Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal (5 page)

Of all the deceased pirates’ weapons, only the grenade launcher
and one Uzi were unspent or unblown-up. Stupid George fired
the grenade launcher. Needless to say—it being Stupid George—
he altogether missed the water, where the sharks were licking
their chops. The grenade ricocheted off the fishing boat (from
which the pirates had boarded us) a quarter-mile aft before
exploding the dock where she was moored.
Duq meantime fired the Uzi, but he ran out of ammo well
before we ran out of sharks.
There was good news: The fires on deck had gone out.
The bad news: It was because we were taking in water like it was
being shot from fire hoses. It looked like the sharks’d be getting
their supper earlier than they figured. All we had to protect
ourselves with now was the silverware and Thesaurus’s single
harpoon.
The great harpooner then hurled his weapon. The baby
flew like a rocket. Problem was, it not only missed the water
entirely but overshot the sharks by a good two hundred feet.
We all figured it must’ve been cause Thesaurus’d spent the last
hour inhaling smoke from the burning bale of “Guavan Gold.”
But then the harpoon lodged in the hull of the fishing boat the
pirates had boarded us from. She’d been knocked loose from
the dock by the grenade blast and was now drifting towards us.
Though she weighed several tons, Thesaurus hauled her in, hand
over hand on the harpoon line, like she was no more than a
dinghy.
A minute later, we jumped from the sinking cabin cruiser
over the couple-foot-wide sea lane and some mighty disappointed
sharks and onto our new brig—and not a bad one at that! The
pirates had retrofitted her with muscular engines—the fishing
stuff was just to veil her true function from the authorities.
Relieved big-time, co-Employees of the Week Thesaurus
and Stupid George (no one but Stupid George had thought
that he’d ever win Employee of the Week once, let alone twice),
Moses, Nelson, Duq and me watched the cabin cruiser cant,
then slip bow-first beneath the waves. The whole of her’d be on
the ocean floor in just a few seconds.
Just then I realized we’d accidentally brought Nelson’s
gear bag. The bag with the eight million in cash in it was still
aboard the cabin cruiser.
P.S. Why the women go for guys like Nelson makes as little sense
to me as anything. Still, cause so many’ve them been writing
in and asking for it, here’s a scrimshaw done of him by Flarq.
Lucky thing for Nelson that Flarq’s still ashore or I’d’ve had
him draw in devil’s horns, which would’ve been fitting given
the way Nelson’s been acting lately.
By the way, in the picture, Nelson’s
shirt has “Pirates” on it, as in the
Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team.
Nelson’s not from Pittsburgh and
he doesn’t like baseball much, but
he thinks it’s funny that he wears it,
to which I say the only way Nelson’s
ever getting work in a comedy club
is if he plunders one.

So my duffel bag and its eight million in cash sank along with
the cabin cruiser. But thanks to Duq machine gunning so many
of them to death, sharks were the fish du jour at all the local
victualleries that night. And as it chanced, the nice big one me
and my crew ordered (broiled, medium-well, and topped with a
delightful pecan crust) had, believe it or not, the duffel bag in its
belly!
Don’t believe it, shipmate. I was just yanking your anchor
chain there.
Here’s what really happened. As the cabin cruiser was
slipping below the surface, Thesaurus pried his harpoon free
from the fishing boat hull, flung it, bulls-eyed the duffel bag,
and jerked it back to us on the line like it was a caught fish.
Afterward, we motored in to Guava, found Flarq, and went out
to celebrate with a nice big shark dinner—which in reality was
neither boiled or topped with pecan crust (it was rare and topped
with nothing but Tabasco).
No sooner did we get served the shark, though, we got
served a subpoena. A whales’ rights advocacy organization
called Bluepeace has got me charged with libeling Dickhead—by
calling him that, bastard, etc., on this blog. Outright ridiculous
as it may be, it so happens that libeling a sperm whale is in
violation of Chapter IV, Article XIII of the Guavan Penal Code.
It’s important to notate two things here: 1. This Bluepeace,
determined to do whatever it takes to keep me from my whale,
has sent a squadron of Ivy League-educated lawyers to Guava.
2.
Guava’s a pretty lawless spit, as you might’ve guessed when eight
men got knife-and-forked to death in the harbor and the cops
didn’t bat an eye between ’em. Only one thing gets the Guava
Five-O to do any part of their job other than sporting house
patrol (though they never bust nobody): a bunch of attorneys
whining lots of big words, thus disrupting prime siesta hours.
Fact is, Guava didn’t even have a Penal Code before those guys
got here.
So now, instead of loading up on weapons and stuff like
that and going whaling, we’ve got to waste time at the Guava
Municipal Court (which doubles as a sporting house at night
incidentally).
To cheer the crew up after getting this crappy news,
Nelson invited us to cruise over to his own sporting house two
islands south. Drinks and tarts will be comped. Sometimes that
Nelson’s a swell guy. This isn’t one of those times. Still sore
about the knockout powder stunt, Flarq told Nelson he’d de-
bone him if he didn’t issue the invite.
P.S. A scrimshaw of one of Guava’s Finest on patrol.

