The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (35 page)

“Next stop, Capetown. But we’re taking on a lot of ice,” he added, peering out through the portlight. “That sleet’s freezing. We should probably knock some off before it gets dark.”

“We have to do that now?” Eddi called from the dome. She’d been steering for hours, but refused every time Sara offered to take a turn.

“You know how Jamie used to nag us to not let it build up. Said we could turn over. And then, if you go in the water—”

“Helpless in sixty seconds.”

“Dead in five minutes.”

Kimura looked from one to the other as they doubled, howling. Sara wiped laugh-tears and sniffled. Suddenly she felt giggly. Maybe it was getting laid after so long, or maybe, more likely, it was just being headed home.

Home … there was a little science center on Nantucket. It was named after Maria Mitchell, the first female American astronomer. Maybe she could teach there. With her degree, it would be a step down. Maybe a couple of steps. But she could get an apartment. Take fourth-graders out to the Moors to bird-watch.

For a moment something like a question, or even like a vision, hung between her and the sea: Mick Bodine working his way up a handrail toward the door of a cottage in Coatue, or maybe Madaket. There might be something like contentment. Stalking the marshes again, in the winter silence—

She shook herself. What was she thinking? They might not make it back. Even if they did, they’d probably be looking at criminal charges. Piracy. A jail sentence. They were so far beyond the pale it was ridiculous to think of any life after this.

Lars handed her one of the baseball bats. It was dented, beaten up, they’d used them so often and so abusively. She took a swing, grinning at Kimura’s boggled expression. “You too,” she told him, and jaundiced daylight slid in slanting as they pulled on their suits and the companionway hatch slammed open.

*   *   *

Topside the light was machined steel. A bank of clouds lay on the starboard hand, solid as icebergs. The sleet had stopped but she guessed only for the moment. A squall trailed its skirts into the sea.
Anemone
rolled. The halyards clanged. The mast creaked. Ice fell from aloft, clattering on the icy decks. Sara looked away from the bundle strapped to the forward stay. Tehiyah was going home too, but not as she’d probably hoped: in triumph, to television specials and celebrity fund-raisers.

She clipped on her safety line, made sure Hy’s was on too. Then led him forward, stepping carefully as Lars began flailing at the boom. “Like this,” she told Kimura, and wound up and took a solid whack at the inches of rime atop the coach roof. The pale carapace resisted, but gradually cracks spiderwebbed it. At her third swing it burst apart like dropped crystal. She kicked it over the side. The green sea walked past, bubbles whirling in their wake. She squatted and hammered with the butt of the bat until the ice split and clattered apart like supercooled diamonds. Kimura’s first clumsy swing glanced off without making a scratch. “Didn’t you have to do this on the whaler?” she asked him, sitting back on her heels.

“No. We had steam lances.”

“How nice. Well, here we have to, every couple days. I guess until we get far enough north.” She shivered, visualizing how cold it would be here in another month. She’d always remember this sere beauty. But even more, this sea’s paralyzing terror. It was a place apart, inviolable, touched by man but not yet tamed. She didn’t condone what Mick and Lars had done. But now she understood it. If the whales could be saved, perhaps there was hope.

They worked forward, whacking and cracking until the ice delaminated and slid overboard in pearlescent sheets. Kimura whooped and struck a samurai pose, then flailed at the lifelines, knocking off frosted tubes that shattered like glass straws. She worked until her arms were leaden, then rested, feeling a looseness, a trickle between her thighs, as she squatted on her haunches.

The squall brushed over them and snow began to fall, heavy wet flakes that cut off vision. She got up and tapped ice off the shrouded form lashed to the forward brace, loosening the silvery shell until it crashed to the deck. The snow whirled down, speckling the sea with millions of dimples that spread with a hiss so faint it could barely be heard above the motor’s hum, the ripple as the prow parted the dull green.

She kicked the ice from the corpse over the bow and was turning when she half glimpsed something far off behind them, only dimly visible in the falling snow. She shaded her eyes and looked again, blinking flakes from her lashes. Another barely distinguishable glimpse of some disturbance against the unillumined sea. A small boat? She edged aft, clearing her safety line as she went, peering in that direction. But she didn’t see it again. If it had been there at all.

