SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  “Bags has been in on it from the start—we go way back to when my bear bride and I kept our eyes on the Soviets along the Finlindian border. But the rest of his team thinks we are just researchers from Europe and are not aware of the entrepreneurial aspects of the network.”

  “So, what’s with Waldena?”

  “She knew about this early on and felt she had some coup to count before her country became involved officially. She must realize I will not let this stand.”

  “Why do you work with her now?”

  “The Estonindian council thinks she is the woman for the job. She has Tharapita’s Hammer Maiden, a crew of tough guys at her disposal, and she has been hunting in these waters long enough that she knows them better than any other Estonindian whaler. Plus, I do not think they like me and were happy to have her plague me.”

  “Well I don’t like her, she’s mean,” said Moira.

  “And violent,” I added. “Though, I don’t know. Maybe she’s complex and troubled.”

  “She is a witch in a Thor cult and you are a fool, Mr. Whippey. Do not believe a word she says.”

  I shrugged, and Moira elbowed me in the ribs.

  “I hope you see why it is so important to remain extremely discreet about this. A great deal of money and time has been invested, and, if you cooperate, you stand to make some money yourself.”

  “Me too?” asked Moira.

  “We will work something out,” said Snorri, “Just say nothing about the Whale Network to anyone.”

  “I’m going to tell Mom.”

  Snorri thought about it. “OK. Mineola knows all about it and has probably told Angie already.”

  Bags announced that we only had around ten minutes of bottom time left before the ascent and that we should be quiet and let him work. Moira kept trying to take up more of the space we were supposed to be sharing. Her elbow was sharp and persistent. I think she was trying to take advantage of her little-girl-ness, and there was no reason I saw that she deserved an inch more room. I’d been folded up for hours and was surely developing lethal blood clots, and it was only my manners and stoicism that had kept me from claiming my proper physical space. She seemed to have constant needs—craning for the window, rooting for a different color pen, the water bottle—all she seemed to do was reach and twist like she had the hivies.

  So it wasn’t my fault that Snorri missed decompression. Moira had virtually forced me to pinch her—she refused to understand that the pinch was part of an autonomic defense reaction that I had little conscious control over. I wish she had just taken the hint and let me be a full-sized adult, but, no. Whatever alliance we had shared during our trip was sundered when she loudly accused me of pinching, and neither Bags nor Snorri—both also full-sized adults—defended me. I did not start it.

  “I’ve got a taser and chemical restraints,” growled Bags.

  “Tase her and give me the sedatives,” I said.

  “He keeps shoving me,” added Moira.

  “I have not! She’s been.…”

  “That’s it! Enough!” said Bags.

  The rest of our trip was aborted. Bags ejected us from the simulation chamber and told us to wait in the conference room. He was short-tempered and annoyed that he had to cede control of Alousia to the back-up team on board her mothership for the sub’s ascent. Snorri was sniffy about it too.

  “How often does a man get to genuinely decompress?” said Snorri. “To sit there and know that your time and depth has been perfectly calibrated to the restoration of your body? The bends are a very painful death.”

  The bends. I had the bends. I had to limp to the conference room because there was no blood in my legs.

  “Herdsman or hunter,” Snorri continued, “you still have to learn how to wait. And it’s not often I get to wait so productively.”

  “Jesus fucking Crackers, Snorri, it wasn’t real, and you had all the room you wanted in front.”

  “You should be thanking me for this experience.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Moira.

  I did not regret missing the opportunity to sit in the stupid pretend submarine for two more hours looking at what water looked like underwater while Snorri re-aligned his molecules.

  “We could go to Friendlys,” said Moira.

  “I have snacks on the boat,” said Snorri.

  “Herring.”

  I said I wouldn’t entirely mind Friendlys.

  Snorri said we weren’t allowed offbase and that we had to get back to Mini’s anyway.

  I thought about jumping ship and absconding to the mainland. Its preoccupation with busyness and its unquantifiable impediments to peace of mind weren’t much more daunting than the sleigh ride I’d been dragged on so far. Still, though, it was the continent, and one of my few pleasures is hating it. Just knowing that all eighty billion of its landlocked inhabitants could be rendered completely insignificant by standing on the island and facing seaward is a fine thing that no stranger will ever understand.

  Poor Moira though. The continent held everything she did not. For any island kid, no matter how privileged, life is full of constraints and prospects denied, even if all you want is TV reception and a trip to the mall every once in a while. What’s worse is you’re not alone. You and the rest of the kids that you’re damned to know your whole life all want offisland too. Every few years there’s a terrible fever of discontent on the island and not all the kids recover from it. The adults expect them to resign themselves to the same traces they’ve toiled in, and the kids who had the fever worst write letters of resignation and go offisland without ever reaching the mainland.

