Song of the Sound

by Jeff Gulvin

  The expectant mother swam in slow circles and Libby filmed her carefully, looking at her markings; she was mottled like a painted horse on the underside of her belly. Obligingly the whale came close, face on so Libby could document the definition of her callosities, jaw line and eyebrow and the tip of her snout: these would be unique and years of practice had enabled her to identify individuals quickly.

  The pregnant cow moved away and two bulls came towards them, pushing another female ahead of them. John-Cody signalled Libby to dive deeper. These were courting whales and as many as six or seven bulls could mate with the same cow; that meant a lot of turbulence and fluke movement that could easily drown them. Libby finned down, filming the males circling the female who swam on her back now, flippers breaking the surface. They caressed her with muzzle and flank and flipper; later they would try to roll her over if she didn’t turn to breathe, then one after the other they would dive beneath her and mate.

  But now there was nothing but gentleness, foreplay, two males vying for the same female, each trying to show his prowess, moving around her in playful rolls, gliding his body against her, touching her with fin and belly and the underside of his jaw. John-Cody felt the cold of the sea working its way into the layer of air that had been built up by the suit. He checked the dive gauge and knew he was at saturation level. The courting whales moved off again leaving them alone and he indicated the gauge to Libby. She acknowledged and slowly they began their ascent.

  On deck Libby was bubbling with excitement. She had dived with whales before, but never had she caught the mating ritual on film. She peeled off her drysuit and half unzipped the under-suit. She cleaned her camera and took the film out, stowing it carefully in a zip-lock polythene bag. Jonah and Tom were on deck and they looked on and smiled as she chattered away nineteen to the dozen.

  John-Cody leaned on the rail in his dripping wetsuit, hair soaked against his skull, sipping coffee and smoking a roll-up cigarette. He stared across the open harbour where the sea lifted to batter the cliffs of Ewing Island. The sounds rushed in his ears, the howl of the wind, the slap of water against the hull, the creak of the shrouds above his head. A gale was raging along the coast and all at once the utter desolation of this place hit him. A chill ran through him and with it a sense of loneliness that no amount of company could compensate. He heard Libby and he heard Tom and Jonah, and yet he heard nothing but the shriek of the wind, the mournful cry of an albatross and the fury of sea on rocks.

  He stared at the great forest of rata where he and Mahina had walked then crawled as the branches bent closer and closer to their heads. Peat-laden soil under bare feet: they had made love beneath the canopy where interwoven limbs could still the wind for a moment.

  He felt eyes on him and looked round to see that Libby had stopped talking and was watching him from her perch on the dive locker. He looked at her and she looked at him and there was gentleness in her eyes that recalled understanding. And through all this desolation he felt an urge for her, a sense of yearning that moved from his breast to his loins like a bridge between the spiritual and the physical. It was a weird feeling, one he didn’t understand: one that smacked of betrayal in an incomprehensible way.

  ‘That was wonderful,’ Libby said. ‘Thank you.’

  John-Cody felt the rocking of the boat underfoot. ‘We need to get to an all-weather anchorage. I’ve let us stay here too long.’

  He peeled off his wetsuit and stood freezing in just his boxer shorts and T-shirt. Tom had read his mind and already started the engines. Jonah was flaking the anchor chain and John-Cody and Libby went inside to shower.

  ‘This is going to be a storm and a half,’ John-Cody said to Tom. ‘Take us right into Laurie Harbour.’

  He heard the final rattle of the anchor chain and felt Tom engage the gears as he stepped into the for’ard shower. He was very cold, his flesh bitten by sea and wind, and it took a while before the heat of the water began to penetrate. The life slowly returned to the skin though and he stood for a long time with water falling over his shoulders, chilblains in toes and fingers. He took the shampoo, massaged his scalp and tried to push away the memories he knew would surface. Seeing Moby Dick had brought them all back: the courtship ritual before mating, that pregnant cow burgeoning with new life. It disturbed him. It was not what he had expected.

