Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [59]
“They’re just crackers,” Captain Jaynes returned. He stared down at his boots’ spikes as he continued, the weight of it all clearly on him. “Trust me, I know white folks, I can smell them a click away. These are just plain old, backward-ass white people. Big ugly ones, but still.” He spoke with an air of unassailable finality.
“All due respect, are you for real?” Jeffree said. “I know white folks too, and these guys don’t look nothing like any white folks I ever seen in my whole life. Did you see how pale they are? Everything about them—they got nails like ivory, you catch that shit? And you could hammer a nail with those foreheads.”
“Just some ugly, big-headed honky albinos,” continued Booker Jaynes, undaunted. “I don’t know, maybe some Vikings got lost down here a long time ago, something like that, inbred for a few centuries. Who the hell knows? But these things are white folks, I’d bet White Folks on that. Maybe the whitest folks you ever met, but white folks just the same. They sure as hell ain’t some sci-fi monkey creatures out of your imagination. They even got that smell too, that white folks smell they get in the rain.”
“We just have to ask Mr. Arthur Gordon Pym,” Nathaniel calmly interrupted. Nathaniel smiled when he was nervous, he smiled when he was calm, he smiled when he was attempting charm as well. Individually, all these uses of the expression were appropriate, but together their uniformity was disgusting. “Stop and think about this another way for a moment. Think about it from a business standpoint. Let’s say for a second he actually is your Arthur Pym, alive after what? Two centuries on? That would be an even bigger discovery than a village of albino monkey people. It would mean the fountain of youth—the most sought after resource in human history. It would mean an infusion of wealth like nothing ever seen before.”
“Nathaniel’s got something.” Jeffree’s breath billowed before him in excitement. “Maybe being on the ice slows down the aging process—like people who survive drowning because of hypothermia.”
“Right. See, I don’t know, but you don’t either. And either way, marketing wise …” Nathaniel drifted off on the last syllable as he waited for us all to fill in the rest of his thought. Apparently the others did, or at least Angela did, because she started nodding excitedly behind him.
“Honey, we could bottle that whole concept up and sell it with the quickness. Run tours down here, set up one of those ice hotels like in Finland,” she absolutely bubbled.
“Think of the documentaries—you remember all that stuff on the Yanomamö tribe we watched on the Discovery Channel?” Jeffree said to Carlton Damon Carter, who nodded eagerly back to him. “This could be even bigger. A reality show, an ongoing series—”
“Whatever they eat could be the next great diet,” Angela interrupted. “Do you know how much those synergistic diet corporations pull in a year?”
“Just honkies. Just really cold, really big honkies, nothing more,” the captain chimed in, not amused by the direction the room was taking.
“I love the way you think, baby. Right here could be a bar-nightclub. We could serve vodka shots in ice cups for twice the cost of the bottle. Honey. Honey. The money.” Nathaniel, lost in his own vision, kept going.
When my darker cousin, being the true leader of our group, tried to engage Pym in a dialogue on his return to this small ice house, you could almost see the well-glazed eyes in the pale man’s head take on an additional layer. Instead of responding, Pym would simply look over toward me nervously, as one might toward the owner of an unruly and possibly dangerous pit bull. It was clear by Pym’s mannerisms that he would listen only to me—his fellow white man. That isn’t to say he