Revolution Number 9 Read Online Free Page A

bug he had ever seen. It seemed to be looking back at him. After twenty or thirty seconds of that, it jabbed an enormous claw in his direction. The claw encountered the wooden cage, twisted sideways, opened, closed. With a crunch, the slat snapped in two. The claw jabbed through the opening. “Jesus,” Charlie said, backing away.
    Carefully, he took the fifth pot off the line and lowered the others over the side. There was no point in continuing with a broken winch. Charlie checked the compass and turned for home. All the way, he heard scary sounds from the pot on the deck behind him.
    Charlie tied up at the dock behind De Mello’s Wholesale Fish. No one was there but De Mello, sitting in his cold office, with fish scales on the floor and Amalia Rodrigues on the tape player. He stuck a bottle in the drawer as Charlie walked in.
    “You went out in this shit?” De Mello said.
    “Got something to show you.”
    De Mello followed Charlie down to the dock. He looked in the pot and made no comment. Charlie had always known De Mello was hard to impress. Now he knew the man couldn’t be impressed. It was a character defect.
    They weighed it on De Mello’s scale, the one all the fishermen suspected was a little light. It weighed forty pounds, one ounce.
    “Is that a record?” Charlie said.
    “Not even close,” De Mello told him. “I’ll give you one twenty.”
    “Thanks. And how much for the lobster?”
    “That’s today’s price. Two ninety a pound, times forty, and rounded off in your favor. It was two seventy-five last week.”
    “Yeah,” said Charlie, “but that’s for lobster. This isn’t a lobster—it’s a tourist attraction. No one’s going to eat it, De Mello. It’ll spend the rest of its life in the display tank at Jimmy’s on the Wharf or someplace like that. And Jimmy’s going to pay you five hundred.” He looked closely at De Mello to see if it was a good guess. De Mello’s face was expressionless. “At least five,” Charlie said. “So I’ll take three now.”
    They settled on two fifty. De Mello took the roll out of his pocket, the roll that had a fishy smell, and counted out the bills with care. He had to be careful counting money, even if it wasn’t sticky—thirty years on a trawler had cost him three fingers and a thumb.
    Charlie went home, had a hot shower, came out with his skin tingling and his senses still wide awake. Lunchtime, and a bowl of egg salad waited in the fridge. He saw himself sitting at the kitchen table, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, alone. He put on a jacket and went out.
    Snow was falling thickly now, covering the ground. A woman in black tights clicked toward him on cross-country skis, her eyelashes fluffy white. She didn’t appear to see him as she passed. Charlie went the other way, following the road that led around the pond to the Oceanographic Studies Center and the Bluefin Café next to the bridge over the cut. Charlie opened the door and felt a warm smoky breath on his face. It smelled of pine, garlic, oranges. He went inside.
    Sunday afternoon at the Bluefin Café. A fire made popping noises in the stone hearth, and Dinah Washington was singing “Unforgettable” on the sound system. The seven or eight little tables in the café were all taken. Charlie sat on one of the two vacant stools at the bar.
    “Hey, Charlie,” said the bartender. “What’ll it be?”
    “Egg salad on rye.”
    “Something to drink? I got Guinness on tap.”
    That sounded perfect, but Charlie said: “Orange juice.” He didn’t like to drink in public. It was just a habit now, a long habit; but habits, in the case of Charlie Ochs, made the man. Still, on top of the weather, the lobster, the tingling in his skin, a mug of Guinness would have been perfect.
    Charlie was halfway through his sandwich, lost in the soundof Dinah Washington’s voice, when a woman came into the café and took the only seat left, next to him. With his consciousness still fully awake, slapped