SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  I didn’t live too far from town, but I wasn’t going to complain we were taking the very long way. We wound up at Oar Point, a sort of spit of land that surrounded Ely Pond, the lamprey breeding lagoon down at the ass-end of the island. She parked.

  “Let’s stretch our legs,” Waldena said with a sensuous, dozy tone.

  We got out and strolled slowly along the sand. I felt like I could pour over the landscape like the lunar light. Waldena said my name again in her lovely precise way. I turned to her, ready to swaddle her in lustrous touch and replied simply, “Waldena.” It may have been just the moonlight, but I thought I saw a tiny apology in her eyes as she slugged me in the temple with something an awful lot harder than her fist. A black pelagic abyss opened up before me; I was going to dive right in, but I belly-flopped in the puddle next to it, instead.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Special Terror in Ely Pond

  Iam a runny thirty-second egg in a hard-boiled world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sap, a fedora, or been called a bright boy. But there’s one thing I know how to do and that’s wake up with a fulminating headache. A bad back makes you realize that every single nerve in your body is connected to your spine; a bad head, though, puts you in direct connection with the cosmos. Every noise, every photon, every speck of stellar dust strikes the brain’s gray pulp like a war hammer. I knew from experience that my best defense in this sort of situation was to die as quickly as possible. I fell back on Plan B, which was to wait until the pain subsided just enough to begin whimpering and dry heaving.

  After an hourless while, I began to add little pieces of the outside world to my interior painscape. I was horizontal, which was the best news so far. Something still felt wrong with gravity. I was pretty sure the Tabasco sauce in my eyes was sunlight. It was daylight again. I must have spent the night here. I’d been bashed in the head with, what, brass knuckles? Pistol-whipped?

  “Orange!” I heard. That was me. Someone had correctly identified me. Good for them. Maybe later I’d wave to them and congratulate them on their perspicacity. I heard my name again. It was Waldena’s formerly sexy orthoepically precise diction. “O-range!” She wanted my attention. I didn’t have any. There were a few more “Oranges” and then a nasty blow to my back. I prepared an executive summary of my situation: My arms are tied behind my back. I am lying on the bottom of a little wooden boat. The boat is floating. I’ve just been hit by a rock. Risking everything, I peeked over the gunwale. I was in a rowboat, anchored in the middle of Ely Pond, the lamprey breeding lagoon. Waldena stood on the shore. She threw another rock at me.

  “Good morning, Orange.”

  “Guh,” I uttered.

  “What?”

  What. I could say that too. Probably. I gave it a try. “What?” My head didn’t explode. I could talk. Too bad; an explosion would have ended my headache quickly.

  “That is all you have to say for yourself?”

  I thought about it. Yes. That was the entirety of what I had to say for myself. But Waldena had good aim and an infinite supply of rocks. A few hit the rowboat and another hit me in the shoulder. I was further inspired to say, “Ow! Stop it!”

  “Hearken! Nearly a complete sentence!”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Ah, Orange is back with us. You would perhaps like to know where you are, how you got here? If only you had been so verbally expressive last night. You’re in Ely Pond, which I suspect you already know. I put you there so you would stop fucking around and start giving me some straight answers.”

  I honestly didn’t even know what the questions had been. Evidently my answers came pre-bent. I felt sulky. “You hit me.”

  “Clever man. You know, last night, I was going to try some softer interrogation tactics. If you had just washed yourself up a bit after you got off work. The car reeked like garbage and bleach. I couldn’t tell whether you were being evasive or stupid. Frankly, I lost the will and patience to try and coax you and didn’t want to smell you or listen to you for the rest of the night. I got back to the inn much too late and barely slept three hours last night, thanks to you. And now its dawn and I’m back here again and I am even less patient. So let’s save ourselves a few hours and you tell me exactly what I want to know. Any questions of your own before we start?”

  “Is Elmö Cookie Monster’s son?” Another rock. Christ, she had a good arm.

  “Let’s start with the last time you spoke to a Korean.”

  “I don’t speak Korean.”

