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'I'm OK, Couth. I'll be all right.'
You stood up with me, you frail angel bastard, and you took hold of my beard and shook my head gently, saying, 'Oh shit, oh shit, if we could only both live with her, Bogus, I wouldn't mind - you know that, don't you? I even asked her that once, Bogus?'
'You did?' I said. I was
holding your beard tight; I half felt like kissing you, but also like snatching you bald. 'What did she say to that?'
You said, 'She said no, of course. But I wouldn't have minded it, Bogus - I think.'
'I wouldn't have minded it, either, Couth,' I said. Which was probably not true.
Like a buoy out on the water, all of the sun was showing itself now, bobbing on the surface of the sea, and suddenly there was too much light to see you by, Couth, so I said, 'Get me those photographs, will you? I have to go now ...'
We went up to the house together, taking the flagstone steps up the boathouse path two at a time. I felt you slip the money I'd given you into my back pocket. And I remembered your bare ass one moonlight on these flagstones, where you lay singing on your belly, Couth, too drunk to stand. That girl with you - one of the two we picked up at the trailer park in West Bath - was putting on her bathing suit, fed up with trying to get you up to the house and the master bedroom. I was cosy with my half of those girls up in the boathouse loft.
I watched you strike out on the lawn, Couth, and I remember thinking to myself as I lay there smugly, not too drunk to screw, Poor Couth is never going to get a girl.
Well, Couth, I've been wrong before.
When they came into the kitchen, Biggie had just made a sandwich for Dante Calicchio. It was a large sandwich which Dante was gnawing off a serving platter shaped like a trough, and Biggie had poured him a beer which he was drinking out of a stein the size of a flower vase.
Dante was wondering who was going to go off with whom next. If this is the part where I take the big blond broad down to the dock, I won't mind, he thought.
'Will you have something to eat, Bogus?' Biggie asked.
But Couth said, 'He wants to go before Colm gets up.'
Who? thought Dante Calicchio. Who in hell could be sleeping through a night like this?
'Well,' Bogus said, 'I'd like to see him, actually, but I don't want him to see me ... if that's not too much to ask.'
'He feeds his animals in the boathouse, the first thing when he gets up,' Couth said.
'And he eats his breakfast on the dock,' Biggie said.
Bogus thought, A routine. Colm has a routine. How kids love a good routine. Did I ever establish a routine with Colm?
But all he said was, 'I could watch him from the pool room, couldn't I?'
'I've got some binoculars,' Couth said.
'Jesus, Cuthbert,' Biggie said. Couth looked embarrassed; she did, too. Bogus thought, Cuthbert? When was it anyone called you Cuthbert, Couth?
In a corner of the kitchen, wary of the spice-rack debris, Dante Calicchio wolfed his sandwich, quaffed his beer and wondered if the limousine service was worried, and if his wife had called the police. Or would it be the other way around?
'We'll be going pretty soon,' Bogus said to Dante. 'Why don't you take a walk, get some air ...'
Dante's mouth was stuffed so he couldn't talk, but what he was thinking was, Oh, sweet shit, you mean I got to take you back with me? But he didn't say a word, and he pretended not to see Bogus slip a big wad of money - maybe as much as a thousand dollars - into the breadbox.
Dante sat below the high-water mark on the cool wet steps leading from the dock to the boat ramp and marveled at the miniature life he saw swarming in the tide pools on the mudflats, and in the teeming crevices of the bared rocks. It was the only mud he had ever seen that he wanted to stick his bare feet in, and he sat with his trousers rolled up to his knees and his blue-white city toes asquirm in the cleanest muck he'd ever felt. On the dock above him, his dusty black city shoes and thin black city socks looked so ominous and foreign that even the gulls were wary of them. The braver terns swooped low, then shrieked off in alarm at this strange deposit left by the tide.
Out at the mouth of the bay, a lobsterman was pulling in his traps, and Dante wondered what it would be like to work with his arms and his back again, and whether he'd get seasick.
He got up and walked gingerly out on the flats, feeling a shell prick his foot now and then, wary of the squiggling life all around him. An old lobster pot lay washed up against the far mooring post of the dock; Dante made his cautious way toward it, wondering what beasts would be inside. But it was staved in and its only contents were the bait, a fish head, picked clean. Then a clamworm scuttled across his foot and he yelped and ran painfully up the shoreline. When he looked up to see if anyone had observed his cowardice, he saw a dark handsome little boy watching him. The boy was in his pajamas and he was eating a banana. 'It was just a clamworm,' Colm said.
'Do they bite?' Dante asked.
'They pinch,' said Colm, hopping off the low side of the dock and climbing barefoot over the sharp rocks as if his feet were soled with rope. 'I'll catch one for you,' he said. He handed Dante his banana and walked through the shells which, Dante was sure, had ribboned his own feet. Feeling sheepish, he resisted the temptation to examine himself for cuts and watched the boy prowl the mudflats, prodding with his fingers at terrible live-looking things Dante would have poked with a pole.
