Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [90]
“Tsalal? What do you know about Tsalal?” Even if there was no world left above us anymore, did that make this goal of discovering Eden any less lofty? Maybe now it was even more so. Tsalal was the world my crewmates and I were destined for.
“I have known of the island, for I discovered it, and the Tekelians did so before me. They sought to use its natives as a source of labor. But the human crop, it was useless. Unfit for proper bondage. Now they grow wild, I presume.”
Trying to calm myself, to avoid betraying how much I wanted this information and letting Pym know he could extort it from me, I continued. “And what else do you know about these Tsalalians?”
“They are black,” Pym said as if this said it all, pausing after each of these three words so that I could perceive the weight of them.†
“Do you know how to get there?” was the most important question I had to ask. Garth paused behind, and his threat definitely affected the speed of Pym’s answer, but I hoped not the content.
“Yes, of course. It’s a simple matter of tides. I could show you. Although, I must tell you: there is no point trying to set up trade with those niggers.”
Spurred by the last word of his statement, Garth gave the white man another smack, this time with the full force of annoyance. The blow left Pym on the ground, very, very unconscious.
“What the hell are you doing, man? He was going to tell us how to get to Tsalal!”
“I don’t like that word.” Garth shrugged. “And I ain’t the kind of nigga that’s gonna let some cracker say that to my face and get away with it.”
Garth showed some bit of regret by grabbing Pym by the collar and smacking him further, more lightly this time, in an attempt to wake him up. But it was clear that Pym would not be regaining consciousness for a while, and the longer we waited the more our immediate plans were at risk.
“Did you bring Dirk Peters’s bones from the base camp like I specifically asked you? I don’t want to lose them.”
“You’re a weird dude, Chris. Really, you’re not right sometimes. Yeah, I got it.”
“Good. We’re taking Pym with us too. That’s the only solution. We’re taking him with us, we can’t … I can’t let this chance slip away.”
“Man, do you not see what that fool did to the other two snowmobiles? We not carrying nobody. Besides, why do we need Tsalal? We already got somewhere to run to. We already got a plan, and I think it’s a pretty good one.”
“I’ll carry him. He’ll be my burden.”
With that, I rolled Pym’s limp body over and tied him up. Then I took the rest of the rope we could find in the truck’s cab and laid it out on the snow in the form of a Philadelphia soft pretzel. Once it was arranged, I poured water onto the line from the bottle that Garth kept in his coat, despite his complaining. And in seconds, when the water had frozen the rope and the snow around it into a hard shape and the makeshift sled was ready, I placed the knocked-out Pym on it and put our food supplies and my bag of bones beside him, securing all of them tightly so that they wouldn’t fall off during the quest ahead of us.
* In African American vernacular, it’s called “going upside the head,” and because of that I have always imagined an open-hand assault in a literal upswing, gliding past the ear and making contact with most of the temple.
† Pym said “black” the way really white people do: not like they are simply naming the pigment, which those people do in one quick syllable, but in the way that made the word specific to Negroes. This black had at least two syllables, b&-’lAk, and there was always enough emphasis on the second syllable to convey all of the anxiety the speaker had about my ethnic group as a whole. Ba-laaaaaaaak.
I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to