by T. C. Boyle
Nick was lighting his pipe. “Uh,” I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back to the ship?”
If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. He was muttering under his breath and jerking angrily at his knuckles. He took a long, slow hit from a tarnished flask, then glared up at the stoic Russian faces and collectively gave them the finger. “Murderers!” he shouted. “Cossack faggots!”
I was on assignment for one of the news magazines, and I’d managed to come up with some expense money from Audubon as well. The news magazine wanted action shots of the confrontation between the whalers and Nick, Gary, and Ernie; Audubon wanted some wide-angles of spouting whales for an article by some cetologist studying the lung capacity of the minke. I’d talked them into the assignment. Like a fool. For the past few years I’d been doing pretty well on the fashion circuit (I’d done some Junior Miss things for Sears and Bloomingdale’s and freelanced for some of the women’s magazines), but had begun to feel that I was missing something. Call it malaise, call it boredom. I was making a living, but what was I doing for the generations of mankind? Saving the whales—or at least doing my part in it—seemed a notch or two higher on the ethical scale than inflaming the lust of pubescent girls for snakeskin boots and fur collars. And what’s more, I was well equipped to do it, having begun my career as a naturalist.
That’s right: I too had my youthful illusions. I was just six months out of college when I did my study of the bearded tit for the National Geographic, and I was flush with success and enthusiasm. The following year Wildlife sent me up the Xingu to record the intimate life of the capybara. I waded through swamps, wet to my waist, crouched behind blinds for days on end, my skin black with mosquitoes though I didn’t dare slap them for fear of spooking my quarry. I was bitten by three different species of arachnids. I contracted bilharziasis. It was then that I decided to trade in my telephoto lens and devote myself to photographing beautiful women with haunted eyes in clean, airy studios.
Nick was on his feet now, fighting for balance as the waves tossed our raft. “Up Brezhnev!” he shrieked, the cords in his neck tight as hawsers.
Suddenly one of the Russians reared back and threw something at us, something round and small. I watched its trajectory as it shot out over the high bow of the ship and arced gracefully for us. It landed with a rush of air and a violent elastic hiss like a dozen rubber bands snapping simultaneously. The missile turned out to be a grapefruit, frozen hard as a brick. It tore a hole through the floor of the raft.
After the rescue, I spent a few days in a hospital in Vancouver, then flew back to New York. Gary—or was it Ernie?—lost two toes. I took a nasty crack over the eyebrow that required nineteen stitches and made me look either rakish or depraved, depending on your point of view. The photos, for which I’d been given an advance, were still in the camera—about thirty fathoms down. Still, things wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the headaches. Headaches that began with a quick stab at something beneath the surface of the eye and then built with a steadily mounting pressure until the entire left side of my head felt like a helium balloon and I began to understand that I was no longer passionate on the subject of whales. After all, the only whales I’d managed to catch sight of were either dead, dying, or sprinting for their lives in a rush of foam. Where was the worth and beauty in that? And where, I wondered, was the affirmation these diluvian and mystical beasts were supposed to inject into my own depleted life?
The night I got in, Stephanie showed up at my apartment with a bottle of Appleton’s rum. We made piña coladas and love. There was affirmation in that. In the morning, 7:00 A.M., Harry Macey was at the door in a warm-up suit. He whistled at the stitching over my eye, compared me unfavorably with Frankenstein’s monster, offered me a dried lemon peel, and sat down at the kitchen table. “All right,” he barked, “let’s have it—all the details. Currents, sightings, the Russian take—everything.” I reconstructed the trip for him over Red Zinger and granola, while he nodded and spooned, spooned and nodded, filing mental notes. But before I’d even got halfway he cut me off, jumped up from the table, and told me there was someone I just had to meet, right away, no arguments, a person I could really relate to.
I looked up from my granola, head throbbing. He was standing over me, shot through with energy, tugging at his ear, blowing the steam from his teacup, all but dancing. “I know you’re going to love him,” he said. “The man knows whales inside and out.”
