They shot again, just as the seal-head came up to breathe.
Fuck, gimme the twenty-two magnums!
Get ready, get ready!
They were very close to the seal now. For the fifth time it surfaced without being able to breathe. On the seventh time a bright red circle of blood marked its surfacing, and with a splashing sound they stabbed it under its dark head with the old man's harpoon, whose point was made of caribou antler. The black flipper moved feebly.
Grab it!
They pulled it in, stabbed it once in the neck, and it died, lying there whiskers up as bloody water ran out of its head. The grandson who always got in trouble pulled the harpoon out and licked the blood off his hand.
Ah, it must taste good! he cried. Wanna eat it right now!
All bent over it in gladness and admiration, and then Three-Nuts rolled it into the hold.
There's a bearded seal out on the ice, said One-Nut. My grandfather sees it.
No! Walrus! Walrus!
Hollowpoint!
They rushed and aimed.
There was a brown islet which turned out to be all walruses wriggling and crawling on each other on a piece of ice you couldn't even see. As the boat bore down they began to flee like a slow explosion of heaviness but the old man in old grayish kamiks had already shot the big one. He'd shot him in the right place, which was the bump behind the head. One-Nut cast the harpoon and they all smiled at him proudly. So much bright blood spread like paint under the boat and beyond.
Now it was the old man who did everything, going over the side to the dinghy for the butchering. It was a wonder how quickly he did it, from the very first moment when the brim of his cap pointed down like a beak as he squatted in the dinghy and leaned, his left hand resting on the side while his right arm and hand slanted down in parallel with his cap, extended by the long knife whose point gleamed sunstruck as it touched and dimpled a sunny place on the pink-mottled brown skin of the dying walrus which lay like a torpedo between the Peterhead's gunwale on which the other hunters crouched and the dinghy, in which Two-Nuts pulled tight the harpoon cable which the old man in old grayish kamiks had so carefully strung, and the cable passed through the boy's clenched fingers and then into the old man's left hand, which was not resting after all; every part of the old man's body was doing a job; and then the cable doubled back up toward the Peterhead and into the grip of the grandson who always got in trouble. In the bow of the dinghy, the boy who hated white people sat holding two lines to keep the vessels close together. And the knife went in. In seconds the old man had begun to lay bare the walrus's yellowish ribs and blue-green membranes behind. His head turned from side to side as quickly as his knife and he grinned a little with effort as his reddened wrist flowed with perfect skill and confidence through the flesh. He'd opened the creature up like a boat, and it lay so whiskery and ancient with its tusks pointing upward, reddish-yellow and lined with long grooves. Between the dinghy and the Peterhead, seawater sparkled and foamed red like fresh raspberry juice. The wrinkled gray hulk of the walrus still breathed, such was the old man's quickness, and even after the first quarter was winched up over the side (the dark meat reddish-purple and the light meat pinkish-orange), the heart still beat. Its wound-gash now clean and bloodless, the next quarter went up only a moment later, making the Peterhead heel a little under the weight. The grandson who always got in trouble guided each still-trembling walrus-chunk into the well at the bottom of the boat, bending one knee and grabbing high where the meat was hooked to swing it down. When the belly-chunk came, the intestines were still squirming and working. Slowly the rectum discharged a mound of custardy excrement and then it gaped open and still. And the Peterhead sat alone in the still sea, the center of a million concentric ripples which bore away with them the last marks of the animal's struggle.
The final quarter came aboard, and for a split second it seemed that the grandson who always got in trouble was embracing it so passionately with his head buried in the flesh just below the hook, but that was only for an instant; then the arms which had gathered the flesh in continued to push it laterally and down; and it was all done. The gray flesh, the black and reddish steaks filled the entire floorspace of the hold.
The walrus penis was given to the kids to use as a baseball bat. Then they turned around for home. There were many other walruses, but the old man said they only needed one. They motored back to their island where the houses of their village would rise up from the muddy bouldery land; they'd go back to the scarlet sunfooted days ahead like toadstools, to the sunny days of swatting mosquitoes, to the summer as huge, scarlet and mysterious as a walrus liver. And the old man sat on top of the pilothouse with One-Nut, whose walrus it was, steering with the sole of his kamik and not quite smiling.
BAD AIR
Up the glary gray roadstripe whose white and red truck-lights were the jewels on the necklace, up they went. He sat beside her, being nothing. The white dots in the passing lanes were other jewels. Effortlessly they ascended that black hill. They could see the drivers of the other cars and trucks pallidly entranced. Headlights glared on a comb of power wires. Headlights masturbated the wheeled blocks of trucks studded with hard lights. A car, a black die of death, came down the hill toward them bearing two red headlight-dots — a low roll. Then it was gone. Opening their palms like seashells, they reached the crest of the hill and began to descend into Los Angeles. He heard her clear her throat. The hot night air made his eyes water. His throat began to ache. He looked sidelong at her and saw her swallowing the bad air. For some reason he did not want her to#know that he had seen her. She did not see; she stared ahead, her interest in him long since molded white like a mongrel pigeon's feathers. They passed a clean white truck which was a wall of perfect cream. Their headlights picked across the rivets of another truck. The sky was already glowing putridly ahead, just beyond the black ridge. He took another breath and willed it to be as clean as the light-sweat on white trucks, but it burned inside him. They went down the dashed white line that dribbled into the night like an old man's urine. He took another breath and coughed. They passed a truck in the night, pleated like a dirty gray accordion. The air was getting murky; there were no white trucks anymore. They followed the curve down between black ridges, marked ahead by the pale lights of oncoming cars. He inhaled the stale smell of some chemical. Foolish rectangles of car-vision swept down across pavement and dead grass. Then at last he saw clearly the low horizon riddled with lights. The weariness of the air was something he could not win over; he could only deny it. Everything was such an effort! The dashed white line had become his only friend now, as long and straight and even as the row of screws in the window-moldings that ran the length of a Greyhound bus. — We'll be there soon, she said without looking at him, and he almost believed that he hadn't heard her. He was already forgetting that the air hurt. He was already saying to himself: I could get used to this. — He was already looking forward to being there.
To the ancient ones who lived behind horse-headed gates, people like him and her would have been appalling. Those two thought themselves at home everywhere, and so they had no home. Long before Magic Mountain the greasy-gray air had begun to smell like burning tires. Three patrol cars sped past. Through his window he saw ape of those skeletal-trailered trucks used to haul racks of new automobiles to the dealers' lots; it was carrying nothing but police cars. He and she both had sore throats by the time they passed the Pico Canyon exit. The air smeared itself more and more thickly over the mountains ahead. To the east, no mountains could even be seen. She drove rapidly. They continued to descend. His eyes began to water. I've never seen it this bad, she said. They passed another car. The driver was looking where the road led and shaking his head. Two men in the next car were gesturing to one another.