“The time to have given up would have been all those years in that awful place.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Libertine. “But even the strongest spirit can only take so much.”
Libertine pitched the bulky blue rubber gloves onto the dry concrete and squatted, elbowing her too-big bib overalls and slicker out of the way, and touched Friday’s cheek. She could feel her pulse racing with excitement—she’d only ever laid hands on a few of the animals she worked with. His skin was warm, smooth, and firm, and he watched her evenly while she scratched him. She suddenly felt him in her head as a lovely hum, almost catlike, and then he was gone. Black skin cells floated away and collected under her fingernails as he continued to slough off the topmost layer of skin that had come in contact with the freshwater in his transport box. She scratched what she could reach of him underwater as well as above—the cold water quickly made her hands ache—and gradually his eyes got heavy and then closed altogether.
Neva stayed nearby, beaming. “Isn’t he just fabulous?”
Hoping her knees weren’t beginning to lock as she continued to squat, Libertine looked closely at the clumps of warty skin above his pectoral flipper. “Do these hurt, do you think?”
“No—they look worse than they are. According to Gabriel, they’re only important because they’re a sign that he has a crappy immune system. Why don’t you go ahead and feed him?”
Libertine staggered a little as she stood up. Neva shuffled a bucket of herring to her through the wet walk. Libertine placed fish after fish in Friday’s open mouth and watched him swallow. “It’s kind of like feeding a slot machine or putting dollars into a vending machine or something. He doesn’t chew.”
“No molars.”
Once Friday had finished every fish in the bucket, the women stood side by side in the shallow water, arms folded, watching him contemplatively. The morning was upon them—another gray day with swollen clouds.
“Do you ever wish you couldn’t sense them?” Neva asked—the first time she’d ever indicated to Libertine that she believed she was capable of psychically sensing any animal.
“All the time,” said Libertine. “All the time.”
Chapter 7
FRIDAY WAS THE most easygoing killer whale Gabriel had ever worked with. Still, he did have a temper, which he lost early one morning during his first weeks at the zoo over a handful of squid he was offered for the first time. While Gabriel and Neva watched, he spit out the squid and then swam around the perimeter of the pool slapping his tail flukes on the water in outrage. In the past weeks he’d flown thousands of miles, worked hard for strangers, accepted new routines, and given blood samples without protest. But the handful of squid was too much. He didn’t know its taste, didn’t like its texture, would not eat it.
They cheered for this first small act of defiance.
He returned. He ate the squid.
BY HIS THIRD week at the zoo, Friday’s diet amounted to nearly twice what he’d been fed in Bogotá, and as he ate, folds in his stomach began to open that had been closed for years. He regurgitated a Colombian peso, several child’s barrettes, and then a partially digested, shoulder-length latex examination glove. The warty masses also began to break up and then fall off. For hours every day Gabriel, Neva, and Libertine took turns rubbing Friday down with their hands, their fingernails, silicon oven mitts, and nylon pot scrubbers, to help him get rid of the sloughing tissue. Beneath the warts was smooth, only slightly scarred skin.
All that time Friday had shown an inexplicable fear of his medical pool gates. The med pool was a small, twelve-foot-deep, rectangular extension of the main pool, accessed by two gates set in the concrete walls. The gates were amply wide and amply deep, but once he was in the small isolation pool, he didn’t seem to recognize that what lay beyond the second gate was his pool, seeing it instead as a new and terrifying frontier. Although he would readily swim into the med pool through either one of the gates, he refused to swim out the other, laboriously backing out instead. No amount of persuasion could move him.
Because the finishing touches hadn’t been put on his pool before Friday’s whirlwind relocation, two workmen arrived one day to install fiberglass handrails in place of the hastily constructed two-by-fours ringing the pool top. One man leaned over the railing to tighten bolts with an electric screwdriver while the other held the railing in place; both men stood in the narrow wet walk. Rapt in the presence of power tools, Friday refused to leave them all day. Believing in the wisdom of choosing one’s battles, Gabriel canceled the day’s exercise sessions. When the final bolt was fixed in place hours later, the men finally packed up their gear and departed. On the way out one called to Gabriel, “Hey, that’s quite a whale you got there!” When Gabriel asked whether the workmen had known Friday had been watching them, he said, “Are you kidding? He had his head on my foot half the time!”
