SWELL Read online

  S W E L L

  S W E L L

  A NOVEL BY CORWIN ERICSON

  PUBLISHED BY DARK COAST PRESS COMPANY

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  3645 Greenwood Ave N.

  Seattle, WA 98103 U.S.A.

  www.darkcoastpress.com

  [email protected]

  Copyright © 2011 Corwin Ericson, all rights reserved.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, website, radio, or television review, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978 0 9844288 4 7

  Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 201192330 First Edition

  Map of the Island of Bismuth illustrated by Lindsey Tibbott and Rachel Blowen, designed by David Stone. Cover design by Chris Jordan, Shipwreck Design Text design by Charlie Potter

  Distributed by Ingram Publisher Services

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Susie Bright, editor of X: The Erotic Treasury (Chronicle, 2009), in which an excerpt from Swell was published as the story “Seagum.” Thank you, Rachel Vogel, of Movable Type Literary Group. My thanks to the good people at Dark Coast Press.

  Honorary Islanders:

  Bethany Ericson, Tamara Grogan, Glenn McDonald, Amanda Nash, Parker Ramspott, Ann Tweedy, Dara Wier, Kimberlie Winter, Jeffrey “Reader Zero” Winter.

  Contents

  Letter from Eric Korangarson Bumpus, (Ret.) Director of the Bismuth Tourism Council

  Map of the Island of Bismuth

  Part I

  Chapter One | Stranded and Conscripted

  Chapter Two | Smugglers on the Polk

  Chapter Three | Seagum

  Chapter Four | The Angie Baby

  Chapter Five | The Tender and the Hammer Maiden

  Chapter Six | Oysters in the Topsoil

  Chapter Seven | Waldena, the Estonindian

  Chapter Eight | A Special Terror in Ely Pond

  Chapter Nine | Mission Statement

  Chapter Ten | Gaeity

  Chapter Eleven | The Sauna

  Chapter Twelve | Up Late with Mineola

  Chapter Thirteen | In Bed with the Beargroom

  Part II

  Chapter Fourteen | The Yankee Circumciser

  Chapter Fifteen | Winslow Homer and the Price of Tartar Sauce

  Chapter Sixteen | A Twelve Pack and the Lucky Lady

  Chapter Seventeen | Waldena in Balsam and Hashish

  Chapter Eighteen | Field Trip to a Dead Whale

  Chapter Nineteen | Castaways

  Chapter Twenty | New Friends on the Princess Pea

  Chapter Twenty-one | The Indian Boys Reformatory, a True Story

  Chapter Twenty-two | BBQ Squid

  Chapter Twenty -three | Donald Slips a Mickey

  Chapter Twenty-four | Brief Redemption

  Chapter Twenty-five | Sampo in the Shed

  Chapter Twenty-six | Reeled In

  Chapter Twenty-seven | The Thing

  Chapter Twenty-eight | The Double Shift

  Chapter Twenty-nine | Provisioning for the Voyage

  Chapter Thirty | The Whale Network

  Chapter Thirty-one | A New Telephone

  Chapter Thirty-two | The Wrong Whale

  Part III

  Chapter Thirty-three | The Spouter

  Chapter Thirty-four | Hyperborea

  Dear Esteemed Publishers,

  I write in my capacity as the now retired Director of the Bismuth Tourism Council to acknowledge our receipt of your gracious gift of the novel, Swell. I speak on behalf of the entire Council when I say how delighted we are to see such a tale set on our beautiful and historic Down East island.

  Fisherfolk and whalers of Bismuth have gone down to the sea in ships and out unto the world for centuries. Family and friends eagerly await their return each time, not just for the bounty of the waters’ harvest, but also for fresh stories that would often ease the strain of winter months and sustain them as heartily as a warm chowder.

  Our rich heritage and traditions continue to thrive thanks to the undaunted courage of writers and artists who persist in patronizing our local culture. Though I have not yet met young Orange, I understand that his story of a boy finding his way in the world is wonderfully representative of the strivings of the spirit and the imagination that marks all Bismuthians.

