Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal by Keith Thomson Read Free Book Online Page A

with Bluepeace. He said he’d first heard about
the organization at the yacht club up in Connecticut where him
and his kids go sailing, and one thing lead to another. Turns out,
outside of court, crazy old H.C. Mutherford’s actually a pretty
nice, normal family man, like I once was. Same story with most
of the other lawyers who’d come down to Guava for the trial.
This made me wonder, why the heck would all these topflight
guys take chunks out of their lives to volunteer for a fringe
marine life preservation organization and come after little old
me? So I asked Mutherford that too.

His face turned as dark as if a thunder cloud had suddenly

come overhead. “Because of your first two whales,” he muttered.
Then he zipped up abruptly and turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. “What two whales?”

“The two kills in California. What else could you have
possibly thought I meant?”

I’ve been living in Oakland for years. But I had no idea
what he meant, and told him so.

“Mr. Openshaw, it’s fortunate for you that you’re not
under oath now.” he said, flying off.

I stood out on the plank a bit longer trying to decide
whether Mutherford was in fact nuts, or getting to the bottom of
this two-whales business should be on my “To Do If Acquitted”
list.

P.S. Here’s Flarq’s scrimshaw of me on the witness stand. They
say a scrimshaw takes off twenty pounds—if you’re the captain. I
tried to get clean-shaved for court but all I had was a steak knife.
Believe it or not it made a huge improvement.

Friday, 9 July 2004 5:15 PM
My Testimony, Part II
    “My Uncle Walt left me his boathouse on the outskirts of
Mendocino, an old whaling village up in Northern California,” I
told the jury. “The place was no more than a shack on stilts and
that it managed not to collapse into the bay must’ve mystified
anybody with knowledge of the law of gravity.
“After Walt went to stay with Davy Jones, squatters moved
into the place. As you may know, squatters generally aren’t big
on home improvements. One of them nearly burned it down
after knocking over a bong. If he’d succeeded, he would’ve done
me a favor. By the time I got possession of the place, my only
chance of unloading it was finding termites willing to pay cash.
So I just left it.

“Then, a year after we got married, my wife saw it. She
said that ever since she was a little girl she’d dreamed of having
her own cozy little place on the sea—”

Here I paused my testimony as several members of the jury
were suddenly looking like they could use a barf bucket.
So I mentioned, “Her family had money.”
The jurors nodded clear understanding, and they showed
nothing but approval when I went on to detail how “over the
next two years I did the three-hours-and-change drive up from
Oakland every weekend to get the place ship-shape.” [I thought
it best to keep to myself that I’d’ve done this even if Lucy’s folks
had been the poorest panhandlers this side of Pluto.]
“By the time it was done, Lucy and me had had us a baby

boy,” I continued. “We went up to Mendocino on the blustery
sort of December night Lucy judged that cozy cottages by the
sea’d been invented for. The 27th December it was, 2003. When
we were all nestled up together by the wood-burning hearth for
the buttered rum and the cookies she’d baked up, it was enough
for me to forget that it’d taken sixteen trips to Fireplace City and
a maxed-out AmEx to restore the thing. In fact it was enough to
make me forget I’d ever had any problems. Except one…
“Baby Augie was fussing. Hardly unusual that time of the
evening though. And like his dad, the rhythmic patter of the
waves usually put him to sleep. So Lucy lay him, in his little
basket, on the sill of the big bay window I’d put in (there’d
previously been just rotting clapboard).
“It was right then that the biggest sperm whale I ever
saw reared out of the water, smashed