Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (5 page)

When a visitor first drives into the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary — five baby blue shiplap buildings trimmed out in cobalt, crouching on the edge of the huge Maalaea Bay and overlooking the ruins of an ancient saltwater fish pond — his first reaction is usually "Hey, not much of a sanctuary. You could get maybe three whales in those buildings, tops." Soon, however, he realizes that these buildings are simply the offices and visitor centers. The sanctuary itself covers the channels that run from Molokai to the Big Island of Hawaii, between Maui, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, as well as the north shores of Oahu and Kauai, in which there is plenty of room for a whole bunch of whales, which is why they are kept there.

There were about a hundred people milling around outside the lecture hall when Nate and Amy pulled into the parking lot in the pickup.

"Looks like a good turnout?" Amy said. She'd attended only one of the sanctuary's weekly lectures, and that one had been given by Gilbert Box, an ill-tempered biologist doing survey work under a grant for the International Whaling Commission, who droned through numbers and graphs until the ten people in attendance would have killed a whale themselves just to shut him up.

"It's about average for us. Behavior always draws more than survey. We're the sexy ones," Nate said with a grin.

Amy snorted. "Oh, yeah, you guys are the Mae Wests of the nerd world."

"We're action nerds," Nate said. "Adventure nerds. Nerds of romance."

"Nerds," Amy said.

Nate could see the skeletal Gilbert Box standing off to the side of the crowd under a straw hat whose brim was so wide it could have afforded shade for three additional people and behind a pair of enormous wraparound sunglasses suitable for welding or as a shield from nuclear flash. His gaunt face was still smeared with residue of the white zinc oxide he used for sun protection when out on the water. He wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers and leaned on a white sun umbrella that he was never seen without. It was a half hour before sunset, a warm breeze was coming off Maalaea Bay, and Gilbert Box looked like Death out for his after-dinner stroll before a busy night of e-mailing heart attacks and tumors to a few million lucky winners.

Nate had given Box the nickname "the Count," after the
Sesame Street
vampire with the obsessive-compulsive need to count things. (Nate had been too old for
Sesame Street
as a preschooler, but he'd watched it through grade ten while baby-sitting his younger brother, Sam.) People agreed that the Count was the perfect name for a survey guy with an aversion to water and sunlight, and the name had caught on even outside Nate and Clay's immediate sphere of influence.

Panic rattled up Nate's spine. "They're going to know we're faking it. The Count will call us on it the first time I say something that we don't have the data to back up."

"How's he going to know? You had the data a week ago. Besides, what's this 'we'? I'm just running the projector."

"Thanks."

"There's Tarwater," Amy said. "Who are those women he's talking to?"

"Probably just some whale huggers," Nate said, pretending that all of his mental faculties were required for him to squeeze the pickup into the four adjacent empty parking spaces. The women Tarwater was talking to were Margaret Painborne, Ph.D., and Elizabeth «Libby» Quinn, Ph.D. They worked together with a couple of very butch young women studying cow/calf behavior and social vocalizations. They were doing good work, Nate thought, even if it appeared to have a gender-based agenda. Margaret was in her late forties, short and round, with long gray hair that she kept perpetually tied back in a braid. Libby was almost a decade younger, long-legged and lean, blond hair going gray, cut short, and she had once, not too long ago, been Nathan Quinn's third wife. A second and totally different wave of anxiety swept over Quinn. This was the first time he'd encountered Libby since Amy joined the team.

"They don't look like whale huggers," Amy said. "They look like researchers."

"How is that?"

"They look like action nerds." Amy snorted again and crawled out of the truck.

"That's not very professional," Nate said, "that snorting-laugh thing you do." But Amy had already walked off toward the lecture hall, a carousel of slides under her arm.

Nate counted more than thirty researchers in the crowd as he walked up. And those were just the ones he was acquainted with. New people would be coming back and forth from the mainland all season — grad students, film crews, reporters, National Fisheries people, patrons — all hitchhiking on the very few research permits that were issued for the sanctuary.

