The Dead Fish Museum (12 page)

“That’s enough, Steve.”

“Hey,” Lindy said.

“And you,” Steve said to me. “You obviously got some kind of fucked-up agenda—”

“Look,” Lindy said.

“Where?” Steve said.

Moving against a low sea current of snow, a turkey, its narrow neck bent, came toward us, following the call. Lindy grabbed a spotting scope from one of the packs, adjusting the focus. “It’s got a beard and a half,” he said, passing me the scope. I slipped off my mittens. Steve worked the wooden slat in a new rhythm, as if mating the tempo to his excitement, locating the music of his desire. I looked through the scope and saw the turkey, its long straggling beard and chocolate-brown feathers and its beady black eyes, narrowed in a heavy-lidded squint against the blowing snow. I passed the scope to Mr. Jansen and he slid the gun into my hand.

We were all silent now, and even the smallest sounds—Lindy’s labored breathing or Mr. Jansen absently rubbing his thigh—seemed a gross and fatal intrusion. Steve let the call fall silent for a moment, and then resumed, and when he did we could hear for the first time the low guttural of the old tom’s response. The turkey drummed and strutted in what seemed to me like hesitation, and then, in a sudden dash, hurried straight toward the decoy.

The gun had a satisfying heft, a weight in my hand that was exactly right. I raised the stock to my shoulder and looked with one eye down the barrel, arranging the red wattle neatly within the notched iron sight. In this snow the dark-brown bird was exposed, and I had a vague sense of understanding the risk it took, the declaration it was making. The tom’s beard blew in the wind, and he began to circle the hen, spreading his wings and fanning his tail. The bird puffed up to three times its size. It was a terrific display, cocky and proud and blustery and, I thought, soon to be irrelevant; my father-in-law gave a nod and I drew a breath and my mind went blank and I let go of the breath as I squeezed the trigger and nothing, nothing at all, happened. I went cold and, confused, stopped sighting the bird. Lindy said, “The fucking safety.” He grabbed the gun, raised it to his shoulder, and fired. A deep blast echoed and unrolled, just as the tom seemed to know it had been fooled. Instantly, the fan of feathers folded and the turkey collapsed.

We rushed from the blind and gathered in a circle over the bird. The shot had been a good one; the turkey’s head was gone, and its neck was now hardly more than a hose filling a hole in the snow with blood. No one bent to touch it, as if this were the scene of a crime and we were waiting for some other, final authority to arrive. At last, Steve Rababy lit a cigarette and, covering his heart with his hat, gave the bird a brief eulogy.

“He was looking for pussy and now he’s dead. Let that be a lesson to you liars.”

Lindy offered a sentimental rephrasing, managing to work a trace of irony into his voice: “He died for love.”

“Dinner,” Mr. Jansen said, putting his vast appetite where it belonged, before all.

The shell had detonated inches from my ear. I worked a finger in it to clear the ringing.

Lindy said to me, “I had to take your shot.”

“I didn’t know about the safety,” I said.

“That’s my fault,” Mr. Jansen said.

“Let’s agree on a story,” Steve said.

“Fine by me,” Lindy said.

They looked at Mr. Jansen for ratification, and then he said, “Okay, we’ll say it was Daly.”

After the high of the hunt, the rest of the afternoon had the long, languid feel of a Sunday. People kept up a compensatory busyness. Mr. Jansen plucked the bird in the garage and brazed the remaining nubs with a blowtorch. He wore an orange watch cap with a comical fur ball dangling from a string, and drank steadily from a cache of beers he’d buried in a mound of snow. Sandy Rababy worked a wooden spoon in a big pink bowl, and Lindy sat on the couch reading the newspaper. Caroline and Lucy discussed acting careers, my wife’s in particular, although now and then my mother-in-law offered an item of gossip she’d gleaned from the tabloids, restating fantasy and rumor as if they were fact. I listened, not so much to the content as to the lilt in my wife’s voice, the English phrasing in some of her sentences, a strange cadence that rose up, seeming to free itself, now and then, from her flat Michigan accent. She had an actor’s gift for mimicry, a hunger for imitation, absorbing the speech of others unself-consciously, and on several occasions in the past her affairs had chillingly registered for me first in a new sound, a surprising word in her vocabulary, a foreign inflection in her voice.

Late in the afternoon, in guest mode, with no specific chore, I went for a walk. The trail I took led through a stand of white pine, ending at the lake behind the Jansens’ cabin. A diving raft was beached on the icy shore, and a string of rental boats was chained to a tree, each boat filled with snow, its gunwales whelmed by deep drifts. I felt as though I were seeing a sculptor’s rendition of my wife’s memories, a summer dream hacked into ice. The lake was fairly large, the surface sealed shut as though paraffin had been poured over it. I walked to the end of the dock. Below the ice, a blue sand pail and a yellow shovel from summer had sunk into the murk. Then I saw my wife out on the lake, perhaps half a mile from the dock, bundled in a shapeless red snowsuit. Her progress over the ice was painfully slow, as though she feared falling through, but then she was gone, and I heard a loon and tilted my good ear toward its call. A loon’s cry makes a haunting music on summer evenings, a tremolo you hear in the dark—eerie, because the two alternating notes mimic the sound of an echo, a call going out and then returning unanswered, a prayerful lament without a response. It was very late in the season to be migrating. The black bird was standing on the ice. Loons are ungainly, barely able to walk, achieving flight only after a long awkward struggle. In the air, they’re graceful and capable of flying sixty miles an hour. I watched until the bird rose up and the black speck, clearing the trees, dissolved like a drop of tint in the darkening sky.

