Along the way, I tried other Bajan specialties. I had what Bajans call pudding and souse, or at least the pudding half; souse does not have the appearance of something that is obviously edible. I had breadfruit chips. I had peas and rice. I had roti. At one of the food booths at the annual Holetown Festival, I asked for cou-cou, which I remembered vaguely as a sort of cornmeal pudding, accompanied by seacat, a dish I'd never heard of and couldn't picture from the description offered in a strong Bajan accent by the person who took my order. While I was waiting for my plate of cou-cou and seacat to arrive, it began to occur to me that I might be unable to tell which was which. That turned out not to be a problem: The cou-cou was the one that had no resemblance at all to a cat. It was delicious. I passed up the seacat on humanitarian grounds.
Although oistins is indeed a fishing port, there is nothing picturesque about it. The fish market is an open building of concrete that was put up by the government. Across a busy road there are stores that amount to a strip mall. Next to the fish market, a long parking lot between the beach and the road has maybe 20 fish stalls and a couple of bars and dozens of picnic tables. The stalls have names like Dora's Fish Corner and Fay's Strictly Bajan Cooking and Taste de Rainbow and Angel's de Grill Fish Corner—the latter two not an attempt at French but a nod toward the down-home, since the sounds like de in the dialect. We arrived at around seven o'clock, but there were already hundreds of people there. Most of them appeared to be tourists; apparently, Bajans tend to show up later in the evening. At least two sound systems were blaring different songs, and some people had started to dance, in one of the bars and outside. There was, I was relieved to find, nothing at all tidy about Oistins.
The line for grilled fish at the Fish Net was already long. Alice volunteered to stand in it, another one of our group staked out a picnic table, and the rest of us split up to acquire whatever else we needed—some fish cakes for hors d'oeuvres and several bottles of Banks, the local beer, and a couple of orders of macaroni pie and some grilled marlin at the booth we figured our New York friend had been trying to indicate on his map. I also got some fried dolphin at Dora's Fish Corner, just in case. When Alice finally got served, it took three or four people to help her carry all of the fish to our table. She'd gotten marlin, dolphin, shark, tuna, and swordfish—all of it just off the grill.
The grilled fish was excellent, but once we started passing it around, the conversation sounded something like this:
"This marlin is the best," Rob said.
"I think that's the swordfish you're eating," Em said.
"No," John said, pointing at his plate. "This is the swordfish."
"That's the shark," Alice said. "The shark is great. Unless that's the marlin."
I liked it all, but I found myself returning again and again to the fried dolphin. Could it be, I asked Alice, that fried fish is simply better than grilled fish? Alice said that the frying did indeed seem to seal in the fish's moisture and flavor. That sounded right. Otherwise, I'd have to face the possibility that what I'd been yearning for all those years was not the fish but the batter.
The fried dolphin confirmed what had been dawning on me during the previous days: Fish doesn't have to be fried on Baxters Road to be spectacular. During the week leading up to our Oistins pig-out, I'd eaten excellent fried fish at a couple of church dinners and at the Holetown Festival and at a stand at Six Men's Bay, where hawkers line a narrow strip of ground between the road and the beach to sell flying fish in lots of 50 or 100. In fact, it occurred to me, since vendors on the streets of New York prepare Italian sausages and taro cakes and tacos al carbon right in front of your eyes, why not fried fish? There happens to be a substantial Bajan community in Brooklyn. On mild evenings, the cousins of Sandra and Dora and Fay could easily cross over to Manhattan—say to the strip of land between the Hudson River and the West Side Highway, in the West Village, just blocks from my house—and set up stands with names like De Flatbush Corner. I can easily imagine the scene. Alice and I are standing there, famished, illuminated by the passing headlights of the traffic. Noticing how fresh the fish looks, Alice asks one of the fish fryers which stupefyingly expensive Manhattan fish market she uses as a supplier.
"That's my little secret, dearie" the woman says.
We order fried tuna with macaroni pie and take it back to our house, where we have our own table and chairs.
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