Friday's Harbor: A Novel

by Diane Hammond

  “You look wrung out. Tough day?” Matthew asked mildly. “Have you had dinner?”

  “Not yet. Neva’s working this evening, so I told Winslow I’d pick up something on my way home. I can’t stay long.”

  “My dear,” Matthew called into the kitchen, “do we have enough dinner to feed a growing boy?”

  “I’m sure we do,” Lavinia called back. “Elena cooked a roast this morning.” Elena was the housekeeper who’d been with the Levy family for nearly thirty-five years. “And Ivy’s gone home for a few days.”

  “Tell Winslow to ride his bike over,” Matthew suggested. Truman lived just four blocks away. Truman got Winslow on the phone and told him to be very, very careful on the ride over, despite the fact that he’d be on residential streets with very little traffic, and to use his headlamp.

  “So,” Matthew said with the faintest twinkle in his eye once Truman was off the phone. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  Truman rubbed his eyes, then his face, then his scalp, harder and harder until his hair stood in lively little spikes all over his head. In his most lawyerly voice he attempted a cogent summary of the day for Matthew, sticking to the facts. When he was finished, what it all amounted to was this: Martin Choi, dim though he was, had brought Truman to his knees.

  “My boy, there’s lying and then there’s what I like to call creative truth-telling,” Matthew said after listening very carefully. “From what you’ve told me, you weren’t so much lying as you were disorganized and tentative. The cardinal rule when working with the press is to keep the story so simple that even the very stupid can’t get it wrong. Identify a simple message, make sure you have facts to support it—and mind you, you can get creative in your presentation—and once you’ve decided you have a story that can be summarized in one simple sentence, blow every hole in it you can think of and see if it sinks or floats. If it sinks, keep working on it, even if the phone is ringing off the hook. If it floats, stick to it no matter what. And don’t lie. Never lie. In work as in life, it rarely helps. And it’ll destroy your credibility forever.”

  Winslow came into the room with Lavinia, who kissed Truman on the top of the head, a rare demonstrative act. She handed around flatware and napkins, to be laid on TV trays rather than the dining room table.

  Then she turned on the last of the evening news.

  IVY FIRST HEARD that Friday had died, an apparent suicide, as she drove home from the market in Friday Harbor. She nearly drove into a tree, and Julio Iglesias was pitched right out of his booster seat onto the floor, where he fixed her with a long and baleful look before turning his back on her and curling into a sullen ball on the floorboards.

  “What the hell!” she said when she connected with Truman. “When were you planning on letting me know? Suicide? I leave for two days and this happens?”

  “Wait,” said Truman. “Wait, wait, wait. Friday is alive. He’s well. It’s all been a huge mistake.”

  “Well?” said Ivy. “Who botched it?”

  “I did,” he said, and proceeded to give her a quick recap.

  “Whew,” said Ivy. “I’m pouring myself a good stiff drink. I’m even giving Julio Iglesias a small one.”

  “Then bottoms up,” said Truman. “And by the way, if you TiVoed the news, I’d recommend you not watch.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yep,” Truman said. “Just don’t.”

  THE NEXT MORNING Truman waited until he’d gotten to his office to open the News-Tribune. The lead headline read KILLER WHALE WANTS OUT. Despite what Truman knew were Libertine’s best efforts, the story was a remarkable work of fiction, claiming that Friday was trying to break the glass in the zoo’s visitors’ gallery as a tactic to demand his return to the wild. Apparently bowing to the fact that a suicide attempt wasn’t likely, Martin had instead seized on the fact that Friday once swam free in the North Atlantic, “at one with his podmates and limitless environment.” Based on the fact of Friday’s wild birth—and Truman granted that at least Martin got that part right—he went on to quote Libertine: “He’s a remarkably adaptive animal. His new surroundings and life are a huge, huge improvement. Imagine if you’d been living in a cardboard box for eighteen years, and suddenly you’re given the presidential suite at the Hilton. That’s what this feels like to him. And he’s the opposite of suicidal; he’s on a round-the-clock high. His new life here at the zoo is phenomenal.”

