There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it.But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.
“Why not?”the old man said.“ Between fishermen.”
“No.I will make it later on.Or I may eat the rice cold.”
“The Yankees cannot lose.”
“Thank you,”the old man said.He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility.But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck.The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks.The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords.But none of these scars were fresh.They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
“No,”the old man said.“ But we have.Haven't we?”“Yes,”the boy said.“Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we'll take the stuff home.”
“We can do that,”the boy said.“But what about the eighty-seven of your great record?”