Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (11 page)

"Clay, I need to ask you something before they get back."

"Shoot."

"Did you check any of Amy's references before you hired her? I mean, did you call anyone? Woods Hole? Her undergrad school — what was it?"

"Cornell. Nope. She was smart, she was cute, she seemed to know what she was talking about, and she said she'd work for free. The bona fides looked good on paper. Gift horse, Nate."

"Jon Thomas Fuller said that he checked and that no one at Woods Hole has heard of her."

"Fuller's an asshole. Look, I don't really care if she finished high school. The kid has proven herself. She's got balls."

"Still, maybe I should call Tyack. Just in case."

"If you need to. Call him this afternoon when you get back in."

"I'm sure Fuller was just yanking my chain. He tried to offer us a boat like his if we backed his dolphin-park project."

"And you turned him down?"

"Of course."

"But those are really nice boats. Our armada has been reduced by fifty percent. Our nautical resources have declined by more than one-half. Our boatage is deficient by point five."

"What's up?" Amy said. She'd come back down the dock and seemed to have shaken off her earlier melancholy.

"Clay's being scientific. Fuller offered us a sixty-foot research vessel like his, with operating budget, if we back his dolphin project."

"Do I have to sleep with him?"

"We haven't put that on the table," Clay said, "but I'll bet we could get a sonar array if you're enthusiastic."

"Hell, Nate, take it," Amy said.

"It would mean selling out my credibility," said Quinn, appalled at what total whores his colleagues had become. "We'd be going over to the dark side."

Amy shrugged. "Those are really nice boats." The corner of her mouth twitched as if she was trying not to grin, and Nate realized that she was probably goofing on him.

"Yeah," said Clay. "Nice." Clay was goofing, too. He'd be all right. Nate shook his head, looking as if he were fighting disbelief, but actually he was trying to shake the memory of his dream of driving a big cabin cruiser through the streets of Seattle with Amy displayed as the bikinied figurehead. "If you're okay, Clay, we really should get out before the wind comes up."

"Go," Clay said. "I'll get the police report for the insurance company." To Amy he said, "You find Kona?"

"He's down there with that Tako guy."

"What's he doing down there?"

"It looked like he was building a saxophone. I didn't go close."

Quinn strode down the dock and looked to where Kona was talking with Tako Man. "No, that's his bong. It breaks down for easy portage."

"What's a bong?"

"Cute, Amy. Help me get the equipment in the boat."

Suddenly Kona started shouting and running down the dock toward them. "Bwanas! I found the boat!"

Clay perked up. "Where?"

"Right there. Tako Man says it's right there. He dove down there this morning."

Kona was pointing to a patch of murky jade green water in the center of the harbor. Jade green because of all the waste flushed from the live-aboards, as well as the bait, fish guts, seasickness, and bird poop that went into the water faster than the scavengers could clean it out, and so it caused a perpetual algae bloom.

"My boat," said Clay, looking forlornly at the empty water.

Amy stepped up and put her arm around Clay's shoulders to resume stage-two comfort. "He dove in that water?"

"The nightwalkers sank it, Bwana Clay. Tako Man saw them. Skinny blue-gray guys. He called them nightwalkers. I think aliens."

"Aliens are always gray, aren't they?" inquired Quinn.

"That's what I say to him," said Kona. "But he say no, not with the lightbulb head. He say they tall and froggy."

"You're high," said Clay.

"Tako Man got dank mystical buds, brah. Was a spiritual duty."

"He's not criticizing you, Kona," Quinn explained. "We just assume that you're high. Clay's just doubting the credibility of your story."

"You don't believe I? Give a man a mask, I'll dive down and get a ting off da boat for proof."

"Hepatitis, that's what you'll bring up," said Amy.

"I'm going to work," said Nate.

"My boat," said Clay.

Nate decided that perhaps he should offer a measure of solace. "Look at the bright side, Clay. At least whales are big."

"How is that the bright side?"

"We could be studying viruses. You have any idea what it costs to replace a scanning electron microscope?"

"My boat," said Clay.

Amy picked the whale. It had been a stressful morning for her, and Quinn wanted to convey his complete confidence in her, so he handed over the headphones and took directions as they narrowed down which of their whales was actually the singer.

"Wait a second," Amy said. "Shut down the engine."

And then she did something that Quinn had seen no one do for twenty-five years, and then it had been his mentor, Gerard Ryder, who most people agreed had been eccentric to the point of being full-blown bat shit. Amy hung over the side by her knees and put her head in the water. After about thirty seconds she swung up, spraying a great crest of seawater all over the boat, then pointed north.

"He's over there."

"That doesn't work, you know," said Quinn. It was pretty much accepted that humans didn't have directional hearing underwater. He was just gently trying to remind her.

"Go that way. That's where our whale is."

"Okay, there may indeed be a singer over there, but you didn't locate him by hearing him."

She just stood there next to him — dripping on his feet, the console, the field notes — looking at him.

