Friday's Harbor: A Novel Page 2

  Truman put his overnight bag in the car’s backseat and hopped in, moving his feet at the last minute to avoid a neat little dog turd on the floorboards.

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” said Ivy, looking down. “Really, Julio!” She pulled a wadded-up tissue from her pocket and with practiced efficiency picked up the turd and tossed it out her window. The culprit was a Chihuahua named Julio Iglesias, with whom she’d been locked in a passive-aggressive warfare for years; he glowered at her from a booster seat clipped into one of the backseat belts. “He must have done that this morning while I was in the drugstore,” Ivy said. “And then he wonders why I make him sit back there.”

  The dog shot Ivy a look of pure contempt.

  “Gabriel was on the ferry, too,” she told Truman. “He’s one of the pioneers of marine mammal husbandry and rehabilitation. People talk about him with a certain degree of reverence.” She spotted a weathered pickup matching the description Gabriel had given her, and waved. He waved back, and once she was sure he was following her, she pulled out of the ferry parking lot. By her reckoning, she had six minutes alone with Truman to cogently review the killer whale’s plight. Once they got to the house the show would belong to Gabriel.

  “Let me tell you what I know,” she said, making sure Truman’s passenger-side window was fully raised so it didn’t dribble.

  “Fire away,” said Truman, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hello, by the way.”

  She waved this away impatiently. “Now, listen. His name is Viernes, which means Friday, and he’s in this tiny pool he shares with Satan’s dolphins—”

  “Is that a species?” Truman said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Oh.”

  “—and they make him do these shows even though he’s thin as a rail and weak. Cheesy shows with beautiful girls standing on his head giving parade waves to the crowd while he swims around the pool, and they have him jump out of the water and splash people in the front rows of the bleachers, that kind of thing. Tacky.”

  “I didn’t know animals could die of poor taste,” Truman said.

  “Don’t you mock me,” Ivy said, giving him a dangerous look.

  Truman subsided. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “His food is crap—whatever they can get cheap at the local fish market, which means it’s spoiled a lot of the time, plus there’s never enough of it. They’re inland like your zoo, so they make seawater with this stuff called Instant Ocean—”

  “As will we,” Truman pointed out.

  “With polluted water?” Ivy said archly. “I think not.”

  “No,” Truman said. “Of course not.”

  “Well then. The water system’s also antiquated, so they can’t chill the pool adequately, which means the water’s hot all the time. And he’s from the North Atlantic, so you can only imagine. He’s also got this nasty skin condition, like big patches of warts, which means his immune system’s probably shot.”

  “My god,” Truman groaned, “the only thing you haven’t mentioned is that he has some inoperable tumor somewhere.”

  “No, no tumor.” Ivy frowned thoughtfully. “At least not that I know of.”

  She pulled into her driveway, looking in the rearview mirror to be sure Gabriel had made the turn, which he had. She turned off the car but made no move to get out. She sensed that Truman was unconvinced.

  “Come on—think about what it could do for the zoo,” she said. “You’d be heroes for taking him in. And people would come out of the woodwork to see him. Think of the revenue stream. Anyway, you don’t have to take my word for anything,” she said. “That’s why I want you and Gabriel to talk. This could be the perfect marriage of need and opportunity.”

  With that she got out of the car, released Julio Iglesias from the detested booster seat, and came around to Gabriel’s truck, rapping it smartly on the flank. “Watch out for the dog,” she called. “He bites.”

  But Julio Iglesias had already disappeared under a scraggly rhododendron from which emanated a delicate but unmistakable odor of rot.

  THE LEVY ANCESTRAL home was one of the biggest and oldest on the island, shingled and squat above a notch in the shoreline too tiny to have a name. Three generations of Levys had grown up there, including Ivy and Truman’s father, Matthew; Ivy had never left. Inside, it was as fusty and worn as a soft paper bag. Braided rugs covered the original fir floors; pine cabinets lined the kitchen walls, and the old upholstered furniture was as enveloping as an embrace. Ivy shooed Truman and Gabriel into the living room. “Get the pleasantries over with,” she called over her shoulder, “while I scare us up some coffee.”

  Truman, being naturally bookish and inclined toward indoor activities, had always loved coming here with his parents. From his favorite sprung old club chair in the living room he’d done a hundred jigsaw puzzles, watched killer whales stitch through Haro Strait, followed seals and sea lions, cormorants and pelicans as they worked the gray water. Nearly everything he valued came from here in one way or another: his love of books and art and living things; his deep sense of family and its commitment to upholding the highest moral standard.

