Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal (12 page)

After the robot squid exploded, Thesaurus believes, he was
praying so hard he entered a meditative state deep enough that
his heartbeat was undetectable. I googled this up and learned
that there are in fact plenty of Zen monk guys who can do that.
Looking back on it, I think the more likely explanation
though is that Stupid George, who was standing by the heartbeat
monitoring machine they had on Thesaurus, accidentally kicked
the plug out of the socket and was ashamed to say anything
about it.
Still, I decided to keep the funeral schooner at sea a bit
longer. Two reasons for that: 1. I’d rented her for a half day and
wanted to get my money’s worth. 2. I wanted to put off getting
back to Sybil on whether I’d marry her. I just wasn’t sure. One
minute my desire for vengeance is telling me: Dive into the ocean
and swim after the bastard if you’ve got to. The next minute I’m
thinking the Conch deal seems pretty good. Then the minute
after that, the desire for vengeance tells me the previous minute’s
thinking was just a result of something Sybil put in my I.V. in the
hospital.
“Bro—I mean Captain,” Nelson said to me, “we’re talking
a hot, genius scientist who likes killing whales, plus is offering
you a whole bleeding kingdom. How many of those fish do think
there are in the sea?”
“I haven’t even had a date with her though.”
“But you’ve gotten to know her plenty. On a date, by your
age, people are supposed to be able to know whether they want
to get married by, like, the time the appetizer comes.”
“I’m forty-four.”
“Whoa, I had no idea you were that far up there. Sorry.”
As usual, Thesaurus was more sensitive. “You think you
could love her, Cap?” he asked.
“I think I could,” I said, “but first, I need to avenge the
woman I’m sure I loved, not to mention my kid and arm.”
Suddenly, I felt calm, like a cool wave had just washed
over the deck. Thesaurus’s simple question had prompted me to
see things as clearly as if there was a giant-assed red arrow in the
sky that said BLUBBERY BASTARD THIS WAY on it.
“Thesaurus, man,” Nelson interjected angrily, “you’ve
been dead the last few days, so you should stay out of this. If
the Cap says yes to this chick, we’ll all live like princes, plus get
cartloads of virgins.”
I’d already made up my mind though. And now I’m
headed to the palace to tell Sybil. I hope she’ll understand, and
that she and I can pick up where we left off after Dickhead and
I have our date. My main concern is she won’t understand, and
she’ll have me thrown right back onto the gallows.
P.S. The guy at Conch Rent-A-Ship where we got the schooner
for Thesaurus’s funeral said
he’d give me 25% off if I
posted a scrimshaw of the
brig. You can get 25% off
too if you print this out and
redeem it any day except
weekends and major whale-
worshipping holidays.

Shipmates, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve seen lakes smaller than the
swimming pool at the royal palace. It’s hand-wrought out of
brilliant grapefruit pink coral and, through some feat of physics,
it juts out over the mountainside so that the far end is like the
way seafaring folks imagined the edge of Earth back when they
thought it was square.
It took a couple minutes before I noticed the pool. That’s
how good Sybil looked in her swim trunks.
“You’re going to turn her down, aren’t you?” said the
palace guard who was showing me out to her.
“What makes you say that?”
“Everyone on the island reads your blog.”
Shipmates, I have got to get to get better at working the
posting delay feature on this thing.
Once the guard left me and Sybil alone and I stopped
being so dumbstruck from the sight of her, I said, “So I was
thinking: You like killing whales, I’ve got a whale that needs
killing, why don’t you and me—?”
“My issue with whales was about my father,” she said. “It’s
behind me now.”
“You still like boat rides?”
“Gus, how would you feel about risking your life to avenge
my first husband?”
“You’ve been married before?”
“It was a hypothetical. Listen, why not just stay here? You
can have everything you had before, plus everything you’ve ever
wanted.”
“It’s sure tempting, but right now there’s nothing I want
more than to get the bastard.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“’Cause you read my blog?”
“No, I haven’t lately, sorry. My fucking parents took the
computers with them when they went to Florida. I knew because
I know what you’re made of.”
This is the part where I figured she’d whistle and the
guard would come back carrying whatever it is they off heads
with. Instead, she kissed me. Real well, I might add.
“Maybe I could stay for a little while,” I said.
“I want you to go kill your whale first, Gus Openshaw.”
I felt like taking a running header down the mountainside
to save time getting to the shore and under weigh. So I could
return to Sybil that much sooner.
“There’s just one problem,” she said.
“That’s better than usual.”
“Phrasing error on my part, sorry. Despite my shipwrights’
round-the-clock efforts, the Lucky Sue is in no shape to scrap
with a battleship again. And now the entire Tortolan fleet is
lying in wait for you. Also, although Admiral Vurman is merely
charged to arrest you, he’ll now want your hide flying from a
halyard. If you’re smart, though, you can get past him. You can
use my navy.”
“You have a navy?”
“You know that barely-seaworthy schooner you rented for
the funeral?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s the best of the five brigs I can commandeer for you,
I’m afraid. I’ve got some cannons in storage though.”
“Not to be a whiner, but the Tortolans have enough
missiles to bring down this mountain.”
“I know. I said you’re going to have to be smart. Now
time’s a’wasting, boyfriend.”
The “smart” part is a troubler. My only idea is to go
floating the Tortolans’ way hidden inside a giant fish made out
of wood.
P.S. Here’s a scrimshaw of one of the spires on the royal palace.
The place is incredible—it’s even got its own bowling alley.

