ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

“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.”

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