by Jeff Gulvin
‘Are you being a smart ass?’
‘No, sir, I’m just telling you how it is.’
The agent laughed. ‘Then get used to the cell back there, because you’re going to be seeing another one just like it. Only you won’t have it all to yourself.’ He leaned on the table and leered. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’
Libby took a cup of coffee to John-Cody who was in the anchor locker scrubbing the wooden boards the chain rested on. They had been in Port Ross a while now and he’d worked out there were eleven days to go till he would be deported. The storm had shaken the sea for more than a week and only today had the wind dropped and allowed the waves to settle. Libby had spent the entire time working from the Korimako; the surface of Port Ross was too rough to accomplish anything in the dinghy and the eddies cutting in from the sea made it far too dangerous to dive. She crouched by the locker and he smelled the coffee before he saw her and looked up, wiping grime from above his eye with the back of his hand.
‘The wind’s dropped,’ Libby said.
He nodded. ‘Finally. That’s how it is down here. It’s why we have to carry extra stores in case we get stuck. The longest I’ve sat here is two weeks waiting for a window in the weather.’
‘You can’t get home until it changes?’
‘You’ve seen the waves, Lib. You’d be punching into a wind that was doing nothing but driving you back again. One time me and Tom were two thirds of the way to Stewart Island when the wind shifted to the north and there was nothing we could do except turn tail and run.’
Libby warmed her hands on her own coffee cup. ‘I want to dive again. I want to try and find that pregnant cow.’
He placed his mug on the deck and hoisted himself out of the chain locker. The wind had lessened considerably: it still ruffled his hair where it frayed out from under his cap, but the grey weight of the cloud had gone and the sky was blue crystal, the winter sun strong all at once overhead.
‘She’s probably given birth already.’
Libby shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She was close, but not that close. I can read the signs,’ she added when he looked doubtful. ‘It’s my job, John-Cody. Believe me, I know what I’m doing.’
He rested one arm on the rail. ‘I’ve seen you, Libby. I don’t doubt it.’ He was quiet for a moment, watching pillars of sunlight fall against the rocks, casting them with slivers of silver as if someone had thrown glitter over the roughened edges. A silence that dulled the senses had descended on the landscape. He spoke without looking round.
‘Tomorrow. We’ll take the dinghy and see if we can find her.’
His voice was hollow and small and Libby tried to see the expression in his eyes, but he had turned his gaze from her.
That night Jonah cooked pork and apple with kumara and Libby ate with the expectancy of the morning in her breast. She had spent the remainder of the day working at the chart table before she and John-Cody took the dinghy and made a circuit of Port Ross, calm and flat now, only crusted in white caps close to the rocks. They counted thirty different whales and John-Cody told her that this was merely the vanguard: many more would arrive throughout the winter. They picked their channels carefully, John-Cody standing in the stern of the dinghy, ever watchful of where the sixty-foot giants were moving. They cruised just beneath the surface, lifting their heads to blow with a sound like a compressed air hose. Libby took countless photographs, of tail flukes predominantly; the whales were rarely at the right angle to get good shots of callosities. Together they sought the pregnant cow but could not locate her.
John-Cody told Libby not to worry, she would still be around. There were a number of cows with calves already, but none small enough to have just been born. She was probably feeding at sea but would return to the sheltered waters for the birth. Tomorrow they would get into their dive gear and trawl the harbour again.
After dinner John-Cody answered a radio call from the Moeraki, fishing north-west of Port Ross outside the management area. They told him they had been having a few engine problems and asked if he had any spare oil filters on board. He always carried spares and told them if they sheltered in Port Ross they were welcome to some.
Later Libby called Bree, the first clear conversation in days, and was relieved to hear that everything was all right back in Manapouri. Bree seemed to be having an excellent time up at Blackmount with Hunter and his family. She said that school was fine and she had discovered she was much better at rugby than she thought.
‘I’m a good passer, Mum,’ she said. ‘I can get the ball to spin really well.’ She also told them that she’d had two more riding lessons with Ned Pole and he had set up a series of jumps, which she cleared without any problems. Hunter had gone along with her and put Barrio through his paces.