Eyolf Holluson lived in a two-room apartment on East Twenty-sixth Street. He was eighty-six years old. We mounted the steps two at a time—all five flights—and stood outside the door while Harry counted his heartbeats. “Forty-four a minute,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Nothing when you consider the lungfish, but not bad for a man of thirty-nine.” In the process, my own heart seemed to have migrated to my head, where it was pounding like a letterpress over my left eye.
A voice, high and nasal, shaken with vibrato, echoed from behind the door. “Harry?”
Harry answered in the affirmative, the voice indicated that the door was open, and we stepped into a darkened room lit only by flashing Christmas bulbs and smelling of corned beef and peppermint. On the far side of the room, lost in the folds of a massive, dun-colored armchair draped with layers of doily and antimacassar, sat Eyolf. Before him was a TV tray, and beyond that a color TV, pictures flashing, sound turned off.
“Eyolf,” Harry said, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine—he’s come to talk about whales.”
The old man turned and squinted up at me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles, then turned back to the tray. “Oh yah,” he said. “Yust finishing up my breakfast.” He was eating corned beef, plum tomatoes from the can, dinner mints.
Harry prompted him. “Eyolf fished whales for fifty-seven years—first with the Norwegian fleet, and then, when they packed it in, with the Portuguese off the Canary Islands.”
“The old way,” Eyolf said, his mouth a stew of mint and tomato. “Oars and harpoons.”
We crossed the room and settled into a spongy loveseat that smelled of cat urine. Harry produced a pocket-sized tape recorder, flicked it on, and placed it on the TV tray beside the old man’s plate. Then he sank back into the loveseat, crossed his legs at the knee, and said, “Tell us about it, Eyolf.”
The old man was wearing a plaid bathrobe and slippers. His frame was big, flesh wasted, his skin the color and texture of beef jerky. He talked for two hours, the strange nasal voice creaking like oars in their locks, rising and falling like the tide. He told us of a sperm whale that had overturned a chase boat in the Sea of Japan, of shipmates towed out of sight and lost in the Antarctic, of a big Swede who lost his leg in a fight with flensing knives. With a crack of his knees he rose up out of the chair and took a harpoon down from the wall, cocked his arm, and told us how he’d struck a thousand whales, hot blood spurting in his face over the icy spume, how it tasted and how his heart rushed with the chase. “You stick him,” he said, “and it’s like sticking a woman. Better.”
There was a copy of the Norsk Hvalfangst-Tildende on the table. Behind me, mounted on hooks, was a scrimshaw pipe, and beside it a huge blackened sheet of leather, stiff with age. I ran my finger along its abrasive edge, wondering what it was—a bit of fluke, tongue?—and yet somehow, in a dim grope of intuition, knowing.
Eyolf was spinning a yarn about a sperm whale that had surfaced beneath him with an eighteen-foot squid clenched in its jaws when he turned to me. “I think maybe you are wondering what is this thing like a bullfighter’s cape hanging from Eyolfs wall?” I nodded. “A present from the captain of the Freya, nearly forty years back, it was. In token of my take of finback and bowhead over a period of two, three hectic weeks. Hectic, oh yah. Blood up to my knees—hot first, then cold. There was blood in my shoes at night.”
“The leather, Eyolf,” Harry said. “Tell Roger about it.”
“Oh yah,” he said, looking at me now as if I were made of plastic. “This here is off of the
biggest creater on God’s earth. The sulfur-bottom, what you call the blue. I keep it here for vigor and long life.”
The old man gingerly lifted it from the wall and handed it to me. It was the size of a shower curtain, rigid as tree bark. Eyolf was smiling and nodding. “Solid, no?” He stood there, looking down at me, trembling a bit with one of his multiple infirmities.
“So what is it?” I said, beginning to lose patience.
“You don’t know?” He was picking his ear. “This here is his foreskin.”
Out on the street Harry said he had a proposition for me. A colleague of his was manning a whale watch off the Península Valdés on the Patagonian coast. He was studying the right whale on its breeding grounds and needed some high-quality photographs to accompany the text of a book he was planning. Would I take the assignment for a flat fee?
My head throbbed at the thought of it. “Will you come along with me?”
