SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  “But what happened?” persisted Donny.

  “Nothin’, I said!”

  Donny was right. Something happened to it. Or the laws of nature were not enforced as strictly as we’d been led to believe. “It’s just a head,” I whined.

  “It’s a sunfish,” snapped Mr. Lucy. “They eat jellyfish. Look at its mouth.”

  Its mouth was beak-like, hardly suited to man-eating. Jellyfish made sense, since they were obviously creatures from beyond—the right meal for a giant floating head.

  “Are they smart?”

  “You’d think,” said Mr. Lucy, “but look at it.”

  Donny was preparing to harpoon it with the boathook. I had to admit, now that I was getting used to looking at it, that it lacked menace. I felt threatened by the mere fact of its existence, but it did look kind of goofy, and one certain mark of a stupid animal is if it sticks around in the presence of armed teenagers.

  In the end, it did nothing about us, and we did nothing about it. Donny and I both felt that authorities should be notified, that others should know that sea monsters were stranger than previously imagined. Mr. Lucy hardly mentioned it to the guys that towed us in.

  If enough generations of wasps pounded their heads against the same point in the window pane, would it break eventually? Why not just fly out the door?

  “I knew it,” said Mr. Lucy, as he gave the back cover a gentle spank, “the fish always dies.”

  “Did you think it would end differently this time?” asked Ill John.

  “Never read it before. Never will again, neither. Probably.”

  “It’s the captain that always gets it in the end,” I said.

  “Don’t be clever,” said Mr. Lucy. “At least the captain sticks with it to the end. It’s the talky guy that always lives to tell the tale. That’s what’s wrong with books.”

  “The captain as his own Jonah.”

  Mr. Lucy scowled. “It’s not enough I just read a book for you?” I was sorry.

  “Why did you never read the book before?” asked Chosen. “Never had the time; knew how it ended.”

  “Why, now?”

  “You know, my dad once gave this guy’s grandfather a ride across town in a wheelbarrow,” said Mr. Lucy, indicating the book’s author and presumably not the title monster.

  “Why, and what is a wheelbarrow?” said Chosen.

  “A wheelbarrow, son, is a cart with one wheel that you push.”

  Ill John pantomimed pushing a wheelbarrow for his partner.

  I tried to signal ‘don’t get him started’ to the Koreans, but they both ignored me.

  “And the reason why,” continued Mr. Lucy, “is ‘cause they wasn’t sober much at all. The old man used to be a summer visitor and was a famous souse. My dad said he had a skinny little mustache and he could talk fancy till the fish drown. The boys thought he was a queer and a pinko, but they liked his stories and let him drink with them at one of their oyster shacks in the evenings. According to my dad, the island was supposed to be dry then, thanks to the temperance crazies, so nobody was supposed to be drinking. Fishermen made more money bringing whiskey in from Canada then they did on fish then.

  “Anyways, one night they’re all blind and staggering and this guy says he’s gotta get home to the wife, only he can’t walk and wasn’t sure where the home or wife was. But, he says, by happy coincidence he’s doing research on an essay he’s gonna write called ‘How to Get Pushed Home in a Wheelbarrow by Fishy-Smelling Drunks’ and that his buddies would be contributing to a great and important cause if they was to push him home. I suppose you might already know they made it into a short subject some years ago.”

  “Edifying,” said Ill John.

  “Well here,” said Mr. Lucy, giving him a fishy eye and then the book, “I don’t need it anymore. Woulda been better if the shark ate ’em all.”

  Several minutes later, I was headed to the docks in the Suburban with the Koreans. Mr. Lucy had hollered to Wendy to get her to bring lemonade to us in the shed, and she had hollered back that we could piss our own lemonade, so we left, and not because we didn’t have cups.

  “Next?” I asked.

  “Next, Snorri,” said Ill John.

  “If you knew he was just reading the book all along, why didn’t you just take it from him?”

  “We discovered we were making friends with Mr. Lucy.”

  “This makes you guys buddies? What, a book club?”

