“Over there, the white boat, The Princess Pea. You see my partner there on board?”
Oh, yeah, the Pee Princess. It had been owned by a few guys I knew. It was the fiberglass equivalent of a rusty old pick-up truck. “Who’s with him?”
“We have a passenger for the day. She is attractive; you may like her.”
“A passenger?”
“She pays us three hundred dollars for today. For a boat ride and a story!”
Three hundred dollars. You aren’t supposed to be able to turn a profit in a lobster boat before you even leave the dock. Not much of one when you get back with a full load, either. “A story? What’s going on?”
“I need to speak with you before you board because we have already begun telling the story to her and we need your help as a native storyteller and pilot.”
Fifty dollars, a picnic, a coffee, an attractive woman. All for a story. I could handle this, I supposed, even if it was early and I was still sober. “So, what’s the scam?”
“Scam? Like crime?”
“Yeah.”
“We are not criminals,” he said, as if he’d practiced the phrase.
“No, me neither. What’s the deal though? You said we need to get our story straight.”
“It is not a straight story or a true story. John and I discussed it yesterday night. It is supernatural, eerie. It is about an absent mountain and creatures from below.”
“Cool.”
“Yes. Will you help us? We need a voucher.”
“You don’t need a voucher, you need a poetic license,” I said.
Chosen looked a bit confused. “We need you for verisimilitude, a native to vouchsafe our story.”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Good! The first things you need to know is our audience is a New Yorker and that John and I are Native American Indians.”
“Wait, why are you selling her a story? No, wait. You’re Indians?” I asked. They had black hair, but.…
Chosen said, “We told you that we have been reading the supernatural literature of the northeast coastal region of America, yes?”
Yeah, I remembered.
“We are fans. Korea has an ancient tradition of ghost stories. Yours is much more modern, just the last two centuries. Ours has many ancestors and demons, yours has many monsters and preposterous events. We like the guise of the reluctant exaggerator. We want to explore and exercise in your narrations.”
OK, I got it. Spinning a yarn sounded like fun to them. Chosen conducted me toward the boat.
“Yesterday, we had not even thought of the opportunity. We were planning on playing the roles of lobstermen. We had just rented the Princess Pea and were scrubbing her when we met that woman there, Lettie, the New Yorker. She approached us and asked if she could buy a lobster. We had not caught any. Then she asked us if we were natives, and John said, yes, we were native Americans. She said, Indians? and he said yes. She was very pleased. We spoke a bit about lobsters. She said she was going to buy one and make a film about herself and her boyfriend eating it. Her boyfriend was in bed trying not to be seasick. She said she was a kind of storyteller and had come to Bismuth Island to find stories about people from here to tell on camera. She was having a working vacation before Labor Day. She wanted to have the experience of being told about the island by natives. She was delighted we were Indians.”
“Yeah, but you’re not,” I said.
“We know. She seemed eager to believe us, we were surprised. So, she has paid us to go lobstering and learn stories about the island from natives.”
“Whose pots you guys hauling?”
“I do not know.”
“What designs are on the buoys?”
“Designs?” asked Chosen.
There were lots of floats hanging around the docks and on the boats. I showed him how each person’s buoys had a unique pattern. Chosen was very impressed. He had thought they were traditional decorations. I told him if he touched the wrong buoy, his chances of catching some buckshot were very high. Chosen said he did not want to disappoint her—I suggested telling her that there was a red tide alert and no lobstering was allowed. I didn’t mention that such alerts didn’t apply to lobsters. Red tide is just such a good, powerful excuse to use on strangers. Raw shellfish with poisonous bacteria. Nobody asks too many questions.
Red tide sounded fine to Chosen. “So, please remember that my name now is Uncas and John’s name is Chingachgook, and he is my brother, and that we are Native American Indians from Bismuth all of our lives.”
“So, what, I’m Natty Bumpo?”
“You may wear the leatherstockings,” he allowed me.
“I don’t think so. You’re going to have to change your names to real Indian names.”
“Those are real.”
