There was a low murmur and then Johnson Johnson lowered Kitty into the grave Libertine had prepared. She handed him the trowel, and he spaded several clods of dirt on top of the body before gulping and handing the trowel to Neva, who handed it to Truman when she was finished, and so on, until the grave was filled. Then Libertine took his elbow and led Johnson Johnson back into the kitchen—it had started to rain, a halfhearted, weepy drizzle—and the others followed.
And then Truman said to Johnson Johnson, “You know, it just occurred to me there’s someone who I think would really like to meet you.” Johnson Johnson looked at him through puffy eyes and Truman said, “Let’s do this. Let’s swing by the Oat Maiden and leave a sign on the door saying you’ll open again first thing in the morning, and then we’ll take you over to the zoo. It’s really high time you met Friday.”
WHILE JOHNSON JOHNSON and Truman placed a note on the café door, Neva called Gabriel to warn him that they were on the way to the pool, explaining about Johnson Johnson and Kitty. “I’m so sorry,” Gabriel told him with the utmost gravity when they got to the pool.
Johnson Johnson nodded numbly.
“Let’s take you upstairs so you can meet our boy.”
They all trooped upstairs. Gabriel had already staged a bucket of fish in the wet walk, and now handed an extra pair of XtraTufs to Johnson Johnson. “Put those on and wade right out there.” Friday was already at the poolside, keen to see what this new visitor might hold in store. He put his chin on the side of the pool and opened his mouth. “You can hand him a fish or two,” Gabriel suggested. “And he likes to be touched. Just go slowly at first so he has a chance to look you over.”
Neva waded out beside Johnson Johnson, handing him a fish to give to Friday. When Friday accepted it, Johnson Johnson reached out with exquisite care, touching the whale with just his fingertips. Neva could hear him draw in a rapt breath. She encouraged him. “Go ahead. Give him a couple more.” Friday exhaled lightly, as though he didn’t want to startle the fragile man before him.
Gabriel called, “He won’t break, and he’s already decided you’re okay or he would have backed up or left by now. Go ahead and scratch him. He likes that.”
Johnson Johnson fed and scratched Friday for ten minutes, then fifteen minutes, until the steel bucket was empty and he admitted that his hands were numb from the icy water. As he left the pool top, Friday followed him with his eyes until he disappeared down the stairs.
“I think he knew who I am,” Johnson Johnson told Neva gravely as they brought the empty bucket downstairs.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so, too.”
Chapter 9
IN HIS OFFICE Truman went over the numbers again and again. Before he presented them to the zoo’s executive committee he wanted to be absolutely sure they were accurate. And once he was sure the figures were correct, he called his mother, Lavinia, and asked if she’d run them herself, which she did, appearing in his office in a pair of impeccably tailored wool slacks, a cashmere twinset, and what she liked to call her “weekend pearls.”
The numbers matched exactly. Seeing his face, she asked if he was all right.
“I’m fine, but I’m not looking forward to presenting this.”
“It’ll be fine, I’m sure. For heaven’s sake, Truman, they’re businesspeople. They’ll understand.”
“I know,” Truman sighed. “Still, it’ll complicate things.”
“Then your job is to keep it simple. Don’t let them get lost in the minutiae.”
“I know, Mother. But still. The bottom line is what it is.”
“Well, be strong,” Lavinia said, looking faintly amused.
Half an hour later Truman reported to his committee that in the nearly six months since Friday had arrived at the zoo, the total number of visitors had jumped by 700 percent from the same period the previous year.
“So why the voice of doom, bud?” Dink Schuler asked, clapping him on the back. “Hell, I thought somebody might have died.”
Truman took a beat and then said carefully, “There are people out there who think we took this animal in strictly to make money. And they’re people with loud voices.”
“Show me where it says we can’t make money,” said Dink dismissively. “Hell, we deserve it, after the last three years we’ve had—there’ve been a few times I’d have shut the place down if it had been up to me. I’m not kidding—show me where it says we can’t be successful. You can’t.”
