The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (39 page)

Lars turned to look at Sara quizzically. She blinked back dully, not really caring.

Kimura said gravely, “I explained this to Sara last night. In some way, we have defiled the order of things. Or perhaps it is humanity as a whole that has disturbed this proper order. Who did it does not really matter. Only that it needs to be set right. We must rebalance our relationship to the sacred world. That is the world from which the being that has been pursuing us comes.”

“It’s Shinto,” Sara mumbled. “His father’s a priest, back in Japan.”

“Hmm. I guess I get it,” Madsen said. More equably than she might have expected. “Sooo … anything you want us to do?”

“That is essential to the ritual, yes. I will ask for your participation in a moment.” He lifted the raft in both hands, avoiding their eyes, and carried it aft and set it atop the ramp leading down into the burble of melted green they trailed through the embroidered sea. From inside his suit he produced a yellow pencil. Thin lightning-shaped strips of white paper were stapled to it. “The purification,” he said. Lifting it in both hands, he waved it streaming in the wind, over their heads, over the stern, the wheel, and the raft.

He lowered the wand and pushed the pencil point into a gap on top of the binnacle. Paused, head bowed, then turned to face the wake.

He lifted his arms, and with a solemn face intoned several sentences in Japanese. He spoke reverently and with obvious awe, gaze lifted to the waves that hulked all around. Then lifted the little woven raft by one end and let it go. It slid down the slanted fiberglass and bumped over a crack where the whale had fractured the hull.

To Sara’s surprise it did not capsize, but sideslipped delicately into the wake. A cloud passed away from the sun. The little craft fell astern, bobbing and whirling in the smoothed turquoise and silver. As it shrank he raised his arms and spoke again, in the same somber tones.

“So what was that all about?” Madsen said when he stopped.

“The invocation. And the offering.”

“Who are you praying to?” Sara asked him. “The whale?”

“If it is a
kami
, yes. ‘To the great whale: I apologize for our errors and wrongdoing, that which we have done, whether knowingly or not, against the fitness of things. I offer you these gifts in apology and reverence, and ask that we be purged of defilement and the world be restored to its rightness.’ That is my
norito
: the words I addressed to him. In brief.” He lowered his head. “Now, we all make a circular progression.”

“A what?” Madsen frowned.

“A circular progression. All together. It is important that all who witness, participate. And that we make the perfect form, the form of the universe completed. Can we turn the boat in a circle?”

The Dane shook his head. “Not without stressing the shit out of that forestay.”

“Then we will progress ourselves. Can you help? Join me?”

Sara said, “Uh—don’t take this the wrong way, Hy, but I don’t believe this kind of thing has the slightest influence on reality.” Then was instantly sorry. Who was she to ridicule, if a ritual gave him comfort?

But her objection didn’t seem to offend him. In fact, he smiled, as if at an uncomprehending three-year-old. “Shinto does not require belief,” he said, watching the paper streamers flicker in the wind. “It is not important what we believe. What matters is what we do. Will you do this with me?”

“All right,” she said. Then, feeling a little ridiculous, followed him in a tight circle around
Anemone
’s helm pedestal. Madsen hesitated, then trailed them, muttering something inaudible.

When they’d made a complete circuit, Kimura said, “Now we bow. All together. Toward the wake.” He demonstrated, hands together, a pained grimace crossing his face. She and Madsen bowed awkwardly too as
Anemone
rose on a crest, and the sun washed over the sea in spangles like a sudden spray of etiolated gold, and the albatross declined, descended, until it hovered fifty yards up, great wings outstretched over the tiny rocking raft as it rose one last time at the crest of a far-off wave, then vanished from their sight.

A silence succeeded, broken only by a clank and a muffled curse as down below Eddi’s bucket collided with something.

Madsen cleared his throat. He checked the gearshift lever. Made sure it was in neutral. Then bent, and pressed the button. A muffled cough below; the oily taint of diesel; a whiff of white fume blowing over them, then scudding off over the sea, coiling and uncoiling. Hardly dissipating at all as it too was borne away by the clear hard wind.

