God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [42]
"Cling to your miracle, Mr. Buntline. Money is dehydrated Utopia. This is a dog's life for almost everybody, as your professors have taken such pains to point out. But, because of your miracle, life for you and yours can be a paradise! Let me see you smile! Let me see that you already understand what they do not teach at Harvard until the junior year: That to be born rich and to stay rich is something less than a felony."
Lila, Stewart's daughter, now went upstairs to her bedroom. The color scheme, selected by her mother, was pink and frost. Her casement windows looked out on the harbor, on the nodding Pisquontuit Yacht Club fleet.
A forty-foot workboat named Mary was chugging her graceless, smoky way through the fleet, rocking the playthings. The playthings had names like Scomber and Skat and Rosebud II and Follow Me and Red Dog and Bunty. Rosebud II belonged to Fred and Caroline Rosewater. Bunty belonged to Stewart and Amanita Buntline.
Mary belonged to Harry Pena, the trap fisherman. She was a gray, lapstreak tub whose purpose was to wallow home in all weather with tons of fresh fish on board. There wasn't any shelter on her, except for a wooden box to keep the big new Chrysler dry. The wheel and the throttle and the clutch were mounted on the box. All the rest of the Mary was a bare-boned tub.
Harry was on his way to his traps. His two big sons, Manny and Kenny, lay head-to-head in the bow, murmuring in lazy lechery. Each boy had a six-foot tuna gaff beside him. Harry was armed with a twelve-pound mall. All three wore rubber aprons and boots. When they got to work, they would bathe in gore.
"Stop talking about fucking," said Harry. "Think about fish."
"We will, old man, when we're as old as you." This was a deeply affectionate reply.
An airplane came over very low, making its approach to Providence Airport. On board, reading The Conscience of a Conservative, was Norman Mushari.
The world's largest private collection of harpoons was displayed in a restaurant called The Weir, which was five miles outside of Pisquontuit. The marvellous collection belonged to a tall homosexual from New Bedford named Bunny Weeks. Until Bunny came down from New Bedford and opened his restaurant, Pisquontuit had nothing to do with whaling—ever.
Bunny called his place The Weir because its Thermopane windows on the south looked out at the fish traps of Harry Pena. There were opera glasses on each table, in order that guests might watch Harry and his boys clean out their traps. And when the fisherfolk were performing out there on the briny deep, Bunny went from table to table, explaining with gusto and expertise what they were doing, and why. While disserting, he would paw women shamelessly, would never touch a man.
If guests wished to participate even more vibrantly in the fishing business, they might order a Horse Mackerel Cocktail, which was rum, grenadine, and cranberry juice, or a Fisherman's Salad, which was a peeled banana thrust through a pineapple ring, set in a nest of chilled, creamed tuna and curly coconut shreds.
Harry Pena and his boys knew about the salad and the cocktail and the opera glasses, though they had never visited The Weir. Sometimes they would respond to their involuntary involvement with the restaurant by urinating off the boat. They called this "... making cream of leek soup for Bunny Weeks."
Bunny Weeks' harpoon collection lay across the rude rafters of the gift shop that constituted the opulently mouldy entrance to The Weir. The shop itself was called The Jolly Whaler. There was a dusty skylight over the shop, the dusty effect having been achieved by spraying on Jet-Spray Bon Ami, and never wiping it off. The lattice of rafters and harpoons underneath the skylight was projected onto the merchandise below. The effect that Bunny had created was that real whalers, smelling of blubber and rum and sweat and ambergris,