“Did he?”
“Yes sir. Him and Bobby. Only people believed me, all right. Constable said any man who hit me first he’d lock him up. Asked me this morning if there was anybody hit me first. I told him yes but I hit at them first. It was a bad night for truth and right, Tom. Bad night all right.”
“Do you really want to cook lunch?”
“Why not?” Eddy said. “We’ve got steaks on the run-boat. Real sirloin steak. You ought to see her. I figured to have it with mashed potatoes and gravy and some lima beans. We got that cabbage lettuce and fresh grapefruit for a salad. The boys would like a pie and we got canned loganberries makes a hell of a pie. We got ice cream from the run-boat to put on top of it. How’s that? I want to feed that goddam David up.”
“What did you figure to do when you dove overboard with the gaff?”
“I was going to get the gaff hook into him right underneath his fin where it would kill him when he came taut on the rope and then get the hell away from there and back on board.”
“What did he look like underwater?”
“He was as wide as a dinghy, Tom. All purple and his eye looked as big as your hand is long. It was black and he was silver underneath and his sword was terrible to see. He just kept on going down, settling slow, and I couldn’t get down to him because that big haft on the gaff was too buoyant. I couldn’t sink with it. So it wasn’t any use.”
“Did he look at you?”
“I couldn’t tell. He just looked like he was there and nothing made any difference to him.”
“Do you think he was tired?”
“I think he was through. I think he’d decided to give up.”
“We’ll never see anything like that again.”
“No. Not in our lifetimes. And I know enough now not to try to make people believe it.”
“I’m going to paint a picture of it for David.”
“You make it just like it was then. Don’t make it comic like some of those comic ones you paint.”
“I’m going to paint it truer than a photograph.”
“That’s the way I like it when you paint.”
“It’s going to be awfully hard to paint the underwater part.”
“Will it be like that waterspout picture down at Bobby’s?”
“No. This will be different but I hope it will be better. I’m going to make sketches for it today.”
“I like that waterspout picture,” Eddy said. “Bobby, he’s crazy about it and he can make anybody believe there was that many waterspouts that time when they see the picture. But this will be a hell of a one to paint with the fish in the water.”
“I think I can do it,” Thomas Hudson said.
“You couldn’t paint him jumping, too, could you?”
“I think I can.”
“Paint him the two of them, Tom. Paint him jumping and then with Roger bringing him up on the leader and Davy in the chair and me on the stern. We can get photographs took of it.”
“I’ll start the sketches.”
“Anything you want to ask me,” Eddy said. “I’ll be in the kitchen. The boys still asleep?”
“All three of them.”
“Hell,” Eddy said. “I don’t give a damn about anything since that fish. But we’ve got to have a good meal.”
“I wish I had leech for that eye.”
“Hell, I don’t give a damn about the eye. I can see out of it fine.”
“I’m going to let the boys sleep as long as they can.”
“Joe, he’ll help me when they’re up and I’ll give them breakfast. If they wake up too late, I won’t give them too much so as not to spoil lunch. You didn’t see that piece of meat we got?”
“No.”
“Goddam she sure costs money but it’s beautiful meat, Tom. Nobody on this island has eaten meat like that in their whole lives. I wonder what those beef cattle look like that meat comes from.”
“They’re built right down close to the ground,” Thomas Hudson said. “And they’re almost as wide as they are long.”