SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  “What fascinates Chosen and I is that so many of the sea paintings of your region after the American Civil War show all these empty boats or individuals adrifting. Yet the most exciting painting, which we look forward to seeing one day at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, Massachusetts, on the continent, is Copley’s dramatic Watson and the Shark. What happened during the period since it was painted during the American Revolutionary War and when these painters began depicting lost moody boats and castaways?”

  “What guide books do you guys read in Korea that includes art criticism?”

  Chosen smiled. Ill John said, “None, but we might write one. This whole region has a fascinating aesthetic history, even if it is now.…”

  “Rundown,” said Chosen for him.

  Rundown was the very word for Mr. Lucy’s shed. “Rundown, no shit. Listen, Ill John, your dad knew Mr. Lucy during the war?”

  “Yes. They met in a naval rescue.”

  “Is it true about the whale? Who was on it?”

  “What whale?”

  I began to explain the story Mr. Lucy had told me in the shed about the submarine and the whale, but then my instincts caught up to me. I had long since stopped believing or disbelieving anything Mr. Lucy, and frankly most of my elders, told me, since the island is essentially a corroboration-free zone. One does not have to apply to a mainland agency to get a poetic license, though they do have to be renewed frequently. Mr. Lucy was probably just keeping his current when he told me about the Yankee Circumciser.

  “Storytelling is a very important tradition on your island, innit,” said Ill John.

  His “innit” was an attempt to use Indian dialect. “Yankees don’t say ‘innit.’ Only Indians—Native Americans, not Northern Indians.”

  “Ah, but we are not Yankees. You have forgotten that visitors do not have the same cultural prohibitions that natives follow.”

  I didn’t have anything nice to say, so I ate a fried clam.

  Chosen asked, “It is part of your culture, though, storytelling? We admire it. I have read a great deal about the supernatural storytelling traditions of northeast coastal Americans. We find speech hard to induce from your neighbors, but also we find that their stories continue for great durations and contain hidden barbs. And also, the elderly of your island are especially difficult to understand, even if they are storytelling at length.”

  “What can I say? We have a lot of time to kill. And bad reception, too.”

  “Maybe we can help with that,” said Ill John. “Killing time? OK, good luck.” They didn’t realize they were in the presence of a master. I’d killed more time than I’d lived through. I’d killed entire histories. My life was a shooting gallery of time.

  “No, reception.”

  “Oh. I gotta dish now, anyway,” I said. “For your telephone?”

  “No, TV.”

  “Why are these called Clam Fritters, and not Clam Dumplings? Are they good in soup?” asked Chosen, holding what we in the Topsoil Kitchen had always called a Clam McNugget.

  “I dunno.”

  “Would you like to eat it?”

  “Sure.” I took it from him, and as I ate it, I began to feel like an ape in a zoo, taking a banana from a visitor.

  “Would you like to tell us an island story? We would be curious to hear it,” said Chosen.

  “No matter how true it is,” said Ill John.

  Their interest in paintings of people falling overboard and the forlorn boats of yesteryear reminded me of the dory races that had lasted here on Bismuth even until my youth. Though by my time they had devolved into drunken scrummages, the dory races were once an important competition between the tribes, families, guilds, sects, and factions of our island. It was a sort of combination of Northwest American potlatch ceremonies and a life boat drill—a way of bleeding your opponents dry by exsanguinating yourself first. On the first Sunday in May, Bismuthians gathered to cripple and sink each other’s boats with generosity. Each crew in this regatta would be obliged to carry their dory full of gifts from other crews across the island, launch it, and then row it back into the harbor. If they made it back to the docks, they’d get to keep the gifts in the dory. You couldn’t just give another crew a boat full of rocks, since the quality and extravagance of your gifts signified the status of your crew, just as much as your own crew’s ability to haul the goods home.

