The whale lawyer Chapter 11

Things get a little more interesting here. I did a strange transition, going back a few chapters to transition out of this one. Anyway, no one cares what I think.
Very soon you'll be reading the ending. You may or may not like it. I'm not sure if I like it, but it's a short story and it has to end. I hate books that don't end and they don't always end the way we want (Spoiler alert: in life everyone dies in the end).
I have it on good authority that in the original Harry Potter concept Voldermort was awarded the nobel prize for defeating death and Potter was suspended for any number of good reasons and ultimately ended up serving a lengthy prison sentence but was pardoned after a kind letter to the judge from Mr. V which ultimately led to a reconciliation between the two although Potter continued to have a troubled life for having spent so much time fighting the advancement in science. In fact, as I understand it, there was no witchcraft in the original, it was merely the story of a wayward youth who crossed a brilliant scientist and the witchcraft was added to make the otherwise absurd concept of trying to defeat the one who was defeating death plausible. But I just made that last paragraph up.

Chapter 11

Hyatt almost tripped trying to get to the pool with his flip flops.  No one else was there this late at night. He couldn’t sleep, so he thought, ‘I might as well try to see what life of a captured whale is like.’

He hit the water, it was cold.  He wanted to jump back out and get back into the hot shower, but he had come this far.  It was what the doctor had said he had to do if he wanted to get the motion back in his leg, but he hadn’t been able to do it, even though he had been fairly good at swimming in high school.  That was so far in the past it seemed like someone else’s life.

Cold, he thought as he swam, but the whale lived in cold water.

The first five laps, he thought.  If I can make it through the first five laps, the cold will stop.  He hit the end of the pool and turned back.

“Why isn’t more money coming into my account?” He had asked. Brian  He had felt like he would be fine if he could just stay in for 8 months.  Maybe just 5 or 6.  But the money from the fund raising had been less in the second month and almost nothing by the third.

“People get interested in something and then forget about it.  The ones who are most likely to give give right away.  There aren’t that many people, I was a little surprised at what we started with.”

“Can’t you do something?”

“I thought from what Beth said you’d work cheap.”

“Do you have any idea what it means to take on a case like this?  I’m trying to prove that a fish has rights.  That has never been done.”

“The fishing act protects not only whales and dolphins, but seals.”

“Protects them?  It only makes fishermen label their catches and use easy techniques for separating them.  It doesn’t give them rights.  It won’t make an aquarium let them go.  That’s what you want me to do.  You want me to convince a judge to give a killer whale rights.”

“Just the right to be free, and they are not killer whales.  There is no known report of a killer whale killing a person except in captivity.”

“Like this whale you want me to set free.”

Ouch!  He hadn’t been paying attention, remembering what happened and he had jammed his finger.  But the cold was gone now.  Back and forth, back and forth.  Now it was fighting against the pain, but it was more the pain of exhaustion.  He had not done 500 yards and he was exhausted he thought disgusted with himself.  The pain in his leg was not bothering him. as much . He had run out of painkillers and was afraid to ask for more, maybe next week...

What the…?”  He felt a hand grab his as he reached the side.

“Truly?  What are you doing here?”

“I come here when I can’t sleep.  Apparently you do too?”  She was wearing a very tight one piece that hid less than when she had stripped naked at night.  “Well, I better start swimming.  You don’t mind?”

“No, not at all,” Hyatt said stupidly.  Now he couldn’t stop and wasn’t sure he wanted to.  Maybe this was what the whale needed, not freedom but a body to share the pool  Truly was passing him effortlessly every few laps, but she had no idea how long he had been here and he was determined to make it look like he was finishing and not just starting a workout.  And if he was forced to stay in, maybe he’d get some exercise.  And he could  try to think like the whale.

“This whale has been specially taught how to speak, by the dead trainer,” Beth had told him when trying to get him to take the case.

“In other whales,” Brian had picked up, “they couldn’t guarantee that the speech wasn’t just mimicry.  But we know whales communicate and pass information down from one generation to the next.  So Don Wordsmith, the trainer who was killed, decided to use his experience with teaching languages to the mentally impaired to teach a whale how to talk.  He actually started working with whales as a way to bring out his human patients.   Now he had come full circle, and he was going to teach a whale to talk.