The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  Anemone pitched hard, creaking. The chains rattled again, dragging along the hull. Something thudded and Sara tensed. “Getting heavier,” Quill observed. “Went through a field an hour ago was almost solid. We get trapped, it’ll turn ugly.”

  “Speed, Lars?” Perrault called.

  “Ten.”

  “Bien. Here is what we are going to do.” The captain tapped the table with a long index. “Mick: Shortwave Esperanza. Let Greenpeace know we have a fix on the fleet. Jamie, take in the main. That will give us more time to avoid floating ice, and less damage if we hit.”

  Bodine scratched black stubble. “If anyone’s listening?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we transmit, the Japanese can pick us up.”

  “He’s right,” Madsen said, voice hollowed by the dome, as if he were a sibyl speaking from within a rock-walled cave.

  “We must share information. We could box the fleet in between us.”

  “They won’t cooperate,” Madsen snorted. “I say leave them out of whatever we do.”

  Perrault weaved his head in a peculiar snakelike motion. “I hear you both. Well, let me think more about it.

  “Meanwhile … Sara, would you get the others out here? Eddi and Georgie and Tehiyah? Jamie, another pot of coffee might be in order.”

  She went aft first, taking particular pleasure in jabbing Dorée hard in the side as she snored sleep-masked and earplugged in the big master bed. Soon everyone was either at the table or, since there wasn’t room, hanging from handholds or clinging to the strutwork that supported the steering chair. Water fell in fat heavy drops from the overhead, as if they were deep beneath the sea. Anemone careened even more heavily as their speed ebbed. The wind shrieked and whistled.

  “All right,” the captain began, rubbing his chin. “We are not far from the whaling fleet, we believe. After all this time. Lars?”

  “I’ve sailed against these people before,” Madsen said, invisible from the waist up. His boots kicked idly. “They’re good seamen, and they react violently to being interfered with. One man’s particularly dangerous. We call him ‘Captain Crunch’ because he rammed a boat two years ago. Two of the crew drowned.”

  Quill said, “Remember, if you go in the water here—”

  “You’re bloody well dead in five,” they chorused. Georgie giggled.

  Perrault said, “I will review our assignments, for if and when we finally encounter those I can only describe as our enemies. In charge of inflatable launch: Mr. Quill, assisted by Ms. Dorée and Ms. Norris-Simpson. In the inflatable: Mr. Madsen, in charge; Mr. Bodine, and Ms. Auer. Their mission is to harass, damage equipment, and place themselves, physically if necessary, between the whalers and their prey. On Anemone’s helm: Ms. Pollard. On deck after launch, to recover the boat and respond to orders as necessary: Ms. Dorée and Ms. Norris-Simpson.”

  He looked around the table. “When in contact with the Japanese, all hands above or below decks will wear exposure suits and life jackets. Anyone topside will also wear safety harnesses. The life raft will be at the foot of the companionway, stocked with radios, batteries, food, water. Jamie, overhaul it today.”

  “Aye, Skipper.”

  “Remember what Lars told you. If we seriously hinder their operations, and they see a chance to run us down, this Crunch has proven he will do exactly that. We must be ready to sustain a collision, abandon ship, and survive until we reach land or are rescued.

  “Well, that is about all I have to say. Any questions?” He held out his mug and Quill poured it full again. Then he looked down as Dorée covered his hand with hers.

  “Why’s she on the helm?” Tehiyah squinted at Sara. “I told you I wanted to do something important. Somewhere I can make a difference.”

  Perrault cleared his throat, still looking at the fingers resting on his wrist. His eyes flicked up toward Madsen, but the Dane’s face wasn’t visible. From the angle, though, Sara was pretty sure he could see what was going on. The boots had ceased kicking idly; they braced against a support. Perrault circled her wrist with two fingers and set it aside. “Sara has proven herself on the helm. And launching and recovering the inflatable will be important, once we are in contact. It will also put you out on deck, where Georgie can film you.… Any other questions? No? Then one more thing. I wish to have this boat cleaned, very thoroughly. We have let conditions go too far.”

