What else was there to do on the very granite slabs that had pressed into the tawny bodies of Denise and Sylvie? I took the situation in hand. My gaff, obdurately unpersuaded, seemed to have other ideas, or perhaps was finally free of ideas. At times, desperate ones, my brain has had me convinced that my body was a vehicle of pain and humiliation that I should just junk. At this time, however, the body seemed free of the mind’s influence and was running rampant, as if it bore the very trident of Poseidon. It was resplendently disempowering. Ghostly Souza hands did not join my own.
I was bruised and soggy, and images of Donny kept intruding. My lips were bluing. There were crabs and buggy things everywhere. I was leaning on barnacles. I was a complete failure as a human being. My genetic line had no future. Some Europeans used to believe narwhal tusks served the same purpose as tiger testes. But the Arctic peoples knew better; they called them corpse whales, due to their pallor. I had that kind of stiff on my hands. I was actually whimpering in frustration when I heard my name.
I peered over the rocks and saw Angie on the Angie Baby waving to me. “Heard you might need a lift,” she called. There are very few degrees of separation between us islanders. Angie is Mitchell’s ex-wife. The Angie Baby used to be his trawler. In fact, it’s one of the nicest boats operating from the island. “If you can get over here, I’ll bring you back to the docks. But hurry up, Orange!”
Angie, of all people. Why did the sea-gods, or at least Mr. Lucy, send Angie? There were so many other Islanders who did not trigger my vanity, my shame. I’d spent years cultivating the belief that this woman was my cousin. If she were my cousin, I could steal a few peeks now and then and continue to admire the way she’d never lost her youthful roundness, the curves that turn to crags and angles so quickly on so many islanders. I could sleep over on her and Mitchell’s couch, and we could shuffle around each other in our underwear in the morning without too much fuss. If Angie were my cousin, the fact that toenail polish matched her lipstick and her habit of wearing only a sweatshirt, a bathing suit, and a kerchief for half the summer would merely be cute and practical; the way her brown pupils contrasted with the whites of her eyes in the same manner that her tan line contrasted with her pale skin when her suit slipped a little off her hip wouldn’t fixate me at all.
I was grateful when the two of them split. It meant I could go back to drinking with Mitchell, quit showering before I went over. Angie had always been too competent for me. Too put-together. It was intimidating. People like her had too much presence of mind, too little self-consciousness. Well, maybe just enough—like just enough lipstick and enough poise to pilot her own boat.
Doing my best to crouch behind the rocks, I pulled on the damp sweatpants and t-shirt. I strapped myself into the life preserver and clambered down into the squishy seaweed and cold swirls of ocean. Once I was submerged, I took my tiller and tucked its tip under the preserver, hoping, absurdly, to preserve some dignity. After paddling over, I had some trouble climbing up the little ladder hanging over the stern.
“C’mon, let’s go, Orange. We’re drifting,” Angie told me as she grabbed my life jacket and hauled me up. My limbs were stiff, the ladder meant for more sure-footed swimmers. Angie hauled me in over the side, grabbing my arm, the straps on my vest, and finally my very own windlass. “Jesus!” she said, surprised. The Lord’s name was more than I could articulate at the moment. She got me the rest of the way in, but kept a firm handhold.
Entirely deprived of language, I gave her a look that was meant to communicate my appreciation of being rescued, my appreciation of the awkwardness of the predicament, my regret at imposing on her, my boyish vulnerability, my acknowledgement of the comedic situation and the fact that nothing like this had ever occurred before, my acknowledgment of my own virility and masculinity, my appreciation of her femininity and firm hand, my talent to be discrete, my ability to take care of myself after this was over, my willingness to sink back into the brine, a wry awareness of what I presumed to be our suppressed mutual attraction over the years, and a rueful apology for remaining friends with Mitchell—along with a sidenote of resigned awareness of the way we must all live in each other’s pockets here on the island. I hoped the extra whites of my eyes expressed an urgent sincerity, and that their craquelment indicated an intriguing but safe degree of derangement.