We docked our new fishing boat at Mollusktown for the evening.
The crew was real excited to hit the sporting house. Nelson being
its proprietor, I was worried it’d be a condemned building, or
for some reason we’d end up fighting for our lives, or both. And
those were the good scenarios.
Mollusktown’s main street gave me no reason to feel
any less pessimistic—it was lined with small one- and two-story
buildings (nothing Robinson Crusoe couldn’t’ve built) that
stunk of fish in a way that brought to mind that month-long
custodians’ strike back at the cat food cannery.
Then we rounded a corner and came to a three-story
building that could’ve passed for a gentlemen’s club a century
or two ago on a good block in London. It had a glowing marble
facade decked out with all kinds of lions heads and crests and
other flourishes like that, plus elaborate curlicue balconies, and
it was topped off by one of those greened-sort-of-bronze roofs.
The lobby was done up in dark wood, sailboat paintings in
gilded frames, and fancy—but not too fancy—antique furniture.
A classy-looking pianist in a tux was playing Beethoven or one
of those guys. Clearly all the money in town was coming here.
Incredibly, this was Nelson’s sporting house. It’s called St.
Mary’s, after its original Madame who’d been beatified in a deal
whereby the local Christian missionaries were able to pay down
their doxy (local term for a sporting house employee) tab there.
St. Mary’s was featured, Nelson boasted, in one of those
glossy interior design magazine’s recent bordellos issue. I never
thought I’d say the nicest place I ever been is a brothel on a one-
horse isle, but there you have it.
A flock of doxies came to welcome us and let us choose
among them. The memory of my late wife still exercising my tear
ducts most nights, my companion of preference was a deep glass
of rum. I sunk into a soft leather wing chair in a dark corner of
the lobby, happy to while away the time by listening to the music,
even though it was interrupted every so often by sounds from
upstairs of debauchery and, strangely, a flamingo.
A half-hour or so of whiling later, a doxy walked a satisfied
customer down the stairs and to the back door. They passed
without noticing me. She was a tall blonde with a low-cut silk
gown. He was a serious-looking old buzzard with a permanently
furrowed gray shelf of a brow and a massive white beard that
looked like a waterfall. He looked familiar. Like one of those
Puritan guys from the history books, I reckoned. He was carrying
a long suitcase in which he concealed his flamingo. The doxy
thanked both the old man and the flamingo, whose name was
Rudy, and saw them out. Then I realized where I’d seen the
guy before. He’s pictured on the local money. He’s Solomon
J. Archipelago, the famously ethical and uncorruptible Chief
Justice of all these Windward Islands, the governing body of
which has got power over Guava.
Nelson, never one to let an opportunity for blackmail
pass, has every room in St. Mary’s rigged up with video cameras,
even the crappers. In other words, the libel case against me has
suddenly taken a turn for the better.
P.S. Here’s Flarq’s scrimshaw of his doxy (who he says just gave
him a massage). Of note, either Flarq’s suddenly gotten awful at
likenesses or this woman’s scrimshaw-o-genicness was enhanced
by the nineteen rums he’d had.

Could the Honorable Solomon Archipelago be blackmailed?
Well, the old buzzard still had aspirations for higher office. Both
his father and grandfather had been governor. The thing is, in
these waters, word that he dropped anchor at a high-end brothel
would win him votes. That he brought a flamingo along’d just
add color. But there was one reason he didn’t want it getting
out—his wife, Pearl. She outweighed him by sixty pounds, had a
lead skillet the size of a tennis racket and a hell of a backhand.
“Still, Openshaw,” Archipelago told me, “you don’t want
to blackmail me.”
“It’s not illegal here,” I said. I’d read the criminal statutes
thoroughly. Both of them.
“You don’t want to do it, son, because you’re not a
seahorse’s ass.”
He was right in one respect. I hadn’t wanted to blackmail
him. His thing for sea birds aside, Archipelago was admired
throughout the region for his integrity, and that’s saying
something in a region where most everyone skipped school the
day integrity was taught. He’d once passed up a chance to be
governor cause his party was in bed with Big Sugar and looking
the other way while field hands, some as young as seven, were
getting beaten like slaves. And he decked the party chairman to
give him a taste of it.
I’d like to think I’d’ve done the same thing if I’d been in
his boots. The night before going to blackmail him, even though
I’d drunken enough rum to float a battleship, I couldn’t sleep.
As I tried telling myself over and over, my priority isn’t being
courteous to geezers. It’s harpooning Dickhead through the
heart. Why? Plain old-fashioned justice.
As if he was reading straight through my head and into my
thoughts, Archipelago said, “Injustice anywhere imperils justice
everywhere.”
I felt a stirring in my heart. I knew then and there that
he was righteous and true, that he deserved the title Honorable,
and warranted my awe. I offered him a quarter-million-dollar
bribe anyhow. He laughed, thinking it was a joke. Ashamed, I
pretended like it had been.
I got to go now. Got to find a good defense lawyer pronto.
P.S. Here’s Flarq’s courtroom scrimshaw of the Honorable
Solomon Archipelago.