SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  I’ve broken some of the cardinal rules of island life. I probably should have died at sea, although that’s not as popular as it once was. Or I shouldn’t have come back from the mainland when I was finished wasting the state’s money and my professors’ time at Norumbega University. I should have fixed up my dad’s lobster boat, the Beothuk, into a swordfishing charter boat instead of watching it rot through most of my twenties. If I were to remain here on Bismuth, unmarried and insufficiently employed, the least I could have done is be found frozen to death in my house after a winter of drinking Sterno. I left Bismuth for college in America because I just couldn’t take it any longer on my island. And because it was mostly free. We have a high school on the island; all anyone has to do is get a B average, and a scholarship for the state university awaits. This is because we are both clinically disadvantaged and a cultural institution— and because there are so few of us that actually make it to college, the subsidy is chump change for the state.

  The first complete rotation of my now cyclic discontent occurred when I came back to Bismuth because I just couldn’t take it any longer in America. The continent was as big and stupid as my aunt’s hairdo and my other uncle’s gut. I was accustomed to people who were experts at being clannish and small-minded; I thought my classmates’ callow attempts at bigotry and the school’s attempt at bureaucratic insularity were laughably inept. I graduated in the late 1980s and returned that summer. The bequeathers of my scholarships should have been delighted, since their plan all along had been to enlighten us with culture and higher education. It’s odd though; that’s not how islanders see it. Getting an off-island education isn’t necessarily a stigma—as long as one doesn’t flaunt it—but returning to the island is somehow an automatic tragedy, as if the rest of your island life were a sequel that should never have been filmed.

  Instead, it was my parents who fled the island, once I returned and settled back into the house, which they had tried to call “their” house for a while, but which I remembered as “ours.” I’m third generation of Whippey here, which isn’t that big a historic deal the way it might be elsewhere. It does mean that the house was paid for long ago and the mock-mortgage I’m supposed to be sending my father in Florida every month is just his way of opposing what he sees as my desuetude, though that is not the way he would phrase it. I oppose his opposition, naturally, by not paying him very often. I presume this relationship will continue until one of us dies, at which point we will have to re-negotiate.

  I’m not the only member of my species here. Fishing is almost impossibly expensive as a small business on Bismuth and everywhere else in the Northeast. It was getting to be that one could count on fishing for providing severed fingers, bankruptcy, and divorce, but not a living wage. I crewed here and there, mostly with Mr. Lucy on his stupid boat. I worked in the kitchen sometimes at the Topsoil. There were other guys like me on Bismuth. There always were. Everyone likes to point out the Quaker captains’ houses in town, but throughout history most Bismuthians were crew. Centuries after whaling ended and decades after fishing sputtered out, our island’s population has thinned dramatically, and men such as myself are considered lucky to find work of any kind. Personally, I do not consider finding work to be any kind of luck at all and have probably said so too publicly. The one cardinal rule I could not break was that Islanders will always be Islanders, which is as much an ancestry as it is an albatross.

  So, I do know something of where I came from, mostly because I hardly left. How I got to be on Mr. Lucy’s trawler, the Wendy’s Mom, skippered by Mr. Lucy—the scourge of my precious idle time—and crewed by his doltish son, Donny—my nemesis and companion since birth—is a tale of rescue and near-shipwreck that begins on an even punier granite speck.

  Wreck Rock is reachable two ways: by boat, with difficulty, at high tide, and by mudshoe at low, but it’s within shouting distance of shore. Wreck Rock’s really Osgood Isle, named for the Englishman who supposedly stood upon it and declared New England to be rich in sassafras—which he thought was a cure for syphilis—and gold and enslaveable people and all his. It goes by Wreck Rock amongst locals for self-evident reasons. I’d had his island to myself since I’d unwisely decided to mudwalk out there and sieve for seagum.