“It’s more of an ethical issue than a fiscal one,” Truman said. “That is, it’s not about the money, per se; it’s more about what brought the money in, if you see what I mean.”
“Look, three years ago, who got rid of the single most popular animal in the zoo? We did! Because that was the right decision for that animal. Now this animal needed someone to help him, we were that someone, zip-zop, story over.” Around the conference table all the heads nodded. “We have absolutely nothing to feel ashamed of. And I’m pretty sure I speak on behalf of the entire board when I say our balance sheet could use a few more years of having this fish here.”
“Mammal,” Truman said.
“Whatever. Cash cow.”
Truman blanched. “Please be careful who you say that around.”
Dink leaned across the conference table to slap him on the shoulder. “Jesus, lighten up, buddy—don’t go all bleeding heart on us. It’s fine! Hell, the board will probably give you a nice fat raise.”
“I’m just saying we all need to be cautious. We don’t want to come across as exploitative and money-hungry.”
“But we are money-hungry.” Dink grinned. “Don’t know about the exploitative part.”
Truman smiled weakly. “Look, here’s what I’d like to recommend to you, and, if you agree with me, you can propose it to the full board. I’d like to take a percentage of the surplus revenue Friday’s bringing in and set up an endowment that will fund projects for the greater good. Say, for instance we could develop a large-animal rehab facility, or a terrific large-animal orphanage. Or we could establish a rehab facility for environmental disaster victims. We have the land—the orchard alone covers two-hundred square acres. I’m just tossing out ideas here—we’d need to do a lot of brainstorming and planning, but there are probably a ton of worthy projects. And that way, no one can say we’ve exploited Friday to fill our own coffers. In fact, we could call it the Greater Good Project and approach major donors for matching funds.” He ended somewhat breathlessly and looked around the conference table. The executive committee members looked back at him blankly except for Dink, who was tipping his chair back on two legs and shaking his head.
“Whoa! Easy there, cowboy. The fish just got here! We could just pad the operating budget, bankroll anything left over, and call it the Great to Have Money Project.” Dink was clearly getting a kick out of himself. “Just ease back, enjoy the cushion, and rake in the cash for a while.” He let the chair thump down on all four legs and sprawled toward Truman across the table. “In my mind that looks an awful lot like fiscal prudence.”
And loathe the man though he did, Truman had to admit that he was right. Or, as he put it to Neva that night, “He’s a Neanderthal, but I’ve got to admit the man is unnaturally gifted with horse sense.”
“So there’s been a nuclear war,” Neva replied in the dark, starting one of their favorite games, “and society as we know it is gone. Your only shot at survival is to find people who can lead you to safety. Name three people.”
“Easy,” said Truman. “My father and Gabriel Jump.” He always named Matthew first, because his father was the most gifted leader Truman had ever known, but the second and third spots were always up for grabs. Gabriel had been in the number two spot since coming to the zoo; Neva was number three. “But I have to admit that Dink Schuler might edge you out.”
In the dark, Neva backhanded him smartly across the chest.
THE NEXT DAY was one of Libertine’s days off, so Neva arrived at the pool at 5 A.M. to do fish hous
e. She was paying for day after day of diving in the forty-degree water to clean the pool and play with Friday. Her energy level was at rock bottom, she had a splitting sinus headache, and every injury she’d ever sustained over her years as a zookeeper—and there were many, from a separated shoulder to a broken nose and torn meniscus—now ached. Music, wielded like a tactical weapon, was her only hope, so she put on a Black Eyed Peas CD, cranked the volume until the stainless steel counters were vibrating, and got to work.
When all the buckets were weighed and filled, she pulled up her hood, hoisted the first bucket of the day, and murmured a fervent prayer as she climbed the rain-slick steel stairs to the pool top: please, God, don’t let Friday have been sucking on a herring all night. He sometimes did. No one knew why.
A nasty little wind was blowing east from Puget Sound fifteen miles away and it was still as black as night. The concrete looked oily in the dim fluorescent lights. Friday was already waiting expectantly as Neva zipped up the last inch of her rain gear, lowered the bucket of fish, and went to the poolside to scratch the killer whale’s head.
