Friday's Harbor (3 page)

Feeling the morning’s cup of strong coffee turn to pure acid in his gut once he was back in Bladenham, Truman decided to drive straight to
Woof!
to caucus with Neva Wilson. The doggie day care business was housed in an empty Chevy dealership on Main Street, fueled by the bottomless guilt of commuters who spent twelve-plus hours each day working in and commuting to and from Seattle. As Truman walked in he saw his pot-bellied pig, Miles, mixing with the large-dog group. Three years ago, when the pig was just a piglet, Truman had given him to Winslow as an eleventh birthday gift, for reasons that had been sketchy even at the time and which he’d often come to regret. The animal snored, wheezed, and passed eye-watering gas; he scared the living daylights out of the UPS driver and the mail carrier. On the bright side, Truman no longer received unwelcome door-to-door entreaties to buy Girl Scout cookies, candy bars, magazine subscriptions, holiday wreaths, or any other merchandise formerly inflicted on him. And the pig was utterly devoted to him and Winslow. When they ate dinner every night in the kitchen he lay on his horse-blanket bed on the other side of a baby gate and mooned over them like a middle school girl. He was not as fond of Neva, whom he apparently viewed as competition, but he adored going with her to
Woof!,
and had a well-established social circle there, composed of several pit bulls, a Rottweiler, two chocolate labs, and a mastiff. The pig was black and white, sparsely haired, and blessed with an unsinkably sunny nature. The minute Truman walked in Miles sensed his presence and, beaming with porcine delight, tip-tapped over on the absurdly small hooves that reminded Truman of the bound feet of Chinese women. Truman patted his shoulder and told him what a good pig he was, and then suggested, with no hint of irony, that he go back to playing with his friends. Miles grunted his boundless adoration and trotted off.

The noise of two dozen dogs was nearly deafening, even once Truman was in Neva’s small office with the door closed. Both he and Winslow had unusually low auditory thresholds. Neva fished out a couple of noise-dampening foam earplugs from her top desk drawer, handing them to him wordlessly across her desk.

At thirty-six Geneva Wilson was small but mighty from years of hard physical work with large animals, and gingery in color, manner, and temperament. She sat across the desk from him in her messy office, wearing canvas army boots, a stained sweatshirt, and cargo pants, her thick red hair indifferently knotted and stabbed through with a chopstick. Truman thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“Your aunt is reacting out of sentimentality,” Neva said after he’d given her a synopsis of the situation. “And pity. You know that, right?”

Yes, Truman knew that. He remembered a number of unlikely orphans that Ivy had been sheltering when Truman came to visit—not just the usual assortment of hapless domesticated animals, but an owl, a nutria, and once, memorably, a male raccoon that washed its food in a dog dish Ivy had put on the floor expressly for that purpose, its splint tapping on the kitchen linoleum like a pirate’s peg leg. The animal had long, thin, artful fingers that deftly rolled pats of butter into perfect little balls the size of BBs before dipping them in the water. “She’s always had a soft spot for lost causes,” he said now. “Take Julio Iglesias. But it doesn’t make her wrong.”

“You know that politically having a cetacean—”

“A what?”

“A cetacean. A whale or dolphin.”

“Oh.”

“—having cetaceans brings the nuts out of the woodwork. They don’t mind so much when you have fish or lesser marine mammals—seals, sea lions, even walruses—but the anticaptivity people go absolutely nuts over whales and dolphins. You could end up being picketed day in and day out for years. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it could.”

“We’re helping an animal in need—a deserving animal. Our motives are purely altruistic. It seems pretty straightforward to me.”

Neva smiled at him fondly. “You’re so naïve. You haven’t seen it, but people lose their minds when it comes to killer whales. I’m serious. You can’t bring a killer whale here without making headlines. Ask anyone at SeaWorld.”

“Are you saying you don’t think we should take him?”

“I’m saying you have to be prepared for whatever is slung at you. If you’re okay with that, I think it’s great.”

