The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  It hung there, to the accompaniment of the grating slide of shattered ice and the discordant twang of rigging like a harp being crushed in a garbage compactor, and the groaning crackle of a hull under unendurable stress. As the stern was forced down, green water flooded up, boiling along the slanted counter. Ice shattered and flew as the deck warped beneath the terrific downward weight of the coffee-colored mass.

  She clung astonished. This close, staring up, she registered strange traceries on that parchment-colored integument, as if urban gangs had gouged graffiti into it year after year until it became a palimpsest of uninterpretable images. No gleam of gold diatoms this time. That is, if it was the same whale. Yet there couldn’t be two this color, this size. Purplish eruptions big as her fists dotted it, as if crab-sized chiggers had burrowed beneath the skin. The whole gigantic forehead, the size of a two-story house, was hung with shredding skin as if from a bad sunburn. No eyes were visible; the orbs were so far around and below that from her vantage point the creature looked blind. Nor could she see a mouth, so far was it slung below the gigantic head.

  With a massive low snort a choking spray that smelled like a combination of rotten fish and a freshly fertilized field blew over them. Madsen had seized a boat hook and was darting it at the monster again and again. The blunt tip bounced back without making the slightest impression. But gradually the thing slid aft, or else the boat was skidding out from under it, hull shrieking. But some projection, or perhaps the burst and torn-apart inflatable, caught or dragged, not letting it go cleanly, and Anemone reared farther, dragged down by the stern as in the cabin gear left shelves and lockers with a roaring clatter.

  Sara had to grab the jambs of the companionway so as not to fall. Below her in the tilted cockpit a bloodlessly detached leg tobogganed down the ramp. A turbulent foam frothed where the screw-wash met the gigantic bulk that lay pressing down the rearmost projection of the boat, now many feet under water. For a moment she could not credit her eyes. Then a body followed, hands outflung, clawing at polished fiberglass, and she gasped.

  It was Bodine, shouting hoarsely as he went.

  She lunged, hand outstretched. “Mick!” she screamed. But without looking back, he vanished into the boiling whirlpool.

  The whale slipped free and with an enormous rolling turmoil submerged. When the sea crashed back the animal was still visible, submerged, wavering. Then it sank away, receding, leaving Anemone quivering all over with the sudden release. For a moment Sara glimpsed a human form beneath the seethe, stroking desperately upward. Then it too sank away, fading; became indistinct, and vanished.

  The boat pitched back upright, shaking off the sea, though the stern was bent awkwardly and splintered edges showed like torn burlap where the high-strength composite had cracked and only partially sprung back into place. From them long skeins of shed skin trailed like snagged veils. The rigging groaned. Ice clattered down, shattering like chandeliers in an earthquake all around her. Where whale and man had vanished a turbulent whirlpool of silvery-green sea boiled, then drifted astern as the screw bit in again and the boat resumed its forward progress.

  She scrambled out of the hatchway and seized the wheel, pushing Lars aside. Whipped it over to port, shouting into the hatchway, “Eddi! Give me the controls!”

  “Holy fuck,” Lars said, trembling, white-faced, bracing himself with one arm. He’d nearly gone down the sloping stern too. Kimura lay where he’d fallen, holding his side.

  “Mick’s down there. Get a line. Get a life preserver!”

  “D’you see him? Where is he?”

  “In that boil. To your left. There. He’ll come up. When he does, hit him with that throw line.”

  “Open the locker,” Madsen snapped. “Hy? Move!” Kimura started. He reached in and came up with a hank of orange line and a throw ring. Sara kept the rudder over, gaze nailed to where Bodine had gone down. The bow came round so slowly that she started to advance the throttle, but then dropped her hand. If they went too fast she’d overshoot. Helpless in sixty seconds kept going through her mind. Fully thirty had to have gone by already. She stood on tiptoe. Was that a head, bobbing in the dissipating foam? or the peak of a wave?

  “Hy, get up on the coach roof. Do you see him? Do you see?”

  “My ribs,” Kimura panted, bent where he sat. Sweat dripped off his brows. His fingers dug into his side, relaxed, spasmed again. He gathered himself, face contorted, and crawled like a stepped-on crab up onto the coach roof. Shaded his eyes. “I … see something,” he began.

