“As opposed to hunting them down on the open sea? That’s not cruel?”
“Exactly! These are powerful hunting animals. Cages destroy their spirit. They need to remain in fighting trim to be worthy of an Estonindian hunter. We wouldn’t sell anything less. If Snorri brokers a deal for the Finlindians to drive a herd to Korea, it will destroy our trade with Korea. We don’t have many customers anymore—we need that trade for our way of life to survive.”
“What about North Korea? A whale would go a long way there.”
“No, not juche.”
“Juche and Sampo—it sounds like a boat drink.”
“What is a boat drink?”
“A leisure-class cocktail. So, the package, the sampo.…”
“It’s just a bribe from the Koreans to the Finlindians. Probably some Korean scrimshaw or maybe chocolate. Sampo is important to all of us Northern Indians, but Ill John and Chosen are exaggerating its importance. It’s a game they’re playing, like cultural flirting. They are more like cultural stalkers than tourists.”
“You tortured me for that? The Koreans know I gave it to Mr. Lucy, you know. He was lying.”
“I didn’t torture you,” she said sharply. “You torture yourself. I was here to do what I could to disrupt their meeting. I wasn’t going to pick a fight directly with the Finlindians—they’re our brothers and sisters. Now it’s too late. There’s going to be some shame in store for me when I get back. All I could do is count a little Finlindian coup to remind them they’re supposed to be hunters.”
“What do you mean ‘a little Finlindian coup’?”
“You know what counting coup is.”
“I thought it was more like playing tag with a stick.”
“You’re thinking of Plains Indians on horses. If I have to go back to my whaling council in Estonindia and report that the Finlindian council got the Korean whale trade, I will at least be able to say I taught Snorri and the Finlindians a lesson.”
“What was the lesson?”
“You might as well stay out of it. Let us just say respect for tradition.”
“Fine by me. Why are you still here, though? Bismuth, I mean.”
“The Estonindian and Finlindian whaling councils have decided to cooperate on a joint research venture and my council wants me to stay in this region to watch over it.”
“So, Snorri, too?”
“As you islanders might say: aye yup,” she said, drawing the word out for maximum sarcasm.
I was going to ask something more about her research venture when Waldena stood and shrugged off the robe. Once again I lost control of my jaw muscles and could only gape. She stepped over to me, greasily and sublimely bare. She tossed her braids in back of her and ran her palm from her clavicle, between her breasts, down to her pubis. She scooped out a dollop of grease from her belly button with her fingertip and poked it in my mouth, like a lurid eucharist. She told me she had to go before it wore off, then leapt daintily overboard. I saw her swim under the hull of a moored pleasure boat before I lost sight of her wake. Later on, I closed my mouth and swallowed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Field Trip to a Dead Whale
The Honeypaws is all fender and hull armor. Snorri cut the engine and let it drift until it bumped Bob’s boat like a milk-drunk bear cub wanting more from mom. “Ahoy, Ranger Orange, great explorer!” he shouted, waving. Waldena’s visit had left me with more of a soft, powdery lunar impact crater than a hangover. I spent the rest of the night dozing under the stars waiting for Ricky to come back and pick me up. I wondered what Waldena had done with him. She probably hadn’t eviscerated him to haruspicate her god’s will. More likely she gave him the time of his life, and then more so. He was probably crouched in a corner somewhere worrying about his vital essences.
I tied Honeypaws to the Lucky Lady and noticed that Snorri had brought Moira with him. “What are you guys doing here?”
“We’re going to America!” said Moira.
“We are taking a field trip to the mainland,” said Snorri. “Would you like to come with us?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Come on. Don’t worry, Uncle Snorri already said we won’t go in any stores or anything. We’re going to go see a dead whale! Way underwater!”
The two of them looked like they were skipping school. “Have fun.”
“What, you have plans?” said Snorri. “I’m waiting for a ride.”
“I’m your ride.”
“Why are you going to look at a dead whale?”
