I figured it was about time for a few answers. I set off for town, hoping to find the Wendy’s Mom and Mr. Lucy, if only to demonstrate to him that I was still breathing air. I would have been very pleased to find some dry pants. My jeans were chafing badly. The first thing I sought out was actually one of Bismuth’s great secrets—a fresh water spigot and hose down by the docks. We don’t tell tourists about it, partly so they won’t use it up, and partly so we could sell them water by the gallon. I took a long drink of water and ran it over my head, trying to clean out the blood and pond muck, along with all the psychic residue of the lampreys. I had a little dozy sit down on the docks, and then a little lie down.
By mid afternoon, I could bear to walk in my now merely damp jeans and sneakers. I scanned the harbor for the Wendy’s Mom again but didn’t see her. I’d pass through most of town as well as by the Lucy’s house by the time I made it home, so I started that way. When I got to the store, I saw Moira, who was sitting on a bench out front eating a popsicle. I waved to her.
Moira took a long drag off her popsicle and gave me a good stare.
“Grape?” I asked.
She showed me her purple tongue. “Mom says to bring you back when you show up.”
“Why?”
Moira’s popsicle was starting to slip from the stick. She expertly sucked the last of the color from it and tossed it in the wastebasket. “I don’t know. She’s angry or something.”
“Wait a second,” I told her and went in and bought a double-sticked grape on credit. I broke it apart and handed her half. We both removed the paper and threw it out. The first licks on a very frozen popsicle are tough—your tongue could cleave to it. We let them air a bit. “How’s school?” I asked.
“It’s summer.”
“I know, but, like, do you like it? What grade will you be in?”
“C’mon,” she said, and we started walking to the harbor. “Fifth.”
“You’re almost done, huh?”
“Two-thirds.”
I knew that girls her age think men my age are astonishingly stupid; I had little evidence to the contrary to offer, so I gave up the conversational gambits and concentrated on eating the popsicle before it went gooey on my hand. It was good. I hadn’t eaten since the Topsoil, the night before. Near the docks, we met a woman who waved to Moira and gave me a hard look.
“Moira, Honey, could I talk to you for a moment?” The woman and Moira stepped into a doorway and had a whisper. Then the woman gave me another hairy eyeball and left. Moira seemed happier.
“What was that?” I asked.
“She wanted to know if you were kidnapping me.” She smiled, her lips were purple. Walking with a grungy codger was one thing; eating popsicles with a bad boy was another.
“Being kidnapped sucks,” I told her.
“You could get kidnapped and chained naked to a rock by an evil prince and a sea monster would be coming to get you. But maybe Pegasus would rescue you if you were beautiful enough.” She seemed to savor the notion.
“Pegasus is never there when you need him.”
“Unicorns are really whales.”
“Whales aren’t really fish.”
“But people won’t believe them.”
“Unicorns?”
“No, the people who knew that unicorns were whales. I already knew that whales were mammals. Pinocchio and Jonah were both kidnapped by a whale. My Aunt Mini’s friend Snorri says his whales are too small to eat people. They eat kribble and they come when he calls them at supper. I go out on his boat you know. It’s called the Honeypaws and it’s named after his bear. Only it’s not his bear’s real name or his boat’s name either; those are secret names. Once me and Mom and Aunt Mini and him all went out. My aunt was yelling at him because he kept talking on his telephone. My mom said he was talking to whales. He wasn’t though. I could tell he was mostly texting. That’s supposed to be like his job, though, calling whales on the phone or something. Sometimes he cries when he talks about bears. It’s weird.” Her “weird” was an expansive one that implicated most adult behavior, present company especially included.
“Lookit what he gave me!” Moira took what I presumed to be a mobile phone from her little back pocket. It was an off-white rectangle with three fuzzy little stuffed animals hanging from it. Moira held the phone like a hypnotist with a watch. “They’re called ‘dongles.’ This one is a mammoth, this one is a raven, and this one is a polar bear. Here, but don’t use it.” She handed me the phone.