‘Mr Pole was really thrilled, Mum. I think Hunter being on Barrio reminded him of his son.’ She paused and sighed. ‘I wish you and John-Cody liked Mr Pole, he’s actually really nice.’
Libby listened and nodded. ‘It’s not that we don’t like him, Bree. We just don’t agree on Dusky Sound, that’s all.’
‘Yes, but surely there’s a compromise? That’s what you’re always telling me: to compromise. There must be some way. It’d be so cool if you all got on.’
John-Cody stood quietly on the bridge and listened to Bree’s voice through the speakers.
He did not sleep at all that night. He lay in his bunk watching the moonlight reflected in the water through the porthole. The boat creaked and moaned as metal expanded and contracted under the varying pressures against the hull. Tonight he could hear every sound with a clarity that normally eluded him. Every creak of the wooden steps up to the saloon and bridge, a pencil rolling on the chart table, the metal pinging on the oven, the shivered rattle of the shrouds, the hollow slop of water against the hull, the rhythmic burr of Libby’s breathing in sleep. His eyes were wide: the hours ticked past and yet he had no concept of time.
The pencil rolling became an irritation and he got up and put it in his briefcase, which stood by the side of the chart table. He lifted it to the desk and fumbled inside for the familiar feel of the envelope, then read again the letters from the immigration service without switching on the light. He stood in the half-darkness, then put the letters back and wandered up top where he watched the black surface of the water through the side windows. A whale blew further up Laurie Harbour and the vapour sprinkled like a fountain in the moonlight. He heard grunts and groans and long throaty ridges of sound: he heard muttered moans and thin tonal mewling coming from the main group beyond Erebus Cove. Sound travelled far in the quieter nights where the acoustics bounced through the water. On deck he rolled a cigarette and looked up at the moon.
Night began to grey into day and again he was aware of just how alive he felt. He stood by the rail where the cage held the compressed air bottles and selected which one he would use. The water shifted below the scuppers, thick and black and cracked by chinks of light where the moon and stars broke upon it. Laurie Harbour gave him only twenty-seven metres in the deepest part, but it was littered with forests of bladder kelp and he could lose himself in those. He smoked his cigarette, rolled and smoked another and then quietly, just as dawn was breaking, he lifted the compressed air bottle, checked his watch with the gauge and let half the air out. What was left gave him twenty minutes at best.
His wetsuit was in the dive locker, which he opened quietly so as not to disturb anyone. Carefully he worked the lycra over his limbs. He pushed his hair back so the hood would cover it properly and selected a weight belt with fifteen kilos on it. He carried the gear to the afterdeck where he stacked it against the glasshouse and then went back for his mask and fins. He buckled the buoyancy control device, tightening the tension straps across his chest, demand valve and spare dangling on the end of their hoses. He had his dive computer strapped on his wrist as he always did, habit more than anything else today, and he washed his mask carefully after climbing down to the platform. The wind was fresh
and cold against the exposed skin of his face and the water felt like ice on his fingers.
Before he pulled on his gloves John-Cody took the tangi-wai, the teardrop stone Mahina had given him, and held it in his palm. The tightly woven material of the glove pressed it against the skin. Strapping the mask over his eyes he secured it and checked the air supply.
Libby woke up with a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach: not quite fear but something akin to it. She was acutely aware of the silence. The wind seemed to have died away completely, something that never happened here; she had grown used to the rushing sound in her ears as part of daily life. But she did not hear it now and the silence had an eerie quality about it. It was accentuated by the silence from John-Cody’s cabin and all at once she got up, pulled on her robe and looked at his empty bed. Again the sensation plucked at her and she stared at the bed for some sign of his passing. She glanced at the chart table: his briefcase stood on top whereas last night it had been underneath. Dressed only in her robe, she climbed the steps to the saloon and bridge but he was nowhere to be seen. The port door was open a fraction, however, and Libby could feel the chill breaching the crack.