  The best mudshoes are made from old-school lobster traps and resembled snowshoes. Mine had been cardboard reinforced with more cardboard, and I had lost them mid-trudge. That muck at low tide is worse than quicksand, and I was knee-deep with my toes being bathed in snails’ digestive juices before I realized the shit I was in. If there’s one thing to be learned from Tarzan movies, it’s that without a vine or helpful elephant, quicksand is lethal. The arrogant explorer has enough time to realize just what a horrible man he is, and, if he’d been more decent, a passing chimpanzee would have extended a branch to him. But he’d been a bad bwana, and, after a couple of gloopy air bubbles, his safari hat is the only thing that disturbs the dun porridge.

  But we Bismuthians have spent centuries scrounging our shoreline, and although most of us can’t swim, we do know what to do when the ooze has seized us: we lean forward and belly-crawl. Which is how I managed to lose my seagum gear and spend the afternoon covered in mud on Wreck Rock shouting and waving until Donny’s sister noticed me. When she came back, Wendy Lucy told me that their dad was going out scalloping with the tide at about five AM, and he’d pick me up then. “How come you didn’t crawl back?” she yelled across the mudflat. Which then became more or less my main topic for ponderment, until it was replaced by Donny’s BÖC tat onboard the Wendy’s Mom.

  Wreck Rock is said to have gone missing a few times. It’s just a jumble of gray rocks with a seaweed skirt, and within its cracks and more permanent puddles it’s the home to any number of bitey, stingy, and pokey things—which, if I had died there, would have eaten and lived within my body for months as they attended to the final stages of my disassembly. I suppose some serious tide could swamp the rocks for some period, and bigger landmasses have been left off charts. It’s certainly legendary on Bismuth, inasmuch that there are no historical records or witnesses to anything that is claimed to have occurred there. If the gulls could tell its story, it would be an epic of shitting and screaming, and their bards did indeed tell me that tale all through the daylight hours. The seagulls would probably have been the second or third stage in my disassembly. I imagine part of what they were screaming was their intent to start in on the soft parts of me as soon as I was too putrefied to defend myself. I challenged their sovereignty of the rock for a while, as I searched for artifacts useful to my survival, or which would at least distract me for a few minutes. I ascertained that the Viking runes remained nowhere to be found, never mind deciphered, that boxes of booze stashed there by prohibition-era Kennedys remained hidden, and that nothing even vaguely dubloonish was to be discovered.

  “You could have just crawled back!” yelled Wendy again, “Why didn’t you crawl back?!” Maybe she thought I was being petulant, but I was trying to figure why that hadn’t occurred to me back on the mud. She answered for me: “You asshole!”

  True enough. I would have said “idiot,” but I couldn’t muster much of a counter-argument. Wendy and I had once shared something more than a clinch in the old Korean War watch-tower. I don’t think she had ever liked me much in high school, but by the time I was twenty-five and back on the island, I had grown out of my adolescent uglies—my limbs were mostly even, my facial features fairly congruent, plenty of hair—and I hadn’t yet acquired the paunch and hygienic decrepitude that middle-aged, single male Islanders usually exhibit. The same could have been said for her. The moon washed the concrete walls of the war ruin to a fleecy gray, the humid ocean breeze made undressing seem reasonable, and, well, there was beer and weed. But by twenty-five, we are supposed to be in the final stages of this sort of mating behavior; your destiny had already shipped you off-island, or you were going to stay and further your genetic line. Which is to say we were both old enough to know I should have b
een nicer to her afterward or at least spoken with her now and then since.

  Throughout that day, as I explored the rock and made treaties with the gulls, I received visitors. Wendy came down the beach again to test her rock-throwing skills. By her third visit, we were back on waving terms. Nathan walked by with his dog and waved to me. Manuel and his guys chugged by on the Manny’s Girls and waved to me. Mitchell drove by in his pick-up and shouted that Mr. Lucy would pick me up later, and I yelled back that I already knew and, “Would you feed Rover for me?” He waved. Rover is my cat, Mitchell is my neighbor. Late in the afternoon, three strangers in kayaks, all women, paddled by.

  “We could probably rescue you if we have to,” one yelled. I just waved.

  “I’ll report you, OK?” I said I was all set, but she was fussing with her tricorder or cell phone or whatever it was on the lanyard she’d pulled from beneath her jacket.