Gabriel canceled the following morning’s exercise sessions, too. They’d get no work out of Friday before noon—he’d been up all night watching a team of painters power-spray his viewing gallery walls.
THOUGH WELL ON his way to physical recovery, Friday still spent the majority of his free time sleeping—far more than Gabriel thought was either necessary or healthy. To improve his overall muscle tone he and Neva had been recycling his show behaviors—bows, breaches, speed-swims, spy hops—five and six times a day, but now Gabriel decided it was time to wake up his mind. On a glorious, clear day in early July, Gabriel took delivery of a blue plastic Boomer Ball.
Made of heavy-duty plastic, Boomer Balls were designed specifically to withstand the force of even the biggest and strongest zoo animals. As enrichment devices, zookeepers often drilled holes in them and stuffed them with treats. But instead of perceiving the ball’s recreational merits, Friday regarded it with abject fear. Gabriel talked to him quietly, touching the ball, rolling it, knocking on it, demonstrating its benign qualities. Then he gently pushed the ball away from the wall toward Friday—where it bobbed in his wake as he fled to the far side of the pool and put his head in the corner. The ball stalled against the side of the pool.
The next morning, they began again. Friday followed Gabriel around the perimeter of the pool as Gabriel nudged the blue ball to keep it nearby, pointing to the whale’s flukes, his pectoral flippers, his nose. “Use your beak; no, not your pec, your beak.” He reached out and tapped Friday’s rostrum lightly. “Your beak. That’s right. Good—good boy! See? That wasn’t so scary. Do it again. Touch it with your beak. No, not your pec; your beak.”
He talked and talked and talked, but Friday was afraid and miserable. Gabriel ended the work session with a few easy requests—squirt water through your teeth; lift your flukes in the air—to let the whale finish with success.
Later that day, at Gabriel’s request, Neva directed Friday into the medical pool and then lured him to the second, suspect medical pool gate. Friday followed the fish she held out until the only thing left in the med pool were his flukes—but he refused to go any farther. Still, they were making progress, even if it was inch by inch. Neva blew her whistle: “Good boy!”
Friday backed all the way out of the gate through which he entered.
GABRIEL NEXT DEVISED a signal that looked like a gunfighter’s quick draw. It would come to mean, You can do anything you want during this work session, but you won’t be rewarded for the same behavior twice. Initially the signal meant nothing, so Friday hung in the water, awaiting further instruction. None came. After ten minutes, just to do something, he opened his mouth. Gabriel blew a blast on his whistle, signaling success. He gave Friday several fish before giving him the same signal.
Friday opened his mouth again, but this time there was no whistle, no fish. He waited. In ten minutes more, when nothing had happened, he turned to go. Gabriel blew his whistle—good boy for turning away!—and gave him several more fish and a quick rubdown before drawing his guns once more. The killer whale opened his mouth, then turned to swim away, but there w
as no whistle, no fish.
Gabriel ended the session with a rubdown and a pep talk.
VISITORS CONTINUED TO pour into the zoo, not just from across the country, but around the world. Many claimed to feel some connection with Friday that they couldn’t explain.
While Neva worked primarily behind the scenes, Sam kept a running log of Friday’s behavior from the viewing gallery windows. One day a young man came in, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. As Sam pieced it together later, after talking with the young man, the woman was ninety-two and dying. The young man volunteered sometimes at her nursing home, and last week had fixed her TV for her when she was frantic that she might miss the evening news. She had confided in him that she had watched every TV news spot about Friday since he’d come to the Biedelman Zoo. She had inoperable cancer and her last wish was to be in Friday’s presence.