For some reason Amy made a beeline for Cliff Hyland and his navy watchdog, Tarwater, who was out of uniform in Dockers and a Tommy Bahama shirt, but still out of place because his clothes were ironed to razor creases — his Topsiders had been spit-shined, and he stood as if there were a cold length of rebar wired to his spine.

"Hey, Amy," Cliff said. "Sorry to hear about the break-in. Bad?"

"We'll be all right," Amy said.

Nate strolled up behind Amy. "Hey, Cliff. Captain." He nodded to each.

"Sorry to hear about the break-in, Nate," Cliff said again. "Hope you guys didn't lose anything important."

"We're fucked," Nate said.

And Tarwater smiled — for the first time ever, Nate thought.

"We're fine." Amy grinned and brandished her carousel of slides like a talisman of power.

"I'm thinking about getting a job at Starbucks," Nate said.

"Hey, Cliff, what are you guys working on?" Amy asked, having somehow moved close enough into Cliff Hyland's personal space to have to look up at him with big, girly-blue eyes and the aspect of a fascinated child.

Nate cringed. It was… well, it was just not done. You didn't ask, not outright like that.

"Just some stuff for the navy," Cliff said, obviously wanting to back away from Amy, but knowing that if he did, somehow he'd lose face.

Nate watched while Amy grated his friend's middle-aged irrelevance against his male ego merely by stepping a foot closer. There, too, was a reaction from Tarwater, as the younger man seemed to be irritated by the fact that Amy was paying attention to Cliff. Or maybe he was just irritated with Amy because she was irritating. Sometimes Nate had to remind himself not to think like a biologist.

"You know, Cliff," Amy said, "I was looking at a map the other day — and I want you to brace yourself, because this may come as a shock — but there's no coastline in Iowa. I mean, doesn't that get in the way of studying marine mammals?"

"Sure, now you bring that up," Cliff said. "Where were you ten years ago when I accepted the position?"

"Middle school," Amy said. "What's in the big case on your boat? Sonar array? You guys doing another LFA study?"

Tarwater coughed.

"Amy," Nate interrupted, "we'd better get set up."

"Right," Amy said. "Nice seeing you guys."

She moved on. Nate grinned, just for a second. "Sorry, you know how it is?"

"Yeah." Cliff Hyland smiled. "We've got two grad students working with us this season."

"But
we
left our grommets at home, to analyze data," Tarwater added.

Nate and Cliff looked at each other like two old broken-toothed lions long driven from the pride — tired, but secure in the knowledge that if they teamed up, they could eat the younger male alive. Cliff shrugged, almost imperceptibly, that small gesture communicating,
Sorry, Nate, I know he's an asshole, but what am I going to do? It's funding.

"I'd better go in," Nate said, patting the notes in his shirt pocket. He passed a couple more acquaintances, saying hello as he went by, then inside the door ran right into a minor nightmare: Amy talking to his ex-wife, Libby, and her partner, Margaret.

It had been like this: They'd met ten years ago, summer in Alaska, a remote lodge on Baranof Island on the Chatham Strait, where scientists were given access to a couple of rigid-hulled Zodiacs and all the canned beans, smoked salmon, and Russian vodka they could consume. Nate had come to observe the feeding behavior of his beloved humpbacks and record social sounds that might help him to interpret the song they sang when in Hawaii. Libby was doing biopsies on the population of resident (fish-eating) killer whales to prove that all the different pods were indeed part of one clan related by blood. He was two years divorced from his second wife. Libby, at thirty, was two months from finishing her doctoral dissertation in cetacean biology. Consequently, since high school she hadn't had time for anything but research — seasonal affairs with boat skippers, senior researchers, grad students, fishermen, and the occasional photographer or documentary filmmaker. She wasn't particularly promiscuous, but there was a sea of men you were set adrift in if you were going to study whales, and if you didn't want to spend your life alone, you pulled into a convenient, if scruffy, port from time to time. The transience of the work drove a lot of women out of the field. On the other hand, Nate tried to solve the male side of the equation by marrying other whale researchers, reasoning that only someone who was equally obsessed, distracted, and single-minded would be able to tolerate those qualities in a mate. That sort of reasoning, of course, was testament to the victory of romanticism over reason, irony over rationality, and pure foolishness over common sense. The only thing that being married to another scientist had gotten Nate was a reprieve from being asked what he was thinking about while lying in bed in a postcoital cuddle. They knew what he was thinking about, because they were thinking about the same thing: whales.