  They steamed beyond Erebus Cove and dropped anchor in Laurie Harbour. The depth varied between twelve and sixty-seven metres and John-Cody, dressed and warm once again, supervised their position using the radar and depth sounder as well as the ever-dimming visibility. The wind was less ferocious here but still it howled at them through the glasshouse, flapping the transparent plastic door and rattling the wire shrouds so they hummed and sang and vibrated.

  Libby was busy working at the chart table. She had her computer set up and linked to the digital video camera to revisit the images she had filmed. They were good, very good, as good as any she had ever got and it was only now, back in the warmth of the boat, that she was able to freeze-frame and really study the state of the pregnant cow. She ran a hand through her hair and sat back. John-Cody came down the steps and bent over her shoulder.

  ‘She’s very close to her time,’ Libby said. ‘Maybe we could film the birth. Nobody’s ever done that.’

  John-Cody looked at her, mouth twisted down at the corners. ‘I told you we tried once. It was night and the lights attracted great shoals of krill.’ He shifted his shoulders. ‘Birth’s a very private thing, Libby. Maybe whales don’t want to be filmed.’

  ‘Maybe not. I’d like to try though. If we could, just think what a breakthrough that would be.’

  John-Cody looked at the ceiling as the wind rocked the boat again. ‘You might have to wait a while. This is going to blow and blow.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. The wind is coming from the north-east. It’s right on top of us and it’s going to stay that way for a while.’

  She lifted one eyebrow. ‘You’re experienced enough to know that?’

  ‘No, I just listened to the forecast.’

  He was right. The storm kicked into a fury and did not let up for three full days. Libby worked as much as she could at the chart table and dangled low-frequency hydra-phones over the side of the boat so she could listen to the mating calls of the whales. She sat for hours wearing her headphones and monitoring the different patterns of sound, isolating some and saving them in different programs so she could evaluate them later. There were low-frequency pulses, tones that lasted between half a second and twenty seconds, vibrations like snores, and deep guttural moans. They were forms of communication, a language system about which humans knew nothing at all except that the whales could hear one another over great distances, depending on conditions in the water. It was at times like this — during the hours she would spend listening to them talking to one another and considering the great migrations they undertook — that Libby felt very small and insignificant in the great scheme of the universe.

  John-Cody lay in his bunk and listened to the wind in the shrouds on the afterdeck. He stared at the ceiling and remembered looking at another ceiling nearly thirty years ago, when he had made a decision that altered his life for ever.

  He was with the band in the upstairs room at Big Daddy’s on Bourbon Street, his draft papers in his hand. They all held their draft papers. Dewey was staring at his and telling the others again how he didn’t even know where Vietnam was.

  ‘It’s in South East Asia, Dewey, where it’s hot and wet and people like us are getting killed or maimed every day.’ John-Cody looked at the paper, the US Army calling him to serve in Vietnam: to shoot people, get shot maybe.

  ‘What’s maimed?’ Dewey said.

  ‘Getting bits blown off you.’ John-Cody looked at him. ‘Arms or legs or your head maybe. You’ve seen the pictures on TV. They try not to show us that stuff but this is America, they can’t not show it.’

  ‘So what happens to the band?’ Jimmy Tib
bins asked him. ‘I mean we were just getting good.’

  ‘I know.’ John-Cody strummed a few chords on his guitar then laid the Fender down. It had taken him three years of delivering newspapers to save up enough to buy it. The rain leaned into the shutters so they rattled and bounced in their housings.

  ‘Hell of a storm,’ someone said. ‘It’s blowing all along the gulf coast. They reckon there’s flooding at Mobile.’

  They went their separate ways, each as subdued as the others. The draft notices gave them dates for their medical examination and after that it was training, then the jungles of South East Asia. John-Cody stowed the Fender in its case and walked home. This part of the city could be dangerous at night, but he had grown up here and had a route that kept him out of trouble.

