Uncaged (17 page)

Cade shook his head, unable to repress an eye roll. “Bigger than this?”

“Yeah—a lot bigger. Hollywood big,” said Twist. “Now, everybody,
out! Everybody except Cade. Go. Go. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Shay was lucky to catch the tail end of dinner, which she ate feeling like the center of attention at a table full of kids who wanted to talk about climbing, and about Twist’s art and the immigrant campaign. Later, back in the room, Emily told her about finding two rare pots in Echo Park, and Shay told Emily about the posters.

“Things are moving for us,” Emily said, excitement in her voice. “We’re gonna do good, Shay.”

Two days at the Twist Hotel, and life had changed in a hurry.

Then it all slowed down.

Shay helped get the leaflets, posters, and silk screens out, and for the next week monitored her computer through a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi. Nothing happened. She didn’t bother to go back to HARC—Singular was hanging around there, and if Odin was checking their Facebook page, he’d been warned. She watched a couple other animal rights groups but saw nothing, and stopped expecting she might. Maybe he’d already left Hollywood … and she’d be buying a bus ticket to somewhere else. She’d have to wait for Odin to contact her.

Eventually, she relaxed a little. Enough that she never noticed the changing rotation of athletic men ambling along, always just a half block and a few people behind her.

She worked four hours a day for Twist in the belfry. Twist, she learned, did three basic kinds of art. One was an intricate realism that he called, half jokingly, reportage, with a French turn to the name:
RAY-POR-
TAHJ
. That was done on canvas with oils, and he might work on each piece for a month or more. He also did cityscapes in a similar style, without the politics. Those, she learned, sold like hotcakes. The reportage also sold well, but a lot of it went for modest prices to museums—Twist wanted to be in the museums, he admitted, so he did what he had to to make a deal.

His other art was purely political, derived from Mexican frescoes and wall art from the 1930s and ’40s. These were huge and cartoonlike, often thirty feet long and ten feet high, and went out to interested schools and political organizations for free. That’s where he needed help from Shay.

Twist began to teach her about mixing color. “I need so much paint that I can use the help. I’ll make a sample of what I need, and then you have to match it exactly, in whatever quantity I need. I mean
exactly
! When I get a cartoon done, I need you to transfer it. Cade and Lou can help, but you’ll be my main man, if you can keep up.”

On her seventh day at the hotel, she made it down to breakfast, spoke briefly to Twist, who’d cut in line behind her, about the day’s schedule, then carried her tray to her usual group, Emily and two other girls she’d started eating with.

They talked about this and that, including an analysis of what
cute
meant when applied to men, and then a couple of guys went by with trays and Shay heard one of them say, “… whales on the beach. I guess there are a whole bunch of them. They’re gonna die.”

Shay’s forehead wrinkled.
Whales?
She turned in her chair to where the two guys were about to sit down and called, “Excuse me. Did you say something about whales?”

The guy who’d been talking about them nodded and said, “Yeah, there’s been a beaching, up in Ventura. It’s a real circus.”

“Where’s Ventura? Is it far?”

The two guys looked at each other, and one said, “What? An hour or so?”

Emily broke in: “I saw a story about that on the lobby TV. I think they said twenty-seven of them. Why?”

Shay forgot about breakfast and reached out and gripped Emily’s wrist. “We gotta go. I’ll pay you.”

“What’s the big deal?” Emily asked.

“My brother will be there,” Shay said, still holding the other girl’s wrist. “He’s the reason I’m in L.A. I can’t explain right now, but if he’s within two hundred miles, he’ll be there.”

Emily stood up. “I could use some beach time.”

“I gotta tell Twist,” Shay said. “I’m supposed to be working this morning.”

Shay took the glacially slow freight elevator up to Twist’s loft. In the week she’d been at the hotel, she’d let slip bits and pieces about her pursuit of Odin. She hadn’t told anyone about the raid at the lab, but had implied that her brother was socially awkward and had left his foster home—run away—because of personality conflicts. She’d worried that he wouldn’t make it on his own in a city as rough as Los Angeles, and so had come to find him.

In the studio, she found Twist talking with Cade and Cruz. Twist caught her intensity: “What happened?”

“I can’t work this morning,” Shay blurted. “I’ll give you four hours free tomorrow. I gotta go to Ventura.”

“There’s nothing
in
Ventura,” Twist said. “Believe me, I’ve been there.”

“There are twenty-seven whales on the beach,” she said. “My brother will be there, if there’s any way he can.”

Twist said, “I really need—”

“Whales, dude,” Cade said.

“I’ll need six free hours,” Twist said, “time and a half, since I’ll have to do your four hours this morning.”

“I’m gone,” Shay said, and started toward the door, and Cruz said, “Me too,” and Cade said, “Save the whales? Hey, wait up.”

Emily knew the beach and pushed the truck to a record sixty-five miles an hour, and with almost no traffic going out of town and a shortcut over to the beach below Oxnard, she got them there just after nine o’clock.