I like to note that the spermaceti—the oil in the bastard’s head
plus what more we’d be able to boil out of his excessive amount
of blubber—is worth more money than all my crewmen together
could earn in a year. I like to note this especially when asking
them to risk their necks, as I am now once again doing in my
new plan to thwart the Tortolan navy. Nelson rated our chances
as not much better than that of your average sperm—and he
wasn’t talking whale.
Fortunately, Sybil enacted a draft of all men who’d ever
served in the Conch navy. She also commandeered all the
island’s battle-worthy brigs. Conch last fought at sea nearly a
century ago though. Sybil’s efforts netted us five sailors (none
younger than eighty, and only three of whom could see) plus
Conch Rent-A-Ship’s three rotting schooners, as well as one
rotting barquentine and one frigate where the rot’s the strongest
part of her hull. Their sails hung limply when at all. With no
time to obtain proper canvas, we had to rig them with whatever
was laying around—bed sheets, fat ladies’ dresses, whatever.
One thing Sybil had plenty laying around of was cannons.
Why? They’re completely outmoded. In these waters, you can
pick up a four-pound (ball weight) gun for the price of a fish and
chips supper. We did salvage our two howitzers, but otherwise,
the cannons were the best we could do on short notice, and our
lives’ll depend on taking out the Tortolans’ missile launchers
with them. This is even harder than it sounds. Let me tell you
briefly what firing these cannons involves.
Imagine Stupid George as loader and Moses as gunner.
(Why them? Loading is relatively simple. Moses is being given the
more difficult gunner assignment cause he’s got more experience
than any ten men when it came to both inhaling smoke and
lighting stuff.) First, the loader carefully lowers the powder
cartridge—a cloth bag with a measured charge of gunpowder—
into the mouth of the cannon. He follows it with the ball, which
he drives to the base of the barrel with a ramming sponge, then
packs tightly against the powder. Next, the gunner aligns the
barrel, then passes a piercing iron through the firing vent at its
base. The piercing iron punctured the cartridge, loosing the
inflammable powder onto the pan. He then ignites it with his
butane lighter—the lone contemporary element we got going for
us. The powder sizzles and—KABOOM—explodes so loud you
figure you feel like a horse just kicked you in the head. Then,
with a red plume of fire, the ball’s shot from the barrel. The
cannon, despite its weight of half a ton and thick ropes lashing
it to the bulwark, kicks back several feet—a recoil so strong that
if not properly tied, it’ll leap across the deck and smash through
the far bulwark. The firing process takes an experienced team
a couple of minutes. If George and Moses can fire a single ball
without blowing themselves up first, I’ll be happy. (Nelson’s
offering a line of 3 to 1 against, if you’re looking for betting
action.)
That brings me to our biggest problem: hands. We had
just the twelve men (average age 75) and a rat. We needed at least
four two-man cannon crews for each brig, plus five real agile sorts
to load and distribute the powder cartridges, plus lots more folks
to sail the brigs themselves. In desperation, we placed a help-
wanted ad offering a ludicrously high hourly pay in the Conch
Times. I figured we’d get no responses. After all, we were off to
slay a whale.
Incredibly, a hundred Conchians showed up on the
dock, throwing punches with one another for the chance to
VOLUNTEER. Turns out Sybil had spun it so they believed that
their god Bulbus wanted the blubbery bastard dead. How did she
do this? A student of politics, she had simply made stuff up.
So at last, after hauling the cannons aboard, getting the
fleet seaworthy as we could, and conducting a day of training,
our little navy’s just boarded and weighed anchor. The wind’s
taking our makeshift sails in her fingers, and Conch is flitting
aft. No one’s saying much, intent instead on the date with the
Tortolans on the morrow.
P.S. Here’s a scrimshaw of one of our younger draftees, Archie
Halbott, a onetime navigator and currently the owner of Conch
Rent-A-Ship (he still does the books; the day-to-day business is
run by his great-great grandson).