  Now, in the light, Truman regarded Gabriel Jump, who had picked up a pair of high-powered binoculars from the coffee table and was peering at something on the water. Though he guessed Gabriel was eight or ten years older than he was, Gabriel was big and powerfully built—the sort of man Truman would instinctively steer clear of on a dimly lighted street; the sort of man to whom Truman, to his deep and lasting shame, had once surrendered his wallet without protest. But now Truman could see that Gabriel’s size, strength, and air of easy athleticism would be excellent qualities in a profession that required hefting big, slippery animals in and out of the water. And there was something incongruously gentle about him, too, as he put down the binoculars and held out his hand to Julio Iglesias, who had come mincing in from the kitchen still munching on some rank and festering tidbit he’d dug up under the rhododendron. Ivy followed close behind him, commanding in a deep and no-nonsense voice, “Drop it, Julio. Drop!”

  Over his skinny shoulder the dog shot her a look of mild amusement, swallowed, and jumped onto her favorite, newly upholstered chair to buff his foul-smelling coat against the seat and armrests.

  “Oh, you get down from there right now!” Ivy shrieked, flapping her arms at him as though to launch a flight of birds. He gave a leisurely yawn and hopped down.

  “Do you see what I have to deal with?” she demanded of Truman and Gabriel.

  “You can always give him up,” Truman said, just as he’d been saying off and on for the last nine years.

  “Never,” Ivy said grimly, setting down a tray of thick mugs of coffee. “I’d never give him the satisfaction.”

  “Here, sit down.” Truman offered her his chair and took her soiled one. Once she was settled in, he turned to Gabriel. “I think the best thing will be if you take it from the top—pretend I know nothing.”

  Gabriel stirred sugar and cream—a surprising amount of both, Truman thought—into his coffee and licked the spoon before putting it down. “I’ve been looking in on this whale off and on since he got there,” Gabriel said. “And for the last few visits I’ve assumed he’d be dead within a year or two. Every time, he’s surprised me.”

  “And now? Why don’t you think he’ll rally now?”

  “Call it professional intuition. Call it a worsening trifecta of insupportable realities.” Gabriel ticked them off on his fingers. “His food sucks. His water quality sucks. And his pool sucks. Nothing new there. But his immune system’s beginning to fail, and that is new. At some point he’s going to reach a tipping point, and when that happens—when, not if—even God won’t be able to save him.”

  “And you think he’s at that tipping point now?”

  “No—if I thought that, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. But I do think he’s close. Really close.”

  “Then why hasn’t anyone tried to save him before now?”

  Ga
briel shrugged, swishing coffee around in his mouth reflectively. “Easy. No market.”

  “What does that mean?” Truman said.

  “It means no one would buy an animal like him, and until recently the Colombians wanted to sell him, not give him away. There isn’t a facility out there that would fork out a million dollars or whatever for an animal that’s been socially isolated, is out of condition, and let’s face it, probably wasn’t the brightest bulb to begin with.”

  “What makes you say that?” Ivy asked.

  Gabriel pressed his thumb and forefinger into the inside corners of his eyes as though he felt a headache coming on. “When you collect them in the wild, the smart ones don’t end up in the nets.”

  “Poor thing,” Ivy said.

  “Plus the market for wild-caught whales in general has dried up. SeaWorld, Loro Parque in Spain, Kamogawa SeaWorld, and Nagoya Aquarium in Japan—the big facilities have captive-breeding programs that spit out healthy, well-adjusted calves like clockwork. They’re in their third and fourth generations of captive-born whales, and they supply the second-tier facilities. There are almost no wild-caught animals left.”

  “And are captive-bred animals better?” Truman asked.

  “You tell me. Captive-born animals never know anything other than a big pool and a buffet of the finest seafood. They have no diseases, no injuries from tangling with boats or fishing gear, and are given the best veterinary care in the world. Then, on top of that, there’s the cost of collecting animals, plus getting through the politics and permits—government regulations make it almost impossible to bring in captured marine mammals, particularly killer whales. Most institutions just don’t think the headache’s worth it. There are diverse enough bloodlines that the captive-breeding population is genetically viable.”

  “But Ivy tells me he’s been in captivity since he was one. Isn’t that almost as good as captive-born?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Sure, if he’d been living at a top-of-the-line place like SeaWorld his whole life. He’s not—he’s living in a third-world slum.”

  Truman put his head in his hands. “Did you know all this?” he asked Ivy.

  “For the most part,” she admitted.

  “For god’s sake, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because if I had, you wouldn’t have considered taking him.”

  “For good reason!”

  “That,” said Ivy, “is where you’d have been wrong.”

  The three of them talked well into the night, circling around and around the one point on which Truman wanted assurance that Gabriel was unable to give him: whether the killer whale would arrive in Bladenham alive. Truman rightly pointed out that selling his board of directors on rehabilitating a high-visibility, desperately sick animal would be hard enough. He didn’t feel he could recommend taking on an animal that might die on their doorstep.

