SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  Cigarettes themselves require no language. One is expected to offer tobacco and once the offer is accepted, actual work must cease. One sits on an overturned milk crate with knees apart and apron spread wide. One does not acknowledge the stinks arising from his self or his comrades or his environment. One’s crotch itches palpably and is indulged. In the winter, on his plastic throne of indolence, the smoker is impervious to the cold. His body steams while he smokes, and his eyes wander from the trash barrels to the band of stars visible between the roofs.

  In the summer, the smoker hears the waves, birds, crickets even. He does not allow them to beckon to him, since each night at work is longer than any land or sea voyage a man could endure and promises not even the dubious pleasure of a destination, and cash out is not for a few hours. The boss, ever in a state of kitchen-apoplexy, rarely pursues the smoker. To see his employees’ hands idle is like seeing his own idol desecrated, so the boss learns to avoid the cigarette break, perhaps even enjoying the respite from his crabby underlings that being lonely at the top of the food chain provides. Waitresses are an even more rare sight by the Dumpster. The kitchen’s alley, like the jailhouse or a ship’s cabin, is a place that those who contemplate presentability do not breach. Waitresses take their tobacco in sharp draws at their station, in between morsels mooched from patrons’ plates. The essence of being an islander is knowing one’s place. I knew I always had a place wherever toil and discontent lurked.

  As I was absorbing my alley-mates’ attestations of who had been born by whore, bitch, and other forms of she-beast, I was summoned from within the kitchen’s screen door: “Orange, is that you out there?”

  I waved.

  “We’re in the fucking weeds, Orange. You want twenty bucks?”

  “No,” I shouted. I couldn’t understand what made me appear so conscriptable. I’m an obvious shirker.

  The cook came to the screen. “Look, we’re slammed and we need another guy. What about thirty-five, just for the rest of the night.”

  I negotiated him up to fifty, just by staring at him blankly. It is my special talent.

  “Good! Here,” he said, handing me an apron and an oyster knife and pulling me inside toward the walk-in. There he pointed to a world of oysters. “We need these shucked yesterday. There’s a big table slugging them down as fast as we can bring ’em out.”

  The thing about shucking oysters is they don’t like it. They are alive and want to remain that way. They can actually fight back through active measures and passive resistance. In the bushel, they organize their ranks, with the most aggressive at the top. If one is foolish enough to look straight into the horde, one is attacked with a jet of bacteria-laden, allergy-inducing water, more properly known as liquor, directed right into one’s eyes.

  When fighting oysters, it’s best to stay entirely engaged in the moment. Pluck one from the bushel, assess its particular weaknesses, swaddle it in a rag, cram a knife into its hinge like you’re separating vertebrae, and twist the knife. The top shell is discarded (centuries of this practice have created entire shoals of oyster shells that have to be dredged from the harbor) and the quivery goo is laid bare. After repeating this process hundreds of times, one’s fingers are smelly, abraded by the shells, cold, and eventually one hand stabs another with the oyster knife, thus confirming the oyster species’ survival strategy against even tool-wielding hominids from the surface world.

  But that’s not the end of the line yet for the oyster. It remains alive, a pitiful and defenseless puddle lying on a sickbed that had been its redoubt moments ago. Some manage to slink away at this point, brave and foolish, believing perhaps that the shell was just an appendage that could be replaced. But there is no refuge for a homeless oyster. Once its shell is forced open, its fate is sealed. In a full-pitched oyster battle, they are borne on their dismembered carapaces to the cook, who fancies them up a bit on a platter, and then rushed to the floor.

  The atrocities perpetrated upon the shellfish before they reach a table are actually only the excruciations that precede their execution. Waiting for them, circled around a table littered with the shells of their comrades, are drunken patrons whose sole intention is to swallow the creatures alive with a minimum of chewing. As the night goes on and the oyster-frenzy continues, the sounds of slurping and belching reach back into the kitchen, where the mollusks clamp their shells even tighter and try to bury themselves deeper in the silt.

