The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (43 page)

“Oh God. Lars.”

“It’s the motor. Every time we run the motor.”

“Can you shut it off? Maybe then…”

This seemed to strike him as a novel idea. He lifted his head.

As he did so the mass alongside rolled along its length, and the eye, the same one she’d met twice before, rotated up into view. She stared down but that dark orb did not meet her gaze. It seemed to be following Madsen as he crept aft on all fours and swung down into the companionway. The engine rose a note, knocked, quivered, and fell silent. The wind caught a rag of smoke and swept it over them.

In the silence the pump hummed again, the stream pulsed once more against the animal’s side. The eye shifted to it, then squeezed closed.

With a lazy, graceful flick that massive tail stirred up whirlpools of olivine that lapped in little splashes against the hull. Sara crouched, watching it move off. She felt like howling, like cackling. “Go away,” she screamed at it. “Leave us alone.” She bent over the side and the raw protein came up in a rush, her stomach clenching like a drawn knot, caustic searing her throat, and she spat after the vomit into the sea, watching the thing plow through the water, waves breaking over it in little flurries of spray. Then a larger wave covered it. She stared, hope struggling against a weight that seemed to be crushing her heart.

“Fuck,” Madsen said softly from the companionway.

It emerged from the wave with the huge head turned toward them. The tail came up. Then down.

With ponderous slowness it gathered speed, wrinkling up the sea like a pushed blanket until it seemed to be burrowing beneath it.

Anemone
reeled at the impact, but also yielded, as if weary of the contest. A splintering and cracking came from forward. The whale had struck the starboard side this time, the undamaged side, two objects nearly the same size, but it was solid tons and the boat a mere bubble of overfatigued fiber and resin and thin wood cradling empty air. Sara watched the side cave in with utter detachment. Her hands tightened on the winch she clung to; that was all. A scream echoed from below. Kimura. “Hy. Hy!” she leaned to yell. “Are you all right?”

He was sobbing. “I am here. What is—”

“Get up on deck. The whale. It’s back. Hurry!”

“I am—I am coming.”

Madsen thrust past her, hustling himself down the companionway at the same time Kimura was trying to come up. “Lars—what are—”

“I’ll stop it,” he said over his shoulder. “Start the engine again. I’ll stop it. For good, this time.”

She hesitated, then bent to the starter. Still warm, the diesel cranked again immediately. But they still didn’t have any way to make it turn the propeller. Or was that what he’d been working on down below? This glacial sequence of thoughts was interrupted as the whale slid away from the side. It sank slowly, as if stunned. But just as it vanished the tail rose, to just below the surface. The long dun-colored ghost slid forward,
beneath
the boat. A quiver ran through the hull, as if its back had brushed the downslung keel.

The sea herniated as if the whale had grown within it. Waves rolled out as it surged forth, breaching half its length before crashing back. As it leaped free she caught the prunelike wrinkles along the after part of its body, and, still dangling ahead of the fluke, the still-embedded harpoon. It waggled its head and half rolled, as if nearsightedly seeking them. Lay for a minute or two, then began swimming again.

“It is coming once more,” Kimura remarked. Standing at the edge of the cockpit, he clapped his hands twice, halfheartedly, then let them drop. For a moment she wondered if he’d had some idea of sacrificing himself, as he thought Eddi had done. But he only watched, stretching out one hand to brace himself as
Anemone
leaned to starboard. They were taking water again, that was clear. After all the bailing, all the patching, they were still going down. Regardless of what the oncoming beast did now, it had sealed their fate. It swam faster, aiming this time for their port side, which it had damaged before. This time it would crash through, and down they’d go.

The forward hatch hinged up. Madsen’s silly cap bobbed up, and both arms braced and drew his long body out onto the foredeck. A long handbag dangled from his shoulder. No, not a handbag. A case.

Lying quickly down full length on the snow-covered foredeck, he withdrew another launcher. He telescoped it apart and put one end over his shoulder. “Turn away,” he shouted back.

She understood then, and bent to put the engine into gear. The whole stern began to shake, the shudder quickly growing so violent she had to cling to the pedestal. She put the rudder hard over and
Anemone
began to move, sagging away to starboard, slowly sinking. But wheeling, angling her bow away from the rapidly closing animal.

