“Are you here for the whale?” she asked Libertine.
“Pardon me?”
“A killer whale came here today from South America. Colombia—is that South America or Central America?”
“South America,” Libertine said. “I think I just saw him arrive. Can you tell me anything about him?”
“Well, for starters they say he’s dying, but how bad can he be, if they’re bringing him all the way here?”
“Didn’t this zoo used to have an elephant?” She remembered a flap a few years ago about a lone captive elephant at a small Washington zoo she’d never heard of before.
“Yep,” the waitress said ruefully. “That’s us.”
By the time Libertine was finished with her meal—and it always amazed her, even after all these years, how little time it took to eat when you were by yourself—she was exhausted enough that even the prospect of her awful motel room didn’t seem so bad. Without another sign from the whale that had brought her so far from home, she fell into bed and a deep, dreamless sleep.
ONCE THE LAST of the media were outside the perimeter fence and tucked into their satellite trucks for the night, and Neva and Sam had gone home to get a few hours’ sleep, Gabriel brought a bucket of fish to the pool top and put Viernes through a few familiar behaviors. The physical exertion would help him shake out any lingering muscle kinks and fully exercise his lungs, both important after remaining motionless for so long during transport. It would also give Gabriel a chance to better assess his condition.
As he watched, Viernes plowed through the water, cheating on his speed-swim by shaving the corners and riding the wave he’d created with his own initial momentum. He was slower than any killer whale Gabriel had ever seen except for the very old or dying. He was winded after a single lap around the pool, and his body jiggled when he exerted himself, even as emaciated as he was; he had almost no muscle tone. When he exhaled, he blew gobs of dirty snot. After Gabriel had given him the last of the fish—nutrient-rich fresh herring of a quality he might not have tasted since his capture off the coast of Norway eighteen years ago—Viernes swam to the far end of the pool, put his head in the corner, and closed his eyes.
Gabriel folded his arms across his chest. Viernes’s recovery would be a long, long road.
Chapter 4
NEVA AND SAM came back to the pool at eleven that night, so Gabriel could get some rest. As soon as he left, Viernes approached them, propping his chin on the side of the pool.
“C’mon,” Neva said to Sam. “You want to get your hands on him as much as I do.”
They stepped into the four-inch-deep, foot-and-a-half-wide wet walk that went all the way around the pool, and reached out tentative hands. Neva had touched a beluga once, years before, and distinctly remembered it feeling exactly like a wet hard-boiled egg, smooth and slippery. Viernes, on the other hand, felt more like a black olive, at least where he wasn’t covered with warty outgrowths. He opened his mouth wide, which Gabriel had told her meant that he was inviting them to touch his tongue. Neva reached in hesitantly, patting it, which Gabriel had said he liked. His eyes went piggy with pleasure.
“No molars,” said Sam, assessing the perfectly conical teeth that interlocked, top and bottom.
“They don’t chew. Their teeth are meant to bite and tear.”
Sam regarded him for a long beat. “Does he look dangerous to you? They’re supposed to be really dangerous, but I’m not seeing it.”
“Well, he’s sick,” Neva reasoned. “Plus he’s used to people. Hannah was supposed to be dangerous, too.”
“Baby girl wouldn’t have hurt a fly,” Sam said loyally. “ ’Cept maybe that Harriet Saul.”
“I’m sure it’s the same with Viernes. Truman was telling me a story they told him down there, about how a toddler fell into his pool once and he picked her up on his back and saved her. No one knows if it’s true or not, though.”
Viernes exhaled—poooooo-siiiiip—making them both jump up and backward. “Aren’t we a fine pair,” Sam said, and Neva laughed at them both.
At 10:00 P.M., to their surprise, Ivy Levy joined them on the pool top, an outraged Julio Iglesias still pinned inside the Snugli. Sam and Neva had set up two beach chairs, and were watching Viernes nap on the far side of the pool. When Sam saw Ivy he hopped up and offered her his chair, which she waved away.
“Hey, buddy,” Neva greeted Julio Iglesias. He showed her his teeth.