Sam watched the young man slowly push the wheelchair through the tight crowds until at last there was no one between the old woman and one of the enormous windows. She was patient, waiting for fifteen, then twenty minutes, but Friday was across the pool, napping. Though there was no telling when he’d wake up, she waved away the young man’s suggestion that they go see something else at the zoo and come back later. She would stay right here.
At last there were cries from the crowd and Friday appeared in the window. He swam past the old woman but then stopped and circled back until he was only inches away from her. They regarded one another, the whale and the woman; their eyes locked and held. Tears ran down her thin cheeks in the chilly air of the gallery.
The young man dug a camera out of the flowered plastic bag hanging from the wheelchair handles and handed it to Sam, who struggled to get both the woman and the whale in the picture. He did the best he could, snapping several mediocre shots. In the end, from what he later learned in a thank-you note, it made no difference—the old woman didn’t live long enough to see them. She didn’t need to: on the drive home, she told the young man over and over, He saw me. I know he saw me. And Sam believed she was right.
ON THE POOL top, Gabriel drew his guns once more, giving Friday the signal to do anything he wanted, but not that same thing twice. This was their third try. Friday opened his mouth, as he had before, and then he turned to swim away. Both behaviors had been rewarded at the first two sessions; both were rewarded again. Then, still stumped, the killer whale just hung there, watching Gabriel and Neva for further direction.
Gabriel and Neva stood in place, arms folded, giving nothing away. Minutes dragged by. Then, hesitantly, Friday spit a mouthful of water between his teeth.
“Good boy!” Gabriel hollered, blowing his whistle to validate the behavior.
Friday lifted his tail flukes free of the water.
“Good boy!” Gabriel yelled.
Friday nodded his head up and down. Pwwwweeeeeet! Gabriel once again blew a long, excited whistle blast. “Good boy! GOOD BOY!”
Friday spit water like a fountain, hung his tongue out of the side of his mouth, shook a pec, squeaked through his blowhole. With each behavior, he got further from anything he’d ever been trained to do. He did a hip shimmy, rolled his tongue, blew a ring of bubbles through his blowhole—riffing, out there on his own.
By the end of the session he was moonwalking across the bottom of the pool.
THE NEXT DAY, building on Friday’s success, Gabriel led Friday around the perimeter of the pool, nudging the blue ball to keep it nearby, pointing to the whale’s flukes, his pectoral flippers, his nose. “Use your beak—no, not your pec; your beak.” He reached out and tapped Friday’s nose lightly. “Your beak. That’s right. Good—good boy! See? That wasn’t so scary. Do it again. Touch it with your beak. No, not your pec; your beak.”
He talked and talked and talked—for fifteen minutes; half an hour. He talked with hand signals; he talked with his voice; he talked through the sheer combined force of his will and eye contact. And, flushed with yesterday’s success, Friday not only touched the ball, he cupped his flukes and dragged it. He bounced it gently with his pectoral flipper, rolled it, set it in a gentle spin. He pushed it under, at first just a bit, then completely, watching it bob back to the surface. He balanced it on his nose and dove, taking it underwater.
“I’ll be damned,” Sam said to Neva, watching. “Looks to me like someone just woke up.”
But still, there were limits to these successes. Several days later, in a problem-solving exercise, Gabriel sent Friday to get his blue ball, which was beached on the wet walk over a grate. They’d been working on manipulating the ball with Friday’s various body parts to encourage body awareness and as physical therapy disguised as play. Now, Gabriel asked Friday to get the ball, which would first require that he get it into the pool.
Friday raised a pectoral flipper and gently touched the ball. It moved slightly and went right back to where it started. He did this over and over and over, rolling the ball slightly, but never enough to get it over the lip of the grate. Each time, he checked with Gabriel: was that good enough? Each time Gabriel sent him back with the same signal: go get the ball.
“You can do this,” he assured Friday.
But in the end, he couldn’t. After fifteen minutes of futile effort, he began keening a piercing cry of fury. Gabriel went to him and pushed the ball into the water, but Friday ignored it, ignored Gabriel, and went off, alone, to the medical pool, where he refused to have anything more to do with Gabriel or the ball for the rest of the day. Gabriel told Libertine, “You always want to end a session before the animal fails—that’s training one-oh-one. I blew it. It’ll probably mean a setback. Damn it.”