Her dongles were cute and well-made, considering. But what was interesting was that her phone bent like it was made of rubber. “Is it supposed to be like this?”
“Ayup and it’s waterproof too.”
I flexed it into a C-shape, then an S-shape. “That’s cool,” I said, handing it back to her.
“It’s got shape memory and it can remember anyone I call too. But right now it only calls my mom and Aunt Mini and probably Snorri. He gave me a big knife too, like a boat knife, but for girls, and with a sheath. My mom won’t let me have it.”
“That looks like your mom’s boat,” I said, pointing with my popsicle.
“How come you don’t have a job?”
“I have a mission instead.”
“What?”
“To find a package and to find out why other people want it.”
“What’s in the package?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do the other people?”
“I think so, but I don’ t really know.”
Moira stopped and thought it over. “Do the other people know where the package is?”
“They think I know where it is.”
“But you don’t even know what it is.”
“Precisely.”
“Why do you want the package?”
I stopped and thought it over. “I don’t want it. Or I guess I don’t. I don’t even know what it is. I guess I want to know why they think I know.”
“That’s a stupid mystery.”
“It’s a mission.”
“A stupid mission.”
“Don’t say ‘stupid.’”
“Do you like my mom?”
I couldn’t understand how Angie could wear the same gray Bismuth Yacht Club hoodie as the rest of us, yet make it look so soft and fetching. Maybe it was just because it was laundered. Or how her face could be so clean, with just the right amount of lipstick for an afternoon on Bismuth Harbor. Or her legs, so smooth and tan—the big sweatshirt made her legs seem that much more bare. “This is good coffee.” I told her, “How do you make it?”
“French press, dark roast, medium grind, no filter.”
“Much better than instant.”
“Orange, listen, you’re a good guy, I think. Smelly, skinny, strange, slow, but essentially decent.”
“You’re making me blush.”
“So why are you hanging around with those Koreans?”
Great, her too. I wondered why everyone seemed to know I was on a secret mission to the Polk, but nobody seemed to be aware of my recent detention in Ely Pond. That would have been the right time to be nosey. I was frustrated. “Listen, Angie. I’ve been shipwrecked, shanghaied, nearly drowned a few times, drugged, beaten unconscious, had lampreys flung at me, shot at, nearly drowned again, and I’ve missed a few meals, nights of sleep, and showers. And those are just the parts that don’t embarrass me. I’d like to know why. So far, apart from you, the Koreans are coming out of this as pretty likable. Maybe I’d like to write them a thank you letter for their hospitality.”
Angie rolled her eyes. “Well my sister says they’re gunning for you.”
“Gunning?”
“She says they say you stole a package from them.”
“Jesus, the fucking package. They gave me the package. They gave me beer. They gave me money. I didn’t steal anything. What’s Mineola got to do with this?”
“I don’t really know. She’s up to something. She says the Koreans told her that you’d be t
aking the long walk soon.”
“The long walk?”
“Till your hat floats.”
“I kind of liked Ill John and Whatshisname. How does your sister know them?”
“Something to do with her boyfriend.”
“Snorri? Shit.”
“You don’t like Snorri?” she asked.
“I like Snorri fine. I like every damn Finlindian. I even like their whales. Snorri’s some kind of wizard though. All those polar bears and runes and yoiking. And your sister’s a job of work, too.”
Angie leaned across the galley table. I thought maybe she was going to give me a kiss. She sniffed me instead. “I’m going out to her island tonight for dinner. You smell. Clean up and you can come with.”
“Why would I?”
“Because you want to know what’s going on. And you like following me around.”
That could have been an insult. I gave her my sad seal eyes.
She laughed. “I just want you to keep your hat on.”
“I’m not wearing one.”
“Maybe I’ll buy you one at the haberdasher.”
“Well maybe.…” Where could you go after “haberdasher”? It was a banter trump card. “I’ll be back, cleaner.”
“Come by at 5:30.”
On my way out, I passed Moira on the deck where she seemed to be staging a scene from the Spanish Inquisition with her Barbies. Ken was doomed.
