“Bad heat begins to come out of the hatch and the devils are having to drag the people toward the hatch because they’ve broken their pitching forks trying to fork in some of the church people. You and me are standing in the center of the picture observing all this with calm. You make a few notes and I refresh myself from a bottle and occasionally offer you refreshment. Once in a while a devil all sweating from his work will brush by us hauling on a big churchman that’s trying to dig into the sand with his fingers to keep from being put into the hatch and screaming to Jehovah and the devil will say, ‘Beg pardon, Mr. Tom. Beg pardon, Mr. Bobby. Very busy today.’
“I’ll offer the devil a drink as he passes, sweating and grimed, going back for another churchman and he’ll say, ‘No thank you, Mr. Bobby. I never touch the stuff when I’m working.’
“That could make a hell of a painting, Tom, if we can get all the movement and the grandeur into it.”
“I believe we’ve got about all we can handle outlined for today.”
“By God, I think you’re right,” Bobby said. “Outlining a painting like that makes me thirsty, too.”
“There was a man named Bosch could paint pretty well along those lines.”
“The magneto man?”
“No. Hieronymus Bosch. Very old-timer. Very good. Pieter Brueghel worked on that too.”
“He an old-timer too?”
“Very old-timer. Very good. You’d like him.”
“Oh hell,” said Bobby. “No old-timer will touch us. Besides the world’s never ended yet, so how the hell does he know any more about it than we do?”
“He’d be pretty hard to beat.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” Bobby said. “We’ve got a picture that would put him out of business.”
“What about another one of those?”
“Yes, damn it. I forget this is a bar room. God bless the Queen, Tom. We’re forgetting what day it is, too. Here, have one on me and we’ll drink her health.”
He poured himself a small glass of rum and handed Thomas Hudson the bottle of Booth’s yellow gin, some limes on a plate, a knife, and a bottle of Schweppes’s Indian Tonic Water.
“Fix your own damn drink. The hell with those fancy drinks.”
After Thomas Hudson had made the drink and shaken a few drops of bitters in it from the bottle that had a gull’s quill in the cork, he raised his glass and then looked down the bar.
“What are you two drinking? Name it if it’s simple.”
“Dog’s Head,” one of the sailors said.
“Dog’s Head it is,” Bobby said and reached into the ice tub and handed them the two cold bottles of ale. “The glasses are out. Rummies been throwing the glasses away all day. Everybody got their drinks? Gentlemen, The Queen. I don’t think she’d care much for this island and I’m not sure she’d do extremely well here. But gentlemen, The Queen. God bless her.”
They all drank her health.
“Must be a great woman,” said Bobby. “Bit on the stiff side for me. Always fancied Queen Alexandra myself. Lovely type. But we will try to give the Queen’s Birthday full honors. This is a small island but a patriotic one. Man from here went to the last war and had his arm shot off. Can’t be more patriotic than that.”
“Whose birthday did he say it was?” one of the sailors asked.
“Queen Mary of England,” Bobby said. “Mother of the present King Emperor.”
“That’s the one the Queen Mary’s named after, isn’t it?” the other sailor asked.
“Tom,” said Bobby. “You and I will drink the next toast alone.”
IV
It was dark now and there was a breeze blowing so that there were no mosquitoes nor sand flies and the boats had all come in, hoisting their outriggers as they came up the channel, and now were lying tied up in the slips of the three docks that projected out from the beach into the harbor. The tide was running out fast and the lights of the boats shone on the water that showed green in the light and moved so fast it sucked at the piling of the docks and swirled at the stern of the big cruiser they were on. Alongside in the water where the light was reflected off the planking of the cruiser toward the unpainted piling of the dock where old motorcar and truck tires were tied as fenders, making dark rings against the darkness under the rock, garfish, attracted by the light, held themselves against the current. Thin and long, shining as green as the water, only their tails moving, they were not feeding, nor playing; only holding themselves there in the fascination of the light.
Johnny Goodner’s cruiser, Narwhal, where they were waiting for Roger Davis, was headed into the ebbing tide and astern of her in the same slip, made fast so that the two cabin cruisers lay stern to stern, was the boat of the party that had been at Bobby’s place all day. Johnny Goodner sat in a chair in the stern with his feet on another chair and a Tom Collins in his right hand and a long, green Mexican chile pepper in his left.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “I bite just a little piece and it sets my mouth on fire and I cool it with this.”
He took the first bite, swallowed, blew out, “thew!” through rolled tongue, and took a long swallow of the tall drink. His full lower lip licked his thin Irish upper lip and he smiled with his gray eyes. His mouth was sliced upwards at the corners so it always looked as though he were about to smile, or had just smiled, but his mouth told very little about him unless you noticed the thinness of the upper lip. His eyes were what you needed to watch. He was the size and build of a middleweight gone a little heavy; but he looked in good shape lying there relaxed and that is how a man looks bad who is really out of shape. His face was brown but peeling across the nose and the forehead that went back with his receding hairline. He had a scar on his chin that could have been taken for a dimple if it had been just a little closer to the center and his nose had been just perceptibly flattened across the bridge. It wasn’t a flat nose. It just looked as though it had been done by a modern sculptor who worked directly in the stone and had taken off just the shadow of a chip too many.
“Tom, you worthless character, what have you been doing?”
“Working pretty steadily.”
“You would,” he said and took another bite of the chile. It was a very wrinkled and droopy chile about six niches long.
“Only the first one hurts,” he said. “It’s like love.”
“The hell it is. Chiles can hurt both ways.”
“And love?”
“The hell with love,” Thomas Hudson said.
“What a sentiment. What a way to talk. What are you getting to be? A victim of sheepherder’s madness on this island?”