Zodiac by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online Page A

the subject of Spectacle Island. This was not a true island but a mound of garbage dumped in the Harbor by an ancestor of his, a tugboat operator who’d been lucky enough to get the city’s garbage-hauling concession in the 1890s. But, as Rory explained many timesand loudly, those were the Charlestown Gallaghers, the rich, arrogant, semi-Anglicized branch. Sometime back in the Twenties, some Gallagher’s nose had gotten splintered in a wedding brawl or something, thus creating the rift between that branch and Rory’s—the Southie Gallaghers, the humble farmers of the sea.
    â€œAttention all crew, we have a long-haired invironmintl at ten o’clock, prepare to be boarded,” Rory called, his Southie accent thick as mustard gas. All these guys talked that way. Their “ar” sounds could shatter reinforced concrete. I’d been to a couple of games with them; we’d sit up there in the bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late, lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn’t not be loud and boisterous, so they gave me shit about my hair, which didn’t even come down to my collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress.
    â€œAaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap’n Taylor, some real skinny oily ones.”
    â€œGoing to the game tonight, Rory?”
    â€œA bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?”
    â€œCan’t. Going to Jersey tomorrow.”
    â€œJersey! Sheesh!” All the buys on the boat went “sheesh!” They couldn’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.
    They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where they’d trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I’d have to dismantle them and run the analysis.
    We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks. These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heros were gigantic black men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn’t brave enough to point out.
    I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can’t charter a boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish off docks. That means they’re looking for bottom fish. Anyone who knows about BostonHarbor gets queasy just at the mention of bottom fish, but these people were worried about kwashiorkor, not cancer. Three-quarters of them were Southeast Asian.
    So a month ago I’d typed up a highly alarming paragraph about what these particular bottom fish would do to your health, especially to the health of unborn children. Tried to make it simple: no chemical terms, no words like “carcinogenicity.” Took it to the Pearl, which is my hangout, and persuaded Hoa to translate it to Vietnamese for me. Took it to an interpreter at City Hospital and got her to translate it into Cambodian. Had a friend do it in Spanish. Put them all together on a sign, sort of a toxic Rosetta Stone, made numerous copies and then made a few midnight trips to the piers where they like to do this fishing. We put the signs up in prominent places, bolted them down with lag screws, epoxied those screws into place and then chopped the heads off.
    And when I came around the curve of the North End, bypassing a few hundred stalled cars on Commercial Street, riding the throttle high because I had miles to go before I’d sleep, I saw the same old pier, all hairy with fishing poles. It looked like one of those shadows you see under a microscope, with cilia sticking out all over to gather in food, healthy or otherwise.
    Somehow I didn’t figure these guys were sportsmen. They weren’t of the catch-and-release school, like those geezers on TV. They were survivalists in a toxic wilderness.
    The old etiquette dies