched the legs off a scorpion.The Old Broad handed Clay a tall, frozen glass and sat in another emperors 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 a round the time of Lincoln, Clay thought.Its so nice to see you, Clay. I dont get many a(prenominal) visitors. Not that Im lonely, you know. I have the cats and the whales to talk to. But thats 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?Thats right. Just a little bit of mint. in a flash, what is it you needed to talk to me about?And ice? I think the coldness makes it, gives it a fantastic, uhTemperature? 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, dont be shy. I know how you loved that boat, and well get you another one. Im just not sure we c an go for one quite that nice. My investments havent been doing well the last couple of years.No, no, its not the boat. The boat was insured. Its Nate.And how is Nathan? I hope hes handling his little crunch with your new researcher with a bit of dignity. He was wearing it on his sleeve that night at the sanctuary. Youd 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 operative up to it.You said had, said the Old Broad. You said Nate had a thing for Amy.Elizabeth, theres been an accident. Three days ago Nate went into the water to get a better look at a singer, and well, we havent been able to find him. Clay put down his tea so he could catch the old cleaning lady should she faint. Im very sorry.Oh, that. Yes, I heard about that. Nates 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 mi ght be, or should he dart her spirits to earth with the truth?Although Nate had found Elizabeths 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 dont think you understand what Im saying He took the pastrami and rye, right? He said he would.Um, thats not exactly pertinent. Hes been gone for three days, and they were right at the wind line toward Molokai when he was lost. Rough sea. Hes probably gone, Elizabeth.Well, of course hes gone, Clay. Youll just have to carry on until he gets back. Now she patted his hand. He did take the machinate, right? The whale was very specific.Elizabeth Youre not comprehend to me. This is not about the whales singing to you through the trees. Nate is goneDont you shout at me, Clay Demodocus. Im trying to comfort you. And it wasnt a song through the trees. What do you think? Im some crazy old woman? The whal e called on the phone.Oh, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I dont know how to do thisMore 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 thats who he was.And it was a male voice?Well, it would be. Hes a singer, isnt he?Shed 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.Shes a total loony he said to himself, as if he just needed to hear the words, to feel their truth. Nothing is all right. Nates dead.Clair would be sleeping at her house tonight, and although it was late, Cl ay 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 impression the motion of descent, but there was only a faint birdie of his breathing, not the usual fusillade of bubbles from a regulator. This was the rebreather footage, from the day he had almost drowned. Hed completely forgotten about it. The breath-holders tail came into frame.Clays first instincts had been right. This was great footage of a breath-holder the best theyd 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 couldnt 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 frequence to kill some of the hiss. Definitely voices.Theres someone outside, Captain.Does he have my sandwich with him?Hes close, Captain, really close. Too close.Then the tail came down, and there was a thundery thud. The picture jerked in a half dozen directions, then colonized as tiny bubbles passed by the lens in a field of blue. The lens caught a shot of Clays 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 couldnt figure out how it could pos sibly have gotten there. lone(prenominal) 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 wasnt too insanely late, he headed across the compound to get Amy.