Truman laced his fingers together, regarding her thoughtfully. “This man Gabriel Jump thinks the whale’s only got six months to a year, at the longest, if he stays where he is. I wish I didn’t know that, but I do. Ivy’s promised to pay for everything, if necessary. I’ve got Gabriel’s commitment to work with us for at least the first year. Would you be willing to come back to the zoo and work with him? It means Marla will have to find a new manager.” Marla was the owner of
Woof!

“Honey, I don’t have any marine mammal experience. I’d kill to work with him, but I’ll be more of a liability than an asset, at least in the beginning.”

“He says if you can work with elephants, you can work with killer whales.”

Neva pressed Truman’s arm across the desktop. “In that case, of course I’ll come back. You know there’s no one I’d rather share a frying pan with than you.”

F
ROM
W
OOF!,
T
RUMAN
drove to the Oat Maiden, a cheerful garage sale of a café in downtown Bladenham. It had gouged and rippling old floorboards, silvering mirrors, mismatched chairs, and heavy wooden tables brightly painted with celestial, aquatic, safari, and Bicycle-playing-card motifs in primary colors. Sitting at a back table waiting for him was Samson Brown, a seventy-one-year-old black man, tall and trim, his lined face testifying to a life of hard work cheerfully undertaken, including forty-one years of caring for Hannah. Truman shook his hand before sitting down.

“So what’s this all about?” said Sam. “You got yourself a whale now?”

“Maybe. Yes. And he’s right up our alley,” Truman said wryly. “He’s sick, he’s needy, he’s in a terrible facility, and bringing him here might kill him. Oh, and once he’s here he’ll be alone, just like Hannah. On the other hand, he’ll certainly die if he’s left where he is now.”

“I don’t believe the good Lord ever meant for death to be the right choice if there’s an alternative,” said Sam. “You got a way to move him?”

“Yes.”

“You got a place to put him once you move him?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody got the know-how to take care of him once he’s here?”

“Yes.”

“Anybody else want to do the same thing?”

“Evidently not.”

“Sounds like you got your answer.”

Truman smiled. “It sure does. The reason I asked you to meet me is, I want to know whether you’d consider helping.”

“Be glad to help, but I don’t know a thing about killer whales. Come to that, I’ve never even seen one except on TV. Can’t swim, either.”

“I’m sure there are ways you can help that won’t involve heavy physical work. Or swimming. You could be more of an observer. And you could work strictly on an as-needed basis. The main thing is, I’d feel a lot better about all this if I knew we could tap into your experience.”

“You don’t even need to ask that. It’s yours anytime you want it.”

“Thank you,” Truman said. “From my heart.”

A young girl approached the table wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m so sorry. We’re backed up in the kitchen. Can I get you something?”

“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” Truman said, indicating Sam’s glass of iced tea and pizza slice. “And tell your boss we said hi.” Johnson Johnson was another member of Hannah’s band of schemers, a man of infinite shyness, few words, and great artistry, who had also recently taken over the Oat Maiden. The round table at which they were sitting was a piece of his work, painted with bright animals from the African veldt and Serengeti Plain in a never-ending circle.

“Perfect,” said the girl and trotted away.

“He’s doing a good job with the place,” said Sam. “Who’d of thunk? Your mom and dad still helping him?”

“From time to time,” said Truman. “Mostly it’s Neva, though. She does the books, helps him order things if he gets too busy, generally keeps an eye on him.”

“She’s a good woman.”

“That she is,” Truman agreed. “That she is.” The waitress set Truman’s drink and a slice of pepperoni pizza in front of him and trotted off again. Truman absently rubbed his thumb through the condensation on the side of the glass. “You know, you said once that Max Biedelman thought the worst thing she’d ever done was to bring Hannah here. I keep thinking about that.”

“She didn’t feel bad about giving shug a home,” Sam corrected him. “What she felt bad about was not being able to give her another elephant. She gave her me—that’s the best she could do except for those couple of years right at the beginning with old Reyna.”

“So was that a mistake?”

Sam shrugged, stirred his ice cubes around in his glass with a straw. “She always kept on forgetting shug would’ve probably died over there in Burma. Elephants have to earn their keep over there, and who’d have hired an elephant who was blind in one eye? And she was just a little bitty thing even after she was full-grown. Don’t get me wrong, it would’ve been nice if the girl would have had another elephant or two to play with, like she does now. But it’s apples and oranges—there wasn’t anything like that back then. I think Miz Biedelman gave her a fine life. Girl never wanted for anything, always had the best food, never had a sick day in her life except for her foot sores.”

