They flew through the water. The whaleboat bucked as it slapped the surface of every swell the whale pulled them through. Fallon held on for dear life, not sure whether he ought to be grateful he hadn’t been pitched out when the ride began. He tried to twist around to see the monster that was towing them, but able to turn only halfway, all he could see for the spray and the violent motion was the swell and rush of white water ahead of them. Tashtego, crouched in the bow, grinned wickedly as he tossed out wooden blocks tied to the whaleline in order to tire the whale with their drag. You might as well try to tire a road grader.
Yet he could not help but feel exhilarated, and he saw that the others in the boat, hanging on or trying to draw the line in, were flushed and breathing as hard as he.
He turned again and saw the whale.
Fallon had been a good swimmer in high school. He met Carol Bukaty at a swimming pool about a year after he had gone to work at the CME. Fallon first noticed her in the pool, swimming laps. She was the best swimmer there, better than he, though he might have been stronger than she in the short run. She gave herself over to the water and did not fight it; the kick of her long legs was steady and strong. She breathed easily and her strokes were relaxed, yet powerful. She did not swim for speed, but she looked as if she could swim for days, so comfortable did she seem in the water. Fallon sat on the steps at the pool’s edge and watched her for half an hour without once getting bored. He found her grace in the water arousing. He knew he had to speak to her. He slid into the pool and swam laps behind her.
At last she stopped. Holding onto the trough at the end of the pool, she pushed her goggles up onto her forehead and brushed the wet brown hair away from her eyes. He drew up beside her.
“You swim very well,” he said.
She was out of breath. “Thank you.”
“You look as if you wouldn’t ever need to come out of the water. Like anything else might be a comedown after swimming. ” It was a strange thing for him to say, it was not what he wanted to say, but he did not know what he wanted, besides her.
She looked puzzled, smiled briefly, and pulled herself onto the side of the pool, letting her legs dangle in the water. “Sometimes I feel that way,” she said. “I’m Carol Bukaty.” She stuck out her hand, very businesslike.
“Pat Fallon.”
She wore a grey tank suit; she was slender and small-breasted, tall, with a pointed chin and brown eyes. Fallon later discovered that she was an excellent dancer, that she purchased women’s clothing for one of the major Chicago department stores, that she traveled a great deal, wrote lousy poetry, disliked cooking, liked children, and liked him. At first he was merely interested in her sexually, though the first few times they slept together it was not very good at all. Gradually the sex got better, and in the meantime Fallon fell in love.
She would meet him at the athletic club after work; they would play racquet ball in the late afternoon, go out to dinner and take in a movie, then spend the night at his or her apartment. He met her alcoholic father, a retired policeman who told endless stories about ward politics and the Daley machine, and Carol spent a Christmas with him at his parents’. After they moved in together, they settled into a comfortable routine. He felt secure in her affection for him. He did not want her, after a while, as much as he had that first day, those first months, but he still needed her. It still mattered to him what she was doing and what she thought of him. Sometimes it mattered to him too much, he thought. Sometimes he wanted to be without her at all, not because he had anything he could only do without her, but only because he wanted to be without her.
He would watch her getting dressed in the morning and wonder what creature she might be, and what that creature was doing in the same room with him. He would lie beside her as she slept, stroking the short brown hair at her temple with his fingertips, and be overwhelmed with the desire to possess her, to hold her head between his hands and know everything that she was; he would shake with the sudden frustration of its impossibility until it was all he could do to keep from striking her. Something was wrong with him, or with her. He had fantasies of how much she would miss him if he died, of what clothes she would wear to the funeral, of what stories she would tell her lovers in the future after he was gone.
If Carol felt any of the same things about him, she did not tell him. For Fallon’s part, he did not try to explain what he felt in any but the most oblique ways. She should know how he felt, but of course she did not. So when things went badly, and they began to do so more and more, it was not possible for him to explain to her what was wrong, because he could not say it himself, and the pieces of his discontent were things that he was too embarrassed to admit. Yet he could not deny that sometimes he felt as if it was all over between them, that he felt nothing—and at others he would smile just to have her walk into the room.
