Old Mr. Flood Read Online Free Page A

say,” Mr. Irwin said. “All I know he’s an old boy who’s trying to live to be a hundred and fifteen years old by eating fish.”
    “God bless us!” said the captain. “How far along is he?”
    “He’s way past ninety,” Mr. Irwin said.
    “I declare to Jesus!” the captain said. “Well, we live and learn. Maybe I ought to start eating fish.”
    After Mr. Flood has inspected the boats, he goes into the shed of the Fishmongers Association. He listens to the blasphemous haggling between the fishmongers and the buyers from the retail fish stores, asks scores of questions, peers into bins, hefts and admires a striped bass here and a redsnapper there, and carries market gossip from one stall to the next. He has so much curiosity that a few of the fishmongers look the other way when they see him coming, but the others treat him considerately and sometimes introduce him to visitors as the Mayor of the Fish Market. Presently he leaves the shed and steps into one of the filleting houses on South Street and helps himself to a bucket of gurry, or fish scraps, with which to feed some one-legged gulls that he has adopted. The fish market supports a flock of several hundred gulls and there are always a few crippled ones among them. “This condition,” Mr. Flood says, “is due to the fact that sea gulls don’t understand traffic lights. There’s a stretch of South Street running through the market that’s paved with Belgian blocks. And every so often during the morning rush a fish or two and sometimes a whole slew of them drop off a truck and are ground up by the wheels and packed down tight into the cracks between the blocks. The gulls go wild when they see this. They wait until traffic gets halted by a red light, and then they drop out of the sky like bats out of hell and try to worry the fish from between the cracks with their beaks andclaws. They’re stubborn birds. They get so interested they don’t notice when the light changes and all of a sudden, wham bang, the heavy truck traffic is right on top of them. Some get killed outright. Some get broken wings and flop off and hide somewhere and starve to death. Those that lose only one leg are able to keep going, but the other gulls peck them and claw them and treat them as outcasts and they have a hard, hard time.” The crippled gulls are extremely distrustful, but Mr. Flood has been able to make friends with a few of them. When he strides onto a pier toting a bucket of gurry they circle down and surround him. One or two will eat from his hands.
    Mr. Flood finishes feeding his gulls around nine o’clock. Then he is ready for his first drink of the day. He is opposed to drinking alone—he says it leads to the mumbles—so he proceeds along South Street, hunting for company. He often goes to the freshwater branch of the market, in Peck Slip, and invites Mrs. Birdy Treppel, a veteran fishwife, to step into a bar and grill near her stand and have one. “I
do
need a little something,” she usually says, “to thaw me out.” Mr. Flood and Mrs. Treppel areold friends. She fascinates him because she is always cold. Mrs. Treppel handles a variety of fresh-water fish, including carp, whitefish, pike, buffaloes, and red horses, and her stand, a three-bin affair partly on the sidewalk under a tarpaulin shelter and partly in the gutter, is in Peck Slip, just below Water Street, right in the path of the wind from the harbor. “I am beautifully situated,” she says, “on the corner of Influenza Street and Pneumonia Slip.” In the wintertime, Mrs. Treppel lets an assistant handle the bulk of her trade, while she keeps a fire jumping in an old oil drum beside her stand, feeding it with barrel staves and discarded fish boxes. She says that it doesn’t do much good. She hovers near the fire, shivering, with her arms in her apron, which she rolls up and uses as a muff. She has a nervous habit of hopping up and down and stamping her feet. She does this in the heat of the summer