Walt by Ian Stoba Page B

of his supper. The music continued to play in his head. Calmly, more calmly than he could ever have imagined himself doing so, he picked up his plate and threw it across the room. The plate hit the wall with a satisfying thwack and a clang. The plate, being metal, was not damaged beyond a few minor dents, but the assorted parts of fish made an impressive display on the wall.
    Walt strode the four strides it took him to cross the room and stood facing his steamer trunk. The trunk, salvaged from another shipwreck, this one around 1880, provided storage for Walt’s few possessions. He opened the hasp and lifted the lid. He brought out two bottles from inside the trunk, one of port and the other of rum.
    Walt was not one to drink. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had had anything to drink besides water and the strong tea that he brewed on winter mornings. He remembered that the port had been a gift. He had once accidentally saved a man from drowning. The man had fallen off another boat and had gotten his leg fouled in one of the lines leading to Walt’s lobster traps. Looking to see what he had caught that day, he was very surprised to find a saturated Tristanian fisherman and no lobsters. To the end of his days on Earth, Walt maintained that the flailing of the overboard fisherman had scared away all the lobsters that day.
    The man was, of course, grateful to be saved. It is a tradition on Tristan, as in most places, to be grateful to a person who saves one’s life, and to show that appreciation in the form of gifts. The problem was, no one was quite sure what Walt liked or what it was that he might want. So, by default, the man with a continued opportunity to be alive gave Walt a blue wool sweater, which was enjoyed immensely; a black wool cap, which went overboard the very first time Walt tried to wear it fishing; and this bottle of port which had lain unopened in Walt’s steamer trunk for some years now.
    He also recalled the genesis of his bottle of rum. He had actually bought it for himself the day he got his own boat. This was also the day his father, to whom the boat had previously belonged, had died. One of the few things that Walt could bring to mind about his father was a saying of his to the effect that anyone old enough to have his own fishing boat was old enough to drink rum. This saying was repeated to Walt’s mother on an almost nightly basis whenever she complained about the old fisherman’s drinking. It was so ingrained into Walt’s impressionable thought process that it was the most natural thing in the world for him to buy a bottle of rum with the money from the first catch he delivered all by himself to the Plant. And with just as little thought, he had delivered that bottle to his steamer trunk where it had remained up until this very moment.
    Only with extreme difficulty was Walt able to uncork the bottles. Of course he had no bottle opener. He was forced to make creative use of a thin knife usually reserved for cleaning fish. He made a mess of it, shredding the corks into so many pieces that they could never hope to reseal the bottles, and dropping showers of cork fragments onto the floor and into each of the liquors.
    So, trying to put out the music in his head, Walt, for the very first time in his life, got drunk.
    The quantity Walt drank that night would be enough to level the most experienced drunk. A whole bottle of rum and another of port were consumed within the space of an hour and a half. Although he had no idea at the time, that amount of alcohol could easily have killed Walt or caused irreparable brain damage. As it was, he lapsed into a coma that was only temporary.
    Walt awoke in a most peculiar position. He was lying down on his stomach on his cot with his head hanging over the edge. He had no memory of putting himself in that position. He was fortunate that he had, though, as almost any other contortion of his body would have resulted in him choking on his vomit, which