The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (9 page)

“I’m ready to help prepare. Whatever we need—”

“See Jamie. He’ll put you to work.” He studied a screen. “I’m glad you’re aboard, Sara. You’re a … steadying influence.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry we haven’t been able to further your research.”

She smiled. “Maybe we’ll find some pods.”

“
Oui.
If we locate the fleet, we’ll find your whales.”

She nodded. He looked haggard. The hoar in his beard seemed to have spread, like advancing frost. He didn’t look down at her. Nor at anything below. Just squinted ahead, chin held low, the leaden light circling him like an ominous halo.

5

Force Eight

Over the next day, though, the weather stayed the same; a varying wind, steel overcast, the sea rough, but nowhere near what they’d feared. She and Eddi and Lars started at the nook of the bow, where spare sails and lines lay bagged and tagged, and worked aft. Everything had to be lashed down, Quill said. So firmly stowed that even if
Anemone
turned turtle, it would stay in place. The mate followed them, tugging on each knot they made and kicking gear to make sure it wouldn’t move.

Between spells of work Sara stood watch. Sometimes on deck for brief periods, but more often, as the temperature fell, strapped into the interior steering station. She had to admit, the dome was surprisingly comfortable. The radar and other instruments were laid out at waist level. The control lines from the sails came through rubber-sealed tubes, so you only occasionally got a blast of cold air. The clear plastic gave a view around the horizon, except for directly forward, which was masked by the jib. Up here the boat seemed to rotate around her when it pitched, making the violent gyrations when a sea twisted
Anemone
’s tail easier to bear. Or perhaps she was just getting used to it.

She was up there, staying alert for the ice that lay scattered across the sea, when Bodine stuck his head out of the forward compartment. “Lars! Where’s—?”

“Here.” Madsen stepped out of the galley holding an apple.

“We lost the signal.”

The Dane’s face went stony. He ducked inside. Not long after, he came out again, and went in search of the captain.

Sara tried not to let it distract her. The lumps of ice varied from the size of refrigerators to that of tractor-trailers. Quill said these “bergie bits” came off icebergs. Only a little showed above the surface, but each could weigh tons. More than enough to crash through
Anemone
’s eggshell hull. The swells were running high, so the radar didn’t help, and you couldn’t see them until you were almost on top of them. So she was sailing under a heavily reefed main and foresail, keeping their speed down, and altering course left and right ten degrees every few minutes to see around the canvas. There was only room for one under the dome, so she and Eddi took turns, swapping out every half hour. The break helped, but it was still nerve-racking.

Perrault came out and stood swaying in the salon. He kneaded his mouth. Quill turned from his seat at the navigation station. “Dru? You okay?”

“We lost the radar.”

“It’s down?”

“I mean, theirs. All at once, like it was turned off.”

Quill clawed in his beard. He’d been braiding it, until he looked like Blackbeard. Then he scratched his ass. “Maybe for the best. D’you see the prognostic?”

They went to the nav station, and she heard nothing for a time. Then Perrault murmured something involving millibars, and more words she couldn’t quite make out.

Quill grunted, “North’d be safer.”

“They’re not headed north. If we stay on this course, we can pick them up when they turn their radars back on.”

“Sure we’re looking at the same low here? This bitch’s as big as New Zealand. Check out those winds.”

Another murmured exchange. Then Quill said, “You’re the skipper, but that projected track? It’s really going to fooking blow. We get on the wrong side of it, we’ll have the wind on our nose, and seas like Paddy’s barn. It’s not coming so fast we can’t turn and—”

“That’s right. I’m the skipper,” Perrault snapped. Then added in a calmer tone, “We knew there’d be rough weather. And we’re ready. Right?”

The mate’s muscle-packed shoulders slumped. Perrault turned away. His gaze locked with Sara’s, dropped, then lifted again. He came over to grip her ankle. “Speed?”

“Twelve, by the knotmeter. A little more by the chartplotter.”

“The GPS will give you a higher reading because the surface water’s being driven by the wind. More ice or less?”

“About the same. But there’s, like, a fog building up. If it gets worse…”

He stood swaying with the pitch.
Anemone
was heeled to starboard. She felt different under reduced sail. As if relaxing into the sea’s arms, rather than agile, avid, as when she tore along on a plane. “How far down are you reefed?”