Remarkable creature though the whale was, it was not so hard to kill one after all. It tired, just as a man would tire under the attack of a group of strangers. It slowed in the water, no longer able so effortlessly to drag them after it. They pulled close, and Stubb drove home the iron, jerked it back and forth, drew it out and drove it home again, fist over fist on the hilt, booted foot over the gunnel braced against the creatures flesh, sweating, searching for the whales hidden life. At last he found it, and the whale shuddered and thrashed a last time, spouting pink mist, then dark blood, where once it spouted feathery white spray. Like a man, helpless in the end, it rolled over and died. Stubb was jolly, and the men were methodical; they tied their lines around the great tail and, as shadows grew long and the sun fell perpendicularly toward the horizon, drew the dead whale to the Pequod.
EIGHT
During the cutting up and boiling down of the whale that night, Fallon, perhaps in recognition of his return to normality as indicated by his return to the masthead, was given a real job: slicing the chunks of blubber that a couple of other sailors were hewing out of the great strips that were hauled over the side into “bible leaves.” Fallon got the hang of it pretty quickly, though he was not fast, and Staley, the British sailor who was cutting beside him, kept poking at him to do more. “I’m doing all the work, Fallon,” he said, as if his ambition in life were to make sure that he did no more than his own share of the work.
Using a sharp blade like a long cleaver, Fallon would position the chunk of blubber, skin side down on the cutting table, and imitating Staley, cut the piece into slices like the pages of a book, with the skin as its spine. The blubber leaves flopped outward or stuck to each other, and the table became slick with grease. Fallon was at first careful about avoiding his hands, but the blubber would slide around the table as he tried to cut it if he didn’t hold it still. Staley pushed him on, working with dexterity, though Fallon noted that the man’s hands were scarred, with the top joint of the middle finger of his left hand missing.
His back and shoulders ached with fatigue, and the smoke from the try-works stung his eyes. When he tried to wipe the tears away, he only smeared his face with grease. But he did a creditable job, cursing all the time. The cursing helped, and the other men seemed to accept him more for it. When finally they were done, and the deck was clean the next day, they were issued a tot of grog and allowed to swim within the lee of the stationary ship. The men were more real to him than when he had sat and watched from the outcasts station of the tar bucket. He was able to speak to them more naturally than he had ever done. But he did not forget his predicament.
“Ye are too serious, Fallon,” Staley told him, offering Fallon some of his grog. “I can see you brooding tbere, and look how it set you into a funk. Ye are better now, perhaps, but mind you stick to your work and ye may survive this voyage.” “I won’t survive it. Neither will you—unless we can do something about Captain Ahab.”
Bulkington, who had been watching them, came by. “What of Captain Ahab?”
Fallon saw a chance in this. “Does his seeking after this white whale seem right to you?”
“The
whale took his leg,” Staley said.
“Some say it unmanned him,” the other said, lower. “That’s two legs you’d not like to lose yourself, I’ll daresay.” Fallon drew them aside, more earnest now. “We will lose more than our balls if we do nothing about this situation. The man is out of his mind. He will drag us all down with him, and this ship with all of us, if we can’t convince Starbuck to do something. Believe me, I know.”
Friendly Bulkington did not look so friendly. “You do talk strange, Fallon. We took an oath, and we signed the papers before we even sailed a cable from shore. A captain is a captain. You are talking mutiny.”
He had to go carefully.
“No, wait. Listen to me. Why are we sent on this trip? Think of the—the stockholders, or whatever you call them. The owners. They sent us out to hunt whales.”