“Looking for something?” Lars was hanging off the stern, suit unfastened, one arm around the after stay. Obviously pissing, though his lower body was turned away. From next to him Mick looked up from the cockpit seat.

“You’re going to freeze that thing off.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t such a good idea. Instant frostbite.” He shook and tucked.

“See something?” Mick said. He kept looking at her, as if he’d never really seen her before. A smile lurked in his eyes. She smoothed her hair and looked aside. For just a moment, she saw the cottage again. The winter marsh behind it, reeds and cattails blowing in the wind, and in the distance, the far distance, the surf white as an old woman’s hair toward Smith’s Point.

“Thought I did. Like an inflatable.”

The Dane said, “Out here? Hundreds of miles from anything?” He looked at the wheel, which was unattended; Auer was still steering from the enclosed station. “I’ll take my trick up here. It’s snowing and the radar’s out; I can see better than from the dome.”

“I’ll take it, since I’m up here,” Bodine said. “Been a while since I’ve steered.”

When she looked back again the snowy curtain wavered. For a moment she saw the sea clear; black jagged waves; utterly empty, save for the vee of their wake. Void, like the thousands of miles all around.

She tried not to think of how casually this icy sea had eaten Perrault. Her breath caught in her throat; a band of dread oppressed her chest, tightening around her lungs. She coughed. Courage, she thought. “Just my imagination, I guess.”

She slid open the companionway hatch, and set a boot on the first step. Then glanced aft as she started to lower herself down the ladder.

And froze, throat locked. From the blowing snow and mist and twisting steam from the exhaust, something unimaginable was taking shape.

17

The Rogue

The yell had barely left her throat, pulling everyone in the cockpit around, when the whale crashed into the sloping stern, jerking them off their feet and tumbling them over one another. Madsen grabbed the wheel. Kimura slammed down into the winch, yelping as something snapped audibly. Sara lost her balance, flailing in the companionway, then toppling over the coaming. Only at the last moment did she catch herself as the blunt head, bigger than a tractor-trailer, descended on the dinghy and its ramp with a shearing crunch that shook the whole boat.

It hung there, to the accompaniment of the grating slide of shattered ice and the discordant twang of rigging like a harp being crushed in a garbage compactor, and the groaning crackle of a hull under unendurable stress. As the stern was forced down, green water flooded up, boiling along the slanted counter. Ice shattered and flew as the deck warped beneath the terrific downward weight of the coffee-colored mass.

She clung astonished. This close, staring up, she registered strange traceries on that parchment-colored integument, as if urban gangs had gouged graffiti into it year after year until it became a palimpsest of uninterpretable images. No gleam of gold diatoms this time. That is, if it was the same whale. Yet there couldn’t be two this color, this size. Purplish eruptions big as her fists dotted it, as if crab-sized chiggers had burrowed beneath the skin. The whole gigantic forehead, the size of a two-story house, was hung with shredding skin as if from a bad sunburn. No eyes were visible; the orbs were so far around and below that from her vantage point the creature looked blind. Nor could she see a mouth, so far was it slung below the gigantic head.

With a massive low snort a choking spray that smelled like a combination of rotten fish and a freshly fertilized field blew over them. Madsen had seized a boat hook and was darting it at the monster again and again. The blunt tip bounced back without making the slightest impression. But gradually the thing slid aft, or else the boat was skidding out from under it, hull shrieking. But some projection, or perhaps the burst and torn-apart inflatable, caught or dragged, not letting it go cleanly, and
Anemone
reared farther, dragged down by the stern as in the cabin gear left shelves and lockers with a roaring clatter.

Sara had to grab the jambs of the companionway so as not to fall. Below her in the tilted cockpit a bloodlessly detached leg tobogganed down the ramp. A turbulent foam frothed where the screw-wash met the gigantic bulk that lay pressing down the rearmost projection of the boat, now many feet under water. For a moment she could not credit her eyes. Then a body followed, hands outflung, clawing at polished fiberglass, and she gasped.

It was Bodine, shouting hoarsely as he went.

She lunged, hand outstretched. “Mick!” she screamed. But without looking back, he vanished into the boiling whirlpool.