  “There’s no reception,” she shouted. I told her I was still all set.

  A little after dark, Mitchell came back and shined his truck’s headlights onto the rock from the beach. “Hey, Orange,” he called.

  “What?”

  “Where’s your pot?”

  “In the cabinet under the coffee maker.”

  “No, I found that, where’s your weed?”

  I couldn’t really see why the seagulls felt they needed sole possession of the rock. They didn’t do anything other than shit and screech and flap around. They didn’t have nests here, and they didn’t seem to be bothering with the mussels and such. Eventually, they grew accustomed to me and reduced their strafings and bombardments to runs every five or six minutes. I didn’t know if a human skull would hold together long in the water. I also didn’t know if a hermit crab would grow to fill up a shell that size. But I could see why the crabs were curious about me. They were willing to walk up my fingers and well up my arms, presumably to investigate whether they could make off with any parts of me for residences. The barnacles and I had relatively little to say to each other. In time, I realized I was going to be without anything to eat or drink until the next day. I figured, though, I’d gone twice that time without any sustenance and without even a conscious thought. All I needed to do was nothing—just loaf and sleep. What I hadn’t factored into my equation was sobriety. One very important resource to surviving an entire night on a rock is alcohol. There were all sorts of substances that can get you by, but not on the rock. I made it though. My power to remain and do nothing has only strengthened over the years, even if my ability to sleep has deteriorated.

  Sometime around dawn, after my night of surpassingly cold discomfort, the Wendy’s Mom arrived. There’s no real way to land at the rock, so Donny threw me a line while his dad kept the bow into the waves. I held the line and waded out a bit onto a slippery hump of seaweed. Then Mr. Lucy opened up the throttle and towed me away. That night had been one of the less pleasant ones of my life, but I was surprised by how much worse I could feel after having been dragged off the rock, through the frigid water, and onto the boat. Mr. Lucy figured I owed him a trip’s labor for the tow and told me to go below and get dressed. Donny let me choose from the pile of rank, communal clothes and told me his sister said I was an asshole.

  I don’t know why God rammed an oar up Mr. Lucy’s ass, but Mr. Lucy seemed to use it to his advantage. One could muse that it attracted some sort of telluric current, one that charged his plodding determination to wring every last drop of suffering from a day that was otherwise merely soaked in toil. As one of God’s stiff and unbending agents upon the earth, Mr. Lucy saw to cultivating his rectitude into a salty pillar of disagreeability and impossibly regular adherence to an agenda of self-abuse that began long before dawn each day and ended each evening with the man making arrangements with his Lord to find the next day colder, rainier, and full of heavier things to make other people lift.

  From what I know of dawn, it is an unaccommodating place where one’s ears ring constantly, and gravity is twice normal. Its sky casts an ulcerous pink haze; the atmosphere enters one’s body to give new life to every pain and ache that had ever resided therein. Those who arrive at dawn find themselves there too late or too early, beset by boiling stomachs and curdling brains, doomed to either wait for or rush to whatever burdensome beasts that they must carry to the far horizon of the land of the rising sun.

  The lords of dawn are men such as Mr. Lucy. Their boats and trucks scrub away the shadows before them each morning, and they bide their time in the empty hours fashioning yokes and manacles for the unwary who stumble into their toils. They remember when dawn was hours earlier and when they had to kill a hundred Nazis every morning just to get to the percolator. They knew that if every young man in this God-fearing country would just get up at 5:30 AM and perform a modest flag ceremony, the upwelling of patriotism and personal pride would hasten Judgment Day upon us and we could get an early start on adoring Jesus in the afterlife before the tourists arrived.

