Tom had inherited the small fishing boat from his father, now dead for about twenty years. It puttered up to the docks noisily despite having put the engine into low gear. Customers at the riverside glared and some children covered their ears as he approached, so he cut the engine all the way off and got out an oar. The sudden drop in speed resulted in his being enveloped in a cloud of the engine’s exhaust as he paddled in, which was thick with the smell of burning oil and partly helped by the makeshift awning he’d added to the boat for shade.
After mooring and shedding his life vest he took his time walking up the dock to the small grocery and café nestled against the shore. On the way, a parent of one of those children who’d covered their ears called to him from a table and chair of wrought iron, asking him when he was going to get a new engine. Tom could only shrug and pretend he intended to as soon as possible. He paid notice to the small creature protruding from her nose and left ear as it wiggled it’s way through what seemed a spacious thoroughfare, extending onto her face and down her neck.
Leaving her to do his shopping, Tom stopped for just a minute or two, ostensibly to smoke a cigarette. What he was doing however, was watching a young woman through the windows of the shop. Tom made sure never to stare directly at her, aware of what a middle-aged man staring at a young woman may appear to be. Even still, he genuinely appreciated the way the young woman helped out around the store and café, and watching her help so happily was one of his favorite things to do.
She was the daughter of the proprietor, someone Tom had originally thought to be a frank and rude man. Despite being widowed, he seemed to have raised a kind and thoughtful young woman. This led Tom to assume his candor was born from an honest place of high standards. After watching for a while he finished his cigarette and took a seat at the bar inside. Tom produced a stack of rolled paper from his cargo pockets. It was spotted with wet places on one side where surf or errant wake had managed to fall into the boat around Tom’s shorts. It was also crumpled slightly because he had been sitting on it to keep it in place. After smoothing it a bit and whipping it through the air in a failed attempt to make it marginally more dry, he set the stack of papers on the counter as payment for his meal.
It was an arrangement posted on the door that allowed Tom to pay this way, which read:
“We don’t serve beggars (but we trade food for just about anything).”
‘Just about anything’ was actually not quite accurate; the stern old man had odd values about work and helping others, and he would reject anything that didn’t meet his standards for a "material good."
When Tom saw the sign for the first time he’d attempted orating classic literature, which worked until it became clear large sections of the recitations were paraphrased from an incomplete memory. Afterwards, Tom had stolen a copy of One Thousand and One Nights from a nearby community library and attempted to read from it, thinking the owner had a penchant for old stories and might let him leech food for as long as a book would take to read. He’d started to read it at the counter aloud for the owner to hear, but before he’d finished the first paragraph the book had been grabbed and flung out into the water.
What had finally worked was a journal; while walking through a park he’d seen an abandoned spiral bound journal of cheap paper, containing someone’s personal diary. Tom had entered the restaurant, opened to the first page of the journal, and pushed it towards the severe cook. The man turned through a few pages (as if to inspect it was written all through), recognized it for a journal, and handed it back with another customer’s discarded eggs and hash browns saying “I prefer poetry.”
Those were the only words he’d ever heard the man say to him directly, but from that point on he’d bring in a poem or short story. Each time the work was inspected thoroughly and judged by way of breakfast, and the message was clear; the better quality the writing, the better breakfast. The proprietor considered the literature to be his after the transaction was complete, and, regardless of the work’s quality, once he was done reading any piece he would toss it in the small wood-fire grill as fuel. This strange ritual proceeded to take place every following morning and night, providing Tom with a breakfast, a dinner, and the opportunity to see a young person enjoying their part-time life of family-run food-service. If there is such a thing as a positive value, these set of interactions were a positive value in Tom’s life.
Today, Tom had gotten a bit fast and loose with his paper reserves and had written a rather large chapter to an episodic he’d been fleshing out between poems. Secretly he hoped one day his writing would inspire the man to spare the paper from the flames, and sometimes invested himself a bit too much in the working of a story. Today was no different; the paper was consumed like the others, but not before the cook had found enough time between other customers to read the entire thing. The tradeoff for working harder at his writing, Tom whined to himself, was that he had to wait longer to eat.
Eventually he was served two scrambled eggs that had been sent back by another customer for being overdone and dry, a small but thick slice of cold ham, and a half glass of orange juice from concentrate. Tom sighed inwardly and ate as the remains of the paper burned into dust with the rest of the fuel. While he ate he noticed the ham was pulsing a bit. This didn’t fully unsettle him, but he did hurry to finish the meal out of respect for the ham. He knew it would complain inside him until it was too digested to exist any more, and he tried making that process as quick as he could most of the time. Finished, he nodded to the owner in thanks, walked down the docks, got into his boat, and left the dock-side eatery for the open waters of the river.