Doc sat up and blinked against the light, a thin, elderly little man with bright blue eyes, a clipped brown mustache and scanty brown hair tousled and wild from sleep. He was stripped to his shorts against the heat, but at some time during the day he had bathed and shaved. He had even washed and ironed a shirt; it hung on a nail over his bunk with a crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket. "Crawl out and cook supper, Rip," I said, holding him to his end of our working agreement. "I've made a day and I'm hungry." Doc got up and stepped into his pants. He padded barefoot across the linoleum and poked at the packages on the sink cabinet. "Snapper steak again," he complained. "Roy, I'm sick of fish!" "You don't catch sirloins with a hand-line," I told him. And because I'd never been able to stay sore at him for long I added, "But we got beer. Where's the opener?" "I'm sick of beer, too," Doc said. "I need a real drink." I sniffed the air, making a business of it. "You've had one already. Where?" He grinned at me then with the wise-to-himself-and-the-world grin that lit up his face like turning on a light inside and made him different from anybody else on earth. "The largess of Providence," he said, "is bestowed impartially upon sot and Samaritan. I helped the little fellow next door to the bathroom this afternoon while his mother was away at work, and my selflessness had its just reward." Sometimes it's hard to tell when Doc is kidding. He's an educated man--used to teach at some Northern college, he said once, and I never doubted it--and talks like one when he wants to. But Doc's no bum, though he's a semi-alcoholic and lets me support him like an invalid uncle, and he's keen enough to read my mind like a racing form. "No, I didn't batter down the cupboard and help myself," he said. "The lady--her name is Mrs. Ethel Pond--gave me the drink. Why else do you suppose I'd launder a shirt?" That was like Doc. He hadn't touched her bottle though his insides were probably snarled up like barbed wire for the want of it. He'd shaved and pressed a shirt instead so he'd look decent enough to rate a shot of gin she'd offer him as a reward. It wasn't such a doubtful gamble at that, because Doc has a way with him when he bothers to use it; maybe that's why he bums around with me after the commercial fishing and migratory crop work, because he's used that charm too often in the wrong places. "Good enough," I said and punctured a can of beer apiece for us while Doc put the snapper steaks to cook. He told me more about our neighbors while we killed the beer. The Ponds were permanent residents. The kid--his name was Joey and he was ten--was a polio case who hadn't walked for over a year, and his mother was a waitress at a roadside joint named the Sea Shell Diner. There wasn't any Mr. Pond. I guessed there never had been, which would explain why Ethel acted so tough and sullen.