They were both lean and blond and weather-beaten, and one evening, as they were portaging gear from their respective Zodiacs, Libby unzipped her survival suit and tied the sleeves around her waist so she could move more freely. Nate said, "You look good in that."

No one, absolutely no one, looks good in a survival suit (unless a Day-Glo orange marshmallow man is your idea of a hot date), but Libby didn't even make the effort to roll her eyes. "I have vodka and a shower in my cabin," she said.

"I have a shower in my cabin, too," Nate said.

Libby just shook her head and trudged up the path to the lodge. Over her shoulder she called, "In five minutes there's going to be a naked woman in my shower. You got one of those?"

"Oh," said Nate.

They were both still lean, but no longer blond. Nate was completely gray, and Libby was getting there. She smiled when he approached. "We heard about the break-in, Nate. I meant to call you."

"That's okay," he said. "Not much you can do."

"That's what you think," Amy said. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet as if she were going to explode or Tigger off across the room any second.

"I think these might mitigate the loss a little," Libby said. She slung her day pack off her shoulder, reached in, and came out with a handful of CDs in paper sleeves. "You forgot about these, I'll bet? You loaned them to us last season so we could pull off any social noises in the background."

"It's all the singer recordings from the last ten years," Amy said. "Isn't that great!"

Nate felt as if he might faint. To lose ten years' work, then reconcile the loss, only to have it handed back to him. He put his hand on Libby's shoulder to steady himself. "I don't know what to say. I thought you gave those back."

"We made copies." Margaret stepped over to Quinn and in doing so got a foot between him and his ex-wife. "You said it would be okay. We were only using them for comparison to our own samples."

"No, it's okay," Nate said. He almost patted her shoulder, but as he moved in that direction she flinched and he let his hand drop. "Thank you, Margaret."

Margaret had interposed herself completely between Nate and Libby, making a barrier of her own body (behavior she'd obviously picked up from her cow/calf studies — a humpback mother did the same thing when boats or amorous males approached her calf).

Amy snatched the handful of CDs from Libby. "I'd better go through these. I can probably come up with a few relevant samples to play along with the slides if I hurry."

"I'll go with you," Margaret said, eyeing Amy. "My handwriting on the catalog numbers leaves something to be desired."

And off they went toward the projection station in the middle of the hall, leaving Nate standing with Libby, wondering exactly what had just transpired.

"She really does have an extraordinary ass, Nate," Libby said as she watched Amy walk away.

"Yep," Nate said, not wanting to have this conversation. "She's very bright, too."

Sometime in the last week a tiny voice in his head had started asking,
Could this get any weirder?
In two minutes he'd gone from anxiety to embarrassment to anxiety to relief to gratitude to scoping chicks with his ex-wife.
Oh, yes, little voice, it can always get weirder.

"I think Margaret may be on a recruiting mission," Libby said. "I hope she checked our budget before she left."

"Amy's working for free," Nate said.

Libby leaned up on tiptoes and whispered, "I believe that a starting position on the all-girl team has just opened up." Then she kissed his cheek. "You knock 'em dead tonight, Nate." And she was off after Amy and Margaret.

Clay and Kona arrived just as Libby walked away, and, irritatingly, Kona was checking out Libby from behind.

"Irie, Boss Nate. Who's the biscuit auntie suckin' face with ya?" (Like many authentic Hawaiians, Kona called any woman a generation older "auntie," even if he was horning after her.)

"You brought him here," Nate said to Clay without turning to face him.

"He's got to learn," Clay said. "Libby seemed friendly."

"She's chasing Amy."

"Oh, she a blackheart thief that would take a man's Snowy Biscuit to have a punaani nosh. That Snowy Biscuit belong our tribe."

"Libby was Nate's third wife," Clay volunteered, as if that would somehow immediately illuminate why the blackheart Libby was trying to steal the Snowy Biscuit from their tribe.