The night I got in, Stephanie showed up at my apartment with a bottle of Appleton’s rum. We made piña coladas and love. There was affirmation in that. In the morning, 7:00 A.M., Harry Macey was at the door in a warm-up suit. He whistled at the stitching over my eye, compared me unfavorably wth Frankenstein’s monster, offered me a dried lemon peel, and sat down at the kitchen table. “All right,” he barked, “let’s have it — all the details. Currents, sightings, the Russian take — everything.” I reconstructed the trip for him over Red Zinger and granola, while he nodded and spooned, spooned and nodded, filing mental notes. But before I’d even got halfway he cut me off, jumped up from the table, and told me there was someone I just had to meet, right away, no arguments, a person I could really relate to.
I looked up from my granola, head throbbing. He was standing over me, shot through with energy, tugging at his ear, blowing the steam from his teacup, all but dancing. “I know you’re going to love him,” he said. “The man knows whales inside and out.”
Eyolf Holluson lived in a two-room apartment on East Twenty-sixth Street. He was eighty-six years old. We mounted the steps two at a time — alt five nights — and stood outside the door while Harry counted his heartbeats. “Forty-four a minute,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Nothing when you consider the lungfish, but not bad for a man of thirty-nine.” In the process, my own heart seemed to have migrated to my head, where it was pounding like a letterpress over my left eye.
A voice, high and nasal, shaken with vibrato, echoed from behind the door. “Harry?”
Harry answered in the affirmative, the voice indicated that the door was open, and we stepped into a darkened room lit only by flashing Christmas bulbs and smelling of corned beef and peppermint. On the far side of the room, lost in the folds of a massive, dun-colored armchair draped with layers of doily and antimacassar, sat Eyolf. Before him was a TV tray, and beyond that a color TV, pictures flashing, sound turned off.
“Eyolf,” Harry said, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine — he’s come to talk about whales.”
The old man turned and squinted up at me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles, then turned back to the tray. “Oh yah,’ he said. ”Yust finishing up my breakfast.” He was eating corned beef, plum tomatoes from the can, dinner mints.
Harry prompted him. “Eyolf fished whales for fifty-seven years — first with the Norwegian fleet, and then, when they packed it in, with the Portuguese off the Canary Islands.”
“The old way,” Eyolf said, his mouth a stew of mint and tomato. “Oars and harpoons.”
We crossed the room and settled into a spongy loveseat that smelled of cat urine. Harry produced a pocket-sized tape recorder, flicked it on, and placed it on the TV tray beside the old man’s plate. Then he sank back into the loveseat, crossed his legs at the knee, and said, “Tell us about it, Eyolf. ”
The old man was wearing a plaid bathrobe and slippers. His frame was big, flesh wasted, his skin the color and texture of beef jerky. He talked for two hours, the strange nasal voice creaking like oars in their locks, rising and falling like the tide. He told us of a sperm whale that had overturned a chase boat in the Sea of Japan, of shipmates towed out of sight and lost in the Antarctic, of a big Swede who lost his leg in a fight with flensing knives. With a crack of his knees he rose up out of the chair and took a harpoon down from the wall, cocked his arm, and told us how he’d stuck a thousand whales, hot blood spurting in his face over the icy spume, how it tasted and how his heart rushed with the chase. “You stick him,” he said, “and it’s like sticking a woman. Better.”
There was a copy of the Norsk Hvalfangst-Tildende on the table. Behind me, mounted on hooks, was a scrimshaw pipe, and beside it a huge blackened sheet of leather, stiff with age. I ran my finger along its abrasive edge, wondering what it was — a bit of fluke, tongue? — and yet somehow, in a dim grope of intuition, knowing.
Eyolf was spinning a yarn about a sperm whale that had surfaced beneath him with an eighteen-foot squid clenched in its jaws when he turned to me. “I think maybe you are wondering what is this thing like a bullfighter’s cape hanging from Eyolf s wall?” I nodded. “A present from the captain of the Freya, nearly forty years back, it was. In token of my take of finback and bowhead over a period of two, three hectic weeks. Hectic, oh yah. Blood up to my knees — hot first, then cold. There was blood in my shoes at night. ”
“The leather, Eyolf,” Harry said. “Tell Roger about it.”
“Oh yah,” he said, looking at me now as if I were made of plastic. “This here is off of the biggest creater on God’s earth. The sulphur-bottom, what you call the blue. I keep it here for vigor and long life.”
The old man gingerly lifted it from the wall and handed it to me. It was the size of a shower curtain, rigid as tree bark. Eyolf was smiling and nodding. “Solid, no?” He stood there, looking down at me, trembling a bit with one of his multiple infirmities.
“So what is it?” I said, beginning to lose patience.
“You don’t know?” He was picking his ear. “This here is his foreskin.”
Out on the street Harry said he had a proposition for me. A colleague of his was manning a whale watch off the Peninsula Valdés on the Patagonian coast. He was studying the right whale on its breeding grounds and needed some high-quality photographs to accompany the text of a book he was planning. Would I take the assignment for a flat fee?
My head throbbed at the thought of it. “Will you come along with me?”
Harry looked surprised. “Me?” Then he laughed. “Hell no, are you kidding? I’ve got classes to teach, I’m sitting on a committee to fund estuarine research, I’m committed for six lectures on the West Coast.”
“I just thought—”
“Look, Roger — whales are fascinating and they’re in a lot of trouble. I’m hoping to do a monograph on the reproductive system of the rorquals, in fact, but I’m no field man. Actually, pelagic mammals are almost as foreign to my specialty area as elephants.”
I was puzzled. “Your specialty area?”
“I study holothurians. My dissertation was on the sea cucumber.” He looked a little abashed. “But I think big.”
The Patagonian coast of Argentina is a desolate, godforsaken place, swept by perpetual winds, parched for want of rain, home to such strange and hardy creatures as the rhea, crested tinamou, and Patagonian fox. Darwin anchored the Beagle here in 1832, rowed ashore and described a dozen new species. Wildlife abounded. The rocks were crowded with birds — kelp and dolphin gulls, cormorants in the thousands, the southern lapwing, red-backed hawk, tawny-throated dotterel. Penguins and sea lions lolled among the massed black boulders and bobbed in the green swells, fish swarmed offshore, and copepods — ten billion for each star in the sky — thickened the Falkland current until it took on the consistency of porridge. Whales gathered for the feast. Rights, finbacks, minkes — Darwin watched them spouting and lobtailing, sounding and surfacing, courting, mating, calving.