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Western Biological was right across the street and
facing the vacant lot. Lee Chong's grocery was on its catty-corner right
and Dora's Bear Flag Restaurant was on its catty-corner left. Western Biological
deals in strange and beautiful wares. It sells the lovely animals of the
sea, the sponges, tunicates, anemones, the stars and buttlestars, and sun
stars, the bivalves, barnacles, the worm and shells, the fabulous and multiform
little brothers, the living moving flowers of the sea, nudibranchs and tectibranchs,
the spiked and nobbed and needy urchins, the crabs and demi-crabs, the little
dragoons, the snapping shrimps, and ghost shrimps so transparent that they
hardly throw a shadow. And Western Biological sells bugs and snails and
spiders, and rattlesnakes, and rats, and honey bees and gila monsters. These
are all for sale. Then there are little unborn humans, some whole and others
sliced thin and mounted on slides. And for students there are sharks with
the blood drained out and yellow and blue colour substituted in veins and
arteries, so that you may follow the systems with a scalpel. And there are
cats with coloured veins and arteries, and frogs the same. You can order
anything living from Western Biological and sooner or later you will get
it.
It is a low building facing the street. The basement is
the store-room with shelves, shelves clear to the ceiling, loaded with jars
of preserved animals. And in the basement is a sink and instrument for embalming
and for injecting. Then you go through the backyard to a covered shed on
piles over the ocean and here are the tanks for the larger animals, the
sharks and rays and octopi, each in their concrete tanks. There is a stairway
up the front of the building and a door that opens into an office where
there is a desk piled high with unopened mail, filing cabinets, and a safe
with the door propped open. Once the safe got locked by mistake and no one
knew the combination. And in the safe was an open can of sardines and a
piece of Roquefort cheese. Before the combination could be sent by the maker
of the lock, there was trouble in the safe. It was then that Doc devised
a method for getting revenge on a bank if anyone should ever want to. "Rent
a safety-deposit box," he said, "then deposit in it one whole
fresh salmon and go away for six months." After the trouble with the
safe, it was not permitted to keep food there any more. It is kept in the
filing cabinets. Behind the office is a room where in aquaria are many living
animals; there are also the microscopes and the slides and the drug cabinets,
the cases of laboratory glass, the work benches and little motors, the chemicals.
From this room comes smells--formaline, and dry starfish, and sea water
and menthol, carbolic acid and acetic acid, smell of brown wrapping-paper
and straw and rope, smell of chloroform and ether, smell of ozone from the
motors, smell of fine steel and thin lubricant from the microscopes, smell
of banana oil and rubber tubing, smell of drying wool socks and boots, sharp
pungent smell of rattlesnakes, and musty frightening smell of rats. And
through the back door comes the smell of kelp and barnacles when the tide
is out and the smell of salt and spray when the tide is in.
To the left the office opens into a library. The walls
are bookcases to the ceiling, boxes of pamphlets and separates, books of
all kinds , dictionaries, encyclopaedias, poetry, plays. A great phonograph
stands against the wall with hundreds of records lined up beside it. Under
the window is a redwood bed and on the walls and to the bookcases are pinned
reproductions of Daumiers, and Graham, Titian, and Leonardo and Picasso,
Dali and George Grosz, pinned here and there at eye level, so that you can
look at them if you want to. There are chairs and benches in this little
room and of course the bed. As many as forty people have been here at one
time.
Chapter V of "Cannery Row" |
