Key West Tales by John Hersey

Author:John Hersey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Forester’s LANGUR caused a bit of a flurry when he stole a RANG that Drum had made, but Forester sounded very firm, saying it was a long-tailed monkey with bushy eyebrows, and none of the others thought he would have the brass to invent two whole-cloth animals in such quick succession. The word went unchallenged, and a good thing too, because the dictionary would have made an additional monkey of the doubter.

Poor Drum has been cleaned out, but soon he gets his chance. Forester quite beautifully converts Paladin’s BEG (not Paladin’s kind of word to begin with, we would have thought) to BEGUM. Chalker, who seems to be catching something of Paladin’s virus of hostility, snatches BEGUM and, adding two letters, spells UMBRAGE. We now see from the aim and brilliance of Paladin’s eyebeams that he has a strong urge to take UMBRAGE, but in fact it is mild little Drum, with an H in his hand and an R from the pool, who slides the word his way and finally has something on his plate: HAMBURGER.

At this point, Paladin has a dangerous run of luck/skill. First he steals Chalker’s WRASSE and makes it SWEATERS; then he takes Forester’s monkey and makes it LANGUOR; and then he turns Forester’s PAT into PLAT. This last, he says with an assurance no one dares doubt, is a map of the sort a developer would draw, with land lots sketched on it.

Chalker, furious at the loss of his fish with its gift of ambiguity, points out to the others that Paladin must be stopped: he has seven words, just one short of victory.

Forester says to Chalker, “If you could spare a Marlboro, I might be able to do something.” Chalker gives him a cigarette and a light. In a few seconds, wrapped in a turban of blue smoke, Forester recaptures PLAT and makes it PLAIT, and then he robs Paladin of ROB and ducks back among his usual trees with yet another animal—namely, BOAR.

Here, then, is how things now look:

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