Ivy watched Viernes for several minutes. “He’s a good-looking whale, all things considered,” she said, pulling a silver flask from her coat pocket. The air was cold, and a light drizzle was falling. “Sam?”
“No, ma’am. I made it a point a long time ago not to drink while I’m working. Never was much of a drinker anyway.”
“Well, I always was one for a good brandy on this kind of night. I have plenty to go around, if you change your mind.”
Neva declined, too. “But can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away.”
“What made you decide to help him?” Neva asked. “He’s incredibly lucky.”
Ivy considered this for a long beat before saying, simply, “He needed someone to.”
“Clearly,” said Neva. “But why you?”
Ivy shrugged, yawned. “You’ve met Julio Iglesias, so it should be pretty obvious that I’m a soft touch, especially when it’s not in my own best interests. When they found Julio he had cigarette burns all over his body and he still had—has—the chutzpah to push my buttons every single chance he gets. Give me a fighter, and I’m a pushover, and the longer the shot, the better.”
Neva laughed. “Well, I’d say this whale’s luck has turned.”
“If he lives.”
“Oh, he’ll live,” Neva said. “When you’ve been a zookeeper for as long as I have, you can spot the survivors a mile away. Gabriel knew it, too, or he’d never have let you take him on.”
AS IVY DECIDED to accept the offer of Sam’s chair after all, softly grunting as she settled into its tight embrace, Gabriel was standing buck naked before the mirror in the bathroom of his hotel room. He was more tired than he’d been in a long, long time, and peered at a clutch of blisters in his throat with a halogen field flashlight. Pustular tonsillitis. He’d probably had it for a couple of days already. He normally kept antibiotics with him but he’d used them all up during the just-completed consultation with a rehab facility outside Beijing, which had lasted not the planned-for four days but nearly three weeks. He’d flown directly from China to Bogotá to finalize transport arrangements, and then from Bogotá to Bladenham to accept a food delivery of a pallet of frozen herring and make sure the pool was fully equipped with dive gear, nets, cleaning hoses, brushes, and other paraphernalia. He’d conned a prescription for amoxicillin from his long-suffering physician, who’d given up insisting on seeing him every time he prescribed meds years ago, when Gabriel had come back from Tierra del Fuego with a deep-tissue infection from a dolphin bite that had nearly cost him his leg, but he hadn’t had a chance to fill it yet. In the meantime he shook a small handful of expired amoxicillin tablets from a bottle Ivy had unearthed from the back of her medicine cabinet before driving down.
Physical infirmity didn’t faze him. He was powerfully built and blessed with an unusually high pain threshold. His skin was filigreed with a ghostly network of past bites, punctures, cuts, and stitches, some of which he’d sewn himself while in the field. Right now his upper right chest was a lively greenish-yellow from nipple to collarbone from a blow he’d taken while maneuvering one of the dolphins into a medical pool for a checkup.
He popped ibuprofen like breath mints.
He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and hung on to the promise of coffee to get himself out of the hotel room. He had no idea what time it was, though it appeared to be near dawn. Time and place were more abstract to him than to most people. Before his initial trip to Bogotá, where he met Ivy, he’d been in Thailand, Holland, Portugal, and Peru. The gift that was his regular
bowels could not be overrated.
Now, staggering out into the early morning, he headed directly for a Dunkin’ Donuts he’d seen yesterday on the way through town.
“Hey,” a cheerful young black woman greeted him from the drive-through window. Beads on her million braids clicked nicely as she turned her head to smile at him. “How you doing, honey?”
“I’m breathing. Can you tell me what day of the week it is?”
“It’s Friday, baby. You have a rough night last night?”
“Yeah. I’d like four cups of coffee.”
“All for you?”
“You bet.”
“Why don’t I just get you a thermos? We’re running a special.”
“Even better. And I’d like a dozen mixed doughnuts, too. Your choice.” Once she’d left the window, he blew his nose out the open car door, field-style.