If I’d been turned over, she would have had a perfect bouncer’s toss handhold—one hand on the collar, the other on the belt. Her grip, though, suggested I was not to be thrown back. If she were fishing, and I’d been a harbor seal, she would have been in a good position to gut me, chum the waters with my organs, and maybe pickle my pizzle for a souvenir.
But she was Angie, whom I had tried so hard not to think about over the years. She’d always been friendly but guarded, treating me a bit like the competition, someone prone to lead Mitchell down unpaved paths of dissolution and boorish bon-hommerie. There was never any profit to explaining to her that it had really been the other way around. Had I ever admired her unbashful way with a bikini? Certainly. Did I know that our friend, Laura, who did half the island’s hair, barbered the fine brown hairs on the back of Angie’s neck once a month? I did. And I had fully imagined running my lips down along those soft bristles, feeling them tickle the rim of my nostrils as I nuzzled her neck, taking my time deciding whether to continue kissing, licking, biting all the way down her backbone, or to take a tack and veer over her shoulder, maybe taking her collarbone between my teeth on my way to the notch of her clavicle, where I would rest my nose as I unbuttoned her shirt and drew my face between her breasts, searching for the dot of perfume she would have harbored somewhere in that soft warmth.
Indeed, in my imagination, Angie and I had gallivanted more than a few times. Sometimes, poor Mitchell would have been relegated to an oarsman down below, chained to his bench. Sometimes I shared his shackles and Angie, the princess whose galleon we rowed, would slip below, point at me, and command, “Bathe him and bring him to my cabin,”—her cabin where she’d napped and frigged herself to the rhythms of waves and the oar pullers’ straining, incessant sweeps. Thus I’d shoot a glance at Mitchell, my fellow traveler all these hard years at sea, as if to say, “Who am I to disobey the princess? I’ll try to steal you some food from above.”
Angie was a good sailor, with a tool for every job and a place for every tool. She was back from setting her wheel on “Thereabouts, slowly,” and unwrapping a rubber before I could even get out of the preserver. I don’t even know how her shorts came off. My yardarm seemed to go straight from her hand to her lovely cunt, without her grip ever lessening. She squatted across me like a coxswain and began her own rhythm, pressing my shoulders back to the deck to let me know that my role was to remain staunch. I pushed her sweatshirt and bikini top up to her armpits, bunching her breasts. I pulled her chest down toward me and snapped at her swollen pink-brown nipples. With a remonstrative palm to my front, Angie arched her back; she feathered and sculled, then bore down with long sweeping strokes that brought her clit right to my pelvic bone. And then again. A blush darkened her chest, and I felt the small of her back dampen with sweat. At last, I began to sense a familiar charge building within my body, a current channeling from the soles of my feet up the back of my legs, meeting the other current surging down from the back of my mouth, and then I was thanking every little thing that anyone has ever worshipped on this island.
We held each other’s eyes in a softer grip than she’d started this off with, and I took a sounding right out of her skull. We were both trying to find words to say something more amorous than, “Thanks, I needed that!” A couple of smiles was all it took.
“There’s juice boxes and chocolate milk and water in the fridge,” Angie called from the bathroom—and it was a bathroom, with a bathtub even. “There might even be a beer if you look around.” In the time it took me to choose water, she’d put herself back together. She handed me the driest, cleanest towel I’d seen in months. “I put a pair of Mitch’s jeans
and a sweatshirt on the bed for you. Take a shower, but hurry up because I have to pick up Moira from step-dancing class in half an hour.” Moira was Angie’s seven-or-eight-or-so-year-old daughter. They’d fitted out the trawler after the divorce into a mix of condo and SUV and lived aboard. It had sonar, a massive winch, and a good collection of Disney DVDs.
I didn’t have a lot of experience being just what someone needed; the glow of it made me sluggish and hazy. I could imagine skippering Moira from school to lesson to birthday party, wearing bathrobes and sipping boat drinks with Angie after we put her daughter to bed. Never hauling a trap again. Slippers. Angie must have noticed me settling into my new life. “Orange, I’m not sure I even want to dock with you on board, never mind have Moira see you.”