Trussed and displayed, our bird seemed to have been sitting on the table for ages, waiting for a banquet to begin. On either side of it, tall white candles flickered in a crosscurrent of the cabin’s many drafts, sending uncertain shadows over the table and lending a layer of depth to the setting. McIntosh apples were mounded in a bowl lined with yellow and brown satin leaves, and a wicker cornucopia at the opposite end of the table had been filled with Indian corn, along with acorns and walnuts and filberts, gourds, sprigs of dried sweet william, figs, a pomegranate—the open mouth of it overflowing with the stuff of harvest. A basket of warm glazed buns was wrapped in a white cloth, and a rich, earthy stuffing, steaming like a bog, was kept hot in a glass-lidded serving dish. China and silver settings had been brought north from Detroit, and there were goblets for both wine and water. With the pipes broken, water was the scarcer commodity. But there was wine. Two bottles had been uncorked and were breathing on the table, and six more sat on a sideboard, above which, on the wall, a large ornately framed mirror, slightly canted, held the whole scene like a still life.

Mr. Jansen poured wine for everyone, and then, as people settled into their seats, stood at the head of the table, flipping open the brass latches of a wooden box and pulling his carving knife and fork from a bed of red crushed velvet. He scraped the knife against a hone, crossing them above his head like a swashbuckler, and then, asking for silence, cleanly cut a first slice of white meat and placed it ceremoniously on my plate. The others clapped and cheered and stomped their feet, and I felt that my face must have reddened. I looked into the mirror and was able to see, as if I were hovering above the table, everyone but myself.

“To Daly, after all these years,” Lucy said.

“Hear! Hear!” Steve and Lindy and Mr. Jansen all said together.

The toast’s concluding ring of crystal rang dully in my right ear, still numb from the shotgun blast. We all drank in my honor, and then drank again when Steve, winking my way, rose to salute the turkey I’d shot.

“I’m surprised,” Caroline said. “It doesn’t seem like you, Daly.”

A gravy boat came down the line, and I ladled a thick, brown, floury paste over everything.

“Yeah,” Lucy said.

“Well . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

Mr. Jansen jumped in. “Why not, Lucille? What, may I ask, is your idea of him?”

“I don’t know.”

Sandy answered. “More passive—not passive but, like, more a pacifist, I mean, a pacifist, not a killer.”

“Oh, no,” Lindy said. “Not the killer conversation again.”

“Hunting,” Steve said, cluing me in, somewhat vaguely, as he had with his politics. His assumption that we shared something unspoken only sharpened my resentment of him.

“You eat, you can’t complain,” Mr. Jansen said.

“But it’s true,” my wife said. “He’s a major bird-watcher. He keeps this stupid little book— I’m sorry, I don’t mean stupid. I mean . . . you know what I mean.” She paused, patting my forearm, and then, covering the awkward silence, continued. “You should have seen how excited he was the day he saw a pileated woodpecker in Central Park.”

“I’ll show you a pileated woodpecker,” Steve said.

“Oh, God, not that pecker conversation again,” Sandy yelled.

“What’s the point of that, anyway, Daly?” Mr. Jansen asked, steering the conversation off the subject of sex. For a pleasure-loving, hard-drinking barfly, my wife’s father was surprisingly prudish. His face was flushed. He’d tucked a corner of his napkin into his shirtfront, like a little boy. As the discussion jumped around, he swiveled his head from side to side, slashing his knife and fork in the air, as if he were trying to stab a word out of the conversation and eat it. “And what’s a pileated? That needs to be cleared up.”

“What’s the point of what?” I asked stiffly. I was seated at the far end of the table, with everyone to my right, and I couldn’t keep pace with the conversation. I was beginning to think my eardrum was punctured. A warm fluid seemed to be leaking from it.

“Watching birds.” Between the sound of his booming voice and my comprehension, there was a distracting lag, and the only replies I could make were serious and plodding, out of sync with the rising hilarity.

“A pileum,” I said, “is the top of a bird’s head.”

“Don’t all birds have tops to their heads?”

“Some birds are topless,” Lindy said.

All this badinage was just crashing and piling up in front of me. It seemed really cornball and canned, but I couldn’t quite catch the tone and join in. I reached for my water and held the glass in my palm, cool against my skin.

“Come again,” I said.

“What?” Lindy said. “Huh?”

“What—” I began, and then everyone at the table started in.

“What? What?”

“What? What? What?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t hear.”

“Ah,” Steve said, “from the shotgun.”

“Just in my right,” I said.

Steve stood beside me with his plate and utensils in hand.

“Trade places,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“No, come on. You still got one good ear, right? Let’s switch. It’s no problem.”

Stubbornly insisting on my seat would only have caused a scene at this point.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to hear,” Lindy said.

Sandy laughed. “Lord knows, he’s better off.”

“Switch over,” Mr. Jansen said with a preemptive wave of his knife. By the time I was seated again, the entire conversation had moved on. Caroline was playing with her food, and I wondered what she was thinking. The silver earrings SJ had given her caught the firelight and flickered as she brought her hand to her lips. Something dropped on her plate, tinging loudly enough for all of us to hear.

Her mother said, “I got one, too.”

“Lead?” Mr. Jansen asked.

“Me, too. That’s lead?” Sandy turned to her husband. “Isn’t lead illegal? That’s what you told me.”

“Baiting turkey itself is illegal,” Steve said. “So whether or not we used a little lead didn’t seem to matter much.” Sandy looked at me, and I made an exaggerated shrug, absolving myself of any accessory role in the crime.

“There’s nothing really wrong with it,” Steve said.

“Except it causes brain damage,” