No More Pranks (6 page)

The Mikes had changed into warm clothes and wading boots. “We'll take over,” Mike Junior's dad called out as he came down the hill. “You kids better warm up,” he added, tossing a couple of sleeping bags our way.

Rosalie and I went to sit by the fire Mike Junior and Réal had lit. I meant to watch the humpbacks, but soon I felt my chin drop to my chest and my head swing to one side. As I dozed off, my mind went back to the pool of blackish red water Mike Junior and I had seen when we'd first come down to the river. And then, still in my half-sleep, I remembered the whirring sound of the Zodiac's motor as it zoomed off into the dark. Only, this time I saw something: a white flag hanging from the boat's stern.

“It had a white flag,” I muttered. My own words woke me up.

“What?” Rosalie asked. My head had been slumped on her shoulder. She couldn't have been comfortable, but it was nice of her not to have pushed me away.

“The Zodiac—the one that took off when Mike Junior and I came down to the shore. It had a white flag.”

“White flag?” Rosalie said, turning my words into a question. “It must belong to Leblanc. He owns a fleet of Zodiacs, and they all have white flags. Just like his name, Leblanc—which means the ‘white one.'”

“I've seen him. He and Uncle Jean grew up together.”

“They did?” Rosalie sounded surprised.

With the other humpbacks nearby, Petit Fou seemed to settle down. But the pool of reddish water grew around him. “It's a good thing his blowhole is out of the water,” I heard Réal say as he and the others took turns dumping more water onto Petit Fou's huge body.

The rest of the night passed in much the same way. Half-asleep, half-awake, we kept an eye on Petit Fou, getting up every twenty minutes or so to relieve the others. What sleep we got was interrupted by Petit Fou's occasional bleating, and by the whooshing sound of the other humpbacks coming up for air.

The whir of a helicopter told us it was a new day. Uncle Jean's eyes were small and red; his clothes, rumpled. “This is Chantal Youville,” he said, introducing the pilot, who also turned out to be the veterinarian.

“Pleased to meet you,” Dr. Youville said, without bothering to look at any of us as she rushed out of the helicopter. She reached into the back of the helicopter for her backpack and sprinted down the beach toward Petit Fou. Uncle Jean followed, stopping only to rumple my hair as he passed.

We crowded around Dr. Youville as she examined Petit Fou. “Looks like his tail was caught in a motor. Pierre,” she said, gesturing toward me, “get the syringe from my backpack. It's already loaded with antibiotics.”

I'll never complain about needles again, I thought as I passed her the biggest syringe I'd ever seen.

“It's mostly used for horses,” Dr. Youville explained as she waded out into the water, holding the syringe like a machine gun.

“Will it hurt?” Rosalie asked.

“I doubt it,” Dr. Youville replied. “And once the antibiotics take effect, Petit Fou should be able to heal without developing an infection. If he's strong enough to swim— provided that doesn't take too long—he may survive. The water is the best place for a whale to heal.”

I winced as she injected the antibiotics into the whale's belly. The others who'd been standing around all took a step back as the syringe pierced Petit Fou's flesh. I tried to imagine the antibiotics working their way into Petit Fou's system, penetrating the blubber and then traveling to all of his organs—and, of course, to his damaged tail.

But there wasn't time for imagining. Rosalie nudged my arm. “How are we going to catch Leblanc?” she whispered.

Why do girls always order salad? I knew better than to ask Rosalie, especially since I wasn't in the mood for some lecture about vitamins and fiber.

“I'll have a burger and fries,” I told the lady when it was my turn to order. The fries were way better at the chip wagon, but that was on the outskirts of town. There was nothing special about the food at the clubhouse cafeteria, but you couldn't beat its
location—smack in the middle of the dock in downtown Tadoussac.

I scanned the room and led Rosalie to a small table by the window. As I put down my tray, I nodded at the group of men sitting nearby, playing cards. Outside, tourists were lining up for the giant tour boats. Strange to think that just three days ago we'd pulled up here in our kayaks after the overnight trip.

As Dr. Youville had predicted, Petit Fou's bleeding had stopped. Last we'd heard, the whale was just beginning to swim out into the shallow water. Dr. Youville and another vet from the interpretive center were monitoring Petit Fou's progress.