“Nope. Now you are. . . Franklin Mint. And he’s Ronco.” Nobody on a boat went without a nickname. We Islanders exercise our Adamic privilege regularly, even when we weren’t very inspired.
“And who are you?”
“Ahnge,” I said, emphasizing the island monosyllabic. “It’s a special name that repels all nicknames.”
“Ahnge, aye yup.”
“Try to sound less like an actor.”
“I will try. Ahnge the Beerslayer, let us meet Lettie.”
“It’s pronounced ‘Beeahslayah.’”
The Pee Princess was looking quite a bit cleaner than her surrounding boats at the dock. Ronco, the Indian formerly known as the Korean Ill John, was wearing a a black nylon jacket with the spoked-B Bruins logo. He was chatting up a thin woman with wiry henna hair who looked like she was in her later twenties. Franklin Mint, who had been born, I presumed, as Chosen, and he had a quiet word, while I lurked on the dock. Ronco-John then waved me aboard.
“Orange, you already know Franklin and I from your youth upon the island. This is Lettie. She is a documentitian from Manhattan, New York City. . . the mainland.” His accent had taken on a John Wayne-ish quality.
I could have told Ill John—Ronco—Manhattan was an island, but I didn’t mention it.
Lettie shook my hand. “Documentarian,” she said, “producer, actually. I’m glad we’re going to have this opportunity!”
“Ayuh,” I said. Nobody says “opportunity” to me without actually meaning trying, unpleasant, unpaid work. But she was kind of pretty in a freckled, red-headed but not Irish sort of way. She seemed professionally curious.
“So your partners.…”
“Ronco and Franklin.”
“. . . Say you were fishing since before dawn. Did you have a good haul?”
“I suppose.”
“What did you catch?”
“Uh, schrod?”
“Mmm. I used to eat that when I was a girl. Schrod with crumbs. It must be fascinating!”
“Schrod?”
“Fishing! Out before dawn on the rough, cold sea; lots of hard, dangerous work. You guys,” she said, gesturing to the three of us, “are the kind of honest, rugged guys that make this country what it is,” she said, making it evident she’d never met a fisherman.
“Well. . . it’s in our blood,” I said.
“Has your family always fished?”
“Sure. All our families.”
“And now you and your friends own this boat together, huh?”
“Yup. Me and Ronco and Franklin Mint on the Pee Princess. Been in the family for years.”
“Whippey family. Franklin and I are brothers in another family,” said Ronco.
“Yeah, there’s lots of Indians here,” I added.
“You’re Indians and he’s a Yankee, right?”
Ronco did a terrible “ayuh.” “Natives.”
“Oh that’s perfect!” said Lettie, obviously enthused about the ethnic angle.
“So, you’re from New York? You have a cigarette?” I asked.
“No, gum.”
“No thanks. I have gum.”
Lettie said, “Your partners have kindly offered to take me o
n a short fishing trip, just so I can get a feel for things here. I was hoping you all could tell me what island life is like, maybe some fishing stories.”
“What show do you produce?”
“Well, it depends on the footage. It would be great if there were celebrities here, but that’s OK because I don’t really do celebrity stuff that much. If maybe one of you gets hurt on the boat or if there’s a storm, it could be a sort of fishing reality thing. Or if there’s like a haunted lighthouse or something we could do a segment of America’s Most Haunted Islands. Or we could do a Trading Boats type thing where we redecorate your boats. Do you guys know any addicts? I bet the island would be good for a Regular Joe Detox episode.”
“I want to decorate the boat,” I said.
“This is a fishing vessel, not a boat.” said Ronco-John.
“I like the ghost one,” chose Franklin.
It was decided that we would decide later. My best-friends-forever, Ronco and Franklin, had offered to circumnavigate the island and “expose island hospitality.” Our island had a famous circumnavigator back when I was a kid. One summer he made it his mission to circle the island in his sailboat every single day. This isn’t that hard to do, but shouldn’t be done in heavy weather. After his seventh or eighth rescue, the harbormaster padlocked the guy’s O’Day to its mooring. The next summer he wasn’t back, and people said that he was dead from cancer. His orbiting summer was, I guess, some kind of slow surrender to the gravitational pull of the island. Not that my new partners knew that story—I was curious to hear what sort of supernatural story they had for Lettie.