  Thus was I employed upon Mr. Lucy’s trawler, the Wendy’s Mom, despite my abhorrence of all manners of trials, toils, tribulations, and especially getting up early to go a-scalloping.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Smugglers on the Polk

  The Blue Öyster Cult symbol is an upside-down question mark with exclamation marks radiating from the shared dot at noon, three, and nine o’clock. BÖC was supposed to be America’s Black Sabbath. In the 1970s, Canada evidently had not yet discovered Satan and had to make do with BTO, which I don’t think had a symbol or an umlaut. Though they did share TCB—Taking Care of Business—as a motto with Elvis. Anyway, I don’t get why we got the shellfish and England got their Satanic Majesties. This country, certainly the island of Bismuth, was settled by Europeans who were absolutely convinced of Satan’s daily role in their lives and of the imminent apocalypse. America invented Rock and Roll by making the children of slaves sell their souls to the Devil and their songs to Elvis. But America invented Mormons and Scientologists too, and our Goths are found at Grimble’s Cybercafe, not cathedrals. It’s probably worth considering that music itself was considered the Devil’s work by our grim ancestors. So I guess Donny was trying to make the best of his cultural circumstances when he got his tattoo.

  Mr. Lucy broke my reverie on the enigma of American music’s imprecise embrasure of the unholy and its influence on body markings of indigenous lower-middle-class white male islanders: “There’s coffee.”

  I nuked my mug of water and stirred in the instant coffee. We Bismuthians take our coffee with sweetened evaporated milk poured from the canister. If you add vodka to the coffee and milk, you get an Irish Russian, which is usually made right in the mug and stirred with a fishy finger. Donny and I had drunk all his fifth the night before, so I had a virgin Irish Russian.

  “We gotta go to the Polk today,” Mr. Lucy told us. “Donny stays onboard. You go out.”

  The only pleasant thing about dredging for scallops is that they are not fish, so I was happy enough to skip the scallops. On the other hand, the Polk was real trouble. Back before the Navy used it for target practice, it had been a dutiful World War Two transport ship, too rheumatic to make it much beyond the coast. During the Korean War, when Bismuth had last been fortified (against, presumably, the North Korean Navy), the USS Sarah Polk ended its buoyant days and was run aground on a sandbank, where it was used as a watchtower for the Coast Guard. The Bismuthians posted there found the Polk to be a convenient waystation for smuggling, which by the 1950s—post-prohibition, pre-drugs—had become a fairly quaint operation of tariff avoidance. The government clamped down hard on this offshore freeenterprise zone and deeded the hulk over to the Navy to use as target practice. They blew holes in it for decades, giving it its present rusty cheese grater appearance. The Navy guns also opened up holes in the Polk’s hull that made for easy, enclosed parking for small boats and greatly facilitated its usefulness as a smuggler’s depot. You could get tetanus from just looking at the thing, and you could get shot for going anywhere near it
, as some windsurfers found out a few years ago.

  Bismuth boasts fortifications from every single war, from King Philip’s through the Korean. We were also rumored to be on the list of high-profile Homeland Security targets, and the fabled grant money for our self-defense was eagerly anticipated. I wouldn’t have guessed that Koreans would be the ones to finally breach our defenses, but it was the Koreans who were waiting for us at the Polk. I don’t think anyone would have guessed that after centuries of having little to offer the world other than arms for oar-pulling, Bismuth had something Koreans were willing to pay for in actual cash money.

  We tied up on the ocean side of the Polk since the Wendy’s Mom was too big to fit through the hull holes. Even though it was a slowly powdering hulk, the Polk was still larger than any building on Bismuth. About two stories up were a pair of guys with rifles pointed, I was certain, directly between my eyes. I would have hidden, but Mr. Lucy seemed to have expected as much. Being a target didn’t seem to faze him.

  “Those are our boys,” he said, pointing with his chin. “And now you’re the man.” To make himself understood to strangers, Mr. Lucy, like many Bismuthian elders, had to pucker up like he was leaning in to kiss a gorilla between the bars at a zoo. This is because the seagum he chewed—the same stuff we were selling—induces neuropathy in a chronic chewer’s lips. Our accent renders words like “are” and “our” and many other words mutually pronounceable as “ah,” so context is very important in conversations with senior islanders. In fact, it probably takes a native listener to comprehend a native speaker. Not that it matters much. The weather, the condition of the boat, the price of whatever—everything is always unsatisfactory to guys like Mr. Lucy, so grunts usually suffice.