  From the first saga-bard to dip his quill in squid ink, to the great novelists of today, the literary arts have long been vital to Bismuth. Ancient codskin vellums describe the epic journeys of aboriginal Americans from our shores to Europe, where they founded the Northern Indian countries. Now, in the modern era, our scribes have turned their eyes on Island life itself.

  Swell, no doubt, knits a seamless net that unites our earliest oral tradition with today’s sharp-eyed scribblers whose keen observation of our island’s traditions paired with their ears trained for lore produce a colorful portrait of a lively, exciting summer destination, indeed.

  Just as Orange Whippey does in his story, visitors, too, can come experience the adventure of a day fishing at sea or relaxing on our scenic shores! Come see how proud we are of our island’s homegrown entrepreneurial renaissance at Ely Pond, or perhaps pay a visit to the salvage displays outside our Historical Society. You may swap stories with Orange or other native Bismuthians during supper at The Topsoil, where they are ready to delight with freshly-fried seafood at reasonable prices. Stay over in one of our several inns or B&B’s, like the quaintly traditional Muffin Basket or The Spouter, our newest and most luxurious lodging. Moorage is available in our snug harbor for boaters.

  Warmest island regards,

  Eric Korangarson Bumpus,

  (Ret.) Director, Bismuth Tourism Council

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stranded and Conscripted

  From my bunk, I found myself staring at the weepy ink of the Blue Öyster Cult tattoo that stained Donny’s buttock. Donny Lucy was a repellent man whose sole topic of conversation was the genitals of various races and ethnicities. Some were prodigious, some were toothed, some toothsome, and a few had a unique tang that was best appreciated by he, himself. It’s difficult to believe he’d done much field research into the subject. Down East islanders have a way of implying a worldliness that their biographies do not support. A few of us—well, many of us, considering that most of us are related in some way or another—have actual genetic links to voyagers to the archipelagos of cannibals and unclad princesses, and this seems to lend license to authoritative pronouncement where others might merely speculate. Donny had applied the speculum of his imagination to the orifices and organs of humanity with such vigor that he had lost sight of much else that the rest of the world considered suitable to discuss.

  I was hoping hard that Donny was asleep, that his rhythmic motions were due to the waves. I was probably right, and he had probably moaned “motherfuck” and wiped his belly with one of the rank communal T-shirts due to a dream about maternal taboos and personal hygiene. Some boats have crews that are actually frisky masturbators. Masturbation is an enduring topic on most boats. Every single aspect of it, with the exception of the pleasure one might pull from it, is routinely discussed. But on some boats—say, one with a fado-crazed Portuguese—a beautiful night with flying fish and falling stars inspires the crewman to make his own arcing deposit overboard, as if to say, “I too am a resident of the Milky Way; here’s my contribution to the sublime fecundity of the cosmos.” In most retellings of this episode, th
is is the pescadoro’s last thought before he’s gored by a leaping swordfish.

  A sleepless night spent eyeing a question mark on a man’s ass is a philosophical night— How did I get here, where am I going? Etcetera. My mother says that when I got here, they called me Orange because I was a scion of harpoonists with a noble name that bespoke our lineage as natives of the island of Bismuth. And that it was rhyme-proof. And also that I was jaundiced at birth. Orange Whippey is a pair of names with plenty of precedence on our island. My nominal provenance can be found on ships’ logs and public records stretching back to the early days of Yankee settlement here. It’s my mother’s job to answer the question of how I got here; it’s my own job to say where I’m going, and all I can really say is that now that I’m in my late thirties, unmarried, and irregularly employed, I have come to realize that merely remaining alive is more of an achievement than I expected.