“Are you and your uncle still fighting?” Rosalie asked. She was leaning in so close our heads nearly touched.

“I don't want to talk about it,” I muttered, backing away from Rosalie. I turned around to check that no one was listening to our conversation. A couple of the card players looked away before our eyes could meet.

“My mother says it helps to talk things through,” Rosalie persisted.

“Your mother says a lot of stuff.” I rolled my eyes to indicate I didn't think much of Rosalie's mother. “Besides, I believe in doing things—not just talking about doing things. If you really want to know—” and here I let my voice drop a little, “that's the worst part about living with someone like Uncle Jean.”

Rosalie nodded, and when, a second later, she made a clucking sound, I couldn't help thinking of Dr. Dingle.

“Uncle Jean talks nonstop about all these plans he's got to expand his business. He says he wants to design his own web site and increase his prices. The problem is—all he ever does is talk!” I continued.

“But your Uncle Jean is a good person. And he loves whales,” Rosalie said softly. You could tell she was trying to calm me down, only this time, she didn't cluck.

“What's the good of being good?” I said, and I could hear the disgust in my own voice. “If Uncle Jean was smarter, he'd remember he's got bills to pay, and that whale watching isn't about saving the world. It's about making money to pay those bills.”

Rosalie looked me straight in the eye. “You can't mean that,” she said, her voice rising.

“I do mean it, Rosalie. Sometimes I think you're as bad as Uncle Jean. Next thing I know you'll be telling me what to have for lunch, where to hang my towel, and how to line up the kayaks. Twenty-two more days till I go home to Montreal, and I'm not sure I'm going to last!” I pounded my fist on the table for emphasis.

Rosalie stood up. Her salad was still uneaten. “I don't know if I can be friends with someone like you,” she said, her lower lip trembling as she spoke. Then, without looking back, she headed for the door.

I took a big bite of my hamburger.

“It sounds like you could use some help,” a gravelly voice said. I didn't have to look up to know whom the voice belonged to. It was Roméo Leblanc. He'd been playing cards at the next table. I'd spotted him—and that diamond pinky ring of his—when I was looking for a place to sit.

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking up at him. At the slamming of the door we both
turned to look outside. There was Rosalie, storming by, her braids flapping in the wind. Leblanc turned back toward me so that only I noticed when Rosalie suddenly spun around. As my eyes met hers, Rosalie mouthed the words to a message: “One last prank!”

Of course, the real reason Leblanc offered me a job was that he wanted to annoy Uncle Jean. I could tell by the way his eyes gleamed when he came over in the clubhouse. “I could use some help with my boats. And from the sounds of it, you could use a new job,” he'd said, without bothering to pretend he hadn't been listening in.

Things went even better than Rosalie and I planned. For one thing, Leblanc didn't mind
when I said I wanted to work at least another week for Uncle Jean. “I owe him that. But he only needs me during the day. I could be at the dock by six,” I told him.

The work wasn't glamorous—sweeping out Zodiacs and emptying trash bins—but it was a way to learn about Leblanc's operation. If Rosalie and I were going to convince park officials that one of Leblanc's Zodiacs had injured Petit Fou, we needed proof of two things: that his Zodiacs were out late at night on the Saguenay and that they got too close to the whales. If we could prove this, we hoped park officials would confiscate his license.

For now, I decided not to tell Uncle Jean and Aunt Daisy what Rosalie and I were up to. They wouldn't like it. Luckily, they didn't get suspicious when I said I'd be hanging out by the dock after dinner.

The hardest part wasn't working two jobs; it was that I couldn't spend much time with Rosalie. If we wanted our plan to work, we had to make it look like we'd stopped being friends. The only time we talked was first thing in the morning, when we'd meet for a
few minutes on the pink bench outside The Whale's Tale.

“Leblanc wants me to work late tonight and tomorrow,” I told Rosalie as I sipped my hot chocolate. “I've got a camera. Did you remember the tape recorder?”

It was Rosalie's idea that I should get Leblanc to admit he sometimes took clients whale watching at night. “You could tape him,” she'd suggested. “My mom has this tiny tape recorder. She got it to tape my father yelling.”

