We Are All Crew

by Bill Landauer

  A voice fizzes from the radio in the cabin, the one Seabrook says he uses to listen in on the Green Police: “Opponents warned that poking new holes in the tundra would devastate this cathedral of nature. In Oklahoma, which has been a top-five oil producing state for more than eighty years, most people are puzzled by these apocalyptic predictions, as they live in harmony with more than one hundred thousand oil and gas wells.”6

  Kang touches Seabrook’s other shoulder, but Seabrook shakes his head. “No, Kang,” he snaps. “Not until we’re clear of those boats.”

  Esmerelda’s eyes won’t stop moving. They dart from the old-fashioned gunwales to the mushroom-shaped smokestack, then to the hold, and finally the wake. She has green eyes, and her skin is freckled and deeply tanned. She looks even more beautiful in the barium-colored light, which makes her reddish locks and her eyes glow.

  “All right, like, what the fuck is this place?” she whispers to me. “And, like, who the hell are you people, and what is this boat thing, and what are you doing out here?” She keeps asking questions, leaning closer to me, but I back off because my breath smells like day-old Salisbury steak.

  Arthur collapses in a corner and falls asleep. The little red crescent moons all over his arms and legs are beginning to dry and get crusty.

  I try to explain everything to this chick, but nothing comes out clearly. Finally, I say, “Look, the doctor will explain everything to you when we’re safely away, okay?”

  I leave her standing in the center of the deck and go lean on the side of the cabin next to Arthur, watching the woods rush past. I’m drifting off to sleep when I feel something pressing on my hip. Suddenly I remember the disc I pocketed, the one that had fallen out of Shwo-Rez’s cigar box. I take it out and look at it.

  What I see freaks me out more than any soldier in black or Shrub Person or chattering thing.

  It’s a circular patch—the kind Boy Scouts wear on their uniforms when they learn how to start fires and tie knots. The design is stitched in thick thread at the center of the circle: the profile of a snarling cat with long, fierce fangs. On the left side of the cat head is a large letter C; on the right curls an S. Circling it: Duty to God, Country, and Species.

  I stare back at the woods and feel cold.

  The same design is painted on the Bitchin’ Poster that hangs over His Eminence’s desk in his office.

  his eminence

  Want to know what I have to live up to?

  Picture this: His Eminence, all of eighteen in the ’70s, six-foot-two with good looks and publicspeak, already impressing the hell out of everybody and about to embark on a lightning political career when he makes his one big rebellious move—even more rebellious than lifting the car and driving west. He becomes an amateur boxer.

  He did it for one summer between his senior year in high school and his freshman year in college, and it’s where he first caught the eye of the Moms, who saw him in the stands and later went out with him for drinks. And he was good too—left with nose intact and ears uncauliflowered because he just whaled on the mofos he went up against. They never stood a chance.

  His Eminence doesn’t even have to give me the disappointment stares. It’s obvious his four-foot-eleven offspring is far from the apple of his eye.

  Not that I don’t think I could handle myself in a fight, if it were to ever come down to that. I’ve played my share of vintage Mortal Kombat, people, and I can feel something animalistic in there; I know if I set it loose I’d just be a maniac.

  But this, now . . . WTF does His Eminence have to do with the Green Police?

  Chapter Eleven

  the things in the box

  They could tell the men didn’t want to look at them.

  Even through the metal grate, the beings inside the box could tell the two men were terrified. They slumped in their shining gray chairs, hands clasped in steel bracelets behind them. The men looked at the ceiling of the white room, the fluorescent bulbs blotting out every shadow. They looked at the metal floor. They looked at their laps. They never looked at the box.

  The things in the box had never seen men like these before. The men they usually saw wore green or gray uniforms with colored ribbons tied around their necks. These men were naked, filthy, and disheveled, one with white hair and the other with gray. They seemed less sinewy than other men, of softer flesh than the others they knew.

  That’s good, the things in the box thought.

