The Korean smugglers took a break from aiming their rifles at us and lowered us a rope ladder. There’s no doubt that climbing the rigging is a skill embedded in the Bismuthian gene pool, but Mr. Lucy’s elbows and knees had stopped following orders reliably long ago. I was to replace his son Donny, who had been thrown overboard in disgust last time, as the bagman. Bismuthians were probably among the first North Americans to ever lay eyes on Koreans, back in the whaling days. Perhaps some loose-lipped swabbie had disclosed our island’s secret during an expedition to the Pacific and opened up this trade between otherwise entirely unlike cultures.
When Mr. Lucy had declared that I was the man, what he meant was I was the monkey. I climbed up the rope ladder and one of the Korean men helped me over the railing.
“You are the new American?” he asked in a measured tone.
“Sort of.”
“And Donny, how is he?”
“His dad locked him in the cabin.” The right answer, evidently. The Koreans brightened. We made our exchange. They gave me a plastic shopping bag full of currency and a small package wrapped in white paper and tied with twine like something from a butcher. I waited for them to ask me if I was going to count the money, since this was my first chance to play a scene I had watched in uncountable movies. They didn’t; I didn’t even know how much money there was supposed to be anyway, so I just shoved it all into the hockey bag I’d lugged the seagum up in. I realized too late that I should have been implying my readiness to hit specific nerve clusters in their bodies and break their bones with strategic karate chops, or that Mr. Lucy was prepared to vaporize them with a shoulder-launched missile.
The Korean who had been silently staring at me since I arrived took off his aviators. “You are a beer-drinking American?” Like his partner, he was gimlet-eyed, but I think he seemed more genuinely interested in my opinion about beer than intimidating me.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You drink German beers? You know many American beers are German beers? That the brewers use ancient German formulations that demand simplicity and purity?”
“Like Budwesier?”
“No, that is Czech.”
The other Korean said, “We would like you to sit down there and to wear this blindfold.” My time for dramatic headkicks and weapon-snatching was already over, so I did as I was told. I heard the sound of two bottles being opened. “In your own words, we would like you to describe the qualities of taste you perceive in each of these beers.”
Both beers were presented cold and with a seemingly equal amount of head. One tasted familiar and pleasant, but when I considered it against the other, it seemed to have an almost cloying sweetness to it. The other beer, while initially tasting bitter, had a more rewarding flavor and left me feeling as if I’d just drunk a slice of astringent wheat bread.
“Now,” asked my Korean publican, “if you were to choose a beer to drink more of, which would it be?” I indicated the bready one.
The two exclaimed to each other in Korean, and then the staring-master Korean said, “Take off your blindfold Mr. Orange Whippey! You have helped us, but we are still in disaccord. The beer you have chosen is from your own geographic region, it is called a small batch micropub brew. The other beer is a famous and common German beer. We compliment your palate and your senses of taste. However, we remain vexed as to whether German national standards have deteriorated, or whether American indigenous brewers have made advancements in formulations that had otherwise been unsurpassed in all of Europe for half of a millennium, or whether, in fact, this American small batch micropub brew should be more properly considered a German beer, despite its origin.”
For the sake of comparative research we drank the rest of the microbrew growler and the rest of the German six. I felt cheerier, but my critical faculties did not improve. I went to piss over the side and saw Mr. Lucy in the boat. I waved. He did something with his arms that looked like yelling. Mr. Ill John produced a very nice looking bottle and said, “This is Japanese whiskey. Regrettably, it is superior to both Scots and Irish whiskies. The controlled conditions of the Japanese indoor peat bogs disallows some of the micro-organic flavoring agents that characterize regional whiskies; however, the purity and tastes cannot be rivaled.”
I too plunged off of the Polk, but I think it was my own fault. I recall telling the Koreans I was going to make some coffee. Then I was cold and drowning and being pulled in to the boat by Mr. Lucy for the second time in two days. “Why can’t you fucking kids keep the fucking money dry?!” he shouted and told me to go get changed. I let Donny out of the cabin and the smug prick offered me my choice of the rank, communal clothes.