  A few decades ago, the Quakers had dominated the dory races for many years. Their chapel still bears evidence of their supremacy. Since many of the more durable gifts included sacred icons, idols, statuary, and even relics, the Quaker Chapel had become a museum of pantheism. Finlindian ursaphernalia, a birch bark canoe, a vast unthrowable spear made of horn named “Lay It in Your Lap!” from the Estonindians, a right whale skull, and the thigh bone of the ancient giant, Glooskap, from the American Indians hung from the rafters. Along the walls stood a statue of the walkingfish god of the Dagon, stitched from hides and skins unrecognized by Bismuthian lay-scholars, a cairn of holy sauna-stones, a suit of lacquered horseshoe crab armor, the island’s first internal combustion engine, a totem pole of famous Northeast Yankee writers, a narwhal pizzle, and an Egyptian sphinx made by the island’s Masonic order.

  As a kid, I found myself in the Quaker Chapel fairly often, and as we all sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” I enjoyed musing on one of the more modest bits of booty—on a shelf was a seemingly empty bluish Ball jar. It was said to contain all the greatest treasures of the tiny people of Bismuth, whose puny boats never stood the slightest chance in the dory races, yet who bravely and stupidly entered every year.

  The minister there told us kids that the races had ended because the crews had become too vain. They had gilded and decorated their boats so lavishly that they didn’t want to sully them any longer by participating in the spectacle. So instead, they rowed them to the great waterfall at the edge of the ocean and pushed them off into space.

  I’ve since learned that a rivalry between the Yankee Quakers and the Portuguese Catholics had ruined the whole thing. One year, the Portuguese gave the Quakers what they said was their most sacred statue, an eight-foot tall figure of St. Cephalus, carved from native granite by a Portuguese sailor blinded in a flying-fish attack. St. Cephalus was one of the more deformed saints, who performed miracles even though he was debilitated by an enormous head and tentacular-like dewlaps.

  The Quakers managed to portage the huge idol in their dory across the island but the top-heavy saint sank the boat just off shore, killing two of the Quaker rowers. Divers still visit the statue today. The Portuguese were horrified by the deaths of the Quakers and, ever since then, feasted the Quakers with paella teeming with squid, octopus, and cuttlefish every year on the anniversary of the race.

  The caption on the wall of sepia photographs in the Historical Society building called them the “Dories of Yore.” This was the phrase in my mind as Ill John considered the empty boats and the collective depressed psyche of Northeast islanders in the mid-nineteenth century.

  I told my Korean interlocutors that I didn’t know any stories, and anyways I wasn’t in the mood.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Twelve Pack and the Lucky Lady

  I’m not sure I had ever killed an entire afternoon in a car going nowhere before. At least food was served. By the time it started getting cool and breezy, I had tired of playing an immobile tour guide for Ill John and Chosen. Plus I was jangly and a little green at the gills from drinking their coffees and eating their fried clams. While they patiently observed Mr. Lucy’s house, I refined my mission: Go home and be done with this business. Pet my TV. Watch my cat. I told the Koreans so, and Ill John said that he wasn’t yet ready to pull up his stakeout. I bid them happy hunting and made my way back downtown, hoping to catch a ride back to my place.

  I stopped into the store to use the bathroom and therein hatched a plan that would lead directly to personal fulfillment: Buy a twelve-pack of nice regionally brewed beer and a pack of cigarettes. Give bottle n
umber one to whomever gave me a ride home; I’d drink number two along with him or her, preferably her. By bottle number four, I would be Orange, Laird of Bismuth. By six, I’d be ready to solve the quandary that most plagues members of the leisure class—shall I sleep on the couch or go upstairs to bed? An excellent aspect of this plan was that there would be more beer for tomorrow.

  The reason that this required a plan and not a mere purchase is that I didn’t have any money on me, which is why I didn’t plan to buy cheap cans of ‘gansett—shoot the moon, I figured. I can’t steal from the store; its existence is tenuous and we were all engaged in a silent conspiracy of good will to convince the owners to keep it open throughout the winter. I could have walked out of the store with just about anything else I wanted on credit, but the owners forbade all the good stuff like beer and cigs unless actual cash was surrendered.

