Grab Bag Read Online Free PDF Page B

with our paper bibs around our necks and our nutcrackers at the ready when Carter-Harrison remarked, “You ought to taste a real lobster.”
    “I’m about to,” I replied as the waitress, whose name is neither Marge nor Myrtle but in fact Melpomene, set one in front of me.
    My companion, being a man of science first and foremost, reached across the table and tore off one of its claws, which he proceeded to excavate and consume the meat thereof.
    “Not bad, considering,” he admitted, wiping melted butter off his chin. “But wait till you toss a bicuspid over a genuine Beagleport lobster, hauled from the briny blue Atlantic about fourteen minutes before you get your grubhooks on to it.”
    “You owe me a claw,” I said. “Where’s Beagleport?”
    Carter-Harrison ate one of his own claws—or, to be scientifically accurate, one of his own lobster’s claws—and wiped more melted butter off his chin. He has one of those long, bony New England jaws ideally adapted for getting dripped on. Then he punctiliously gave me his other claw. Then he uttered.
    “Did I ever tell you about my family?”
    “I never knew you had one,” I replied. “I thought you sprang full-armored from the brow of Dr. Spock.”
    He thought that one over for a while. “Ah, I see. One of your jokes. No, Williams, I was born pretty much according to normal procedure, of not exactly poor and almost ridiculously honest parents, in the village of Beagleport, Maine.”
    “I’ll bet you were a beautiful baby,” I said with my mouth full of tail meat.
    “My mother always thought so. That’s why she insisted on splicing her maiden name of Carter to the paternal cognomen. My parents have now passed to the Great Beyond, namely Palm Springs, but the old family homestead is still occupied by my Aunt Agapantha and my cousins Ed and Fred. I was thinking we might take a run up there this weekend.”
    “Are you sure this is the right time of year to go?” I asked, gazing out the window at the lashing sleet that gives our city so much of its gentle springtime charm.
    “The perfect time,” he assured me. “We won’t run into any tourists.”
    “I wouldn’t mind running into some tourists,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. These excessively brainy types never do.
    And that’s why, some three hours later, we were groping our way up the Maine Turnpike in my old Chevy. I was groping, anyway, trying to sort out the road from the surrounding frozen wastes by the occasional glimpses I was able to get through my slush-caked windshield. Carter-Harrison was thinking deep thoughts. At least I assumed he was. He never said.
    By ten o’clock, I’d had it. We found a motel open somewhere between Kittery and the Arctic Circle, and turned in. I woke expecting more of the same, but Saturday dawned crisp and clear. We got out of the motel early—there wasn’t much there to hang around for—and fetched Beagleport around the middle of the morning.
    Carter-Harrison started barking orders like “Left at the fire station” and “Right at the general store.” At last he sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now we’re on the home road.”
    “This is a road?” I cried in startled disbelief.
    He didn’t answer. He was busy sniffing, his bony nose straight forward like a bird dog’s at the point, his bony cheeks flushed the way they get when he’s about to give birth to another bright idea. I felt an ominous twinge.
    “What’s eating you?”
    “It’s the air,” he replied.
    There sure was a lot of it. I tried a few sniffs myself, a rich blend of salt, pine trees, and ancient vehicle. We sniffed our way along until we came to two houses, one of them painted baby blue with scalloped pink shutters. The other was merely white. It was when we reached this latter that Carter-Harrison yelled, “Starboard your helm.”
    “Huh?” I said.
    “Turn right. This is our driveway.”
    And so it proved to be. Ah, I thought, civilization at last. Then a powerful