Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [125]
Since we couldn’t just reanimate the corpse for the thirty or forty seconds we needed, we decided to improvise. If Sausage Nose couldn’t appear and ease his fellow warriors’ suspicions, then we would simply have to find an understudy for his role. I nominated myself for this—stripping the soiled cloak from the beast with no small amount of disgust. I was willing to take on the danger of trying to pass myself off as the monster, but unfortunately my frame was a poor match for the beast’s jacket size. I even tried adding a line of broomstick to broaden the shoulders, but it was no use. So instead Garth Frierson went, his unique physique finally being applied to practical purpose. Garth’s arms weren’t close to as long as those of the character he hoped to play, but they were as thick. As long as no one got close enough to see that that circumference was simply fat, I hoped he might be convincing. The issue of skin tone, of course, had to be addressed. Any melanin at all would have revealed him to be an impostor. To camouflage him, we relied on teeth-whitening toothpaste, which the bright-smiling Karvels had in great supply. It took about two tubes each to cover Garth’s hands and arms, another for his neck, and two more for his face. Not that we intended anything but his fingers to be seen, but in the wind of the upstairs it felt safer to cover up all that could possibly be revealed. The paste left the former bus driver a tad shiny, but fortunately I found an open box of baking soda in the back of the Karvels’ Sub-Zero, and I blotted it onto Garth’s skin like it was the finest talcum.
As soon as I stepped out onto the roof, I knew that we were right to have made our preparations. All of the creatures’ heads turned on our arrival, and they clearly weren’t just looking for the pudding. As I walked out with the pans in my hands, they saw behind me what looked like the arm of their leader slapping the back of my head to speed me up. Or at least they saw Sausage Nose’s sleeve, wiped clean of bile. And from within this sleeve, they saw a white hand, even paler than their own, which I hoped they wouldn’t notice. In my attempt to hide Garth’s blackness, I’d been a little too eager, I realized once faced with the actual living Tekelian skin tone. In my mind it was white, but really it was flecked with tones of gray.
“You’ve got to come, and you’ve got to come now,” I urged the Karvels as soon as I reached them. You have never seen two more relieved white folks.* In their brief time in the outdoors, their faces had become flushed and ruddy, their noses running and freezing at the same time. Mrs. Karvel was smoking right in front of her husband now, she didn’t even care. I understood. They hadn’t been living in the Antarctic like the rest of us, they’d simply been hiding within it. Pushed well beyond their comfort levels physically and socially, the two scuttled past me to the inside before I could even finish my request. My cousin, on the other hand, proved nowhere near as easy to convince.
“I don’t want to have nothing to do with it, Christopher,” Booker Jaynes said as I came closer. “You see how well your dirty little trick went? You see that all that poison was for nothing? I could have told you that. If it was that simple, slavery would have been over by the seventeenth century.” Jaynes moved past me to serve his mistress another plate of potatoes au gratin, a dish he had prepared himself. Hunka had come with the rest, looking for him, and Jaynes had found her. He had taken special care to ensure that she would receive food untainted by our deceit. None of her kin seemed to notice that her servant’s efforts were a little too attentive. Even when he dabbed a smudge of cheese off the corner of her mouth, the other Tekelians apparently found this intimate gesture not the least bit out of the ordinary, the actions of a good slave and a good lover being more or less the same.
“Just get off the roof, okay? Promise me that. Take your lady and get her as far away from here as you can,” I insisted, interpreting his shrugging nod