“For the sake of Moira’s cultural and scientific education.”
“You said revenge,” said Moira, savoring the idea.
“Well, yes. My council suspects one of our whales has been rustled. But this will be an educational trip. So, how about it?”
“No. I don’t want any more education, especially about dead whales.”
“Oh come on, you need your horizons expanded.”
“I don’t need a dead whale on my horizon.”
“A little surly today, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t get much sleep. Or supper, or breakfast—or lunch, depending on what time it is.”
“You probably shouldn’t be drinking that can of beer.”
“There wasn’t any coffee served.”
“Oh Jeez, you’re like my Dad,” said Moira. “Beer and cereal is so gross.”
“I have snacks, Orange. Come on board; I’ll feed you, and you’ll learn something while you help me out. We’ve got some serious talking to do, and you might even stand to make some money.”
Snacks? Money? Ricky was never going to pick me up. My only alternative was to get on the marine band and make a big fuss, guaranteeing trouble from the harbormaster and Bob, whose boat I’d been squatting on. I told Snorri that I supposed so and went and fetched the remaining three Buds from the fridge. I battened the Lady and clicked the padlock back in place on the hatch’s hasp. Moira granted me permission to board Honeypaws, and we shoved off. I went down to the boat’s galley with Moira as Snorri took us out of the harbor. She and I found nothing but jars of pickled herring and incredibly dry, thin crackers. I was hungry enough to eat it; she wasn’t.
“I think I might have seen the Hammer Maiden leaving harbor very early this morning,” Snorri told me when I left Moira on the rear deck and joined him in the wheelhouse.
“Yuh, you mighta.”
Snorri beetled his bushy brow at me and asked me for a beer.
We sipped our brunches for a while.
“You know why Waldena is so surly?” asked Snorri.
“Parasites?”
“The Estonindians have a national inferiority complex.”
“I doubt she’d put it that way.”
“It’s true,” he said with regret. “The Northern Indians were one people for long after their arrival in Europe. It was an ethnicity that spread from little Bismuth here, all the way across the Arctic and into Europe. By the time we’d balkanized into warring countries, our rivalries were so bitter it was only the common enemy of the Vikings that kept us from each other’s throats.
“In time, the empires of Europe: Rome, Christendom, Germania, Russia, the Germans again, the Soviets, the EU, all found reasons to annex the Estonindians. For long periods, centuries even, they had to tend to their own culture in secret, while slaving for their conquerors. It’s been barely 150 years that they’ve had borders worth defending. It’s all that blood-letting and cultural hibernation that makes them bitter and defensive.”
“Understandable, I suppose.”
“Throughout their history, they’ve had to slink back to the Finlindians to get what they need. They could have marched back, proudly, to join us, but they’re too stubborn—they just beg, borrow, and steal from us instead, convinced we’re withholding something important from them, sure that the snow is always brighter on our side of the gulf.”
“That sounds a little arrogant.”
“Ha! At times, their country has been s
o awash in blood and gore that they’ve even lost their own language! Everyone knows the Finlindians are lexicologists, but they might not know that we’re word wizards because we’ve had to tend to our words—and the rest of the Northern Indians’—so long and so far, like I told you, from here, up through the ice, down into the continent of religions and empires, and then all the way through all of time. We had words! Forged steel! Boats! We know who we are. We can yoik on any subject; we can go generations without eating a vegetable, we can swim.…”
“Snorri, I.…”
“You’re right, of course. We are also modest and generous. Our nets are flopping full with fish for our fellow Northern Indians. Our meat pits are more like meat mounds, and our cultural coffers overspill tradition and history to spare.
“You know, when their lugubrious, nameless giant of a national epic hero wanted anything, he’d swim to Finlindia: ‘wolves ate my horse,’ ‘we’re out of seeds,’ ‘I need a sword,’ ‘we forgot how to talk,’ ‘our fire’s gone out,’ ‘we ate all our reindeer,’ ‘the dogmen are chasing me,’ ‘a witch stole my penis.’”