  The article then quoted a person named Katrina Beemer, vice president of a group called Friends of Animals of the Sea, which Truman had never heard of, who said in rebuttal, “Sure, his accommodations there are a step up, but replacing one prison cell with another, better prison cell doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s still a prison. He’s captive and a long way from home. It’s no coincidence that he’s sick. Sickness is the outward manifestation of a dying spirit. Animals from the sea should be returned to the sea. I implore the Max Biederman [sic] Zoo with all my heart to do the right thing here and let him go home.”

  The article then revealed that Friends of Animals of the Sea was accepting donations to launch a campaign to return Friday to the North Atlantic.

  “C’MON,” SAID DINK Schuler at that afternoon’s emergency executive committee meeting, which Truman had convened. In front of him on the table was a copy of Martin Choi’s article. “The guy’s an idiot—everybody knows that.”

  “I disagree,” said Bruce Horvitz, vice president of the zoo’s board of directors. “That is, yes, the guy’s an idiot, but he’s still capable of stirring up a storm.”

  “Nah,” said Dink. “No one reads that paper anyway, and the people who do don’t make the decisions in this town. Besides, who the hell would turn loose an animal that hasn’t smelled ocean air since he was a kid-whale? That woman is bat-crap crazy.” He stabbed his finger at a photo of Trina Beemer. “And while we’re at it, why do the nut jobs always turn out to be such dogs? Seriously.”

  “Libertine?” said Truman, who couldn’t see the paper. “Actually, she’s turned out to be quite an asset—”

  “Nah, nah, that Tina Bender or whoever, from the Animals of the Sea Society or whatever the hell it is. ASS,” Dink ranted. “What kind of an organization calls itself something that spells ASS?”

  “It’s actually Friends of Animals of the Sea. FAS,” said Truman.

  “I don’t care what it is; they better keep their mitts off this whale. We’re making a goddamn fortune! I mean, all those years of scratching around and now we’re swimming in money.”

  Truman smiled weakly and said he’d keep them updated as new stories appeared in the media, but the five men and one woman on his executive committee didn’t care: After some very hard times, the zoo was running in the black and its name was suddenly known to half the residents of the Pacific Northwest and a hell of a lot of others across the county, even over in the UK and Germany. It was fun to be on top, politics be damned. Let them raise their money. Legally the whale belonged to the zoo.

  JUST BEFORE LUNCH Gabriel called Truman and asked if he had an hour or so to come over and help with something. Gabriel refused to say what that something was, but Neva met Truman at the door to the killer whale office with his wet suit and a broad smile.

  “Thank you for the concern,” Truman said, “but this is not the time—”

  “We think this is exactly the time,” Neva said. “C’mon, a little whale therapy would do you good. And him, too. Someone advised us to keep him busy and away from the windows. Here’s your chance to do your bit.”

  No amount of objecting dissuaded her, and anyway the thought of his office and the inevitable stack of media calls, was suddenly too much. Truman gave in.

  It took him forever to put the thing on—he’d never worn a wet suit before, or even tried it on, and he was amazed at how heavy and clumsy it was. Once he was dressed, Neva hustled him to the top of the pool before he had a chance to focus on how ridiculous he felt.

  He slipped into the water beside her. Cold water immediate
ly trickled down his neck into his suit and inside his sleeves. The sensation was unpleasant but fleeting; his body heat quickly warmed the thin layer of water. He was weirdly buoyant inside the neoprene.

  Almost immediately he felt a presence below; an approaching enormity. Friday surfaced just one foot away from him, utterly silent. When he exhaled it scared Truman half to death, despite the fact that it was a sound he’d heard a million times before. He could feel the whale regarding him.

  Neva greeted Friday with a pat on the surface of the water—a signal that she’d give him a scratch if he came over. The whale accepted, rolling on his side and lifting one pectoral flipper high, offering her the killer whale equivalent of an armpit. Truman horned in on the moment and gave scratches, too, thinking that Friday’s skin didn’t feel like skin—at least not in the human sense—and it was hard to believe that this huge animal could feel something as delicate as a light touch. Still, there was no doubt that he could. He lolled and rolled with pleasure.

