The Night Swimmer Read Online Free PDF Page A

immediate aspect of an isolated, rugged outpost and a pedestrian, quaint, domestic town at the same time, a testament to the amount of time that people have been living and working there. We parked the van in the public lot in the tight little harbor, which consists of a set of concrete piers laid out in a rough semicircle, the northern end dominated by abandoned warehouses, an impromptu boatyard, and the Baltimore Sailing Club shed. Fred was immediately interested in the sailboats.
    Takes a hardy type, Albert said, to sail Roaringwater Bay. This is a rough stretch of water.
    We walked up the short hill to the strip of a dozen row-house shops centered above the harbor, three pubs, a few restaurants, and holiday accommodations. Our pub was in the middle, the concrete exterior painted a deep garnet with black shutters, a carved wooden sign, The Nightjar, arched over the threshold. The slate roof, with its attic gables, was covered in a patina of blue-green lichen.
    The Nightjar had a long, low main room, with the bar along one side and a short passage directly opposite with a pair of bathrooms and a step-down into another small dining room. When we got there the main room was filled with stacked furniture and rusty kegs. The carpet in the dining room was a faded gray-green affair, torn andstained beyond recognition from the multitude of boots and fishing rubbers and a permeating stench was squeezed from the floor with each step.
    Fred had done research, consulting with pub owners and reading books about the finer points of preparing and maintaining a business like an Irish pub, and so he trotted Albert the Murphy’s representative and his clipboard through the rooms, pointing out things and demanding certain repairs and changes as if he had been running a pub all his life. Fred always was good at this kind of deception.
    All the dining room carpets had to go, the hardwood floors had to be rebuffed and treated, as well as the paneled walls. The main bar was still in good shape, a hulking mass of Irish maple covered in a glossy layer of heavy shellac, with an angled armrest running along the top and a metal foot pipe. All the beer lines would have to be replaced, as well as the carbon dioxide holders and primers. The kitchen was in a narrow back room with a utility sink, a squat little steel oven, and an ancient range with gas burners, crusted like a coral reef with the scars of a thousand fry-ups. Soon the kitchen was jammed with crates of bottles and paddocks of beer kegs, packages of napkins and bar straws, boxes of pint glasses and shot glasses, stacking up in the back storage area, the old walk-in freezer, as well as spilling into the main bar. Albert brought a crew in to strip the floors and plumbers were punching holes in the walls to wrench out old pipes.
    That first evening I discovered that out the front windows you could see Sherkin Island a mile off to the west and the dozens of small rock islands of Roaringwater Bay. Cape Clear Island was just a smudge a few miles beyond that, only neatly visible on a clear day as the setting sun descends behind it into the ocean.
    To stay out of Fred and Albert’s way I spent whole days at the old Baltimore Beacon, which stands on a promontory a half mile outside of town, a whitewashed brick thimble on a cliff two hundred feet above the water. In the old days local fishermen called the beacon Lot’s Wife. It seemed absurd, a candle in the wild dark, but apparently it kept ships from smashing into the rocks for a couple hundredyears. Flocks of gulls screamed and swooped, circling back to the cliff face and then suddenly congregating on the water, deep blue and flocked with foam.
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    We were temporarily bunking in the rooms above the pub, which were drafty, damp, slope-ceilinged affairs, Fred’s stacks of sailing books and pub papers on every surface, books in long rows on the floor awaiting shelving, already warping in the damp, our laundry in an old