The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (41 page)

Madsen pushed by in the passageway. She started to follow, then stopped. She wanted to run topside. Not linger in this shadowy, creaking Hades. The monster could return at any moment. She couldn’t shake the dread that single look had imparted. No pity, no fellow feeling, had gleamed from that condemning orb. Only an implacable hatred.

She picked up a settee cushion, which ran water. Dropped it and wandered to the foot of the companionway and stood clinging, head twisted to study the sea jetting in those thin delicate laminations. It was coming in through three cracks, spaced at roughly similar intervals along the port side. Where the ribs had punched through the skin, no doubt. Her breath glowed in the cold air. A shiver racked her from spine to fingertips. Her feet were ice. The water rolled and sloshed, the sound not loud, but intensely disquieting.

Madsen came out wiping his hands on a rag. A dark smear sullied the hound-cap’s white muzzle. “Fuel line,” he said, sounding relieved. “Leaked a few gallons, but I got it cut off. We can forget about the engines. But I don’t think we’ll burn.”

“I guess that’s good news.” She glanced at Eddi’s cubby. The blue curtain had been torn in two and hung sagging, half off its rings.

She jerked her gaze away as he added, “We’re taking water fast. We better start thinking about what to do when this thing sinks out from under us.”

“Sinks from … but what
can
we do? The inflatable, it went down when the whale…” Suddenly she couldn’t finish a sentence.

“We have that emergency raft baled up forward. Have to drag it back and check it out.”

She felt hope for a moment, then remembered: The nearest downwind land was four thousand miles distant. “Three people in an unheated raft aren’t going to make it to Australia, Lars. Can we send an SOS somehow?”

“The best I can do is try the handheld. But it’s short-range. And needless to say, there aren’t many ships way down here.”

“Then we have to stay afloat.”

“Oh yeah? Well, suggestions are welcome.”

His tone was dismissive. Suddenly she’d had enough. “
You
got us into this. We wanted to turn back. Eddi and I
voted
to, after Dru died. But you and Mick insisted. And now look at us.”

“Oh, yes. Look at us.”

Was she reading this wrong, or was that contempt in his voice? “What the
fuck
, Lars? What’s with the attitude? I’m pointing out that we wouldn’t be trapped here on a sinking boat if you hadn’t decided you knew better than everybody else. It’s
your
fucking arrogance—”

“Correct me if I’m wrong. But didn’t we come down here for a reason?”

This time there was no doubt; he was sneering at her. Leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed. She said, “Yeah. We did. But we haven’t made much of an impact.”

“We attacked the fleet. Pretty effectively, I think. We struck a hard blow.”

“We barely scratched them! They’re still down there. Still killing whales. All we’ve managed to do is mightily piss off one of them. Of the whales, I mean.”

“Oh. So you think it’s a whale, now? Not a spirit?”

She slapped him. It felt so very good she almost did it again, but faded on the backswing. He sucked a breath and looked so dazed she relented. “You deserved that,” she muttered. “But maybe I—overreacted. Sorry.”

He didn’t answer. Just slung the rag across the cabin, and went forward. He called over a shoulder, “I’m going to try to slow these leaks down. If you see that—
thing
—again, how about letting me know.”

“I said I’m sorry,” she called after him. But he didn’t look back.

*   *   *

On deck again she snugged up her suit zipper.
Anemone
was rolling, but not as hard as during real storms. The wind seemed stronger now that they weren’t making headway, though it sounded weird without the whine of the rigging. But the snow had stopped while she was below. It lay piled in every corner and against every fitting, drifts streaming away on the lee side of each winch and chainplate. The sky was gray or maybe white, a color without hue. Without form, either, like looking straight up into fog.

Hideyashi sat with head in hands on the cockpit bench, knees sprawled. He was shaking. “Hy, get out of this wind,” she said. “We’ve got to conserve body heat.”

Without looking at her he muttered, “It does not matter. I did not have
kokoro
.”

“And what is that?” she said, suddenly very tired. A ripple on an oncoming wave nearly stopped her heart. But it was not what she feared.

“The purity of heart which allows one to connect with the
kami
. I know now I do not have it.”

“Well, Hy, if any of us did, I’m sure it would be you.”