Harry looked surprised. “Me?” Then he laughed. “Hell no, are you kidding? I’ve got classes to teach, I’m sitting on a committee to fund estuarine research, I’m committed for six lectures on the West Coast.”
“I just thought—”
“Look, Roger—whales are fascinating and they’re in a lot of trouble. I’m hoping to do a monograph on the reproductive system of the rorquals, in fact, but I’m no field man. Actually, pelagic mammals are almost as foreign to my specialty area as elephants.”
I was puzzled. “Your specialty area?”
“I study holothurians. My dissertation was on the sea cucumber.” He looked a little abashed. “But I think big.”
The Patagonian coast of Argentina is a desolate, godforsaken place, swept by perpetual winds, parched for want of rain, home to such strange and hardy creatures as the rhea, crested tinamou, and Patagonian fox. Darwin anchored with the Beagle here in 1832, rowed ashore and described a dozen new species. Wildlife abounded. The rocks were crowded with birds—kelp and dolphin gulls, cormorants in the thousands, the southern lapwing, red-backed hawk, tawny-throated dotterel. Penguins and sea lions lolled among the massed black boulders and bobbed in the green swells, fish swarmed offshore, and copepods—ten billion for each star in the sky—thickened the Falkland current until it took on the consistency of porridge. Whales gathered for the feast. Rights, finbacks, minkes—Darwin watched them spouting and lobtailing, sounding and surfacing, courting, mating, calving.
Nothing has changed here—but for the fact that there are fewer whales now. The cormorants and penguins and seals are still there, numbers uncountable, still battening on the rich potage that washes the littoral. And still undisturbed by man—with one small exception. The Tsunamis. Shuhei, Grace, and their three daughters. For five months out of the year the Tsunamis occupy the Península Valdés, living in a concrete bunker, eating pots of rice, beans, and fish, battling the wind and the loneliness, watching whales.
Stephanie and I landed with the supply plane, not two hundred feet from the Tsunami bunker. It was August, and the right whales were mating. During the intervening months I’d nursed my split head, drained pitchers of piña coladas, and gone back to the Junior Miss circuit. But I kept in touch with Harry Macey, read ravenously on the subject of whales, joined Greenpeace, and flew to Tokyo for the trial of six members of a cetacean terrorist group accused of harpooning a Japanese industrialist at the Narita airport. I attended lectures, looked at slides, visited Nantucket. At night, after a long day in the studio, I closed my eyes and whales slipped through the Stygian sea of my dreams. There was no denying them.
Grace was waiting for us as the Cessna touched down: hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, eyes like polished walnut. The girls were there too—Gail, Amy, and Melia—bouncing, craning their necks, rabid with excitement at the prospect of seeing two new faces in the trackless waste. Shuhei was off in the dunes somewhere, in a welter of sonar dishes, listening for whales.
I shook hands with Grace; Stephanie, in a blast of perfume and windswept hair, pecked her cheek. Stephanie was wearing sealskin boots, her lynx coat, and a “Let Them Live” T-shirt featuring the flukes of a sounding whale. She had called me two days before I was scheduled to leave and said that she needed a vacation. Okay, I told her, glad to have you. She found a battery-operated hair dryer and a pith helmet at the Abercrombie & Fitch closeout sale, a wolf-lined parka at Max Bogen, tents, alcohol stoves, and freeze-dried Stroganoff at Paragon; she mail-ordered a pair of khaki puttees and sheepskin mukluks from L. L. Bean, packed up her spare underwear, eyeshadow, three gothic romances, and six pounds of dried apricots, and here she was, in breezy Patagonia, ready for anything.
“Christ!” she shouted, over the roar of the wind. “Does it always blow like this?” It was howling in off the sea, a steady fifty knots.
Grace was grinning, hood up, hair in her face. With her oblate eyes and round face and the suggestion of the hood, she looked like an Eskimo. “I was just going to say,” she shouted, “this is calm for the Península Valdés.”