  Sara brought the rudder back to centerline, aiming at the fading patch that rocked fifty yards ahead. “Where? Where is he? Point, Hy. Point.”

  The Japanese stretched out a shaking arm. Following it, she was drawn not to where Bodine had disappeared, but off to the right. Where the sea broke over what looked like tan rocks. A crooked, sideways jet burst like a geyser, broke into mist, and drifted raining across the back of a swell.

  “Pis og lort. It’s coming again,” Madsen cursed, as if he didn’t believe what he was seeing. He bent to a forward locker divided from the rest, unsnapped a latch, and hauled it up.

  Sara jerked her eyes off the oncoming monster and searched again where the sea was now gentling, smoothing. They purred up on it and she reached for the throttle, intending to stop, but Madsen’s glove overrode hers and pushed it all the way forward. She rounded on him. “Mick’s still down there!”

  “He’s not coming up. It’s been too long.”

  “No! We’ve got to be here when he—”

  “He’s dead—”

  They were screaming in each other’s face when Eddi swarmed up the companionway and thrust herself between them. She stared to starboard. “Oh Christ,” she moaned. “Look.”

  The very sea bulged, driven before the massive ondriving head as if by the bow of a great ship. The same thought must have hit all three of them at the same time, for they grasped the wheel together and hauled it over. Anemone’s bow swung toward the oncoming beast, but so damned slowly. Lars hit the button for the second engine. It coughed into life and he pushed the gear lever forward. The boat came around faster. Until it was aimed head to head, and boat and animal drove toward each other across a slick jostling sea.

  “Shoot this at it,” Lars shouted, and handed her an object in tangerine plastic that only belatedly did she recognize was a flare pistol. “It’s cocked.”

  She leveled it across the coach roof and pulled the trigger. A ball of scarlet flame cracked out, bright in the gray light and the falling snow. It drew a short arc and met the oncoming head, spattering bright sparks, and glanced off and down into the sea. Still burning, it sank, rays shimmering up to refract in a slowly fading glimmer. But the whale drove on. It had not altered its course at all, had not even seemed to notice it. At the last possible moment Madsen spun the wheel left.

  They met with a crash that knocked them all off their feet and set the mast jangling again.

  But the boat’s smooth flank seemed to yield, absorbing the blow. The whale dragged down their side, its spout jetting again to drench them all with a stinking exhalation. For a moment she thought they’d avoided a direct collision. But then something hard crashed against the hull. A crunch ran up her bones into the very tympana of her ears, as if her own body were being torn apart. And as the scribbled waxy-yellow bulk, scored with livid signs, passed by again, she glimpsed something hanging from its flank, long as a man’s body, trailed by many fathoms of bright orange line striped at intervals with black. From his clinging perch, one arm hugging the mast, Kimura yelled, “Harpoon. One of our—one of their harpoons.”

  “The fleet’s?” Madsen shouted.

  The Japanese nodded hard. “From Number 3. They use that line.”

  The whale had half rolled as it slid aft. Now, for the second time, she looked directly down into its eye. Only for a fraction of a second, though, as her gaze dropped to a splitting-wedge of jaw, long as a stretch limousine, that gaped to expose yellow pointed tee
th many inches long.

  Then it was gone again, in a welter of foam. The lift and drop of a massive tail sent solid sea cascading over them, drenching them all.

  With a spasmodic, rejecting gesture a panting Madsen pushed both throttles all the way forward and spun the wheel centerline, pointing between two small floes several hundred yards ahead. “Shit, shit,” he mumbled. The engines rose in pitch. Yet something was wrong with the notes, as if one warred with the other, discordant, grinding. A shudder worked its way up the steering pedestal, plucking the after shroud to a shimmy. A thunderclap came from astern, echoing over the water and back off the ice. The mast swayed and creaked. From beneath came that same cracking groan they’d heard earlier in the voyage.

  “Oh fuck, the keel,” Eddi said, clinging to the winch and looking astern, where the whale had submerged again. The thunder, Sara realized, must have been its tail striking the sea as it sounded.