She returned with a torpedo-shaped thermos and a doughnut box that she handed him through the window. “You just drink that coffee, hon, and it’ll fix you right up.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. And if I’m wrong, you just tell the good Lord Rayette sent you.”
LIBERTINE AWOKE AT dawn to find the smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the motel’s cheaply paneled walls and Viernes throbbing in her head. Animals were often represented by colors, and this morning his was the purple of bruised and aching things—as could be expected after such a long journey. She was exhausted, too, but resolute, especially because in daylight the motel room was even more horrible than it had been in the dark. She took a shower as quickly as she possibly could, vowing to buy flip-flops before nightfall, and then set out to find something to eat. She drove through Dunkin’ Donuts, buying not only a thermos of coffee, but also half a dozen doughnuts—figuring the combined sugar and caffeine should be enough to fuel her at least through early afternoon.
“You’re the second one this morning who’s bought a thermos,” said the young woman at the drive-through. “Must be a lot of tired people in town. You here to see that whale they just brought to the zoo last night?”
“How did you know?” Libertine asked. She briefly wondered if she should get someone at the beauty school to do her hair in a million tiny braids like the young woman’s, then dismissed the idea. White people wearing black hairstyles usually just looked silly.
“I don’t know you. A town like this, you usually know just about everyone. You’re like the ninth stranger to come through in the last fifteen minutes,” the young woman said.
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Most of them said they drove all night to get here. You ask me, I say that’s some kind of crazy.”
“Well, whales do that to people sometimes.”
“Yeah?” The young woman shrugged. ”I guess I just don’t see it.”
“I wish more people felt that way,” Libertine said, taking her paper bag of doughnuts and the cylinder of coffee. “If they did, there wouldn’t be as many killer whales in captivity.”
“Yeah, well, you can bet those people at the zoo are seeing dollar signs all over the place.”
“Oh, I’m sure they are,” Libertine agreed.
Provisioned, she drove back to the zoo. At the ticket booth she asked whether visitors could see Viernes yet. “No, not today,” the woman said regretfully. “We hope you’ll be able to see him by Friday, though.”
“There’s no way I can see him sooner than that?” Libertine asked. “I came all the way down from Orcas Island.”
The woman looked genuinely dismayed, but stuck to her guns. “We have lots of other wonderful animals I’m sure you’d enjoy.”
“That’s okay—maybe I’ll come back later.” Libertine went back to her car and drove along the fence line until she reached the back entrance she’d found last night. The street wasn’t cordoned off anymore, so she pulled onto the gravel shoulder. If the whale wanted to communicate with her, at least she’d be nearby. Making the best of it, she set up a nylon camp chair and TV tray she kept in her trunk for just such occasions, brought out her bag of doughnuts and coffee, and filled her mouth with sugary goodness.
WHEN GABRIEL MADE his way aloft he found Ivy yawning uncontrollably and Neva and Sam sitting in flimsy webbed lawn chairs.
“So how’s our boy?” Gabriel asked, setting his thermos and box of doughnuts down on a nearby cooler top.
“He’s the coolest thing ever,” Neva said. “Sam and I both think so.” They caught him up on how much Viernes had eaten, how much he’d slept, how he’d interacted with them during their watch. While they talked, Viernes swam over and rested his chin on the side of the pool, watching.
“Here’s a question for you both,” Neva said to Gabriel and Ivy, exchanging a quick look with Sam. “We both feel kind of self-conscious calling him Viernes. I mean, if you speak Spanish it probably trips off the tongue, but we were wondering if we could call him Friday. Since that’s what Viernes means.”
“Run it by your boss, but it’s fine with me.” Gabriel looked at Ivy. “Do you care?”
“Not as long as he doesn’t.”
“Truman?”
“The whale. It is his name.”
“Believe me, he won’t care,” said Gabriel, crossing his arms and watching the whale watch them. “So he didn’t move around much overnight?”
“No, hardly at all,” said Neva. ”Except to eat.”
Gabriel nodded. “He’s probably stiff from yesterday. We’ll get him moving in a little while.”