  The shiny black window on the wall blinked on. A face appeared, one the things had seen many times before in these situations, and were now indifferent to. If they had thought about it, they would have considered its immensity, its impossible roundness. But they didn’t think about it.

  It spoke in a language they’d heard many times before, one they lacked both the ability to understand and the desire to decipher. Its meaning was inconsequential; the soft men were important.

  “Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Crawley.”

  “Look. F—for the love of God, you don’t need to do this,” said the white-haired one.

  “We want to cooperate. We have been cooperating,” the gray one added.

  “Jesus. Yes.”

  “Well, you poor dears,” said the large round face. “There’s no need to take on so. We’re just going to have ourselves a little chat. I’m Maude Sweetwater.”

  “Oh my Christ.”

  “You’ve heard of me?”

  “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck . . .”

  “Secretary Sweetwater, ma’am, we are completely willing to cooperate. We had no prior knowledge of any wrongdoing on the part of the representatives of Super Corp., and I am more than happy to turn over—” The white-haired man was sweating now. The things could smell it in their cage. It excited them.

  “Super Corp? Oh, your little federal indictment. Oh, Mr. Schwartz, we don’t care a whit about that, dontchaknow.”

  “I don’t. I . . . I’ll sign anything, Ms. Sweetwater. It’s what I do best. Gray-Aide. Chuck. Chuck’ll tell you.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, Mr. Schwartz, I really do. But all I care about is Doctor Marion Seabrook.”

  “Who?”

  “She means the wraiths, Great Shwo-Rez—um, Bob. The wraiths.”

  “A couple of men and two boys recently paid you gentlemen a visit. They were on a boat. I’d like to know what happened to that boat.”

  “The wraiths?” said the white-haired human.

  “The boat, gentlemen. Where is it?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  “Ammospermophilus homoedo.” That was particularly familiar to the things in the box.

  “What?”

  “It’s a breed of squirrel. Long name for a little squirrel, am I right? Ha ha. Well, this little squirrel used to be a very rare species found in the Midwestern United States and the Pacific Northwest. Thought to be entirely extinct by the dawn of the twentieth century—one of those poor, sweet, innocent victims of the Industrial Revolution. There wasn’t a whole lot of human contact with the ammospermophilus homoedo, gentlemen, except for one relatively little-known incident that happened ’round about 1850. A wagon train—the Soup party, named for Mordeci Soup, the head of the party—was making its way across Kansas to Colorado when it had an encounter with this rare breed of squirrel.

  “It wasn’t until 1855 that the remains of the Soup party were discovered by another wagon train. Twenty-eight men, women, and children, their bones strewn among the wreckage of their wagons, mixed up with the clean, white bones of the horses, just baking in that hot Kansas sun—licked clean, mind you. A couple of skeletons of children were discovered a good ways away from the wreckage. Apparently some of them tried to run and were cut down.

  “Well now, the pioneers that spotted them, they figured they were the victims of Indians. But there were no arrows or hoof marks—just lots of little tracks, from tiny animals that must have swarmed around that wagon train like piranhas.

  “That’s when the Stewart party—the wagon t
rain that spotted the Soup party—became the first group of people to meet up with ammospermophilus homoedo and live to tell the tale. You see, ammospermophilus homoedo is the man-eating squirrel.

  “Now it just so happens that this rare breed of squirrel couldn’t cope with the pollutants in the atmosphere from nearby cities and mostly died off. But, dontchaknow, life has a way of going on. In the early twentieth century, our predecessor organization happened to discover a nucleus of these little man-eating squirrels and began a program to repopulate the species.

  “We at Locksley Ponds have continued their work.”

  The soft men glanced for the first time at the beings swarming in the box.

  The beings in the box chattered appreciatively.

  “Jesus, Secretary Sweetwater. You don’t have to do this.”

  “No, I’m afraid I do. The Green Police have been tracking that boat for months. We almost had her on the Allwyn River, but there was a storm.”

  “The Allwyn. That goes right past Oxnard Gulch Air Force Base.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Chuck.”