“OK, OK,” I told her. The hot water was a delight just shy of Angie’s attention. And the towel and dry clothes were some of my most coveted articles of civilization. If I could have added a good night’s sleep, a decent meal, health insurance and financial security for myself and all possible subsequent progeny, I would have felt like a new man. I joined Angie next to the wheel as she piloted the boat into the harbor. She put her hand on mine and I felt my throat swell again. Soon, I would step from the boat onto a dock, then real paved land. A woman of real beauty and character would wave to me and say something fond. Someone would give me a ride home, and Mitchell would have cleaned up my house and left my refrigerator full of beer.
“Listen, I’ve got an idea,” Angie said. Yes, I thought, Yes, yes. I’ll live in a cabin at the end of a wharf and you and Moira can stay on the boat. We’ll give charter cruises to summer tourists. Moira will make them snacks, and I’ll spin yarns about how ancient Bismuthians brought civilization to Europe and opine on how to make real chowder. “I’m going to drop you off at the Topsoil dock first, so I can go pick up Moira at the town dock; that OK with you?”
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“If you tell Mitchell, I will actually kill you.”
“Thanks,” I said again.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Tender and the Hammer Maiden
Istood on the Topsoil’s floating dock and waved goodbye, as I watched the Angie Baby’s stern weave through the harbor’s moored boats. I didn’t have a dime on me, and I figured Donny was in the bar anyway, so I just stayed on the dock awhile. Ricky, the kid who ran the Topsoil’s tender shared a joint with me, and I helped him ferry tourists from their boats to the restaurant.
Restaurants have come and gone on Bismuth in my lifetime, but the Topsoil is the only one that has become an institution. We have a couple places to buy coffee and muffins and such, a store that sells everything you should have bought on your last trip to the mainland, and for nearly three decades, the Top-soil with its oft-shuttered raw bar upstairs and restaurant down. It had a symbiotic relationship with the ferry, which delivered both its customers in twice-daily clumps and much of its supplies. Islanders ate and, more typically, drank there too, though not during the rushes at mealtime. In the off-season, the dining room was often open, but the kitchen was not. You could ask the bartender to pop a frozen pizza in the bar’s toaster oven, and there was usually chili or chowder to be fortified with handfuls of the crumbled ship’s biscuits from a bowl on the bar. Ever since I was a teenager I had been an irregular in the Topsoil’s militia of native employees, which meant I got called now and then to fill shifts in the kitchen.
There’s not enough room on any of the island’s docks for all the visiting boats to tie up, so the harbor moorings and temporary maritime parking spaces were regulated more stringently than most enterprises on Bismuth. The Topsoil had always employed kids like Ricky to fetch people from their moored boats with a tender. Usually they were the sons of wealthy regular summer people who knew the island protocol pretty well and were presentable enough to shepherd tourists without making them hide their wallets. Ricky and his ilk usually looked like prep-school kids who’d slept a night or two on the beach. They had tans and attractively bleached hair, and they got their choice of the summer people’s daughters. Their unofficial job was to act as procurers and fixers for native lowlifes such as myself. For years us seedy types had taken advantage of these quasi-concierges as mules and gofers, and the clever ones used the contacts they built up at school and ski resorts to maintain a decent trade in overpriced weed and shitty coke. Ricky wasn’t much of a prick, and it was his second summer as the tender’s pilot.
“All the rabbits have tularemia and there’s a bounty on their ears.” Ricky was telling me about a rabbit infestation on Slubby-cunk, an island south of us. “They’re supposed to club ’em cause the island’s too small for a bunch of hunters with shotguns.”
“Wabbit season, huh?” I waited him to respond with “duck season,” but the current crop of teenagers know nothing about the classics.
“Good thing the monkeys are gone,” Ricky said.
“Monkeys?”
“Yeah, they used blowguns on them.”