CHAPTER THREE
Sedgwn
We Bismuthians have become experts in the multitudinous forms (or lacks of form) of various sea snots and marine mucilages and their relative worth in Asian markets. Somewhere, just over the horizon, there were factory ships with safes full of dollars waiting to buy up every depilation of the beaches’ scaly dander; the carbuncles, worms, issuances, and repulsive undulants that the islanders had a particular talent for harvesting, due to the lessons of their ancestors in how to avoid them. It seems that the more nettlesome and gloopy they are, the more they fetch. Some are rushed into life-support chambers of the cargo holds to be delivered still quivering and secreting. Others are sealed up to ferment and further decompose what little cellular structure (or overabundance thereof) they once had into fizzing, bioactive delicacies.
Seagum, hauled up in sieves or sloughed off more properly piscine catches, is our island’s specialty. It is denser than jellyfish but lacks even their animalian characteristics. Its particular link in the great chain of being is difficult to determine—too coagulated to be a liquid, too soupy for a solid, it doesn’t even seem to belong to the kingdoms of plant or animal. As one early taxonomist put it, it was “known to produce an urticative fret in bathers.” This is known to natives as “the hivies,” which, along with goose flesh and hypothermia, and the uncountable methods of drowning, is among the many reasons we do not swim.
If you ever crack open a clam or lobster or really any of the ocean’s many grotesqueries, at some point you are going to wonder about the first man to do so and how hungry he had to be. I figure it was the very first man to see one. You put a man and a pile of seagum—or frog spittle, or fish milch, or what have you—on an empty beach together, and by tomorrow he will have looked at it, poked it, rolled in it, eaten it, washed his hair with it, and tried to build a shelter with it. By the next day, he’d be trying to mate with it. Sure, maybe this is the vaunted ingenuity that has raised us above the rest of the world’s creatures, but I think it shows us to be collective slow learners. Mistakes are made to be repeated—just look at us Bismuthians: we’re still here aren’t we?
Raw seagum is processed in a few stages. First, it has to be mashed. For the basic homebrew seagum, this is done simply with two buckets, a pair of waders, and a woman. She stomps side to side, not unlike the rolling stride of a seaman, squishing a bucketful of seagum with each foot until it changes from a gloppy blob to a pourable goo. The liquefied seagum is then poured into shallow, wide trays and left to dry for several days. It dessicates into a leathery film that is cut into strips and preserved in layers of salt and dried grass. Seagum is what gives us Islanders our distinctive slack and rubbery locution. Like betel and khat and coca, it’s a mild stimulant that we chew like cud. It helps us haul in the nets hour after hour and gives us an unfounded sense of mild euphoria. It also slowly destroys the nerves in one’s lips. Most senior islanders are unable to whistle or produce a pucker, making for a manner of speaking that most offislanders find difficult to understand and unpleasant to listen to.
For some of us, seagum-gathering falls somewhere between wasting time and odd-jobbery—yet another way to make a boat payment or at least to ignore the payment-due notice. Donny’s dad, Mr. Lucy—whom I disliked only a bit less than his fuck-headed son—showed an entrepreneurial zeal
, unknown on Bismuth since the days of the grim Quaker captains, when he established the seagum trade with a pair of tight-lipped Koreans.
Thanks to my own lack of entrepreneurship, I found myself press-ganged by Mr. Lucy for occasional scallop dredgings and other low-paying forms of drudgery on the Wendy’s Mom. It was usually a couple nights worth of toil and indignity on my part, and my pay was usually blown at the Topsoil before I even made it home. I was accustomed to Mr. Lucy’s addlepated, inarticulable grudges and Donny’s general repugnance; my own contribution to the esprit de corps was typically shirking sullenness.
But today Mr. Lucy seemed almost cheery; he had a hold full of scallops and a bag full of cash. He wouldn’t tell me what was in the package he had taken from the hockey bag, and I noticed that he hadn’t unwrapped it. On our way back to the island, I stood next to him in the wheelhouse and told him I’d never seen a Korean or any kind of offislander chew seagum.
