Barney was waiting in the bar, a glass half-filled with cognac to hand, his eyes shiny and unfocused. “Pussy trouble?” he asked.
“Good-night, Barney.”
“A word of advice, buddy boy. You never should have let your hair go grey like that. Have it dyed. We’ve been together two years and she still doesn’t know my real age. I keep my passport hidden.”
“Did you see your father when you were in Montreal?”
“Take my advice and have it dyed. Pump iron. Look at you. Shit.”
EVERYBODY WAS AT BREAKFAST by the time Moses got there.
“Well,” a red-eyed Barney said, mopping up the eggs on his plate and shoving back his chair, “I’m for an early start, baby.”
“I’m not going out with you this morning. It’s going to be buggy as hell out there and I don’t want to pick any more hooks out of my sweater.”
“You worry too much about your tits springing a leak.”
“Maybe there are some folks who don’t know yet. Why don’t you put an ad in the newspapers or on TV?”
Mary Lou flung her napkin down on the table. “Come with me, Rob.”
“My eggs weren’t turned over easy like I asked,” Rob said. “I’m bitten everywhere.” He banged his radio down on the table. “And something’s wrong with my Sony. I told you we shoulda bought a Sanyo.”
“There are fresh batteries in the car,” Larry said.
“It’s not the batteries. It doesn’t work. It’s fucken broke. Shit. My asthma. I shouldn’t get excited.”
“There’s a Radio Shack in Campbellton that would probably fix it,” Moses said. “It’s not such a long drive.”
Rob lost another fish in the rain that morning. Larry didn’t bring back anything and Barney, who had to settle for what looked like a nine-pound fish but weighed in at eleven, waited impatiently at the dock to see how Moses had made out. But when Jim motored into camp he was alone in his canoe. Moses, he explained, had been invited to lunch with an old chum, Dan Gainey, at the Cedar Lodge; and then he held up a twenty-six-pound salmon for Barney to admire. Which was when Darlene came skittering down the hill to join them. “I need the car keys,” she said.
Barney grabbed her by the buttocks, driving her against him. “I know what you need, but I could do with something to eat first.”
“While you’re having your nap I’m going to drive into Campbellton and get Rob’s radio fixed.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, tossing her the keys, which were weighed down by a heavy brass disc bearing the initials B.G.
WHEN HE UNDRESSED HER Moses had no doubt that he would find a little cord with a catch on the end dangling from her back. He would yank it and she would blink her eyelashes and chirp, “What’s up, doc?” Meanwhile he settled in to wait for her in the dark of the Marie Antoinette Room of the Auberge des Voyageurs in Campbellton. Three sodden Micmacs, seated at the bar, were watching a wrestling match on TV. An hour passed. Moses was about to give up when Darlene flew into the room, arms fluttering, eyes signalling fire and flood and emergency exits, her full petulant mouth forming a huge startled O. “Surprise, surprise,” she shrieked. “You’ll never guess who’s here, MARY LOU!!”
Mary Lou, stumbling in the unaccustomed dark, couldn’t even find Darlene at first. Squinting, she finally got her bearings. “Why if it isn’t the highbrow,” she said.
“What a COINCIDENCE!” Darlene pleaded, eyes darting from one to another, settling on Moses. “She needs the powder room right now.”
Moses indicated the door marked COURTESANS and Mary Lou toddled off obediently. Darlene’s explanation came in a rush. “He took the car keys with him this morning I could have died. When he got back, it seemed like CENTURIES. I said I would drive here to get Rob’s radio fixed and she insisted on coming along. But she won’t tattle on us. Mary Lou and I belong to the same coven. In a previous incarnation she was my son and in ancient times, when I was king of Egypt she was my queen.”
“Obviously you’ve been through a lot together.”
“I’ll say. But what are we going to do now?”
“There’s a bottle of vodka sitting in an ice bucket in the room I rented for the afternoon here.”
“Oh, you are such a dreadful man!” She offered him a quick hug. “But I couldn’t go that far now. I’m too scared. Mary Lou is very sensitive ever since her first husband, blessed be, was lost in the mail.”
Moses doubted that he had heard right.
“It was a very severe blow at that point in time. She should have sued the post office for plenty is what I told her. Some Christmas. All the family was gathered together but it just wasn’t the same opening the presents without Lyndon there.”
“How was he lost in the mail?”
“Cheezit,” she hissed, bashing his ankle under the table hard enough to make him wince.
Mary Lou settled into her chair, shed her glasses, and stared at Moses with big blue eyes as blank as Orphan Annie’s. “I can tell that you are a very well educated man just by looking into your third eye. If you ask me,” she said, her mouth puckered with suspicion, “your wife is a very lucky lady.”
“Actually, I’m not married.”
Making his excuses, Moses directed them to the Radio Shack. He retrieved Gainey’s Ford pickup and returned to the cabin on the river where Gainey kept watch over the Shaunnessy pools. Then he canoed back to Vince’s Gulch. Jim, standing on the shore, greeted him with a perfunctory nod. “What in the hell can you see in her, Moses?”
“She makes me laugh. Never underestimate that.”
Entering the dining lodge in search of a coffee, Moses found that Barney and Larry were being entertained by a deputy of New Brunswick’s minister of trade, an obsequious young man wearing a tartan jacket and canary yellow Bermuda shorts. The deputy had come equipped with information on local land and labour costs. Larry, taking notes on a legal pad, needed to know what kind of sweetener they could expect investment- and tax-wise from the provincial government. The deputy assured them they could expect New Brunswick to be generous, but he was not authorized to talk numbers. Barney didn’t like that. “The trouble with you Canadians,” he said, “is that you’re always sitting on the fence. Look at it this way, buddy boy, you can’t catch a dose pulling your meat, but it sure as hell ain’t as much fun as pussy.”
“I will certainly advise the minister of your feelings,” the deputy said, and then he reminded them that a lot of important people were waiting to meet them at the country club, but if they didn’t leave soon they wouldn’t be back in time to fish.
Barney called for another Scotch. “We’re waiting for the future Mrs. Middle-Aged Spread to get here.”
But when Mary Lou led Darlene into the dining lodge she was obviously in no condition to go anywhere. “I think I’d better lie down,” she said.
“Shit.”
“Shall we be off, then?” the deputy asked.
Barney looked hard at Moses sipping coffee in a far corner of the room.
“I promise to get you back by six, sir.”
Moses retreated to his room, aching for a nap, but no sooner did the cars pull out than he was startled by a rhythmic tapping on his wall. “Boo,” Darlene said.
She was waiting on the porch when he got there. All twinkly again, she drove him back into his room, thrusting against him. A perplexed Moses was weighing the two hundred jobs at possible risk against his so-far frustrated lust when the screen door banged open behind them. Rob, munching on a Lowney’s Nut Milk, asked, “Were you at least able to get it fixed?”