Ivy clapped him on the back and said, “Unless there’s more excitement coming that I’m not aware of, this old lady’s going home for a nap.”
“Take one for me, too,” Gabriel said.
“I wish I could,” Ivy said earnestly. “You look like you could use it. Here, maybe this will help.” She dug around in her purse and pulled out two pill bottles, which she shook like maracas. “This one’s the amoxicillin, and this one’s Vicodin from my personal stash.” She toasted him with the bottle of painkillers. “To your health.”
“And yours,” Gabriel said, toasting her back. “Sweet dreams.”
Once Ivy was gone, they all stood for some minutes in the sort of ragged silence that comes from sleep deprivation and adrenaline depletion. Friday drifted away, using minimal energy, opening and closing his mouth.
“Why’s he doing that?” Sam asked.
“Because he can,” said Gabriel, yawning.
“They ever scare you?”
“Who?”
“Them,” Sam said, nodding toward the whale.
Gabriel took a big swig of coffee before saying, “I’ve been working with them for a long, long time, so no, not in the way you probably mean. But you have to be on your game. Just because they’re tractable doesn’t mean they can’t kill you. They can play with you to death. They can keep you underwater too long. They can pin you to a wall, or whack you with one good kick of the flukes. Let your guard down and you can be dead—and they may not even realize what they’ve done.”
Sam regarded Viernes for a few minutes. “You believe animals have souls?”
“Do I believe they’re just like us only in funny clothes? No, I don’t believe that. I think it demeans what they are in their own right.”
“That’s not the way I meant it, exactly,” Sam said. “When I first met shug—that’s Hannah, my elephant—I thought she was just about the funniest-looking thing I’d ever seen. But only that one time. After that she was always beautiful in my eyes. I believe it was her soul I was looking at every day.”
Gabriel face softened. “Then yes, by that definition I believe animals have souls.”
“I loved shug with all my heart. Still do. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that way about another animal.”
“You’d be amazed at how much the heart can hold,” Gabriel said. “Have you been down to the sanctuary to see her?”
“Nah. Me and Mama don’t travel. She doesn’t need me anymore. If I showed up it would only confuse her. Girl’s g
ot what she needs. They send me DVDs from time to time, and in every one of them shug’s smiling. It does a heart good to see that.”
Gabriel nodded. “Saying good-bye’s always tough.”
“I only had to do it that once. Shug was my one and only. I never meant to be a zookeeper like you and Neva. I came back here from Korea in 1955 and next thing I know, I’m working for Miz Biedelman, and then she gives me shug to take care of. Put the fear of God in me, I’ll tell you that. I always did wonder what she saw in me, to trust me with the girl.”
“You’re a natural animal person,” said Gabriel. “That’s what she saw.”
“Don’t know about that—shug just taught me what she needed me to do, and I did it. And now she’s made friends with the other elephants down there. I was sure glad to know she still could after all those years by herself. We worry about the girl, Mama especially. You worry about this whale at all?”
“What, his being alone?”
Sam nodded. “It hurts my heart to see.”
“Would I rather see him with other killer whales? Sure. But don’t forget that for him, it’s normal to be the only one. And it’s been like that nearly his whole life. At least here he won’t have dolphins beating him up.”
“Well, I guess that’s something,” said Sam.
“Yes,” said Gabriel firmly. “It is.” His face gentled. “Why don’t you go home, you and Neva, and get some sleep? It’s been a long night.”
“Think I will,” said Sam, at the exact moment Neva said, “Hell, no.”
Gabriel shrugged. He assumed she’d been a zookeeper long enough to know about pacing herself; and if she didn’t, she was about to learn it in a hurry.
TRUMAN CLIMBED TO the pool top half an hour later, clad head to foot in what he termed his Media Suit: Max L. Biedelman Zoo turtleneck, Max L. Biedelman Zoo polar fleece sweater, Max L. Biedelman Zoo jacket. He clapped Gabriel on the shoulder. “You get some rest?”
Friday's Harbor: A Novel Page 5