“Tiger testes,” he said with the poor lip control of a lifelong chewer.
“What?”
“The Koreans grind it into a powder and sell it as counterfeit tiger testes.”
“People buy powdered tiger testes?”
“Yeah, it supposed to give’m a hard-on like a tiger’s.”
Donny asked, “Tiger hard-ons?”
“They snort the stuff and then fuck, I guess,” said Mr. Lucy, “Supposed to make’m tigers.”
This was news to us. “I’m gonna try it,” Donny said. I’d been thinking the same thing. I was also thinking I was very grateful that I’d be off Wendy’s Mom before Donny could begin his experiment in priapism.
“Don’t,” his father told him.
Mr. Lucy let me borrow his cell to check my messages. I doubted I had any, but I wanted to make a show of it, so Donny and Mr. Lucy would understand that I had a life beyond being dragged onto their boat. I was surprised when someone answered.
“Who’s this?”
“Orange?” replied a groggy, familiar voice.
“Mitchell?”
“Hey Orange, how you doin’?”
“I’m fine, Mitchell, how are you, and why the hell are you answering my phone?”
“I just got up,” he replied.
“Where’s Rover?”
“Denise says she just fed her.”
“Denise?”
Mitchell told Denise, “Say hi to Orange,” and she shouted hey.
“You’re just waking up with Denise Souza in my house?” “Sylvie’s here too.”
“You’re just waking up with Denise and Sylvie Souza in my house?”
“What are you, homesick? Where’s your coffee filters?”
Hate and envy are curiously complimentary emotions that defy concise articulation. I handed the phone back to Mr. Lucy and told him I didn’t know how to turn it off. We were still an hour or two off the island; I joined Donny in the cabin before Mr. Lucy could assign me more chores.
Donny was using a shot glass and a cereal bowl to crush up a few strips of seagum. “Tiger cunt,” he told me.
“What?”
“I got a tiger stiffy, I figure I’m gonna want some tiger pussy. You think this stuff would work on girls?” “I dunno, does Viagra?” I replied.
“Viagra’s for guys. Tiger balls could probably go either way.” “But this is seagum,” I reminded him. “Yeah, but you don’t have to say.”
“What are you going to do, tell a girl that it’s not actually counterfeit tiger testes, it’s the real thing?”
“I’ll just tell her it’s coke.”
We used Mr. Lucy’s drinking straw to snort the roughly ground seagum. I was a little giddy. It’s not often in one’s adult life that a brand-new drug comes one’s way. It was something like fiberglass and rocksalt, with an afternote of low tide.
“Maybe we should have cut it with something,” I croaked.
“I take it straight,” testified Donny.
We huffed the other lines and hoped we’d filled our tanks with the tiger. I saw Donny’s nose start to bleed before I noticed my own trickle.
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright!” I told Donny.
“Fuck yeah!”
We both ran our fingers around the bowl and rubbed the remaining powder on our gums. Donny was starting to fade in a red haze. Or, rather, every blood vessel in my eyes was bursting. I began to feel as if I were perspiring internally. My bones spun in their sockets. There was a hurricane in one ear and angry fleas in the other. I felt my windpipe go bullfrog and heard Donny rasp, “Cocksucking Christ!” as if he were a Tuvan throat singer. I spent my last moments of respiration clawing my way out of the cabin.
Mr. Lucy soon had us both in the cockpit with buckets of sea-water between our knees. Speaking and thinking were impossible. I held my head in the bucket for as long as I could and then wept and sputtered as I tried to suck air through my engorged throat. Donny was similarly engaged. Mr. Lucy expostulated on our substandard humanity and locked himself in the wheel-house. I could breathe, but my ribs were trying to wriggle out of my chest. I felt my eyeballs liquefy and trickle down the back of my throat. I wanted to purge myself, sea-cucumber style, by barfing my toxic internal organs out onto the deck. I held my head between my knees, wrapped my arms around my legs and felt my entire body puckering.
Then I felt something bumping into my forehead. The stuff worked.
