Free Friday's Harbor by Diane Hammond Page B

When Friday reached him again, Gabriel blew a high tweet on a whistle and tossed a few fish into the whale’s open mouth.
    Ivy regarded Sam. “Do you think you’ll help out here? Only occasionally, I hope. After all, you’re a carefree retiree now.”
    Sam cut his old eyes at her shrewdly. “I’m an old man with diabetes and free time, is what I am.”
    “You’re better now, aren’t you?”
    “Mama makes sure I behave myself. I’ll tell you what, though. It sure would be good to have a doughnut from time to time,” he said wistfully and then brightened. “We send a twenty-five-dollar Dunkin’ Donuts gift card down to shug every month.”
    “I’m sorry I didn’t meet her before she left,” said Ivy. “To tell you the truth, the only thing I really know about elephants firsthand is that at a certain point in time, their feet made dandy wastebaskets. My uncle had one in his study.”
    Sam blanched.
    “Of course, they didn’t know any better. In fact, I think he shot that elephant on a safari way back around 1912 or so. But here’s justice for you—he lost his own foot in World War I. No bad deeds go unpunished or whatever the hell that saying is.”
    “No good deed,” said Gabriel, who’d finished working with Friday and come around the pool to their side.
    “I like mine better,” said Ivy, and then to Sam, “Anyway, this whale’s going to need someone just as much as Hannah did, if he’s going to be alone here for the rest of his life.”
    Neva had joined them, too, and now said, “You don’t know that.”
    “Tell that to him,” Ivy said, inclining her head toward Gabriel. “He seems to think so.” He’d stressed that to both Truman and Ivy at their first meeting in Friday Harbor, and had been reiterating it periodically ever since.
    The others looked at Gabriel expectantly. Gabriel just shrugged. “If no other facility wanted to take him on because of possible disease transmission, they certainly won’t send one of their whales here as a companion.”
    “What about a rehab animal?”
    “How many rehabbed, wild killer whales can you name that are in captivity?”
    Ivy looked at Neva, Neva looked at Ivy, and Sam looked from one to the other.
    “None, is how many,” said Gabriel.
    “Why is that?” Neva asked.
    Gabriel shrugged. “Just doesn’t happen. Even if they’re injured they can probably still hunt until they either recover or die. They only come up on beaches if they’re going to drown, and even so no one’s going to see it. Plus the cost of bringing in an injured adult whale is astronomical. No one’s going to do it.”
    “Well,” said Ivy. “So much for that discussion.” She hauled from her tote a long, circular knitting needle and a length of completed afghan in a Fair Isle pattern. “Do you think he’s okay up here?” she asked Gabriel, gesturing to Julio Iglesias, who was still picking his way prissily around the perimeter of the pool, keeping well back from the four-inch-deep wet walk.
    “As long as he doesn’t fall in. We might want to find a flotation vest for him, though, just in case.”
    “Oh, he has a very healthy respect for the water,” Ivy said. “He fell off a dock once and scared the living shit out of both of us. I was thinking more along the lines of whether our little boy might eat him.”
    “Is he a fish?” Gabriel asked.
    “No.”
    “Does he look or sound like a fish?”
    “No.”
    “Then there’s no reason to think Friday would eat him. Play with him, yes; eat him, no.”
    “Play with him how, exactly?” Ivy said.
    “Don’t know. It might be fun to find out, though.” Gabriel gave her a wicked smile. Ivy whacked him on the arm with her knitting needle.
    T RUMAN CAME BACK to the pool top in the afternoon, telling himself he was legitimately responsible for checking on things, but the fact was, if he could have justified it he’d have spent the whole workday watching the goings-on at the killer whale pool instead of revising