Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [110]
Sunshine ran to Quoyle, put her mouth to his ear and sent a loud, tickling message in.
“Dad, Beety is showing me how to knit. I am knitting a Christmas present for you. It’s very hard.”
“Good lord,” said Quoyle, astonished. “And you’re only four years old.”
“It’s kind of a trick, Dad, because it’s just a long, long, fat string and it turns into a scarf. But I can’t show it to you.”
“Are you telling a certain secret?” asked Beety.
“Yes,” said Sunshine, beaming.
“See you later,” said Quoyle.
“See you!” called Dennis eagerly.
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[252] It took Quoyle and Nutbeem an hour and a half to get to the trailer. They made long stops at the liquor authority loading boxes of beer and rum into the station wagon until the rear end sagged, stacking the backseat with plastic-wrapped party platters of sliced ham, turkey, cold cuts and red-eyed olives from the town’s only supermarket, then on to the fish processing plant for a tub of ice which Nutbeem somehow lashed on top. Early darkness. A few more weeks until the winter solstice.
“Isn’t this is too much?” said Quoyle. “Too much everything.”
“You’re forgetting the contributors and advertisers, and those two discriminating food critics, Benny Fudge and Adonis Collard, who write the food column. Did you read their latest? Sort of a ‘Newfoundland Guide to Fried Bologna.’ Then there’s your pal, the old chap down at the harbor, and the court laddie who gives me the S.A. news. There’ll be the odd midnight arrival. And maybe fifty layabouts. You’ll see. Killick-Claw is a party town. Why I got six gallons of screech.”
“Actually, fried bologna isn’t bad,” said Quoyle.
“You have gone native.”
They drove to the south end, over a one-lane bridge to a trailer behind a cluster of houses. Faded pastel pink with a stenciled frieze of girls with umbrellas, a low picket fence. Nutbeem’s scabby bicycle leaned near the steps.
“The Goodlads live in the proper houses,” said Nutbeem. “Fishermen. Lambie and John and his mother in the green house, the two younger sons, Ray in the white and red house and Sammy in the blue. The oldest son is a fisheries biologist in St. John’s. This is his trailer. He came up once last summer, but left after two days. On his way to New Zealand to study some kind of exotic Southern Hemisphere crab.” Nutbeem himself was drawn to crabs in a culinary sense, although a surfeit gave him hives on his forearms.
“Come in,” he said and opened the door.
Just another trailer, thought Quoyle, with its synthetic carpet, cubbyhole bedrooms, living room like a sixties photograph except [253] for four enormous brown speakers ranged in the corners like bodyguards, kitchen the size of a cupboard with miniature refrigerator and stove, a sink barely big enough for both of Quoyle’s hands. The bathroom had one oddity. Quoyle looked in, saw a yellow spray hose coiled on the mat like a hunting horn, and in the shower cubicle, half a plastic barrel.
“What’s this, then?” he asked Nutbeem.
“I longed for a bath—I still do, you know. This is my compromise. They ship molasses in these barrels. So I cut it in half with a saw, you see, and stuck it in here. I can crouch down in it. It’s not awfully satisfactory, but better than the cold plastic curtain twining about one’s torso.”
Back in the living room Nutbeem said “Wait until you hear this,” and switched on a tower of sound components. Red and green running lights, flashing digital displays, pulsing contour bands, orange readouts sprang to life. From the speakers a sound as of a giant’s lung. Nutbeem slipped a silver disc into a tray and the trailer vibrated with thunder. The music was so loud that Quoyle could not discern any identifiable instrument, nothing but a pulsating sound that rearranged his atoms and quashed thought.
Quoyle rammed the beer bottles into the tub of ice, helped Nutbeem push the table against the