Donny the Tiger was roaring, “Dad, Dad! It works!”
“You two fucking idiots stay away from me!” Mr. Lucy shouted from the barricaded wheelhouse.
I did not feel erect. I felt as if I had the very hook that would land the leviathan. I felt as if I could support all the troops at once. I felt that, if I ever pissed again, I would bore a hole in the moon. Leaping porpoise, cresting narwhal, electric eel, anything but a turtle gliding gently into the quiet deep.
An hour later we were heading past the breakwater into the harbor. Donny and I had kept to our benches and overturned the buckets on our laps. Donny was drumming on his with his thumbs. “I’m going to the fucking Topsoil as soon as we dock.”
“Nobody’s gonna be there this early,” I told him.
“There’s waitresses.”
“You mean Mrs. Barrow?”
“Well, there’ll be fucking tourists anyway.”
“Yeah, like you’ll be fucking tourists.”
“Fuck you, Orange.”
“You got a bone to pick with me, Donny?”
Donny launched himself at me, more bellowing manatee than tiger. Later, the bruises and cuts would remind me of his assault, but my initial impression was only of my face being pressed into the soft and stinking blubber of his chest, his sulfurous breath, and the sting of his saliva in my eyes, as his flippers bashed my head side to side.
I was still sitting on the bench, Donny astride me, flapping. I tried to heave him off my lap and felt instead an alarming sense of pleasure as my marling spike rubbed along his mizzen mast. This served to reverse our polarity sufficiently enough to send us back into our corners of the cockpit. I took the offensive next, figuring a headbutt to the bridge of his nose would be a strategic response; however, due to the pitch of the boat and my martial unsuitability, I found myself giving him a glancing wet willy as I pitched overboard.
I was lucky there were so many illegal lobster pots there, clogging the harbor approach. I was able to grab a buoy without foundering entirely. I yelled and waved and found myself unwilling to use the first person, screaming instead, “Man overboard!” It was a while before the Wendy’s Mom began a slow, reluctant arc back to me. I found the most effective way to stay above water was to straddle a lobster buoy, as if I were riding a bike with a banana seat underwater. It was soothing. I rode and pedaled and paddled until Mr. Lucy circled the boat up and threw me a life jacket, hollering, “You’re not getting back on my boat, Whippey!”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Angie Baby
It’s only about twenty minutes with no wake to get from the harbor entrance to the docks,
but it’s a hell of a walk. Bismuth’s breakwater was our Great Wall of China, a half-mile-long stone wall that was built in the fat days of whaling to protect the harbor from storms and navies. It had later been fortified with barges full of rocks and huge piles of cement rubble from some off-island civic catastrophe. It afforded one a prospect from which to look back on the town and wish one was much farther away. I dogpaddled—with my newly stiffened daggerboard—over to it from the buoys and tried to dry off some. My wardrobe had, for the last couple of days, been an assortment of abandoned T-shirts and sweats from the boat. I took them off and lay them on the rocks to dry in the sun. I sat on the life vest down in a gap in the rocks to get out of the wind. My lingam was still good for surf-casting, and I was very uncomfortable with my level of exposure.
My altogetherness there on the breakwater wasn’t altogether unprecedented. Our island lacked warm water and any stretch of sand pleasant or private enough to bare one’s parts, but the breakwater’s rocks and distance from civilization had a way of inspiring the youthful and exhibitionistic. I was neither. I wished there was a chart I could consult to tell me when my own personal high tide would ebb. So I laid there on the rocks, basking, with my gnomon seemingly stuck on noon, trying to think my way into de-tumescence. I thought about poor lonely Rover and how Mitchell might be at this very moment trying to trick her into the microwave. This was also a mistake, since thinking of Mitchell and Rover led to thinking about how the Souza sisters used to play mermaid out here at the end of the breakwater. Or were they playing siren? The fisherfolk of Bismuth, after days at sea among the worst squalor of manliness, felt very welcome when they returned to harbor on a warm summer afternoon. And they all knew how to find their binoculars in a hurry.
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