  In the end, we milled around the conference room, inspecting the cabinets for leftover snacks or loose pens we could take. Bags was on the phone with his colleagues on the mothership for around half an hour until he could come and escort us out of the harbor on his Boston Whaler. It wasn’t until then that Moira saw fit to mention that she was overdue back at home, and that she hadn’t told anyone where she was going.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Castaways

  Nobody in the whole history of yelling at me had yelled at me like Angie Bombardier. The only reason she hadn’t murdered me on the spot was so she could preserve her moral superiority. My inferiority, along with an ample catalog of character flaws, was well explained to myself at high volume and rapid pace, accompanied by multiple jabs of the finger to my chest. I really should not have tried to explain that I felt that her daughter Moira had been more complicit in kidnapping me than me making off with her. I should not have introduced the word “kidnapping” into the dialogue. “Not my fault” was not a phrase I had been allowed to complete. I should have known better. I should have thought about the safety of her daughter before anything else. I should have called Angie. I should have asked more questions. I should go entomb myself in the Alousia simulation chamber. I should go feed myself to hagfish. I should have had better judgment than a drunk, whale-fucking coot and a fifth grader. I should consider myself gloriously fortunate that law enforcement had not become involved, that Mini’s security guards weren’t practicing their enhanced interrogation tactics on me with phone books while I barfed into a fertilizer bag cinched over my head. I should be aware that Bismuth was going to get smaller and smaller until I could bear it no longer and that there were a number of short piers available for long walks.

  It hadn’t been until we were back on the Honeypaws, on the way out of the mainland harbor, that Moira had told us she was AWOL. I hadn’t really understood the significance of this, since AWOL was more or less my typical MO. Snorri and I agreed that replacing Moira on Gaeity ASAP was our best plan. Moira seemed to take sly pleasure in watching us dither—she already knew better than us how much holy hell we would soon be facing.

  I suppose that, after beating our retreat from Gaeity on his boat, I should not have lost my shit on Snorri, though I was mostly glad I did, and he certainly deserved it. It galled me beyond reason that he was trying to suggest he was not
the true culprit in this field trip turned fiasco. I am willing to admit that his windpipe was not the right place for my forearm, and that I ought to regret the fire hose of recriminatory verbal pissing that I treated him to. But it was his fucking fault. By the time we’d made it back to Bismuth and Snorri dumped me at the town docks, I was still full of ugly swagger, and he was sulking, so I felt like I’d won something. Of course it was the feeling that I’d lost everything that had set me off.

  I sat out on a hidden corner of the dock, leaning on a splintered, tarry piling. Seeing a dead whale was supposed to have been that day’s defining moment. Instead, I had kidnapped a little girl who was nearly forced to wear a diaper in the presence of three grown men showed her a murdered whale, proven my complete and utter unsuitability as a partner for Angie, and then brutalized an old man, just because I was frustrated. The fact that I’d meant well meant nothing. I didn’t want to hide here on the docks all night. I didn’t even know why I was hiding. Probably because I kept weeping. I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to get drunk, I didn’t want to be sober. I didn’t want to be alive and didn’t want to make the effort not to be. Above all, I did not want to be Orange Whippey, Idiot of Bismuth.

  I had decided to sit on the docks until I felt toweringly sorry for myself. Then, I figured, my next terrible decision or act of abysmal judgment would be evident to me. But, of course, even my plan to be the sorriest man alive was ruined. I’d been moping for at least an hour when I heard someone whispering, “Dude, dude!” It wasn’t the seagulls, or the staring little tourist kid being pulled away by his mom. There was nobody else around. “That you, Orange? Down here.”

  I rolled over and peered between the boards of the dock. It was low tide and resting on the soupy clay eight feet below was a nasty oarless little wooden dinghy holding Ricky, the kid who ran the Topsoil taxi, and whom I had presumed had been sacrificed to pagan gods by Waldena.

  “Ricky?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Don’t call me ‘dude.’”

  “Sorry.”

  He actually sounded especially sorry. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Sitting in a dinghy.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you need a hand up?”

  “No, I’m just going to wait for the tide.”

  It was going to take more than a full moon’s worth of tide to raise his spirits. “You been there a while?”

  “Since this morning. I guess.”

  “Where were you last night? I was stuck on Bob’s boat.”

  Ricky looked stricken, like he’d swallowed a sea nettle. “I… I can’t say,” he said weakly.

  I knew it. He’d been bewitched. “Let me help you up.”

  “No. It’s OK. It feels safe here.”

  I wondered what Waldena had done to him, but didn’t want to ask, since then I’d have to explain what she’d done with me. “Tide’s not in til after dark, you know?”

  “I know. Hey, you still got my pipe?”

  “Yeah, but I’m keeping the bag.”

  “Would you mind just packing it and then giving it to me? Keep the bag, that’s fine.”

  It seemed merciful, so I packed it tight and even removed a couple seeds for him. I found a wide enough slot between the boards to drop it down into his little boat.

  “Thanks,” he said. Then after a bit, “Do you have a lighter?”

  “Nope.”

  Ricky sighed. I hoped it was clear to him I wasn’t going to go asking for matches. He looked bad. Pale, drained—a creature that belonged under the docks.

  “Were you crying. . . ?” he asked.

  I could tell he had a tough time not ending his sentence with ‘dude.’ “Why, what did you hear?”