"Okay, I'm going." He started the engine and pushed the throttle over. "Tell me when I get there."

A couple of minutes later Amy signaled for him to cut the engine, and she was hanging over the side with her head in the water while the boat was still coasting.

"Well, this is just stupid," Nate said while Amy was submerged.

Amy dedunked long enough to say, "I heard that."

"Looks like you're bobbing for whales, is what it looks like."

"Shut up," said Amy, up for a breath. "I'm trying to listen."

"You look like that cartoon character in 'B.C. that used to watch fish all day."

"That way," said Amy, up again, pointing and dog-shaking the water out of her hair onto the Ph.D. "About six hundred yards."

"Six hundred yards? You're sure?"

"Give or take fifty."

"If we're within a half mile of a singer, I'll buy you dinner."

" 'Kay. What do you suppose the freight is to fly a lobster from Maine to my plate in Lahaina?"

"I'm not going to need to know that."

"Drive the boat, please. Over there." And she pointed again, not unlike Babe Ruth indicating the Wrigley Field fence over which he would hit the famous promised home run (except Amy was thin, a girl, and alive).

Quinn heard the singer even before they put the hydrophone in the water. The whole boat started resonating to the song as they coasted into a drift.

Amy hopped up on the bow and pointed to some white spots dancing below the surface — pectoral fins and a tail. "There he is!"

If there had been a crowd, they would have gone wild.

Quinn smiled. Amy looked back at him and grinned. "Steak
and
lobster," she said. "Something red and French and expensive for the wine, something on fire for dessert — don't care what it is, long as there's flames coming off it — then a backrub before I send you back to your cabin alone, disappointed and confused. Ha!"

"It's a date," said Quinn.

"No, it's not a date. It's a bet, which you have lost miserably because you had the audacity to doubt me, and for which you shall remain ever sorry. Ha!"

"Shall we work now? Or would you like to gloat a bit longer?"

"Hmmm, let me think about it…"

She's so small, yet she contains so much evil,
Quinn thought. He threw the field journal at her and read her the longitude and latitude off the GPS. "Film's in the camera. New roll. I loaded it this morning."

"I was thinking I'd gloat some more." Amy picked up the notebook, then paused as she opened it to begin writing. "Singing stopped."

"Sometimes I think they just stop singing to freak me out."

"He's moving," Amy said, pointing.

"Moving," Quinn repeated. He looked over the side and saw the white pec fins and flukes flash out of sight. "Hold on." He started the engine.

"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.

They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.

"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool."

"Maybe you should have a doughnut or something, get your blood sugar up," Amy said.

"Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and —»

"I thought you liked these animals."

"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."

The whale had led them five miles out toward Molokai and very close to the wind line, where the waves were too big and the current too fast to stay on a singer. If the whale continued in this direction, they would lose him within the next two dive cycles and the day would be wasted. What was even more frustrating was that this animal was hanging in the water and singing with his tail only a few feet below the surface. Typically, a singer in the channel would be thirty to fifty feet down — this guy was at about seven. Nate kept having to pull up the hydrophone to keep it from bopping the whale in the noggin as they drifted over it.

"He's coming up," Amy said. She grabbed the camera off the seat and aimed it at a spot twenty yards or so in front of the boat so the auto-focus and exposure would already be set.

Nate pulled up the hydrophone with two yanks and started the engine. The whale was moving faster this time. Nate adjusted the throttle to put Amy at the right distance for a full-frame tail shot.

One breath and he was down for ten seconds, another breath twelve seconds, another breath and the great tail peduncle arched high into the air.

"Looks like he's going to do it," Nate said.

"Ready," Amy said.

The tail cleared the water by just a foot, presenting an edge view instead of a flat horizontal view that would give them all the markings, but Nate thought he saw something. Something that looked like black letters on the underside of the tail.

"You get that? You get that?"

"I got what there was. He didn't present very well." Amy had run the motor drive for the whole cycle of the dive, maybe eight frames.

"Did you see those markings? On the underside? The black… uh, stripes?" Quinn whipped off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt.

"Stripes? Nate, I didn't see anything but edge through the camera."

"Damn it!"

"Look, he fluked. Maybe he will again."

"That's not the point."

"It's not?"

"Get up on the bow, see if you can find him."

Amy stood on the bow and directed Quinn. When she dropped her arm, he killed the engine. And there was the whale, hanging there, singing, his tail not ten feet under the water. They weren't a hundred yards off the wind line, and the boat was drifting away from the whale faster than it had before. They'd be over it for only a minute or so. This close to the wind line, they'd probably lose him the next time he came up. Nate was not going to finish this day wondering if he was having hallucinations again. "Amy, hand me my mask and flippers from the bow cabinet, would you?"

"You're going in the water?"

"Yes."

"But you never go in the water."

"I'm going in the water." Nate opened a plastic Pelican case and pulled out his Nikonos IV underwater camera, checked to make sure it was loaded.

"You're not a water guy."