  “Yes it does, Mr. Crawley. Seems there was an incident there. The base was overrun by animals.”

  “I don’t follow . . .”

  “Bears, deer, and birds all broke through the gates at Oxnard Gulch, gentlemen. Destroyed four jets on takeoff—birds flying into the engines, dontchaknow. Bears took out ten men before we could carpet bomb the hills. And that boat, the Tamzene—by then that illegal boat slipped through our clutches once again.”

  “My God.”

  “So you see how important it is that we get that boat. How important it is—given the lives lost, the treasure lost, and knowing full well who that boat’s allies are—that we capture that boat. So gentlemen. Where is it?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  “I will ask one more time. And then you’ll meet our furry little friends.”

  “Jesus Christ, Secretary Sweetwater, we don’t know anything—”

  The round face disappeared from the window on the wall as the hatch flung open, granting the beings access to the searing whiteness of the room. The men in the chairs made loud inconsequential noises.

  The things in the box had been right.

  The men were soft.

  PART THREE

  The Evil Lobster

  Anything different—that’s what they’re gonna talk about—race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other, so that they can keep going to the bank.

  —George Carlin

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  kang operates

  At midmorning, Doctor Seabrook falls against the wheel and to the cabin floor with a moist splash.

  Kang was expecting it. He drags him to the hold, where he has already laid bedding in a corner. Arthur and I each take a leg, and Kang grabs Seabrook’s shoulders. We carry him down the steps like that, despite his groggy protests that he needs to keep piloting the boat. Kang anchors us on the lee side of a small island, under some enormous weeping willows.

  Belowdecks, the doctor, lying on his stomach, closes his eyes and passes out. Kang cuts off Seabrook’s army shirt, revealing an inch-wide crater that’s splashed blood all over his back. It’s nasty. Kang cleans the blood off with a rag soaked in water from a canteen, but more tarry ooze continues to froth from the hole. He orders Arthur to press down on the wound with a cloth and then goes up on deck.

  Kang boils water in a tall pot on the grill. He places a pair of needle-nose pliers and a lobster pick into the boiling water. After a few minutes, he takes them out and goes back to Seabrook.

  Watching Kang remove the bullet from Seabrook’s back almost makes me hurl. I’ve seen lots of gunshot victims, of course; most heal up long before the movie ends. But seeing an actual wound and all that blood makes everything turn black around the edges of my vision. The skin looks more fragile and easily torn than I imagined it would—like candle wax. The blood is black and smells like metal.

  Arthur is pale. When I sit down, though, he continues to mop the blood with a rag. Esmerelda wrinkles her nose and holds the pliers for Kang when he isn’t using them.

  i show my moves

  Kang takes the boat another mile downstream and scans the banks for a hiding place. He finds one in another shoal behind trees that smell like the Moms’s linen closet. After we anchor, Kang motions for us to stay on the boat. Then he climbs overboard, and we watch him disappear into the forest.

  It isn’t until I can no longer make out the silver and white feathers of his headdress that it occurs to me that he’s gone off looking for a town, which sucks because I don’t want to wait here—I want to tag along so we can start hitchhiking to California. The plan, as far as I’m concerned, can still be to hitch west, see the show, then tell His Eminence about this world-changing invention as a peace offering. Score one for Wimp Winthrop.

  But I can’t think about leaving Seabrook right now—we’ll at least hang until the old man gets some help.

  Silence envelops the deck after Kang disappears. The wind rushes through the trees, spreading that sweet closet smell over the dead fish odor. I feel shaky—and not just because I can’t stop thinking about that patch I found, or because I saw a guy with a gaping hole in his back. I haven’t eaten anything except a couple of Pop-Tarts and a seaweed citrus juice since before the Shrub People captured us.

  “The concert is in six days, Arthur,” I say. “Did you realize that?”

  Arthur nods.