  Until there’s a PBS special with an endoscopic camera, no one will ever know just what occurs to an oyster after its slide down a person’s gullet. Most things that live in shells are stupid and stubborn. Too much so to just give up the ghost when they should. Once they hit the stomach, who knows how long they rage against peristalsis and acid? Horseradish, alcohol, and overindulgence have surely abetted plenty of oysters back up the esophageal escape tube, but that’s as useful to the oyster as being blasted out of an airlock.

  I would imagine that most shuckers entertain the fantasy of discovering a pearl. After so many, many tedious and unpleasant hours, something good ought to come from all this labor. Miners find gold, bricklayers wind up with buildings, shouldn’t all this disemboweling produce something? And indeed, most shuckers I’ve spoken to claim to have found or known a fellow to have found a pearl. Yet not a single shucker has a pearl to show for their troubles. Cooks don’t even bother to offer the possibility of a pearl as an inducement to their shuckers. It would be reasonable to assume that pearls were the product of a shucker’s imagination, that the grunt who survives on the meager dregs of the economy’s bounty after the tide has long receded might dream that not only would his toil produce something of significance, something of sublimity might even come his way. This would be reasonable to assume because the only thing those who suffer the shit jobs ever get is a lecture that they are lucky to be shoveling or swallowing shit. Yet, I knew that at that very moment, there were several women on the floor who had specially cultivated their tans to show off their cultivated pearl necklaces, which did indeed come from oysters. Just not the kinds of oysters the likes of workers such as myself will ever pry open. Those who eat oysters alive get pearls. Those who shuck them get squirted in the eye and infected cuts on their hands.

  And perhaps I should be glad that the strangers, off-islanders, and summer people of the world cultivate their interest in oysters, because harbored within the benthonic depths of the unlit intestinal caverns of shuckers like myself lay hidden the only jewel a human can produce, a bezoar, so derived from the Middle Persian for “protector” and “poison.” Like a pearl, a bezoar is formed around an indigestible irritant. It is marbled and complex to look upon. Also like a pearl and until very recently, a bezoar could not be extracted without killing its bearer. The ancients treasured them like narwhal horns—as an antidote to poison—the largest of them were valued as highly as meteorites and had the same mystical properties attributed to them. However, now that far more peasants are poisoned than aristocrats, bezoars have become relegated to cabinets of curiosities. For this we should be glad. Humanity, it would seem, has not yet come to induce and harvest bezoars from its underclasses, as it has with organs and hair and such.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Waldena, the Estonindian

  At the end of the night in a restaurant, the wait-staff sit at a table to count their tips and complain. But there is no sitting, ever, in the kitchen, and much of the most odious work happens as the front-people flirt and begin their drinking. If a kitchen worker has somehow miraculously remained dry and un-smelly throughout the night, mop swill ensures wet socks, at the very least, for the trip home. I was mopping my way out of the kitchen toward the front when I was stopped at the wait station.

  “There’s still a table out there, Orange,” Cindy, a waitress, told me. “One of them asked if you were still here, too. Bob told them you were busy.”

  They must have been big spenders—not a category of people whom I’ve associated with much—since most tourists were shooed away
on weeknights, once Bob had judged they were no longer leaking enough money. I peered around the partition and saw Waldena, the only Estonindian I’d ever met who was willing to speak English, a few strangers I didn’t recognize, and a midden of oyster shells. I waved to Waldena.

  “Orange,” she said, pronouncing both syllables of my name, unlike most Bismuthians, “I heard you’re responsible for these delicious oysters.”

  I nodded and wiped my hands on my apron.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Orange? Oyster?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Beer?”

  “Sure.” Bob and Cindy both scowled at me. Scullion sculchs do not sit with the guests. I squinted a bit at Bob, hoping to imply that if he had cashed me out when I asked, I would have been long gone.