  “Isn’t he amazing?” Neva asked, clearly delighted to share this experience with him. “He’s the most fabulous animal!” She’d taken to his world quickly and capably, diving and swimming and giving him exercise sessions and silly sessions and work to do. And Truman knew that almost anyone would kill to be here in his place, in this icy water beside this enormous animal, but he couldn’t shake his uneasiness. He rode Friday’s back and scratched him until his fingernails were black with sloughed skin cells, but then he told Neva he was ready to get out, hitching himself up to sit on the dry concrete.

  “Really?” She looked crushed. “You’ve only been in here for a few minutes. Don’t you like him?”

  “It’s not that—I don’t even know him. I just don’t feel comfortable.”

  “Are you scared? Because he’s really just a big pussycat—”

  “It’s not that—I’m not scared. Well, maybe a little, but that’s not it. Don’t you feel like we’re, I don’t know, trivializing him somehow? He isn’t just a big pussycat. He’s a wild animal, and he’s smart, crazy-smart—you can just feel it.”

  Neva looked him right in the eye. “Yes, he is. And we’ve been able to give him a decent life here, for the first time in forever. How often can you say that?”

  “I know that, of course I know that, but I can’t help feeling, I don’t know—guilty.”

  “Why on earth would you feel guilty?”

  “He’s here because of us, isn’t he?”

  “We got him away from that terrible place.”

  “I don’t mean here here,” he said, indicating the pool. “I mean, you know, here.” He held out his arms to take in the universe. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’ve played God?”

  “You didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “You know what I mean. He doesn’t belong here, he didn’t do anything to deserve this. What was it that woman said in the paper this morning? ‘Replacing one prison cell with another, better prison cell doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s still in prison.’ Something like that.”

  Neva hitched herself up to sit beside him, her feet beside his in the wet walk. Friday had taken his blue ball across the pool and left it on the surface while he sank to look into the viewing gallery. She sucked reflectively on her wet suit sleeve. “Gabriel said that only the stupid ones get caught. The smart ones get away.”

  “So, what, now he’s somehow to blame for his own captivity?”

  “No, more like it’s natural selection at work. I didn’t know you felt that way about captivity. It’s probably not the most helpful mind-set for a zoo director.”

  He looked at her earnest little face beside him. Feeling a rush of affection, he leaned over and kissed her. “Don’t mind me—it’s just been a bitch of a day.” Then he went downstairs to change back into his real clothes.

  The next day, as abruptly as the body slams had begun, they stopped.

  Chapter 12

  IT WAS COLD on top of the pool, and very dark, even darker than it usually was at 2 A.M. The unlit water was as black and opaque as tar. When the security guard did her regular rounds, she didn’t see or hear Friday. In what changed from concern to near panic, she waited and waited and waited, stock-still, for some sign that the whale was all right, that he was breathing, that he was there at all. She looked at the moon momentarily for strength and—

  WAHHHHH!

  Just two feet away, Friday burst straight up through the water’s surface, rising higher and higher. As she told the story later, the security guard nearly had a seizure.

  “If that whale has a sense of humor,” she said, “you know he was laughing like hell.”

  From that night on, scaring the security guards became one of Friday’s favorite late-night games.

  IN THE EARLY spring the zoo was approached by an IMAX movie producer who wanted, in exchange for a sizable donation, to come to the zoo when the gallery was closed to the public and capture footage of Friday. Now, half an hour before the zoo would open, Neva escorted a photographer and his assistant to the gallery. They were thrilled when Friday swam right to them, keeping himself neutrally buoyant while he inspected them and their gear. Neva had predicted as much, and they thanked her profusely, but in fact the prediction was a no-brainer: in the early morning Friday had seen no one in the gallery for hours, and anyway he was always glad to see a camera of any kind. The truth was, Friday had begun to earn a reputation around the zoo as a shameless media hog. He would swim the entire length of the pool if a commercial camera appeared, cocking his head, opening his mouth, and giving a cheesy smile. The appearance of a beta-camera could wake him from a sound sleep; he would follow one for hours. No one knew why.