He opened his mouth wide and there it was, despite her prayers: a foul, ruptured, sucked-upon fish. The smell could have killed a cow. Preventing herself from retching by the narrowest margin, she flung a fresh fish in with the old one so he’d swallow them both. Looking into his eyes, she was absolutely certain he was laughing.
Once she was sure he’d swallowed the mess she squatted beside him and petted his tongue, head, and jaw until his eyelids drooped with pleasure. She had never known an animal that craved interaction as much as this whale did. Even Hannah had contentedly spent hours by herself, puttering around her little yard while Neva and Sam had done their chores. Friday so desired her attention that Truman sometimes joked he was beginning to feel like he had competition, and there were times when Neva thought he might be right. The whale was in her thoughts constantly, whether she was at work or at home. During her first week at the pool, Gabriel had warned her that she would have to bring her A-game to work every single day. She had thought he was blustering a bit to shake her cage, but she could see now that he’d simply been stating a fact. No animal she’d ever worked with had been at once so hard to read and so exceptionally intelligent. Some of his inscrutability came from the fact that he had no facial muscles—he couldn’t smile, raise his eyebrows, grimace, frown, or do any other of the thousand and one things terrestrial mammals did to express a state of mind: essentially, he was masked. And while Gabriel could read minute clues the killer whale expressed through his body posture and eyes, Neva guessed she was years away from having the necessary experience.
She had found out just how hard it was to interpret Friday’s actions during a recent stretch of unseasonably clear weather, when sunbeams had streaked the water and dappled the whale’s head. He had feinted, parried, and threatened with an open mouth something invisible to the rest of them. Gabriel had challenged them to figure out what he was doing. All of them—including even Libertine, who, as an animal communicator, should have known—were completely stumped. Gabriel let them swing in the wind for a day and a half before giving them the answer.
Friday was boxing with his shadow.
He continued to spend hours and hours in the gallery windows, watching people watch him—acting up for them by waggling his tongue and blowing bubbles from his blowhole and tracking specific visitors as they made their way through the crowd.
Today he was in a contrary mood, either refusing to do what Neva requested or doing it in the sloppiest possible way. She finally broke when he responded to her speed-swim command with a halfhearted circuit around the pool that he abandoned altogether halfway around in order to inspect a piece of Styrofoam on the wet walk. She threw her arms in the air: what is it with you? To her astonishment, he immediately rose straight up on his tail and pushed himself backward through the water. Dumbfounded, she called Gabriel upstairs and repeated the gesture. Once more Friday stood on his tail and labored backward.
“What the hell?” she said.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gabriel said softly.
“What?”
“Right at the beginning, when he first got to Bogotá, a friend of mine from Marineland went down to help them train him for his first show. They used that signal for a tail-walk, but he was never really good at it, so they stopped using it. I guarantee you he hasn’t seen that signal in eighteen years.”
When she told Truman the story that night, he said, “I think now I know how some husbands feel when their wives bring home a new baby.”
“What do you mean?”
“You almost never talk or think about anything anymore besides that whale.”
“Really?” She’d been dismayed.
“Luckily I’ve been through that, except it wasn’t Rhonda who was besotted, it was me, and instead of a whale we had Winslow.”
“I bet he’d love the comparison. How about we do this—I’ll have half an hour every day to talk about Friday and after that you can cut me off.”
“Nah,” Truman said. “That’s okay. I was probably like that with Miles when he was a piglet. There’s no denying love when it finds you.”
“And is that what this is—love?”
“If it walks like a horse and it sounds like a horse, it’s probably a horse.”
Neva said, “For the record, I’ve always hated that expression. In my business, sometimes it is a zebra.”
“Or a whale,” said Truman.
“Or a whale,” Neva agreed.
FOUR DAYS LATER any suggestion of good weather was a distant memory and the wind on top of the pool was blowing so hard it knocked Libertine off her feet. Even Friday stayed on the surface only long enough to breathe and then returned to the visitors in the gallery, which was packed in spite of the filthy weather. A TV crew from Germany was attempting to put together a five-minute segment using indoor footage exclusively.