On our way out of the harbor, Lettie told us that she had got her start as a videographer during 9/11. New Yorkers claim ownership of everything, including the apocalypse. I bet she even went to the afterparty. She said we must have known people who drowned. I told her islanders like to talk about drowning about as much as heavy smokers like to talk about cancer. She said she knew someone who had just died of cancer and AIDS. She also knew several famous people I’d never heard of before and had been to parties on some of their roofs and that there had been DNA and bone fragments found on some of those roofs after the World Trade Center attack. Indians, she said, had built some of the towers. She said it was important to join up and show support. She said her videography career began when she realized how important it was to make things known to other people around the world. In her role as a producer, she got to travel all over and work with people to share their stories. She said it was beautiful here but needed better cell phone coverage. Her muffin was unsatisfactory this morning and she knew fellow producers who traveled with bagels. There’s actually a good bagel place on Fire Island, she said. The best pizza was to be found some place in New York near where an avenue and a street intersected. It was all about the water. New York water was essential for pizza and bagel dough. Other people disagree but are wrong. Most of her friends lived in Brooklyn. The isolation of the borough concerned her. She knew someone who used to be a fisherman in Alaska. Or maybe he worked at a cannery. He made a lot of money one summer. He was her ex-boyfriend. Her boyfriend now was back at the B&B recovering from the ferry trip. She was going to get a massage when she got back to town, and, no, she hadn’t heard the old island maxim “suffer and be silent” ever before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Indian Boys Reformatory, a True Story
“Did you know that part of Bismuth is missing?” I asked Lettie.
“No, we know where it is. Mostly. It’s somewhere near the Fens and the Leif Ericson statue in Boston. The Bismuthians sold everything from Mount Bis along Bismuth Downs, up through the swamp to the city of Boston to use it as fill. There’s supposed to be a plaque on the street there thanking the residents of Bismuth for their dirt.”
“Where was it?”
We were passing out of the harbor and beyond the breakwater. I pointed out Wreck Rock. “Right there, that’s the mountain’s stub.”
“Are there pictures of Mount Bis from before?”
“No, and if you weren’t a stranger, I wouldn’t have even mentioned it. Bismuthians don’t like to talk about the mountain; they’re still too superstitious.”
Ill John, AKA Ronco, pointed with his chin: “You see yonder mountain?”
Lettie scanned the horizon with her hand shading her eyes.
“Yonder?”
“Yes. It is new.”
“A volcano?”
“No, it is Ted Williams’ sludge,” he said.
“What?”
“It is dredged from the bottom of Boston Harbor to make a tunnel. And then put here to make a mountain.”
“Why?” asked Lettie.
“The people of that island were paid to take that dirt and keep it on their island forever.”
“Why didn’t Boston just leave the sludge underwater?”
“It is poisoned by Boston Harbor water. The city wanted the harbor to be cleaner.”
“What happened to the people on the island?”
“They are members of our tribe,” said the newly coined native. “They have moved to Florida.”
“A lot of my tribe did too,” said Lettie.
“You are Indian?” asked Ronco.
“No, Jewish.”
“The Jewish are a tribe?” asked Franklin, née Chosen.
“Twelve different tribes—God’s chosen people,” she said.
“And the Jewish North American Indian tribe are the Mormons, yes?” asked Ronco.
“No? I’m not sure. I think the Mormons are like the Celtics— all white until a few decades ago,” I said.
“No. I am sure,” said Ronco. “They migrated from Palestine across the Arctic Circle and down into North America. Guided by angels. It says so in their book.”
Before either of my Indian friends could ask about the religion of the ancient Celtics, or the Yankees or the Knickerbockers, or the Redskins and Red Sox, I changed the subject and asked Ronco if some of his ancestors hadn’t lived on Mount Bis.