But with the next week came a chance for redemption. Gabriel asked Friday to swim into the med pool and then out the second gate—the same thing they’d been working on for weeks now. This time only two inches of Friday’s tail flukes remained behind him in the medical pool; the rest of his body was in the main pool. His eyes were wide, red, locked onto Gabriel’s. He was nervous.
Without breaking eye contact Gabriel grabbed a handful of herring and flipped it into the water two inches beyond Friday’s head.
Instinctively, the whale reached.
He was out. He had gone through the second med pool gate.
Gabriel blew a sustained, triumphal blast. “Good boy!”
He and Neva fed Friday four buckets of food—most of his day’s allotment. Then they jumped into the water with him to play. For days afterward, Friday spent his free time swimming in one gate and out the other, in one and out the other.
Here was a conqueror of worlds.
EVEN IN MID-AUGUST the world media continued to take an unabated interest in Friday’s progress. And with the extensive coverage came requests from movie stars and other VIPs for private audiences with Friday. Neva spent more and more time playing host to these visitors—who, Truman reminded her when she got cranky about it, often left the zoo sizable donations after their visits. One was the star of a hugely successful 1990s detective series who arrived in floppy shapeless pants, sneakers, a baseball cap, and no makeup, looking unabashedly like hell, which earned her Neva’s grudging respect. She was very breezy and crooned softly to Friday, “Look at you, you beautiful thing!” Friday hung motionless in the water, watching her watch him. She squatted down on the wet cement and extended her hand for Friday to sniff, by which Neva knew she was a dog person. Dog people invariably held their hands out this way, a pointless courtesy in Friday’s case, since he breathed through the blowhole on top of his head and had no olfactory sense at all.
Still, he came within a few inches of the movie star’s outstretched hand—but every time she leaned forward, he backed up. After going through this little dance several times, the TV star asked Neva who had hit him.
“What?” Neva said, startled.
“Who hit him? Look how head-shy he is. You see that with horses when they’ve been beaten. Dogs, too.”
Neva was impressed. She and Gabriel had often wondered the same thing—and a fe
w days later got an unwelcome insight. Gabriel took a new cleaning implement into the pool, a scrubbing head on the end of a long aluminum pole. He had just begun using it on the pool’s rock work when he heard a loud, ominous buzzing—a killer whale’s unmistakable expression of rage. He looked up just in time to see Friday heading toward him fast, straight, and livid. Before he’d had a chance to react, Friday bit the pole cleanly in half.
Too startled to be afraid, Gabriel hollered at him around the regulator in his mouth and windmilled his arms. Contrite, Friday swam meekly away and took his blue ball into a corner, where he remained in a self-imposed time-out for the rest of the afternoon.
“Now we know,” Gabriel told Neva. “They hit him with poles. Maybe other things, too, but definitely metal poles.”
IN LATE SEPTEMBER Truman announced that one of Friday’s Colombian trainers would be visiting—the one who’d called him Gordito, Little Fat One. She brought along a film crew that was shooting a documentary about her and her husband, a famous Colombian soap opera star. Neva dutifully accompanied her to the pool top, where she was promptly surrounded by cameras and sound gear. The trainer wore an expensive purple and black wet suit, and sat on the side of the pool with her legs dangling in. Now and then her fingers described circles in the water, a gesture she had used in Bogotá to summon him. Friday declined over and over, until the director began to get anxious, pacing, crouching occasionally, and, to show he was calm and patient, rubbing the young woman’s back, or at least rubbing the unyielding wet suit.
The fact was, they were running out of time and light and they were scheduled to leave first thing in the morning. The director had indicated on their way here that the beautiful trainer should let her sorrow flow as she contemplated parting from Friday once again. On camera she’d already described Friday as her best friend, her lover. They needed a close-up, one close-up. They needed the whale.
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