The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (34 page)

“After we take care of Tehiyah,” Sara said.

“That can wait. No hurry there.”

“No, it can’t. We’ll do it now.”

All three men looked at her. “Okay,” Madsen muttered at last.

*   *   *

After breakfast she and Eddi and Hideyashi beat the ice off the mainsail and cleared the compacted snow out of the tracks. Then they gathered on the foredeck. It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but a black mist that was probably a coming squall stretched from broad on their left hand all the way off to the horizon, inchoate and somehow more threatening than a mere storm should be. All around the rollers coursed, endless, devoid. Their soullessness struck her through with something deeper than terror. “There was spray last night,” she said, coughing into her glove as the cold bit her lungs and looking down at the glistening dew on the rough canvas. “It’ll freeze, then thaw, freeze and then thaw. That’s not going to be good for … long-term preservation.”

“We must put her below, then,” Kimura said.

“Can’t, Hy. Granted, it’s not that much warmer down there. But she’ll still start to … rot.”

She looked around again, noticing only then that the helmsman’s dome was empty. Yet the wake stretched straight. Lars must have put the self-steerer back on. Whoever was on duty was still supposed to keep lookout, but he must have figured they’d keep an eye out while they were on deck. Above them the makeshift forward stay vibrated as
Anemone
plunged and reared, reminding her of a painting she’d seen once somewhere, a ship too small for the seas, a grim cape towering behind it into ominous clouds. The wind was stronger; the seas were growing, whitecaps breaking here and there between them and the still-ghostly horizon. One dead ahead caught her eye and for a second she tensed—
ice?
—but then it disappeared.

“Tie her to the mast?” Eddi was saying.

Sara sighed and looked up. The main snapped and bellied, reefed, but still catching each gust. “I don’t know. That might jam something? If we’ve got to get that sail down fast—”

“Okay, then up forward.” Auer pointed.

They looked back and forth. “That is where she’d want to be,” Hy said. “Leading us home.”

No further discussion seemed necessary. They stood her upright, the tightly wrapped body stiff and unresponsive as a wooden figurehead, and lashed her to the stay. By the waist, then by the feet. Spray kept flying up from the port side as they worked, and by the time they were done the first thin glaze was silver-white.

When they stepped back Dorée was in roughly the same posture as when the bullet had struck her down. Sara found that fitting. As if still defiant, even in death. “We loved you, Tehiyah,” Eddi said softly, then lost her footing and began to slide. Sara grabbed her, but started to go too, soles gaining no grip on the rapidly accreting snow. She threw out a hand; locked arms with Kimura. His other arm gripped the port lifeline, and snapped them all up short like a child’s game of crack the whip.

“We better get back below,” Sara said. But she looked back once more, as they dropped down the forehatch. The mummied bundle stood erect, nodding slightly as the bow dipped and then heaved, slowly being covered, shrouded, encapsulated by the solidifying sea.

*   *   *

The salon was empty. They found both men in the forepeak, scowling as they listened to excited chatter from a speaker. “Hy, come listen to this,” Madsen said. “What’s going on?”

The Japanese cocked his head as gear swayed and stirred around them in the narrow tunnel. “The factory ship. It has caught fire.”

“Really,” Auer said from the doorway. She rubbed her arms. “From whatever it was you shot at them?”

Madsen said, “They don’t say.”

“I thought you said the radio was broken,” Sara pointed out.

“The antenna, not the radio,” Lars snapped. “He’s got a stub up. We can’t transmit, but we can receive.”

“Just a sec.” Bodine turned up the speaker. This transmission was in English. “
Maritime New Zealand, this is
Ishinomaki Maru.
We have two casualties from smoke inhalation. We will advise again in two hours, advise again in two hours this frequency.
Ishinomaki Maru,
out
.”

“These are not safe ships,” Kimura said. “Very unregulated. There were two fires on our way down from Japan. There are many accidents, with the machinery. It may not have been—us.”

“We put it right into their engine room,” Bodine noted. “If we hit a fuel tank, or even just a fuel line, that’d sure as hell start a fire.”

Sara knelt on a coil of line, feeling lightheaded. Then almost panicked; who was on lookout? What if they hit ice? But when she gazed back along the twisting length of the forepeak she glimpsed Auer’s legs ascending into the dome.

