Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [119]
“I’ll find something else,” said Quoyle. With every breath a charge of snowflakes in the nostrils. The headache was a dull background throb.
[271] “It’s too bad,” said Billy Pretty, silvered with snow, changing color with the season. “It’s too bad.” That seemed to cover everything.
Quoyle squinted at the sky where nothing could be seen but the billions of tossing flakes stirred by a rigorous wind.
“It’s a stepmother’s breath,” said Billy.
34
Dressing Up
Sailors once wore their hair in queues worked two ways; laid
up into rattails, or platted in four-strand square sinnets. The
final touch called for a pickled eelskin chosen from the brine
cask. The sailor carefully rolled the eelskin back (as a
condom is rolled), then worked it up over his queue and
seized it. For dress occasions he finished it off with a red
ribbon tied in a bow.
“QUOYLE, finish that up and I’ll take you round the corner to the Heavy Weather and buy you a hot grog.” Tert Card, morose and white, staring with hatred at the ice-bound bay. For it had gone very still and cold. Pancakes of submerged ice joined with others into great sheets, the rubbery green ice thickened, ah ice foot fastened onto the shore, binding the sea with the land. Liquid became solid, solid was buried under crystals. A level plain stretched nearly to the mouth of the bay. He watched the ice breaker gnawing through, cutting a jagged path of black water.
“I suppose I can.” Reluctant. Didn’t want to drink with Tert Card but thought no one else would. A quick one. “Let me call Beety and say I’ll be a little late.” But wanted to collect his daughters and go home to the Burkes’ house, a squeaky, comfortable house [273] with many cupboards in unlikely corners. The strangest thing in the place was a lampshade that crackled modestly as the bulb warmed. There was a bathroom with a handmade copper tub wide enough for Quoyle. The first tub he’d ever fit in. Spare rooms for visitors. If any came.
“Then we’ll have a glutch or two, or two,” grinned Tert Card, the devil plucking at the strings of his throat as if it were a guitar. “Follow me.” The vehicles groaned through the cold.
The Heavy Weather was a long room with a filthy linoleum floor and the smell of a backed-up toilet, vomit, stale smoke and liquor. This was where Tert Card drank, the place he scrawled home from, barely able to get up the steps and into his house. Quoyle thought he probably shouted at home. Or worse. The few times he’d seen the wife she looked a bent thing and the children shrank when he said hello to them. For he noticed small children.
Fluorescent halos. A solid row of backs at the bar. Silhouettes of men in caps with earflaps that came down when wanted. Showing each other photographs of boats. The talk was of insurance and unemployment and going away to find work. Quoyle and Tert Card sat at a side table littered with wadded napkins. A smoldering ashtray. Behind them two old slindgers in overcoats and pulled-down Donegal caps, all mufflers and canes and awkward knees. They sat close together on a long bench. Each, a hand on the glass. It might have been a village pub across the water, thought Quoyle.
“What’ll you have?” Tert Card, leaning on the table until it rocked. “What’ll you have, don’t tell me, don’t tell me, it’s going to be screech and Pepsi.” And off he went with his hand worrying his pocket for money.
And back again in the gloom.
They drank. Tert Card’s throat worked thirstily and he swallowed again, lifting the cracking arm and beckoning, thrusting two fingers.
“I seen worse than this.” He meant the weather. “Two years ago how thick the ice was around the shore. The icebreakers was running full clock. And the storms broke your heart. Just a few years ago, first week in December we had screeching bitter winds, fifty-foot waves thrashing around, it was like the bottom of the [274] ocean was going to come up. You should have seen the way Billy sat in his corner