“So what’s the plan?” I asked them.
“Delicious barbeque, Korean-style,” said Ill John.
You can’t shock me with a squid; I’ve seen too many. The ones we fish around here are like children’s hands with eyeballs. Sorting them can be difficult. If I think about them too much, I have to go sit down—I’ve never been completely comfortable around tentacles. They’re slithery and intentional when fish are merely random and floppy, and plus squid piss black ink all over you. I know they have cousins who are much too large and smart for their own good. I’ve heard tell that the summer after the Cape Cod Canal was dug, it clogged so badly with migrating squid that cutters had to go out dragging heavy cables to slice through all the entangled tentacles and make the new canal navigable again. I don’t suppose many species out there have humans digging a giant shortcut to their mating grounds for them.
I’ve seen them vomited from fish. I’ve chopped them into a slurry of chum. I’ve watched their torpid limbs stiffen terminally mid-grapple as they try to crawl from the freezer holds. However, this was the first time I’d seen them so flat and well-organized. While Chosen set up a Hibachi that hung on a bracket from the side of the boat, Ill John produced a leather attaché case that opened from the top. Inside it was divided with expandable file folders that Ill John flipped through with his forefingers.
“These are unavailable in your hemisphere,” he told me, “but common in Korea. Chosen already selected the right ones for this evening. He began preparing them this morning. Here is another good one, please be careful.”
I took the squid he was showing me. It was light, tan, stiff, and flat. It looked like an old sandal. “See, it still has all its limbs and eyeballs. Many are damaged, even counterfeit. See the two longer tentacles? They are the favorites for children to chew. One is used to deposit sperm.”
Ill John re-filed the squid. I figured his system probably wasn’t alphabetical. I thought about Korean kids chewing their favorite tentacles, and then I tried to unthink the thought.
“I am not the chef, though, and perhaps Chosen is not either. He is an artist, a scientist. You Americans think you invented the barbeque, but we were grilling animals before this continent even had the wheel.”
The attaché case folded open further to show an apothecary of jars and bottles labeled in Korean. Each was strapped in with a leather band or bundled in a handkerchief. “I have been curious about Tartar sauce since we first tasted it here,” said Chosen. “What do the Turkmen have to do with Bismuth? Their ancestors were masters of the grass sea, not the ocean.
“Upon your revelation that the Topsoil makes it by mixing mayonnaise and relish, I was disappointed.”
“You should see them make Thousand Island dressing.”
“Furthermore,” said Chosen, “it does not contain tartaric acid, which would be helpful for the squid. As I sought to prepare the liquid for the squid, I reviewed other materials in your store. I found that tonic water contains a cure for malaria and that club soda does not contain a sufficient amount of bicarbonate of soda. I had been told that the English translation for what I wanted was Lyle Water however, and I cannot buy such a thing.”
“Tonic water’s a mixer for boat drinks. They call club soda ‘sparkling water’ at the Topsoil now. If you want a Coke or something, you can say ‘soda’ now, but we used to say ‘tonic’ and sometimes still do. Just don’t say ‘pop.’ I’ve never heard of Lyle Water. But I meant to ask, do you guys have any beer?”
They had played their lobstermen role too well. All they had was a case of Bud cans. At least I was helping to contribute a sense of realism. Whenever Donny and I drank cans on his dad’s boat, we always shotgunned the first one by punching a hole near the base of the can. Donny, however, was a dick; whereas I was gallant and cosmopolitan. I opened mine properly and made sure I took at least five minutes to sip it down.
Chosen resumed his disquisition. “What was necessary was lye solution. I considered making the lye by soaking wood ash, but that too is hard to find here.”
It was true. Only God knows the last time there was a hardwood tree big enough to cut for cordwood on the island.
“In the shop I found the solutions I needed outside of grocery. A drain cleaner contained more lye than I could ever use. Baking soda powder for sodium bicarbonate. Do you say ‘making math’ here? I thought the verb was ‘doing.’”
“Why?”
