Raven1 ushers2 Y.T. onto a flat-assed boat with a canopy3 on top. It is some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a Vietnamese/American/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling den4. It has a few big rooms, where lots of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.
The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her bronchial passages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted steel walls at three hundred decibels5. A television set bolted onto one wall is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta6 and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile7 E. Coyote with rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros. could think up. It's a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off completely or else overwhelmed by the screeching8 melody coming out of the speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.
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 scatter9 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, illuminated10 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 haze11 coming out of the TV set, spiked12 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 variant13 of Taxilinga.
"I ordered you some squid," he hollers. "That's a mollusk14."
Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.
There is a shouted conversation lasting15 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 poking16 squid into his mouth and the music isn't too loud:
"Russians fucked us over ... smallpox17 had a ninety-percent mortality rate ... worked as slaves in their sealing industry ... Seward's folly18 ... 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 lull19 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 aboriginal20 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 tattoo21. "That's also when I learned how to make love to a woman -- which is the only thing I do better than harpooning22."
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 is 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 ashore23 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 killing24 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 shrugs25. "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 pokes26 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.
收听单词发音 |
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raven
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| n.渡鸟，乌鸦；adj.乌亮的 | |
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ushers
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| n.引座员( usher的名词复数 )；招待员；门房；助理教员v.引，领，陪同( usher的第三人称单数 ) | |
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canopy
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| n.天篷，遮篷 | |
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den
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| n.兽穴；秘密地方；安静的小房间，私室 | |
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decibels
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| n.分贝( decibel的名词复数 ) | |
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magenta
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| n..紫红色（的染料）；adj.紫红色的 | |
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wile
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| v.诡计，引诱；n.欺骗，欺诈 | |
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screeching
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| v.发出尖叫声( screech的现在分词 )；发出粗而刺耳的声音；高叫 | |
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scatter
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| vt.撒，驱散，散开；散布/播；vi.分散，消散 | |
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illuminated
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| adj.被照明的；受启迪的 | |
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haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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spiked
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| adj.有穗的；成锥形的；有尖顶的 | |
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variant
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| adj.不同的，变异的；n.变体，异体 | |
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mollusk
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| n.软体动物 | |
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lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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poking
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| n. 刺，戳，袋 vt. 拨开，刺，戳 vi. 戳，刺，捅，搜索，伸出，行动散慢 | |
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smallpox
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| n.天花 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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lull
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| v.使安静，使入睡，缓和，哄骗；n.暂停，间歇 | |
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aboriginal
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| adj.（指动植物）土生的，原产地的，土著的 | |
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tattoo
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| n.纹身，(皮肤上的)刺花纹；vt.刺花纹于 | |
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harpooning
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| v.鱼镖，鱼叉( harpoon的现在分词 ) | |
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ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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shrugs
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| n.耸肩（以表示冷淡，怀疑等）( shrug的名词复数 ) | |
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pokes
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| v.伸出( poke的第三人称单数 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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