Under the guidance of our ninety-one-year-old navigator Archie
Halbott, our fleet circumnavigated the Sea Witch without her
so much as batting an eyelash. The Tortolans lay in ambush on
the far side, their sleek (at least relative to our wind-propelled
wooden buckets) battleships gleaming in the morning sun
like knights in armor. There wasn’t one of the six brigs that
couldn’t’ve swallowed all five of ours whole.
Good news was they weren’t expecting such a quick
passage through the Witch. So our brigs were able to sail up
shooting, getting off twenty cannonballs before the Tortolans
even got their missile launchers switched on. Though outmoded
more than a century ago, our cannons didn’t suck. Capable of
firing the four-pound balls at speeds of more than a thousand
feet a second, they were turning the enemy’s decks into puzzle
pieces and sending the crews scurrying for cover.
But as scissors are to paper, missile is to old wooden ship,
as became evident when the Tortolans fired their first missile.
The current alone carved a canal through the whitecaps. It
struck the starboard cannon on our lead ship, spanking the
half-ton gun to sea as if it were a nickel. And that was nothing.
A second later, another missile split the mizzenmast. The upper
portion, with its royal, topgallant and topsails, soared off like a
paper plane. It splashed down five hundred feet to starboard and
drowned beneath a mound of vapor.
Thirty explosions (ten seconds) later, flames were
everywhere, though the only evidence of them was the crackle—
the air was solid gray with smoke. Chunks of timber rained onto
the decks, and much of the decks in turn rained into the sea.
Finally, ship’s bells began to peel—the last rite when going down
at sea. And then all was black.
Everyone’s fine though.
The crew and me are again on the fat tail of the blubbery
bastard.
As the Tortolan navy has by now discovered, the five
sailing ships they sunk off the coast of Conch the other morning
were in fact unmanned. Their rudders and sails were turned and
their cannons were loaded and fired by remote control gizmos
Sybil built. We’d wanted to distract the Tortolan navy from the
fact that we were really weighing anchor and escaping from the
other side of Conch.
Mr. Halbott advised trying this ruse just a few hours into
our naval training as, when told to load the cannonball, Stupid
George didn’t put it into a cannon. Instead he tried to get the
thing open to load it. At the same time Moses was attempting to
smoke the powder cartridge.

A second reason Halbott wanted the ruse was the
insurance bonanza it would mean for Conch Rent-A-Ship.
Finally, he’ll be able to retire.
The downside to the ruse was we had to leave the Lucky
Sue behind. The Tortolan air force (either plane) would’ve
spotted us cruising off in her.
We are now in a brig which, for security reasons, I can’t
describe. I can tell you though that we rechristened her the
Georgette. Yep, we had a contest and Stupid George drew the
lucky straw. I can also tell you that she’s got nowhere near the
size or speed of the Lucky Sue, or the weaponry—we’re down to
just ten whale irons (as you might expect, those things weren’t
so easy to come by on Conch). I’m afraid the only luxuries the
new brig does have is both men’s and ladies’ buckets. Overall,
though, I’m way better off than when I first weighed anchor in
that termite-infested wooden cabin cruiser back in June. I’ve
gotten myself a swell the crew, and the experiences we’ve been
through together have both bettered and bonded us. Also,
the odds of the crap that has befallen us befalling us again are
astronomical.
I may have typed too soon…
It looks like we may be down to eight whale irons. I’ve
just gotten word of a duel to the death between George and Duq
going down on the stern. So
I’ve got to go now. See if I can
convince them to wrestle to
the death instead.