  He lay in bed, listening to his father snoring through the wall. His sister got up and went to the toilet. Earlier she had asked him how long he would be in Asia. He had no answer for her. Now he lay with his hands behind his head and stared at the wrinkled cracks that littered the ceiling.

  His father had handed him the unopened letter when it came: both of them knew what it was and they sat together at the kitchen table and looked at it. His mother left them alone to talk.

  ‘Did you fight, Dad?’ John-Cody had asked him.

  His father shook his head. ‘Your granddaddy got killed in World War II, but the army never took me.’ He slapped his thigh as he said it. He had been injured in an accident when he was thirteen and the surgery on his right leg had left it an inch shorter than the left.

  ‘Would you have gone?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have had a choice.’

  ‘Just like I don’t.’

  His father said nothing, merely looked at him, his gaze steady and even across the space between them.

  ‘I want to play music, Dad. I don’t want to kill anybody.’

  His father nodded. He was a harmonica player and a good one, working at the railroad station in the daytime and playing Cajun clubs at night. There was nothing either of them could say. An edict from the government had fallen through the letterbox and John-Cody was summoned to serve his country. He wasn’t in college, had no remote chance of going to college and was banking on a career in music. The band was good enough to get noticed, playing rock ’n’ roll as well as the blues-type stuff expected in New Orleans.

  He lay back in bed later with sleep far from him and he made a decision, perhaps not even consciously: he didn’t remember it being conscious. Early the next morning he got up and packed a small bag, took his guitar and stole out of the house. He had a few hundred dollars saved from the money he earned on Bourbon Street and he went to the Greyhound terminal and took a bus heading west. He told no-one, just crept away without looking back and left New Orleans for ever.

  He got off the bus in Dallas and played music on the street for a few extra dollars before moving out to the highway again and extending his thumb for a ride. Two months later he got out of a truck in McCall, Idaho, right by Payette Lake. He liked what he saw, lied about his age and got a job, tending bar in Hogan’s Hotel. He had been working in various clubs for three years already and had watched some of the best bartenders in the world mix cocktails. He knew more about alcohol than most of the customers who frequented Hogan’s over the weekend, and on top of that he had a fancy guitar he could pick at. He had cultivated his father’s limp to avoid too much scrutiny. He was mature for his years and could grow a good beard by the time he was seventeen: his hair was thick and long and with the limp he looked like he had already been to Asia. Some people commented on it, but he avoided that kind of conversation and after a couple of months his weekend guitar-playing had doubled Hogan’s takings.

  Then one day the FBI showed up and arrested him. He had been watching Hogan’s back as they paid in at the bank. A sedan pulled up and two agents jumped out and challenged him. Sweat on his brow, though there was the hint of fall in the air and the leaves were beginning to turn russet on the cedars that lined the sidewalk. One agent watched the street while the other handcuffed him then pressed his head down like a felon and forced him into the back of their car. People stood and stared as they drove him out of town.

  TWENTY

  THOSE TWO FBI AGENTS plagued John-Cody’s mind for the next week. Three days of storms and they hunkered down in Port Ross with the atmospherics so bad they could barely raise Alex on the radio. John-Cody, Jonah and Tom worked on maintaining the boat while Libby monitored whale activity via her system of hydra-phones. When the weather allowed, John-Cody took the dinghy across to Erebus Cove where they dropped a hydra-phone mounted on a buoy. Libby could see the awesome power of the Southern Ocean as it battered Friday Island and Rapoka Point between Enderby and the main Auckland Island. The noise was terrific, a continuous booming roar that lifted above the howl of the wind. She thought about the Derry Castle and the Grafton and the wreck of the Invercauld. ‘This must be a terrible place to die,’ she said.

  John-Cody squinted at her from his stance in the stern.