  “There was, like, a puddle.”

  I told him it wasn’t me; he let it go, unchallenged.

  “Where’s the Topsoil tender?” I asked.

  “It’s back fine. I came here after, I guess.”

  “You still got a job?”

  “Yeah, probably. I didn’t even talk to anyone.”

  Ricky and I had a lot to not talk about, yet neither of us seemed to be on our way anywhere else. I could only see him by lying flat on the dock and looking with one eye through the slats. It made conversation awkward.

  “Summer’s almost up,” I told him. “Labor Day’s coming.”

  Ricky looked out on the harbor, as if Labor Day were floating just beyond the horizon.

  “You gonna go back to school?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You gonna keep renting here?”

  “I stopped paying a while ago. They already got my last month’s and security and they’re never giving back my security, so why pay?”

  He was right. Nobody ever got their security back here. At best, it got counted towards a down payment to reserve a place for next summer. There was no way he’d be wintering here. It might have seemed romantic to him at the moment, but he didn’t have the fortitude to commit to that kind of melancholia. Besides, he was too young and handsome. The girls go for those bleached curls and beachworn Oxford shirts. He actually held one of the best summer jobs on the island. I was probably the only living being who didn’t pay him a tip for his taxi service.

  I think the best summer job probably was Bismuth Yacht Club sailing instructor. Their afternoons were spent on Sunfishes coaxing teenage girls in bathing suits out of the harbor and beyond parental supervision. The boats were invariably flipped, and only a few of the young ladies returned in tears.

  “My buddy worked at Potemkin Smeerenberg this summer. I might go with him next year,” said Ricky.

  “At a whaling camp?”

  “It’s a tourist thing. People come to be whalers for a week or something. My friend says the first-year guys have to work the blubber ovens, though.”

  “The try pots. They’re supposed to reek.”

  “You know about the Vault?” he asked.

  There was one in the Topsoil. Every skeevy islander had thought about it at one time or another. “No.”

  “My friend says there’s the Doomsday Vault on the same island as the whale camp.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s for all the countries to use for before the apocalypse. It’s like this deep freeze mineshaft. All the countries are filling it up with stuff people might want after the apocalypse, but it’s got to be kind of small, like DNA and seeds.”

  “How are people supposed to get up there at the end?”

  “They aren’t. It’s just for stuff. All the languages and instructions and seeds and stuff will be there for afterward.”

  “Who would know where it was?”

  “They probably wouldn’t,” he said, settling back down. “Nobody even knows it’s there now. Maybe some people would be trapped inside it when the airlocks closed.”

  I took a good look at Ricky down in his pitiful little boat. It wasn’t hard to work out a scenario in which he and his Smeerenberg summer love found themselves in the vault and repopulated the human race. For many generations everyone would look slightly like Ricky.

  “What?” said Ricky.

  “I should go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  New Friends on the Princess Pea

  I’d walked back to my house after chatting with Ricky in his dinghy. It was nice to see my cat, Rover. We hadn’t spent much time together lately. She and I had what was left from Ricky’s bag of pot, ate a can of soup and a bowl of kibble, watched Jeopardy, and were asleep before the sky was dark. Consequently I awoke more sober and rested than I expected. All night in a comfortable bed, my own even—I thought I ought to do that more often. It seemed to come to most people more easily than me, but it felt pretty natural. I was wondering what I’d do about coffee when my phone rang. The caller ID said “WhaleNet,” which I couldn’t place. I answered it on a whim.

  “Mr. Orange Whippey?”

  Not enough people call me “M
r.,” so I said yes. “This is Chosen, your Korean acquaintance.”

  “Howdy.”

  “‘Howdy!’ America! Ha! Howdy Doody is very strange. Is he related to your Yankee Doody? Is Yankee a puppet also? No he is a historic legend. Northeast, but not coastal. Right?”

  “It’s ‘Doodle,’ actually. What’s up?” I asked.

  “We have a job for you! Are you ready to work?”

  “No.”

  “We have rented a native lobster boat, Orange. We would very much like you to be our companion on it. It has less controls than a car, but the boat owner insisted we have a local on board to pilot. We mentioned you, and he said, ‘OK, I guess.’ Will you be our pilot? We have the ship right now.”

  “If it’s for lobsters, it’s a boat, not a ship,” I said.

  “Will you be the boat pilot? We have fifty dollars and a picnic for you.”

  “Today?”

  “Right now!”

  “OK, I guess.”

  “Please find us at the town dock soon.”

  “Coffee.”

  “What?”

  “Fifty, a picnic, and a coffee-to-go,” I said.

  “A coffee-to-go? No worries, mon.”

  “Wrong island. We’re the one with the worries.”

  Even if I don’t have dreads or a nice accent, I do still keep island time, so it was a while before I made it down to the docks in town. Chosen was waiting for me with a Styrofoam cup of coffee gone cold. He was wearing a garish Tyvek New England Patriots windbreaker and looked more like a jerk for it—and therefore a little more convincingly native.

  “Which one?” I said, taking the coffee from him and drinking.