Read Online Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore - Free Book Online

thought.
    "We're fine." Amy grinned and brandished her carousel of slides like a talisman of power.
    "I'm thinking about getting a job at Starbucks," Nate said.
    "Hey, Cliff, what are you guys working on?" Amy asked, having somehow moved close enough into Cliff Hyland's personal space to have to look up at him with big, girly-blue eyes and the aspect of a fascinated child.
    Nate cringed. It was… well, it was just not done. You didn't ask, not outright like that.
    "Just some stuff for the navy," Cliff said, obviously wanting to back away from Amy, but knowing that if he did, somehow he'd lose face.
    Nate watched while Amy grated his friend's middle-aged irrelevance against his male ego merely by stepping a foot closer. There, too, was a reaction from Tarwater, as the younger man seemed to be irritated by the fact that Amy was paying attention to Cliff. Or maybe he was just irritated with Amy because she was irritating. Sometimes Nate had to remind himself not to think like a biologist.
    "You know, Cliff," Amy said, "I was looking at a map the other day – and I want you to brace yourself, because this may come as a shock – but there's no coastline in Iowa. I mean, doesn't that get in the way of studying marine mammals?"
    "Sure, now you bring that up," Cliff said. "Where were you ten years ago when I accepted the position?"
    "Middle school," Amy said. "What's in the big case on your boat? Sonar array? You guys doing another LFA study?"
    Tarwater coughed.
    "Amy," Nate interrupted, "we'd better get set up."
    "Right," Amy said. "Nice seeing you guys."
    She moved on. Nate grinned, just for a second. "Sorry, you know how it is?"
    "Yeah." Cliff Hyland smiled. "We've got two grad students working with us this season."
    "But we left our grommets at home, to analyze data," Tarwater added.
    Nate and Cliff looked at each other like two old broken-toothed lions long driven from the pride – tired, but secure in the knowledge that if they teamed up, they could eat the younger male alive. Cliff shrugged, almost imperceptibly, that small gesture communicating, Sorry, Nate, I know he's an asshole, but what am I going to do? It's funding.
    "I'd better go in," Nate said, patting the notes in his shirt pocket. He passed a couple more acquaintances, saying hello as he went by, then inside the door ran right into a minor nightmare: Amy talking to his ex-wife, Libby, and her partner, Margaret.
    It had been like this: They'd met ten years ago, summer in Alaska, a remote lodge on Baranof Island on the Chatham Strait, where scientists were given access to a couple of rigid-hulled Zodiacs and all the canned beans, smoked salmon, and Russian vodka they could consume. Nate had come to observe the feeding behavior of his beloved humpbacks and record social sounds that might help him to interpret the song they sang when in Hawaii. Libby was doing biopsies on the population of resident (fish-eating) killer whales to prove that all the different pods were indeed part of one clan related by blood. He was two years divorced from his second wife. Libby, at thirty, was two months from finishing her doctoral dissertation in cetacean biology. Consequently, since high school she hadn't had time for anything but research – seasonal affairs with boat skippers, senior researchers, grad students, fishermen, and the occasional photographer or documentary filmmaker. She wasn't particularly promiscuous, but there was a sea of men you were set adrift in if you were going to study whales, and if you didn't want to spend your life alone, you pulled into a convenient, if scruffy, port from time to time. The transience of the work drove a lot of women out of the field. On the other hand, Nate tried to solve the male side of the equation by marrying other whale researchers, reasoning that only someone who was equally obsessed, distracted, and single-minded would be able to tolerate those qualities in a mate. That sort of reasoning, of course, was testament to the victory