“Well, we wanted to fuck them up,” Madsen said. “Are they still whaling? Or are they headed for port? Japan? New Zealand? Australia?”

“That I am not sure of,” Kimura said. “I heard no one say they were doing anything other than fighting the fire. It sounds like the kill ships are nearby the
Ishinomaki
.”

“The transmissions are fading,” Bodine said.

“We could still pursue,” Madsen said. “Replace the forward stay, and—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Sara. “Dru and Tehiyah—haven’t we paid enough? Eddi thinks so. Hy too. Hy?”

“I think it would probably be wise to call an end to your expedition,” Kimura said, looking down. “But I do not really have a—”

Sara lost her patience. “Oh, for—! You’re a grown-up. You’re got as much of a vote as any of us.”

Bodine looked resigned. Spread his hands. “I guess the girls have got it right this time, Lars. If we didn’t have all this damage … maybe. But we do. So, yeah—time for a strategic retreat.”

Sara blinked, taken aback. She’d expected him to agree with Madsen, as he had every time so far. “Well—about damn time. Okay. Northeast. That’s the course for Australia—isn’t it?” No one answered. “Lars? So?”

“That might not be possible,” he said, after a moment.

She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The stay. We can run before the wind, because that presses forward on the mast. But the farther north we head up, with the wind the way it is, the more strain we put on that jury-rigged shit.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure how to address that. But there it is. We sure don’t want the mast to come down. Right now, we’re probably safe. If the wind changes—”

“So meanwhile, we just sail east?” Sara put in.

“Got a better idea?”

“Drop the sails. Run the engines.”

“Not enough fuel. Land’s thousands of miles away.”

“But we can run north, out of the ice. We might see a freighter, or a military ship. Get help repairing the keel, the mast, the radio.”

“The antenna,” Mick corrected absent-mindedly, glued to the earphones again.

Sara shrugged him off. “So we’re going back? On the motor?”

“I guess,” Lars said. She looked at him a moment longer, then reached for a handhold and pulled herself to her feet. Staggered aft, barking her shin on the jamb, and passed the decision up to Eddi. Shortly after, the motor coughed, but didn’t start. Coughed again, a shaky, disgruntled noise. But no reassuring purr came, much less the banshee howl. They exchanged looks.

“It’s not catching,” Auer called down.

“Did you set the throttle to Start?” Madsen yelled back.

“Yeah.”

“It should crank right up,” Bodine said. Then got a funny look. “Or, wait a minute—”

“The strainers.” Sara gripped her forehead. “Oh, fuck. Remember, they froze—”

The starter ground again and they both shouted, “Stop. Stop!”

“It’s not like starting a car,” Sara added. “We need to go back there and see what’s wrong. Mick…”

Bodine winced. Started to hoist himself, then winced again. Sweat broke on his forehead. “You all right?” Madsen asked him.

“Could use … a hand.” He snorted. “Or better yet, two fucking legs.” He grimaced as he lurched up. Sara walked behind him, and waited as he let himself down the half ladder into the engine room.

*   *   *

This time it took even longer to get the ice chipped and melted out of the strainer and the hoses. There were actually two strainers, one for each engine, but Bodine said once one was running the space would warm up enough to melt the ice in the other. Still, it meant hours of lying on a freezing deck, taking turns chipping until their hands bled and their faces stung from flying chips.

She said, “You know, if we’d put antifreeze or alcohol or something in these, after we shut down, they wouldn’t be frozen like this.”

“Yeah, if one of us had remembered. After Tehiyah—”

“I’m only saying.”

They lay full length, facing each other as he chipped away. He kept avoiding her eyes. At last, as if making a decision, he sighed. “All right, Sara.”

“All right, what?”

“You’re mad at me. Guess you have a right to be, but—”

“Fucking correct, I do. Keeping secrets. Treating Eddi and me like children. Then head-butting me. Not to mention, firing some kind of illegal weapon—”

The hammer clanged. “I butted you because you were stomping on my hand,” he reminded her. “And those whalers had already tried to kill us. Run us down. And damn near succeeded. Or did you forget that?”

