“What idea is that?” Sweetland asked while Barry waved the suggestion away.
“Come on,” Keith said. “Out with it.” He turned to Sweetland. “This is real money we’re talking about now,” he said. “We could make a killing on it.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Well,” Barry said, “the idea is we buys up the cove after everyone shifts out.”
“I’m not moving anywhere.”
“Hypothetical, Scarface,” Keith shouted. “Speculation is all we’re doing.”
“All right then,” Sweetland said.
“So, houses and sheds and wharves and whatnot. I figure we could get the works for ten or fifteen thousand.”
“Hypothetically,” Sweetland said, “wouldn’t this place be reverted to Crown land once people leaves?”
“So we leases it or some such. We’ll let the lawyers worry about that. Then we comes in here and rips out all the vinyl siding.”
“Get rid of it all,” Keith said with an elaborate swing of his arm.
“Paints the whole place up with ochre and whitewash, puts out a couple of dories behind the breakwater. And we sells package tours to a vintage Newfoundland outport. It’ll be like one of them Pioneer Villages on the mainland. Only, you know—”
“Authentic,” Keith said.
“That’s exactly right. The real McCoy. We could have people out here dressed up in oilskins, take the tourists fishing, show them how to split and salt the cod.”
“No one knows how to salt cod anymore,” Sweetland said.
“Shut up there, Eeyore,” Keith said.
“Whatever the fuck,” Barry said. “Feed them a bit of Jiggs’ dinner. Get someone to play the accordion, put on a dance.”
“We could do weekend packages,” Keith said. “Week-long, ten days. People would pay a fortune for that kind of time.”
They were always chasing after money when they were high. Sweetland had heard them spin a thousand get-rich-quick schemes, each more unlikely than the last. Bootlegging out of St. Pierre, smuggling drugs up from Mexico by sailboat. Shipping seal penises to the Chinese as aphrodisiacs.
“I got the advertising for this thing all figured out,” Barry said and he raised both hands like he was displaying a banner. “Experience Life in Sweetland.”
“No, no,” Keith said. “Experience the Sweet Life in Sweetland.”
“That’s a fucking gold mine,” Barry said. He pointed across the table with his truncated index finger. “All we got to do is get rid of this old fucker.”
“From what I been hearing,” Keith said, “someone else is likely to look after that end of things.”
Sweetland straightened in his chair. “What is it you been hearing?”
“Be a shame to lose him, you ask me,” Keith said. “We could fit him out in a sou’wester, put him on display for the tourists.”
“The last Sweetlander, like?”
“The genuine article.”
“Jesus in the Garden,” Sweetland whispered.
The rest of the evening carried on in the same coke-addled vein, the brothers riffing back and forth on one topic or other. Sweetland thought several times to ask the brothers what exactly they’d been hearing about him and from who. But he knew it would come out a useless muddle, half of it exaggerated or misremembered, the other half made up, and he let them go their own way. Keith talking about a woman he was screwing in Fort Mac, reaching into the bedside table for the lubricant he kept there, grabbing a tube of muscle cream by mistake. “That A535 shit,” he said, his arms across his guts for laughing. “Lathered her up good and the burn kicked in. And she starts yelling, What the fuck did you do to me? What the fuck did you do? Wasted half the night into Emergency with her.”
“Only Keith could make a woman that hot,” Barry said.
“Jesus, Barr, tell Mose about the sixty-nine thing.”
“Fuck off, he don’t want to hear about that.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Sweetland confirmed.
“He don’t even know what sixty-nine means,” Barry said.
“He’ve got the internet, tell the goddamn story.”
“Oh fuck,” Barry said. He straightened in his seat, hauling his jean jacket tight at the waist, like someone about to give testimony in court. “I was with this girl,” he said. “Nice girl, I liked her. And we were, you know, doing the sixty-nine. And it was pretty goddamn slippery down there. Anyway, I’m face and eyes into her—”
“He really liked her,” Keith said.
“I practically needs a snorkel to breathe is the fact of the matter. And I’m just about to go off when she rams a finger up my ass. And I snorts in, you know, just automatically. And I inhaled her — her—” he said, struggling to hold off the laughter or find the word he was after. “Her labia,” he said.
“Fuck,” Keith said, already pounding the table. “Moses don’t know what labia means.”
“Cunt lips,” Barry shouted. “Right up my nostrils. And she got her legs clamped around my ears. And fuck if I don’t start laughing. And I’m choking and cumming and laughing like a Jesus idiot.”
“Cunt lips up his nose,” Keith roared. His face cherry red, his eyes bulging.
“I almost fucken drowned,” Barry said.
“Man Asphyxiated by Woman’s Labia,” Keith said, which set both men off on another helpless round.
“Best fuck I had in years,” Barry said when he’d finally settled down.
Sweetland didn’t mind the Priddles once upon a time, it was true. But he was too old for their bullshit now, the relentless, senseless surge of it. It was like being out in a storm too rough to make for shelter, all you could do was keep face on to the wind and ride it out. He sipped at a glass of warm homebrew and waited for the barrage to end.
“We’re keeping you up,” Barry said an hour later, “we should go. Catching the ferry tomorrow.”
“Heading back to Alberta?”
“St. John’s,” Keith said, and he slapped Barry’s shoulder. “Got Fucknuts here an appointment with that shrink Jesse’s been talking to. See if we can’t straighten him out.”
Barry turned his backside toward his brother, slapped the cheek of his arse. “Kiss yer mudder good night,” he said.
They spent fifteen minutes more yammering at each other before they finally went out the door, and Sweetland stood there after he latched it closed, listening to them head down the path. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he thought, that their mother wasn’t around to see the lives they were leading as men.
~ ~ ~
BOB-SAM LAVALLEE MADE THE TREK in from the lighthouse to look the lifeboat survivors over. They were all suffering from exposure and dehydration, though none of them appeared to be in serious danger. No solid food, Bob-Sam said, just soup broth and water and clear tea.
Any word on the Coast Guard? Sweetland asked.
It’ll be tomorrow sometime before they can get a vessel out here, Bob-Sam said. They wants to know what ship these fellows come off of.
There was a name on the lifeboat, he said, but someone scraped it away.
The men were divided up among the houses in the cove and taken off to be stripped of their filthy clothes and bathed and put to bed.
Sweetland’s mother was only nine months dead at the time and he was still adjusting to the house without her. The tiny rooms echoing like vaulted spaces. He spent most of his free time with his sister and Pilgrim, eating his meals there and occasionally kipping down on the daybed in the kitchen when he’d had too much to drink to face the two-minute walk up the hill.
He hadn’t volunteered to take any of the refugees in and no one would have allowed them to suffer a house without a woman to look after them. He went down to Pilgrim’s that evening to see how they were making out and to glean whatever gossip might be making the rounds about their ordeal. Pilgrim was in the rocker beside the stove in the kitchen, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table.