Chapter 13

The next few days went by in a blur for Maggie.

She swore Jason to secrecy about Minacou’s speech (both of them were quickly coming to think of the dolphins by their real names now, instead of Emily and Toby).

“Look, we need to do this really rigorous. In marine biology this is going to be a sensation, and I expect it’s going to make even the popular news. But we can’t go off at half cock. Think about Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness monster and the Abominable Snowman and all,” she added, mentioning some famous scientific hoaxes and fiascos. “I want to be able to prove this to the worst skeptic, I mean the worst, and there’ll be a lot of them, before we start talking.”

He agreed reluctantly, but balked at keeping the news from Morris. “Maggie, he’s your backer, right? I mean, he’s putting up the bucks, even if it’s not a lot. And he’s putting up the dolphin, dolphins now, which is a lot. Really, you gotta tell him he’s backing a winner.”

“Jason, I need to make sure about my grant first,” she protested. “If this gets out prematurely—”

“Maggie, that’s not even paranoia,” he chided. “It’s just plain old ordinary noia. And you’re getting ‘noying with it. Come on, give it up.”

She laughed and conceded, albeit still somewhat reluctantly. But she needn’t have worried; when they brought Morris out for a demonstration he simply shrugged it off. “Neat, talking fishies,” he said dismissively. “But what’s new? You had them talking before, this is just a little more, huh?”

“Morris... ,” Jason began, looking helplessly at Maggie.

“Never mind, Jason,” she interrupted hastily. She’d given in to telling Morris, but driving the point home was more than she could take. “It’s a lot more, Morris, but you’re right, they were talking before. Now it’s more.”

“Good about the more,” the innkeeper said. “But when are we getting back to showing off the more? Can’t we do some shows with just this one?”

“Uh, Jason and I think we need to wait until Kitik’s back,” Maggie said. In fact it wasn’t their decision; Minacou, who was displaying the same feisty attitude with which she’d scolded Maggie about their choice of names, had flatly refused to perform until Kitik returned.

Early on in their talks Minacou had asked why others came only a certain times. Maggie explained about the concept of shows, which the dolphin seemed to understand generally, and then went on to how the shows generated revenue, which she didn’t understand at all. Maggie tried to explain about money, but the concept was completely alien to the animal until she equated it with food.

“Give food see Kitik, me?” Minacou asked. In fact Morris didn’t charge for the shows, figuring the exposure was worth far more for both the motel and the restaurant, but it was close enough; Maggie confirmed. “Why? I not give food see human play.”

For a moment Maggie had a ludicrous mental picture of men and women cavorting on the apron while an audience of dolphins filed through turnstiles to watch them, and giggled. But then she thought of circuses, athletic competitions, theatrical and musical performances and the like. “Humans will give food to see special things, things they can’t do themselves. I think maybe even a dolphin”—one of the earliest lessons had been what Minacou’s species was named— “might give food for that.”

“No,” the dolphin replied. “Other dolphin see me jump sometimes, I go high. But not give food. All share food.”

Maggie didn’t pursue the point, but when the issue of resuming the shows came up Minacou had balked. “Not right,” she’d told them. “Human hurt Kitik. No play for human until Kitik here.” It was a stance from which she’d refused to budge.

But that she could now take such a stance and express it in speech represented progress beyond Maggie’s wildest imaginings. She’d been working with Minacou for long hours, and the dolphin’s vocabulary had made huge strides. Her grammar was a sometime thing, as might be expected—American children spend twelve long years of schooling in which English is taught in every one, and still often don’t get it right—but the words and rough syntax were coming quick­ly. It helped a great deal that the dolphin’s memory was proving almost frighteningly good; once she’d grasped a term or a concept she rarely needed reminding.

Maggie was having to do most of the work herself; for several days Jason was largely absent. He was spending a large amount of time visiting Kitik at Flagler, where the dolphin was still recovering, and additional time at the local sheriff’s department where he was receiving a good deal of unwanted attention.

The deranged shooter had lain on the apron where he’d fallen for nearly half an hour until the paramedics arrived, and had survived for two more days in the hospital, but had then died without regaining consciousness. His death bothered Jason considerably. “Dammit, I killed him!” he expostulated to Maggie. “I didn’t want to kill him, just stop him. I’ve never killed anything, I don’t even step on ants if I can avoid it.”