The whale was at speed now, the spout jetting at intervals like the stack of a steam locomotive. A crest burst and it crashed through, exploding a massive breach in that watery wall, then blasting out of it, head lifting and dropping as it pitched to the unimaginable power of that massively pistoning tail.

She raised her eyes to a figure on the coachroof. Kimura was bowing, hands together, to the approaching beast. He unclasped his hands and scattered something over the boat. Crystal granules of salt flew on the wind like tiny diamonds. Sara stood riveted, hands braced on the hard-over wheel, as
Anemone
shook. Green water lapped up over her pointed bow, as if she were bent on diving, like a submarine. The engine-pitch dropped, as if laboring under terrific load.

A flash of fire from the foredeck yanked her gaze back. The flame darted out across the sea and plunged into the whale’s flank slightly ahead of the harpoon. A muffled bang echoed on the wind. For a moment the whale did not falter, only kept plunging ahead. Then, a fraction of a second after the first, came a second detonation, like a stick of dynamite damped under many feet of sand.

The whale’s head lifted and blood exploded from its side. Yet its momentum carried it onward, the sea rolling away in front, and once again
Anemone
vibrated to the shock of many tons driven at furious speed. Sara crouched, desperately wrapping her arms around the pedestal to the sound of tearing carbon fiber and snapping ribs as the boat tilted back. Even the sinking bow came rearing up out of the sea. She caught a man’s form sliding back and down off the canted foredeck, the still-smoking tube rolling away. At the last moment one arm snagged a line on the tarp-bound bundle lashed to the side. But the line came away, unraveling, and he slid under the lower lifeline and shot out into the roiling sea.

The boat hesitated, forced over so far the gunwale was buried deep. Then, to a ripping and snapping, as if suddenly released, she rolled back. Bobbed higher, as if released from some heavy burden carried too long.

The sperm’s massive head lay half within the hull, which rolled and pitched about it with a grinding frisson. Blood poured from an open crater near one flipper as if fire-pumped. Pieces of white hull composite and dark wood bobbed out on boiling water, then were sucked back in. The great tail vibrated, then flexed upward slowly, as if drawn on invisible cables. It hesitated. Tensed. Then smacked down with a blow that sent the red-stained sea shattering apart, sending bloody spray over Sara as she cowered, covering her ears.

A head surrounded by a floating whirl of long blond hair came up screaming just under the counter. Beside it floated a silly cap with sad hound-dog eyes. Head and hat whirled in a complete turn. Bare hands white as marble thrashed at the icy sea.

Then the thrashing slowed. Lars’s gaze sought hers, held it for perhaps a second; then slid off. The chin lowered deliberately, as if praying, into a welter of bubbles. And sank. The uplifted hands still stroked feebly, agitating the surface for some seconds, until the sea smoothed again, sealing itself on the glassy backside of a comber.

Slowly,
Black Anemone
began to capsize. The whale’s tail flexed again. It dropped beneath the water, and the flipper jerked. Its head emerged, foot by foot, and then the monster floated free of the hole in the boat’s side in a gush of water and debris like a monstrous birth.

As the big Dewoitine corkscrewed herself down into the green sea Sara let go of the wheel and scrambled backward. The backs of her legs struck the coaming at the rear of the cockpit and she went over. Her head hit something hard and she grabbed to stop herself but too late. She was sliding and then she was underwater, the cold green all around filling her mouth with an explosive unimaginable cold that drove fiery needles deep into every centimeter of exposed skin.

When she fought her way back to the surface a strange long red mass rolled uneasily on the sea. Some yards distant Hideyashi was fighting desperately beneath a heap of lines from the dumped-open cockpit lockers. He thrashed and clawed, but the heavy wet nylon kept dragging him down. At last, still struggling, he too sank, leaving only a heaving mass of blue and white cordage.

Something in that silent vanishing energized her. She furiously worked arms and legs, floating back from the russet curvature she now recognized as
Anemone
’s broad bottom, exposed obscenely to the rushing clouds. A blackgreen rime of weedy growth fringed the trailing edge of the now-vertical rudder, elevated high above her like some skyward-reaching pylon. There was no keel. It had wrenched out at last.

