SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  Snorri hadn’t been seen in these parts for awhile. I hoped he was well. Maybe Mineola had tamed him some. They were an odd pair. Mineola was a new kind of island captain who seemed like she lived at least several years in the future. Snorri seemed like he’d been to the future, but only because he’d lost track of time. I just couldn’t imagine Mini joining him on the beach to yoik whale calls.

  On the way over, Angie said they’d been getting pretty cozy together lately, and that last winter her sister had been to Fin-lindia on an ostensible business trip that she’d kept awfully mum about. Snorri was not a mum man, but he was cryptic. I figured that he might know something about his rival Waldena’s fixation on Mr. Lucy and the fuckity package—I’d try to fish something out of him and get myself out of hot water. And then into Angie and her rich sister’s good graces. It was a clever plan that involved two good-looking women. Foredoomed, of course. But I didn’t want to muse on that quite yet. As we neared the harbor I came to feel immodest as the Angie Baby’s figurehead, so I returned to the wheelhouse.

  “You don’t have to eat whale; I’m sure Aunt Mini will have something for you,” Angie was telling Moira.

  “I don’t want to drink any old milk either; I hate it.”

  “You don’t have to eat anything you don’t want to eat.”

  “Uncle Snorri smells like old milk. He smells like a wet goat.”

  “That’s not nice to say. Snorri says that old milk keeps him strong.”

  “It keeps him gross, and he won’t even say what it really is. Orange probably likes it.”

  Where does old milk come from? Snorri guards his secret needlessly. I pray he’ll never tell me. Native Bismuthians have strong stomachs thanks to natural selection (the seasick long ago starved to death) and the gastrointestinal calmative found in the freshwater springs that made our island inhabitable in the first place. Nevertheless I remain thoroughly untempted by old milk. We Bismuthians may consider a meal incomplete unless it’s served with a brick-like ship’s biscuit, but the food of the North Indies tends more toward endurance than store-bought survival rations. A race of people who, for centuries, went without any reasonable means of food-preservation produces a cuisine that dangles so far over the edge of rancidity, the rest of us no longer recognize it. The typical back story of an average Northern Indian dish begins with that which would have gone to the sled dogs. Then it is re-introduced into whatever bladder-like organ from whatever creature it once was. Bacterial agents are added to promote liquefaction over the long haul. Then whatever it is is sealed away someplace dank and forsaken and left to stew in its own juices. On some distant feast day it is disinterred, and the children run for their lives. Presumably, the day after the feast day, the survivors marry each other and the next generation of Northern Indians is conceived.

  “I like Yoo-hoo better,” I said. “I don’t think it comes from a mammal, though.”

  Moira said she’d had strawberry Yoo-hoo and it was OK.

  The three of us were trying not to think about old milk when a naval-sounding siren made us all jump.

  “I wish she wouldn’t do that. It’s not like we’re Vikings,” grumbled Angie.

  Scores of birds flapped loudly up from the small bay—every living creature on Mineola’s Island must have raced to their battle stations at the claxon. I went back on deck to ready the docking lines. At the pier, two of Mineola’s security men wearing dark blue Cordura windbreakers with “GAEITY” printed on the back in large yellow block letters caught the lines and tied us off to the cleats. I have always liked this about boating. The necessity of tying up a boat has made for a grace note of welcoming. No matter where one is, if someone is on the dock, he will help you tie up. Except for Vikings, who preferred grappling hooks.

  I think it was Moira who saved me from being frisked. I don’t think children can resist running down a dock. Nor can a parent resist telling them not to. I was just trying to ingratiate myself to Angie when I trotted after the wayward Moira. The guards shouted at me to halt and I sort of did, mostly out of confusion. I turned back to see the two men reaching under their wind-breakers for weapons and Angie right up in one of their faces. When in any kind of doubt, these kind of men mutter into their sleeves and stick a finger in one of their ears. This ritual action evidently calmed our two sentinels. A lifeguard would have just said “No running,” and been done with it.

  There was only room for four on the golf cart meant for transporting guests up to the house. I walked, while the ladies and the guards drove alongside me. I told them to go ahead, but I was told unaccompanied visitors were prohibited. On the way I stopped and gave my shoes a thorough retying just to let them find out how slow their cart could mosey. It wasn’t far, anyway— a couple of unnecessary switchbacks kept the house out of sight from the dock and gave us something to look forward to. The house itself was as low-profile as a mansion gets. It was dug right into the hillside, right into the granite that made up the island, actually. From the front, long narrow windows of dense, dark glass glared at us from below the frowning brow of a roof entirely covered by grass and shrubs. I followed the cart around the back and found the rear to be three stories tall, facing a beautiful but oddly flat meadow, which may have once been tennis courts.

  Mineola and Snorri were waiting around back for us. They pretended to be a little startled by our arrival. She hugged her sister and niece, leaving Snorri and I to shake hands.

  “Greetings and welcome to Gaiety, Orange.”

  “Snorri.”

  “It’s a delight to see you. How’s Rover?”