“The white whale is a whale.” Staley looked petulant. “Yes, of course, it’s a whale. But there are hundreds of whales to be caught and killed. We don’t need to hunt that one. Hasn’t he set his sights on just Moby Dick? What about that oath? That gold piece on the mast? That says he’s just out for vengeance. There was nothing about vengeance in the papers we signed. What do you think the owners would say if they knew about what he plans? Do you think they would approve of this wild goose chase?”
Staley was lost. “Goose chase?”
Bulkington was interested. “Go on.”
Fallon had his foot in the door; he marshaled the arguments he had rehearsed over and over again. “There’s no more oil in Moby Dick than in another whale. ...”
“They say he’s monstrous big,” Staley interjected. Fallon looked pained. “Not so big as any two whales, then. Ahab is not after any oil you can boil out of the whales flesh. If the owners knew what he intended, the way I do, if they knew how sick he was the week before he came out of that hole of a cabin he lives in, if they saw that light in his eye and the charts he keeps in his cabinet. ...”
“Charts? What charts? Have you been in his cabin?” “No, not exactly,” Fallon said. “Look, I know some things, but that’s just because I keep my eyes open and I have some sources.”
“Fallon, where do you hail from? I swear that I cannot half the time make out what you are saying. Sources? What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, Jesus!” He had hoped for better from Bulkington. Staley darkened. “Don’t blaspheme, man! I’ll not take the word of a blasphemer.”
Fallon saw another opening. “You’re right! I’m sorry. But look, didn’t the old man himself blaspheme more seriously than I ever could the night of that oath? If you are a Godfearing man, Staley, you’ll know that that is true. Would you give your obedience to such a man? Moby Dick is just another of God’s creatures, a dumb animal. Is it right to seek vengeance on an animal? Do you want to be responsible for that? God would not approve.”
Staley looked troubled, but stubborn. “Do not tell me what the Almighty approves. That is not for the likes of you to know. And Ahab is the captain.” With that he walked to the opposite side of the deck and stood there watching them as if ' he wanted to separate himself as much as possible from the conversation, yet still know what was going on.
Fallon was exasperated and tired.
“Why don’t you go with Staley, Bulkington? You don’t have to stick around with me, you know. I’m not going to do your reputation any good.”
Bulkington eyed him steadily. “You are a strange one,
Fallon. I did not think anything of you when I first saw you on the Pequod. But you may be talking some sense.”
“Staley doesn’t think so.”
Bulkington took a pull on his grog. “Why did you try to persuade Staley of Ahab’s madness? You should have known that you couldn’t convince such a man that the sky is blue, if it were written in the articles he signed that it was green. Starbuck perhaps, or me. Not Staley. Don’t you listen to the man you are talking to?”
Fallon looked at Bulkington; the tall sailor looked calmly back at him, patient, waiting.
“Okay, you’re right,” Fallon said. “I have the feeling I would not have a hard time convincing you, anyway. You know Ahab’s insane, don’t you?”
“It’s not for me to say. Ahab has better reasons than those you give to him.” He drew a deep breath, looked up at the sky, down at the men who swam in the shadow of the ship. He smiled. “They should be more wary of sharks,” he said.
“The world does look a garden today, Fallon. But it may be that the old man’s eyes are better than ours.”
“You know he’s mad, and you won’t do anything?”
“The matter will not bear too deep a looking into.” Bulkington was silent for a moment. “You know the story about the man born with a silver screw in his navel? How it tasked him, until one day he unscrewed it to divine its purpose?” Fallon had heard the joke in grade school on the South Side. “His ass fell off.”
“You and Ahab are too much like that man.”
They both laughed. “I don’t have to unscrew my navel,” Fallon said. “Were all going to lose our asses anyway.”
They laughed again. Bulkington put his arm around his shoulders, and they toasted Moby Dick.
NINE
There came a morning when, on pumping out the bilge, someone noticed that considerable whale oil was coming up with the water. Starbuck was summoned and, after descending into the hold himself, emerged and went aft and below to speak with Ahab. Fallon asked one of the others what was going on.