He murmured to his boots, “Or else, the sin we have committed is too great to apologize for. Nature has turned on us and now she will destroy us.”

“This is Shinto you’re talking again?” She kept feeling as if someone were watching her, staring at her from behind. But no matter how quickly she turned, the granite rollers were vacant. The boat had turned slightly away from the oncoming seas and now lurched more heavily, surging abruptly from side to side as the crests hissed past. A brighter patch glowed through the white. She lifted her face to it. Was it her imagination, or did a tiny bloom of warmth play on her cheeks? She felt naked without mast and sail between her and the sky.

She lowered her gaze to a bundle recumbent on the forward deck, tangled in the fallen stays. The snow dusted it, making it seem like a deformed part of the hull itself. “Keep an eye out for me. I’m going forward.”

Clipped to the sagging jackline, she crept around the coach house on the port side. Here there was no fallen cordage, only slick snow-ice her soles got hardly any purchase on. She went down twice working her way forward. On the second fall pain jarred through a wrist, and she cursed and scrabbled forward as the hull canted, hesitated, canted again.

“Tehiyah,” she murmured, resting stretched out beside the bundle. The rime covered it in a translucent crust like spun sugar. A fairy-tale shroud. The fallen lines had wrapped around the body. She had to work for some time with numb fingers to strip them away. She cut shorter lengths and knitted the tarped body to the stanchions of the bow pulpit. Her brain seemed even deader than usual and she couldn’t recall any knots other than the ones to tie her shoes with, so that’s what she used. She made them tight, but couldn’t say she had much confidence in her work.

“Shinto is only recognizing what is,” Kimura said when she slid back into the cockpit. “Don’t you feel it?”

She lowered her head slowly. Hugged herself. Okay, maybe she did. Or maybe it seemed more important, just now, to find some way to keep on living, rather than worry about Nature. At the moment it was Nature that was trying to kill them, after all.

“Eddi had it,” the Japanese said miserably. He probed his side. “Ahh … I can feel them grinding. The broken ends.”

“What’d you say about…?” She started awake, back from a dream of a beach, of waves rolling in out of fog.

“I said, Eddi—she had
kokoro.
And great courage. I asked if there was another sacrifice that would be more pleasing. But I did not mean her. She offered herself.”

“Good grief,” she said, drawing back to stare. “Are you serious? Is that what you think?”

“Of course. That is why it departed, and has not returned. Why else?”

Madsen’s sudden appearance in the companionway hatch made her gasp. He was rubbing reddened eyes, and the blond goatee was matted with grease. “I got some rags in the worst leaks. But it’s still rising.”

She cleared her throat. Finish your sentences, Sara. “What’s the plan here … Lars? We don’t have sails. Don’t have engines.”

“Plan? Stay afloat as long as we can, I guess. I checked Dru’s charts. We’ll drift downwind at three or four knots. The current goes east at this latitude, too. If we can stay on top of the waves, we’ll get there. There’s more ship traffic closer to Australia. Somebody will see us. Eventually.”

“Do we have enough food?” Kimura asked.

“Only three of us now. Food’s not our problem,” Sara told him. “But if we sink?”

“Then it’s the raft. But our chances won’t be as … they won’t be good then.” He looked away. “Anyway. That means we all have to hand-pump and bail. Two at a time. One sleeps.”

“My ribs are broken.”

“Sorry. You too.”

“There isn’t any way at all we can run the electric?” She looked up at the genny, which was still, miraculously, spinning away, pointed into the wind. The falling mast must have just missed it. “We still have power, don’t we?”

“That pump draws a lot of amps. Maybe for an hour or two a day, if we let it build up.” He took a deep breath. His gaze, she noticed, could not stop roaming the waves that towered all around. “So, Hy, what do you think? As our whale expert. Is it coming back?”

The younger man shrugged. “I did not have
kokoro
,” he said again, but not as loudly as he’d said it to her. “Not like Eddi.”

“What did you say?” the Dane said sharply.

Kimura shook himself. “I am sorry. I was discouraged, and lost heart. We must struggle to survive. But that is true of all living things, is it not? The great Darwin’s insight.”

Lars frowned. “How about a straight answer?”