  Dorée seemed about to protest again, but subsided. Quill showed big yellow teeth in a simian grin. Sara thought he looked more like Hagrid of Hogwarts than ever.

  * * *

  They ran east. She put in another few hours on the wheel while the rest, chivied by Quill, began at the bow. The smells of disinfectant, detergent, and bleach penetrated the chill air, the mildew stink. She smiled down at Dorée’s bent back as the actress pushed a mop along the deck. She glanced up, as if feeling Sara’s gaze. They regarded each other for a moment; then Dorée, without the slightest change in expression, went back to mopping.

  “Inside the bubble, dashboard, everywhere you can reach,” the mate said, handing up bucket, sponge, and spray bottle. “But don’t let it distract you from the ice.”

  So far on this watch, though, she hadn’t seen any. Stretches of heaving water, black as coal. Shoals of birds. But the snow had stopped. The fog was thinning, visibility opening out, though the dim light made it hard to see far even with the heavy night binoculars that hung by the wheel.

  * * *

  No night, and no day. But the light was ebbing again as she nursed a mug of tepid tea on the salon settee. The boat creaked and swayed. Anemone was cutting through the waves with a hiss like sled runners, given her head now that the danger of ice seemed to have receded. Quill’s boots now dangled from the steering position. When Sara looked forward the rolling tunnel of the long hull rotated like a funhouse ride. Through the open hatch she could make out the glowing dials and screens that illuminated Bodine’s constricted kingdom.

  She microwaved another mugful and took it forward, stepping carefully. Past the sounds of sleeping men and women. The washer-dryer had been repaired and all the curtains taken down, laundered, and rehung, and everyone had been issued fresh towels. The newly cleaned bulkheads gleamed, reflecting her in distorted versions as she passed. She corkscrewed through the hatch, caught a handhold, and stepped over and between the green duffels and boxes of stores and reels of heavy line that covered the deck. She couldn’t fully straighten, and the overhead came down and the deck up with each step so that by the time she reached where the ex-soldier sat in his taped-up, lashed-down armchair she was crouched in a space barely adequate to breathe in.

  “Earl Grey?”

  “Hey. Thanks.” He removed his eyes from the screen and focused fuzzily on her. Stubble coated his cheeks like black soot. He wore green coveralls with the sleeves pushed back and chest bare at the throat except for a loosely twisted cloth with a reticulated pattern in desert tan. His rumpled hair grew down the back of his neck untrimmed.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me. About the—the laundry.”

  “Not a problem. We don’t draw a line in the sand, she’ll take the whole boat over.” He patted a sailbag. “Grab a perch.”

  She wriggled down on the crackly bag, her bottom sinking into stiff yet yielding folds within. Her knees stuck up and her back was rammed against a coil of thick yellow line studded with hard round things.

  He returned his attention to the screen, which jumped with vertical bars of light. He took off the earphones and turned them toward her. A sizzling static backed by a steady hum pulsed against the swish of water. It occurred to her then that Bodine, alone up here, crippled, with all that gear swaying between him and the hatch, would be trapped if they hit ice. How must he feel when it thumped and banged against the thin fiberglass? She shuddered and hugged herself. It was much colder up here too, far from even the scanty warmth of the heaters.

  The man beside her fitted the headphones to his skull once more. He turned s
witches, and another screen powered above the first. He pulled the keyboard down and typed in a gunfire rattle. Listened, head cocked. Then slid the phones off again and turned up a speaker.

  Another sound filtered into the rushing sea and tapping gear and the thump of her heart in her ears. A distant lonely wail, trembling with ethereal beauty. Music from the depths of space. Notes intertwining, playing off one another in ghostly counterpoint. A chant in a cathedral as huge as the ocean itself.

  “Humpbacks?” she murmured. “How far?”

  “No telling. There’s a sound channel that takes it hundreds of miles.”

  They listened as the eerie music echoed from the deep. Each vocalization began with a trill, then meandered through several phrases before ending on an upward flourish. After several minutes he murmured, “The males come up with a new routine, a new song, every spring. It originates east of New Guinea and gets passed from one pod to another. The North Pacific. The North Atlantic. Antarctica.”

