Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal (18 page)

The bastard was still attached to us by the two harpoon
lines, floating less than a fathom away, just as stunned by the
detonation of the Tortolan navy as the crew and me. We shook
it off first. We were eager to capitalize on Sybil’s sacrifice and
finish him.
“Dig your oars and paddles in,” I ordered the men,
“and shove the water between us and him the heck out of the
way.”
Then I thought of something. Sometimes you can lose
your perspective when you’re exhausted, starving and badly in
need of a drink while in the middle of a really long quest for
revenge against a whale.
“Hold up a sec,” I told the crew.
All of them looked mystified suddenly—except George,
who looked that way to begin with. Still they lifted their oars and
paddles out of the water and rested them on the gunwales.
“I want to kill the bastard,” I said, “and I’ll follow him to
any corner of the world to do it. The thing is, I’ve realized that
anyone who would do what Sybil did for me is worth postponing
a vendetta against a whale for and then combing every ounce of
water where the Tortolan navy went down. That’s what I want to
do now.”
The men weighed this. “It’s only once in a lifetime that
you get a chance at a woman,” said an understanding Nelson,
“with that kind of money.”
“The problem is the whale has a vendetta of his own,”
Flarq said, pointing.
Once again violating all rules whales are supposed to
play by, Dickhead had turned around. He came at us like a
locomotive, and we were like the damsel tied to the railroad
tracks in those old black-and-white movies. I had a plan though.
“Row fast,” I ordered the crew, and they did. We were on
a course perpendicular to the bastard’s. Rate we were going, we’d
collide with him in a couple hundred yards or thereabouts. I
had a plan though, a page not from Whale Killing 101 but major
league baseball pitching. “At the last second, on my command,
reverse. It’ll slow us by a knot or two. The change of pace’ll
throw the bastard’s timing off and he’ll shoot past us.” I looked
to Flarq and Thesaurus. Both seemed impressed with this plan.
As the bastard thundered to within a hundred feet, the
water around us throbbed, and we were close enough to learn
what a dinner of giant squid the night before smells like on a
sperm whale’s breath.
“Reverse,” I hollered, and me and the men threw our
weight into our oars. Thesaurus’s paddle snapped like a twig and
he toppled aft onto George and Nelson, costing them both their
oars. Still, the whaleboat slowed by as much as a knot, which
might’ve been enough for my plan to work. Openshaw’s Law
(in which Murphy’s Law is a good-case scenario, and not only is
the glass half-empty, it breaks and cuts you before you have time
to drink it) kicked in though. One of the waves Dickhead had
created picked us up and cast us forward. All told, we gained
speed. We were right smack in the bastard’s path.
It was like the sky itself dropped down to squash us. The
crew collectively gasped. Including Bob the rat, who peeked
out from Duq’s sack of pain-inflicting kitchen implements.
He’d been stowed away there after being bypassed in the crew
selection.
All of a sudden, Dickhead swerved, roaring past just a
few feet to starboard. Could the sixty-some ton whale have been
spooked by a miniscule rodent?
Nope. The bastard had bigger, wickeder plans.
“He means to wreck the Georgette, leaving us with just
this,” Flarq said, tapping the flimsy gunwale of the whaleboat,
“so that we have no refuge and he can take his sweet time killing
us.”
Indeed, leaving us in his wake, Dickhead directed his
monstrous snoot at the starboard hull of the Georgette. Moses
stood there looking over the rail, his mouth hung open like a
mailbox.
“Think he notices the whale?” Nelson asked.

I don’t know if they’ve ever tried this in one of those drug rehab
clinics, but if Moses is any evidence, a sixty-some-ton whale
bearing down like an avalanche on a person can sober him at
once and maybe forever.

Moses suddenly snapped to, bounded up the steps to the Georgette’s bridge nimble as a gymnast, spun the ignition, and brought the engines roaring to life. It just wasn’t in time to send her forward and avoid a blow from Dickhead, unfortunately. The bastard crunched into her hull amidships. At that moment, however, one of the engines Moses had turned on

exploded. The Georgette’s stern bucked like a mule, whacking
the whale in the jaw. Among other shrapnel, the propeller shot
at his face, leaving a scarlet stripe above his left eye that looked
like a cartoon villain’s arched brow. And when the stern fell,
it belted him in the noggin once more. Like a boxer going to
canvas, he fell beneath the waves.
In the whaleboat, a quarter of a mile away, the crew and
me watched in utter disbelief. At the same time, we were wary.
Openshaw’s Law said that the bastard would resurface beneath
our hull any second, and all the furiouser.
“George, I need to ask you something,” Nelson said.
“When I said that the beans could make enough gas to get us to
Tripoli, you took me literal, didn’t you?”
George stared down at his feet and said nothing.
“That explain why me, Thesaurus and Flarq see you in
engine room last night,” Duq said to George. “You put beans in
fuel tank.”
George looked up at me full of remorse. “Sorry, Cap, I
was trying to help.”
“George, what you did’s as idiotic as anything I ever heard
of,” I said. “But ’cause of it, you might just have earned yourself
yet another Employee of the Year.”
George was puzzled. I pointed aft. The whale had
resurfaced and was swimming slowly in the vicinity of the
Georgette, swerving like a drunk.
“Now is the time,” said Flarq, “to finish him.”

