Kingfisher(11)

Merle seemed to sense her; this time he looked toward her, waiting. The priest watched silently as well. She said nothing to Merle, just handed him an old-fashioned brass key that looked big enough to open a cemetery gate. Perhaps feeling Pierce’s curious gaze on her, she gave him a brief, wide-eyed stare back, revealing pale eyes like her father’s. A fairy tale impression of her stern, graceful face—skin as white, lips as red as—clung to memory as she whisked herself away.

Merle rose, too, nodding to Pierce. “Just another minute or two. You’re that close.”

He followed his daughter; the man with the backward collar followed him. Pierce turned to try for Tye’s beleaguered attention and found the cold, foaming beer already in front of him.

After what seemed the slow march of time toward forever, both swinging doors opened wide and stayed open, held by the gold-haired father and son, standing like sentinels flanking the man who entered.

People rose, murmuring, greeting him, raising their mugs and wineglasses in salute. He was very tall, broad-boned, lean, and muscular, a warrior in frayed jeans and a faded flannel shirt. His white-gold hair hung thick and wild to his shoulders; an ivory mustache like a pair of ram’s horns curled down the sides of his mouth. He held a gnarled staff in one hand, a carved, polished hiker’s stick he used as a cane. He needed it, Pierce saw. Though he smiled broadly as he entered, the lines on his face tightened slightly at every other step as pain bled through him and into the shifting, halting staff.

The young man whose collar announced he was holy followed, carrying a gaff the length of a spear. The metal pirate’s hook at the end of it glistened oddly with a sheen of red, as though it had tangled with something closer to human than fish. Merle came after him, holding a huge oval platter with the biggest salmon on it Pierce had ever seen. The platter, an ornate, old-fashioned piece with bumps and ruffles and flutings all over it, looked as though it were made of pure gold. The knife laid across the edge of the platter beside the fish riveted his attention. The blade was crafted of hand-hammered metal with a sandwich of polished ash fitted along the length of the metal handle. Long, broad, and sweetly curved to its point, the blade would rock with a satisfying heft in the hand, finely mincing anything it was fed with its thin, wicked edge: elephant garlic, delicate chives, hazelnuts, words.

I want that, he thought, and found Merle’s eyes on him across the room as though he had heard.

Carrie, oven mitts on both hands, followed her father, carrying a cauldron etched all over with an endless, dreamlike tangle of circles and knots. The cauldron filled the room with the smell of seafood seasoned in brine and aged sherry and mysterious spices from some land so exotic it hadn’t yet appeared on a map. Even she was smiling a little, her ivory skin flushed in the steam.

Under the chandelier, which was still all cold stars and no visible light, Hal stopped. Everyone stopped. No one spoke. Candles burning on the bar tables, small lamps along the walls shed a misty, golden glow over Hal’s white-gold head, the oak in his hand, the bleeding gaff, the salmon and the blade, the silver cauldron. Pierce watched, wondering. Then time flickered; past and present seamed together in the moment; what was old became new, and new became more ancient than he could imagine.

I know this, he thought, then: But what is it?

“Welcome,” Hal said, “to the Kingfisher Bar and Grill. We have an inexhaustible feast of crab cakes, shrimp, scallops, halibut, salmon, oysters, clams, all you can eat and any way you like them. Come into the restaurant or stay here and eat as you please. Just let us know what we can do for you.”

The odd procession broke apart; the gathering in the room and in the restaurant itself, visible now beyond the open doors, dissolved into jovial chaos. The restaurant tables, Formica-topped rounds with a single plastic flower in a bud vase on each, began to fill. A gray-haired woman, a skinny young man in black, a gum-chewing girl with purple hair, moved among them, taking orders. Pierce looked around for the gaff, the platter, the knife, Hal with his staff. They all seemed to have vanished.

What was that? he wondered. What was that about?

“Something you need?” Tye asked, unexpectedly in front of him despite the crowd around the bar. He lingered as Pierce gazed at him mutely, wondering at his attention amid the clamor. “Anything?”

Pierce shook his head abruptly. He was on his way south. No mysteriously crippled fisher, no amount of goodwill and fellowship, no hints of lost glory would strand him there with the Formica tables and the chandelier that didn’t work anymore. “I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks.” He raised the beer with an appreciative smile, and Tye moved away.

The girl with the purple hair came soon after to take his order. He sat there at the bar and ate the seafood stew, trying to identify its tantalizing backwashes of seasoning, then the crab cakes with their outrageous sweet-fiery sauce, and, when he could positively eat no more, a few bites of deep-fried salmon, which seemed a disgraceful end for such a noble fish until he tasted it.

“God,” he said reverently, and Tye, rattling a martini shaker, smiled.

“Nope. Carrie.”

He found himself with yet another beer in his hand and smiling mistily at the memory of the meal. The room around him was quieting. Most of the diners had left; there were rumbles and clangs of cleanup from the invisible kitchen. The homely tables within the next room had been tidied, set for the next day. Through the swinging doors, propped open now, Pierce could see the ghost of the hotel in the high, shadowed ceiling too far above the modest restaurant area, and the hint, behind three makeshift walls around the tables, of the long, wide, empty husk of the older room enclosing them.