The cold was crushing her lungs. She stopped swimming a few yards away, and drifted, watching. At least the air in the mustang suit was buoying her up.

A clicking that seemed to penetrate her came through the water. It waned, then grew again. Grew into pain, and she cried out strangling through the water in her mouth. A turbulence like a waterfall rushed closer.

A gigantic form rose from the sea, streaming white water from puckered flanks. The whale blew in midair, but now black blood vomited from the blowhole. Its judging eye was squeezed closed. It fell from midair full on the capsized boat, filling the sea with a bursting crackle and sending a massive wall of water back into her face that tumbled her over and over like the backwash of a heavy surf.

21

The Shroud of the Sea

When she opened her eyes again a pearly opalescence filled her vision. She lay on her back, arms outstretched. Was her body gone? She couldn’t feel it.

Then her gaze locked on a bird slanting far above, and the opaline light became clouds, writhing and re-forming as they drove rapidly from one wall of her vision to the other. As they did, more spilled over a horizon that as she turned her head seemed far too close, jagged and foam-topped. A wave lifted her, covering her face so she choked and coughed, then rolled away.

She turned on her belly and tried to swim but her arms were teak balks. They swung from the shoulders but she could not feel her hands or even her elbows.

When she lifted her head she floated alone on a dusky sea across which bits of white and brown were scattered as if dropped from a height. Shattered bits of foam hull coring, of soaked-through cardboard, bobbed here and there. Astonishingly little, though, and she could only conclude that most of what the boat carried had gone down with it.

The whale. She glanced around, suddenly stabbed by fear, but there was no sign of it. The rocket must have triggered the explosive in the harpoon too. Yet it had still lived for minutes afterward. Long enough to finish what it had begun, days before.

The flotsam rocked on long billows. Only four thousand miles to safety. She nearly laughed. She too was only floating debris. The last survivor. But not for long. Already the cold was creeping into her brain, slowing thoughts to molasses. The mustang suit would give her a little longer, but soon her core temperature would fall. The sea would suck out her heat, and give her peace in exchange. She’d fall apart and dissolve like sodden cardboard. She blinked something sharp from her eyes. She’d lost her goggles somehow, and her glasses, too, torn off by the wave-surge as the whale had breached for the last time.

But she had time for a last look around with those freezing eyes. At an old, old sight, yet somehow young; not changed a wink since she’d first glimpsed it as a little girl from the sand hills of Nantucket. Such a heartless immensity! A wave lifted her like God’s hand, and from its crest she marveled at a white mass shining dully in the leaden light. A berg, far away. For a moment she hallucinated swimming to it. She stretched an arm, then let it subside. Smiled, and the fantasy flickered away.

A trough dropped her but the next wave lifted something dark a few yards away. It rolled uneasily, trailing a line. She eyed it with dull curiosity. Then breaststroked slowly toward it. Her arms barely moved. She went under and had to struggle up to the surface again. She was growing heavier. So heavy it was hard to stay afloat.

The second time she went down, surrounded by the serene translucent green she’d soon be part of, she looked yearningly up at the slowly receding, rocking, silvery surface. Perhaps she should just open her mouth. That at least was left: to choose death; and for an instant she relished that possibility, thrilled to the last exercise of will before whatever had moved and desired and called itself Sara Pollard returned to nonexistence. Merely to part her lips …

But she didn’t want to drown. Everyone said dying of the cold was almost pleasant. So she fought her way to the air once more, knowing this was the last time she’d have the strength to do so. Reached out, and snagged a novocained claw in the tarp-wrapped bundle that rolled in the long swell.

Part of Dorée’s exposure suit and life preserver was still visible beneath a corner that had come unwrapped again. Sara couldn’t see the dead woman’s face. She reached out to turn the tarpaulin back a little more, for company, than let her glove drop again. She didn’t need to see her. They’d float together for a little while, that was all. She worked an arm through the lashing, sobbing, and finally got it through up to the elbow. Then she could relax. Stop fighting. Just drift. Drift and look out as thoughts oozed ever more slowly through her freezing brain.