"See if there's a weight belt in there, too."

"Clay says you're not a water guy. You're a boat guy."

"I'm going to get an ID photo from under his tail. If he's going to be accommodating enough to stay this close to the surface, I'm going to go get the photo."

"Can you do that?"

"Why not?"

She handed him a belt weighted with ten pounds of lead, and Nate buckled it around his hips. He pulled on the mask and fins, then sat on the gunwale with his back to the water. "You're going to drift off of me. I'm not going to try to swim to catch you, so come back and get me. Wait till I wave. I don't want you to start the engine until I'm sure I have the picture. Keep recording until you come get me."

" 'Kay." Amy's mouth was sort of hanging open as if she'd just been slapped.

"This is no big deal."

"Right. You want me to do it? It's my fault I didn't get the shot last time."

"Not your fault. The shot wasn't there. See ya."

Quinn put the snorkel in his mouth and rolled backward off the boat. At seventy-five degrees, the water was still cold enough to knock the breath out of him. He floated to the surface and tried to take controlled breaths until his system adjusted.

The whale was close, only a hundred or so feet away. The song reverberated in Nate's ribs as he kicked over to it. This had to be the "bite me" whale. Even if he'd somehow been wrong about there actually being letters, there were certainly some strange markings on this animal's tail. And there was more than that, too, if he could prove to himself that this was the same animal. It would mean that the whale had stayed in the general area of the Au'au Channel for over three weeks, which was fairly unusual. Of course, conclusions weren't reached from that lack of data. It could simply be that they hadn't computerized the catalog of Hawaiian ID photos the way they had in Alaska. And without the first picture there'd be no proof that this was the same animal, but Quinn would know. He would know. That had become the impetus of this silly mission, not just proving that he wasn't hallucinating. He was a man of science, of facts, of reason. He didn't need to prove he was sane.

I'm out of my mind,
he thought. He'd never even heard of anyone trying to do an ID photo underwater.

The animal was perfectly motionless, a great swath of gray in a field of infinite blue. But Quinn thought he saw movement on the far side of the whale. He lifted his head out of the water and looked back at the boat. Amy gave him a thumbs-up. He took a deep breath and made his dive to take the photo.

If he'd been wearing tanks, he might have let the weight belt take him down slowly, but he knew he'd be able to stay down for only forty to sixty seconds, so he went headfirst, kicking hard until he was down twenty or so feet. Then he leveled off, holding the camera in front of him, and looked up at the underside of the whale's tail.

There it was, in big, sans-serif, spray-paint-like letters: BITE ME! He nearly forgot to take the picture. How could this possibly be? Had the animal somehow been caught in a net when it was younger and marked by a sardonic fisherman before being released? Was it one of those animals that had swum up a river and got stranded, then been rescued by an army of fish-and-game people?

He centered the tail in the viewfinder and hit the shutter. Advanced the film and shot again. Then he needed to breathe. He turned and kicked to the surface, but again he saw the dark shape moving near the whale.
Remora,
he thought. Although it looked too big to be one of the parasite fish that often attached themselves to whales.

At the surface he looked back down at the singer, near the left pec where he'd seen the movement. The animal was doing ribbits. Quinn smiled around his snorkel, took three deep breaths, held, then dove again.

This time, before he could get the camera up, he saw the movement of a dark fin on the far side of the whale, and he squinted to see deep into the blue distance. Blue-water willies, was how he'd always thought of it. The feeling you get when you realize that something big and carnivorous could come at you from any direction, then you start looking for gray missiles in the blue, like looking for a malevolent face to appear at a dark window.

Then the whale moved. The wash of the tail pushed Quinn back, but he maintained his bearings and started toward the surface, trying to keep his eye on the animal. The whale turned around in little more than its own length and shot toward Nate. He kicked laterally, trying to move to one side or another, then up, so he'd be tossed over the top of the animal rather than under it as it came up, because it was definitely going to bump him.

He looked back beyond his fins as he kicked and saw the whale adjust its direction to keep coming toward him. Nate kicked once for the surface, then looked back again to see the animal's enormous mouth opening beneath him.
No, this can't be happening,
he thought.

The panic rising in his chest demanded air, but it was as if the entire ocean had opened up a hole behind him, and he wasn't going to make it to the surface. The whale came halfway out of the water as it scooped him up, and Nate saw sky, and white water, and baleen fringing the upper jaw above — all of it framed by the huge trapezoid that was the whale's open mouth. Then he felt the whale sinking back, and he saw the baleen close over him. He rolled into a ball, hoping not to be crushed by the jaws, hoping to be spit out as a horrible dining mistake. But then the great tongue came forward, warm and rough, driving him against the baleen plates — it was like being smashed into a wrought-iron fence by a wet Nerf Volkswagen. He could feel the baleen ripping the skin on his back as the tongue covered him, pressing the seawater out around him as it would strain krill, then crushing him until the last of the air exploded from his body and he blacked out.