CHAPTER TEN
Gaeity
Iwasn’t going to have time to walk home and then back to town, and I didn’t want to get stuck washing dishes at the Topsoil, so I used the public bathroom on the docks to wash up. Bismuth rented a cop every summer from off-island, and ever since he’d been told his cap might start floating if he kept trying to ticket cars from Bismuth’s motor pool of un-in-spectable vehicles, he’d taken to lurking around the public dock and bathroom. I felt a little bad for him. To shuck oysters is low, but to work for the town government here meant either high-minded volunteerism or taking a pitiful check from a bureaucracy that, in its isolation, had bipolar swings from plodding Ceausescu-era totalitarianism to Deadwood-style anarchy.
I was in my underpants, standing barefoot in the warm film of water that hadn’t drained yet from the bathroom’s concrete floor, having a sponge bath with the soap powder and easily melted brown paper towels when Officer Dewey came in to roust me.
“Sir, full body washing is not permitted here.”
“Sorry, I was just changing into my bathing suit,” I told him.
“No you’re not.”
I looked up at him, ready to argue that my JC Penny boxer briefs were indeed a bathing suit and imply that I was a man of leisure and not a local wastrel, when I had yet another terrible fright. This one wasn’t paranoia, though I imagine there’s a very long German word for it. I experienced withering self-pity by way of empathy. I saw myself through Officer Dewey’s eyes. He—a twenty-something prick with a crew cut and muscles, full of dim-witted thoughts of the mastery of his own potential—was looking at a nearly naked scrawny pariah who should have made something of himself, or at least found a way not to be such an obvious bum in a public place. Moments ago, I had been a twenty-something prick, albeit with hair and without muscles. In just seconds, decades passed and hosts of opportunities were pissed away.
“Sir. . . . ”
I crammed a handful of paper towels into my underpants and dried off my scrotum. “I’ll be on my way.”
His small act of cruelty was to stand there as I got dressed. I slunk past him in the doorway, ever mindful of the banality of uniformed evil and the necessity of not triggering a bully’s predatory instincts. I didn’t really have much of a way to be on—it was more of a wait to attend—so I meandered around the docks, occasionally bearing the baleful glare of Officer Dewey, who was probably trying to figure a way to have me exploded for being a suspected infernal device or just an unidentified substance.
Late that afternoon I met back up with Angie and Moira at the town docks to take a ride and pay a visit to Angie’s sister, Mineola Bombardier, on her island for supper. To the locals, it was simply Mineola’s Island. To the recreational summer boaters, it was taboo, and they learned to avoid it, like the Polk. On the maps, it was Gaiety, which everyone—locals and strangers—made an effort to avoid uttering. Gaiety is actually the abbreviation of a much longer Indian name that supposedly means “that island over there.” Before the Yankees arrived, Indians of these parts had a variety of names for islands. Their language could indicate complex shifts in derision and condescension based on degrees of rivalry and the current disposition of the speaker. Long after the Indians decamped, a sportsmen’s camp was built there for the elite of the New York City Jewish garment district merchants, and the name was contracted to Gaiety—to encourage them to frolic. They rode out the summers of Prohibition and the Depression on Gaiety. They made enough of a presence out here to sire a few kids with the local Yankee girls they employed as housekeepers and to ensure that a few Yiddishisms would still be in use today on Bismuth. By the time I was a kid, it was in ruins. The last time it had been inhabited was during World War II, when the federal government foreclosed on the camp and used it as a German POW facility.
Mineola Bombardier had bought it in the mid-1990s, flabbergasting and delighting the Bismuthians. For a local girl to get off-island and marry rich was an achievement in itself, but to come back and buy an entire island and then get rid of the husband—that was revolutionary. Very few islands are owned by actual islanders. We all loved Mineola, but from a distance. As far as I knew, she hadn’t stepped foot off of her island in years and allowed few visitors. She helped herself to as much privacy as the community could bear—it was a consensual act, after all, helping her mind her own business so well. To thwart straying tourists and pleasure boaters, Mineola hired various guys from Bismuth to orbit her island all day long; when a strange boat intruded into what she considered to be her territory, it was met first by a local lobsterman doing his best to act spooky and inbred. If the boat made it all the way to her bay, her own security force took over.