  Snorri’s love and respect for my big furry coon cat Rover forgave any of his skaldic excesses, at least as far as I was concerned. He knew her from when she and I used to live near the Historical Society and I’d come home a few times to find them having private colloquies on my front steps. They were both usually pretty cagey about their time together, but I was glad she had the old gent for a confidant and trusted them not to mock me too much.

  Once, Snorri divulged that Rover refused to believe in whales. Cats are generally equal parts hubris and curiosity. I suspected Rover of pulling Snorri’s leg—she has the power to ignore things into nonexistence, but to ignore a whale she would have had to get started good and early, long before there was even any evidence to dismiss. There was hardly a cat on Bismuth that didn’t come from an ancestral line of whaling cats. Coon cats from our parts had spotted blows throughout the Atlantic and Pacific from their perches in the rigging and done nothing about it. As much as they revered shredding up small animals, they rarely participated in the trying-out of a whale. I suspect that the Bismuthian breed of cats were of the opinion that all human endeavor was pure folly and their maintenance of plausible deniability when it came to whales was a form of signifying that belief.

  “She’s good—I hope. I haven’t been home in days to see her.”

  “Rover can take care of herself.”

  “Yeah, but she might not feel like it.”

  Snorri gave me a long look with bloodshot gray eyes. His breath was a bit rancid and he seemed not to have acquired his land legs yet. His long ponytail was going from steel to ash and his alarming eyebrows had gone snowy. “Ha!” he exclaimed, “Indeed. ‘Take care of yourself.’ I hate that. A stupid North American way to say goodbye. It’s an exile, is what it is. Enjoy your ice floe, old man.”

  It was a warm, breezy island evening. The sort of spell of weather that makes one forget entirely about the infinite winter. Hardly a single mosquito attended our plein air banquet. Mineola, or perhaps her invisible staff, had prepared a fine supper for us. We sat outside at a round table with a linen cloth; green bottles of white wine and sweet cider sweated in the center, surrounded by a wreath of nacreous blue mussel shells. We began with bowls of perfectly clear fish broth upon which collops of blubber first floated atop, then melted and spread into a savory layer. Moira was given a hot dog with a knife and fork. She knew she was being patronized, but was willing to suffe
r. Next we had a salad of warm poached fiddleheads braised with chunks of salt pork on a bed of toasted island grains. Instead of the traditional Bismuthian cold summer cod—cod, potatoes, onions, and ship’s crackers baked in evaporated milk and served cold in the summer, which I abhorred—we had slivers of whale sashimi with capers and toasted pine nuts on crispy bruschetta. It is actually illegal and genuinely impolite to eat a real summer meal on the islands without clams, so the steamers were no surprise, but the urchin roe/cedar vinaigrette in the mirpois was. Moira was delighted that French bread was served with the clams, and we were all perplexed by the foam that accompanied the baguette—we felt butterless and deprived, especially when sour cream was served with the new potatoes. The foam turned out to be a congealed froth of sweet mussels and seaweed. It was like an especially awful shake at McDonalds. Dessert was, as always, blueberry cobbler with a heavy dose of cardamom, a favorite spice of the Finlindians.

  Snorri was more than capable of epochal silence, but not when there was a captive audience. This evening, however, he seemed sulky, and he was hitting the old milk pretty hard. At first I think we were pleased not to have to abide a disquisition on the ancestral lineage of a particular herring or the travails of the ancients as they sought Hyperborea, but we were so accustomed to leaving half-hour long chunks of time free to pretend to listen that we found ourselves struggling a little to fill the gaps. Moira had already been in adult company for far too long. She was tired of listening politely to our self-important drivel. She knew the formula for mixed adult dinner conversation: don’t mention the other parent, try not to bargain too artlessly for better food and later bedtime, and don’t interrupt grownups as they prattle on about doctors and furniture. But she was a Bismuthian too, which meant she carried the genes to hold forth no matter who the audience was, nor how small they numbered. As well, she’d picked up some of Snorri’s bardic flourishes, which meant that she was learning that any moment in danger of passing into history unremarked could be enlivened with scraps of saga. She began to glow with the febrific heat of a pawky kid kept up too long in the presence of her boring elders.

  As the crickets chirred and the cobbler congealed, she broke the seal on her word hoard in the form of a story about an Arctic island south of Hyperborea called Archangel Danger and the family of miniature mammoths that lived in burrows in the snow near a hot spring. She went on at great length, only pausing long enough to warn us to continue listening. It would seem there was a girl mammoth, possibly a princess, who became very lost and was stalked by an Odin-like hunter with a spear and two pesky ravens. She was rescued by a polar bear who turned out to be a man with long black hair wearing a bearskin. Together they hiked and swam all the way to his land, where it was summer and he had a warm barn full of sweet hay for her to live in.

  When she finished, she told us the girl mammoth would live happily forever after in the world’s nicest barn and then looked each of us in the eye, as if daring us to contradict her. I could see white all the way around her pupils—I would have believed Angie if she told me her daughter had been possessed. Angie and Mini seemed as if they’d heard it all before, but Snorri seemed genuinely affected; tears welled in his eyes. He got up without saying anything and came and locked Moria in her chair with a bear hug for so long, she squirmed and gave her mom a panicked look.