  Chosen turned to face me from the front seat and handed me the book. “Only your friends steal your books, Orange.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Reeled In

  Iscanned the harbor for familiar boats. In the summer the harbor gets cluttered with pleasure boats, and the harbormaster has a lucrative cash trade going for overnight mooring rights. He patrols his waters in a decent Boston Whaler and carries a shotgun and a nasty-looking dog to remind the tourists that he is more than a meter maid. Today there was a preposterous yacht anchored inside that should never have been let into the harbor. I couldn’t figure why a ship that size bothered with islands. It probably had more flushing toilets aboard than we had in all of town.

  Maybe it’s good that the aristocracy comes to demonstrate their finest and most agreeable floating castles to us now and then. It might do us good to see the baronial daughters sunning in their bikinis through our binoculars. Maybe someday I’ll be rowing by in my muscular, hardworking, seaworn way and a bikini top would flutter from a pair of well cultivated breasts, and I would snatch it from the air before it became sullied by our yacht-discharge waters and present it to the young Miss in a manner that irresistibly combined my rustic charm and native grace. She would be terribly curious about Island men, having been forbidden to even look at us by her father, yet intrigued by her sea-chambermaid’s nearly primal enthusiasm for social congress with the strapping fishing-lads of Bismuth, such as myself.

  “I do not see Honeypaws,” said Ill John.

  “Me neither. I don’t see anyone worth looking for or avoiding.” “The coast is clear,” said Chosen.

  “So you guys don’t need me right now, right?” They both peered over their aviators at me. My indentureship had not yet concluded.

  “We will have to go to Gaiety,” said Ill John. “We will take the Princess.”

  We found their rental boat tucked in among the lobster boats and trawlers at the commercial wharf. We shoved off with a notable lack of picnic baskets; Ill John did a serviceable job of extricating the boat from the welter of lines and double-parked rust buckets.

  We made our way in a glugging trundle to Mini’s island. I thought it would be just delightful if her sister were not there, but I hadn’t seen the Angie Baby anywhere around Bismuth. It was clear at sea; the continent a mere smudge of fog and toxic out-gassings. Snacks were not served.

  I was telling them about the nerve tonic/soda drink Moxie, and how the bartender at the Topsoil had once lost a bet on it. He was an offislander and claimed that Moxie could not be mixed with anything alcoholic and remain potable. Me and a few guys were making our way through the Mr. Boston well bottles, trying the gamut from rye to gin in a series of undrinkable highballs and baroquely poisonous island ice teas. We had hit on a contender with Jaegermeister, only I felt the flavors were too similar. The bartender pulled out a dusty greenish bottle from the cabinet under the register. It was absinthe, he said. We all knew it was illegal, but none of us knew why. It was the lonely unicorn of liquors. All the rest of the booze got to repopulate the continent after prohibition was repealed, but absinthe never made it off the ark. We were all very pleased with ourselves. The green liquor made earthy swirls in the brown, fizzy Moxie. We knew we were supposed to do something with a sugar cube, but not what. We added ice and, hey, it wasn’t bad. Much better than cough syrup and better than either of its components on their own. It was dubbed a “Mabsy,” and we never drank it again.

  Ill John was describing some of the improbable liquors distilled by, as he called t
hem, “prison campers from the North,” when we noticed both the Honeypaws and Tharapita’s Hammer Maiden moored off of Mini’s dock. A cocktail that ensured a hangover.

  I told the Koreans that judging by the quality of the sunlight and the color of the water, and especially the presence of the two vessels, that the forecast for Ragnarok or Rapture was medium-to-high, and we’d be wise to heed the squall signs. Chosen told me it was a good thing they were with me, otherwise I’d never get anything done. It wasn’t worth re-explaining that nothing was exactly what I’d wanted to get done.

  “Shouldn’t we at least call ahead, maybe find out first if we need to call the Coast Guard?” I asked.

  “We should not need to call first. Mineola Bombardier knows we are here,” said Ill John.