  Waldena could have been a figurehead on an ancient Estonindian longboat. She wore her long black hair in two braids that dangled down over her chest, one nearly nestled in between her breasts. Like most people from the North Indies, her eyes were the blue of ancient icebergs. Her sharp cheekbones angled up toward her temples, giving her face a slightly feline appearance that was encouraged by an upturned nose. She wore a black tank top that seemed to be a hybrid of neoprene and walrus skin and which revealed muscular arms that looked like she was born pulling oars.

  The three men with Waldena didn’t look like chatty types. They had the squint and thin-lipped snarl of men who didn’t want to sully their tongues with the English language, much less be introduced to a native speaker. All three of them were big guys with at least fifty pounds on me. Each of them had black hair long enough for a pony tail and they wore identical barrettes with a complicated silver-work knot design to hold their hair back. At first I thought their thin gray sweaters were part of the uniform until I realized each had a different highly stylized animal pattern around the cuffs and collars. The collars looked exceptionally itchy. The men and I didn’t exchange a word or even a direct look, but did manage to communicate our mutual hatred, as I imagined was the case with most men in the presence of Waldena.

  “This is Oskar, Kermit, and Elmö,” she said.

  I did something of an internal spit take and had to rub some beer away that dribbled out of my nostrils. I just had learned either something very odd about Estonindian men or something even stranger about Sesame Street. Neither Waldena nor her Praetorians saw any humor in it. I waited until I had sorted out breathing, drinking, and speaking again and nodded to them.

  “Orange,” she said, and again her pronunciation of my name was unnerving, “did you know my people and Snorri’s people, the entire Northern Indian race, had its origin right here in the coastal northeast of the American continent, uncountable millennia ago?”

  “Ayup.”

  “You know what brought us to the part of Europe that became the Northern Indies?”

  “You followed the whale roads,” I said, using Snorri’s oft-repeated kenning.

  Waldena smirked at her po-faced crew and said something in Estonindian that I presumed meant, “See, he’s not as dumb as he looks.”

  “But I imagine,” she said, back in English, “you didn’t know that the name of your island is in our national anthem.”

  She was right.

  “We don’t call it ‘Bismuth,’ of course. It’s the Wind’s Mouth, where we filled our sails for the journey.”

  One of her Muppets snickered. Waldena glowered at him and told me, “Children sometimes make a pun about farting when they recite those lines in the anthem.”

  “I thought Bismuth meant ‘Land Kissed Twice.’” I did. My mother had often told me the North American Indians called our island that because it was kissed by the River Bis, whose waters drained into the enormous gulf our island sat in, and by the ocean itself. And then she would kiss me, which I was not going to tell Waldena and her sulky bruisers.

  That cracked them up and cemented our animosity. Waldena’s voice took a tone of amiable colonialism. “Each culture has their origin myths. My crew members here, this is the first time they’ve been to your island; they aren’t sure what to make of our culture’s humble beginnings. What would you say if I told you a whale road led us back here?”

  I wasn’t sure if she were asking me a real question or setting me up for a Estonindian version of a ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ joke, so I said nothing.

  She gave me a harder look. “Do you know anyone else here who has heard the call of the whale?”

  Again, I said nothing. ‘I hear the call of the whale’ is the sort of thing someone might announce as they went to take a piss off the side of a boat. She kept her eyes on me; I heard a peristaltic rumble from my gut. It seemed as if she were genuinely fishing for an answer, so I said, “Mermaid?”

  Waldena looked perplexed. “You mean like in Denmark?”

  “No, I, I don’t…” I didn’t even know there were Danish mermaids. I had said it because it had occurred to me just then that it might be nice to look her in her glacier milk eyes and say ‘mermaid.’

  The topic badly needed changing, so I asked them if they liked the oysters.

  “Only when in North America,” said Waldena, answering for all of them.

  I drank my beer down, wondering why I merited a drink from a beautiful Estonindian who seemed to be confusing whale calls with last call at the Topsoil. I assumed she wanted to show her boys some local color, hence the oysters, beer, and me, the autochthon. Actually, I’m merely indigenous. My own raft of ancestors arrived here just a couple of hundred years ago. To justify the beer, I told them the legend about the largest lighthouse in the prehistoric Western Hemisphere, here on Bismuth, and how it could be seen from the White Mountains.

