Duffy sipped his whiskey and looked down at the stuff on his plate. "This isn't crab," he said softly.
"Oh, sure it is," said Professor Rind.
"The fuck it is." He looked around for Staci. The place was fairly crowded. When he had spotted her, he motioned with a crook of his finger.
"This isn't crab."
Staci's neck was very long, the painterly Duffy saw. A duckling, though not a dreadfully ugly one. Something of a ducky, in fact. But confused.
"Oh, sir," she said, inspecting his plate. "Yessir, it's all crab." Staci smiled cautiously. "Like real fresh."
"It may be real fresh," Duffy said. "It may be fucking alive. But by Christ it ain't crab."
"Oh," Staci said.
"Let me tell you what it is, sweet thing." He had risen to his feet and raised his voice. Among the Rinds, only Hank looked at him. People at the adjoining tables looked also.
"It's some rotten thing out of a tube. Made by people who hate us and think we're stupid."
He looked around and gave the room a hateful glare.
"Because we are stupid! They've invented this red crap, oozes out when they squirt it. So it's red, see. Because Americans are moronic cupcakes who could be induced to eat their own shoelaces. So this shit makes it."
Mrs. Rind rose majestically, nudged her plate aside and spoke an order in Indo-European to her children. The three marched away and Duffy looked sadly after them. His favorite Rind had bailed. He turned his disappointment on poor Staci.
"Especially on Sunday in Pahoochee. Where I'm sure it's a favorite."
Staci's nestling's neck reddened. The older Mrs. Rind stood and hurried the way her daughter had gone. Hank Rind and his father-in-law kept their chairs.
"You go in there, pumpkin," Duffy told the girl, "and you tell the thief that employs you that he's a liar. Tell him that if he keeps on selling painted fish guts, I'm going to put him in jail." The young waitress started to flee, but Duffy called her up short. "And you're going up with him, Staci, Magnolia, whatever you call yourself professionally. Unless you stand up in court and rat him out. I mean only to frighten the child," Duffy explained to the other people in the restaurant. "She's not the one to blame."
There was a disturbance in the kitchen. Shrieks and incredulous roars emerged from it. No one in the dining room was eating. Security men in blazers had gathered at the door leading to the hotel lobby, awaiting orders. Shortly, from the kitchen came a fat perspiring man. He wore a black-brimmed sea captain's hat with red stains on the white part. There was a blue-and-white sailor-style neckerchief around his rubbery neck. Duffy thought he looked like neither a chef nor a mariner. He looked at Duffy, shaking with fury. Duffy stood his ground.
"Were you off somewhere?" he asked the cook, looking with contempt at the man's attire. "Was your riverboat about to catch the evening tide? Keeping steam up, right? Then, when the health department shows up, you disappear into the bayous. Mammal on the menu, folks!" Duffy shouted at the top of his voice. "Chef Boyardee here is a-gonna skin us some muskrats. When he runs out of fish-flavored toothpaste and red dye."
"You damned drunk," the enraged man screamed. "What the hell are you calling me?"
Duffy's rage increased.
"I'm a-saying you a warlocky witch, motherfucker. Bad man wizard. I'm a-saying you bad food poison man. I'm a-saying they gonna send you back to the swamp to be drowned in shit."
Duffy managed to sidestep the fat man's expertly executed kick, intended to painfully disable him. Two waiters caught their boss and only with great difficulty held him back. The small waitress looked on in tears.
"You no-good bastard," the cook cried, indicating Staci. "You bastard, you made her cry!" Altogether beside himself, he paused for breath.
Duffy drew himself up to his full height, which was about five foot nine.
"That's because her time to weep has come," he said viciously. He pointed his finger in the cook's face. "Yes, M'sieu Escoffier." Duffy turned to look over his shoulder, feeling, incorrectly, that a wave of support was gathering behind him. "The time has come when we must all weep. Because, goddamn you, you filthy poisoned rat, whatever you've done in there to that poor young girl — a child half your age, you scum — there shall be no more of it, I promise you." Blind to the chaos around him, Duffy carried on upbraiding the chef as a security man, aided by volunteers from among the male customers, wrestled him toward the door. At this point, in custody, he broke down and wept himself. "Christ's blood! Crab? Don't make me laugh. The only crabs you people got is in your pubic hair!"
It was all he remembered of the evening. Next day, the Rind boys found their way back to the Petrel's Perch in hopes of seeing more of Duffy.
Of course he had missed the lecture. At Pahoochee State College — or University, as it had been lately designated — colleagues rallied round Hank Rind to console and embrace him. Secretly, though, ill-wishers chortled and claimed never to have had any regard for him or for Duffy or his work.
Enormity descended. He was awakened by a policeman — in his experience always a bad sign. An African proverb he had learned in the Peace Corps went something like, "The morning policeman shoots the mice to frighten the monkeys." The maddened policeman, morning's minion. Despite the early hour, a man who said he was the manager of the hotel appeared, another who claimed to be an assistant district attorney, and several of the hotel's security stooges. One of the stooges was charging Duffy with assault, the felony compounded by his brandishing of a ballpoint pen. Brought before the town justice, Duffy had no choice but to call his estranged wife for bail.
When his turn at the phone came, he called collect, in violation of the instructions on the sign over the phone. To his relief it was Otis herself who answered. Otis who must know that it was him she really loved. Otis, descendant of an insane signer of the Declaration of Independence. But when he recounted his story, she was bad Otis.
"I'm so sorry," Otis said weepily. A false voice, Duffy knew. "My purse was stolen in the supermarket. I've canceled all my credit cards. Each and every one."
"You gotta be shitting me," Duffy suggested.
"Alas not."
"Well, how about a check?"
"My checkbook is with it, Jim. I've stopped all payments."
Duffy swore so foully that even his fellow inmates at the county jail were dismayed.
"Honestly," said Otis, "I am sorry, darl. But I'm not sure I can cover what you need. Frankly, you've been in the drunk tank before. All things pass, big guy."
"This is no drunk tank," Duffy pleaded. It was, finally, a lie. "Do you know where I am?"
"Yes, I think so. How funny! Because I was just reading about the state prison there. The book is called Worse Than Slavery."
Duffy paused to gain control of himself.
"Otis, sweetheart, I need your help badly."
"I know, my dear. My help isn't what it was."
"Please, baby." Duffy's fellow inmates, a generally semiviolent lot of drunks and panhandlers, laughed openly. It was impossible to converse discreetly. "What about your boy toy there? He's got bread."
"Bread? Aren't you quaint. Do you mean Prosser? Yes, he has 'bread,' I suppose. His latest novel is pretty successful for a literary book."
"Isn't that nice?" Duffy said. "So get three grand off him. I'm good for it."
"I'm surprised at your lack of — what shall I call it? — pride?"
"You tell that illiterate pinhead he better cough it up. Otherwise his ladylove's rightful spouse will — in the fullness of time — go up there and make him eat a hardcover copy of his successful literary book."
"He's not afraid of you, Jim."
"Really? Then he's made real progress in fear management. How's his ex, by the by? Still cochair of Lesbian Gardening?"