  Waldena picked up another rock. A nice skimmer. It skipped three times before it hit the rowboat. “What were you and the Lucys doing with the Koreans on the Polk?”

  “We were selling seagum to them.”

  “Seagum?”

  “It’s the specialty of our island; it’s derived from an ocean-borne organism with the consistency of.…”

  “Shut up!” she yelled, raising the pistol. “Just tell me what the Koreans gave you.”

  I could guess easily that she would have shot me if I had said beer. “Money,” I said. “I don’t know how much.” She appeared to be doing some math in her head. I knew how hard that could be; I didn’t elaborate, so she could concentrate.

  “What else?”

  I thought about it. Money, then beer, then whiskey. Oh yeah, “A package.”

  “Money and a package,” she said. “What was in the package?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I put it in the bag with the money.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “I gave it to Mr. Lucy.”

  “So where’s Snorri?”

  “How should I know?”

  She reached down for another stone.

  “No really, he hasn’t been here all summer!”

  “Of course he has,” she said. “I saw him and Honeypaws a couple days ago.”

  “So where is he?” I asked. “What did the Koreans give you? Don’t make me force you to tell me!”

  “Orange! You are supposed to be telling me!” she said.

  “I think I have a concussion.”

  Poor Waldena. She looked aggravated. “Let’s try this: Where do I find Mr. Lucy?”

  “Probably on his boat,” I told her, “the Wendy’s Mom.”

  Waldena dropped her stone. “You people, even your boats are stupid.” She put her pistol in her belt, took a phone from her pocket and photographed me with it, then walked to the Saab.

  “Hey, wait!” I called.

  “No, you wait.” She got in the car and drove away.

  I tell people the thing I fear most in this world is Clamato. I say I’m deathly afraid of being tied to a chair, having a funnel crammed in my mouth, and being forced to drink Clamato. Clam broth and tomato juice cocktail. It is a preposterously unlikable beverage. And astonishingly real—it’s owned by a real multinational, has a marketing campaign, comes in juice boxes for kids, and cans of energy drink blend for God knows who. It makes as much sense to me as a nice warm glass of mayonnaise and ipecac before bed. It has the musky tang of menstrual blood; it looks like the product of a severe ulcer. Granted, chowder—clams boiled in evaporated milk—is disgusting too, but at least it was born from attempts to survive the winter. Clamato has somehow found its way to being a luxury product. It was brought to Bismuth by demented yachters who considered it an ingredient for boat drinks and is now stocked year-round at the store, presumably for the island’s emetophiliacs.

  I tell people this because it is one of the most horrid things I can imagine passing through my lips. Plenty of horrid things have passed through my lips in both directions, though. And my secret is that I think I could bear it. To let the world know that Clamato is kryptonite is something like telling an American interrogator that your innermost fear is to be scandalized by a sexy blond American woman in a miniskirt. While this may cause genuine acute anxiety, one suspects that the detainee could imagine worse fates.

  On an island, the very epitome of
a closed society, one guards one’s vulnerabilities. One’s weaknesses are divined and exploited from birth by fellow islanders. There’s no point in trying to hide my laziness and general dissipation—my supposed moral turpitude and personal lack of accomplishment are qualities that have been described to me at substantial length throughout my life. But irrational fears that put one in mortal terror of having one’s intestines unravel out of one’s belly button are best kept private. Islanders, not surprisingly, tend to stultifying paranoias like agoraphobia. This type of fear is a sort of psychic blubber that insulates one against personal vagaries and environmental instabilities. One feels safe at home. Safety becomes the femme fatale that seduces with extravagant notions of preparedness and reasonableness. Until one has not left the house in years and has lost the ability to eat anything except Campbell’s Chicken and Stars Soup.

  This is not my affliction. Mine writhes right here, in Ely Pond. I did not become fully aware of where my pitiful little boat was anchored until Waldena had left. Initially, I was smug, amused at her underestimation of my ability to sit in a boat and do nothing. Then, without histrionics—not even an “oh my dear”—the cartilage in my knees melted and I fainted. Ely Pond is a lamprey breeding lagoon, as I knew quite well already, but had somehow managed not to mention to myself until now.

