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.