That night we sat around the Franklin stove, eating game pie and talking whale. Grace was brisk and efficient, cooking, serving, clearing up, joking, padding round the little room in shorts and white sweat socks. Articulated calves, a gap between the thighs: earth mother, I thought. Shuhei was brooding and hesitant, born in Osaka (Grace was from L.A.). He talked at length about his project, of chance and probability, of graphs, permutations, and species-replacement theory. He was dull. When he attempted a witticism—a play on “flukes,” I think it was—it caught us unaware and he turned red.
Outside the wind shrieked and gibbered. The girls giggled in their bunks. We burned our throats on Shuhei’s sake and watched the flames play over the logs. Stephanie was six feet long, braless and luxuriant. She yawned and stretched. Shuhei was looking at her the way an indigent looks at a veal cutlet.
“Well,” I said, yawning myself. “Guess we better turn in.”
We’d pitched our tent just before dark, and it had blown down three times since. Now, as we made for the door, Shuhei became insistent. “No, no,” he said, all but blocking our way. “Stay in here tonight—with us.”
Grace looked up from her sake. “Yes,” she said. “We insist.”
I woke to the sound of whales. A deep, resonant huffing and groaning I could feel in my bones, a sound like trombones and English horns. It was light. I glanced round and saw that the Tsunamis were gone, hurriedly pulled on my clothes, grabbed my camera, and slipped out the door. There was no need to wake Stephanie.
The sky was overcast and the wind was still blowing a steady gale—it threw sand in my face as I made my way down to the cove where the Tsunamis kept their inflatable raft. There were birds everywhere—gulls whitening the sky, cormorants diving for fish, penguins loitering among the rocks as if they’d been carved of wood. Elephant seals and their pups sprawled on the beach; right whales spouted in the bay. It was like a National Geographic Special. I took a few shots of the seals, then worked my way down the shoreline until I found Grace and Melia perched atop a sand dune with a pair of binoculars and a notepad. Grace was wearing a windbreaker, white shorts, and a scarf; Melia was six years old.
Grace waved. “Want to go out in the boat?” she called.
I stood in water up to my knees, bracing the raft, while Grace pulled the starter cord and Melia held my Bronica. As we lurched off into the persistent swells I found myself thinking of Nick, Gary, and Ernie, but my initial fears proved unfounded: Grace was a faultless and assured pilot. We cut diagonally across the bay toward a distant sand spit. Gulls keened overhead, seals barked, spray flew, and then, before I could even get my camera focused, a big right pounded the water with his massive flukes, not thirty feet from us. “That was Bob Tail,” Grace said, laughing.
I was wiping the spray from my lens. “How could you tell?”
“Easy. There’s a piece missing from his left fluke.”
We cruised the bay, and I was introduced to thirty whales or so, some recognized by name, others anonymous. I saw
Gray Spot, Cyclops, Farrah Fawcett, and Domino, and actually got close enough to touch one of them. He was skimming the surface, black as a barge and crusted over with barnacles and lice, the huge yellowed mesh of his baleen exposed like the insides of a piano. Grace wheeled the raft round on him, throttle cranked down to idle, and as we came up alongside him I reached out and patted his cool, smooth hide. It was like patting a very wet horse the size of a house. I laid my open palm against the immensity of the whale’s flank and for one mad moment thought I could feel the blood coursing through him, the colossal heart beating time with the roll of the tides and the crash of distant oceans; I felt I was reaching out and touching the great steaming heart of the planet itself. And then, in a rush of foam, he was gone.
For the next two weeks I spent mornings, afternoons—and when the light was good—evenings out on the bay. Stephanie came out with us once or twice, but preferred beachcombing with the girls; Shuhei was busy with the other boat, running up to Punta Tombo and back—something to do with his sonar dishes. He was gathering data on the above-water sounds of the right whale, while Grace was busy surveying the local population for size, color, distinguishing characteristics. She was also intent on observing their breeding behavior.
One afternoon we came upon a female floating belly up. Two males—one an adolescent no more than two-thirds her size—were nudging her, shoving at her great inert form with their callused snouts like a pair of beavers trying to maneuver a log. Grace cut the engine and pulled out her notepad. “Is she dead?” I asked.