Whale Music (29 page)

Claire is taciturn, still upset. The few words she does speak are directed towards Barney, murmured canine praise, “Nice poochie,” and that sort of thing. Barney keeps up his end of the conversation with a few strident yawps. The most loquacious of us is my ward Bob, who produces a steady stream, murky water sluicing down a sewer.

Finally Claire pipes up. “That was frigging brilliant.”

“I am sorry about our misunderstanding.”

“Our misunderstanding when you said that I had no business telling people they could come into our house, like I hadn’t been living there, like I was just some bimbo you brought in to do your cooking and give you blow-jobs?”

The little fuzzball cackles lasciviously.

“Do you mind?” I demand. “We are trying to work out our problems in a civil and mature manner—”
Agh
. The poor Whale-man, beached upon the shores of adulthood.

“Des!”

Oh, peachy. Just what I need.

“Des, hang a minute, dude!”

I spin about, brandish the fatty dukes. “Go away, unless you care to tussle again.”

“Des …” Farley O’Keefe shakes the tiny head wearily. “Would you mind explaining what is going on?”

He hasn’t changed one bit, except that his handlebar moustache is longer by a half-inch on either side. His T-shirt advertises a resort in Cancun and he wears Bermuda shorts that are bunched in about the waist, although his thighs threaten to rend the garment to tatters.

“There’s no talking to him, Farls,” says Claire, that Benedict Arnold.

“You know, Des, I didn’t mind when you fired me for no good reason,”—Farley has assumed his tone of parental forbearance—“but what did bother me is the fact that you haven’t called, you haven’t returned my calls, I have even written to you—”

“Learnt to write, have you?”

“Des!” he screams. “Tell me why you’re so mad at me!”

“I beg your pardon?” I bridle with indignation.

“We used to be friends, Desmond. We used to talk, we used to laugh, then all of a sudden, I get the can, you lock yourself up in your house, Fay starts calling me in
tears …”

“Do
not
,” I launch a finger into his puss for emphasis, “allow her name to vault through your lips.”

“Why not?” he demands.

Whooo, what I wouldn’t give for a little shot, a little drinky-poo. We’re near liquor-store heaven, what’s stopping me from merely wheeling around and storming off? Nothing. Let’s do it then. And who has chosen to join me? I steal quick peeks to either side. Not a one of them. Fine. Good.

“Just tell me,” screams Farley, “why I shouldn’t mention my own sister’s name?!”

I haul monies out of my pockets, I intend to purchase several demijohns of rotgut whiskey.

“She told me what happened with Danny!”

I am dropping to my knees, the mangled heart turns the valve and the eyes weep.
“Christ!”
I bellow.

“It didn’t mean anything to her!” persists Farley.

I’m even willing to buy that, although she certainly enjoyed it, slobbering over Stud E. Baker’s prong. Perhaps it did mean nothing to her, but it meant something to Daniel.

“Christ.” It is but a whimper, He is not coming, He has had much better invitations.

I will now admit that when I came home that day it was Fay and my brother I stumbled in upon. I knew it was somebody’s brother, Fay’s brother Nathan adopted the name Farley O’Keefe, who could blame me for getting confused? Now I’ve got it straight—it was my own brother. Fay immediately began wailing, the tears tumbled upon breasts that were heaving with torment. “Forgive me!” she screamed, but forgiveness was not an option, it clearly states
AVAILABLE ONLY TO HUMAN BEINGS
. Danny started pulling on his greasy jeans, he struggled into a torn undershirt, he rammed the Confederate Army cap over his curls. Stud E. Baker lit a cigarette and as the smoke snaked around his head he stared into my eyes. Finally Daniel nodded. “That should do the trick,” he muttered and left my house.

But it didn’t, did it? Danny had miscalculated. He was much more certain when, some months later, he drove the Porsche through the guardrail.

Look what is there on the sidewalk before me. Toes, dainty toes, toes that have been nibbled by trout in crystal clear springwater. Feet that have caressed verdure, the feet that
foothills
were named after. A hand touches the top of my head. “Get up, Desmond,” she whispers.

My disordered and defeated heart squeezes with the little it has left.

I believe I once mentioned to you that I have been in hospitals. You may have guessed that it was not my physical well-being the doctors were concerned with. I had a visitor then, and although the import of his words was lost on me, foggy and
counter-drugged as I was, they return to me now. “Desmond,” he said, in an enfeebled voice. Certainly his voice was enfeebled, this was a man who had been tortured within an inch of his life and starved to his current weight of maybe sixty-four pounds. I lay there in a kind of half-sleep, with no true purchase on reality.

“What is that?” I heard the good professor ask. The nurse responded with the name of some drug, one that even I had never heard of. “Don’t give him that,” snarled the little man. “Doctor’s orders,” she insisted. “What do you think I am, bubbie, a refrigerator repairman? I am this boy’s personal physician, and I say no more drugs.” Professor Ginzburg’s Ph.D. was in nuclear physics, but given the way I’d been abusing my body, that more than qualified him to look after me. The nurse left.

“Des,” the professor said, “I want you to get up and take a look around. A good, hard look. Without drugs, without booze. I want you to look at
everything
. And then, if you decide you still don’t like it, I’ll help you. I mean, I’ll help you, you know, to leave. I’ve seen ugliness, I couldn’t even make the words come out of my mouth, that’s how bad it was. But I’ve also seen naked ladies. I’ve heard the music of Mozart. I’ve caught a fish, must have weighed forty-seven pounds. Me and my friend Karl Oberheim once slept on a hill, and the stars were so close you could reach out and pick them like berries.”