  Best of all, this camera was enormous and made a fine, loud ticking sound Neva suspected he could hear through the gallery windows.

  The IMAX photographer rolled his film; his assistant worked inside a blackout bag to load up extra cartridges. They filmed Friday inches away through the window; they filmed him following them from one window to the next. At first they were ecstatic, but after fifteen minutes and all the close-up shots they could ever want, it became clear that Friday had no intention of leaving, even though they needed swimming footage. The minutes went by. The cameraman drummed his fingers on his tripod; the assistant went out for a smoke. Friday waited in the windows with the patience of Job.

  Finally, defeated, they packed up their gear and were never heard from again.

  THE MAX L. Biedelman Zoo, like most other zoos, rented its facility to groups and individuals for private events. One Saturday evening when Truman was working late, he discovered a forlorn bride and groom sitting alone at the reception’s head table in Havenside’s ballroom. The groom was patting the bride’s hand comfortingly. There was no one else in the ballroom, though there were tables that could accommodate somewhere between seventy-five and one hundred guests. On this most special of days, the newlyweds had been upstaged by Friday—all the guests were in the viewing gallery, and had been for nearly an hour. The bride and groom would have liked to cut the cake, but in spite of three requests, no one was coming back to the ballroom.

  In the end it took Truman making an announcement over the public address system to pry the guests out of the gallery.

  THE PARADE OF celebrities asking to meet Friday up close continued. Truman accommodated them when he could—or rather Neva accommodated them in her ever more time-consuming role of guide and interpreter—but one VIP in particular would always stand out from the rest. He was a musician, possibly the oldest-looking sixty-year-old in the world, stringy and dissipated, a health insurance nightmare, a man easily twenty years past his prime. Once, he had been the opening act for some of the greatest rock musicians in the world. Now he was playing secondary Native American casinos in Washington State. Still, his name was recognizable. He got his promoter to set up a visit with Friday on his one free night. He wanted to see the killer whale he’d been hearing about—the one that was now almost as famous as the musician still was
in his dreams.

  Neva had a rare night off, so Truman escorted him to the empty viewing gallery in the early evening. For the musician this was the worst time of day, before the bars and clubs got going, after people with families had gone home, when lonely people populated the world. Truman faded back against the wall, leaving the musician to his encounter.

  Friday swam over immediately. For a long time the two regarded each other through the glass, red-rimmed eye to red-rimmed eye. The musician saw on the whale’s flanks a quilting of old wounds, teeth marks, lesion scars. He pulled his jacket tight, and then, astonishingly, he closed his eyes and began to yodel. The sound reverberated in the hollow air, haunting and pure.

  Friday stayed, rapt. Truman called Neva at home, and she called Gabriel and Libertine, and one by one they arrived and stayed, bearing mute witness to this homage to survival.

  EVER SINCE FRIDAY had arrived at the zoo, a municipal clerk from St. Cloud, Minnesota, had called Neva once a month to check on him. She always called during her lunch hour, keeping the calls short and businesslike, and declined whenever Neva offered to call her back, to save her the money it cost to make the calls. In all, the clerk had sent Friday four checks for twenty-five dollars each—what she felt she could afford.

  As she explained to Neva, she had never met Friday, or even seen a killer whale in person. She saw Free Willy once with her grandson, and although she liked it well enough, she hadn’t been overly moved. In fact, she couldn’t explain her interest in Friday at all, although she had been following his progress ever since she saw a news clip about him when he first arrived in Bladenham. As she tried to articulate it to Neva, her vigilance on his behalf had to do with her sense of citizenship, the kind that might lead her to keep an eye on a neighborhood dog that had been left outside too much. She felt no psychic pull, just this abiding sense of responsibility.