  “We could fire a flare,” I said. “They might appreciate a cease-fire. You’re cultural ambassadors right? Just like them? You could stay here and host a summit and I could take the Princess back.”

  “Why are you so reluctant?” said Ill John.

  “We’re all looking at the same boats, right?”

  “This is an excellent opportunity.”

  “To not and say we did.”

  “Orange, you may understand that others may have agendas to which you are only a codicil?”

  “Right, it’s none of my business. You’ve seen the light. You can just give me a beach ball, and I’ll float home from here.”

  “Yet a codicil can be a crucial addendum.”

  I was fed up with my inability to distinguish between palling around, doing a favor, and being press-ganged. They’d sort of sweet-talked me with flummery about destiny, but here I was, literally being taken for a ride by a pair of mooks. Albeit bilingual flâneurs with a decent sense of adventure.

  “Tell me honestly.” I said to Ill John, “Why bother?”

  “You know that Mineola Bombardier is a spy, right?”

  “Here I thought she was a cultural ambassador too. Who’s she spy for?”

  “Herself. She is a fisherwoman for information and has her hooks in the jaws of many.”

  “We’re being reeled in?”

  “We have casting rods ourselves,” he said.

  “So you figure you’re both pulling.”

  “Perhaps, so to speak. But you remain the Yankee.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Thing

  Snorri told me that Angie wasn’t around. He’d been there to catch our lines and help us dock. He was cooling his heels seaside, he said, since Mini was otherwise occupied.

  “And your tan is well?” asked Ill John.

  Snorri raised an eyebrow. “Tan?”

  “Cooling the heels is working the tan, right?”

  “Mini won’t let me in until I talk to Waldena,” he said, pointing inland then to the Maiden.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Waldena won’t get off her boat. She says, ‘Not while Mini’s got the Varangian Guard here.’”

  “Why’s she here?”

  “Followed me here to kill me, she says.”

  “And you?”

  “She would never leave the harbor alive. I have resources and assets.”

  “A Mexican stand-off, then?” I said.

  “No Mexicans,” Chosen observed.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I asked.

  “Arrive with all the answers,” said Snorri.

  The three men waited for my response.

  “Well that’d be something.”

  We watched Waldena busy herself with boatwork while we tanned our heels. Snorri said he’d learned important lessons about immobility when he fought with the Forest Brethren. He said you could waste hours, even days of immobility if you succumbed and moved just an inch.

  I hadn’t thought about why we didn’t just walk up to the house until I heard the whine of Mini’s golf cart. She was being chauffeured by one of the Gaiety Varangians. In her straw hat and blue smock, she looked dressed for a bit of aristocratic gardening—ordering the servants about while she clutched some blossoms.

  “I’ve figured out how to get rid of you all,” she announced. “You need to have a Thing.”

  I barely suppressed my groan. Things reportedly lasted weeks; Islanders who hadn’t uttered a word all winter would stemwind for hours about the failings of their peers. Our island had kept up this tradition of self-governance since time immemorial and some people claimed that it was our ancestors who brought the practice to the Old World. However, World War II had been the end of all Things on Bismuth. After that, no one person could manage to remember all the laws and debts, and the surfeit of uniforms that accumulated on our island during wartime had so many conflicting and hermetic notions about jurisdiction that any sort of peaceable assemblage of authority figures was a farce anyhow. My father said that the end of Things had made us all good Christians—we just gave up sorting out morality and ethics for ourselves and declared we were all sinners, therefore we were both absolved of all guilt and free from any further bonds of self-reliance.

  “Excuse me, a Thing?” asked Ill John.

  “An ancient tradition,” said Snorri, “where the tribal leaders gather to decide disputes. Today, all the first-world countries do it in parliaments with elected members.”

  “Yes, Korea as well. South Korea, anyway. And here?”

  “Here they do it with think tanks.”

  Snorri made it sound like an insult, but I liked the sound of think tanks. They seemed science fictional.

  “And who would be in our Thing Tank?”