They glared at each other, but she had to admit, he was right about the whalers. She shuddered. The sheer terror of those moments when the prow had loomed over her, and she’d expected to die … Maybe it
was
war. Violence for violence. This man had given his legs in battle. She couldn’t call him a coward, or someone who evaded the consequences of his beliefs.

“But for what it’s worth,” he muttered, looking past her, “I’m sorry I dragged you into it. And about Tehiyah. I didn’t intend that.”

She drew a deep breath, suddenly shaky, as if her feelings were only now catching up to everything that had happened. Who the fuck was she to point fingers and act sanctimonious? The disgraced Dr. Pollard. The failure. The outcast. “Well. As long as we’re apologizing. That time, up in the forepeak—”

He let the hammer sag, and looked away. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I just wanted to say. It wasn’t what you think. Not—your legs.”

His gaze came back. Dwelt on her face. “No?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I had some silly notion it would be … unprofessional.” A sharp corner of the engine was digging into her back; she wriggled away. The cold air was still and icy down here, and the sea sounded very close, sloshing beneath the thin hull only inches below. She took a deep breath. “But I was wrong. What did Quill used to say? ‘South of sixty, there’s no law’?”

“Actually, the saying is, ‘no God.’”

“Uh-huh. So … what I wanted to say is … I was wrong.”

His mouth was sour on hers. His breath was not so great and his stubble grated on her skin. But none of this stilled the hunger to feel someone’s arms around her, or to keep kissing him. And she probably smelled just as bad.

But you didn’t have to smell great to want a man.

She glanced back once, up the ladderway, to make sure no one was coming. Then stripped off jacket and sweater and bra. His gaze followed the swing of her breasts as he unzipped his own clothes, then cursed as he couldn’t get his pants off.

“Turn over, on your back,” she told him, and straddled him, shivering, naked legs and shoulders instantly goosefleshed in the frigid air, yet with an interior heat igniting. She left her boots on and pushed her pants down onto them, careful not to dislodge the scab on her thigh, so that when she knelt her knees weren’t on the cold deck but on the folds of cloth. Their smells mingled, and she bent to his cock springing up from a nest of kinky black hair but before she took it into her mouth decided against it and just brushed it lightly with her cheek.

She forked her body over him and guided him in, to a place that was exactly where she’d wanted someone for so long, and gasped and arched her back. Then whispered “Fuck” as the back of her head slammed into an arch of hollow steel tubing.

He half rolled and they crawled and pushed deeper into the embrace of the engine and the muffler and heavy thick black rubber hoses strapped with shining stainless connectors and extruded metal tubes bent and twisted in among one another. Here they were boxed in on all sides but she had room to straighten. She reached up to grasp an icy cold thick stem of metal with both hands. She used that leverage to lift and then plunge, him grunting beneath her, his face turning blotchy and red. An iron stem seemed to be reciprocating inside her, hard and thick but hot instead of icy cold. For a few seconds it felt like a hard yoga workout. Then the pleasure fired like electricity deep in her belly, and he reached up and grasped her breasts. She arched her back and opened her mouth and he closed his eyes and bared his teeth and they hung there, welded like hot-running machines, as the energy and lust they’d brought out of the sea so long before came again into both of them and they moved together, together, straining at the boundaries of self and space.

She lifted herself and collapsed beside him. Suddenly she was cold again, and her knees hurt where she’d knelt, and soreness chafed her thighs. But she didn’t care. He pulled her sweater down and covered her with his arm. “Incredible,” he said into her ear, and for a few minutes they snuggled, drowsy, spent. Until her legs began to cramp. So at last they moved apart, rearranged themselves. She crept out from between the engines and searched around on the deck and found the hammer and the screwdriver they’d been using to chisel out the ice and set to work again.

*   *   *

But when they tried the engine again it still didn’t start. This time Bodine traced the line and found more ice in the hoses to the saltwater cooling pump. He took off the connectors, leaving the through-hull closed, and she carried the heavy black hose up into the galley. Her legs were still quivering as she poured the boiling water Hy had going for the dinner spaghetti into it. Meanwhile he took the pump apart and blowtorched the ice out. When they reinstalled the hose and pump the engine turned over and kept running. A weak cheer rang out in the salon as Eddi brought the wheel around. The thrum wormed through the hull. Madsen said to keep it down to a thousand rpm, to stretch their fuel. But they were headed north.