  A surprisingly wide variety of namesakes are available to Bismuthians here off the North Atlantic coast. Our island has a winter population of just a few hundred people, but an impressive number of flip flops, Crocs, foul weather boots, and moccasins have trod upon Bismuth. We had actual natives here before the current versions of “native” arrived and gave them the Old World-crafted gifts of smallpox and Christianity. Nobody even knows what language the naturals, as the English called them, or the skraelings, as the Norse said, spoke or what they called themselves. The Northern Indians of Europe say that their ancient ancestors lived here—in fact, Snorri the Finlindian says his people, the Northern Indians, came from right here, when our little granite speck in the cold northeast Atlantic was taller, greener, warmer and the center of a bustling archipelago.

  The way Snorri tells it at his occasional Bismuth Historical Society summer afternoon guest lectures is that his people migrated from Bismuth and the rest of the islands up through what would later become Labrador and Markland and Vinland and then east across the Arctic, fighting past Scandinavia, until they settled the northern coast of Europe and formed the countries of Finlindia and Estonindia way back in deep time. Their triumphs against the Vikings and Christians made them the most hated peoples in Europe for the most of two millennia, but their lack of assimilation into European culture had brought them into a sort of vogue here in the new century.

  Snorri likes to visit Bismuth to maintain his ethnic claims of nativism, and I think he just likes it here more than he’s willing to tell us—I can’t see the profit in lurking about here otherwise. He speaks English better than many of my fellow Islanders, and claims to speak the language of every country that borders Finlindia, including the Estonindian dialect, and can communicate many significant gestures and vocalizations with bears and whales.

  When I was a kid and still learning the nuances of island kinship and nativism—which was essentially us, the Islanders, who were divisible into people I was directly related to and people I was distantly related to, and them, the strangers, who could be broken down into many subgroups based on the regularity of their return to the island—Snorri and his ilk confounded my tidily bipolar sorting of the world. I think I first noticed him as the oddly dressed man with egregious eyebrows that reached up over the brim of his cap. I naturally assumed all such foreigners were so equipped and awaited puberty when I could sprout my own forehead feelers.

  They didn’t burst forth, thankfully, and by the time I could grow a reasonable mustache I had learned that in addition to Islanders and strangers, there were several billion other people on the planet who were all potential strangers whom I would never have to meet if I stuck it out here on Bismuth. Snorri wasn’t the only Finlindian to spend time on the island. There are, presumably, brochures about Bismuth on Northern Indian travel agency shelves, but if you don’t own your own boat like Snorri, this is an expensive destination involving an intercontinental flight, car rental, and a ferry ride, and then a stay at an inn or a mildly shabby rental house maintained by an uncaring person such as myself.

  It’s only been recently that another Northern Indian boat has frequented our waters. Unfamiliar boats, especially exotic ones capable of crossing the Atlantic, are watched like potentially rabid raccoons, so Waldena the Estonindian and her crew did not exactly sneak into our harbor. I hardly knew anything about her, though. She didn’t seem like the ethnotouristic type. She and her crew drank at the island’s only permanent restaurant, the Topsoil, where they gained a reputation for being cryptic and cold, which, considering our own legendary maziness and unamiability, is a significant cultural achievement. When I worked in the Topsoil kitchen, the waitresses hated serving them and found them stingy with tips, flirtation, and the English language. Waldena was the one who made me feel uneasy. Her Estonindian hardboys were variants of a breed of masculinity I knew well enough already. She, however, snatched a little bit of my breath each time I saw her. She knew my name and that fact thrilled and frightened me unreasonably. Thoughts of beautiful exotic strangers who knew my name had sustained me through many kitchen shifts and fishing trips, but she was the first real one I’d ever encountered.

  She and Snorri, like their countrymen, did not get along well. It’s difficult for me to see the difference between an Estonindian and a Finlindian, but to them, it’s as obvious as the difference between a Bostonian and a New Yorker, and one confuses the two at one’s own peril. They’re both the same race of people, inasmuch as “race” and “people” are meaningful terms. Their great schism lay in their treatment of whales, which represented the quintessence of cultural values to each of them. The Finlindians were pastoralists. They herded their whales and had domesticated breeds of them back before anyone in North American had even laid eyes on a goat. The Estonindians were hunters; as far as they were concerned, any domesticated fjord-bred Finlindian whale was a sad mutant aberration.