  Snorri sorted himself out, rubbed his eyes and snuffled his nose. He announced that it was the best story he had ever heard, a real Finlindian yarn, and said he was going to call it Moira’s Edda. Then he stumbled a bit as he circled the table back to his chair. Propping himself on the chair’s back, he told us he was off to prepare the sauna. He grabbed his tankard of old milk and swerved his way back into the house. One of Mineola’s minions kept him from walking through the pane of the sliding glass door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Sauna

  Many of the structures at Mineola’s compound looked as if they would survive a bomb blast and defy any sort of scrying. From her patio I could see that one outbuilding’s lavish durability surpassed them all—the smoke sauna. Built from the prow of an ancient whaler, it was topped by a figurehead of a merdeer, a sort of mermaid with antlers, a creature from North Indian myth. It looked like a ship was cresting straight up from the ground, seized in mid-leap. Snorri had slunk off shortly after Moira’s hitherto-unknown chapter of the Northern Indian saga to supervise the smoke-letting and scrubbing stage of the sauna’s preparation.

  The ancients of our parts brought their smoke lodges across the Arctic to the North Indies, if the likes of Waldena and Snorri were to be believed. It’s easy to imagine their boats afire, sinking into the icy sea and a bunch of very warm Indians thinking that the frigid brine was a nice, cleansing relief to their superheated shipboard saunas as they drowned. A Roman general who had pushed far enough north to see the North Indian Sea wrote about flaming long boats in his memoirs. Some Northern Indian scholars have suggested that he had seen out-of-control sauna boats and not the Viking funeral ships that the Norse peoples would have us believe. Not many Bismuthians or other islanders of Yankee stock used saunas. Most of us were Christians with an apocalyptic bent, and that meant we were positive that witchcraft and licentiousness occurred within the sweat rooms. Stories go that the nasty old Puritans loved to trap Indians in their sweat lodges and let them bake to death. Saunas were enjoying a bit of a revival though, now that North Americans realized that the only thing going on in the sweat lodges were Northern Indians on the verge of heat stroke droning endless genealogical chants about their whale relations.

  Even before she hooked up with Snorri, Mineola had been interested in the ways and lore of the ancients, and in the way of aging people all over the world, the two of them found enthusiastic common cause in easing the aches in their joints and stewing in their own juices for vague but encompassing therapeutic reasons. I had never stepped foot in a sauna, mostly because I’d never been invited, but the notions of sweating, endurance, and purification sounded much more like work to me than relaxation, so I’d always been wary of them.

  “Snorri is making sure my staff have scrubbed away all the soot and that the sauna tea has been brewed correctly. He’ll be back when he’s sure the rocks are hot enough,” Mineola told us. She added that we’d soon be joining him.

  I told her that Snorri didn’t seem as if he’d quite acquired his land legs yet, and Mini explained he hadn’t had them for a while now and that he was sorely testing her patience. “Something happened to Snorri many years ago that just broke him. He’s spent the rest of his life trying to be a new man, but there’s a big black bear that still follows him.”

  “Literally?” I asked.

  “Yes. Or no, imaginary. Well, if Snorri says he sees a black bear in the corner of the room, I believe he sees a black bear, but I don’t believe there is a black bear.”

  “I’ve seen those bears, those corners.”

  “Actually, I don’t think you have. Snorri’s bear was or maybe still is real. He was very close to it. Very. Before he was a whale man, he was a bear man. He had a whole other life in the forest with that bear.”

  Mineola had real compassion for Snorri. I couldn’t think of anyone else who would have tolerated bearlovesickness as well as she. I asked if his bearbride was the namesake for his boat, Honeypaws.

  “I think so. I’m not positive. Snorri can be slippery with names and dates. I don’t know how to describe his relationship with that bear. She was, I guess, like his pet, his daughter, his wife, and his foxhole buddy. He’s got melancholia like a trick knee and when times get tough, he starts to maunder on about her. They broke up or she died—I don’t really know, but it was something traumatic. He tells stories about her, but only when he’s drunk and maudlin, and the stories tend to be vague and contradictory. I think it all happened years ago, but sometimes it’s just yesterday to him. If it weren’t for his work with the Whale Council, I doubt he would have survived.

  “But, anyway, he’s usually pretty buo
yant; you caught him on a dark swing. I think something set him off recently. He was fine most of this summer. He’d been busy chasing his whales around the North Atlantic, stopping here now and then. Maybe it was Waldena. The two of them are supposed to be working together, but they can’t even bear to be on the same boat, never mind cooperate.”

  “She’s kind of a bitch,” I said, still sore from our encounter.

  “More of a witch, according to Snorri.”

  “A witch?”

  “She’s a priestess of a Thor cult that goes flying around the boreal forests and swimming among the icebergs, or so he says. I’ve heard she’s been giving you swimming lessons.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You and I are going to have a conversation soon,” Mini said sternly. “Before you leave Gaeity, you’re going to tell me what’s going on between the two of you.”

  “I’ll tell you right now. She’s nuts.”