Читать книгу Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles - Kira Henehan - Страница 19

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Wherever we went, wherever the concerns in need of Investigation took us, we always stayed at Tiki Ty’s Tiki Barn. And unlikely seeming as it seems, it always seemed to be exactly the same place.

One learns that certain questions are unanswerable.

This is why we need words like ‘conundrum.’

Tiki Ty’s was always where we stayed and was always a large bright generous sort of bookstore-slash-vintage surfing memorabilia museum. The books were not necessarily about vintage surfing memorabilia; I perhaps misspoke. There were few, if in fact any, books on vintage surfing memorabilia at Tiki Ty’s and perhaps in the whole of the world. Vintage surfing memorabilia being one of those memorabilias that people prefer to see accidentally or even on purpose, in person, but rarely, if ever, to read about.

Though perhaps they would enjoy a picture book of vintage surfing memorabilia?

This may not even be the case.

This may be something that warrants further investigation, but perhaps by someone else.

Tiki Ty was always expecting us, though I never saw anyone send a messenger ahead, and always had the same small rooms available for our use whenever we arrived. Tiki Ty always greeted us with a happy good nature that we without fail found vaguely alarming and suspicious at first, and then warmed up to. Tiki Ty had great massive waves of jet black hair that he piled always into a large artistic clump on the top of his head and fixed in place with an invisible elastic band and then a profoundly visible enameled stick, perhaps the length of a schoolchild’s straight-edge. Tiki Ty served shrimp in an unusual way, which is to say, not fresh and pink and pearly but battered and cooked and spiced in a manner that I would not have thought of and indeed never thought of at all outside of Tiki Ty’s immediate presence but which all the same made my mouth water in a Pavlovian sort of anticipation each and every time I entered the Tiki Barn.

My mouth watered in a Pavlovian sort of anticipation. Tiki Ty greeted us in a riot of black hair and pale green scrubbish garb and shuffling holey mules made of balsa or seagrass or salsa.

No.

This last is incorrect.

However.

He greeted us also with shrimp, arrayed around a puddle of dipping on a large metal platter that once had a painted spray of peonies featured beneath the shrimps but that now with time and with use had faded to only the idea of peonies.

Raffia.

Tiki Ty uses a different sort of dipping as well. His dipping is not red but yellow, and not spicy but quiet and like an animal.