  She’d read that in the literature, but it was different hearing it. He eased a dial around and the tones became sharper, more piercing. Again, each utterance ended with that upward pitch. She murmured, “It’s like a human being asking a question. Can it be they’re talking? Rather than singing?”

  “Anything’s possible. They could be debating their version of Aristotle.” His face was entranced, shut off. He seemed to be gazing through the side of the boat, into the chill lightless sea hundreds of fathoms down. The whales gave bubbling trills and gulps that sounded like birdsong processed through an upset stomach. “They use tools—those bubble nets we saw them weave, to fish. I read a paper by some Scottish researchers, about sperm whales. It said they have individual names.”

  “Actual names…?”

  “They analyzed a five-click call they make at the beginning of their vocalizations. It’s called 5R. Everybody always thought it was the same for every whale. Like every blue jay’s call is the same as every other. But when these guys looked at the click timing, they could tell which whale was transmitting. And so, obviously, could the other whales. Which makes sense, when you think about it. We don’t typically open our conversations with our names. When we make a radio call, though, we start ‘This is Anemone.’” His gaze met hers. “Or am I getting too … anthropocentric?”

  “They don’t need to be smart to communicate. Or as smart as we are.”

  He half smiled. “You consider us intelligent?”

  “Have to have a benchmark. But I know what you’re saying.”

  “What am I saying?”

  She grimaced. Spread her hands. “Individually, we do all right. But as a species, we don’t act intelligently. Crime. Greed. War.”

  “Overpopulation. Destroying the environment we have to live in.”

  “Apes defecate where they live. When it gets bad, they move. But we—”

  “Right,” he said. Responding not to what she’d voiced, but to the next step in her reasoning. Which, she had to admit, she liked.

  The whales kept calling, echoed now and then by others, fainter, incomparably farther off. No one had realized elephants used ground-conducted subsonics until Katharine Payne at Cornell had discovered their seismic communication. Someday someone would discover just what these “songs” were. She doubted it would be her—better minds had tried—but there could be no doubt the phenomenon carried some freight of meaning. If only to mark territory, or identify a pod. But then why would the songs change?

  “You’re deep in thought.”

  She half grinned. Conscious, suddenly, of his warmth only inches away. Her eyes drifted to his lap, then to where the legs of the coveralls were neatly rolled and clamped with binder clips. He was damaged, sometimes unpredictable, but she had to admire his determination. He stayed at his post. He hauled himself around the boat using those massive shoulders almost, if not quite, as nimbly as those who still had legs. She’d never heard him complain, though who knew how much it hurt. She cleared her throat. “Are you—comfortable?”

  He looked confused. “What?”

  “I mean—your injuries. Do they give you pain?”

  He looked taken aback, but only shrugged. Seemed to go somewhere else, though he didn’t shift in the chair. “Not so much these days,” he said, looking away. “Your eye? How’s that doing?”

  “Better. Not itching as much.”

  He reared back, stretching. Those powerful shoulders bunched, those big hands worked at his neck. He said through his teeth, “But it does get old, sitting in the same position.”

  She said, “Turn away.”

  His hands stopped. “Turn what?”

  “Away from me. Bend forward. Yes. Like that.”

  Under her hands his muscles were hard as resined carbon. So taut it was painful to feel. Her own fingers, stronger than they’d probably ever been after weeks fighting the wheel, barely sank in. He kept leaning away, head bent, and as she worked up and then down his spine he relaxed. “Better?” she murmured.

  “You got strong hands.”

  “Mm-hm.” She worked on, until he winced and straightened.

  Something rolled off his work surface and fell into her lap. She picked it up, started to replace it, then turned it over in her fingers. At first she’d thought it a spool of green thread. It was a wooden spool, yes, but wrapped with something thicker than thread, so dull and shineless it was almost invisible. “What’s this?”

  He squinted in the screenlight. “Trip wire.”