Truman frowned. “But she was alone here. This whale will be, too. Does that make it morally wrong to bring him here?”

“Never heard anybody say the right thing is the perfect thing.”

“Max Biedelman—what do you think she’d do, if it were up to her?”

Sam grinned. “Heck, that’s easy. She’d have already packed her bag to go down there and get him.”

O
N
J
UNE THIRD
the board of directors of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo voted unanimously to bring the killer whale to its facility as soon as arrangements could be made. Three weeks later, Truman and Gabriel departed for Bogotá to transport him home.

That evening, Ivy and her older brother, Matthew Levy, sat at their respective dining room tables, Ivy on San Juan Island and Matthew in Bladenham, connected via Skype. Matthew, a retired state appellate court judge, had drawn up a legal agreement between Ivy and the zoo, even though he had told Ivy numerous times and in no uncertain terms that she was poised on the brink of a headlong dive into a yawning black fiscal hole. His had always been the Levy family’s voice of pragmatism, even when he was a boy, and over the past several weeks he had spent significant energy trying to dissuade both Ivy and Truman from undertaking such a high-risk, low-yield project. Then, when it became clear that he wouldn’t prevail, he crafted as ironclad an agreement as he could between Ivy and the zoo, protecting her assets as much as possible, not only in the event of the animal’s untimely demise, but also in the case of a flood of surplus revenue.

While Matthew reviewed the terms of the agreement, Ivy filled in the Os in the document’s immaculate title page with a leaky ballpoint pen and drifted away, wondering if she should burn a little sage to cast out any negative energy and attract positive energy to the whale transport scheduled for first thing the next morning.

“Are you listening?” she was suddenly aware of Matthew asking her.

“Apparently not,” she said. “Honey, can’t we do this when I come down there tomorrow?”

“You should have done it a week ago. Until you and the zoo president sign this, you’re not protected,” Matthew said. “And neither is the zoo. You don’t seem to realize how vulnerable you are.”

Ivy sighed.

“Look, let’s just get through it. It won’t take long.”

And so he took her, page by numbingly tedious page, through an agreement between her and the Max L. Biedelman Zoo (henceforth referred to as THE ZOO) that laid out the conditions under which she (henceforth referred to as THE DONOR) would and would not finance the ongoing care and maintenance of the killer whale Viernes. Under the agreement, she would be the sole contributor to a trust, blah blah blah.

It wasn’t that Ivy didn’t care; as a rule she managed her significant fortune very attentively. Her grandfather Levy, the family patriarch during her childhood years, had always stressed that it was her duty to support the Needy, including food banks, homeless shelters, and women’s centers; the Greater Good, including the local police and fire departments; and Our Cultural Legacy, including the Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and several local arts and historical organizations—all just so much bland philanthropic toast, though worthy. Ivy had dutifully supported all of them in generous, though reasonable, ways. This gesture, right now, was the one and only rash financial move she had ever made.

“And you understand that you will have a vote—not the controlling vote, but a vote—in decisions affecting the animal’s ultimate disposition,” Matthew was saying.

Ivy snapped to. “What does ‘ultimate disposition’ mean?”

“It means any decision affecting where the animal lives. In the event of his relocation to another facility, for example.”

“Why on earth would he be moved to another facility?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” said Matthew. “I’m just trying to cover all possible eventualities.”

“Oh.” Ivy subsided, nibbling at a cuticle. “You know, if I were you I’d have opened a vein years ago.”

He gave her an exasperated look. “Ivy, Truman has told me these things can become very political. We want to be sure you have a say, if and when it becomes necessary to move him.”

“Can I have the controlling say?”

“I’ve looked into that. It would be illegal, given that the zoo is a municipal organization. Besides, giving you the controlling interest in a specific animal’s welfare would set a terrible precedent.”

“Well, I don’t see why,” Ivy said sullenly, aware that she was just being difficult. “It’s not like I want to have anything to do with the sloth or the dik-diks.”