“I cannot give you that. I do not know what motivates this creature.” He sighed. “Perhaps it thinks it has wounded us enough. Perhaps it was satisfied with Eddi. I see no other reason it would have stopped attacking.”

“Mocha Dick,” Sara mumbled. They flinched and glanced at her. “The whale in the 1820s that attacked whaleships. We talked about it, Hy, remember? It rammed the
Essex
twice. If this one’s obeying the same instinctual drives, two attacks might be enough.”

Madsen dug fingers into his mouth as if feeling for missing teeth. Finally he said, “Instinctual drives?”

“It’s still just an animal, Lars. No matter what supernatural motivations Hy’s come up with.”

“A damn ungrateful one,” Madsen said. “We come down here to help. It attacks
us
—”

Kimura just smiled sadly. “
Kokoro
,” he murmured, so softly it could have been meant only for himself.

“All right, then,” the Dane said. “I’ll pump first. Sara, can you come bail?”

She sat for a moment longer. Then took a deep breath, and staggered to her feet.

*   *   *

They pumped and bailed through the day. The suck-suck, gush-gush of the hand pump clacked from the engine room. She dragged between salon and galley, dipping the bucket into the never-ending spring of the keel well, always fresh and always full, and lugging it into the galley to dump down the sink. An hour of this left her too exhausted to stand. Her hands cramped into lobster claws. The inside of her forearms ached fiercely. Meanwhile the water had risen at least two inches. She didn’t want to think how little time this meant they had left.

Though immersed in icy water, her feet felt as if they were on fire. Finally she set the bucket down and sat and pulled her boots off. She peeled her socks down, unable to remember the last time she’d changed them.

She stared at sloughing ulcers. Her toes were red and inflamed. Blisters had broken and were weeping.

“Sara. Sara!”

“What!” she screamed.

“Back here.”

When she got there, feet stamped back naked into the wet boots, Madsen was lying in his back in several inches of water, cursing and working over his head under one of the engines. “I think I have frostbite,” she told him. “On my feet.”

“What color are they?”

“What?”

“Your feet. Your toes.”

“Red. Infected.”

“Probably just chilblains. If they were black, I’d say frostbite.” He peered up into the recesses of the engine, and despite herself she looked at the wedge of deck where she and Mick Bodine had lain. “I fixed the fuel line, but it still won’t start.”

“Are we sure we
want
to start it? Remember, you know…” She sagged to a perch on the step. Started to scratch between her toes, but stopped herself.

“How much progress did you make bailing by hand?” He picked up a wrench and began tinkering it into place.

“It’s even higher than … okay. I get it.” She hugged herself, watching the smoke of her breath curl in the icy air. She wanted to believe he could get it started, but fear made her hope desperately he couldn’t.

“Sorry I was an ass,” he muttered from beneath the engine.

“That’s all right. I lost my temper.” She took a few deep breaths.

“We haven’t gotten along on this cruise. I guess it’s mainly my fault.” He lay silent, then added, “The voyage hasn’t turned out so well. I know that. But it’s not the last mission we’ll send out, you know.”

She opened her mouth, but good judgment intervened and all she said was, “Want me to pump now?”

“If you can. I’m not sure a pail doesn’t get the water out faster.”

She held up a claw. “I can’t lift one anymore.”

“Then pump,” he snapped. The wrench slipped with a bang and he sucked at a bleeding knuckle. “Fuck.
Fuck!
”

*   *   *

Kimura took a turn bailing, but he was very slow and complained incessantly: his chest, his ribs, and so forth. At last he said he couldn’t anymore, but would make something hot for dinner. Madsen reluctantly agreed.

Toward dusk they gathered in the salon. The water inside was over a foot deep now. It rolled past in waves. Sometimes she caught glimpses of extremely small zebras on surfboards riding the breaks. She assumed these were hallucinations. The electric pump hummed busily aft, but Madsen had warned they didn’t have enough power left to run it for long. Her hands kept spasming, as if she were still bailing. She sagged over the table, then snapped upright as a lit candle, a mug of hot tea, and a plate of rice and steaming-hot stir-fried peppers, onions, and some kind of white meat materialized.

“Oh, man,” Madsen said. “This looks fucking great, Hy. Where’d you find all this stuff?”

“Bottom of the freezer. You have to eat it up now, it’s not going to keep.”