  “I understand this time around they’re opening up with tunes from the Bruiser album. ‘Show Biz’ is the first tune.” I stand, walk to the center of the deck, and spread my legs wide. I grab a fake microphone, do a pirouette, and kneel, looking at Esmerelda for a reaction. This is my cool move, people—it’s old school Axl Rose, from the heyday of badass front men. I’m a pro. I practice front man dance techniques in the mirror of my walk-in closet, and this move is one of the best in my repertoire—almost as killer as the one where I spin and do a flying scissor kick. Sometimes, though, when I do that move, I lose my balance and fall into a pile of laundry. The pirouette move is the safer bet. “Opening with ‘Show Biz’ is a shade on the obvious side, don’t you think?”

  Arthur nods and mouths the word journeys.

  “Yeah, they opened with ‘Journeys’ in Berlin last year,” I say. I whirl again and this time punctuate my landing with a karate kick. Something in my leg pops, and hot needles shoot up my hamstring. Grabbing my ass in pain would embarrass me in front of the chick, so I try to keep my face tight and kneel again.

  “You guys are talking about the Red Grizzlies?” says Esmerelda. She’s watching me dance with her arms crossed over her chest. I don’t see any awe. In the night, she unfurled her tattered clothes and put them on normally. Now she wears ripped bell-bottom jeans and a tight AC/DC T-shirt.

  “Yeah!” I say. “We’re actually on our way to California to—”

  “How can you guys, like, listen to that crap?”

  Crap?!

  “You . . .” I manage. “You don’t like the Grizzlies?”

  I look at Arthur, who seems to be taking this blasphemy pretty well for a true believer. In fact, Arthur is smiling. He sits up and turns toward Esmerelda.

  “No,” she says. She reclines on an elbow and looks up at the trees.

  How could such a gorgeous thing be capable of so horrible a sin as bad-mouthing the Red Grizzlies?

  “What’s wrong with them?” I ask.

  “You know,” Esmerelda says, “maybe one of us should be, like, sitting down there with Doc Seabrook until Kang gets back.”

  My neck bristles. My head aches. “What’s wrong with them?” I ask again, through clenched teeth.

  “With what? The Grizzlies?” she says, smiling. “Oh, come on, stubby. Hello? How ’bout for starters that they’re, like, not real?”

  Arthur rolls over on his side, an
d a soft chirping sound comes from his mouth. The son of a bitch is laughing.

  “Not real?” I might possibly be screaming. “Not real? The Greatest Band on Earth not real?”

  “Unbunch your panties,” Esmerelda says. “I don’t mean to diss something that obviously you think is the shit.”

  “Well what do you mean, not real?”

  She looks at me with half-lidded eyes. “Look, all I’m saying is that the Red Grizzlies are a corporate creation. Rim-Shot Records realized there was this post-grunge music revolution, like, a decade ago, and they, like, created a band out of session musicians and gave them a personality.”

  Arthur is totally beaming at her, and I will strangle that lame-o—right after I finish with her.

  “That’s bullshit!” I shout. Pigeons that were roosting in the laundry closet tree squawk and take flight. “That’s such bullshit!” And I laugh! I am totally laughing at how stupid this chick is. I mean, come on. “They’re the most influential rock band since Zeppelin!”

  Esmerelda looks at Arthur and giggles. “Oh come on, guys! Like, wake up and smell the corporate propaganda! Indie rock is where it’s at. Hit iTunes up for some tracks by the Porpoises or the Drier Sheets already. That’s wicked badass.”

  I laugh again—a series of high-pitched bleats that would have embarrassed me ordinarily, but right now I’m too pissed to care about appearances. “The Drier Sheets! The . . . the Drier Sheets!” A thousand insults for her obviously inferior choice of music clog my head so that I can’t get a single one out. “How could . . . The trouble with that, is . . . See . . .”

  The hottie giggles and puts a hand over her mouth. I give her an ugly stare, then sit cross-legged on the deck, peering into the forest for Kang.

  What a nut job. How can anybody hate the Greatest Band on Earth—especially somebody who looks like that? And what’s up with Arthur? Earlier I swore I’d never pick on the kid, but right now, people, I want to hurl the most mentally-leveling insult in his general direction.