Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [79]
“The place was right across the road. The tourists come in the summer with their cameras, you know, at, they’ll sit here all day long and watch the water. It’s like it’s a strange animal, they can’t take their eyes off it.”
“You’d know why if you came from Sudbury or New Jersey,” said Quoyle.
“Here. It’s here. I can smell cooking oil stronger than the stink of that suitcase. You leave that suitcase outside.”
There were no customers, the waitress and the cook sitting companionably at one of the tables, both tatting lace doilies. A smell of bread, the daily baking for the next day.
“Girl, we’re that starved,” said Billy.
“Skipper Billy! Give me a start coming in out of the fog that way.”
The cook put her tatting aside and stood next to the chalkboard.
“That’s all there is now,” she said, erasing COD CHEEKS, erasing SHRIMP DINNER. “There’s fried squid, m’dear and meatballs. You know that moose Railey got, Skipper Billy? Well, we ground up so much of it like hamburger, you know, and I was wantin’ to get the [177] freezer emptied out so I made it up in meatballs this morning in a gravy. It come out good. Mashed potato?” All vertical lines, her face riven, the dark pleats of her skirt.
Billy telephoned Tert Card, leaned against the wall with a toothpick in his teeth.
“Me and Quoyle is down to Desperate Cove, fogbound. I’m going to leave my boat here if you can get us a ride back to Killick-Claw. He’s got his car over there and I left my truck down the wharf. Yeah. I’ll get it tomorrow. Wracker Quoyle here picked a valise off the Net-Man. We don’t know. It’s locked. Fog’s that thick, so you go easy. There’s no hurry. We’re eating dinner over here. Yep. No, she made Railey’s moose up into meatballs. At, I’ll tell her.”
Quoyle had the squid and a side dish of onion hash. The squid were stuffed with tiny pink shrimp, laid on a bed of sea parsley. Billy worked at his platter of meatballs. The waitress brought them hot rolls with butter and partridgeberry jam.
The cook stuck her long face out of the kitchen.
“I made a old-fashioned figgy duff for Railey, Skipper Billy. There’s quite a bit of it on hand. P’raps you’d like to refresh your mouth with some?”
“I would. And Tert Card is comin’ down to pick us up. He wants an order of the meatballs to go if you got enough.”
So, a dish of figgy duff with a drop of rum sauce, and coffee.
“I’m going to open that suitcase,” said Quoyle.
“Wracker Quoyle, that’s all you can think of, that bloody suitcase. Go ahead and open it. Pick it open with a fork tine or bash it with a rock. And I hope it’s crammed with prizes from the treasure troves of Gaze Island.” Billy held his finger up for more tea.
¯
Quoyle dragged the suitcase under the single wharf light. He found a piece of pipe and jabbed the lock. The pipe clinked against the brass. The lock held. Quoyle looked around for something to pry, a screwdriver or chisel, but there was nothing but stone and [178] broken glass. In frustration he raised the pipe over his shoulder and swung as hard as he could at the lock. A metallic crack and, with a frightful wave of stench, the suitcase sprang open.
Under the light he saw the ruined eye, the flattened face and blood-stiff mustache of Bayonet Melville on a bed of seaweed. The gelatinous horror slid out onto the wharf.
22
Dogs and Cats
“The mesh knot is the ordinary way of tying the SHEET BEND
when it is made with a netting needle.”
THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS
“AGNIS have a manly heart, Agnis do,” said Mavis Bangs to Dawn when the aunt went off with her measuring tapes and notebook. “A boldish air, she grasp on things like a man do. That’s from living in the States. All the women down there is boldish. See how she was calm? When the nephew was all jelly? Finding that head. She said he couldn’t drive for two days he was that shocked. I was shocked myself. What with the Mounties coming in and asking. Questions and questions. Poor Agnis.
“There’s the other thing, too. She’s a Hamm, but she’s a Quoyle. The stories, m’dear. Omond—that was my poor husband—knew them.