The Strangle Snare

Previously: The gals hang out at the headquarters of the local brothel franchise, make a delivery, learn about a new sex move, and make an appointment with a not-too-tall escort for Batya later that evening.

— 49 —

The sisters leave White Clinic via the airlock and there, seated at a streetcar stop, is Gas Mask, not wearing a gas mask, a seagull tucked under his arm. Next to him is Estra Maxie, adhering a fresh bandage to his forehead.

Batya is in no shape for another round but finds it within herself to make a fist and show it to Gas Mask, her rings glistening in the autumn sun. “We friendly?”

“Please put that away,” he says wearily.

Estra Maxie thwacks him on his injured head. She says, “Jakey Jakes won’t give you any more trouble.”

“His name is Jakey Jakes?” Mina says.

“It’s the name that occurred to me when I birthed him.”

“This fool is your kin?” Bat hoots. 

“Listen,” Jakey Jakes says. “I was hired to do a job, Mom was hired to do a job. Jobs get tangled up sometimes, you know how it goes.”

“Of course,” Mina says. “And we won fair and square.”

“I guess. Except for that little fork that made me go insane, that didn’t seem fair at all.”

“I never used it before,” Bat says. “It made me smell fruit. What’d it do to you?”

“How can I put this. That snake statue there in the fountain? It starting writhing around and then put its tongue in my eyes and said something like: It is time to receive my fetus.”

“That’s hilarious,” Mina says.

“Oh and it was speaking in my own voice, but my voice when I was a little kid.”

Bat says, “Sorry man. Here, you can have it, you earned it.” She tosses him the tuning fork.

He catches it, fumbles it because of the gull he’s holding. The bird squawks, looking deeply unhappy. “This is Pepper Jack.”

“Aw, Pepper Jack! Can I pet him?”

“Neither of you would enjoy that,” Estra Maxie says, spying the Monkey Fish streetcar ambling toward the stop. She and the kid get up.

“Where you off to?” Mina says.

“Docks,” Estra Maxie says. “We’re shipping out.”

“We don’t like to let the sun set on us in this dump,” Jakey Jakes says, gesturing at the boulevard and the neighborhood and the city around them.

“This is our home,” Bat says, civic pride burning a hole in her chest. “You sick bitch.”

“It’s a port. You don’t stay here.”

Mina tries to hold her sister back but nothing doing. “Fort Hook,” Bat shouts over the squealing brakes of the streetcar, “is a place people came to fish and then ended up staying here forever because it ruled.”

“Sure,” Estra Maxie says, waving goodbye. “If you believe that hokum.”

The hokum in question, or at least the version I’ve heard:

About two hundred years ago, and a couple nautical miles from where the Hull sisters currently stand, a cuckolded captain was on the deck of his sloop, binding an anchor to a young angler’s feet. The captain, his breathing ragged, admired his handiwork. “That there’s a double constrictor,” he said, feeling through his inner pockets for his tobacco pouch.

“A little showy,” the angler said, half-heartedly pulling at his restraints. “Me, I lean toward the strangle-snare.”

The captain nodded, found his pipe, beat it against the heel of his hand. “That’s a respectable knot.”

“You struggle, it holds tighter,” the angler said. He was barefoot, skin and bones, only recently able to grow a beard. “Might’ve been a good choice, seeing as I’ll probably be thrashing about as I drown.”

“Your opinions on knots will be fine company for you at the bottom of the sea,” the captain said, crouching down on the deck of his boat, shielding his flint from the salty wind. The sky was low and a decent storm was imminent. He got his pipe up and running, a warm orange glow against the endless washes of gray. Smoke drifted NNW. “I tell you where I got this pipe?”

“I hope it is a lusty tale for it shall be the last I hear.”

“Pulled in the nets one day and found a skeleton in there, one whole man skeleton with all his parts still attached, and stuck fast twixt his teeth was this beaut.”

“Now how’d that get in there, I wonder,” the angler said, his bound wrists itching, the tooth in the back of his head—rotting away for months now—really starting to ache.

The captain studied his pipe, clearly never considered the issue before. “I reckon he was smoking whilst in a fracas and received a good wallop in the chops.”

“You figure the stem punctured his thinking cap and ended him?”

“Couldn’t’ve helped matters any.”

“So, in your imagination, he’s standing there enjoying a puff with a fistfight in the midst?”

“Aye. I seen plenty of coldblooded apes who perform a multitude of tasks while giving you a good stabbing. Waxing their mustaches or chatting up your mother. One hellion—well, you know Shaw, of course, he’s strumming his banjo, singing hymns even as he’s going at some poor innocent seaman with his spurs.”

The angler’s cough was shallow and wet. “Heard the government took his head right off and out poured arctic water. The head just rolled ‘round, cackling.”

“Pff, your informant can take that clap back to the gully,” the captain suggested. “Shaw’s still at large. You remember the morning Bess kicked up a fuss and—” He stopped suddenly, remembering, a confused look tangling up his eyes. “Maybe we should speed along this mercy killing.”

The angler nodded. “I’d hate to get rained on.”

