Red Clocks(32)

“You need to leave, girls,” says a cop not much older than they are. “We’re clearing the beach. And put out that cigarette.”

“Why isn’t anyone putting them back in the water?” says the daughter.

The cop peers at her. “A, they’re dead. B, you realize how much these goddamn things weigh?”

“But one of them isn’t dead!”

“Go home, okay?”

She and Ash walk past the enormous bodies—one spray-painted with an orange question mark, another sprayed with OUR FAULT!—to the last breathing whale. Its flukes lie still. Blood pools on the sand by its head. The mouth is open, drenched red. The beaky lower jaw, illogically small for such a huge skull, is sown with teeth. The daughter touches one: a banana of bone.

Has moved amid this world’s foundations.

“Now your hand is infected,” says Ash.

She wipes it on her jeans.

The whale’s eye, wedged between wrinkled lips of skin, is open and black and quivering. Hast seen enough to split the planets. She kneels down. Leans her cheek against the gray body. Dry, scarred leather.

“It’ll be okay,” she says.

Can’t hear any clicking sounds.

Where are the machines? The cables, the levers?

A whale is a house in the ocean.

A womb for a person.

Whale song is heard from sea floor to star, from Icy Strait Point to Península Valdés.

“Ash, give me your hoodie.”

“I’m cold.”

“Give it.” The daughter runs down to the waves and douses Ash’s hoodie and her own. Runs back to throw them, dripping, onto the whale’s head. The only song she can think of is “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” She’s in the midst of chanting “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah” when she hears a gunshot.

Then screams.

Everyone is clustering around something up the beach.

It wasn’t a gun; it was a whale. Exploding. The gray belly, split wide, leaks slimy bundles of pink intestine and purple organ meat. Fat shreds of flesh flap in the wind. “Get it off! Get it off!” yells a boy, pawing at ropes of innards stuck to his chest.

And the stink—God!—rancid blast of farts, fish rot, and sewage. The daughter pulls her shirt up over her mouth.

Black-red liquid foams at her feet.

The scientist is explaining to the cop that she’d been trying to collect samples of subcutaneous adipose tissue and visceral adipose tissue. When she sank her knife into the whale, it burst.

“Methane gas builds up in the carcass,” she says. “This one must have been the first to die, possibly days ago. If he was their leader and died at sea, and his body floated to shore, the other whales would have followed. They’re loyal to a fault.”

“Ma’am, you can’t just go around chopping up corpses,” says the cop.

“This magnificent creature isn’t anyone’s property,” says the scientist. “I intend to analyze the tissue and figure out how they ended up here.”

“What lab are you with, ma’am? My captain said the OIMB guys weren’t going to be here until—”

“I’m an independent researcher. But this”—she holds up two clear plastic bags of red flesh—“I know what to do with.”

The daughter heads back to her whale.

His eye is no longer moving.

Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck.

She presses the eye with her fingertip.

It is clammy and springy, like a hard-cooked egg.





How to make tv?st og spik:



Prepare pilot-whale meat in one of the following ways: boil fresh, fry fresh, store in dry salt, store in brine, or cut into long strips (grindalikkja) and hang to dry.

Prepare pilot-whale blubber by boiling, salting, or drying. (Do not fry.)

Serve meat and blubber together with boiled and salted potatoes. In some Faroese homes, dried fish is also included on the tv?st og spik plate.





THE MENDER


Cotter reports that Lola fell down the stairs. Was in a little coma. Better now.

New clients are supposed to leave a note at the P.O., but Lola just showed up one day, drenched. “I heard of you from my friend.” The mender brought her inside, gave her a towel, inspected the red smear on her forearm.

“Is it going to scar?”

“Yes,” said the mender. She pressed fresh-bruised leaves of houseleek to the damaged skin, waited, blinked at Lola’s breasts, those plump puddings, then wrapped the arm with a poultice of leek juice and lard. “How did this happen?”

“It was stupid,” said Lola. “I was making dinner and I caught my arm on a hot pan.”

Her husband also snapped her finger bone. Left a six-colored bruise on her jaw.

Two more warts on Clementine’s fig.

Clementine says, “This is kind of extremely humiliating?”

“Just a body doing what it does.”

“But they’re so nasty.”

“Lots of people get them,” says the mender, and she holds a compress of crushed, wet lupine seeds against the vulva. White lupine is also good for bringing down blood—a missed period, a uterus unhappily full—and for calling worms to the surface of the skin. Summers, the mender burns its seeds in stone cups to fend off gnats.