John-Cody slipped into the icy water and it knocked the breath right out of him. He hovered a moment, still holding the wooden slats of the dive platform until he could calm the rush in his lungs and get used to the cold. He could see the hull of the Korimako through the haze of his mask and with it her port of registration. The memories flooded back: the day he quit fishing for ever when he and Mahina decided to try to bring some understanding of the fragile ecology to those visiting Fiordland; the day he flew to Australia after seeing the Korimako advertised. That was the catalyst, when the pair of them went for broke and sank every penny they had and a great deal they didn’t into the purchase of the boat. Before then they had chartered other boats to use but it was only when they bought their own that they had finally taken their efforts seriously.
Gradually his breathing settled into a rhythm and he relaxed, his mind wandering now, almost in a dream. He turned and kicked away from the dive platform, swam a few yards on the surface then slipped quietly beneath it with only the line of bubbles as evidence of his passing.
Libby went on deck, hugging the robe about her, barefoot against the chilled metal. John-Cody was not on the foredeck so she picked her way down the narrow gangway beyond the wheel-house. He was not on the afterdeck either and she screwed up her face and then heard the slap of fins and saw a dark shape drifting below the surface fifteen yards off the stern. She was about to call out but knew he wouldn’t hear her and she leaned over the rail and watched the bubbles as he descended. Dread cramped her gut. Why would he dive so early and on his own when all the time they had been down here he refused to let her enter the water without a buddy? She remembered his moods, the terrible silence that had enveloped him since that meeting with Ned Pole: she stood on the stern, watched the flat of the water and the line of bubbles gradually moving away and felt totally and utterly helpless.
John-Cody swam straight down, kicking laconically with his fins and feeling the chill of the water rush over his body. He could hear no sound save the rasp of his own breathing, giving him life still so evident it filled every pore of his being. The water was cold and clear and empty: he saw a handful of silver-backed fish swimming away, and clawing up at him from where it was rooted to the bottom near the shore, line after line of vertical bladder kelp, yellow and brown like the tentacles of some gigantic swaying sea monster or the billowing hair of a goddess fallen from heaven. The whales liked to swim among the kelp, gently rising to the surface where they would lay the massed fronds over their sensitive blowholes.
He dived and as he did so his life unfolded before his eyes in a way he had not expected. He saw the faces of his parents who had died years ago back in New Orleans. He had seen them only once after he left that morning, when they came to McNeil Island for a visit before he was paroled. He saw Bourbon Street in the rain, could hear the strains of his own guitar above the sound of his breathing. He saw the roads through Texas, dust-blown, desert edging the blacktop and tumbleweeds kicked around by the wind. He saw the ice sculptures in McCall, Payette Lake frozen where the really keen fishermen drilled holes in the winter. He saw the icebound highway on the Camas prairie and the back of the FBI agent’s head, just before they ran off the road.
He saw the car wreck and himself standing ankle deep in powdered snow on the road above the scene, like some shivering sculpture of his own in the moonlight. He remembered the frostbitten chill in the air and the weight of his breath as steam. He remembered just how silent that Idaho night had been before the headlights from the truck lit up the bend in the road and the chattering diesel engine broke open the stillness. He remembered the bar in Bellingham and the first mate’s stare: the vessel steaming up the strait and his belly bilious as they hit the open sea. He remembered Hawaii and then the second and third boats and the. New Zealand coastguard’s scrutiny and how he determined he would jump ship as soon as the skipper informed them they were landing their catch at Bluff Cove. He saw his deer trap at Yuvali Beach and he saw Mahina for the very first time, mud climbing naked ankles where she hopped out of the dinghy.
He finned down and heard the first whale grunting loud and higher pitched, almost like threads of humpback song coming through the depths like a warning.