None of them were prepared for the horror that lay strewn for a quarter mile across the sand.

Or the noise.

Twenty-two clicking and blowhole-gasping sperm whales were pitched across the beach like a freeway pileup. Ranging in length from fourteen to forty feet, they’d come ashore in the middle of the night, at high tide, for reasons none of them could speak. Another five were already dead.

Someone had gone through the motion of stringing yellow police tape between two sheriff’s trucks, which were parked like
parentheses around the stranded animals, but there was no containing the growing chaos on an easily accessed public shore.

Emily wedged the Scout into a too-small parking space. For a few seconds, parked there above the dunes on the Pacific Coast Highway, the brownish-black humps glistening in the morning light almost looked lovely, like a natural wonder that four teens might have stopped to see.

The spooky sounds of distress carried up on the breeze betrayed the illusion.

“They can be saved, can’t they?” Cruz asked.

“Not without a tsunami-sized tide to float their boats,” said Cade, scrolling through web pages on his phone. “The Zoological Society of London says your average beached whale starts having kidney failure within an hour, so you might as well just shoot it and get it over with.”

“They do not say to
shoot it!
” Emily protested.

Cade showed them the article. “For you more sensitive types, the word they use is
euthanize
.”

“A gray whale got pushed back to sea at Devil’s Elbow State Park in Oregon and lived,” said Shay. “My brother was there, and told me about it.”

Shay, Emily, Cade, and Cruz ran for the beach, absorbed in the chaotic streams of volunteers and spectators. It was half carnival, half emergency rescue. Functional outdoor clothes and hats and gum boots mixed with beer coolers, beach umbrellas, kids, and dogs.

Media crews jockeyed for the best live shots, though there seemed to be enough whales for everyone to claim an “exclusive.” Overhead, news choppers buzzed the shore for aerial footage,
sometimes dipping so low the propellers kicked up gusts and swirls of sand. “Help! Over here!” a guy in a Greenpeace vest shouted.

Emily broke Shay’s concentration as she scanned the beach for Odin and said, with a tug, “C’mon!”

They crossed the beach to the nearest whale, a mother who was nearly dead from dehydration, and beside her, a young daughter.

“What do we do?” Emily asked.

“Keep them wet—hope the tide will carry them back out,” the Greenpeace guy said, and handed each of them a bucket.

Emily and Cade joined the crew helping an orphaned male, while Shay and Cruz teamed up to help the mother and baby. For some reason, the mother kept raising her tail fluke and slamming it against the ground with such force that Shay and Cruz felt their legs wobble with the impact.

“Why does she keep doing that?” Cruz asked. “She’s wasting energy.”

“I don’t know,” Shay said.

They’d been throwing buckets of seawater on her and her eighteen-foot baby girl for an hour when Shay picked out a pattern.

“I don’t know what it means,” she told Cruz, “but listen. The next time the baby makes two long clicks, and then three short noises that sound more like pings, the mom’s gonna slam her tail.”

The baby lay with her flat forehead lodged against the mother’s right flank so that together they formed a T. The angle was such that the mother, unable to twist around in the sand—unable to twist around for the first time in her life—could not see her dying child.

Ninety seconds later, the baby clicked and pinged, and the mother slammed her tail.

“You’re right,” Cruz said. “They’re talking.”

Shay decided it meant:
Hang on
.

Twice, Shay left her post to chase down phantoms.

“Odin! Stop!” she shouted at the tall, slim backside of someone in khaki shorts and sandals. She got close enough to tag a shoulder. The brown-haired stranger turned around with eyes that weren’t blue like their mother’s and a chin that wasn’t dimpled like their father’s and said, “Excuse me?”

The stranger was a middle-aged woman.

Suddenly Odin was everywhere … and nowhere.

Everyone working to save the whales—marine biologists, local environmentalists, animal lovers, even a few homeless campers—understood that defeat was inescapable, and the desire to comfort the doomed creatures was palpable.

Emily and Cade were working three whales over from Shay and Cruz, draping wet sheets on the orphaned male. At one point, Emily collapsed on the sand with frustration and began weeping. Cade shouted at her, got her on her feet, and they began dousing the baby again. One of the lead Greenpeace volunteers felt the baby stood a chance, that he might be light enough and near enough to the water to be pushed out with the tide.

And meanwhile, the carnival rolled on.

Single-engine planes towed advertising signs along the beach, including one for a new sports drink. Two minor celebrity chicks from a reality TV show arrived in their bikinis to help pitch in … more or less.

The governor, who had a mansion in L.A., showed up in a wet suit.

By noon, postmortems on half a dozen whales were under way. Scientists passed around boxes of latex gloves and a few wore fishing waders against the blood and gore. More yellow tape was staked around the open-air dissections, but there was nothing to stop dozens of spectators with cameras from standing on the edges and documenting every slice. Two scientists cut into one of the dead whales and carved out her heart. The video was on YouTube within the hour.