She sympathized. So did the state police, who quickly wrote the death off to inadvertent and justifiable homicide. The local authorities were less lenient; in the tourist economy of the Keys any death hurt business, and this one had received fairly broad publicity due to the circumstances. For several days they questioned Jason hard about the amount of force he’d used, openly skeptical of his insistence that he’d thrown only a single punch.

Indeed, for a time it appeared that Jason might be arrested and jailed. But a number of witnesses that the sheriff’s office tracked down bore him out, as did an autopsy showing that the death was due to a fractured skull when the man’s head hit the cement. When a background check revealed that he’d been a religious fanatic with a history of numerous arrests and three convictions for violent outbursts, the sheriff released Jason from further questioning after a stiff lecture on the virtues of self-restraint. By that time Jason had become so disgusted with the whole process that his feelings of guilt had receded considerably.

But all this left Maggie with almost the entire burden of feeding the dolphin, monitoring her health and, most of all, teaching. And Minacou was proving to be a demanding student. Hour after hour she would lie on the surface alongside the apron, peppering the young woman with questions and absorbing anything and everything.

Their exchanges were often fascinating to Maggie. Early on the dolphin asked about human sexes. “Humans two, like me, Kitik?” she questioned. “Same?”

Two sexes. “Yes, two,” Maggie replied.

“Both like Kitik, you, Jason?” the animal persisted.

“No, Jason is male, like Kitik, but I’m female. Like you.”

“Not right,” Minacou told her—almost condescendingly, it sounded. “You name two sound—Mag-gie. Two sound male. Kit-tik. Female name three sound, Min-a-cou. You not know names?”

“Well... ,” Maggie replied, flustered. “Actually my name is Margaret. Three sounds, OK? Mar-ga-ret.”

“Why say Maggie?” came the dolphin’s almost instant response.

“It’s, well, it’s a nickname. A different name. We often do that, we humans, make shorter names for ourselves. Some names are only one sound. Ed. Sam. May. Those are names. And some names are more sounds—Abercrombie, Columbina, er, Persephone.” She was grasping at straws.

“Mar-ga-ret,” said the dolphin in a reflective tone Maggie had occasionally heard her use before. “Female name. Good. But you not know names right. I say Maggie, name you choose. Name Jason say.”

It seemed from the last that Minacou was thinking of Jason as her mate. Well, that was all right, she wasn’t answering to dolphins about her sex life quite yet, but it gave her an opening for something she’d been longing to ask.

“Minacou, Kitik is your mate, your male? The one that is most important to you?”

“Yes,” said Minacou briefly. But there was more. “Kitik with me when small,” she continued after a pause. “Both small. Kitik mother—” an unintelligible string of clicks and hums.

“Did she die?”

“What ‘die?’”

“She ... well, she stopped swimming. She was gone, not with him any more. Is that what happened?”

“Yes. We say— what word where you are, where you live?”

“Land?”

“‘Land,’” the dolphin repeated. “We say go land. Mean end, finish. Kitik mother finish. My mother take him, he go with us. Then she go land, leave Kitik, me alone. But together. Together now.”

Maggie wondered briefly how the two mother dolphins had died. But there was little time for speculation, Minacou was speaking again with her questions and the lessons went on...

It was an exhausting time. Without Jason on hand to help much she was carrying virtually the entire burden and the dolphin’s eagerness to learn gave her little time off. She also had her own reasons for expediting the lessons as much as possible; her savings were seriously depleted and she needed to have Minacou ready for a really eye-popping “show-and-tell” when she made her bid for a grant. For a time she considered asking Morris to give her a temporary room in the motel, but she cherished the privacy and comfort of the small home she’d made for herself too much to abandon it even short-term.

To give Maggie some more help Jason tried curtailing his visits to Kitik, but the dolphin was clearly unhappy when he wasn’t there. The impersonality of the Flagler environment, ­coupled with the restrictions of the very small tank in which he was being held—the veterinarians wanted his movements temporarily restricted to help him heal—made him very uneasy. All that could be done, it appeared, was to wait out the healing process with as much patience and endurance as possible; but for all of them it was a grueling process.