“Main, all the way. Plus the fore.”

“Can you handle it?”

She nodded and he stood there a bit longer, then turned away. The door to the engine compartment banged open, then closed.

“Hear that?” Eddi said. “About the storm?”

Sara sighed. “He knows what he’s doing, Eddi. No point worrying.”

The videographer sighed, too, and fell silent. Sara peered ahead, caught a speck of white lifted on a grayblue sea. Turned the wheel and watched it slide past, spinning slowly, a bluewhite chunk of destruction, stained with a greenish smear of algae.

She hoped she was right, about Perrault.

*   *   *

When their watch was over she bunked out with her e-reader, trying to make progress on a book about beaked whales. Since they didn’t linger on the surface, the way humpbacks did, only recently had they even been noticed by science. New species were still being discovered. A team out of Seattle had put a transponder on one and tracked it diving to almost three thousand feet. They sang complex, lengthy songs. No human knew what they meant, although researchers said they were definitely carrying information of some type.

She cradled the reader, blinking at the underside of the deck above. Imagining a creature that hunted in complete darkness half a mile under the sea. A world of sound, not sight. Of crushing pressure and utter cold. No one knew much about whale social behavior. Which made sense; you could observe chimps and bonobos in the wild, house them in a habitat and test them. But a creature that came to the surface for a breath only once an hour, that spent most of its time where only a submarine could follow? About all you could do was kill them and weigh them. That gave you a sense of their ecological niche, but not much about their lives. How much could you guess about Einstein by examining his stomach contents?

Not that she thought whales were geniuses, no matter what Madsen said. They might have large brains, but comparing brain mass to body weight, humans came out ahead of most whales. But there was still plainly much to learn.

She was rubbing her face, wondering why she had such a headache, when a heavy voice—Quill’s—shouted, “Everyone on deck.” She flinched, debated leaving her curtain drawn. Then swung out and started pulling on gear.

*   *   *

Topside the wind was much stronger. It bit through the balaclava, numbing her lips and freezing the moisture on her glasses. She pulled her goggles down, panting in short breaths that chilled her tongue. The air tasted like the icicles she’d used to pull off the eaves of their house in Nantucket. She touched the back of a glove to her lips. It came away bloodstained. The repeated exposure was cracking her lips. She crouched behind the drawn-up, shuddering bulk of the Zodiac, squinting as a sea came in from aft. The swells were bigger than ever, and the wind had taken on a near-supersonic shriek. White spray tore off the crests as they broke around the stern, blowing downwind in long roiling streaks. She clung as the boat pitched. The low sky was the same almost-black cinder-gray as a thunderhead. Under that storm-light the sea was a strange hue; neither green nor blue nor gray, yet all of these together; and it seethed under the lash of the wind as if alive, resentful, capable of taking on any and all forms, given time and energy.

Quill had a locker open and was pulling out the metal bats. Sara squatted as
Anemone
soared, teetered on the back of a great silver sea, then plunged. The staysail snapped and cracked, blowing off a metallic-looking halo of spray and ice that rattled across the foredeck. Two red-orange figures, slow as moonwalking astronauts, had ventured out between mast and satellite-antenna dome. They clutched the lifeline with one hand as the bats rose and fell in the other. The whacking thuds came aft only faintly, as if the wind blew away all sound. She coughed. Beside her a bulky figure muttered, “Does he really expect us to go up there?”

“Tehiyah? That you?”

“This is ridiculous. We’re risking our lives out here.” She turned and Sara saw she didn’t have a face covering on. Silvery rime frosted dark lashes. Her perfect teeth were astonishingly white. They
had
to be capped. Sara glanced quickly away as something in her brain reset them into a lower jaw grinning with shining enamel and bloody bone. No, she told herself. Not now.

Dorée yelled, “Is it my imagination, or is it blowing harder?”

“They were talking about a storm.”

“Oh, just fucking peachy.” She put her arm around Sara, who stiffened. “How are you and Lars getting along?”

“If you mean is anything going on, it isn’t.” She blinked, wondering where Dorée came from when she did this girlfriend thing. The idea someone like her could see Sara Pollard as some sort of competitor was ludicrous. Unless she was paranoid as hell.

