Free Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly by James M. Cain

pulled out I figured he was done. I took him out and put him in a bowl. She reached for the pot to go out and empty it. I almost fainted. “Let that water alone. Leave it there, right where it is.”
    I cut off his head, opened his belly, and cleaned him. I saved his liver, and was plenty careful how I dissected off the gall bladder. Then I skinned him and took off the meat. The best of it was along the back and down the tail, but I carved the legs too, so as not to miss anything. The meat and liver I stowed in a little bowl. The guts I threw out. The bones I put back in the pot and fed up the fire again, so it began to simmer. “You better make yourself comfortable. It’s a long time before dinner.”
    I aimed to boil about half that water away. It began to get dark and we lit the candles and watched and smelled. I washed off three eggs and dropped them in. When they were hard I fished them out, peeled them, and laid them in a bowl with the meat. She pounded up some coffee. After a long time that soup was almost done. Then something popped into my mind. “Listen, we got any paprika?”
    “No, no paprika.”
    “Gee, we ought to have paprika.”
    “Pepper, salt, yes. No paprika.”
    “Go out there to the car and have a look. This stuff needs paprika, and it would be a shame not to have it just because we didn’t look.”
    “I go, but is no paprika.”
    She took a candle and went back to the car. I didn’t need any paprika. But I wanted to get rid of her so I could pull off something without any more talk about the sacrilegio . I took a candle and a machete and went back of the altar. There were four or five closets back there, and a couple of them were locked. I slipped the machete blade into one and snapped the lock. It was full of firecrackers for high mass and stuff for the Christmas crèche. I broke into another one. There it was, what I was looking for, six or eight bottles of sacramental wine. I grabbeda bottle, closed the closets, and came back. I dug the cork out with my knife and tasted it. It was A-l sherry. I socked about a pint in the pot and hid the bottle. As soon as it heated up a little I lifted the pot off, dropped the meat in, sliced up the eggs, and put them in. I sprinkled in some salt and a little pepper.
    She came back. “Is no paprika.”
    “It’s all right. We don’t need it. Dinner’s ready.”
    We dug in.
    Well, brother, you can have your Terrapin Maryland. It’s a noble dish, but it’s not Iguana John Howard Sharp. The meat is a little like chicken, a little like frog-legs, and a little like muskrat, but it’s tenderer than any of them. The soup is one of the great soups of the world, and I’ve eaten Marseilles bouillabaisse, New Orleans crayfish bisque, clear green turtle, thick green turtle, and all kinds of other turtle there are. I think it was still better that we had to drink it out of bowls, and fish the meat out with a knife. It’s gelatinous, and flooding up over your lips, it makes them sticky, so you can feel it as well as taste it. She drank hers stretched out on her belly, and after a while it occurred to me that if I got down and stuck my mouth up against hers, we would be stuck, so we experimented on that for a while. Then we drank some more soup, ate some more meat, and made the coffee. While we were drinking that she started to laugh. “Yeh? And what’s so funny?”
    “I feel—how you say? Dronk?”
    “Probably born that way.”
    “I think you find wine. I think you steal wine, put in iguana.”
    “Well?”
    “I like, very much.”
    “Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
    So I got out the bottle, and we began to swig it out of the neck. Pretty soon we were smearing her nipples with soup, to see if they would stick. Then after a while we just lay there, and laughed.
    “You like the dinner?”
    “It was lovely dinner, gracias.”
    “You like the cook?”
    “Yes.… Yes.… Yes. Very fonny cook.”
    God knows what time it was when we got up from there and