The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer (22 page)

Great God almighty . . .

"Dad? Dad, you okay?" asked Jack, who was
bending over to speak urgently in my ear.

"
Yeah, I'm okay," I answered finally, as
soon as I could work my jaw, "I'm fine."

"How big was he?" asked Tony. The boy's
tone was hushed, reverent.

"Maybe fifty feet," said Tom, leaning over
the starboard bow and trying to peer into the deep. "And, it
might be a girl. We won't know until it surfaces again."

We motored along, cut to a crawl, and waited and
watched. ffffffff0000sh! . .fffffffff00000shh!

Two whales surfaced in unison, blowing enough air
between them to last a man a day and a half. I saw their heads: from
above, the taper in front resembled a blunt Gothic arch. The tops of
the heads were relatively flat, and were covered with patterned bumps
several inches across. These bumps, which Jack told me later were
enlarged hair follicles, looked almost exactly like rivet heads,
making the whales' heads look like the blackened metal boilerplate
side of old steamships. They looked, in fact, like the Disney
rendition of Captain Nemo's Nautilus.

We watched the two whales roll forward, tucking their
heads and letting their long, wet-asphalt backs slide forward, then
there was a repeat vision of those beautiful tails, each powerful
enough to smash our thirty-foot skiff into splinters with one swipe.

Picture yourself walking out of the African scrub
onto a parched plain on which forty huge elephants are feeding. Think
of walking out into this herd, standing in front of, behind,
underneath them as they feed, hearing the muted grinding of their
molars, the loud, damp plats of their bowling-ball-sized droppings,
the sound of their stomachs and bowels rumbling wet . . . perhaps the
rough rasp of their trunks as they slide past you . . . seeing the
dusty, dry flap of their billboard-sized ears. And you're out there
on that parched plain totally exposed. There's nothing but you and
all of them—no trees to climb, no place to hide. And all you can do
is stand there amazed and awed, and hope like hell they don't get
steamed and stomp you into grease, or maybe skewer you with one of
their tusks.

That's the feeling of being in the middle of a pod of
whales in an open skiff thirty miles offshore. Except that each whale
weighs forty or fifty tons, not six or seven.

The two tails slid under. We waited about forty
seconds to see the animals surface again. They reappeared, puffing
great gray clouds of vapor, then slid under again. At no time were
the tops of their backs more than a few feet out of the water. But
the third time they surfaced they showed their heads clearly as they
came up. Their giant puffy breathing was louder, and after their
front halves went under, their backs had a much more pronounced arch.

"See them hunching up like that, Dad? They're
getting ready to sound. That's how they got their name: humpback."

The tails came up, up, towering ten feet above us,
spread out and dripping, like the wings of an airborne manta ray.
Then the entire stem and tail of each whale stiffened straight up and
shot downward with a speed and finality that meant we wouldn't see
them for a while. I couldn't say anything, not even gee or golly. I
just sat there dumbfounded, amazed that a creature so gigantic could
surface, breathe, and dive within twenty yards of us and do it with
such grace, and, except for the big puff of blowing air, in total
silence.

"Did you see the markings on the underside of
the tails, Dad?" asked Jack.

"Well, I saw a lot of white, with black
blotches, if that's what you mean/'

"That's what I mean. Those markings are
different for each animal, and it's how we tell them apart. The one
on the left was Churchill, the guy on the right was Roy."

"You mean you know each whale? You've given them
names?"

"Oh sure. There are several pods in these
waters. Most of the whales come back each year and we know them
intimately. Now Churchill's been around for years, but Roy's a
rookie. Churchill got his name for the V-shaped notch on his flukes.
Look here . . ."

Jack went to the bow and leaned over, pointing at the
water.

Where the two whales had sounded was a pair of
swirling depressions in the sea, two whirlpools as wide as living
rooms.

"The whales' footprints," he said
triumphantly. "When they sound, whales always leave footprints."

I stared at the gently swirling, shallow conical
depressions on the ocean's surface. They remained perhaps half a
minute, then disappeared.