19

The Sacrifice

She went below and lay in her bunk but the unsteady beat of the diesel, now stronger, now fainter, would not let her sleep. She could not help wondering if something else also listened, miles distant, fathoms down. But they’d been sailing for nearly a whole day since they’d seen it last, first dodging amid the ice, then running fair in the open sea. Sixty miles last night; at least a hundred since the thing had body-slammed them. Surely distance would screen their signature amid the constant crowd noise of the sea.

At last she got up and went aft. Auer snored behind her curtain. The water she waded through was no shallower than it had been when she came off watch. But it wasn’t any deeper, either.

Suddenly ravenous, she found crackers and jam and made herself a plateful in the galley, looking out the portlight at the sea surging only inches below the greasy salt-streaked glass. The food seemed insubstantial, as if her body were a furnace that demanded fat and meat, but she stoked it with grape jelly and saltines until she could eat no more. Perhaps later she could make something more substantial. It did seem like a long time since they’d sat down to a real meal. Baked yams. Beans and rice. She dropped to the damp mildew-smelling banquette and leaned back, blinking at the black streaks on the overhead.

She woke after some interminable time and had to pee. The engine noise was louder as she squatted in the head. She turned a tap, then remembered: frozen. She cleaned up with hand sanitizer and toilet paper. Wiped down the commode seat, which needed it. Remembering guiltily how Quill had driven them to keep things clean. They’d have to start paying attention again. Once they had time to do more than steer and bail.

The slow clump of steps on the companionway ladder. She opened the door of the head to see a stooped Madsen looking toward Auer’s curtain. “She asleep?”

“Sounds like it.”

“I hate to wake her. Can you take it awhile? I want to check that pump. We’re still on zero eight zero.”

“Sure.” She got back into her suit, wound Tehiyah’s scarf around her jaw, and found her goggles.

The day was grayer now. No sun in sight. Thick clouds frosted the sky from one horizon to the other like black icing. She checked the sails, then the compass. Adjusted the self-steerer. She wasn’t on deck for more than ten minutes when the first flakes drove down, skidding and zigzagging over a slaty, lumpy sea to crash and be instantly absorbed. When she looked back the sea behind was weathered tar. Their faithful albatross had left them; it no longer hovered like some benediction or curse. She stood at the wheel, looking at the wrapped shape on the bow. Each time the boat sagged off, Dorée seemed to be walking across the sea.

She yawned, and gradually the hollowed waves became long dunes rising from shining sand where lilliputian plovers darted back and forth, tiny legs clicking smartly as windup toys. Above stretched the wind-scalloped curves of Smith’s Point, dotted with poverty grass and the tiny dancing pink flowers of searocket. And above them, the bent low wind-twisted bonsai shapes of pitch pines and scrub oaks.

The cottage stood above a salt pond on sturdy pilings black with age. It had been built of driftwood, planks swept overboard and blown ashore, bits of long-wrecked ships. A rocker, white paint flaking, nodded on the porch, pushed by the wind that howled without cease, sandpapering the world to a satin finish and bleaching every color to its ghost. A flame-light glowed in a window high above the marsh. She trudged toward the glow but it did not come nearer. Instead the world grew darker, the sky more threatening. Saltbushes thrashed in the wind, and the clouds raced as if fleeing Armageddon. Someone was waiting in there. Someone she’d once known. For a moment she almost glimpsed him, or perhaps her, though the antique wavy glass, half lit by that flickering flame. Then it shrank, vanished, and she kept slogging upward, but now the cottage was even farther away than when she’d first come up from the beach where the plovers and sanderlings still skittered, spindly legs clicking like clockwork.…

Madsen bulled through the half-closed hatchway, shouldering it aside. Something cracked sharply. “Pump’s working. You awake? Maybe you better go back below.”

She roused herself and twisted her ear. The pain obliterated dunes, cottage, the waving cattails. “Tehiyah’s unwrapping,” she said. “I’m going forward to fix her.”

“Keep your line clipped.” He wedged himself against the genny mast and sank into his own somber study of the sea.

The waves heaved. She snapped the carabiner and began working forward. The deck was worn and here and there cracks showed in the gelcoat where they’d beaten the ice off. There was little now except where it had lodged in crannies, but the snow was coming down harder, blowing past in big flakes in a steady river that tickled her cheeks under the goggles.