As the crew was hauling on the harpoon lines to pull our
whaleboat towards the bastard, it worried me that even though
he was laying there bloodied and woozy, he might just be
playing possum. Nelson, thinking along similar lines, drew his
.357 Magnum—if Dickhead did take a chomp at us though, the
bullets’d be no more effective than birdseed tossed at a Sherman
tank. Duq meanwhile passed around the stuff from his sack,
including the homemade lances, spades, cutting blades, blubber
hooks, and what’re known as whale-boarding knives.
Thesaurus climbed onto the prow to drive a lance into
the bastard’s “life,” the big reservoir of oxygen-enriched blood
that enables whales to go on their long dives. Once a lance
does its job, that blood fills the whale’s lungs. When he spouts,
he’ll spout red. Then you’ll hear the call that for centuries has
enchanted whaling men more than any siren’s song: “Chimney
Afire!”
Thesaurus drew back the lance. The whale hardly
blinked—he was no threat.
Finally, nearly
two years since the
attack that took my
wife, son and arm,
after all my troubles
since, and after all
these long days at sea,
revenge was about to be mine.

You’d think I’d be pumped, but I wasn’t. Not just cause my mind
was on Sybil. Reflecting back on all the long days, something else
snagged my thoughts. As a result, I sprang toward the prow and
grabbed Thesaurus by the shoulders just as his arm flew forward.
Knocked free of his grip, the lance clattered to the deck.
“Let’s let the whale alone,” I said.
The men looked like they might lance me. (For what it’s
worth, the whale looked grateful.)
“Cap, when you had your big realization that you’ve been
overly obsessed with vengeance before,” Nelson said, “no one
wanted to say this and hassle your self-discovery buzz, but we
think that the odds are pretty damn high that Sybil’s flotsam
now. The sperm oil from out of this big old bastard here’s a bird
in hand though—and the cash we’d get from selling it’ll make all
we been through worth it ten times over.”
“It would be wrong,” I said.
Thesaurus asked, “Captain, is this not the bastard
responsible for the deaths of your wife and son and the loss of
your arm?”
“No,” I said, “Moses is.”

The crew seemed to write off my response as your garden variety
eager-to-go-rescue-a-princess delirium. Keen to finish off the
whale and claim his valuable sperm oil, none of the men were
inclined to listen to my theory of why he should be spared.
Except Nelson.
“Just make it quick ’cause there’ll be sharks here soon,” he
said. “And keep it sane enough so we don’t have to throw you to
them.”
I stepped up onto the prow to address them (and because
I might need the lance there to defend myself).
“When Flarq said the whale had a vendetta against us,” I
said, “it got me wondering why.”
“We’ve tried to kill him lots of
times,” George said.
The others nodded. You’re
probably thinking: Openshaw, if your
crew is seeing things Stupid George’s
way instead of yours, you may as well
jump overboard and swim for it.
But I needed them to help me row
(at least three miles to Sybil), plus I
couldn’t let them kill the whale.
“The thing is,” I said, “when
the whale passed us by and took a
crack at the Georgette, it made me

realize that the time he rammed the superyacht, and every single
time he’s so much as glared at me, Moses has been right nearby.”
This gave the crew a moment’s pause.
“And there are a couple more things. Moses said whale
killing’s the greatest high in the world. So we’ve got to figure
he’s killed whales before—and it’s a gig you’ve got to travel quite
a bit to get. As we all know, he was tending bar in Tortola,
where there was that whale killing I was found guilty of in
absentia. And of course just days before the fire in my shack
in Mendocino, two sperm whales had been found butchered
nearby. As you might recall, the fire spread cause there was
sperm oil in the shack, and it started when a squatter there
knocked over a bong.”
Now aboard the whaleboat, you could’ve heard a mollusk
breathing.
“Lately, Moses has claimed to be tormented by bees—we
figured it was just some hallucination cause of his withdrawal
crap, but what if it’s really been guilt? What if he meant not
the insect but the letter B, like the squid mark on the whales
in Dickhead’s pod? The whales killed in Mendocino were forty
and twenty tons—the relative sizes could make ’em a female and
a young one. If so, maybe they were Dickhead’s. He’s one smart
fish, smart enough to track Moses along the coast back to the
shack. So then, what if that night a couple years later when I’d
fixed the place up and brought my wife and kid there, the whale
saw me in silhouette through the new bay window, thought I was
Moses come back with a female and young one of his own, and
was getting his revenge?”
If this was true, Dickhead had acted honorably, which
means a lot in these waters—remember, the Code is revered by
even the lowly swab who’d steal a diaper off a baby.
The men’s eyes shot up to the deck of the Georgette,
bobbing just a short ways to starboard. Moses had emerged from
the bridge and was standing at the rail listening.
“Is this true, Moses?” Thesaurus asked.