“His penis?”
“We forge him a new one from sacred ore we’d carried in our sauna ships all the way from the coast of North America. We cast delightful spells all up and down its shaft. We bury it in mammoth dung to let it mature. We give it a name so wonderful, we mourn the loss of the name from our language.
“Off he swims, the oaf with his cock. Is he happy? No. He’s the prototypical Estonindian; he can’t be happy, even with a big new Finlindian prick.
“Down south, there’s a series of maidens and nymphs that he’s crushed or impaled to death. He’s supposed to use his phallus to plow and plant all the land, but the Estonindians miss spring for a few decades because he can’t stay stiff enough to scratch a decent furrow. One winter the sense of failure is so overwhelming, it doesn’t even snow, and he decides to put an end to himself. He’s a giant, so he’s hard to kill. He figures the easiest, cleanest way to do it is to just jump off the side of the earth. But of course, he can’t find it, and he swims back across the gulf to ask us directions.
“The cooler minds of Finlindia prevail. We teach him something peaceful and practical—whaleherding. He’s bad at it, but we let him be. When we visit his fjord to check up on him, the penis is gone. He’s got a story about whales but none of us believe him. He yoiks ‘sad, lost penis’ so well, our sun goes out for months. He curses his own legs for not walking him to the edge of the earth, and they take umbrage. They run away and leap off the earth without him, and he bleeds to death.”
“Well, that’s.…”
“Of course he cannot even die right. He’s caused us all so much misery, he’s chained to the gates of hell, where he sets the tone for new arrivals by yoiking ‘torment’ and ‘frustration’ and ‘penis’ unto eternity.”
At “eternity,” it seemed as if Snorri had said his piece. Warily, I waited a few minutes to see if the conversational coast was indeed clear. “So you’re saying Waldena’s got penis envy?”
“Thursdays are her sabbath, Orange. She and the rest of her cult worship on the day you call Thursday. You know what Estonindian witches do on Thursday nights with full moons?”
“Swim to the moon?”
“The rites are a bit more visceral than that.”
“What?”
“She’s not his handmaiden for nothing.”
“Hammer maiden.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly?”
“Listen, the Estonindians need periodic re-assembly. It’s our role as Finlindians—their older brothers—like it or not, to go find all their bones, their penises, their words and rebury the people in the right order so they can come back whole again. They are still our sisters.”
“With penises.”
“Not all of them.” Snorri then said he was going to check on Moira. When he returned he had his leathern flask of old milk. “Partake, Orange, in the ichor of Finlindia.”
“Ugh. I don’t even know what animal—no wait, I don’t even want to know.”
“Your loss. It’s both bracing and a direct link to the history of our culture. I won’t tell you how it’s made—there are secret rites involved—but I can tell you some of the bacteriological agents in it are from a line older than our nations. A bit like your American pioneers’ sourdough, I imagine.”
I shuddered.
“Oh come on, what do they say in your country, ‘cowboy up’?”
“They say that down in Red Sox Nation. Up here in Down East we say ‘old milk is revolting.’”
Snorri took a long pull. “Just a cordial, then.”
Moira joined us in the wheelhouse, wrinkling her nose at the aftercloud of Snorri’s liquid patriotism. “How much longer?”
“We have barely left the harbor, Boo Boo.”
“Boo Boo?”
“That’s what you call bear cubs, right?”
“No.”
“What about Yogi?” he asked.
“Yogi?”
“She’s too young,” I told Snorri. “But she’s got a point—where are we going?”
“We are on course to the submarine pens of the Oceanographic Institute on the mainland. It will take around an hour. Our approach is going to be a bit tricky. When we get near their bay, we are going to meet another boat who will guide us in.”
“Why? That’s an easy harbor. No shoal or anything.”