Despite her reclusiveness, her face and voice weren’t ever that far away. Gaeity, Mineola’s own island, was only a quick half hour from Bismuth and, fog permitting, usually within sight. Mineola had a curious and contradictory celebrity as a privacy pundit—her disembodied head appeared regularly via satellite on news and talk shows. She even had a syndicated column and something called a podcast, which had nothing to do with fishing. Privacy is a moot point for most of my fellow islanders. We pretend to mind our own business, but there’s no such thing as anonymity on such a small island. On the other hand, we are roundly ignored by most of the rest of the planet.
We liked to hear Mineola’s reifying homilies on modesty and drawing the curtains. Of late though, the gales of technical information and apocalyptic tone of her discourses had mostly just confused us. Our souls were in peril from birth, we all knew that well enough. Original sin and venality was our lot from the start. Toil and suffering was our purpose. If you tended your soul carefully enough, the toil would transcend the sin and a heaven-bound bunk was reserved for you. But, indeed, we venal sinners have some dominion over our souls here on Earth—for some of us, our souls were our one vendible commodity, the only important choice some of us might ever have. So how could our identities be stolen before we even got the chance to sell our souls, and, especially in the case of people like myself, why bother? What would happen to it? Would my identity wind up like someone’s pet? Would it be eaten? Coffled into a chain of virtual slaves?
Mineola Bombardier, Priestess of Privacy, had the answers, even if I couldn’t understand them. It was a fine evening for interisland visiting. I did feel a little princely accompanying Angie and her daughter on the valiant Angie Baby as it made for her sister’s sanctum. To be at the prow of a clean and decent boat and watch the waves part before me gave me a sense of purpose and destiny that was as exhilarating as it was false. But
I was also feeling as swallowed and waylaid as the Biblical Jonah. I liked this particular fish and the way it made room for me in its belly. I suspected strongly, however, that once I was vomited from this fish, I’d find I’d been in another, larger fish all along. The fish would probably keep getting bigger until I found I was within a leviathan indistinguishable from what I’d thought was my whole world.
From the harbor approach, Mineola’s island looked quaint—a weatherworn quaintness of abandonment and degradation that tourists expect from fishing communities here. But as we got closer, we saw that the ancient gray pilings and slouching docks belied an infrastructure of firm, unwormed wood and that the bracing beams that held the slanting shacks had been there from the start. It was camouflage, a movie-set version my own habitat.
Dominating Mineola’s little sound was another big tough-looking catcher boat, the Honeypaws. Unlike Waldena’s coldwater-black boat, this was white with rounder lines. Though it too had a harpoon gun mounted on the foredeck, its prow was built up with a brow of armor that made it look like it could butt its way through an iceberg. If Waldena’s boat was a lurking wolf, this was a lumbering bear. Like the Hammer Maiden, it could leap up onto hydrofoils and ski across the ocean’s surface. I could picture Snorri twirling a lasso on the foredeck as he rocketed between icebergs, rounding up his little dogies.
I knew this to be Snorri the Finlindian’s boat from his many visits to Bismuth. He was a nearly perennial summer visitor who set up camp at the Historical Society building to show rune stones and tell the story of how the ancient Bismuthians who became his Northern Indian ancestors voyaged the whale roads from here, across the Arctic, fought the Vikings, and settled the icy wastes of the North Indies on the European continent. His lengthy, edifying tales of grim forbearance and royal grudges quickly bored children and adults alike, but some left with a sense of ethnic pride and a deeper understanding of heavy metal album cover art. I liked him and had been curious about him since I was a kid. He seemed the same age these days as he had in my childhood—impossibly old, but not particularly fragile. He was actually hard to keep up with when we took walks on the island, which is something guys who live on boats are not usually that good at. I think my dad thought Snorri was a hippy, but I’m not sure Snorri even knew what a hippy was, and besides, my father could smell a hippy almost anywhere, even though they hadn’t really existed in decades.
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