Friday's Harbor (12 page)

“What?” Neva said, startled.

“Who hit him? Look how head-shy he is. You see that with horses when they’ve been beaten. Dogs, too.”

Neva was impressed. She and Gabriel had often wondered the same thing—and a few days later got an unwelcome insight. Gabriel took a new cleaning implement into the pool, a scrubbing head on the end of a long aluminum pole. He had just begun using it on the pool’s rock work when he heard a loud, ominous buzzing—a killer whale’s unmistakable expression of rage. He looked up just in time to see Friday heading toward him fast, straight, and livid. Before he’d had a chance to react, Friday bit the pole cleanly in half.

Too startled to be afraid, Gabriel hollered at him around the regulator in his mouth and windmilled his arms. Contrite, Friday swam meekly away and took his blue ball into a corner, where he remained in a self-imposed time-out for the rest of the afternoon.

“Now we know,” Gabriel told Neva. “They hit him with poles. Maybe other things, too, but definitely metal poles.”

I
N LATE
S
EPTEMBER
Truman announced that one of Friday’s Colombian trainers would be visiting—the one who’d called him
Gordito,
Little Fat One. She brought along a film crew that was shooting a documentary about her and her husband, a famous Colombian soap opera star. Neva dutifully accompanied her to the pool top, where she was promptly surrounded by cameras and sound gear. The trainer wore an expensive purple and black wet suit, and sat on the side of the pool with her legs dangling in. Now and then her fingers described circles in the water, a gesture she had used in Bogotá to summon him. Friday declined over and over, until the director began to get anxious, pacing, crouching occasionally, and, to show he was calm and patient, rubbing the young woman’s back, or at least rubbing the unyielding wet suit.

The fact was, they were running out of time and light and they were scheduled to leave first thing in the morning. The director had indicated on their way here that the beautiful trainer should let her sorrow flow as she contemplated parting from Friday once again. On camera she’d already described Friday as her best friend, her lover. They needed a close-up, one close-up. They needed the whale.

Far below Friday hunkered down at a window. In the viewing gallery, a workman was buffing the acrylic.

A
N HOUR BEFORE
the zoo opened several days later, Neva escorted a noted wildlife photographer and the marketing director of a major toy company to the empty visitors’ gallery, where the photographer meticulously laid out his cameras, lenses, filters, and a tripod. Then he wadded up two small pieces of duct tape, applying them to the window. With great solemnity the marketing director opened a box, gently removing the prototype of a special-issue scuba-diving doll with Baby Friday. Truman had given the toy company permission to use Friday’s likeness in exchange for a sizable donation. The doll wore a stylish wet suit and pink plastic scuba gear, and the photographer gravely stuck her to the window so she appeared to be swimming. He quickly dodged behind a camera and waited.

As they’d hoped, Friday approached. He applied his nose directly to the doll’s backside. The doll fell off the window.

Neva couldn’t quite stifle a guffaw.

The window was cold, the gallery was damp, and the tape refused to stick. Worse, each time the photographer did manage to successfully apply the doll to the window, Friday continued to home in on her butt. As Neva watched, the photographer began to come undone in a quiet, professional, unassuming way. He twisted his cap around backward; he screwed new lenses onto his camera; he moved pointlessly from side to side; he snapped a few halfhearted shots in what he later told Neva was the blind hope that a miracle would happen and the images would come out better than what he was seeing in the viewfinder. Finally, he vowed that he would never again accept a product photography assignment, if only he could salvage one shot.

He salvaged exactly one shot.

F
RIDAY HAD BECOME
a full-blown international celebrity. Crews arrived from as far away as Australia and China. Television stations from Vancouver, B.C. to San Diego begged their affiliates in Portland and Seattle to file weekly stories with plenty of B-roll to pad the longer segments. Radio stations lobbied to broadcast their morning drive-time shows live from the pool top. (Truman wondered about this. After all, it was
radio
. Couldn’t they just
say
they were there?)

With his newfound health, Friday gradually revealed a deep inner silliness. He hovered in the gallery windows for hours on end, sleek, black, and glossy as a patent-leather purse. He waggled his tongue at visitors and blew bubble rings from his blowhole. He swam his blue ball around the pool underwater; he glided past the gallery windows upside down with his eyes closed. He unfurled a yard-long penis from his genital slit and ejaculated, forcing parents to answer awkward questions from young children.

In early October, Christian Thereaux, the colleague who’d once saved Gabriel’s life, spun through Bladenham on a lightning trip from Seattle to San Francisco. Gabriel insisted that he stop at the zoo for a few hours, at least; like Gabriel, he had often visited in Bogotá to look in on Friday.