The whale slipped free and with an enormous rolling turmoil submerged. When the sea crashed back the animal was still visible, submerged, wavering. Then it sank away, receding, leaving
Anemone
quivering all over with the sudden release. For a moment Sara glimpsed a human form beneath the seethe, stroking desperately upward. Then it too sank away, fading; became indistinct, and vanished.

The boat pitched back upright, shaking off the sea, though the stern was bent awkwardly and splintered edges showed like torn burlap where the high-strength composite had cracked and only partially sprung back into place. From them long skeins of shed skin trailed like snagged veils. The rigging groaned. Ice clattered down, shattering like chandeliers in an earthquake all around her. Where whale and man had vanished a turbulent whirlpool of silvery-green sea boiled, then drifted astern as the screw bit in again and the boat resumed its forward progress.

She scrambled out of the hatchway and seized the wheel, pushing Lars aside. Whipped it over to port, shouting into the hatchway, “Eddi! Give me the controls!”

“Holy fuck,” Lars said, trembling, white-faced, bracing himself with one arm. He’d nearly gone down the sloping stern too. Kimura lay where he’d fallen, holding his side.

“Mick’s down there. Get a line. Get a life preserver!”

“D’you see him? Where is he?”

“In that boil. To your left. There. He’ll come up. When he does, hit him with that throw line.”

“Open the locker,” Madsen snapped. “Hy? Move!” Kimura started. He reached in and came up with a hank of orange line and a throw ring. Sara kept the rudder over, gaze nailed to where Bodine had gone down. The bow came round so slowly that she started to advance the throttle, but then dropped her hand. If they went too fast she’d overshoot.
Helpless in sixty seconds
kept going through her mind. Fully thirty had to have gone by already. She stood on tiptoe. Was that a head, bobbing in the dissipating foam? or the peak of a wave?

“Hy, get up on the coach roof. Do you see him? Do you see?”

“My ribs,” Kimura panted, bent where he sat. Sweat dripped off his brows. His fingers dug into his side, relaxed, spasmed again. He gathered himself, face contorted, and crawled like a stepped-on crab up onto the coach roof. Shaded his eyes. “I … see something,” he began.

Sara brought the rudder back to centerline, aiming at the fading patch that rocked fifty yards ahead. “Where? Where is he? Point, Hy. Point.”

The Japanese stretched out a shaking arm. Following it, she was drawn not to where Bodine had disappeared, but off to the right. Where the sea broke over what looked like tan rocks. A crooked, sideways jet burst like a geyser, broke into mist, and drifted raining across the back of a swell.

“
Pis og lort
. It’s coming again,” Madsen cursed, as if he didn’t believe what he was seeing. He bent to a forward locker divided from the rest, unsnapped a latch, and hauled it up.

Sara jerked her eyes off the oncoming monster and searched again where the sea was now gentling, smoothing. They purred up on it and she reached for the throttle, intending to stop, but Madsen’s glove overrode hers and pushed it all the way forward. She rounded on him. “Mick’s still down there!”

“He’s not coming up. It’s been too long.”

“No! We’ve got to be here when he—”

“He’s dead—”

They were screaming in each other’s face when Eddi swarmed up the companionway and thrust herself between them. She stared to starboard. “Oh Christ,” she moaned. “Look.”

The very sea bulged, driven before the massive ondriving head as if by the bow of a great ship. The same thought must have hit all three of them at the same time, for they grasped the wheel together and hauled it over.
Anemone
’s bow swung toward the oncoming beast, but so damned slowly. Lars hit the button for the second engine. It coughed into life and he pushed the gear lever forward. The boat came around faster. Until it was aimed head to head, and boat and animal drove toward each other across a slick jostling sea.

“Shoot this at it,” Lars shouted, and handed her an object in tangerine plastic that only belatedly did she recognize was a flare pistol. “It’s cocked.”

She leveled it across the coach roof and pulled the trigger. A ball of scarlet flame cracked out, bright in the gray light and the falling snow. It drew a short arc and met the oncoming head, spattering bright sparks, and glanced off and down into the sea. Still burning, it sank, rays shimmering up to refract in a slowly fading glimmer. But the whale drove on. It had not altered its course at all, had not even seemed to notice it. At the last possible moment Madsen spun the wheel left.