An Ear to the Ground

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I had this story from Al Barney, a beer-sodden beachcomber who haunts the waterfront of Paradise City, always on the lookout for a sucker to buy him a beer.

At one time, so I was told, Al Barney was the best skin diver on the coast. He had picked up a lot of money teaching diving, spearing sharks and laying the wives of the rich tourists who infest this coast in the season. But the beer rained him.

Al was an enormous man, weighing around three hundred and fifty pounds with a beer belly on him that rested like a balloon on his knees when he sat down. He was around sixty-three years of age, burned mahogany brown by years in the sun, balding, with an egg-shaped head, steely, small green eyes, a mouth that reminded me of a Red Snapper and a flat nose that spread half over his face from a punch he had had — so he told me — from an unreasonable husband who had caught him in the hay with his wife.

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