She got to the bow and hauled herself erect. Dorée gazed unflinchingly ahead, slender neck encrusted with a white rime of salt. Her eyes were open. This seemed strange, as Sara could have sworn they’d been closed when they’d tied off the tarp. She tried to reclose them, but the lids were frozen solid to the eyeballs. With one elbow around the stay, she hauled in the flapping tarp, wrapped it tight again, and tied it off. Then dropped to hands and knees and crept aft.

She was halfway back when she glimpsed something in the hazy sea astern. A crack in the ocean, through which knobby protuberances showed. Then a wave broke over them, veiling them with trailing spray mixed with falling snow.

“Lars!” She pointed and Madsen, at the wheel, turned quickly and looked back, but when he did there was only a scar on the sea and nothing more and that too vanished as flakes blanched the roiling gray. He stayed twisted, eyes shaded with a glove, as she struggled forward. Then something caught and snatched her back, and she jerked at it, panicky, until she realized it was only her safety line, snagged on a sheave.

“Thought I saw something,” she panted, swinging her legs down into the cockpit. “Out in the fog. Over there.”

She pointed again and he pulled the binoculars from their waterproof stowage and swept them over the sea. She stood indecisive in the blowing flurries, then bent to the companionway. “Eddi! Hy! Get your suits, and get up here!” she yelled.

The whale came in from dead abeam, pushing up a black fold of weltering sea like the cowcatcher of some old-time locomotive. He materialized from the snow-mist out of which the flakes blew ever thicker, driving parallel to the wavecrests until they reached up and pulled them down. Sara watched him come, the huge vertical forehead only partially visible behind the swell he was pushing. Then bent again and screamed down, “
Get up here! Now!
”

Anemone
lifted as the bulge in the sea neared, but not fast enough. When the whale hit she folded around the impact like a hollow vibrating tube. The jury-rigged forward stay snapped instantly. The whale kept coming, bulldozering them, a boil of sea white behind it. She saw the tail down there, whipping up and down with unbelievable rapidity for its size. The boat careened over and began to slide through the water sideways.

Her ears seemed to turn off then. Madsen’s mouth was open, yelling, but no words emerged. Gear was falling from aloft. The noise must have been terrific, but she didn’t hear it. The mast toppled, toward them, veering aside only at the last moment to crash down beside the cockpit. Then it too, still attached by a crazy snarled mass of steel and nylon rigging, was being shoved through the water by a frenzied power as the whale nodded its way through the seething sea, leaving a foamed highway twenty yards wide behind it.

At the companionway, the pale oval of Eddi’s features. Her gaze sought Sara’s, then slipped aside as she fell back down the ladder.

Then sound came back. The clatter and crash from below. The tail emerged from the sea, pointed flukes notched deep, and slammed down flat with the doom-crack of a close strike of lightning. The livid sea rolled back almost biblically, opening like thick lips, then reversing itself and surging back in, filling a sudden vacancy where a vast sand-colored mass had just submerged.

Anemone
screamed and rolled back upright, quivering along her whole length. The snarled cordage and wire and aluminum and sailcloth that lay tangled and heavy along her whole starboard side grated on her deck. She groaned to port, then to starboard, but her rolls were different now. Shorter. Quicker.

Quill’s red toolbox was flung up, followed by Eddi Auer, the videocamera slung around her neck. Kimura was close behind. Both were in the bright red mustang suits, but neither had gloves on. Eddi looked over the side and whistled. “Shit. It finally came down.”

“The whale rammed us again,” Sara told her. “It knocked the mast down.”

“Oh, holy King Jesus. Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” Madsen said, head whipping anxiously around, the boat hook brandished like a spear. The waves surged and dropped away, blue and black, looking as if they were coated with granular grease. Snow blew out of the mist. He must have realized how ridiculous it was as a weapon, because he lowered the pole and set it aside. His face was strained. “But it’ll probably be back.”

“So what do we do?” Eddi said.

He shrugged, looking around. White sclera gleamed at the margins of blue irises. “What
can
we do? Other than wait.”

Sara said, “Eddi, are we leaking more below?”

“I don’t know. I smelled fuel, though.”