  Lampreys have no lips, no jaws, no opposable fins, no scales, no decency. They are covered in toxic slime. They are self-propelled intestinal tubes with a suction cup mouth rimmed with needle teeth. They attach themselves to anything lacking sufficient appendages to pluck them off. They suck the life out of their prey with a rasp-like tongue that shreds away the prey’s skin and pulps the flesh with an anticoagulant chemical.

  I recovered consciousness but not rationality quickly. My heart had simply decided to keep all its blood to itself for the time being. Wisely so, too. My first instinct was to huddle down on the floor of the boat—to hide. But the only effect of this was to bring me that much closer to the lampreys. I tried briefly to hover above the boat. I decided my best survival strategy was to sit quietly and motionlessly on the bench and try to convince my internal organs to come back to work. Eventually, I summoned up the courage to peer into the water. Oh there were lampreys. Oh, so many of them. Whatever they ate there in the pond, there wasn’t enough of it. I could see several of the creatures cannibalizing one another. Like the innards of a gutted mammothly corpulent sea pig spilling endlessly from its slit belly, the lampreys slid over each other in foul gooey loops. I puked, of course. Several slued up to feed on the slumgullion. My arms were tied at the wrists and elbows, which made paddling with them even more out of the question. The anchor line was evidently too short to allow the boat to drift to shore. My hair felt matted, probably from dried blood. I tried not to let the lampreys see my injury.

  Ely Pond isn’t much of a pond; in fact it’s actually a shallow crater. About a hundred years ago a humpback carcass had washed ashore here. Several hundred years ago that would have been a bonanza for the islanders, but by the early twentieth century, it was a massive, reeking, civic conundrum. The Bismuthians of that era decided to solve the problem with modern science, which, for them, meant a liberal application of dynamite. Every permanent resident of this island has their own version of what a truly horrible idea it was to blow up the whale, but back then, exploding animals still seemed progressive and clever. Ely Pond is the blast crater from the exploded whale. For nearly a generation, locals avoided that stinking, sulfurous marsh thanks to the whale stew that had been created. Even now it’s not hard to find bone fragments in the piss oak and poison sumac.

  Many years later, an enterprising islander laid claim to the pond and began to set up an oyster-ranching operation. As he was clearing the muck from the pond, he was daunted and disgusted by the number of lamprey that inhabited it. They had either arrived with the whale or shortly thereafter, to feed off it and the other animals it attracted. Each one he tried to haul out struggled like a fire hose. If he tossed it ashore to die, it slithered back to the pool—their coatings of mucous function like dive suits in reverse and they can survive out of the water for much too long. Holding them by the tail and whipping their heads against a rock didn’t help much either. Brainless and skull-less, they were very slow to perish. It seemed the pond suited them very well. Instead of having to find the continental swamps and rivers they were born in, they made a shorter and safer trip to this pool, where they could breed in safe harbor. It took many more years for someone to figure out how to make a profit off of this squirming hell mouth by selling its contents overseas, where people have strange and perverse tastes.

  I sat in the rowboat most of the day. It was character-building. My plan was simple: sit there and get sunburned until something happened. Don’t rock the boat. I was deeply engaged in carrying out my plan when I spotted the Saab’s return.

  Waldena, looking quite more cross, yelled, “Mr. Lucy says you’re hard to drown!”

  “Well, I try.”

  “If I understood him correctly—which is very difficult, you know—he does not care in the least if you never take another

  breath.”

  “Why would he?” I asked, unsurprised.

  “I showed him your picture and told him that if he doesn’t give me the package, you wouldn’t come back from this little fishing trip alive.”

  “So he didn’t give you the package?”

  “He said you have it, Orange.”

  “I don’t even know what it is.”

  “That’s what they all say,” she told me.

  “Listen, Waldena, I don’t know what the package is; I don’t know where it is; I’m wicked thirsty, and I don’t think I can deal with the lampreys much longer.”

  “If you don’t know where it is, and Mr. Lucy doesn’t know, what do you suggest I do, Orange?”

  “You should torture Donny Lucy. You’d enjoy it. He’s a good victim.”

