The Bovado Will Pop Off If You Put a Little English On It

The stuff we were drinking would have scalded the Bovado off the hull of any trawler, but we were issued runcible spoons because we were going to save them to pickle, so they had to be removed carefully, one at a time.

I scraped my spoon with my thumbnail while the guard searched my cavities for contraband. Around us, ships lay on their sides in the drained port. Somebody had brought an inflatable dragon pool toy. It hung from a rope by its throat, its eyes bulging from their sockets, defying death with the strength of a thing built to be abused by children.

I watched the Bovado as they breathed on the hulls, expanding and contracting like I was hallucinating. I might have been: I had meant to bet on sports at Bovada.lv yet here I was on a work crew in a gulag scraping and pickling Bovado. That’s what I get for opening my big yap.

The Bovado had the colour and consistency of the skin beneath a band-aid you’ve left on too long, with a small coppery hinge at one end. Through its translucent belly I could see a grain of black sand travelling uphill. I tipped it. The sand continued climbing. Whatever gravity it obeyed was somewhere inside it, and I envied that, standing there with my pants down for a man who breathed exclusively through his mouth. He finished his search and withdrew his hand and wiped it on a deconsecrated flag.

Our jars waited on a trestle table. Vinegar, peppercorns, dill gone brown at the extremities. Each lid had a name written underneath, where you couldn’t read it once the jar was closed. Mine was already screwed tight. I had tried opening it with my coat wrapped around the glass, holding it between my knees, everything short of asking for help. Inside, one peppercorn rested against the wall. It troubled me how closely it resembled a pupil when there was absolutely nothing else resembling an eye.

The ship above us was called the Analysis, according to the letters welded across its stern. Someone had painted a thin red line through ysis. Bovado crowded its exposed underbelly in crusty shingles. In places their overlapping lips had sucked the antifouling paint clean away. Here was bare steel, pink with the beginning of rust; here a rivet furred with their tiny feeding filaments. The smell coming off them was intimate and appalling, hot pennies wrapped in wet hair. My mouth watered. The drink had made a collaborator of my mouth.

I fitted the spoon beneath one. Its lip tightened. A pale bead appeared where metal met flesh, enlarged, and stayed there. I leaned closer. My knees settled into the harbour mud. There were little square impressions in it, hundreds of them, as though someone had knelt here wearing trousers made of postage stamps.

I kept the pressure on the spoon. Beneath its bowl the Bovado slowly disclosed a narrow underside lined with blue bristles. They moved in sequence. I could feel them through the metal, a delicate brushing along the bones of my hand, then higher, inside my elbow. My arm wanted to bend the other way. We had been promised a meal afterward. I concentrated on this. Potatoes, probably. Something that had never attached itself to anything.

Far up the hull a porthole stood open. From it protruded a long, stockinged leg. The leg was attached to the reward for whichever man peeled off the most Bovado. We were all thinking about that stockinged leg, and a handful of the hopeless had goosed the action with a prop bet at Bovada on the name of the lucky guy.

Through the transparent green stomach of the inflatable green dragon I saw the opposite quay, elongated and yellow, and men standing beneath an awning holding towels. The quay folded into the dragon’s belly as I stood watching as if it had been eaten whole. The stopper valve pressed against its now full belly. A pinch of white sand lodged in the stopper. I remembered being told never to pull that stopper. I had been told with considerable firmness. This is a euphemism of course.

I put a little more English on it and the Bovado came away at last. A round wet patch remained on the steel. In its centre was a keyhole packed with meat. I held the spoon level. The creature spread itself across the bowl of the spoon, testing the three grossly inadequate teeth of the spoon, and from its copper hinge exuded a tiny curl of paper. I recognized the blue type of a betslip.

My jar stood open on the table. Beyond it, the guard cupped his match. The first edge of flame illuminated his fingertips, red through the flesh, and under that light the ships seemed almost buoyant. I carried the Bovado toward the jar of vinegar. There was my name beneath the lid of the jar, in a cypher I used to communicate with my deaf mother before I had learned to write. The dragon’s stopper loosened. I picked up the jar and put the lip to my open mouth and took a long slow drink as the guards shrieked and pulled out their batons.

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