Billingsgate Shoal Read Online Free Page B

invisible but still
treacherous), where she'd been stranded hours earlier, and headed off
due west, toward Plymouth, with remarkable felicity.
    "Geez, honey, look at her go," I murmured.
    Mary turned to see the long sloping plume fast
disappearing in the distant haze. We dropped sail a few minutes
later, stowing the jib down the forehatch and fastening the main and
its gaff along the boom with shock cords. We motored in the rest of
the way and gently glided Hatton back into her berth.
    The sun had been making good progress all morning,
and now was halfway out. We left the harbor and hurried back to the
domicile where Mary promptly changed into her swimsuit and flopped
down on the deck, swatting at greenheads. I went running.
    I left the cottage and began my run along Sunken
Meadow Road. I ran up to the main road, then along it until I came to
the old windmill (Eastham's landmark), and then back. It was slightly
over six miles, and during the last part was setting a pretty good
clip. I staggered into The Breakers and paced around until I cooled
off, flicking on the sauna bath. I grabbed my bucket and digging
fork, and an old-fashioned tin salt shaker, and strolled out onto the
flats. The tide was ebbing; by 5:30 it would be out. Already though,
the long tan flats stretched away for hundreds of yards. I was
looking for razor clams. Half a mile from the beach, I began to see
tiny ovoid depressions in the damp sand. Sprinkling salt from the
shaker on these, I watched the long, rectangular creatures squirt up
out of these depressions, exposing half of their delicate shells to
the air. Sometimes they dove down the other way, into the sand about
a foot. Then I'd pry them out with the fork. They were six to eight
inches long and shaped like a folded barber's razor. In forty minutes
I had filled my bucket, and started back to the cottage. I stopped at
a tide pool and filled the bucket to overflowing with brine, then
padded back to the beach.
    Our cottage was a bluish gray rectangle on the bluff
top. The American flag hung limp on the mast. I squinted and could
see the three metal cups of my anemometer slowly turning. The dull,
cold gray of the weathered cedar shakes belied the coziness of The
Breakers. The smallish rooms with low, beamed ceilings. The library
corner of the living room, where you could sit for hours, days, under
the brass student lamp with the green glass shade and listen to the
surf crash, or the thunder roll. The kitchen with its skylights,
wineracks, copper pots, and smells of coffee, roasting meat, sizzling
fish, clam chowder. I liked hunting my own food out on the flats.
There was something elemental, even prehistoric, about i the act.
Like sex, it was something that came to me unfiltered by modem
civilization. It was animal. I was a hunter-gatherer. The damp sand
felt good under my bare feet. I climbed up the bone-colored wooden
steps and placed the bucket of clams in the shade on the deck. I
would cook them up in butter in a big iron pot, then add the clam
liquor, potatoes, onions, cracked pepper, celery, milk, and perhaps
some leftover corn and little pieces of cooked bacon. I drooled at
the thought.
    I went into the sauna. The temperature was 190
degrees. Perfect. I baked in there three times, coming out only long
enough to shower under cold water each time. Finally I showered for
good. I felt so laid back I couldn't have gotten it up even if I were
naked in the sack with all three of Charlie's Angels.
    No, wait. I take that back.
    I made the chowder. Soon the big iron pot was
simmering away and I tended to it as I sipped a Gosser beer.
    "Isn't that Jack, Charlie?" shouted Mary
from the bathroom. The cream colored Toyota Land Cruiser swept into
the gravel driveway, and number one son climbed out. On his back
bumper is a sticker that reads: STOP THE WHALE KILLERS! BOYCOTT
JAPANESE GOODS!
    Now you don't stop to think about this until you
realize that the sticker is affixed to none other than a Toyota,