  “It’s just a Thing,” said Snorri.

  “So, who?”

  “Us, I guess. I propose we sink the Maiden with all hands on board.”

  “That’s not how it works,” said her chauffeur.

  “If you agree, we may hold the Thing on my patio this afternoon,” said Mineola.

  “How are Things decided?” asked Ill John. “Votes?”

  “Either a king or votes, depending,” said Snorri. “Is there a king?”

  “I think it would only be fair if we voted,” said Snorri.

  “And that Mineola should get two votes, because this is her island.”

  “Ow!” yelled Mini, yanking on a piece of plastic that had evidently been wedged deep in her ear.

  “That was Waldena,” she said. “She’s been listening on the Bluetooth. She disagrees.”

  I looked over to the Maiden. Waldena was semaphoring Gaiety the finger.

  They all bickered about parliamentary procedures until the two Koreans agreed to be one voter. I wasn’t too clear on what needed to be decided beyond how I should be brought home and fed, so I stayed shut up.

  Eventually the rules for the summit were determined: after Mini and her staff finished dinner, during which they would not be disturbed, we would come to the back patio, sober and weaponless, where we would solve our problems with all the wisdom and dignity that our respective civilizations represented. And sauna afterward, added Snorri.

  I was looking forward to unloading the number-one bestselling unputdownable novel that was soon-to-be-made-into-a-major-motion-picture. It was developing a noumenal static charge, becoming a whatsis with more symbolic lumber than physical weight. The cover had torn an inch or so since Mr. Lucy gave it to me, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I guess I had imagined handing it to Snorri like a dean dispensing a diploma. Neither of the Koreans had inscribed it, and it wasn’t exactly gift-wrapped. Someone had used the title page to figure how to divide twenty-five by seven. The retail price had been magic-markered out; inside the cover it was listed for fifty cents. Tag sale, I concluded. The used bookstores that came and went on the island would have charged more. When I held the book nearly horizontally, I saw the vermiform topography of indented handwriting, but could read none of it.

  I hadn’t been paying close attention during much of the Thing. Snorri and Waldena had ethnonational differences with prehistoric roots that could only be expressed through epic and allegory, w
hich they delusionally believed they were cogently expressing as necessary preambles to their specific, more topical conniptions. They also seemed to believe that we foreigners would appreciate the educational aspects of their intractabilities. Mineola, who had one vote, proposed we break. She had one of her Gaiety Myrmidons bring us a pitcher of iced sumac tea, which turned out to be drinkable with a minimum of six ice cubes and a heap of sugar.

  Snorri handled the book handover with aplomb, happening to notice it, saying he’d heard of the book and had always been curious to read it in English. The rest was easy—I said it was indeed very good in English; however, it was not mine to loan. Snorri allowed Ill John to refuse to allow Snorri to borrow it, insisting Snorri must take possession of it as a token of friendship and memento of their time together here in the North American Northeast Atlantic Archipelago. Snorri tugged on an eyebrow, declared he was touched, and he’d begin it that very night.

  That was it. I didn’t fall in the ocean or anything. My albatross had finally rotted off.

  Waldena saw the book and the exchange as perfect proof of the absolute idiocy of all involved. I wished I could disagree with her rattling rhetorical bullet points. As Waldena enumerated and castigated examples of our genetically ordained stupidity, Snorri’s color and dudgeon rose. I knew from stories he’d told that somewhere in Finlindia, locked in an ancient cedar chest banded with brass and warded with long-forgotten incantations, was his family’s bear shirt. Judging from the steam I could almost see shooting from his ears, I knew he must be thinking of it. If he were to throw back his patio chair and stomp off from our Thing, make a quick dash back across the Atlantic to Fin-lindia, grab the bear shirt and return—presuming of course that we stayed here biding our time—he would don the hide, suck in the stench of epic battles that clung to it like olfactory heraldry, and go berserk until fjords of blood flowed from our islands. His rage would be unquenchable, and he would fight until the entire nation of North American bears banded together to vanquish him.