“He didn’t die,” I says. “Mabel fed him.”
“So I see.”
I went over and cut on the lights. All of a sudden that little gray lump out there in the water was a great blue shadow, and then it began to move. It would flit this way and that way, not like anything swimming, but like some big bat that was flying. Pretty soon it went up to the far end, turned, and came straight down the pool. And boy, if you ever saw a man’s eyes pop out, Mort’s did when that big train came at him, hit the end of the pool so hard you could feel the ground shake, washed a big wave of water over the gutter, then turned and began to flit around again.
I cut the lights. “Funny thing about that whale,” I says, and sat down beside her on one of the benches and nudged her. “He was a gift. We got a paper that says he’s all ours. We sure do appreciate that.”
He sat down on another bench, and I kept it up. I harpooned him with some of the best cracks I ever thought up, if I do say it myself. “Yeah,” he said after a while, “he’s all yours, and I wish you both good luck. I hope you’re happy, and get all the breaks.”
“Would you mind telling me what you mean by that?” she says in a strained kind of voice.
“Oh, it’s easy enough to see what’s been going on. I didn’t get it at first, but I do now. You and Dave, you make a team. You get along all right. Well, you got my whale. You got each other. It’s all right. I wish you luck.”
“Oh.”
“A shill in an amusement park! A bally for a swimming-pool. A diving Venus.” He stood up so he was sneering down at her. “And then that wasn’t enough for you. You had to get yourself a whale. Believe me, if you weren’t plenty low before, you’re plenty low now.”
“I think you better take your whale back.” She stood up and tried to go past him. He wouldn’t let her.
“Oh, no. I don’t take him back.”
“Let me go. You’ve been nagging me all week because I wasn’t a trouper — because I was a punk amateur. And then, when I try to be a trouper, when I save your whale for you — Let me go!”
“Yeah? Well, now you’re going to hear some more. I had them break that guy for you. I smashed your ladder on purpose. If I had a whale in my pool, you weren’t going to dive in any other pool, see? Well, that was yesterday. Now you can dive in any pool you want. You and Dave, you can go get yourself a flea circus. Or maybe a boxing kangaroo—”
I clipped him on the jaw then, and that stopped it. But before he could even pick himself up, where he went down, she ran to the pool. “Something’s wrong,” she says. “He hasn’t been up!”
I jumped for the lights. The whale was down there with one fluke over the outlet, where it was running out, held there by suction, and fighting like mad to get clear.
“Quick, close it!”
I screwed down the valve, but it didn’t clear him. There was a vacuum there, and it held him, like he was riveted. “Oh, he’s drowning,” she says, and grabbed the bar we used to turn the valves with. She went right overboard in her white dress and let the bar pull her down, head-first. She stuck it under his fluke, gave it a kick with her feet to drive it in, then pulled her feet down and lifted. Up he came, and began to blow like a drowning man would.
She let the bar go, came up, and began to talk to him. “Poor little thing,” she says. “Away from his mamma, and nobody to play with, and in a terrible place where awful things happen to him. I wish we could take him back where he came from, so he could be happy once more.”
“Let’s do it,” I says to her. “I believe I can do it.”
“Would you, Dave?” she says.
And then it happened, like a slow movie. The whale was in the corner all the time, watching her in the middle of the pool. He didn’t seem to mind her much, but then he dived and started to go past her. She opened her legs for a scissors kick that would take her out of the way. He changed his mind and turned back, and his tail came up slow. She kicked slow. And she kicked right into this piece of net that was still hanging on his tail. She was flung up in the air, and whirled down under, and it made you sick to think what she would look like if she got slammed against the side.
Mort started to run almost before it happened. He grabbed a fire-ax. He smashed the underwater lights in one corner, and about ten of them went out. The whale made for the dark place, and he and the ax hit at the same time. Mort drove the spike into his head up to the wood, and he never even moved. I went overboard and pulled her clear, and Mort lifted her out.
“I didn’t mean it,” he says. “I didn’t mean any of it. If only you’re not killed!”
“I’m all right,” she says. “Did you kill him?”
“I had to.”
She pulled him down and kissed him, and then looked in the pool. We all looked. And then, brother, we saw death. The big blue shadow was there, perfectly still. Then it began to tip. One fluke went down. It began to sink, in a kind of a slow circle. And then, when it got below the lights, it turned from blue to gray, and settled, awfully small, on the bottom. It was like we had seen his soul pass out of him...
The sun was coming up when we got the kegs loose and watched the waves close over him.
“Some whale,” says Mort.
“Yeah,” I says, “some whale.”
She just put her head on Mort’s shoulder and began to cry.
(Redbook, April 1934)
Come-Back
This is how Kennelly came back; and if I don’t tell it the way he tells it, all I got to say is that he don’t tell it. He is always so busy explaining how dumb Hapgood was, that he never gets to the lion part; but the lion had a lot more to do with it than Hapgood had, so why talk about a heel that it would be better all around if you could just forget him? I will put in about the lion, and not say any more about Happy than I have to. Maybe you read about the lion in the papers, but they got it all mixed up, so it will not hurt any if I tell the straight of it, once for all; and then you will know why you haven’t got a Silver-throated Cowboy any more, but have Mowgli the Untamed; and if I’ve got to take one or the other, I’ll take Mowgli at that, because he is not all the time singing about love among the cows.
Kennelly hit the skids when Silver died. He was all right up until then. He had plenty of work in straight Westerns, singing his songs in between the shooting, and he had a bank-account, a ranch and a future. But then Happy figured they better bury the horse in a big way. Happy is Kennelly’s agent. He is the worst agent in Hollywood; and brother, to be the worst agent in Hollywood, you’ve got to be bad. I mean you’ve got to be so bad that no man in his sober senses could really believe it. So he bought a lot in a cemetery, got a permit from the Health Department, dressed twelve bums up as cowgirls, and had them throw roses in the grave, had Kennelly sing “Home on the Range,” and a bugler blow taps. The papers took plenty of it, and so did the news-reels; and by the end of the week Silver was the deadest horse this side of Tombstone, Arizona.
And then they woke up that the burial was Silver’s but the funeral was Kennelly’s. The kids had loved Silver, and they cried plenty over all that stuff that Happy thought up; but after it was over, they wouldn’t have any horse in his place, and they wouldn’t have Kennelly. When they saw how his great heart was broke over Silver, they couldn’t understand why it didn’t stay broke; and there didn’t seem to be any way to tell them that even if his heart was broke, he had to eat. They just wouldn’t have any more to do with him. If Silver had died quiet, and another white horse named Silver had trotted out in his place, they would never have known the difference, and Silver would have stayed young like Chester Gump does — and fact of the matter like any other white horse in Hollywood does.