Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [40]
When the satellite suddenly lost its reception and went to static, we didn’t even look away from the screen. Our satellite was always going down, and the signal was never very strong. I remember thinking that the white noise was a bit of a relief, a chance to brace ourselves before the next wave of chaos blinked into view.
“Turn it off. Turn it,” Captain Jaynes said, pointing. His voice was deep and bellowing and full of enough drama that it demanded authority or confrontation if he could get it. “There’s nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do down here. We’re not just going to sit and watch all day going crazy. That don’t make no kind of sense. Best thing to do: turn the news off for a bit, get our work done, get our minds off of what we can’t change for the moment. When the satellite feed comes back through, we’ll deal with it.”
“Boss man, I likes the way you think,” Jeffree agreed. “But it’s Saturday. The day off. The Shabbat, baby. We got nothing to do but wait for the TV to come back on, then watch it.”
“No,” Captain Jaynes disagreed, his voice rising so that the whole room could take in his declaration. “What we have is a very expensive piece of mining equipment that has to be retrieved from a hole in the ground.”
The only white folks Captain Jaynes, Race Man, invited onto our crew’s Antarctic mining mission was White Folks, his dog. And even that dog was a thickly spotted Dalmatian. My cousin loved calling his name in anger, and the poor mutt gleefully suffered it. I was nice to him, though,* and as we drove Captain Jaynes to the site White Folks leaned into my hands to be scratched.
“I saw something. I saw someone down there. A creature. Just walking by,” I confessed to my cousin. Past him, Garth gave me the funky eye. Jaynes looked over like he knew there were two kinds of Jaynes minds too, and he was pretty sure how I should be categorized.
“This ain’t going to be some great excuse for you to start going off about your book again, is it? People don’t want to hear it, man; that shit on the TV just makes it more so. So promise me, no more stories about super ice honkies. Understood?” he asked.
I nodded. Because I did understand. I was obsessed, I knew it even though I couldn’t stop being that way. I bored myself, truly. But I saw what I saw, and I said so.
“To think that a work of fiction, no matter how old or what you think you’ve discovered about it, has any reality. It ain’t normal, son,” Captain Jaynes offered. “I’ll tell you something else, life is too short to be reading more books by white people. Especially dead ones. We got our own books. We got our own culture. We don’t got to borrow theirs.”
Garth followed the tire tracks we’d made on our last visit, deeply concentrating on the road, lining up his wheels with their initial journey to save the trouble of replowing. The others behind us did the same. Nobody talked. Besides the last comment, the only sound in the cab was White Folks panting between his master’s legs, his enormous pink tongue hanging out past his muzzle. Around the dog’s neck was his uncomfortable looking collar: an old iron chain, weathered and with links nearly two inches long. I’d seen it before, but staring longer I realized what it was: old slave bonds.
“Are they real?” I motioned to White Folks’s neck. I even repeated it as the captain stared mutely back at me.
“Real enough for White Folks,” he told me. My cousin was a collector of black memorabilia, this was one of the things we had in common. Most of Captain Jaynes’s acquisitions were of the remnants of slavery: chains like this one, bills of sale, sale adverts, runaway notices, cages, neck spikes, face masks, the like. Jaynes even had a vintage hogshead barrel that he’d filled with various cat-o’-nine-tails.† I would imagine that the links would pull at the Dalmatian’s short hair or pinch his skin, but White Folks didn’t seem to mind as he pushed back eagerly into his owner’s hand.
“Why do you do it, then? Why exactly do you collect