“What?” I'd asked.

“My father used to yell so much when he got upset that my mom worried he might have a heart attack. So she taped him, and then afterwards, when he calmed down, she played it back to him. He hardly ever yells anymore.”

I decided it was time to stop bad-mouthing Rosalie's mom—and her theories. Thanks to her, I was about to get my hands on a tape recorder.

The tape recorder was no bigger than a bar of soap. It came with a small attachable microphone. “All right then, I'll admit
it,” Rosalie said as she handed me the tape recorder, “sometimes—in an emergency—pranks are okay.”

Truth was, lately I hadn't been thinking much about pranks. Sure, it had been fun to prank Leblanc into hiring me. But catching Leblanc in the act wasn't about teasing him or getting attention. It wasn't even about feeling angry. No, this prank was a way to right a wrong. Knowing that felt good. Better, come to think of it, than any prank had ever made me feel.

“It's going to be a late night,” Leblanc said when I turned up at the dock that evening. “You and I are going out on a Zodiac. Instead of cleaning, why don't you have a nap in the clubhouse?”

Getting paid to sleep sounded like a sweet deal. Besides, I was exhausted. Though the clubhouse couch smelled musty, and there were springs sticking out at the bottom, I fell right asleep. I had a lot of dreams. Petit Fou and Rosalie were in most of them. I even dreamt about Mr. Quincy. In my dream, he was at assembly, telling students I'd drowned in the Saguenay. “He was a prankster,” Mr. Quincy said, nodding his head sadly. “Only, the last prank was on him.”

It was after midnight when Leblanc shook me awake. “There's a group of tourists ready to pay big bucks to go whale watching this time tomorrow. We're going on a practice run. I need a pair of young ears to listen for whales.”

Leblanc let the motor idle as he pored over a map. When he put the map down, he pointed at a damp cushion in the boat's stern. As I sat down, I stuck my hands into my pockets. I felt the hard ridges of the camera and, in the other pocket, the tape recorder. I'd rigged things up so the wire that attached the microphone to the tape recorder was hidden inside the sleeve of my windbreaker. With one finger, I searched for the tape recorder's switch. I was pretty sure I'd be able to flick it on without Leblanc noticing.

At night, the waters of the Saguenay were as black as the sky. The sharp scent of pine filled my nostrils as the Zodiac took off. All
I could see of Leblanc was his back, hunched over the wheel. “I got really close to a humpback the other night,” he muttered, without turning around.

Gee, I thought as I flicked on the switch to the tape recorder and tugged the tiny microphone out from my sleeve and into my palm, this is going to be easier than I thought.

“Humpbacks?” I asked, leaning in toward him. “Pretty rare out here, aren't they?”

Leblanc grunted. I couldn't tell whether that meant yes or no.

“How close did you get?” I asked, careful to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“I'd say five meters, maybe four,” Leblanc said, turning around to face me. Was he trying to gauge my reaction?

“Cool!” I said. My answer seemed to satisfy him.

It was hard to know exactly where we were. Out in the dark, you couldn't spot landmarks. The waters we were traveling through had narrowed. There were no beaches in this area, just scraggly shrubs that grew close to the shore. Overhead I could make out the
outline of hydroelectric cables crisscrossing the sky.

If there were whales around, they were staying clear of the Zodiac. My eyes dropped to the floor of the boat. A coil of thick cord lay next to a pile of blankets. If I get cold, I thought, I could grab a blanket. Just then I saw something roll under the blankets. Was there an animal on board?

It was a good thing I didn't say anything, because a second later I spotted another piece of what looked like thick cord. Only this was dark brown—and it was moving. Which is when I realized it wasn't cord at all. It was a braid. And I only knew one person with braids.

Partly, I was pissed off. What was Rosalie thinking? If Leblanc found her, we'd be in hot—or more likely, cold water. But another part of me felt glad she was along for the ride.

I was trying to think of a way to signal Rosalie that I'd spotted her, when I heard a faint whoosh. I spun to the right. So did Leblanc, and as he did, he turned on the boat's searchlight. Its hazy beam picked up the
reflection of what looked like a shiny white half moon on the water's surface. Then there were more of the half-moon shapes. They were up ahead, near a small island.