  “Look,” Gabriel finally said. “I’d be an idiot or a liar if I guaranteed the transport would go off without a hitch. You have to understand there’s a risk anytime you move any animal, no matter what shape it’s in. But what I can tell you is that this killer whale should have died years ago—years ago—and yet he’s still alive. He’s two thousand pounds underweight, his living conditions are deplorable, his diet is worse, and he’s lived like that for eighteen years. He’s a survivor. My professional instincts are that he’ll not only make it to your zoo alive, he’ll recover once he gets there. Can I guarantee that? No. Would I tell your board this animal’s worthy of a second chance? Absolutely. The bottom line is, you’ve got a state-of-the-art pool with no animals, and I’ve got an animal needing a pool.”

  Truman sighed, considering Ivy, considering Gabriel. “Say I’m convinced that it’s a win-win for the whale and for the zoo. We still haven’t talked about money. I have no idea what we’re talking about here. Tens of thousands?”

  Gabriel and Ivy exchanged a quick glance. “More like a hundred thousand,” Gabriel said.

  “For a year?”

  “For the transport. More, depending on what equipment we can borrow.”

  “There’s no way we can come up with that,” Truman said.

  “Of course there is,” said Ivy. Julio Iglesias hopped into her lap, circled, and settled. “I have it. You know that. What the hell else am I going to do with it?”

  “Let’s say the zoo accepts your donation. What about once he’s there?”

  “You must have budgeted something for the porpoise program,” Ivy pointed out.

  “Yes,” Truman said. “A minimal amount. We knew we weren’t ready to open it yet.”

  “Then I’ll make up the difference,” said Ivy, pulling on Julio Iglesias’s ears absently. He put on his Greta Garbo eyes.

  “Ivy—”

  “No!” snapped Ivy. “Don’t try to talk me out of spending my money on something I believe in! Honey, if you could just have seen him.” She swirled her fourth whiskey and soda around and around, finally looking toward Gabriel in a mute appeal.

  “I’m sorry—I don’t know what more I can tell you,” he said to Truman. “I’d be glad to come talk to your board if you want.”

  “But you honestly believe if he stays down there he’ll die?”

  “No question about it. I give him six months. A year, tops.”

  “And if you can rehabilitate him, how much more time is he likely to have?”

  “We don’t know how much his life expectancy has been compromised by the crappy food and environmental conditions, but it could be years—a lot of years. Ten.”

  Truman sat with his chin in his hand, gazing out the window into the darkness. Finally he said to Gabriel, “I have one condition if I take this to the zoo’s board.”

  “What?”

  “That you head up the project—set up the transport and rehabilitation program and run it at the zoo. Without your experience and expertise, we could never take something like this on.”

  “You mean would I work for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “We’d pay!” Ivy assured him. “Whatever you’d ask for, we’d pay you.”

  “What if we hired you as an independent contractor?” Truman asked. “I’d recommend that the board consider a twelve-month, renewable commitment.”

  “Oh, honey, say yes!” Ivy spilled Julio Iglesias out of her lap to lean forward. “Please say yes.”

  Gabriel looked at her for a long time, considering. “I’ll give you one year. If the whale isn’t healthy by then, he never will be.”

  Ivy clapped her hands. “You won’t be sorry. I know you won’t.”

  THE DEBATABLE WISDOM of opening the zoo’s doors to the sick killer whale circled around and around in Truman’s head long after Ivy saw him off on the next day’s midmorning ferry. The zoo was a small affair with roots in a turn-of-the-century menagerie privately owned by Maxine L. Biedelman, daughter of a Pacific Northwest timber magnate. Max, as she’d insisted on being called, had willed the property and all her exotic animals to the City of Bladenham upon her death in 1958. A wildly eccentric woman, she had lived in a hilltop mansion and housed her animals along winding pathways on the grounds in whimsical thatched and conical huts and pastoral barns, many of which still survived. By all accounts she’d been an eminently practical woman despite her penchant for swashbuckling and cross-dressing, and Truman suspected she would have advised that in the wake of Hannah’s loss, the rest of the animal collection should be found new homes and the zoo closed.

  Once back in Bladenham, Truman methodically worked through the steps he’d need to take in presenting the project to the zoo’s executive committee, a collection of small-town businesspeople more familiar with running family-owned diners and auto-body shops than high-profile rescue projects with budgets manyfold greater than their net worth. Before he and Gabriel Jump had left Ivy’s house that morning, they’d drafted a written summary of the killer whale’s current living conditions, health profile, relocation requirements, and budget, incl
uding the cost of one year’s rehabilitation at the zoo. At the same time, Ivy wrote a letter of commitment to send back with Truman, guaranteeing that she’d cover any or all of the expenses that exceeded the zoo’s preexisting budget for completing and operating the porpoise pool. If the committee showed interest, both Gabriel and Ivy had agreed to come to Bladenham and meet with the full board.

  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.