Ironic if he ended up sliding in and out of a booming water cave, companion to the man in yellow.
“Not while I have this hot box,” he said aloud, for he had begun to think the red cooler was filled with glowing charcoal. He deduced it because when he raised his chin from the cover his jaw chattered uncontrollably, and when he rested it back against the box the chattering ceased. Only a wonderful heat could have that effect.
He was surprised to see it was almost dusk. In a way he was glad, because it meant he could go to bed soon and get some sleep. He was tremendously tired. The rising and falling billows would be deliciously soft to sink into. This was something he’d worked out. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before, but the yellow man was not dead. Sleeping. Resting. And in a minute Quoyle thought he would roll over too and get some sleep. As soon as they shut the lights out. But the hard light was shining directly into his swollen eyes and Jack Buggit was wrenching him away from the hot box and onto a pile of cold fish.
“Jesus Cockadoodle Christ! Iknowedsomebody was out here. Felt it.” He threw a tarpaulin over Quoyle.
“I told you that damn thing would drown you. How long you been in the water? Couldn’t be too long, boy, can’t live in this too long.
But Quoyle couldn’t answer. He was shaking so hard his heels drummed on the fish. He tried to tell Jack to get the hot box so he could get warm again, but his jaw wouldn’t work.
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Jack half-dragged him, half-shoved him into Mrs. Buggit’s perfect kitchen. “Here’s Quoyle I fished out of the bloody drink,” he said.
“If you knew how many Jack has saved,” she said. “How many.” All but one. She got Quoyle’s clothes off, laid hot-water bottles on his thighs and wrapped a blanket around him. She made a mug of steaming tea and forced spoonsful of it between his teeth with the swift competence of practice. Jack mumbled a cup of rum would do more good.
In twenty minutes his jaw was loose enough and his mind firm enough to choke out the sinking of the boat, the illusion of the hot box, to take in the details of the Buggit domicile. To have a second cup of tea loaded with sugar and evaporated milk.
“That’s a nice oolong,” said Mrs. Buggit. Rum couldn’t come near it for saving grace.
Everything in the house tatted and doilied in the great art of the place, designs of lace waves and floe ice, whelk shells and sea wrack, the curve of lobster feelers, the round knot of cod-eye, the bristled commas of shrimp and fissured sea caves, white snow on black rock, pinwheeled gulls, the slant of silver rain. Hard, tortured knots encased picture frames of ancestors and anchors, the Bible was fitted with sheets of ebbing foam, the clock’s face peered out like a bride’s from a wreath of worked wildflowers. The knobs of the kitchen dresser sported tassels like a stripper in a bawd house, the kettle handle knitted over in snake-ribs, the easy chairs wore archipelagoes of thread and twine flung over the reefs of arms and backs. On a shelf a 1961 Ontario phone book.
Mrs. Buggit stood against the Nile green wall, moved forward to the stove to refill the kettle, her hands like welded scoops. Great knobby knuckles and scarred fingers. The boiling water gushing into the teapot. Mrs. Buggit was bare armed in a cotton dress. The house breathed tropical heat and the torpor of comfort.
She had a voice built up from calling into the wind and stating strong opinions. In this house Jack shrank to the size of a doll, his wife grew enormous in the waxy glitter and cascade of flowers. She searched Quoyle’s face as though she had known him once. His teeth clattered less against the mug. The shudders that had racked him from neck to arch eased.
“You’ll warm,” she said, though she herself could not, coming at him with a hot brick for his feet. A mottled, half-grown dog stirred on the mat, cocked her ears briefly.
Jack, like many men who spend their days in hard physical labor, went slack when he sat in an easy chair, sprawled and spread as if luxury jellied his muscles.
“It was your build there, all that fat, y’know, that’s what insulated you all them hours, kept you floating. A thin man would of died.”
Then Quoyle remembered the yellow man and told his story again, beginning with the walk on the point and ending with the light in his eyes.
“At the ovens?” Jack went to the telephone in a wedge of space under the stairs to call the Coast Guard. Quoyle sat, his ears ringing. Mrs. Buggit was talking to him.
“People with glasses don’t get on with dogs,” she said. “A dog has to see your eyes clear to know your heart. A dog will wait for you to smile, he’ll wait a month if need be.”
“The Newfoundland dog,” said shuddering Quoyle, still weak with the lassitude of drowning.
“The Newfoundland dog! The Newfoundland dog isn’t in it. That’s not the real dog of this place. The real dog, the best dog in the world that ever was, is the water dog. This one here, Batch, is part water dog, but the pure ones all died out. They were all killed generations ago. Ask Jack, he’ll tell you about it. Though Jack’s a cat man. It’s me as likes the dogs. Batch is from Billy Pretty’s Elvis. Jack’s got his cat, you know, Old Tommy, goes out in the boat with him. Just as good a fisherman.”
And at last, Billy Pretty and Tert Card told, the Coast Guard informed of the yellow man, Quoyle’s tea mug emptied. Jack went down to the stage to clean and ice his fish. Had saved, now let the wife restore.
Quoyle followed Mrs. Buggit up to the guest room. She handed him the replenished hot-water bottles.
“You want to go to Alvin Yark for the next one,” she said.
Before he fell asleep he noticed a curious pleated cylinder near the door. It was the last thing he saw.
In the morning, ravenous with hunger, euphoric with life, he saw the cylinder was a doorstop made from a mail-order catalog, a thousand pages folded down and glued, and imagined Mrs. Buggit working at it day after winter day while the wind shaved along the eaves and the snow fell, while the fast ice of the frozen bay groaned and far to the north the frost smoke writhed. And still she patiently folded and pasted, folded and pasted, the kettle steaming on the stove, obscuring the windows. As for Quoyle, the most telling momento of his six-hour swim were his dark blue toenails, dyed by his cheap socks.
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And when her house was empty again, Quoyle gone and the teapot scalded and put away on the shelf, the floor mopped, she went outside to hang Quoyle’s damp blanket, to take in yesterday’s forgotten, drenty wash.