  It was hard to tell whether they were rapt, bored, or just didn’t speak English. Rapt seemed least likely.

  I heard Bob, the owner of the Topsoil, tell Cindy loudly, “You can go when ORANGE’S table is clear.”

  “I gotta go,” I told Waldena.

  “That must have been a magnificent, enormous structure to behold,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes just a little.

  “Yup,” was all I could manage.

  Bob must have shaken down the wait-staff for part of their tip money because the wad of cash he gave me was mostly fives and ones. Still, though, enough money to make a bulge in my pocket was something of a thrill. I was standing in the parking lot thinking I should have called home to check to see whether Rover was taking care of Mitchell when I heard a car horn. It was Waldena in a nice-looking Saab, which was a touch odd, since I’d never met anyone from the North Indies who would ever drive a Saab or Volvo—they’d been bickering with the countries of Scandinavia for eons. They probably didn’t like Ladas or Trabants either, but neither of those companies were doing much business these days.

  “Hey,” I said as I walked over.

  “You need a ride somewhere?”

  I most certainly did want a ride from Waldena. “Where’s your crew?” I asked her.

  “Back at the Inn. They are obsessed with the hot tub. It’s their first time. We only have saunas back home.”

  “I could use a ride.” I got in. I liked the Saab; most of the vehicles on Bismuth were janky unregistered pick-ups that reeked of fish water. “Where do you rent a Saab?”

  She didn’t answer. She’d been poking at a glossy little black slab that made me think of a tiny model of the monolith from 2001. “All I can get is visual voice mail. I hate the American networks.” She stowed the slab and lit a joint, dragged it, and passed it to me. I knew right off this was nothing like the kelpweed I’d been smoking with Ricky.

  “Shit,” I told her, meaning that I was really enjoying having my brain scrambled by a beautiful woman in a luxury car.

  “Indeed,” she said.

  Her car seemed as if it might have been hovering some off the road. Or the weed was counteracting gravity.

  “It’s Estonindian hydro. Most of it gets sold to Holland. We’ve been growing indoors since the war.”

&
nbsp; “Ayuh,” I answered, coughing, “the war.” We drove a little while and smoked. It finally occurred to me that I should have been giving Waldena directions to my house, since I knew where it was. I let the thought pass; I was concerned we’d get there before we finished smoking.

  “So,” she said, “your old friend Snorri is in town. How is he?”

  “I don’t know, older?” Actually, I didn’t know Snorri was around, I hadn’t seen his boat, the Honeypaws, since earlier this summer.

  “Did he introduce you to his new Korean friends?” “He has Korean friends?”

  Waldena stroked me lightly with one finger on my knee and took the roach from me. I had smoked most of it. “Yes, he does; I think you’ve met them, too.”

  I was exhausted and too stoned for my own good. I thought about my new drinking buddies, Ill John and Chosen, the Koreans. Then I thought about their Kalashnikov and decided not to mention them. Waldena’s wicked weed was like a Zamboni smoothing out the inside of my skull. My thoughts just couldn’t get much traction. I should have been able to figure out she wanted something from me other than my company. Instead I was trying to figure out if I wanted her to touch my knee again. I couldn’t tell whether I was experiencing lust or dread.

  “So how is fishing with Mr. Lucy?” she asked.

  I wondered if I should touch her knee.

  “Catch any big game?”

  I wondered if she were going to pass the roach back to me. It was going out. “Big lobster sometimes,” I said. “Hard way to make a living,” she said.

  “Got that right.”

  “But that’s not all you do.”

  “Yeah, the Topsoil sometimes.”

  “I mean you and Mr. Lucy and his son Donny.”

  “Nope,” I said and let it suffice, even though I wasn’t sure whether I was agreeing or denying. I had mostly smoked all the language out of my head.