“Too bad. You’re not that horrible-looking. Unlike that deformed bitch Angelina. I know an image consultant—”

Quill shouted, “You two, cut the quiffing. Get up there and knock some of that ice off. We need to be light aloft when this thing hits. Clip to the jacklines—the blue lines I ran fore and aft on each side. Don’t clip to the lifelines, or the stanchions! If you go overboard at this speed, that lifeline’ll break.”

Fighting a profound unwillingness, she took a deep breath and forced her shivering, cowardly carcass forward. The wind clawed at her, flapping the hood around her head as if ravens were attacking her. The boat seemed to choose these times to leap into the air and shower her with freezing spray, or slide her crazily across the wet icy deck until she crashed into the deckhouse or bubble or satellite dome. She was going to be covered with bruises, but of more concern at the moment was the livid sea that foamed and heaved only a few feet below. She didn’t want to slide off into that cauldron. Halfway forward another bulkily suited figure passed her a baseball bat as it crawled aft. She tucked it into her armpit and pressed on.

At last she and Dorée reached the bow. They huddled there and began flailing. Ice coated the forestay in white tubes. It layered the deck with white sheets greasy with seawater. It loosened its grip reluctantly, only gradually lacing with lucent cracks, like flaws in diamonds, as she whaled at it, then suddenly bursting. Each whack jolted pain up her wrist into the elbow. On the other side of the pulpit Dorée was smashing away, sliding around with each pitch of the deck, grunting like a hog with each blow. A shower of spray submerged them; Sara came up gasping, only to howl as a hammer blow struck her buttock. “That’s my fucking
ass
,” she roared.

“Sorry,” came the answering scream, faint against the whine of the wind, the creak and snap of the storm-sail burning fluorescent orange above them. The sky reeled. A sea humped its back and spat stinging foam. Freezing air sawed in and out of Sara’s throat. She hacked and hacked at a lump that wouldn’t yield.

Then Dorée whacked her again, this time across the back of the thighs. She twisted, suddenly enraged, and cracked the other woman across her bent back. The actress arched her face to the sky and howled like a dog. “You hit me!”

“Well, you fucking hit me twice!”

“This fucking ice. And these fucking
bats.
” Dorée reared and hurled hers whirling like a majorette’s baton across the waves. It vanished instantly, rolled over by a huge turbulent locomotive that raced alongside for a hundred yards before breaking in a thunder of rolling foam and needling spray.

Sara’s terror buckled and they collapsed in a storm of giggles like fourteen-year-olds, Dorée hugging her as they slid back and forth like pigs on ice. They ended up pinned between the forestay, which trembled as the swollen, balloon-taut fabric barely contained the immense force of the wind, and the bow pulpit, an arrangement of curved stainless tubes that looked like it belonged on a kids’ playground.

Another dousing in freezing seawater sobered them both. They crawled aft, separating at the satellite antenna to creep past the lookout dome down the port and starboard walkways. They tumbled into the cockpit as a scowling Quill looked on. And from there, after dripping dry for a few minutes, down the companionway to mugs of hot strong tea cheered with a dollop of rum.

*   *   *

The wind kept rising as the sky darkened all that afternoon. Its keen climbed to a shriek, then to a register almost too high to hear. Quill and Perrault took turns in the chair. The word went around: They were in for hurricane-force winds. Everyone without a reason to be up should weather-cloth himself into his bunk.

Before Sara did so, she looked in on Georgita. The assistant was a slight hump under a damp wool blanket. Sara smelled urine, but when she asked the assistant if she needed to go, all she got was a shake of the head. “I prefer not to,” Norris-Simpson whispered. Her limpid, unfocused gaze followed as Sara checked the splint, tucked the blanket back in, and tried to feed her a cookie. It too met with the same whispered refusal.

Sara swallowed a handful of dry-roasted peanuts and Aleve, rubbed Vaseline on her cracking lips, climbed into the cupped sleeping shelf, and lashed herself in. But there was no way to sleep while being thrown against the overhead or the bunk strap every few seconds. Not to mention the thump and whoosh against the hull, like trying to nap with your ear pressed against a flushing toilet. So she just lay there with her e-reader, but turned it off too after a while and just lay in the near darkness listening to
Anemone
fight the sea. Ominous creaks and pops came from forward as the hull flexed. The bilge pump cut on, hummed, cut off.