  She whirled, staring. “Where are you going? Mick—he’s still back there—”

  “He’s dead, Sara. He never came up.”

  Eddi’s arms wrapped her as if she thought she might go over the side after him. She shuddered, looking down at the cold sea sliding past as Anemone accelerated. But slowly, with a deep shudder like her own.

  “She’s not getting on step,” Madsen yelled. “I’ve got rpm, but something’s wrong.”

  Auer hugged her closer, and water squelched and ran down between them. “Hy, you better get down from there,” she shouted. “Can you get down?”

  “My side. I think I broke something.”

  “Sara, can you help me get him down?”

  “I need a lookout. In case that thing comes back.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll be right back up.” She forced herself to move. They got the sobbing man into the cockpit, then down into the salon. They laid him in a bunk. When she stepped back Sara heard a splash. She looked down and flinched. The water around her boots was an inch deep.

  * * *

  When they poked their heads topside again the engines were howling, the stern was shaking, and the masttop was quivering in large circles against charcoal clouds from which snow was still dropping. Madsen kept adjusting the throttles and frowning. He shouted, above the yowl of engines and the whine of the wind, “How’s he doing?”

  “In pain. A broken rib?”

  “I think we left it behind. It can’t keep up, not at this speed. But there’s something wrong.”

  “Sounds like it,” Auer said. “And we’re taking water below.”

  Lars blanched. “Water? How fast? How much?”

  “About an inch on the salon floor.” Sara kept swallowing, trying not to think about Mick tobogganing past, just out of her reach, or the thing that had attacked them. “When it hit us? Maybe it knocked something loose. Like the keel.”

  “That wire Dru and Jamie rigged,” Eddi said.

  “I need to check it.” He looked around the horizon, then back where they’d come from. The sea surged in the gathering darkness. Snow whirled into their faces. “Eddi, can you take it?”

  “Up here? It’s fucking freezing, with this wind—”

  “Afraid so. No radar. Use the binoculars. Look for white patches. But keep going. As fast as you can without shaking her to pieces.”

  “We’re burning a lot of fuel,” Sara pointed out.

  “I just want to leave that thing astern.” Madsen relinquished the wheel. “Okay, I’m going below.”

  In the salon Sara squatted beside him as he pulled the access plates off the keel well and inspected the pivots. Hy kept groaning in the bunk but there was nothing she could do for him until they figured out where the leak was coming from. Finally the Dane clambered out. He said harshly, “The pins, all right. Sheared through their sockets.”

  “But it’s only an inch deep, and it hasn’t come up any.”

  “That’s because it runs aft and down into the bilge, and the pumps in the engine compartment pump it out. As long as they’re running, we’re okay. When they stop, we sink.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Uh-huh.” Oil and bilge-muck smeared his cheeks. He looked gaunt and exhausted. “It didn’t seem like anything could kill Mick,” he muttered. “He got through the war. Coped with everything.” He glanced at her. “At one point I thought the two of you—”

  “Is there any way we can slow down the leak?” she asked. Not wanting to talk about the other.

  “Not that I can see. We’re lucky it didn’t tear out of the hull. Then we’d just turn over and go down.” He rubbed his cheek, glancing to where the Japanese moaned. “Can you do something for him? I’m going to check the shafts. See if that’s where all that vibration’s coming from.”

  When he went aft she pulled a chair to the bunk. “Any better, Hy?”

  “Every time I breathe, hurts.”

  “Are you spitting up blood?” She had a vague memory, something about broken ribs puncturing the lungs. “Let me get the first-aid book.”

  “I very need something for this pain,” he said. “This is really hurts.”

  The book wasn’t very helpful. Wrapping or bandaging wouldn’t help. Painkillers would help him breathe, that was about all. She selected some and took them to him. “Water,” he croaked.

  “The system’s still frozen. I’m melting ice for tea. Can you get them down dry?” He made a face but swallowed and lay back, stiffening with each breath. She put her face in her hands. She ought to cry, oughtn’t she? But they hadn’t really been in love. Had they?

  “Are you all right, Sara?” Hy peered at her like a sick cat.

