tINNED hADDOCK iN MARINER'S oIL7*

He, the man in the hat, awoke to a dismal gray sky, a bird, a wren or a jackdaw, twilling string and barbed wire into a makeshift nest, his thoughts on soup and curds of day-old bread, kiwi Jell-O and tinned haddock in mariner’s oil. I will meet the morning headlong, he thought, butting my way through the day. I will catapult myself into the day, like a trebuchet weighed heavy with lead; drag moor stretched tight, my legs akimbo to the side-swing. His father would never have approved, as his life had been palliated with fish and gorse, yellow trawl line and cedar crates, and a double-clutch that wobbled beneath his father’s dowelled leg. He would have decried him for foolishness and half-wittedness, and wearing a fedora when a cap better suited his mien and temper. His father’s father, the man in the hat’s grandfather, wore a panama with a hatband stitched into the rattan, and smoked selfsame cigars that smelled of clove and allspice. He, the man in the hat’s father, daubed his knees with mercurochrome to prevent the skin from rubbing off on the dashboard, or creping the window, where his father’s cigar ashes built charcoal nests gout with fish scales. A cobbling of fish smell and creel, and his father’s arm slung out the window like a weather sock, his shirt sleeve flapping madly in the wind, a trail of ash boot blackening the stubble on his unshaven face. It seemed reasonable that he, the man in the hat, the grandson of the man in the hat’s father, should be born with a game leg, a reminder that genetics sees no reason to alter its course or regroup ex folio.