Looking for something new and stimulating to give Friday on such an unpromising day, Gabriel recalled an offer from Winslow’s friend Reginald to bring his pet rat to the office for Friday to see. It was a Saturday, so he called Sam’s house, and soon Molly, a pretty little gray and white rat, was sitting on the office windowsill. She was young, even tempered, and entirely unconcerned about the killer whale looming inches away on the other side of the glass. She turned every bit of her small back on him and groomed her fur and whiskers. Friday didn’t leave the window for half an hour.
“Cool!” said Reginald, when Friday had left at last. “Let’s do a snake next time.”
“You got a snake I don’t know about?” Sam asked him.
“Not yet,” said Reginald.
“Then let’s just keep it that way. A rat’s bad enough, but a snake would put Mama right into an early grave.” Reginald subsided, and Sam continued, “What we should do is, we should bring in a power tool or two and run ’em.” He turned to Gabriel and said, “You got something you might want us to paint or drill holes in? He likes that.”
“Not that I can think of,” said Gabriel, “but here’s a thought. Do you by any chance have an extra television, or know somebody who does?”
“There’s that big one shug used to watch,” Sam said. “Don’t know where it is, but it stayed here at the zoo. Truman might know.”
“Excellent,” said Gabriel.
Later that day Truman came to the office and Gabriel asked the whereabouts of the set. “The nights alone get pretty long and killer whales don’t sleep the way we do.”
“No?”
“They’re voluntary breathers,” Gabriel explained. “If they slept in the sense that we do, they’d die. No one really knows how it works, actually. They may sleep with one half of their brain at a time; or they might only doze and not really sleep at all. In either case, the nights go on and on.”
“They did for shug, too,” said Sam sadly.
The television was quickly resurrected from a storage room, and two nights later Johnson Johns
on pulled together a pizza and cookie dinner for everyone, to be held in the killer whale office. The TV was wheeled around so it faced into the pool from the office window. Neva set up a few folding chairs she and Truman had brought from Havenside’s conference room; Ivy brought Julio Iglesias and her knitting; Sam and Corinna brought the old lamp and armchair they’d used when they watched TV with Hannah in the elephant barn; Libertine transported the Oat Maiden pizzas and cookies Johnson Johnson had prepared.
“I should have brought some wine or beer,” said Ivy, smacking her forehead.
“It’s just as well you didn’t,” said Gabriel. “I’ve instituted a zero-tolerance policy for alcohol here.”
“At the zoo?”
“At the whale pool. Killer whales and alcohol don’t mix.”
“He’s behind a pane of glass, for god’s sake,” said Ivy.
“Acrylic,” said Gabriel.
“Whatever. He’s not going to come flying through the window, is he?”
“Doesn’t matter. You may have to go in the water with little or no notice, and believe me, booze plus whales is a bad idea.”
“Well, I guess that makes sense,” grumbled Ivy, “though you are a killjoy. Even Julio Iglesias appreciates a little beer from time to time.” The dog was on the floor, sniffing for crumbs. Neva fed him a piece of mozzarella.
“Oh, sure,” Ivy said, watching her. “Now you’re going to be the golden one.”
As soon as the pizza was gone they all settled into a screening of—what else—Free Willy.
“You think he’s going to get some bad ideas from this picture?” Sam said doubtfully. “What with Willy jumping over that jetty and all?”
“You know what actually jumped that jetty?” asked Gabriel, grinning. “A life-sized, neoprene-covered model. They catapulted it. Want to know how you can tell? There’s no genital slit. Censored for your family’s viewing discretion.”
Since Friday wasn’t even in the window anymore—and hadn’t been since the janitorial staff had arrived to buff the floor in the visitors’ gallery—they fast-forwarded the movie to the denouement. A great whoop went up as “Willy” indeed sailed over the jetty in the movie’s climactic shot, his underbelly smooth and featureless as a cue ball.
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