  “And what would Donny Lucy know about this?”

  “Nothing, probably.”

  “I think I will keep working on you, Orange. Let’s be perfectly clear. I want that package in my hands before I see Snorri again. I do not want that man counting coup on me before I am done with him.”

  “What’s counting coup?”

  “As you Americans might say, it is a way to take the piss out of someone who deserves it.”

  Waldena picked up a boat hook from the side of the pond and used it to stir the water around. When she brought the hook up, there was a lamprey wrapped around it. “Catch!” she shouted, and flung it toward me. It missed. Nonetheless, I started to feel peaked again.

  “I don’t know anything!” I shouted.

  “Did you know,” she asked, stirring the pond casually with the hook, as if we were having a chat over a cappuccino, “that two English kings died from lamprey poisoning?”

  I mulled this over. “They’re not venomous or poisonous,” I told her with the grave authority of a paranoiac.

  “Overindulgence, Orange. They ate too many lamprey pies.” She must have seen the queasiness win out over my feeble stoicism and took the advantage. “That’s right, pies. Lampreys preserved in gelatin, floating, quivering there, as if they were still alive. You know how gelatin is made, of course, by boiling down horse hooves.”

  She got what she wanted. The thought of eating enough lamprey pie to kill a fat English king sent me into conniption. As I sputtered, she brought up another lamprey and tossed it at me. I could feel a scream of terror mounting within me. It was going to be a scream in a tonic register I had not achieved since before puberty. Only the jaw-fusing paralysis of fear saved me from complete demasculinization.

  “Why don’t you save me all this fish flinging and tell me about the package?” She could sense her enhanced interrogation tactics were failing her. I was losing my ability to speak. Out came the pistol again. “Do you know who Vedius Pollio was, Orange?

  I shook my head.

  “He was an ancient Roman senator
who loved to eat fresh seafood and to torture his slaves. His villa was right on the water, and he kept a special pool filled with his favorite food. Lampreys. He kept the biggest and oldest of them as pets. They would wriggle to the surface when he called them, and he would decapitate a mouse and squeeze the blood and guts right into their mouths. Some grew as long and thick as your leg. But he wasn’t always so tender. One night, when Caesar Augustus was dining with him, a servant dropped a goblet and broke it. Vedius Pollio had the slave’s arms and legs bound and dumped him in the pool, to be eaten alive in the most horrifying manner imaginable. You know that they like to latch on where there’s already an orifice, right? The anus, the eyeballs, and so on.” She raised the pistol. “Where’s the package, Orange?”

  I was ready for the coup de grâce. I knew I could bear being eaten alive by lampreys if I was clean dead first. All I could do was stare at her and twitch. Waldena sighed theatrically and fired the gun several times. I remained alive and unshot. The dinghy, however, had a nice series of holes in the side just below the waterline. She waved to me and drove off. As the water surged into to the boat, I let my scream loose.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mission Statement

  Whenever Tarzan is being chased into a river full of alligators, he simply scampers across their backs, sometimes even apologizing to them. This would be the likely manner in which I escaped the sinking rowboat— skipping across the mucousy backs of the largest of the man-eating lampreys. I’m not positive that’s how it happened. I simply cannot remember a moment of my escape. I was soaked though, which detracted from the lamprey-skipping theory. I may have just walked, since the pond isn’t actually that deep. Regardless, it was a superhuman act that I am either too modest or too astonished to recall.

  I sat on the bank of the pond, reassembling my faculties. I promised the lampreys that I’d return someday with enough dynamite to recreate the big bang that began their universe. I considered the natures of justice and retribution, and how I was unlikely to ever obtain them. Then I considered the nature of being stuck in the swamp end of the island with my arms bound. At first I thought I’d have to trudge all the way back to town with my elbows and wrists tied behind my back. All the beach rocks I could find were too smooth. Eventually I found I could saw the rope on the edge of a quarried granite block that was marking the edge of the parking spots near the pond. Waldena hadn’t actually knotted the loops of rope around my elbow, so that wasn’t too bad. I think maybe I was supposed to be able to get loose.