Libby stood at the stern rail for a few minutes before the cold and her sudden fears drove her inside once more. The sunshine of yesterday was broken now with patches of mist mottling the tangled land south of the Hooker Hills which seemed to mass against the boat, rata and scrub, and all at once a thousand black petrels were leaving their nests for the sea. They startled her, the scavengers of the Sub-Antarctic lifting into the air with one combined shriek, massive wings beating the air as they took off towards the ocean. She watched a pair leave the main cluster and fly high in courtship, the male with his wings pinned back, breast thrust out and his beak open, calling to her in black silhouette against the sky.
She went below and dressed quickly, then she looked again at John-Cody’s cabin, seeking some sign of his intentions. Call it woman’s intuition, she had no other name for it, but she knew something was wrong. She had half a mind to wake Tom and Jonah but for some other reason, not quite apparent, she resisted. At the chart table she paused, eyeing John-Cody’s open briefcase standing where it had not stood last night. She looked inside and her gaze settled on a battered brown envelope. She did not remember seeing it before, and she furrowed her brow when she realized it was from the immigration service. There were three letters in all and a handful of words assaulted all of her senses.
Forty-two days to leave the country or face arrest and forced removal.
TWENTY-ONE
THE WHALE WAS A young male under ten years old, barely an adolescent: dark on his back, almost the black of his ancestors but mottled at the fluke and tips of his flippers. Sea lions were hounding him, darting at him, nipping his tail flukes and torpedoing off his flanks. John-Cody finned down past them, watching for a moment as two of the young sea lions came right up to him, circling with a grace which belied their movements on land. They barked at him as if they knew his purpose, but his resolve was fixed and he finned slowly on. Swathes of bladder kelp rose up from the seabed to greet him, yellow and brown and interspersed with other varieties of weed. Two yellow-eyed penguins flew past after krill, probably taking him for a sea lion and giving him a wide berth. The water was clear and blue with the sunlight falling in incandescent shafts that glittered below the surface. There was no evidence of a current; the only wash he felt was from the tail flukes of a whale passing some distance away. Whales weighed upwards of seventy-five tonnes and could move with surprising speed, and getting in the way of the flukes meant broken limbs at least.
John-Cody was no longer aware of how cold the water was. His head felt clear for the first time in a long while, almost at peace, and yet way at the back of his mind was a
nagging sensation, not enough to disturb his purpose but there all the same. Tom would get them home: that was why he had brought him. Jonah was good crew and Libby knew what to do in a boat.
His thoughts centred on himself again. As soon as he had seen the bald facts of the letter from immigration he knew he couldn’t go through with it. Fiordland was the only home he wanted: the boat, the sounds and this place where the wind was so strong it pushed columns of water back up the cliff face. The fight was lost, Pole and his backers were too strong and they held a trump card he could not play against. He wondered again how the man had managed to find out about his past. But Pole was a Vietnam veteran and proud of it, his wife was an American lawyer and a good private detective could find out just about anything. None of that mattered any more. They wanted the Korimako but the skipper of the Korimako wasn’t bringing her home.
Libby stuffed the letter into the back pocket of her jeans and thought about waking Tom. It seemed the obvious thing to do but still something stopped her. She could not identify what that something was, but she might be wrong about the whole thing and worrying Tom would not endear her to John-Cody when he surfaced. Didn’t she mean if he surfaced? The letter said it all. It answered the question of why he had brought her here in the first place. There was no chance of finding a resident pod of dolphins this far south: they had both known that. She had jumped at the chance of seeing the lost tribe of southern rights. John-Cody had come here to die.
That thought twisted like knotted cord in her stomach and she went back on deck. Standing in the stern she looked for his bubbles, the tell-tale line of rising air pockets that would indicate where he was and that he was still alive. She couldn’t see any. Moving to the port quarter she looked the length of the boat and saw the dive flag still twisted in its lowered position round the shroud. He hadn’t raised it. He always raised the dive flag: it was habit, even down here where there were no other vessels. She gripped the stern rail with freezing fingers, and desperately she scanned the flattened surface of the bay for any sign of him. There was no sign and she knew she needed to be higher. The jib mast had a crow’s nest at thirty feet: without another thought she rushed for’ard and climbed.