Franklin answered before Ronco could. “Ted Williams is buried there.”
“Not on Mount Bis,” I said.
“No, of course. He is buried in Ted Williams Island Mountain.”
“That’s not entirely the case,” said Lettie. “His head is cryogenically frozen in Florida.” Was she on to us?
“But I think Roosevelt’s tomb is on Campobello Island, Isn’t it?” she continued.
“No, I have been there,” said Ronco, “It is just his monocle, cigarette holder, and the skeleton of his dog.”
“He was just a summer person,” I added.
“So your ancestors lived on the mountain?” Lettie asked. “Was it a reservation?”
“No, there were no white people yet,” said Franklin. “The mountainous people warred instead with the lowlanders and the mainlanders. They were miners instead of fishermen.”
“Miners? What did they mine?”
“Bismuth.”
“Oh yeah. Why?”
“They traded it for mussel shells.”
“Why?”
“Mussel shells were like dollars. They made great middens of shells in the mineshafts to save for later. They were frugal,” explained Franklin Mint.
“Middens in mineshafts?”
“Yes, it is disappointing they did not also have compound interest.”
“But the mines were haunted, right?” I said.
“Quite cursed.” said Franklin.
“But they’re gone?” asked Lettie.
“There are said to be shafts that went below the roots of the mountain, down under the water line—Tunnels and caverns where Franklin and Ronco’s ancestors hid during raids and brutal winters.”
“Our ancestors told legends of shamans who descended into the mountainous bowels and never returned,” said Ronco.
“They became nacreous pale creatures that learned the language of the whales,” said Franklin. “They sang with them in hooms and thrums. They were said to travel impossible
distances—to distant shores and the icy wastes in the north. Maybe through cracks in the planet, maybe in the bellies of whales.”
“Mmm. The ancestors made sacrifices to them. Maidens, first-born sons, tribal enemies and that ilk,” said Ronco.
“And in return,” I said, “the creatures from below guided whales to the island, where the original islanders would swim out, spear them to death and drag the carcass to shore.”
“The waters were fouled with gore. Sharks would come. The tide would be red for weeks from the slaughter,” said Franklin.
Lettie asked if she could interview a shaman. Franklin said they were gone with the mountain.
“Wasn’t there a reform school on the mountain?” I asked.
Franklin Mint and Ronco didn’t answer. I guessed they might not know what a reform school was.
“The Indian Boys Reformatory. It’s where the whites sent orphan or otherwise undesirable Indian boys to learn the salubrious effects of industry and obedience.”
Neither of my fishing buddies seemed ready to elaborate on the reform school; I supposed the next bit of telling was up to me.
“After the glory days of whaling had waned, and before the mountain was sold for landfill, most of the Indians here had moved to other Indian islands or to the mainland. The Yankees couldn’t see the profit yet in these islands, so they used them for dumps and prisons—A leper colony here, a POW camp there, maybe some pasture islands of merinos. They saw the islands as the outermost margins of civilization, not the point of origin, like the Indians here and the Northern Indians think.
“The reform school was built into the entrance of an old mine shaft carved from the side of the mountain. The Stony Lonesome for boys with no place to go anyway. The Quakers who ran it had a delusional zeal for discipline and self-sufficiency that would make a modern North Korean proud. In fact, the entire continent believed entirely that beatings and toil were to be passed down from the richest, palest people and distributed among the masses of indigenous and immigrants, thus making us all the very model of Christianity, to be smiled upon during the final judgment.”
“The reform school?” prompted Franklin.
“Well, it was around the time of the Civil War. The Indian boys sentenced to the school were charged with raising sheep and gleaning from the abandoned mines. The merino wool was actually a reasonable source of profit then, and an island is a pretty easy place to be a shepherd. When the boys weren’t tending the sheep or sorting through the tailings, they were supposed to be memorizing their Horn Books or attending chapel service. It was a miserable life, but nobody was ever happy in those days.
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