“As I counted my change from the clerk, he asked me if I was ‘making math,’ where I thought I was ‘doing math.’”
“He said ‘meth’—crystal methamphetamine—poor man’s crack made from store bought chemicals.”
“Ahh. Why, when you have seagum?”
“The grass is always greener,” I told him.
“What?”
“The next drug is always better.”
“Well, indeed, because the next drug was very helpful.” Chosen showed me a glass jar full of a yellow-gray liquid that fizzed a little when he wiggled it. He opened it and offered to me to smell. It made my eyes water. Snorri. This was old milk.
“This is old milk,” I said, handing it back quickly.
“Yes! From Snorri! We have nothing like it in Korea!”
“Nor here.”
“It is perfect, and Snorri assures that it is entirely organic,” said Chosen.
I never understood the consolation of “organic.” All the most horrible things in the world are organic.
“Snorri would not explain the ingredients, but I think I understand the principle. This is an animal’s milk that was going to become a cheese when a bacteria was introduced. However, both the milk and the bacteria used are very strong and they continue to fight each other, instead of adapting to being comfortable cheese. Snorri keeps them in chaotic equilibrium secretly.
“After Snorri donated his sample of old milk, the preparation congealed in my mind. The opposing forces of lye and soda, once distilled, could be made cooperative. The old milk assists in the unlocking of squid protein structures while adding an element of the uncanny. And finally, we make it personal!” Chosen held up a vial of pink powder.
“Bismuth! Right from your island! I saw the pink stomach preparations in the store next to the calcium carbonate tablets and had the idea. It is a regulating force to the wildness of the old milk and the combativeness of the lye and soda, while adding a calming pink hue to what I have named the Bismuth Squid Relaxing Juice!”
I demonstrated how mature and open-minded I was by not jumping overboard.
The charcoal briquettes were nearly gray to the center, and Chosen was ready to grill. He pulled a plastic bin out from under a bench and peeled off the lid. “The squids soak in their tub for most of the day.” He swirled the liquid. “The squid relaxer was hard to devise. First versions of it.…”
“Exploded,” interjected Ill John.
“Yes. But this,” he said, as he held up a dripping squid and laid it on the grill, “is an elixir.”
At that slap and sizzle, my stomach contracted like a child’s fist.
“The relaxing juice bloats the squid body enough to make it good for chewing. I will grill it for approximately ten minutes to sear the outside and add the flavors of charcoal and smoke, while making the skin somewhat crisp and sweet. Sometimes this squid is eaten with a sauce of garlic and chilies, but Ill John has a special surprise.”
Ill John had a big ceramic baked bean pot. “This has been in my family for generations. My mother is very unhappy it has left Korea. She gave it to me so I would remember her and home.”
He opened the lid and held the pot before me. “See? Real kimchi!”
I imagined gulls dropping from the sky, simply from the stench of the stuff. I felt dizzy and febrific, but not at all hungry. Somehow, Ill John’s sentimentality and Chosen’s sincere enthusiasm, when combined with what they considered supper, had unmanned me. I felt my lower lip tremble and my throat swell. The film in my eyes welled and spilled down the sides. I tried c
hoking down some beer, but it wound up in my nose. Chosen stared at me, and I felt Ill John’s hand smoothing my back. “It is OK, Orange. I brought a sandwich, just in case.”
That had been a real mom-and-apple pie moment for the Koreans, and I was annoyed with myself for not appreciating it. I had buckled, I supposed. Underslept and unmoored. I was grateful to Ill John, and I didn’t want to be. I really did need to sit quietly by myself on the foredeck and eat a turkey sandwich slowly. But it bothered me that he knew me well enough to suggest it. The only thing to do was pick myself up and eat squid like a real man.
Ill John and Chosen were ready to help me save some face. Everybody with a boat knows the liberty of no witnesses. Usually it’s just license for hedonism or at least bad personal grooming, but I thought my ex-lobstering partners were being remarkably humanistic about it. Chosen offered a choice of tentacle or body. I chose body. He gave me a finger-long strip around an inch wide that had been siped like a balding tire with cross-hatched grooves. Considering its origin and recent history, it wasn’t all that bad. In fact the same piece continued to be not all that bad as I chewed it for the next several minutes. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to swallow it or not.
