It’s impossibly crowded, they’ll never get a place to sit. But shortly after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the corner suddenly stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, snatching up their cigarettes and drinks almost as an afterthought. Raven pushes Y.T. through the room ahead of him, like she’s a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go, people are shoved out of her way by Raven’s almost palpable personal force field.
Raven bends down and looks under the table, picks a chair up off the floor and looks at the underside—you can never be too careful about those chair bombs—sets it down, pushed all the way back into the corner where two steel walls meet, and sits down. He gestures for Y.T. to do the same, and she does, her back to the action. From here, she can see Raven’s face, illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light filtering through the crowd from the mirrored ball over the erotic dancers, and by the generalized green-and-magenta haze coming out of the TV set, spiked by the occasional flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.
A waiter’s there immediately. Raven commences hollering across the table at her. She can’t hear him, but maybe he’s asking her what she wants.
“A cheeseburger!” she screams back at him.
Raven laughs, shakes his head. “You see any cows around here?”
“Anything but fish!” she screams.
Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.
“I ordered you some squid,” he hollers. “That’s a mollusk.”
Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.
There is a shouted conversation lasting the better part of an hour. Raven does most of the shouting. Y.T. just listens, smiles, and nods. Hopefully, he’s not saying something like “I enjoy really violent, abusive sex acts.”
She doesn’t think he’s talking about that at all. He’s talking politics. She hears a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and a burst here, when Raven isn’t poking squid into his mouth and the music isn’t too loud:
“Russians fucked us over… smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality rate… worked as slaves in their sealing industry… Seward’s folly… Fucking Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp for the duration…
“Then the Americans fucking nuked us. Can you believe that shit?” Raven says. There’s a lull in the music; suddenly she can hear complete sentences. “The Nipponese say they’re the only people who were ever nuked. But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka. My father,” Raven says, grinning proudly, “was nuked twice: once at Nagasaki, when he was blinded, and then again in 1972, when the Americans nuked our homeland.”
Great, Y.T. thinks. She’s got a new boyfriend and he’s a mutant. Explains one or two things.
“I was born a few months later,” Raven continues, by way of totally hammering that point home.
“How did you get hooked up with these Orthos?”
“I got away from our traditions and ended up living in Soldotna, working on oil rigs,” Raven says, like Y.T. is supposed to just know where Soldotna is. “That was when I did my drinking and got this,” he says, pointing to his tattoo. “That’s also when I learned how to make love to a woman—which is the only thing I do better than harpooning.”
Y.T. can’t help but think that fucking and harpooning are closely related activities in Raven’s mind. But as crude as the man is, she can’t get around the fact that he’s making her uncomfortably horny.
“I used to work fishing boats too, to make a little extra money. We would come back from a forty-eight-hour halibut opening—this was back in the old days when they had fishing regulations—and we’d put on our survival suits, stick beers into the pockets, and jump into the water and just float around drinking all night long. And one time we were doing this and I drank until I passed out. And when I woke up, it was the next day, or maybe a couple of days later, I don’t know. And I was floating in my survival suit out in the middle of the Cook Inlet, all alone. The other guys on my fishing boat had forgotten about me.”
Conveniently enough, Y.T. thinks.
“Anyway, I floated for a couple of days. Got real thirsty. Ended up washing ashore on Kodiak Island. By this time, I was real sick with the DTs and everything else. But I washed up near a Russian Orthodox church and they found me, took me in, and straightened me out. And that was when I saw that the Western, American lifestyle had come this close to killing me.”
Here comes the sermon.
“And I saw that we can only live through faith, living a simple lifestyle. No booze. No television. None of that stuff.”
“So what are we doing in this place?”
He shrugs. “This is an example of the bad places I used to hang out. But if you’re going to get decent food on the Raft, you have to come to a place like this.”
A waiter approaches the table. His eyes are big, his movements tentative. He’s not coming to take an order; he’s coming to deliver bad news.
“Sir, you are wanted on the radio. I’m sorry.”
“Who is it?” Raven says.
The waiter just looks around him like he can’t even speak the name in public. “It’s very important,” he says.
Raven heaves a big sigh, grabs one last piece of fish and pokes it into his mouth. He stands up, and before Y.T. can react, gives her a kiss on the cheek. “Honey, I got a job to do, or something. Just wait right here for me, okay?”
“Here?”
“Nobody will fuck with you,” Raven says, as much for the benefit of the waiter as for Y.T.
Chapter Fifty-One
The Raft looks uncannily cheerful from a few miles away. A dozen searchlights, and at least that many lasers, are mounted on the towering superstructure of the Enterprise, waving back and forth against the clouds like a Hollywood premiere. Closer up, it doesn’t look so bright and crisp. The vast matted tangle of small boats radiates a murky cloud of yellow light that spoils the contrast.
A couple of patches of the Raft are burning. Not a nice cheery bonfire type of thing, but a high burbling flame with black smoke sliding out of it, like you get from a large quantity of gasoline.