Now, when Christian arrived in the office, Friday looked at him through the window and swam off, unimpressed.

“Man, he looks
great,
” Christian told Gabriel.

“Want to do a session with him?”

“Yeah?”

“Come on.” Gabriel grabbed a bucket of fish, tossed Christian a pair of XtraTufs, and they went upstairs.

It was a sunny, windless day, the first in a long time. Friday was in excellent spirits. Christian stepped into the wet walk, set down a bucket, and, like an orchestra conductor, raised an imperious hand:
attention!
Friday approached him and Christian asked him to nod his head, a nursery school behavior. For a long beat Friday regarded him through slitted eyes. Then he exhaled explosively in the Frenchman’s face, turned around, and swam very, very slowly to the far end of the pool, where he sank underwater, returning to his fans in the viewing gallery. The snub was absolute.

On the pool top Gabriel and Christian collapsed in hoots of laughter. Only a healthy animal had the wiles to best you.

Chapter 8

O
N THE FIRST
Sunday morning in November Truman woke up at six o’clock, his favorite time of day, when the rest of the world was still asleep and no one needed him for a single thing. Beside him Neva was sprawled on her back with the covers kicked aside, her mouth slightly open and her fiery hair going every which way across the pillows. She was an energetic sleeper, giving the appearance of being on her way to someplace else—an impression she also gave him sometimes when she was awake.

Miles, a light sleeper like Truman, got up from his nest of blankets on the floor with a piggy stretch and a soft grunt and followed on his soft little hooves as Truman tiptoed out of the room and pulled the bedroom door closed with great care. Man and pig paused for a moment to listen to Winslow’s gentle snoring—the boy suffered from year-round allergies—before padding downstairs to retrieve the Sunday
New York Times
from the front stoop.

Truman yawned with pleasure, knowing that for now and the next hour or two, the people he loved most were safe beneath his roof. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that if he were to drop dead at this exact moment, he would die in a state of contentment. After the terrible drama of his marriage to Rhonda, he didn’t take for granted even an instant of grace.

As always, Miles followed him to the den, where he curled up on his special blanket at Truman’s feet, resting his head cozily on Truman’s instep. Truman patted and scratched him a little here and there, whereupon Miles heaved a deep sigh, gave Truman one last adoring look, and fell utterly asleep. Say what you would, the pig did have an undeniably sweet and accommodating nature.

Truman shook out the business section of the
Times
. As a boy, he had spent every Sunday morning with his parents in their white-and-chintz sunroom with a carafe of excellent coffee and cinnamon rolls. Lavinia always wore a pair of white cotton archivist’s gloves to keep the ink off her hands, about which she was vain; Matthew chewed the stem of a pipe he hadn’t lit since 1982. They had encouraged a lively give-and-take over the news of the day, and sometimes the discussions had gone on between his parents until midafternoon. In those cases they excused Truman, who went off to his room and solitary play.

Truman realized once he’d had Winslow that Lavinia had treated him less like a child than like a very small defense attorney. There had been no mother-and-son afternoons of Let’s Pretend or play with wooden blocks. Truman’s earliest construction had been a set of bookshelves; his blanket-fort had been a courtroom. He rarely had friends visit—he had very few friends to begin with, which Lavinia preferred—and was hardly ever invited to the never-ending circuit of birthday parties and sleepovers he’d heard about in school. He was a solemn boy, responsible, careful, and disciplined. Family lore had it that his first words were “May I be excused?” Life was not a festival as his parents led him to believe, but a set of increasingly serious challenges to the concepts of what was right and what was wrong and why.

Giving Miles to Winslow on his eleventh birthday was arguably the first indefensible thing Truman had ever done. It had been a heady experience, fueling a faint suspicion that the older he got, the more childish he would become. Running out for ice cream in place of a meal; taking a drive to nowhere in particular and staying there overnight; falling in love with Neva, a woman who lived almost entirely in the right-now: these were all outgrowths of his hike through the unspeakable muck and stink of Miles’s barnyard, and among his proudest moments.

If they had had shortcomings as parents, Matthew and Lavinia had been more successful as spouses, each finding in the other a best friend, which hadn’t prepared Truman at all for Rhonda. When she left him, and despite her awful nature, he’d felt stricken. His days had been defined by her: what they ate, what movies they saw—even who they saw on holidays and weekends. At first it had been because she had cared so much more than he did, but within a year he had just found capitulation easier.