“Chewy,” I said.
“I grilled four,” said Chosen, “have all you want. You sure no tentacle?”
I was sure. The two of them promptly broke off their choice of tentacles from the stack of grilled squids. Chosen chomped his down, while Ill John worried one like Eastwood with a cheroot. I let my wad soak into a swallowable bolus in the pouch of my cheek. Another beer helped.
“So that was a wicked story,” I said.
Chosen beamed. “In college, I took ‘Supernaturalism in Coastal Northeast American Literature’ in the English language. Lovecraft was best. I kept the books. I read King in English now. Ill John likes Poe.”
“I didn’t know people in Korea read that stuff.”
“There are many important writers from this region,” said Chosen.
“I don’t think I’ve read any Korean books. Not that I read Korean.”
“Not much gets translated. Many Koreans study English literature, some study American.”
“There is a big American Army base in Korea. We tire of big Americans quickly there,” added Ill John.
“Here, too,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Donald Slips a Mickey
The sub-woofing “thug-thug” of a fishing boat takes a few seconds to catch up to the boat itself, but the waves have a way of pushing sound forward, and sometimes it heralds rather than explains an arrival. I heard something like it: distant concussions with a rhythm, maybe even a military backbeat. My skin horripilated while I braced irrationally for a rogue wave wash-over. It was all sonic. The sound of muscly, sluggish propulsion— an overbored engine lurching forward on too much throttle—resolved into a drive and drop of fuzzy guitar growls and whomping percussion that mimicked the whooshing slatch and rattling slap of a longship riding and crashing on steep gray waves.
This was Estonindian black metal dub. Music for wounded bears as they shrugged off tranquilizer darts. A genre so conclusively suicide-inducing, blue-ribbon Congressional panels were afraid to listen to it. If Francis Scott Key had been a ninth-century raider whose head was still throbbing and clanging from an ax-blow to the helmet, standing with one hand braced on the dragon prow of his longship watching his enemies’ tarred warships burn in an uncanny blue bituminous haze, while unseen galley slaves chanting the stroke rumbled the ship from below, he may have closed his eyes, thought of Ragnarok, and composed an anthem like this.
The loury drone that underlay belied a bass drum thumping away at smothering rapidity, like adrenalized mastodons stomping out a tachycardiac wardance. Snatches of phrases, usually snarling exhortations to stroke harder, blew in and out of the lumbering music; it was music for weeks of sleet on the open sea, for the anthemist to wrap himself in a reeking wool cloak and keep his ax close. Soon the galley slaves would be dead of overwork and starvation and he would have to pull an oar himself if he ever wanted to see his own linden-graced shores again. It was music of the cold, countless waves of the middle distance, well past the point of no return.
Yet here it was in our harbor in the form of the Hammer Maiden sluing toward our little Princess Pea on a slow but irredeemable collision course. We banged hard to port as she arced in the other direction. Chosen flipped open a compartment under the deck’s bench and grabbed his Kalashnikov. Waldena was probably lucky his attention was split between the collision and rescuing his alchemical cooking kit. Waldena herself was right there on her deck waving both arms, shouting “No!” I think maybe I was too, but I was shouting to her boat, while she was shouting to Chosen.
We grazed each other right around amidships, which was healthy piloting by Ill John. The Princess took a good body check and a bite out of her gunwale from the Maiden and left a ragged smear of chalky white paint along the whaler’s dark hull. Had our angles been off just a little, the Maiden would have foundered us like a hibernating bear sow smothering her cub. I couldn’t help noticing her black opalescent paintjob and the unibrow-like louvers beetling over the smoked amber windows of her conning tower. This was a wicked boat that picked tubs like ours out of her teeth. We were lucky to have bounced off her.