  I waved to Donna at the register as I walked out, already feeling nostalgic for my plan, which, though simple and well considered, remained an impossibility. I met Ricky, the kid who ran the Topsoil tender, coming in. He had money, he had to. He got more tips than most anyone else on the island. And he was friendly and sympathetic to most endeavors that included drugs or alcohol. And he was probably legal too. I described my plan to him, emphasizing the immediacy with which I would remunerate him, as well as the nice cold beer I would immediately render him upon receipt of the twelve pack.

  Ricky concurred that this was a fine plan and even went so far as to go into the store to buy the beer, instead of just loaning me the money. When he got out, he took a bottle of the nice stuff from the case, popped the top with the opener on his key chain and handed it to me. “On the house,” he said. I had a long smug pull before it occurred to me that Ricky had modified my plan and that now he had eleven beers, a pack of smokes, and I only had one beer and it was half gone.

  Donna banged on the inside of the store’s door and told us to beat it. Ricky asked me if I wanted to smoke some bowls. I allowed that might be something worth doing, though I should probably have gone home.

  “Actually,” Ricky said, “I gotta get back to work. You want to just smoke on the tender?”

  I also allowed that although I ought to go home, I could probably bear to watch Ricky work as long as I did not have to remain sober, nor work myself. It would be easier on me, I cautioned him, if he also did not strain himself.

  Bob, the owner of the Topsoil, did not share this opinion. When we got back to the dock where the tender was tied, someone must have ratted Ricky out for dereliction of duty, since Bob was on the radio ranting almost the moment Ricky turned it on. Ricky was politely contrite in a way that only well-bred offislanders can manage. He told me he, himself would open the floodgate of the dinner rush and that within a couple hours Mrs. Barrow, the ancient waitress who had worked there since before food was invented, would be radioing on the sly to ask him to bring in the tourists more slowly, so things would be less frantic on the floor.

  There were actually worse ways to kill an evening. I don’t think drinking with my cat would have been an improvement, though I really should have started home earlier that day. I held the boat steady a dozen or so times as veiny-legged, knobby-kneed geezers in pastel shorts clambered down their yachts’ ladders onto our taxi. The worst was a return trip where Ricky and I had to play hospital orderlies to get a hostile yachtsman flushed with sunburn and cocktails back up his ladder. But even then, his wife gave us a twenty. It was a nice switch for me. Usually I lost dignity and money. Here, they lost dignity and I got paid.

  It was around eleven and we were on the last pair of beers and idling out on the far end of the harbor when Ricky got a cell phone call. He turned his back to me and hunched over the outboard motor to give himself a sense of privacy. I could hear him quickly assenting to several things. When he finished I asked him how he’d found a new phone on the island to replace the one he’d dropped overboard.

  “Look, dude, it’s like this,” he said with quiet urgency, “she gave me this phone. She calls, I come.”

  “Who? And don’t call me dude.”

  “I. . . I don’t even want to talk about her. But I have to go now.”

  “OK but can you drop me down the town docks instead of the Topsoil? It’ll be easier for me to find a ride there.”

  “I mean I have to go now. There’s. . . a window.”

  “A fuckin’ back door, I bet. Who is she?”

  Ricky looked concerned, spooked almost. Determined, though. Little Ricky had found himself a Mrs. Robinson he couldn’t quite handle, but he was definitely going to try—again. Or so I presumed.

  “I got an idea,” he said. “That’s Bob’s boat, the Lucky Lady. I’ve got the key to the hatch. He’s not going to sleep out there tonight, especially if I’ve got the tender.”

  “So?”

  “So you could crash there and I can come pick you up after.”

  “After?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When’s that?” I was dubious.

  “I could leave you at the breakwater.”

  “Not a chance.”

  He was already heading to Bob’s boat. “Ricky, just take me back. What’s that going to take, half an hour?” He looked desperate.

  “Here,” he said, and gave me a sandwich bag with around half an eighth of weed left and the little wooden pipe shitty with resin we’d been using. “And he’s got a full bar with a beer fridge.” I held the baggie and pipe but didn’t put it in my pocket. Ricky delayed a moment and then grubbed out the tip money from his pants pocket and handed me the wad.