"Footprints, eh? What good are footprints that
disappear?"

"
Everything disappears, Dad, given time."

I pondered this metaphysical tidbit while we waited
for the pair to come back up. They stayed down over thirty minutes,
then surfaced two hundred yards off our port bow, spurting those gray
plumes of vapor and sliding their black, slick shapes forward and
under. We were so busy watching the antics of Churchill and Roy that
we forgot the water right under us.

"
Ooo, wow!" said Tom McDonnough, "look
below us. We got company."

Well offshore, the ocean is quite clear, unclouded by
river runoff. In strong light, you can see thirty or forty feet down
with no problem, especially if what you're gawking at is as big as a
pair of hitched locomotives. Below us was a whale, perhaps thirty
feet directly under the boat, hovering there in the wavy green
shimmer. It was my first look at the whole thing at once, rather than
its various parts exposed to the surface in sequence. It took my
breath away. I noticed how really long the humpback's flippers were.
They were whitish gray, in contrast to the black of the body, and
were about eighteen feet long, swept back in a crescent. The animal
looked almost like a deformed jumbo jet, with its streamlined, fat
body and rear-swept flippers that seemed way too big for flippers,
way too small for wings....

Then it came up. It rose without effort or apparent
motion; we simply saw it getting bigger and bigger, closer and
closer, until at last there it was, right alongside us, floating
motionless next to the boat, its exposed portion about as large as a
black, shiny, bumpy, shuffleboard court. My heart was doing the
shimmy-shake, and seemed to want to leave my chest and dance around
on the gunwale awhile until it calmed down.

"Let's get the hell out of—”

"Wait a second, that's Crystal. HI CRYSTAL!"
shouted Jack, leaning over the rail and waving. It was the dumbest
thing I've ever seen, and I told him so. But then, lo and behold, if
the whale, Crystal, didn't do the most amazing thing. She rolled on
her side and swatted the ocean with her port flipper. Whap! Whap!
Whap! It wasn't a hard swat, but rather a gentle patting, though I'm
sure you could have heard it a hundred yards away.

"Why's she doing that?" asked Tony.

"He, Dad. Crystal's a guy. He's glad to see us.
I can recognize Crystal from front and top by his barnacles. See
those three huge growths on his lip? That's Crystal. Of course, when
he sounds, we can always tell him by his tail markings, too. Now
watch! He's gonna open his mouth for us."

Lucky us. The huge creature rolled over again, making
the skiff pitch and roll, and then the enormous upper jaw opened. It
resembled a giant car hood and gave the impression that the animal
was upside down. It wasn't of course. Jack explained it was just the
shape of the baleen whale's mouth. The flat, pointed, black top of
Crystal's head lifted up, revealing rows and rows of hanging baleen
plates inside. His mouth looked large enough to hold ten or twelve
men, which meant that while a whale couldn't actually swallow Jonah,
it could sure as hell hold him in its mouth with no problem. The
baleen plates, all seven hundred of them, were triangular, fringed
and fibrous, and colored brownish black. They looked more vegetable
than animal. It looked as if poor Crystal had tried to swallow a
dozen rotting palm trees. Or maybe two tons of dead eucalyptus bark.
The mouth was wondrous, amazing, surrealistic. It was also
disgusting.

The odor that issued forth was nothing to brag about,
either. As an oral surgeon, I'm an expert on halitosis, and believe
me, Crystal the humpback was in the running for the Bad Breath of the
Universe award. In fact, with his warty, rivet-head hair follicles,
his bumpy, grayish white clusters of barnacles, and his weird,
otherworldly appearance, it was difficult to call Crystal handsome,
and I told Jack so.

Jack frowned in my direction. "Handsome is as
handsome does," he said. And he continued to talk and coo to his
enormous friend, telling us what a rotten shame it was he hadn't
brought the hydrophone, so we could all hear the whales talking
underwater. I leaned way over, almost touching the animal, and saw
his tiny eye, two feet under the surface, staring at us.