With Neva, it was all so different. They liked the same foods, hated the same movies, talked the same politics. When conversing with Rhonda—and not even deep conversations; it could be a quick exchange in the cereal aisle at Safeway—Truman had always felt she had the whole thing scripted out, only to have him blow his lines. With Neva, there were no lines or unmet expectations. She wasn’t as well read as Rhonda, or as sophisticated in her tastes in art and music, but she was fiercely committed to what she believed in—which, to his everlasting amazement, included him; she was earnest and generous; she knew how to make Winslow, naturally a grave child, get silly; and she was a superb auto mechanic. His household had gone from bleak and lonely to a sunny meadow. Not a day went by that didn’t find him raising his face to the heavens in thanks.

Just before ten o’clock, Winslow slap-slap-slapped into the den in his new wet suit, hood, booties, and flippers. Miles rose from Truman’s feet to greet him and squeeze into his favorite spot beneath the den’s piano while Winslow removed his flippers, placing them within easy reach beside the piano bench. The boy had Rhonda’s dark eyes and Truman’s tendencies toward gravitas and introspection. Truman loved him fiercely. From the first trimester, Rhonda had proudly declared the pregnancy difficult, saying that from the moment he’d quickened, the baby took perverse pleasure in punching and kicking her where it would inflict the most pain. When she was awake, she claimed, he slept; when she tried to sleep, he not only woke up, but he brought out weapons.
He’s like Hephaestus,
she liked to say.
It’s like he’s in there forging armor
.

But in this as in nearly everything else, Winslow, as well as Truman, had proved to be a disappointment. He was a placid, sober, sleepy baby who, as long as there’d been music playing, could happily deliberate over his hands and feet for hours. Later, perversely, Rhonda had refused to acknowledge that the boy might in fact possess a prodigious musical talent, which Truman chalked up to her disinclination to acknowledge any talent that might burn brighter than her own. Truman had taken Winslow’s musical education upon himself and quietly presented him to Mrs. Iris Leahey, a classical concert pianist who took on a student or two by audition when she wasn’t on tour.

Now Truman said, “What are you going to practice,
La Mer
?”

“Ha ha.”

“Come on, that was good.”

Winslow failed to suppress a smile. “Yeah, it was.”

“So what does it feel like in there?” Truman asked, of the wet suit.

“Hot. I bet its gets really stinky, too. All that sweat. I hope we get to go in the pool soon. Neva said the saltwater and the neoprene make it so easy to float that if you want to go to the bottom you need dive weights.”

The thought of sharing a pool with one of the ocean’s top predators, even a debilitated one, didn’t strike Truman as nearly the great opportunity everyone else seemed to think it was. “Let’s just take it one step at a time, Winnie. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

By now beads of perspiration had begun to dot Winslow’s forehead and upper lip, and his cheeks were blotchy. He turned his back on Truman and said, “Can you undo the zipper?”

Truman unzipped him from neck to waist, releasing a wave of muggy heat. Winslow shucked off the suit until he stood there in nothing but a pair of faded swim trunks—a soft-bodied, moon-pale boy of minimal athletic prowess and late-onset puberty. Truman couldn’t help smiling. “Winnie, let me ask you something. What do you think of Friday, overall?”

“Are you kidding? He’s awesome! The kids at school all want to come meet him. Nobody teases me or Reginald anymore, because Reginald told them we might be able to invite them over.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that,” Truman cautioned. “He’s not a pet.”

“Yeah, we know, but Reginald says just because
we
know doesn’t mean
they
have to. Not yet, anyhow.”

Truman sighed and shook his head. “That boy’s going to grow up to be either a millionaire or a con man.”

“He says he might be president one day.”

“Which combines them both. Anyway, no one’s ever going to be allowed to come over and swim with Friday, not even you—at least not until Gabriel says it’s safe.”

“At least I can see him whenever I want. Do you think he likes that, having people come to watch him?”

“Apparently—especially little kids.”

Winslow ruminated. “Yeah. Maybe seeing them keeps him from getting lonely, at least until Gabriel gets something else to put in with him.”

Truman looked at his son sharply. “Did he say he planned to do that?”

“No. Me and Reginald think he should, though.”

“Reginald and I,” Truman corrected. “You know, not everyone agrees he should have come here. There are people who believe he’d be better off dead than in captivity.”

“Nuh-uh. How can you let anything die if they don’t have to?”

“I happen to agree with you, but there are people—lots of people, according to Gabriel—who think otherwise.”

“Max Biedelman saved Hannah from dying, and she got to live for over forty more years,” Winslow pointed out.

“But she was also alone here that whole time. That was the trade-off for getting to live.”

“That’s not true. She had Sam.”

“And Friday will have us, but some people are going to say we just saved his life so we could exploit him, turn him into a lucrative attraction, a sideshow.”