I sent up a barrage of spurious snoring.

“Get up, Desmond,” he said.

“Get up, Desmond.”

“Christ.”

I lumber skyward, no big deal, plants do it all the time.

“Well,” I say, “let’s go home.”

So, I have lost my brother Daniel, that is the long and short of it. He was born too late, at any rate. This time is a strange new neighbourhood, no one likes it. It makes no one feel like crocheting doilies that read
HOME, SWEET HOME
.

The last time I saw Daniel I was in bed. It was not a major bed-going, not in my terms, although I think I’d been there for about five weeks.

Daniel appeared through the bedroom window. That was before I had the thing boarded and barred. He climbed up a tree and launched himself outwards. He broke the pane of glass into a million pieces, lacerated his forearms. He rolled among the shards and then clambered to his feet. He was neither Danny nor Stud E. Baker, he was a drunk and fuzzy combination of the two. His eyes, red and spinning like planets, Danny tried to aim these at me.

“Desmond,” he whispered. It was an enticing whisper, urgent, meant to lead me back into the fold. “It’s me. It’s your brother.”

I sought refuge on the outskirts. “I have no brother. My brother died long ago in a car accident.”

“Des,” he said wearily, “we all make mistakes.” He pulled out his bottle, tugged at it, wiped his red lips with the sleeve of his leather jacket. “I got one thing to say. One fucking thing, Des. I am sorry.”

I almost—
almost
, I say—lumbered out from underneath the blankets to either strangle or embrace my brother. Of course I
did neither. I merely closed my eyes and launched myself into orbit. “You know your way out, don’t you?” I spoke quietly. “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”

The good news is, Freaky Fred Head has finished mixing the Whale Music.

I have scuttled down the cliff, I am on top of a huge rock, the waves crash against it and seaspray wets the tootsies. If I cant my head upwards I can see Claire climbing down the rockface. Occasionally I’ll shout to her, “Be careful!” but she is very sure-footed. Look up in the rookeries, see what are perched there,
speakers
, huge things with fourteen-inch cones, horns for the high frequencies, louvres to spread the music across the ocean.

Above me, standing on my lawn, sipping cocktails around the swimming pool, are people. My friends and family. I know what you’re thinking—“Be careful, Claire!”—you’re thinking that I have gone radically fuzzy, that I hurried down the scarry crag to avoid social intercourse. No way, it is in fact social intercourse I am after. Listen as the “Song of Congregation” erupts into the salt air. Yes, I am expecting the Whales.

Claire is just above me now, preparing to join me on the huge rock. “The music’s beautiful,” she says.

I take her hand, and she is beside me.

But we are halfway through the “Song of Congregation”, and I have yet to see a solitary fluke. I was afraid this might happen. There is a great furious flurry of notes—besotten as I was that
night, I sure played the hell out of the Yamaha 666—but on the horizon is nothing but the steady roiling of the water, the slow movement of dark clouds.

“It’s not working,” say I.

Claire squeezes my hand. “What’s the matter?”

“Where are they?” I plop the plump keester down disconsolately.

“Oh, Des,” Claire says, and she sits down beside. “The music wasn’t really for the whales, was it? I thought it was for us.”

The last notes of the “Song of Congregation” fly away, the Beast’s cry has gone to die on a lonely archipelago.

From above, from the top of the rockface, I can hear a smattering of applause, but it is a puny human thing.

The new song begins. I am sickened at heart, this music has all the natural majesty of a Veg-o-Matic.

“Hey, Desmond,” asks Claire, trying somehow to cheer me, “what’s this one called?”

“This?” I look down at the water. People have tossed their garbage into the ocean, look there, a pop can, a cigarette package. “This is called ‘Have You Guys Seen Danny?’ ”

Claire swings her head upwards, her eyes are strange. “No, Desmond.”

“Yes. It’s called ‘Have You Guys Seen a Guy in a Silver Porsche?’ ”

“No.” Claire takes my head between her hands. “No, Des.” Tears stream down her cheeks. I, too, start to cry. “Be happy, Desmond. Why can’t you be happy?”

I place my head on her shoulder, I gaze out at the desolate sea. “But,” I whisper, “I have to tell him that I forgive him.”

“Desmond.” Claire holds me, we are all alone.

And then the “Song of Sadness” begins. The terrible burden of humanity sits upon me just as that pelican there sits upon the rock, immovable, unflappable, even though Mother Nature
dances about as though she were on bad drugs … Wait, though.

Something distant, something deep and dark as a mystery, breaks through the waves. Then it’s gone.

“Umm …” I begin uncertainly, I wipe tears off my chubby cheeks.

A fluke breaks into the daylight, the mighty tail towers above the waves.

I climb to my feet and a huge head rises with me, the eyes large as tires, the bluish maw twisted into what appears to be a smile. It is so close that I could reach out and pet it. Claire screams, and as the monster disappears, her scream turns to laughter.

There is a moment of tranquillity, and then the whales rise all around us.

Scores of them, their gleaming backs black as the bottom of the deepest hole, the bellies preternaturally white and lined with heavy scars. They churn the water, the ocean boils with life.

“Yowzers,” mutters Claire.

I am a fat man perched on a rock, the soul God gave me is not much good for anything. Still, I raise my arms towards the sunlight, hold them there for a long moment. Claire leaps up and down, she cries and laughs, she makes whooping noises, embraces me, shakes her fists gleefully in the air.

I lower my arms with all the grace and dignity I can muster.