  “Trip wire? It looks like what you’d use to … strangle someone.”

  He chuckled. “Not hardly. Breaking strength on that’s only about fifty pounds. But it comes in useful more often than you’d think. That and hundred-mile-an-hour tape, you can fix almost anything.”

  She was still holding it when he gently removed her glasses and took her face in his hands. She stopped thinking. When his mouth found hers in the darkness she seemed to stop feeling. Or felt all too much, as her arms rose to pull him close.

  When his hand found her neck and followed its curve down into her pullover she broke away, breathing hard. He tensed. “Sorry … am I going too fast?”

  She glanced at the open oval of the access. “I don’t know. But I’d better close that.”

  When she came back she stood bent, breathing fast and shallow as he kissed her again. Those rough hands seemed to know in advance every curve they encountered, every zipper. Her top came off and she sank back again on the duffel, unable to muster objections as his fingers found her nipples. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “Feel good?”

  “Very.”

  His mouth sought hers again. The scratchy stubble of bristly beard. Rough warm lips that somehow evoked pleasure down her whole body.

  Then his hand slipped lower, and she gasped. Started to push it away, but her arm had lost the power to do so. Enervated by the waves of pleasure that made her hips jerk as his fingers found exactly what she wanted them to. She lay back, eyes still closed, conscious of cold air on her naked skin, throat to belly, but intent above all else on the focused warmth that pulsed and grew. Her hips moved again, and she bit her lip to stifle the noises she wanted to make. Above them the whales still called, trilling and reverberating in haunting refrains that forever hovered at the edge of meaning.

  “Such a lovely woman,” he murmured, breath hot against her skin.

  Astonishment penetrated. Could she really be doing this? Falling for a legless veteran, a man she barely knew? Or were they all so sealed in, so hermetically isolated, she didn’t know what she was feeling? Some uninvolved corner of her mind whispered: This is not smart. You’re not eighteen anymore, messing around in a car on ‘Sconsett Bluff.

  His fingers paused. She opened her single eye to his face, hovering. “Still okay?”

  “I … guess.”

  “Having doubts?”

  “A little.”

  His lips traced from hers to her neck. And downward. The sea whispered past, hissing and surgi
ng. She stiffened, fingers digging into the duffel on which she lay. “—hurt you?” he murmured.

  “Uh-uh. Oh. Oh.” Shamed, yet still wanting more, she laid her arm over her face. Bit her wrist.

  He shifted, grunted deep in his throat, and she heard the chair creak and felt his weight come onto the duffel too. Heard the sloughing of cloth and another exhalation as he shifted again. She lay with legs spread, the air icy between them, and didn’t care. She arched her back to shift something hard out from beneath it and lifted her knees. Her shoulders drew back, bracing. A wave gathered between her legs, rising in throbs of something almost like anguish.

  When she opened her eye again he hung close above her, bare chest hairy, a steel chain hanging from a dark nest. His neck looked strangely vulnerable, his nostrils like caverns. His hand left her and took his weight to one side as he half rolled, working the last of his clothing down his trunk.

  Despite herself, she glanced down.

  The cloth pushed free from his crotch and his penis sprang free. But her gaze traveled past it, to where there was … nothing. Save blunt appendages seamed with wormtracings of stitching and scar tissue.

  She suddenly realized what he intended, and her acquiescence turned inside out. He wore no protection. She had none either. Since Leo had left she hadn’t bothered. Hadn’t thought it would be necessary. But that wasn’t it. She didn’t want this, even if he’d worn something, or if she’d brought her pills. They were co-workers. Unprofessional. Stupid. Sara, what are you doing?

  “What are you doing?” she said. Her hand came up to shield her nakedness. Her legs straightened, pushing her upright even as his weight eased down on her. She felt his penis probing, rigid, engorged, seeking. “What are you doing?”

  He went tense too, suddenly suspending motion. Said nothing, though he bent his head back, trying to look down into her face. But her gaze slid aside. She got a hand up and locked an elbow over her breasts.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This whole thing. That’s what’s wrong.”

  “It feels right to me.”