“Want me to shut the doors?” Joseph asked.
“No. Only if things start to break.”
“Mr. Roger gone walking on the beach,” Joseph said. “Headed up toward the end of the island.”
Thomas Hudson kept on reading his mail.
“Here’s the paper,” Joseph said. “I ironed her out.”
“Thank you, Joseph.”
“Mister Tom, is it true about the fish? What Eddy was telling me?”
“What did he say?”
“About how big he was and having him right up to the gaff.”
“It’s true.”
“God Almighty. If that run-boat hadn’t come so I had to stay in to carry ice and groceries I’d have been along. I’d have dove right in after him and gaffed him.”
“Eddy dove in,” Thomas Hudson said.
“He didn’t tell me,” Joseph said, subdued.
“I’d like some more coffee, please, Joseph, and another piece of papaw,” Thomas Hudson said. He was hungry and the wind gave him even more appetite. “Didn’t the run-boat bring any bacon?”
“I believe I can find some,” Joseph said. “You’re eating good this morning.”
“Ask Eddy to come in please.”
“Eddy went home to fix his eye.”
“What happened to his eye?”
“Somebody balled their fist in it.”
Thomas Hudson believed he knew why this might have happened.
“Is he hurt anywhere else?”
“He’s beat pretty bad,” Joseph said. “On account of people not believing him in different bars. People ain’t never going to believe him that story he tells. Certainly is a pity.”
“Where’d he fight?”
“Everywhere. Everywhere where they wouldn’t believe him. Nobody believe him yet. People took to not believing him late at night that didn’t know what it was about even just to get him to fight. He must have fought all the fighting men on the island. Tonight, sure as you eating breakfast, men’ll come up from Middle Key just to doubt his word. Couple real bad fighting men down at Middle Key now on that construction.”
“Mr. Roger better go out with him,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Oh boy,” Joseph’s face lighted up. “Tonight’s the night we got fun.”
Thomas Hudson drank the coffee and ate the cold papaw with fresh lime squeezed over it and four more strips of bacon that Joseph brought in.
“I see you were in an eating mood,” Joseph said. “When I see you like that, I want to make something out of it.”
“I eat plenty.”
“Sometimes,” Joseph said.
He came in with another cup of coffee and Thomas Hudson took it up to his desk to answer the two letters he needed to get off in the mail boat.
“Go up to Eddy’s house and get him to make out the list of what we need to order by the run-boat,” he said to Joseph. “Then bring it to me to check. Is there coffee for Mr. Roger?”
“He had his,” Joseph said.
Thomas Hudson finished the two letters at the work desk upstairs and Eddy came over with the list of supplies for the next week’s run-boat. Eddy looked bad enough. His eye had not responded to treatment and his mouth and cheeks were swollen. One ear was swollen, too. He had put Mercurochrome on his mouth where it was cut and the bright color made him look very untragic.
“I didn’t do any good last night,” he said. “I think everything is on here, Tom.”
“Why don’t you lay off today and go home and take it easy?”
“I feel worse at home,” he said. “I’ll go to bed early tonight.”
“Don’t get in any more fights about that,” Thomas Hudson said. “It doesn’t do any good.”
“You’re talking to the right man,” Eddy said through the scarlet of his split and swollen lips. “I kept waiting for truth and right to win and then somebody new would knock truth and right right on its ass.”
“Joseph said you had a lot of them.”
“Till somebody took me home,” Eddy said. “Big-hearted Benny I guess it was. He and Constable probably saved me from getting hurt.”
“You aren’t hurt?”
“I hurt but I ain’t hurt. Hell, you ought to have been there, Tom.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t. Did anybody try to really hurt you?”
“I don’t think so. They were just proving to me I was wrong. Constable believed me.”