Christopher Moore - Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

"I know you will, but Clay's right. Nobody cares. I should have gone into biochemistry or become an ecowarrior or something."

"I care."

Nate looked at her feet to avoid looking her in the eye. "I know you do. But without the recordings… well — then…" He shrugged and took a sip from the rum bottle. "You can't drink, you know," he said, now the professor, now the Ph.D., now the head researcher. "You can't do anything or have anything in your life that gets in the way of researching whales."

"Okay," Amy said. "I just wanted to see if you were okay."

"Yeah, I'm okay."

"We'll get started putting it back together tomorrow. Good night, Nate." She backed out the door.

"Night, Amy." Nate noticed that she wasn't wearing anything under the T-shirt dress and felt sleazy for it. He turned his attention back to his blank piece of paper, and before he could figure out why, he wrote BITE ME in big block letters and underlined it so hard that he ripped the page.

The next morning the four of them stood in a row on the front of the old Pioneer Hotel, looking across the Lahaina Harbor at the whitecaps in the channel. Wind was whipping the palm trees. Down by the breakwater two little girls were trying to surf waves whose faces were bumpy with wind chop and whose curls blew back over the crests like the hair of a sprinter.

"It could calm down," Amy said. She was standing next to Kona, thinking, This guy's pecs are so cut you could stick business cards under them and they'd stay. And my, is he tan. Where Amy came from, no one was tan, and she hadn't been in Hawaii long enough to realize that a good tan was just a function of showing up.

"Supposed to stay like this for the next three days," Nate said. As disappointed as he appeared to be, he was extraordinarily relieved that they wouldn't be going out this morning. He had a rogue hangover, and his eyes were bloodred behind his sunglasses. Self-loathing had set in, and he thought, My life's work is shit, and if we went out there today and I didn't spend the morning retching over the side, I'd be tempted to drown myself. He would rather have been thinking about whales, which is what he usually thought about. Then he noticed Amy sneaking glances at Kona's bare chest and felt even worse.

"Ya, mon. Kona can spark up a spliff and calm down that bumpy brine for all me new science dreadies. We can take the boat no matter what the wind be," Kona said. He was thinking, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but I really want to get out there with the whales.

"Breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks," Clay said. He was thinking, We'll have breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks.

None of them moved. They just stood there, looking out at the blowout channel. Occasionally a whale would blow, and the mist would run over the water like a frightened ghost.

"I'm buying," Clay said.

And they all headed up Front Street to Longee's restaurant, a two-story gray-and-white building, done in a New England architecture with shiplap siding and huge open windows that looked across Front Street, over the stone seawall, and out onto the Au' au Channel. By way of a shirt, Kona slipped on a tattered Nautica windbreaker he'd had knotted around his waist.

"You do a lot of sailing?" Amy asked, nodding to the Nautica logo. She intended the remark as dig, a return for Kona's saying, "And who be this snowy biscuit?" when they'd first met. At the time Amy had just introduced herself, but in retrospect she realized that she should probably have taken some offense to being called both snowy and a biscuit — those things were objectifying, right?

"Shark bait kit, me Snowy Biscuit," Kona answered, meaning that the windbreaker had come from a tourist. The Paia surfing community on the North Shore, from which Kona had recently come, had an economy based entirely on petty theft, mostly smash-and-grabs from rental cars.

As the host led them through the crowded dining room to a table by the windows, Clay leaned over Amy's shoulder and whispered, "A biscuit is a good thing."

"I knew that," Amy whispered back. "Like a tomato, right?"

"Heads up," Clay said, just as Amy plowed into a khaki package of balding ambition known as Jon Thomas Fuller, CEO of Hawaii Whale Inc., a nonprofit corporation with assets in the tens of millions that disguised itself as a research organization. Fuller had pushed his chair back to intercept Amy.

"Jon Thomas!" Clay smiled and reached around the flustered Amy to shake Fuller's hand. Fuller ignored Clay and took Amy by the waist, steadying her. "Hey, hey, there," Fuller said. "If you wanted to meet me, all you had to do was introduce yourself."

Amy grabbed his wrists and guided his hands to the table in front of him, then stepped back. "Hi, I'm Amy Earhart."

"I know who you are," said Fuller, standing now. He was only a little taller than Arny, very tan and very lean, with a hawk nose and a receding hairline like a knife. "What I don't know is why you haven't come to see me about a job."

Meanwhile, Nate, who had been thinking about whale song, had taken his seat, opened a menu, ordered coffee, and completely missed the fact that he was alone at the table. He looked up to see Jon Thomas Fuller holding his assistant by the waist. He dropped his menu and headed back to the site of the intercept.

"Well, partly" — Amy smiled at the three young women sitting at Fuller's table — "partly because I have some self-respect" — she curtsied — "and partly because you're a louse and a jamoke."

Fuller's dazzling grin dropped a level of magnitude. The women at his table, all dressed in khaki safari wear to approximate the Discovery Channel ideal of what a scientist should look like, made great shows of looking elsewhere, wiping their mouths, sipping water — not noticing their boss getting verbally bitch-slapped by a vicious research pixie.

"Nate," Fuller said, noticing that Nate had joined the group, "I heard about the break-in at your place. Nothing important missing, I hope."

"We're fine. Lost some recordings," Nate said.

"Ah, well, good. A lot of lowlifes on this island now." Fuller looked at Kona.

The surfer grinned. "Shoots, brah, you make me blush."

Fuller grinned. "How you doing, Kona?"

"All cool runnings, brah. Bwana Fuller got his evil on?"

There were neck-snapping double takes all around. Fuller nodded, then looked back at Quinn. "Anything we can do, Nate? There are a lot of our song recordings for sale in the shops, if those will help out. You guys get professional discount. We're all in this together."

"Thanks," Nate said just as Fuller sat down, then turned his back on all of them and resumed eating his breakfast, dismissing them. The women at the table looked embarrassed.

"Breakfast?" Clay said. He herded his team to their table.

They ordered and drank coffee in silence, each looking out across the street to the ocean, avoiding eye contact until Fuller and his group had left.

Nate turned to Amy. "A jamoke? What are you, living in a Cagney movie?"

"Who is that guy?" Amy asked. She snapped the corner off a piece of toast with more violence than was really necessary.

"What's a jamoke?" Kona asked.

"It's a flavor of ice cream, right?" Clay said.

Nate looked at Kona. "How do you know Fuller?" Nate held up his ringer and shot a cautionary glare, the now understood signal for no Rasta/pidgin/bullshit.

"I worked the Jet Ski concession for him at Kaanapali."

Nate looked to Clay, as if to say, You knew this?

"Who is that guy?" Amy asked.

"He's the head of Hawaii Whale," Clay said. "Commerce masquerading as science. They use their permit to get three sixty-five-foot tourist boats right up next to the whales."