“You are forgetting that I’m not an American citizen and that the submarine pens are full of nasty military secrets. My colleague will escort us through security. Just stay calm—the Americans panic easily these days.”
I suppose the Honeypaws has a low profile. I suppose that since it wasn’t up on its hydrofoils blasting away with the harpoon cannon, and Snorri wasn’t chanting a yoik about running minkes across the wide blue lonesome, the entire U. S. Navy hadn’t noticed his approach. Still, I had the strong sense that we were risking a fully immersive experience at the waterboarding spa in Gitmo.
Snorri had been on his odd-looking telephone, making arrangements. Our native guide to American military security waited for us in a Boston Whaler out near a welter of moored boats at the outer edge of the harbor. He took us on a long, elliptical route into the docks of the Oceanographic Institute. We were obliged to tie Honeypaws up at one of the outer docks— she was just too big for where we were heading. Moira, Snorri, me, and a guy named Mr. Bagsadarian, who told us to call him Bags, took his Boston Whaler from there and continued under the docks. Soon, we were underneath buildings in a canyon of pilings that continued inland much further than was apparent from the harbor.
Well under the docks of the Institute, hidden within the submarine pens, is the Office of National Deep Submergence, which Bags explained was recently appropriated by the Office of the Vice President and no longer beholden to the namby-pamby agendas of the tubeworm-fellating scientists in the Oceanographic Institute above.
Bags of ONDS was a Mr. Seville Bagdasarian. He was conspicuously a “Mister,” here among the titled ranks of the Navy. His hair was too long and he didn’t call Snorri or I “Sir,” which I took as a sure sign that he was some kind of spy or special ops. I got the sense that the Office of National Deep Submergence may well have been an undisclosed location—why else would everyone from the founder of the CIA to the president’s dad live near here? It’s not because they like shoveling snow all winter. This was likely one of the country’s back doors, a taxi stand for trips to locations of hitherto unheard of undisclosability. This made me feel a bit smug, since my island is hardly ever disclosed and I seemingly already had a head start on the VIPs away from whatever catastrophes the continent could prepare for us.
Well back under the piers, we tied up at a floating dock and went inside a weathered unmarked door that opened to what looked like a utility closet too small to hold the four of us. From there it was a bolt hole in the floor down a staircase that took us under the water level and to a watertig
ht door with a vault-like lock. Bags poked in a security code and led us in to a conference room with a white board and a big picture window. The room on the other side of the window was dark, but from what I could make out, it looked like a small TV studio with bucket seats. There were three Danishes on the conference table and a small sideboard with powdered creamer and a stack of Styrofoam cups, but no coffee machine. We ate the stale pastries. Bags fussed with some type of digital projector. The white board showed a field of not quite oceanic blue and the word “WAIT” fluttering across its surface. Eventually he quit whatever it was he couldn’t start and addressed us.
“Welcome to the Baphometric Orientation Room Exercise. Today we will learn the basic operational parameters of Alousia, the Plutonic Depth Class Submergence Vehicle.”
“Can we skip this?” asked Snorri.
“Yeah, I guess. It’s just a bunch of specs and pointless advice on what to do if you’re about to be crushed.” Bags gave me and Moira a once-over. “Look, I’ve been down with Snorri, he knows the drill. You two are going to need a bit of orientation though. Let’s get some preliminaries of Baphometric exploration out of the way. You’ll each get a waste liquid bottle and a diaper if you want it—you’ll have to change into the diaper before we enter the Alousia. ...”
Moira looked aghast.
“It’s a seven-hour dive,” said Bags.
I was horrified.
“And there’s no toilet. In fact, there’s only three seats at all, and I can’t see how we’re all going to fit.”
Moira volunteered to stay behind, and I mentioned plans I’d already made to breathe air on the surface world that afternoon. Snorri brooked no dissent.
“I am not wearing a diaper,” said Moira, nearing tears.
“Me neither. And I don’t like it underwater.”
“How do you know?” Snorri said, “You’ve never been.”
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