“I wish they had a drink the color of sea water when you have a depth of eight hundred fathoms and there is a dead calm with the sun straight up and down and the sea full of plankton,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s drink this shallow water drink.”
“Tom, what’s the matter? Do you have some problem?”
“No.”
“You’re awfully sad and you’re a little bit old today.”
“It’s the norther.”
“But you always used to say a norther gave you pep and cheered you up. How many times have we made love because there was a norther?”
“Plenty.”
“You always liked a norther and you bought me this coat to wear when we have them.”
“It’s a pretty coat, too.”
“I could have sold it half a dozen times,” Honest Lil said. “More people were crazy for this coat than you can imagine.”
“This is a fine norther for it.”
“Be happy, Tom. You always get happy when you drink. Drink that drink and have another one.”
“If I drink it too fast it hurts across the front of my forehead.”
“Well just drink slow and steady, then. I’m going to have another highbalito.”
She made it herself from the bottle Serafín had left in front of her on the bar and Thomas Hudson looked at it and said, “That’s a fresh water drink. That is the color of the water in the Firehole River before it joins the Gibbon to become the Madison. If you put a little more whisky in it you could make it the color of a stream that comes out of a cedar swamp to flow into the Bear River at a place called Wab-Me-Me.”
“Wab-Me-Me is funny,” she said. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It is an Indian place-name. I ought to know what it means but I’ve forgotten. It’s Ojibway.”
“Tell me about Indians,” Honest Lil said. “I like to hear about the Indians even more than about the crazies.”
“There are quite a few Indians down the coast. They are sea Indians and they fish and dry the fish and are charcoal burners.”
“I don’t want to hear about Cuban Indians. They’re all mulatos.”
“No, they’re not. Some are real Indians. But they may have captured them in the early days and brought them over from Yucatan.”
“I don’t like yucatecos.”
“I do. Very much.”
“Tell me about Wabmimi. Is it in the Far West?”
“No, it’s up north. In the part that’s near Canada.”
“I know Canada. I came into Montreal up the river once on a Princess ship. But it was raining and we could see nothing and we left that same evening for New York on the train.”
“Did it rain all the time on the river?”
“All the time. And outside, before we came into the river there was fog and part of the time it snowed. You can have Canada. Tell me about Wabmimi.”
“It was just a village where there was a sawmill on the river and the train ran through it. There were always great piles of sawdust beside the railroad tracks. They had booms across the river to hold the logs and they were almost solid across the river. The river was covered with logs a long way above the town. One time I had been fishing and I wanted to cross the river and I crawled across on the logs. One rolled with me and I went into the water.
When I came up it was all logs above me and I could not get through between them. It was dark under them and all I could feel with my hands was their bark. I could not spread two of them apart to get up to the air.”
“What did you do?”
“I drowned.”
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t say it. Tell me quick what you did?”
“I thought very hard and I knew I had to get through very quickly. I felt carefully around the bottom of a log until I came to where it was pushed against another log. Then I put my two hands together and pushed up and the logs spread apart just a little. Then I got my hands through and then my forearms and elbows through and then I spread the two logs apart with my elbows until I got my head up and I had an arm over each log. I loved each log very much and I lay there like that a long time between them. That water was brown from the logs in it. The water that’s like your drink was in a little stream that flowed into that river.”
“I don’t think I could ever have come up between the logs.”
“I didn’t think I could for a long time.”
“How long were you underwater?”
“I don’t know. I know I rested a long time with my arms on the logs before I tried to do anything else.”
“I like that story. But it will make me have bad dreams. Tell me something happy, Tom.”
“All right,” he said. “Let me think.”
“No. Tell one right away without thinking.”
“All right,” Thomas Hudson said. “When young Tom was a little baby—”
“¡Qué muchacho más guapo!” Honest Lil interrupted. “¿Qué noticias tienes de él?”
“Muy buenas.”
“Me alegro,” said Honest Lil, tears coming into her eyes at the thought of young Tom the flyer. Siempre tengo su fotografía en uniforme con el sagrado corazón de Jesús arriba de la fotografía y al lado la virgen del Cobre.”
“You have great faith in the Virgen del Cobre?”
“Absolutely blind faith.”
“You must keep it.”
“And she is looking after Tom day and night.”
“Good,” said Thomas Hudson. “Serafín, another of these big ones, please. Do you want the happy story?”
“Yes, please,” Honest Lil said. “Please tell me the happy story. I feel sad again.”
“Pues el happy story es muy sencillo,” Thomas Hudson said. “The first time we ever took Tom to Europe, he was only three months old and it was a very old, small, and slow liner and the sea was rough most of the time. The ship smelled of bilge and oil and the grease on the brass of portholes and of the lavabos and the disinfectant they used that was in big pink cakes in the pissoirs—”
“Pues, this isn’t a very happy story.”
“Sí, mujer. You’re wrong as hell. This is a happy story, muy happy. I go on. The ship also smelled of baths you had to take at regular hours or be looked down on by the bath steward and of the smell of hot salt water coming out of the brass nozzles of the bath fixtures and of the wet wooden grate on the floor and of the starched jacket of the bath steward. It also smelled of cheap English ship cooking which is a discouraging smell and of the dead butts of Woodbines, Players, and Gold Flakes in the smoking room and wherever they were dropped. It did not have one good smell, and as you know the English, both men and women, all have a peculiar odor, even to themselves, much as we have to Negroes, and so they have to bathe very often. An Englishman never smells sweet as a cow’s breath does and a pipe-smoking Englishman does not conceal his odor. He only adds something to it. Their tweeds smell good and so does the leather of their boots and all their saddlery smells good. But there is no saddlery on a ship and the tweeds are impregnated with the dead pipe smell. The only way you could get a good smell on that ship was when your nose was deep in a tall glass of dry sparkling cider from Devon. This smelled wonderful and I kept my nose in it as much as I could afford. Maybe more.”
“Pues, it is a little more happy now.”