  “I’m just so very tired. And scared.” She shook herself and lifted her head. “I understand why it’s angry. After all. What I don’t understand is why it’s displaying this agonistic behavior toward us. We were trying to stop the killing.”

  He passed a hand over a sweating forehead. “Perhaps it has confused us with the whalers.”

  “It’s the only explanation I can think of. Did you see the harpoon?”

  “I saw it.” Kimura shifted and flinched again. Breathed hard. “Oh. That does not feel good. Like harpoon in my side. But the strange thing is, they are not designed to do that.”

  “To do what?”

  “To stick in like that. I don’t know the right word—but there are explosives in the head. A bomb? It explodes inside, to kill. This one did not go off, or the animal would not be alive. An explosion inside will kill any whale.” He hesitated. “That is why I am not sure this is a whale.”

  For a second she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “What—what are you saying? That it isn’t a whale? I saw it. What the hell else can it be?”

  “No, no—you are right. It is what it is. A sperm whale. Male, most likely, from the size. It witnessed the attack on the pod—”

  “On its mate, maybe? Maybe that was its calf—”

  “Those were minkes, not sperm, Sara. Also sperm pods do not come down to the Antarctic. Only the males.”

  “Oh. Right.” She was still puzzling over what he’d said, though. “You didn’t hit your head, did you? When you got knocked down?”

  “No.”

  “No bumps, lacerations? Blood from your scalp?”

  He shook his head. “What is your feeling? You are the animal behaviorist, after all.”

  Behind them the engine-hum dropped a note, then another. A disquieting vibration laced it, setting up a sympathetic buzzing somewhere in the galley. She tried to think objectively, but it seemed harder than usual. “Well—I hadn’t really had time to think about it. In chimps—I guess, more generally, in primates—we see agonistic behavior mainly either in dominance relationships, or in territorial defense. In fact, they meet Vehrenkamp’s—uh, criteria for despotic dominance. But—whales?” She waved her hands, as if she were back in the classroom, and just that gesture made the words come more easily. “If they have social hierarchies, there’s got to be some mechanism for intimidating conspecifics. To assert dominance status, and
access to sexually receptive females. I could see a butting behavior stemming from sexual competition. Chimps also defend territory, to exploit scarce food resources, and cooperate to do so by violence—thus mimicking, or prefiguring, human tribal warfare. Um—but I can’t see whales doing that.”

  He looked grave. “It’s hard to conceive of. Based on what little I have seen, I would agree that it is unlikely.”

  “But there is a precedent for a rogue. Almost two centuries ago, now—”

  “Mocha Dick,” Kimura said.

  Despite herself a chill tensed her shoulders. She sat back, trying to force the behavior they’d just observed into some methodological framework. Could this animal really be aggressive, malevolent, murderous? Like the legendary beast?

  The old frame house still stood on Center Street, only a block or two from the restaurants and bike rental stands and T-shirt shops of Nantucket harbor. Her family had lost it long ago; the last time she’d been to the island, it had been a fancy art gallery, with a candy shop next door. A plaque at street level said it had been owned by Captain George Pollard, Jr.; that Herman Melville had spoken to him, and that Pollard’s true story had been the basis for the famous novel.

  But in fact, Melville had not met the old man until long after the book had been published. Pollard had gotten another captaincy after the sinking of the Essex, despite the lurid tales of castaways and cannibalism. But he’d lost that ship as well, and two strikes were enough for the canny shipowners whose mansions still stood along maple-shaded streets. Pitied by the townspeople, Pollard had finally been given the sinecure of a night watchman.

  But Melville had read about the disaster, or heard a garbled sea-version during his own voyages. He’d changed the name, and perhaps the beast’s color—although most sources said the name “Mocha” had actually referred to Mocha Island, off Chile—to Moby Dick, the White Whale. Now she wondered what might have led to that long-ago maritime disaster. Could the same events recur after two long centuries? Could a difference in color between one creature and its fellows, the very whiteness of the whale itself, lead to rejection, thence to self-awareness, and at last, to violence? Was she perhaps reading her own feelings into this creature’s? Or did she even need a reductive explanation?