  The people of the North Indies had maintained their traditional culture with much more zeal than their national neighbors. There were probably at least a few rune-covered centuries-old spoons in each Northern Indian kitchen from back in the day when people could really make spoons. Their language, which was mostly impenetrable to outsiders, was both antagonistically conservative—in the sense that old words died hard— and curiously round-heeled, since their lexicons would fall over, legs in the air, for anything new that came their way. So in the cutlery drawer next to the venerable spoonage—a good example of where English fails; we just don’t have the vocabulary for the daily respect a Northern Indian has for proper utensils—were plastic sporks, which they kept for guests who wouldn’t understand their spoons. Likewise for their spork-like language. They had no problem adding new terms like “cell phone” to the language, but returned happily to anachronistic phrases like “Ho-bomac spits in Loki’s ear” for “wrong number.” Their national languages had subdivided centuries ago, but they could seemingly understand each other the way a Mainer could follow a Cajun. I think their fervor for telecommunications might have its origin in their culture’s automatic inclusion of all their history in so much of their daily life. Their cell phones were a logical next step from the rune stones and sagas that communicated to them across the gulfs of time. One of Snorri’s devices was encased in yellowed ivory that I bet his ancestors had set aside in anticipation of the invention of mobile technology.

  Even their names were a combination of the traditional and the progressive. Northern Indian surnames were post-parental; for instance, if Snorri—who, as far as I knew did not yet have a last name—had a daughter named Thora, his own name would change to Snorri Thorasfottir. Thus there were illegitimate parents—fathers and mothers with no last names—but not children. This practice is maintained in America by little kids who referred to their friends’ parents as “Mrs. Larrysmother” and such. They loved proper names over there. Their houses, cars, and heirloom spoons all had proper names—some even had secret names which would only be whispered once in a lifetime. Snorri’s boat, the Honeypaws, was like that. “Honeypaws” was just a nickname—he’d never tell anyone t
he boat’s real name.

  Snorri’s claim to nativism on our island was backed up with his own translations of fragments of sagas and eddas that were themselves translations of vellums long lost to kleptomaniacal Irish monks and Norse plunderers. The Northern Indian claim to coastal northeast America seemed like a case of wannabe colonialism to the rest of Western Europe until early twentieth-century linguists from Estonindia proved their language had origins in the Indo-American family instead of the Indo-European, like the rest of the Europe. Why the ancient Indians left Bismuth baffles historians. Snorri’s explanations involve whales, bears, magic, and a quest for the Northern Indian version of El Dorado—Hyperborea, the mythical city of ivory and crystal hidden away at the North Pole. There’s actually little Snorri tells anyone that doesn’t start with a litany of Important Herring of Mythology or a sketch of what the world was like before the homo sapiens arrivistes paddled onto the stage.

  Most of the Indians I know are people whom Snorri calls cousins and who think Snorri is a pedantic kook. My own family name is Whippey, as it was for my Yankee ancestors, who saw themselves as the original inhabitants of Bismuth. The Whippeys and Oranges of yore were whalers and some were even captains. Many were Quakers, which meant they saw their profit margins fulfilled by working indentured servants to death instead of African slaves. This moral high ground, along with our geographic isolation, gave us a sense of dominion over all the other peoples and creatures of the planet, which is why we pretend our current endemic poverty is ennobling.

  There were Indians, and there are Yankees, but Bismuth has more exotic surnames on its gravestones than Ellis Island does on its customs logs. Not that there are many actual bodies in our graveyards. For every family plot with its listing headstones, there’s a lichen-spangled marble cenotaph with a dozen names of sailors who died at sea. There’s a cenotaph for Bismuthians who died trying to rescue those who died at sea. There’s even a memorial for dogs that died trying to rescue the shipwrecked. There is a colored graveyard for Africans and French-Canadians. There’s a praying Indian graveyard. After death became less segregated, Portuguese, Basque, Hawaiian, and Scandinavian names became as common on the stones as the Yankees’ own biblical concordance of graven names.