'They're kind of hard to catch sometimes,' said Colm, squatting down and digging up a great glob of mud. His tiny hand shot into the hole and came up with a long greenish-reddish worm which wrapped itself around his hand. Colm had it pinched just behind the head and Dante could see the thing's black pincers groping blindly in the air.
Wise-ass kid, Dante Calicchio thought. You come near me with that thing and I'll drop your banana in the mud. But Dante held his ground and let Colm walk right up to him.
'See the pinchers?' Colm asked.
'Yeah,' said Dante. He thought of giving Colm back his banana, but he feared the boy might think he was making an exchange. Also, Colm was covered with mud. 'Now you're too dirty to eat your breakfast,' Dante said.
'No,' said Colm. 'I can wash, you know.' He led Dante to a tide pool trapped higher up in the rocks and they washed the mud away together.
'You want to see my animals?' Colm asked. Dante wasn't sure; he was wondering what Colm had done with that worm. 'What's a chauffeur?' Colm asked him. 'Like a taxi?'
'Uh-huh,' Dante said. As alert as a rabbit, on the lookout for the animals lurking in there, he followed Colm to the boathouse.
There was a turtle with what looked like rocks growing all over its back, and a gull Colm told Dante not to get close to - it had a busted wing and liked to peck. There was a fiercely active little animal that looked like an elongated rat, which was a ferret, Colm said. There was a zinc washtub full of herring, half of which were dead and floating on the surface; Colm scooped these up with a net, as if these deaths were commonplace.
'Cat food?' Dante asked, meaning the dead herring.
'We don't have a cat,' said Colm. 'They kill more than they can eat.'
When they came out of the boathouse, the sun was warm enough to flush Dante's face, and a sweet, salt-smelling wind had picked up off the bay.
'You know what, kid?' said Dante. 'You're pretty lucky to live here.'
'I know,' Colm said.
Then Dante glanced up at the house and saw Bogus Trumper at the pool-room window watching them through a big pair of binoculars. Dante knew that the boy wasn't supposed to know he was being watched, so Dante moved his bulky body between the boy and the house.
'Are you sometimes a soldier?' Colm asked, and Dante shook his head. He let Colm try on his fancy driver's cap; the kid grinned and marched a few steps up the dock. Funny, Dante thought. Kids love uniforms, and most men hate them.
Trumper watched Colm attempt a military salute. How tanned he was! And his legs seemed much longer than he remembered.
'He's going to have your length. Big,' he mumbled. Biggie was exhausted; she lay sleeping on the couch in the pool room. Bogus was all alone at the binoculars, but Couth heard him. When he saw Couth looking at him, Bogus moved away from the binoculars.
'He looks fine, doesn't he?' said Couth.
'Yup, yup,' said Trumper. He looked at Biggie. 'I won't wake her up,' he said. 'You say goodbye for me.' But he tiptoed up to where she lay; he seemed to be waiting for something.
Couth tried to be casual about looking out at the sea, but Trumper still didn't seem comfortable, so Couth ambled out of the pool room. Then Bogus bent over Biggie and kissed her fast and light on the forehead, but before he could straighten up, she reached a groggy hand into his hair, giving him a soft stroke and a sleepy groan.
'Couth?' she said. 'Is he gone?'
He was gone, all right. He had Dante stop at an Esso station in Bath and pack the tiny ice box in the back of the limousine full of ice. In Brunswick, he bought a fifth of Jack Daniel's, and in a Woolworth's across the street, one glass.
So he was gone by the time they crossed the Massachusetts line. He sat in the plush back seat with the glass divider shut tight, and drank until the tinted windows seemed a darker green, even though the day was getting brighter. In the soundless, air-conditioned Mercedes, he slumped like a dead king riding in his cushioned coffin back to New York.
Why New York? he thought. Then he remembered that it was because Dante was going there. He took out his envelope of money and counted up to a fuzzy fifteen hundred or eighteen hundred, give or take a hundred or so. It never came out the same twice, so after he counted it four times he put it back in his pocket and forgot about it.
But Dante noticed, and it was the first notion he had that the nut in the back might not be so rich. If you took the time to count it, you didn't have enough.
By the time they got to New Haven, Trumper was so crocked that Dante didn't even have to ask if they could stop for a moment. Dante phoned New York and got a bawling out from the limousine service and a lot of tearful shouting from his wife.
When he returned to the car, Trumper was simply too stewed to understand what Dante wanted to tell him. Dante wanted to warn Trumper that 'they' were waiting for him in New York. 'You mean the cops?' Dante had asked the limousine service. 'What do they want with him?'
'Bigger than ordinary cops,' the limousine service told Dante.
'Oh, yeah? What'd he do?'
'They think he's nuts,' the limousine service said.