We do-si-doed back to neutral corners, while Chosen kept a bead on the Maiden. Ill John backed off to an idle to see if she were pursuing us. She was beginning to orbit back around when her engines and music cut. She lifted a bit as her wake passed under her. Waldena kept waving to us in a jerking semaphore and yelled, “I’ve been tampered!”
“What?” I yelled.
“I’m. . . Jesus Fuck!” she screamed. Then followed up in ranting Estonindian with what I presumed was her assessment of the desert god’s son’s shameful intramural relationships, as well as how his turpitude was directly responsible for her current state. She concluded, “I need help!”
We huddled. “You know Waldena, right?” I asked the Koreans.
“We would be fools not to,” said Ill John.
“You can still be fools even if you do,” I said.
“Orange!” she hollered. My goose pimples grew back.
“If we leave her for the harbormaster, she’ll hunt us down and kill us,” I said.
“We are proper mariners,” said Ill John. “We must have honor.”
We came around and puttered down to her. As we came alongside, she told us to use bumpers.
“We are not tying up,” yelled Ill John. He held a coiled line in his hand. “You have had a boating accident. Take this and we will tow you to shore.”
He tossed the line across her foredeck. Waldena snatched it and flung it back. “You will not!”
“You are not in distress?”
“I’ll swim back before I get towed in by this thing!” I think all three of us paused to entertain private thoughts about the contradictory needs of dangerous women.
“So. . . ?” said Ill John.
“So, fuck!” Waldena looked more cross than engine trouble warranted. If she wasn’t hopping mad, she was at least tap dancing. She was wearing a tank top and I could see that a flush had spread up from her chest to set her arms and face aglow. Her eyes were far too open and sweat soaked her hairline. I put my hand on Ill John’s arm like he was going to help me cross the street.
“I think she wants a ride,” said Ill John.
“She’s a pretty good swimmer,” I said. “Maybe she should just swim to shore.”
We tied up, bumpers and all. Waldena dropped anchor, two anchors in fact, and spent a piece of time battening the Maiden. Ill John and I differed on whether she was fastening or fascinating. She stood a good chance of catching some hell from the harbormaster for illegal parking. Once the boat was theft-proofed, or whale-proofed, or whatever her inordinate security protected her from, Waldena leapt down from her boat onto the Princess’s foredeck, dropping down to one knee to soften her landing
. This brought her face to face with Ill John and I in the wheelhouse. She put both her palms on the windshield and gave us a hard stare until the glass fogged over. She was clearly in distress, and, therefore, so were we.
Waldena was radioactively pissed off. It was hard to tell who was to blame, since most of creation had been itemized and cursed in an accelerated sputter of English and Estonindian. Held to particular account were the Island, Snorri, the Lucys, me, the Koreans, and the ocean, all of whom had collaborated to produce this pitch of botheration. I don’t think any of us, even Waldena, could have anticipated the effect she soon had. Ill John gunned us toward the dock, flouting the wake rule.
Chosen hurriedly packed up his cooking kit and then sat on it, clutching his AK. I found myself gnawing on my knuckles. When Waldena paused her diatribe to cross her eyes and knees and exhale hard through her nostrils, Chosen said something to Ill John in Korean that suggested he had figured something out.
“What?” I asked.
“Tiger testes.”
Oh God. “Seagum?”
“What?” asked Waldena.
“Seagum,” I said.
“Tiger testes,” said Chosen.
Waldena looked frustrated and perplexed.
“A white powder?” asked Ill John.
“Not cocaine?” she asked.
I had an insight: “Not Donny Lucy?”
Waldena pinched her eyes to arrow slits. Her flush empurpled. I felt her teeth grind. Or, no, I felt my own teeth grind. I was growing confused, and her agitation was infectious. Our cockpit had become a pheromonic funk hole; we were all gasping.
“Donny. . . Lucy. . . not.…”
Waldena was too incandescent to finish speaking. I took a towel and soaked it over the side. “Here, put this over your head. It’ll help us calm down.”
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