“You really are to be congratulated.” President Biddle was dancing with excitement, and I knew I’d be eating at Government House on guest nights again this season. It had taken a year or two - but the President had finally accepted me as though I was island-born. I was one of his children, with all the special privilege that this position carried with it.
Fred Coker arrived in his hearse, but armed with his photographic equipment, and while he set up his tripod and disappeared under the black cloth to focus the ancient camera, we posed for him beside the colossal carcass. Chuck in the middle holding the rod, with the rest of us grouped around him, arms folded like a football team. Angelo and I were grinning and Chubby was scowling horrifically into the lens.
The picture would look good in my new advertising brochure - loyal crew and intrepid skipper, hair curling out from under his cap and from the vee of his shirt, all muscle and smiles - it would really pack them in next season.
I arranged for the fish to go into the cold room down at the pineapple export sheds. I would consign it out to Rowland Wards of London for mounting on the next refrigerated shipment. Then I left Angelo and Chubby to scrub down Dancer’s decks, refuel her across the harbour at the Shell basin and take her out to moorings.
As Chuck and I climbed into the cab of my battered old Ford pick-up, Chubby sidled across like a racecourse tipster, speaking out of the corner of his mouth.
“Harry, about my billfish bonus-” I knew exactly what he was going to ask, we went through this every time.
“Mrs. Chubby doesn’t have to know about it, right?” I finished for him.
“That’s right,” he agreed lugubriously, and pushed his filthy deep-sea cap to the back of his head.
I put Chuck on the plane at nine the next morning and I sang the whole way down from the plateau, honking the horn of my battered old Ford pick-up at the island girls working in the pineapple fields. They straightened up with big flashing smiles under the brims of the wide straw hats and waved.
At Coker’s Travel Agency I changed Chucks American Express traveller’s cheques, haggling the rate of exchange with Fred Coker. He was in full fig, tailcoat and black tie. He had a funeral at noon.
The camera and tripod laid up for the present, photographer became undertaker.
Coker’s Funeral Parlour was in the back of the Travel Agency opening into the alley, and Fred used the hearse to pick up tourists at the airport, first discreetly changing his advertising board on the vehicle and putting the seats in over the rail for the coffins.
I booked all my charters through him, and he clouted his ten per cent off my traveller’s cheques. He had the insurance agency as well, and he deducted the annual premium for Dancer before carefully counting out the balance. I recounted just as carefully, for although Fred looks like a schoolmaster, tall and thin and prim, with just enough island blood to give him a healthy all-over tan, he knows every trick in the book and a few which have not been written down yet.
He waited patiently while I checked, taking no offence, and when I stuffed the roll into my back pocket, his gold pince-nez sparkled and he told me like a loving father, “Don’t forget you have a charter party coming in tomorrow, Mister Harry.”
That’s all right, Mr. Coker - don’t you worry, my crew will be just fine.”
They are down at the Lord Nelson already,” he told me delicately.
Fred keeps his finger firmly on the islan’s pulse. “Mr. Coker, I’m running a charter boat, not a temperance society. Don’t worry,” I repeated, and stood up. “Nobody ever died of a hangover.”
I crossed Drake Street to Edward’s Store and a hero’s welcome. Ma Eddy herself came out from behind the counter and folded me into her warm pneumatic bosom.
“Mister Harry,” she cooed and fussed me, “I went down to the wharf to see the fish you hung yesterday.” Then she turned still holding me and shouted at one of her counter girls, “Shirley, you get Mister Harry a nice cold beer now, hear?”
I hauled out my roll. The pretty little island girls chittered like sparrows when they saw it, and Ma Eddy rolled her eyes and hugged me closer.
“What do I owe you, Missus Eddy?” From June to November is a long offseason, when the fish do not run, and Ma Eddy carries me through that lean time.
I propped myself against the counter with a can of beer in my hand, picking the goods I needed from the shelves and watching their legs as the girls in their mini-skirts clambered up the ladders to fetch them down - old Harry feeling pretty good and cocky with that hard lump of green stuff in his back pocket.
Then I went down to the Shell Company basin and the manager met me at the door of his office between the big silver fuel storage tanks.
“God, Harry, I’ve been waiting for you all morning. Head Office has been screaming at me about your bill.”
“Your waiting is over, brother,” I told him. But Wave Dancer, like most beautiful women, is an expensive mistress, and when I climbed back into the pick-up, the lump in my pocket was severely depleted.
They were waiting for me in the beer garden of the Lord Nelson.
The island is very proud of its associations with the Royal Navy, despite the fact that it is no longer a British possession but revels in an independence of six years’ standing; yet for two hundred years previously it had been a station of the British fleet. Old prints by long-dead artists decorated the public bar, depicting the great ships beating up the channel or lying in grand harbour alongside Admiralty Wharf - men-of-war and merchantmen of John Company victualled and refitted here before the long run south to the Cape of Good Hope and the Atlantic.
St. Mary’s has never forgotten her place in history, nor the admirals and mighty ships that made their landfall here. The Lord Nelson is a parody of its former grandeur, but I enjoy its decayed and seedy elegance and its associations with the past more than the tower of glass and concrete that Hilton has erected on the headland above the harbour.
Chubby and his wife sat side by side on the bench against the far wall, both of them in their Sunday clothes. This was the easiest way to tell them apart, the fact that Chubby wore the three-piece suit which he had bought for his wedding - the buttons straining and gaping, and the deep-sea cap stained with salt crystals and fish blood on his head - while his wife wore a full-length black dress of heavy wool, faded greenish with age, and black button-up boots beneath. Otherwise their dark mahogany faces were almost identical, though Chubby was freshly shaven and she did have a light moustache.
“Hello, Missus Chubby, how are you?” I asked. “Thank you, Mister Harry.”
“Will you take a little something, then?”
“Perhaps just a little orange gin, Mister Harry, with a small bitter to chase it down.”
While she sipped the sweet liquor, I counted Chubby’s wages into her hand, and her lips moved as she counted silently in chorus. Chubby watched anxiously, and I wondered once again how he had managed all these years to fool her on the billfish bonus.
Missas Chubby drained the beer and the froth emphasized her moustache.
“I’ll be Off then, Mister Harry.” She rose majestically, and sailed from the courtyard. I waited until she turned into Frobisher Street before I slipped Chubby the little sheath of notes under the table and we went into the private bar together.
Angelo had a girl on each side of him and one on his lap. His black silk shirt was open. to the belt buckle, exposing gleaming chest muscles. His denim pants fitted skin-tight, leaving no doubt as to his gender, and his boots were hand-tooled and polished westerns. He had greased his hair and sleeked it back in the style of the young Presley.
He flashed his grin like a stage lamp across the room and when I paid him he tucked a banknote into the front of each girl’s blouse.
“Hey, Eleanor, you go sit on Harry’s lap, but careful now.
Harry’s a virgin - you treat him right, hear?” He roared with delighted laughter and turned to Chubby.
“Hey, Chubby, you quit giggling like that all the time, man!
That’s stupid - all that giggling and grinning.” Chubby’s frown deepened, his whole face crumbling into folds and wrinkles like that of a bulldog. “Hey, Mister barman, you give old Chubby a drink now.
Perhaps that will stop him cutting up stupid, giggling like that.”
At four that afternoon Angelo had driven his girls off, and he sat with his glass on the table top before him. Beside it lay his bait knife honed to a razor edge and glinting evilly in the overhead lights.