“The casks are leaking. We’re going to have to lay up and break them out. If we don’t, we stand to lose a lot of oil.”
Some time later Starbuck reappeared. His face was red to the point of apoplexy, and he paced around the quarter-deck with his hands knotted behind his back. They waited for him to tell them what to do; he stared at the crewmen, stopped, and told them to be about their business. “Keep pumping,” he told the others. “Maintain the lookout.” He then spoke briefly to the helmsman leaning on the whalebone tiller, and retreated to the comer of the quarter-deck to watch the wake of the ship. After a while Ahab himself staggered up onto the deck, found Starbuck, and spoke to him. He then turned to the men on deck.
“Furl the t’gallantsails,” he called, “and close reef the topsails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burtons, • and break out in the main hold.”
Fallon joined the others around the hold. Once the work had commenced, he concentrated on lifting, hauling, and not straining his back. The Manxman told them that he had been outside Ahab’s cabin during the conference and that Ahab had threatened to shoot Starbuck dead on the spot when the mate demanded they stop chasing the whale to break out the hold. Fallon thought about the anger in Starbucks face when he’d come up again. It struck him that the Starbuck of Melville’s book was pretty ineffectual; he had to be to let that madman go on with the chase. But this Starbuck—whether like the one in the book or not—did not like the way things were going. There was no reason why Fallon had to sit around and wait for things to happen. It was worth a shot.
But not that afternoon.
Racism assured that the hardest work in the dank hold was done by the colored men—Dagoo, Tashtego, and Quee-queg. They did not complain. Up to their knees in the bilge, clambering awkwardly over and about the barrels of oil in the murderous heat and unbreathable air of the hold, they did their jobs.
It was evening before the three harpooneers were told they could halt for the day and they emerged, sweaty, covered with slime, and bruised. Fallon collapsed against the side of the try-works; others sat beside him. Tall Qucequeg was taken by a coughing fit, then went below to his hammock. Fallon gathered his strength, felt the sweat drying stickily on his arms and neck. There were few clouds, and the moon was waxing
full. He saw Starbuck then, standing at the rear of the quarterdeck, face toward the mast. Was he looking at the doubloon?
Fallon got shakily to his feet; his legs were rubbery. The first mate did not notice him until he was close. He looked up.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Starbuck, I need to speak to you.”
Starbuck looked at him as if he saw him for the first time. Fallon tried to look self-confident, serious. He’d gotten that one down well at DCB.
“Yes?”
Fallon turned so that he was facing inward toward the deck and Starbuck had his back to it to face him. He could see what was happening away from them and would know if anyone came near.
“I could not help but see that you were angry this morning after speaking to Captain Ahab.”
Starbuck looked puzzled.
“I assume that you must have told Ahab about the leaking oil, and he didn’t want to stop his hunt of the whale long enough to break out the hold. Am I right?”
The mate watched him guardedly. “What passed between Captain Ahab and me was none of your affair, or of the crew’s. Is that what you’ve come to trouble me with?”
“It is a matter that concerns me,” Fallon said. “It concerns the rest of the crew, and it ought to concern you. We are being bound by his orders, and what kind of orders is he giving? I know what you’ve been thinking; I know that this personal vengeance he seeks frightens and repulses you. I know what you’re thinking. I could see what was in your mind when you stood at this rail this afternoon. He is not going to stop until he kills US all.”
Starbuck seemed to draw back within himself. Fallon saw how beaten the man’s eyes were; he did not think the mate was a drinker, but he looked like someone who had just surfaced after a long weekend. He could almost see the clockwork turning within Starbuck, a beat too slow, with the belligerence of the drunk being told the truth about himself that he did not want to admit. Fallon’s last fight with Stein Jr. at the brokerage had started that way.
“Get back to your work,” Starbuck said. He started to turn away.
Fallon put his hand on his shoulder. “You have to—
Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18 Page 22