He sweats them out worse than I do. Why do you do it, Boy? If you would take them easier you would be much better off. I take them as easy as I can, he said to himself. I really do. But Boise can’t.
At sea he thought about Boise and his strange habits and his desperate, hopeless love. He remembered him the first time he had seen him when he was a kitten playing with his reflection on the glass top of the cigar counter of the bar at Cojímar that was built out on the rocks overlooking the harbor. They had come down to the bar on a bright Christmas morning. There were a few drunks there left over from the celebration of the night before, but the wind was blowing freshly from the east through the open restaurant and the bar, and the light was so bright and the air felt so new and cool that it was no morning for drunks.
“Shut the doors against that wind,” one of them said to the proprietor.
“No,” the proprietor said. “I like it. Go and find a lee somewhere else if it’s too fresh.”
“We pay to be comfortable,” one of the leftovers from the night’s drinking said.
“No. You pay for what you drink. Find another place to be comfortable.”
He looked out across the open terrace of the bar at the sea, dark blue and with whitecaps, with the fishing boats crisscrossing it sailing and trolling for dolphin. There were half a dozen fishermen at the bar and two tables of them sitting on the terrace. They were fishermen who had done well the day before, or who believed the good weather and the current would hold and were taking a chance and staying in for Christmas. None of them that the man, whose name was Thomas Hudson, knew ever went to church even on Christmas and none of them dressed, consciously, as fishermen. They were the most unfishermanlike fishermen he had ever known and they were among the very best. They wore old straw hats, or were bareheaded. They wore old clothes and were sometimes barefooted and sometimes they wore shoes. You could tell a fisherman from a countryman, or guajiro, because the countrymen wore formalized pleated shirts, wide hats, tight trousers, and riding boots when they came to town and nearly all of them carried machetes, while the fishermen wore the remnants of any old clothes they had and were cheerful, self-confident men. The country men were reserved and shy unless they were drinking. The only way you could tell a fisherman, surely, was by his hands. The hands of the old men were gnarled and brown, spotted with sun blotches, and the palms and fingers were deep cut and scarred by the handlines. The young men’s hands were not gnarled; but most of them had the sun blotches and they were all deeply scarred and the hair on the hands and arms of all but the very darkest men was bleached by the sun and the salt.
Thomas Hudson remembered how on this Christmas morning, the first Christmas of the war, the proprietor of the bar had asked him, “Do you want some shrimps?” and brought a big plate piled with fresh cooked prawns and put it on the bar while he sliced a yellow lime and spread the slices on a saucer. The prawns were huge and pink and their antennae hung down over the edge of the bar for more than a foot and he had picked one up and spread the long whiskers to their full width and remarked that they were longer than those of a Japanese admiral.
Thomas Hudson broke the head off the Japanese admiral prawn and then split open the belly of the shell with his thumbs and shucked the prawn out and it was so fresh and silky feeling under his teeth, and had such a flavor, cooked in sea water with fresh lime juice and whole black peppercorns, that he thought he had never eaten a better one; not even in Málaga nor in Tarragona nor in Valencia. It was then that the kitten came over to him, scampering down the bar, to rub against his hand and beg a prawn.
“They’re too big for you, cotsie,” he said. But he snipped off a piece of one with his thumb and finger and gave it to the kitten who ran with it back to the tobacco counter to eat it quickly and savagely.
Thomas Hudson looked at the kitten, with his handsome black and white markings, his white chest and forelegs and the black, like a formal mask across his eyes and forehead, eating the prawn and growling, and asked the proprietor who he belonged to.
“You if you want him.”
“I have two at the house. Persians.”
“Two is nothing. Take this one. Give them a little Cojímar blood.”
“Papa, can’t we have him?” asked the one of his sons, that he did not think about any more, who had come up from the steps of the terrace where he had been watching the fishing boats come in, seeing the men unstep their masts, unload their coiled lines, and throw their fish ashore. “Please, papa, can’t we have him? He’s a beautiful cat.”
“Do you think he’d be happy away from the sea?”
“Certainly, papa. He’ll be miserable here in a little while. Haven’t you seen how miserable the cats are in the streets? And they were probably just like him once.”
“Take him,” the proprietor said. “He’ll be happy on a farm.”
“Listen, Tomás,” one of the fishermen who had been listening to the conversation from the table said. “If you want cats I can get an Angora, a genuine Angora, from Guanabacoa. A true Tiger Angora.”
“Male?”
“As much as you,” the fisherman said. At the table they all laughed.
Nearly all Spanish joking had that same base. “But with fur on them,” the fisherman tried for another laugh and got it.
“Papa, can we please have this cat?” the boy asked. “This cat is a male.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know, papa. I know.”
“That’s what you said about both the Persians.”
“Persians are different, papa. I was wrong on the Persians and I admit it. But I know now, papa. Now I really know.”
“Listen, Tomás. Do you want the Angora Tiger from Guanabacoa?” the fisherman asked.
“What is he? A witchcraft cat?”
“Witchcraft nothing. This cat never even heard of Saint Barbara. This cat is more of a Christian than you are.”
“Es muy posible,” another fisherman said and they all laughed.
“What does this famous beast cost?” Thomas Hudson asked.
“Nothing. He’s a gift. A genuine Angora Tiger. He’s a Christmas gift.”
“Come on up to the bar and have a drink and describe him to me.”
The fisherman came up to the bar. He wore hornrimmed glasses and a clean, faded, blue shirt that looked as though it would not stand another washing. It was lacy thin in back between the shoulders and the fabric was beginning to rip. He had on faded khaki trousers and was barefoot on Christmas. His face and hands were burned a dark wood color and he put his scarred hands on the bar and said to the proprietor, “Whisky with ginger ale.”
“Ginger ale makes me sick,” Thomas Hudson said. “Let me have one with mineral water.”
“It’s very good for me,” the fisherman said. “I like Canada Dry. Otherwise I don’t like the taste of the whisky. Listen, Tomás. This is a serious cat.”
“Papa,” the boy said, “before you and this gentleman start drinking, can we have this cat?”
He had tied a shrimp husk on the end of a piece of white cotton string and was playing with the kitten, who was standing on his hind legs, as a rampant lion does in heraldry, boxing with the lure the boy swung at him.
“Do you want him?”
“You know I want him.”
“You can have him.”
“Thank you very much, papa. I’m going to take him out to the car to gentle him.”
Thomas Hudson watched the boy cross the road with the kitten in his arms and get into the front seat with him. The top of the car was down and from the bar he watched the boy, his brown hair flattened by the wind, sitting in the convertible in the bright sunlight. He could not see the kitten because the boy was holding him on the seat, sitting low on the seat out of the wind, stroking the kitten.