When she came out, he remarked how beautiful she looked. “Like a sleek arctic seal.”
“Oh stop it.”
“Don’t dry off, please. Don’t ever dry off.”
“Get your hand away from there.” Nina slapped him sharply. “Put your clothes on. Chelsea’s waiting at the office.”
Joe Winder said, “I’m phoning in sick.”
“No, you’re not. You can’t.” She wrapped the towel around her hair and left the rest bare. “He wasn’t calling about the dead person on the bridge, he was calling about the whale.”
“Orky?”
Nina opened the bathroom door to let out the steamy humidity. Joe Winder impulsively clutched her around the waist. He pressed his cheek against her damp thigh, and began to hum the tune of “Poor Pitiful Me.” Nina pried him loose and said, “I’m glad you don’t get beat up every day.”
Something was out of alignment in Winder’s brain. He blinked three or four times, slowly, but even as the steam cleared it didn’t go away. Double vision! The bastards had pounded him that badly. Nina’s bare bottom appeared to him as four gleaming porcelain orbs.
Distractedly, he said, “Go on. Something about the whale?”
“Yes,” said Nina. She stood before the mirror, checking her armpits for stubble. “Chelsea said the whale is dead.”
“Hmmm,” said Joe Winder. Orky the Killer Whale.
“And?” he said.
“And, I don’t know.” Nina stepped into her panties. “He said for you to come right away. He said it was an emergency.”
“First let’s go to bed.” Winder came up behind her. In the mirror he saw two pairs of hands cupping two pairs of nipples. He saw two faces that looked just like his—lumpy, lacerated, empurpled—nuzzling the tan silky slopes of two feminine necks.
“All right, Joe,” Nina said, turning around. “But I’ve got to be honest: I’m very disappointed in you—”
“It wasn’t what you think.”
“—and I’m only doing this because you’re in pain.” Mechanically Nina took his hand and led him toward the bed. She kicked off her underwear and unwrapped the towel from her hair. Winder was grinning like an idiot.
“I’m warning you,” Nina said, “this isn’t an act of passion, it’s an act of pity.”
“I’ll take it,” said Joe Winder. “But, please, no more talking for a while.”
“All right,” she said. “No more talking.”
Orky the Killer Whale had come to the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills under clouded circumstances. His true name (or the name bestowed by his human captors off the coast of British Columbia) was Samson. Delivered in a drugged stupor to a north California marine park, he was measured at twenty-nine feet and seven inches, a robust male example of the species orca. Samson was larger than the other tame killer whales in the tank, and proved considerably more recalcitrant and unpredictable. In his first six months of captivity he mauled two trained porpoises and chomped the tail off a popular sea lion named Mr. Mugsy. Trainers worked overtime trying to teach their new star the most rudimentary of whale tricks—leaping through a plastic hoop, or snatching a dead mackerel from the fingers of a pretty model—with minimal success. One day he would perform like a champ, the next he would sink to the bottom of the tank and fart belligerently, launching balloon-sized bubbles of fishy gas to the surface. The audience seldom found this entertaining. Eventually most of the seasoned whale trainers refused to enter the water with Samson. Those who tried to ride his immense black dorsal were either whiplashed or pretzeled or corkscrewed into semi consciousness.
Quite by accident, it was discovered that Samson was enraged by the color green. This became evident on the day that the human trainers switched to vivid Kelly-green tank suits without telling the other performing mammals. Samson was supposed to open the first show by fetching an inflatable topless mermaid and gaily delivering it to a young man on a ladder, in exchange for a fistful of smelts. On this particular morning, Samson retrieved the toy, carried it across the water on his snout, flipped it into the bleachers, snatched the green-clad trainer off the ladder, flipped him into the bleachers, then dived to the bottom of the tank and began to pass gas relentlessly. Each time somebody tried to lure him up, Samson shot from the depths with his mouth open, the great black-and-white jaws clacking like a truck door. The crowd loved it. They thought it was part of the act.