  Back on board the Korimako he thought about Libby’s words and the sky glowered at him as if his very thoughts had angered the gods. That brought him back to Mahina and the new confusion that reigned in his head: so many mixed emotions, such tangled thoughts. His head echoed with it and he had to go outside to breathe, but when he did the weight of the storm seemed to push him down to the deck. He stood against the rail, rain and spray streaming off his oilskins, alone with his thoughts and this place and the voices of whales lifting through the tempest.

  The FBI took him to Boise where he was locked up for the first time in his life, a weight like a stone in his gut as the key turned in the lock. There was one window in the cell, a narrow slit high in the wall, and the bars covering it were like bars across his soul. He could feel the first fingers of claustrophobia beginning to probe and he stood up and paced the floor like an animal. He worked his hands at his sides, loosening the joints as he did when he was getting ready to play. His guitar had been left in the upstairs room he rented at Hogan’s bar and it was all he could think about now. There was no air in the cell or that was how it felt and he had to fight to get some movement in his chest. A stitch developed and he could neither sit nor stand in any degree of comfort.

  He heard people moving about in the corridor on the other side of the wall and only then did his confinement really hit him. Freedom, the thing he valued above all else, the ability to come and go as he pleased, had been taken away from him. His wrists still chafed from the handcuffs, having been forced to sit on his hands all the way from McCall. He looked at the door with no handle, touched its flatness with his fingertips, ran his palms over its smoothness as if requiring a sense other than sight to convince himself that he couldn’t get out. His whole future, whether he lived or died, lay with those on the other side of that door. If they did not open it he would die in here like some skeletal wreck lying underground in chains.

  He sat on the bed and considered his actions. He had skipped the draft, run off hoping they would never find him. He would not fight. He had known that as soon as the draft papers landed. He had known it as he picked at his guitar in that upstairs room when a silence descended on the band the like of which none of them had ever known before. Even now he knew it. He was scared in a way he had never been scared before and he had no idea what they would do to him. But he knew he could never put on fatigues, pick up an M-16 and aim it at another man. It was beyond him as beyond him as waiting to mug somebody in the dark places of the French Quarter.

  Finally they opened the door and he looked into the face of another special agent, a small but well-built man in his mid-twenties, hair clawing the back of his skull and hacked to a fuzz on top. In his hand he held a sheaf of papers and he shook his head in a dismissive sort of way, stepping back from the door. ‘Haul ass, cowboy.’

  John-Cody stepped into the corridor and the trapped air broke from his throat in a cough. The agent looked back at him. ‘Does get kind of airle
ss in there, doesn’t it?’ He took John-Cody to an interview room, stark and bare with just a thin-topped table and two chairs. John-Cody sat down, resting both hands in his lap and trying to keep the quiver from his limbs. The agent could smell his fear and his eyes darkened as if the weakness sent a charge right through him.

  ‘You ran away from the draft. That makes you a coward, Mr Gibbs.’ He sat back, resting one elbow on the chair back. ‘It makes you unpatriotic. Your country needs you and you’re letting us down.’ He shook his head. ‘If I had my way we’d shoot people like you. You see, to me you’re a deserter, you just haven’t done the training yet.’

  John-Cody was aware of every breath that climbed from his lungs and sank back again. He said nothing, kept his eyes averted, concentrating on keeping those breaths going because if he didn’t he thought he would die as he sat there.

  ‘The army is a little bit more flexible than me, though, Gibbs.’ The agent sat forward. ‘Fortunately for you. You see, they get a lot of people running off like you did, thinking that nobody would come after them.’ He made a face. ‘Maybe because you’re young they give you the benefit of the doubt.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going to drive you up to Fort Brett where they’ll ask you again to join up. Nice of them to give you a second chance, don’t you think?’

  John-Cody stared at him and in that moment a sense of calm descended. The trembling ceased and he looked the agent squarely in the eye.

  ‘It won’t make any difference.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I still won’t go.’ John-Cody screwed up his eyes. ‘You may think it’s cowardice, special agent, but I could no more shoot someone in Vietnam than take your gun and shoot you.’ He made an open-handed gesture. ‘You see, I’d be useless to the army.’