“No way.” I said, remembering the legend of Bismuth’s monkey problem. Supposedly, a sea-captain’s pet jumped ship back in the whaling days and found itself an unexploited ecological niche. It browsed the cliffs for seabird eggs, leading a mysterious and lonely life. When it spotted a whaling ship coming into port, the monkey would howl and wail at it from the cliffs. Over the years, enough other sea-captains’ pet monkeys responded to his hail and jumped ship too, forming a monkey colony. It was said that the monkeys would guide captains into port on fogbound days with eerie howls. After whales were domesticated and the industry moved across the Atlantic, Bismuth hit hard times, and it was decided there was only room enough on the island for one kind of primate. “They didn’t use blowguns,” I told Ricky.
“Yes way.”
“Nobody north of Ecuador uses a blowgun. It’s un-American.”
“The introduction of blowguns to North America led to the extinction of the monkeys; look it up,” Ricky told me.
From where we stood, the harbor seemed free of monkeys, though I saw a rat under the Topsoil’s pilings. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to deal with Mitchell. I didn’t want to deal with Donny upstairs either. Angie had already dealt with me, and the sense of emergency I’d felt earlier in the day was dissipating like chum in open water. Above us on the restaurant’s deck, some kids were squirting mustard on potato chips and flinging them to the gulls.
Poor Ricky. He’d dropped his phone overboard earlier in the day and was stuck with just me and the marine band radio for conversation. He said there were messages he hadn’t seen on his phone from a daughter he’d ferried yesterday from her family’s yacht to the restaurant dock. We wondered if some fisherman would find his phone in the belly of a cod someday, still carrying plans for a teenage tryst. He’d asked another passenger to call the number, but they were on the wrong network.
The sun, as the tourists say, was over the yardarm, and I was fixed to begin my trek inland, where, I hoped, Rover was waiting patiently for me in her little bed—which I fashioned with my own two hands from a cardboard box—fending off the affections of Mitchell and his entourage. I was expressing just such a thought to Ricky when we heard the basso profundo glug-glug of the Tharapita’s Hammer Maiden approaching.
“Oh shit, Estonindians,” muttered Ricky.
Waldena’s boat was a long open-sea catcher boat of a type mostly unknown in North America, though the narcopirates in the Caribbean prized them. Its black hull rode low in the water until it was at speed, then its hydrofoils extended, and the ship vaulted into warp drive. Instead of a flying bridge, it had an armored conning tower with narrow smoked-glass windows. On the foredeck was a military-grade harpoon gun, politely enshrouded with a Kevlar tarp for its trip into the harbor. As the boat cut its engines to drift into the dock, it sank even further into the water and pushed a slow surge in front of it that lurched the dock and made Ricky and I grab a rail for balance.
The Estonindians usually conducted their busine
ss with us far off shore, well away from witnesses. I knew myself to be an attractant for low-grade, personal dignity-eroding forms of trouble and wished I had cut my idyll on the dock short before their arrival. While I was considering my options, I found that, once again, decisions had been made for me below my belt. This time the legs were in charge, and I was already walking backwards up the dock’s ramp.
CHAPTER SIX
Oysters in the Topsoil
Smoking cigarettes is the only pleasure in kitchenwork. No matter the weather or time of day, nothing beats sitting on a milk crate in the alley, surrounded by garbage and grease, in whites soaked with gore and dishwater, and smoking. I had slunk up the ramp and found myself in the Top-soil alleyway out of sheer habit, I guess. All I’d been meaning to do with myself that afternoon was lurk about, and the alley made natural sense. I caught a couple dishers on break out back and was offered a smoke.
It was in the Topsoil’s alley during my occasional bouts of employment in their kitchen that I first heard the Spanish and Portuguese cadences of complaint and suffering that inflected the speech of sailors trapped on shore in indentured servitude. My familiarity with this dialect of grumbling and staccato cursing helped me on the boats too. It felt like a fraternity of dirty-jobbers; our disgruntlement was a chantey anyone could whistle; its melody of boss-hatred and toil-grudging carried undertones of withered ambitions and abandonment.
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