“Like Siamese twins in the old days?”

“Exactly.”

“Actually, that would be cool to see,” Winslow said. “I bet Reginald would want to, also.”

Truman sighed. “That wasn’t exactly my point.”

Winslow wrapped his arms around himself. “Now I’m cold.”

“All right—go take a hot shower. And rinse out the suit while you’re at it. You can leave it hanging in the tub.”

“If I promise to practice tonight instead of now, can I go over to the pool? You’ve had all this time over there, but I haven’t.” Truman had refused to let Winslow go after school, only on weekends, and then only if he had his homework done.

Truman conceded. “Call Reginald and see if he wants to go, too. Tell him if it’s okay with Sam and Corinna, I can pick him up.”

But before Winslow had even left the den, the phone rang and it was Gabriel. Truman raised a finger to Winslow—
don’t leave yet
—and listened with a series of
uh-huh
s and
sure
s. When he hung up the phone he told Winslow there had been a change of plans: Gabriel wanted to try something new with Friday and he needed their help to do it.

“Oh boy,” said Winslow. “Reginald, too?”

“Reginald, too.”

Within half an hour, they’d all squeezed into the pool’s small office: Neva, Gabriel, Sam, Libertine, Truman, Winslow, and Reginald. Friday hung in the window, watching them.

“Here’s the deal,” Gabriel told them. “We’ve been working with him on finding a shape or object in the pool windows. So far it’s been easy stuff.” He nodded to Neva, who held up a cardboard triangle, circle, and square. “That’s the problem, though: it’s too easy. So I want to put a bunch of other stuff in the viewing gallery windows to throw him off, and then send him to find one of the shapes.

He distributed among them not only the triangle, circle, and square, but a ratty stuffed goat, a coffeemaker, a flat white cardboard star edged in black, a similar hexagon, a bright blue notebook, and a basketball. While everyone else scattered to the viewing windows, where they placed the objects and shapes, Gabriel fed Friday, then gave him the directive to go find the triangle.

Friday swam straight to the gallery windows, scanning all three as he approached. Gabriel had told everyone to stand well away from the objects, so they didn’t accidentally broadcast the correct answer, but it was still no contest. Though he seemed to enjoy looking at the ratty stuffed goat, Friday gave it a regretful last glance and zeroed in on the triangle.

At the postsession confab with all the players, Gabriel announced that he would suspend the shape identification program. It was simply too easy.

L
IBERTINE CAME TO
the whale pool every morning with a glad heart, knowing the day would be full of meaningful work, intelligent company, and an increasingly healthy and fun-loving killer whale. She enjoyed even her menial duties because they meant she was right there, where the real work was being done. She didn’t think of the pool as a prison; didn’t even realize she’d stopped thinking of it that way. For her, as for Friday, it was simply a place of event and excitement.

And Gabriel was always nearby.

It had been a long time since Libertine had had a crush of any kind, never mind one so epically inappropriate. Her last one had been nearly eleven years ago now—Paul Fortunati, a baked-goods supplier who had serviced the ferries between Anacortes and the San Juan Islands. A cheerful, hearty soul, he’d been as meaty and solid as an old prizefighter, and she believed he was capable not only of keeping the world safely at bay, but of doing so with a smile. He’d called her Libby—
Hey, there’s my Libby, talked to anyone interesting lately?
—and would periodically toss her a muffin or baguette or cookie as a treat. In fact, he was the only man who’d ever crafted a nickname for her, which she treasured. When she was alone she’d sometimes contemplated a different life, a life filled with fresh yeasty smells and warm, papa-san embraces that would envelope her and keep her from harm. She had spent a fortune on the ferries that year just to see him, though she always claimed pressing business when he asked her, which anyway he hardly ever did. In her experience, he was a man of the moment, cheerfully taking in the world around him, slapping backs and calling out hearty greetings to other favorites, none of whom were women, though she jealously watched, prepared to fight for her position.

A year—one full year of feeling cosseted and shielded from the full blast of a lonely life, and then, just like that, he’d stopped coming to the ferry—any ferry. She knew because in her desperation she’d started riding on different routes, at different times, hoping he’d simply been transferred, in which case she was prepared to adjust her own schedule accordingly. But after two weeks without a sighting she’d broken down and asked his replacement, an impossibly tall, thin, awful woman named Deirdre, who told her he’d retired and was moving to Arizona. Libertine called the phone number the woman gave her, a lapse in judgment she deeply regretted to this day. When she’d identified herself, carefully giving her first and last names, he’d said the single most terrible word ever uttered:
Who?