"His eyes are sure small; they're out of
proportion to the rest of him," I said.

"Uh-huh. Horses' eyes are bigger. Whales don't
use their eyes a whole lot. So long, kid . . ."

Crystal eased forward and down, thrashed his immense
flukes against the sea, and was gone.

"Wow!" said Tony softly.

"Yeah," I agreed, as Tom throttled up. We
saw fourteen more whales that afternoon, including a mother with her
calf. It sure beat the hell out of anything I'd ever seen before, or
have seen I since.

'
On our way back to Great Harbor I asked Jack if he
remembered that summer back in 1970 when the whales died on the beach
and he cried for a week, and then we went to see the dolphin , show
up in Brewster where the dolphins clapped their flippers on the water
just the way Crystal had done. He said he didn't remember it. I asked
him again, just to make sure, and he said the same thing. I guess
maybe he'd repressed the painful memory. For some reason, it made me
very sad. A powerful, shared experience had crumbled with time.
 

SIXTEEN

JOE'S KNOCKING at our door woke us up a little after
eight. It was Wednesday morning, the day after the whale watch. I was
tired after our day on the water, still feeling stunned by the
experience. I had been dreaming about the whales sliding along
through the swells, their dripping tails following behind . . .

"C'mon you two—get up. I just got a call from
Keegan. He says Slinky and company are on their way up here from
Providence. Mary, you keep saying you want to see a real mobster—

"I do, I do," she said, bounding out of bed
bare-ass.

I still can't get used to the way these two siblings
parade around naked in front of each other. We WASPs frown on such
impropriety.

"Keegan's a wonder kid," I said. "How'd
he manage to collar Slinky anyway?"

"Let's just say, diplomatic pressure applied by
our Rhode Island counterparts. But I think the kid's cooperation
makes him look pretty good, frankly. Although Keegan warned me Slinky
will have his mouthpiece with him. I'll go down to town and get
coffee and rolls. You guys hurry up and be ready when I get back."

Keegan joined us over coffee, and the four of us were
waiting on the steps of Lillie Hall when the big white Caddy slid up
Water Street and came to a halt in front of us. It was a Mafia wagon
all right. The windows were so dark you couldn't see inside. I
noticed two fancy antennae riding on the rear deck, right in front of
the continental kit holding the spare tire. The spoked wheels were
all shined up. The driver's door opened and a huge man got out,
walked across the street, and positioned himself nonchalantly on a
bench overlooking the beach. Nobody would notice him, of course, just
your average 270-pound chauffeur wearing shades, a cream-white
tropical wool sport coat, burgundy slacks, and alligator shoes so
shiny they gave off sunbeams. He didn't stand out in Woods Hole.
Nooooo. Not any more than the Colossus of Rhodes . . .

"He's packing iron," whispered Joe to
Keegan. "Only reason anybody wears a friggin' coat in the
summertime is to hide artillery. There! See the bulge?"
 
Keegan nodded, chewing his gum slowly,
keeping his steely gaze fixed on the car. The back doors opened and
two men got out. Right away I knew which one was Eddie Falcone,
a.k.a. Slinky. He was young, with thinning black hair, and was
wearing white, pleated, baggy pants, a blue silk shirt with no tie,
and a stone-washed denim Jacket. Right out of Ralph Lauren's latest
catalog. His shoes were Mexican huaraches of woven leather. He wore
shades, too, and a lot of gold. With the dark glasses on top of the
smoked glass of the car, how the hell could they see, I wondered. The
man with him carried a brown attaché case and was dressed in a plain
brown summer suit, with white shirt and tie. That would be the
mouthpiece Keegan had mentioned; he had lawyer written all over him.
I was surprised he wasn't carrying a pair of scales.

"Mr. Keegan?" said the man in the suit.
"I'm Marshall Brooks, , representing Mr. Falcone. We have come
here voluntarily to see if we can help you in this investigation?

"Thanks, we do appreciate it," answered
Keegan. "But does your heavy think it's necessary to carry a
piece with him? We've got a strict law against handguns in this
state."