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Show 71 on his ivory leg, making a great clatter on the deck. "Exterminate the brute," he howled. Sadly I picked up another harpoon and cocked my arm. "Wait! Wait!" the whale cried. "What do you get when you cross the Mississippi with a rubber raft?" "No mercy!" Adam ordered, clattering his leg louder. I aimed for the limpid eye of the beast and let fly. The whale gave a great dying shriek and slowly began to tip. The genial mouth opened: "You get to the other side," it screamed. It rolled over dead. "Look what you've done," my dad said sadly. "One of God's creatures, it was. For shame." When I woke up the whale's cry was still ringing in my ears and it took me a minute to associate it with the wail of the lumberyard's noon whistle, which was a part of the waking world. On the far side the divers had shucked off their masks and flippers to eat lunch. Gathered on the river's edge in their black wetsuits, they looked like a congregation of crows. I climbed down out of the tree and sat on the wooden bench with my book and my sandwich. I turned to the chapter on the Whiteness of the Whale and tried to get in tune with Melville's jocular horror as a way of shaking myself loose from that depressing dream. But it was only literature, and it didn't move me. I heard a tennis-shoe squeak on the wooden deck. Before |