“All such a damn shame. We come across you near dead and I say to...I say to my wife, I say to my beloved, I say, Bess, let’s take mercy on this pathetic whelp, get him aboard, get him on the crew. And she says, the loveless wretch, she says, Oh let’s, she says. He’s so much like you as a younger man.”

The angler laughed a quiet laugh. He couldn’t help it.

The captain lurched down, took him by the throat. “I take you in as my own, I pass down the wisdom, and soon as my back’s turned you, you, you trespass upon my wife’s frilly sanctum?”

“In my defense,” the angler croaked, “I was merely responding to her kind invitation. I did not wish to be impolite.”

The captain threw him down on the deck, got back up with a tired grunt. “I thought we shared a, a, a…” He jabbed at his chest with his thumb, unable to gather the grains of emotion together into a complete thought. “A bond of the sea. Which is why, even though you deserve nothing more than this pipe in your skull, I am giving you a proper salt’s death, a man’s death. This is how I’d want to go. When my time comes, I hope this is just how it runs, the sea opening up and letting me right in, right where I belong.”

“The sea is like a woman, isn’t she,” the angler said. “Spreading wide for anyone who wants to go in.”

Well, that was that. The pipe dropped from the captain’s mouth and he picked up the anchor and swung it overboard. The angler jerked feet-first against the rail and then flipped over it. He managed to grab hold with two or three fingers but the captain brought down an angry fist and shattered his bones. The angler let go, said “Ffhhh—” and followed the anchor down to the waves below.

He shouted but only sickly black bubbles came out. He thrashed against the ropes, heard something give way in his shoulder, felt a stinging behind his eyes, in his throat. His eardrums burst. The surface shrunk to a single blinding pinprick of light, and then vanished.

He hit the bottom of the ocean standing upright. Silt mushroomed around the anchor. His body shuddered and twisted and he howled his last breath.

Then he heard a piercing song in his punctured ears, and then he opened his eyes. He saw a giant hand reaching out for him, fingers outstretched and clenched in rage.

The ropes fell apart, freeing his wrists and ankles, threads of hemp unwinding and floating away. He swam, grasping for the hand. Their fingers met and he was surprised by the rough texture.

And then a jagged white fire lit up his veins. The water around his body recoiled, tearing itself apart.

He let go and felt his heart beat again. Seawater coursed in and out of his lungs smoothly, cleanly. He could make out every edge and shadow of the enormous stone hand there in the darkness, where monsters gave off their own light. His fingers and shoulders felt fine, just fine. The tooth was calm and silent.

He breathed in deep, and currents spiraled out from his open hands. He listened as his laugh escaped to the surface.

He swam the miles back to shore like they were nothing, moving with an eerie kind of grace. He came upon a desolate spit of sand at the tip of a crescent-shaped peninsula which formed a little bay. Along the southern stretch was a dense forest where he camped out. Halfway through the first night, he was ambushed by a roving gang of scalawags looking for a bad time. An exceptionally hairy villain flourished a small blade, held the angler by the back of his neck, and cut his stomach open. His obnoxious brethren found this funny and they slapped their palms against his, a local gesture of triumph and goodwill.

The angler, furious, stood there holding in his guts. He said something like: Any other dullards want to make the last mistake they’ll ever make? And while the buccaneers tried to work out why this kid wasn’t dead yet, a great roar rose up from the sea, and then a tidal wave burst through the woods. Most of the men died by having their heads crushed against tree trunks, and the rest drowned.

The wave subsided, waterlogged bodies hung from twisted trees, coastal fish flopped and gasped. The angler picked up a crab, tore off a claw, and tasted its meat. He felt fantastic.

He meandered out to the beach, leaned into the wind, and watched as the sea gave up its bounty of sablefish, rockfish, dungeness crab, spiny lobster, bluefin tuna, pink shrimp. Anything he wanted. Literally flinging themselves out of the water.

And, as Batya said, word spread quickly, and soon the shoreline was crowded with fisherfolk from all corners, their baskets overflowing. They asked the angler how long the season lasted here and he said: I’ll show you. He waded out into the waves, bent down, waited a moment, then thrust his hand into the water and plucked out a fat silver salmon, not even native to those waters, his fingernails deep within its flesh. He said: There are no seasons if you know what you’re doing.

The fishers were astonished and stayed put, building lean-tos that became tents and huts and shacks. Quick access to Port Rohner up the coast made for easy trade. More journeymen arrived, and they built docks, and started families, and pulled one fish after another out of the drink.

The shantytown grew into a village, big enough to need a name. The angler called it the Hook, based on the shape of the peninsula and the tool that snagged their livelihood. And this skeletal, scarred kid of eighteen dubbed himself the Mayor, and even though many tried to take the name from him over the years, using all manner of subterfuge and weaponry, none ever succeeded, for he had the God of Salt in his veins.

Batya Hull watches the Monkey Fish streetcar disappear over a hill, clanging its bell. She says, “Eat shit, Pepper Jack.”

+++

This has been Chapter 49 of Chokeville, a novel by Josh Fireland.

Next up: Your Thighs Are Generous