Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [44]
“No, it’s not a cave,” said a voice that surprised me before I realized that Captain Booker Jaynes had stopped what he was doing and crept up behind us. Jaynes, to my surprise, now wore an expression much like Jeffree’s, and I realized that I also wore the same foolish, overwhelmed look. Jaynes’s eyes were focused on the things that I dared to think were the tracks of a creature that had walked upright through here only hours before.
“It’s a tunnel,” Captain Jaynes finally managed.
We kneeled silently in the cold, taking in the sight and its repercussions. Far above us, Carlton Damon Carter filmed, and unseen beyond him, Garth and the Lathams sat warm in the trucks that hummed and roared. Finally, as my knees began to numb and my excitement threatened to overpower me, I broke the meditation.
“Captain, what do you want us to do now?” I asked. Booker Jaynes was a man who lived life by either being in control or pretending he was long enough to gain control again. Here was a situation that no one besides myself had ever thought they’d face. Captain Jaynes met it with belligerent, folded arms, but then his attitude just fell away. My cousin turned to me, slapping me several times on the shoulders as if discharging any responsibility for this new discovery.
“Me? Hell, looks like we got a snow honky problem. You’re the expert.”
* I really, really liked that dog.
† This he displayed in his office in a way that others took, rightly, as a veiled threat.
‡ Or Jeff-Free, as it said on the website, although I don’t think that was the legal spelling.
§ I’d heard grunting in the area of his and Carlton Damon Carter’s storage unit but didn’t pry.
‖ Or perhaps it was Carlton Damon Carter, who was also a high alto when speaking above a whisper.
OF course, I was the expert on the phenomena we seemed to be encountering. Unfortunately, my sole primary source was those few lonely paragraphs in The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself:
As we go south, the sky darks in a polar dusk and the fog gets thick. The birds, white gulls (or albatross or some such) were not stopping, gray ugly things that kept croaking “Tekeli-li” like we supposed to understand them. Infernal! The Tsalalian had been dying for days, then in a few minutes he dead. I says that we should dump the corpse immediately, for the sake of decency if not good health and stink, but Arthur Pym was looking by the body. Dripping more spit than I thought he still had in his self, he says, “That wouldn’t be prudent.” Alas, the flesh that had been Nu-Nu got saved for then as we were soon up on a strong current that shot us past the broken ice at fast speed. What can I say of what was seen next? Not nothing. So let me just say that we approached an ice shelf too long to be another iceberg, going into the distance of east and west. As we were move forward, a slice of this thing fell into the ocean before us, showing both a crack in the ice and a shrouded figure in white standing within it.*
Floating forward, we moved into a cave within the ice itself. There we come to a landing, and they surrounded us. Arthur Pym stepped out of the boat despite me yelling to stay put, so transfixed was he. The group surrounded him. And then I kicked off and made a quick exit out of there.
After that, Dirk mostly talks about how the current pulls him back, and how he’s really fortunate that he listened to Arthur Pym and didn’t get rid of the body of the late Mr. Nu-Nu, coasting as he did in the monthly return tide back to Tsalal. “You never know what you’ll eat if you [sic] hungry enough. I cut up Nu-Nu’s corpse into bite-size pieces, then I used them as bait for the Bich de Mere. Those things taste like horse shite,” was the entirety of Dirk’s recorded reflection on the experience.
So from my research I knew that we should avoid eating