T. Boyle - Water Music

♦ ♦ ♦

“Hey, Mr. Park,” rumbles the voice of Johnson, “don’t you know enough to come in out of the sand?”

The explorer, fighting the dry heaves, does not respond. His eyes are crusted over and someone has been building sand castles in his ears. He has no idea where he is.

“You coulda had the hide confricated right off you, you know that? I mean a sandstorm is nothin’ to fuck around with.”

The explorer is groggy. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got here, and he can’t see a damned thing. Is it night already? There is the sound of wind, the hiss of sand. “Johnson,” he says, “—is that you?”

Instead of answering, Johnson’s voice slips into Mandingo, and the explorer is startled to hear laughter blooming in the darkness around him.

What is going on here? “Johnson?”

‘‘ Obo weebojalla ‘imsta, kootatamballa ” says Johnson, and the laughter bursts out afresh. And then: “Don’t you worry, Mr. Park — we’re in safe hands.”

“But where are we? And how did we get here?”

“Root cellar. I walked, you was dragged.”

So that’s it. He must have been unconscious all this time. But whose voices are these, and why this impenetrable, godawful darkness? He detects a whisper, somewhere close by, followed by a giggle. And then the maddening swish and tinkle of liquid swirled in a jar. “Johnson,” he calls. “Couldn’t we do with a little light in here?”

“I think it can be arranged,” says Johnson, whose voice abruptly changes direction, and in resonant, jocular tones wades through a muddle of Mandingo m ’s and k ’s and long smooth double o ’s. Other voices — grunts really — answer from the void. After a moment or two the explorer becomes aware of a low, barely distinguishable sound from the far side of the room: a murmur, a rustle, the gentle soughing of treebranches rubbing in the wind. He is puzzled at first, but then it comes to him: sticks. They’re chafing sticks! A second later there’s a spark, and then a hungry flame swelling from a handful of shavings to illuminate the room.

What he sees is this: five men, black and knobby, sitting against the earthen wall passing a calabash and holding it to their lips. One of them is Johnson. The others are Jarran Mandingoes, feet splayed, baggy knees, noses pushed back into their heads. Each wears a white toque set atop his crown like a mushroom, and a variegated sash that runs from shoulder to crotch and back again. The soles of their feet are the color of smoked salmon. The gentleman closest to the explorer, a toothless relic with a concave chest, offers up the calabash. Mungo takes it gladly. As he tips his head back, the fire winks out — but no matter, he’s more concerned with the business at hand than with peering into crannies. He gulps and guzzles, flushing the sand out from under his gums and between his teeth. He rinses, gargles, drinks deep, the dark a comfort, his thirst boundless, all thought, sensation and reflex held in abeyance to this single-faceted ecstasy, this pouring of liquid into the buccal cavity and down the esophagus. But then a weathered hand makes contact with his own, and he’s forced to give up the calabash. “Damned good stuff, Johnson,” he murmurs, addressing the darkness and hiccoughing between syllables. “Reminds me of a good Irish stout.”

From the corner, the voice of Johnson, muttering. “Good as anythin’ them potato pluckers ever come up with. Better. That’s Sooloo beer you drinkin’ there, Mr. Park. Sooloo beer. Black-roasted sorghum malt and the purest spring water, aged and krausened in strict accord with a ancient and closely guarded tribal formula. Hey — this is the cradle of civilization here, Mr. Park. Who you think was around this planet first anyway — us — or them bleached-out Hibernians? This is beer, brother.”

There is something unfamihar in Johnson’s delivery. His words are sluggish and chewed-over, his tone combative. And his pitch deeper than ever — the sort of thing you’d expect from the banks of a pond on a summer’s night. Could it be that he’s had one pull too many at the calabash? “Are you drunk, Johnson?”

“Drunk?” he repeats, his basso scraping bottom. “Hell, yes. Drunk as a emir.”

At that moment an exceptionally virulent gust rattles the cane-and-earthen floor above them, and a quantity of sand explodes across their faces like buckshot.

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” bellows Johnson. “Rage! Blow!”

An idea had been forming in the explorer’s head — something to do with the fact that this was the first time in nearly six months that he’s been left unguarded. But the sudden gust and Johnson’s exclamation have driven it right out of his head. Besides, someone has just passed him the calabash.

♦ YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN♦

When they first spotted him they thought he’d been dead for days. His hands and chin were fast-frozen to a block of ice and the fluid in his eyes had turned to slush. He was bobbing there like a piece of driftwood, the black waters of the Thames lapping round his shoulders and ears.

“Wa’ is it, Liam?”

“Doan’t know, Shem: looks like a dead mon, and drownded.”

Shem Leggotty and Liam McClure were fishermen. Six days a week they set their gill nets for salmon and sturgeon coming upriver with the tide. The fish would blunder into these nets, catch their gills in the three-inch mesh, thrash about and drown. Sometimes they would thrash about and escape. It was all in the cards. This night, as the men tugged at the net, it felt somehow different, peculiar. It wasn’t the weight — a good sturgeon could go ten feet long and five hundred pounds — it was just the feel of the thing. A bitter wind stabbed at the back of their throats. Their hands were raw. Was it an ice floe? A log? When Shem lit a lantern to investigate, there he was, riding the swell like a man three days dead.

“So it’s a drownded mon, then. And froze.”

“That it is.”

“Well then. Let’s cut the poor beggar loose and be on with it. He’s no consarn of ours.”

They tugged at the net. As the drowned man came into contact with the bow of the boat, his head knocked against the planks with a crack, wood on wood. “Ik,” he said.

“Wa’ was that, Liam?”

“I didna say nothin’, Shem.”

The drowned man bobbed at their feet as they worked to disentangle him. His mouth was frozen open and the tongue welded to his teeth. “Ik,” he said.

“Sweet Jaysus, the mon’s aloive! Here, help me get him into the boat, Shem.” Liam’s breath hung in the air in clumps. He was a monument of sinew and brawn, case-hardened by years of hauling nets and brawling on the docks. He bent his back to the drowned man and heaved him up into the skiff, ice floe and all. The drowned man was naked from the waist down and wrapped in a sodden cape.

“Get some blankets round him, Shem. And hand me the usquebaugh.”

“The usquebaugh? That’s as like to kill him off as bring him round.”

It was a home brew, potent as fire. Liam poured it down the man’s throat while Shem pried his chin and fingers from the block of ice. The effect was almost instantaneous — the dead man lifted his head, vomited and fell unconscious. “Ik-ik,” he said.

♦ CHICHIKOV’S CHOICE♦

Fishstink. For the past three months it’s been fishstink, day and night. The oily stink of eels taken from the green water among the pilings, the salt-stench of skate and mackerel, the cold mud reek of pouters and perch and carp. He’s snuffed them all — tench and bream and saury pike, bearded ling, gouty blowfish, alewives, hake and haddock — plucked out their entrails, whacked off their heads, set the air afire with their flashing translucent scales. It’s a grim, stinking, thankless job.