  “Oh good, I can throw a boat party.” What was I supposed to do? If it came to an oar fight, I’m not sure I would have won. My brain had gone soft and beery anyway.

  I’d been on Bob’s boat before; it was kind of plush. Sometimes there were parties after work there, especially if there were new, cute waitresses around. I looked at Ricky, ready to tell him to fuck off. There was smoke coming out of his ears; I could smell his wires frying. I was a fool and then some, but I was feeling lazy and avuncular. “Fuck. OK. But right after, OK?”

  “Right after. She won’t let me stay long anyway.”

  I didn’t wave as he motored off to his assignation, not that he would have noticed; he had the scent bad and would have swum to her if he had to.

  Bob’s boat, the Lucky Lady, was a cabin cruiser, something over 30 feet. It was pretty typical of the pleasure boats moored in the harbor, but back in the early 1980s when Bob acquired it, it was considered a little too big for the island. Ricky had given me the key for the hatch on a red and white bobber keychain so I let myself into his pleasure palace. The way Bob tells it, he got the Lady off a dead cocaine cowboy.

  The story goes he’s trying to close up the Topsoil, but a hard-partying trio won’t get the hint. There’s a Colombian or some kind of Central American guy—short and ugly—Bob emphasizes. Bob is tall and paunchy now; he was probably swank in denim bell bottoms and a blow-dried beard in his prime. With the

  Colombian are two beautiful young women from, as Bob figures it, New York. He says they had to be escorts. Bob winds up sitting with the three of them at the bar after closing, doing some lines. They run out, but the Colombian says he’s got a stash back on his boat.

  They’re all real well lit so it sounds like a good idea to the four of them, and Bob takes them out to the cowboy’s boat with the Topsoil’s launch. According to Bob, he wanders into the cabin to find the head. He opens a stateroom door and nearly has a heart attack—the room is packed with bales of money. Shrink-wrapped bundles of pure, uncut greenbacks.

  Bob is truly disappointed because now he feels burdened— he’s obliged, he says, to steal it. There you are, an honest man, a Boy Scout even, and you have to begin a life of crime just because some gangster is too buzzed to hide his cash. So, he tells the threesome he’s sick and leaves on his launch. He comes back to the restaurant, slaps himself sober and makes his ninja plan. Before dawn he paddles back out in an in
flatable and sneaks on board. There’s nobody there. He checks the rooms—no cash. He’s disappointed but relieved of the responsibility of having to steal that much money.

  A week later, the Lady is still moored in the harbor. The harbormaster has noticed. Bob rows over for another visit and nobody’s home. He doesn’t think anyone’s been there since he went and found the money gone. He waits a few days, pays yet another visit and finds her title—it’s registered to someone in Virginia. Another few days and Bob has signed the boat over to himself and now it’s his.

  The best part of the story comes weeks later. Bob says he finally had time to take it out of the harbor. He goes to use the head and discovers the Colombian’s severed head floating there in the blue chemical solution of the toilet. Bob adds as a coda to his story that he thinks the girls did it, maybe they were assassins, and if he’d stayed any longer on the Colombian’s boat, he’d have been killed too. It was only his decision to steal the money that saved his life.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Waldena in Balsam and Hashish

  It was good and late. Ricky was unsurprisingly absent. I never did believe he was coming back. I had gone to lay down for a while in the bedroom that had once been filled to the ceiling with bales of cash money, thinking to replace its absence with my presence would be amusing. It wasn’t—it felt like I was gently rocking in a crypt and it made me feel queasy. Bob’s bar was like an adult orphanage. Midori, Cointreau, Irish Mist and so on—all absurdly undrinkable. The promised beer fridge held a six of Buttwiper and my brain was already too wet to get excited about it. I opened one out of pity—just to give the six a reason to exist. I went topside and stretched out on a bench on the rear deck. Only the smallest of waves were still awake and chattering against the hull. I could hear a shushing roar of surf from out past the breakwater and the sporadic clangs of halyards against aluminum masts from the dozing sailboats moored in the harbor.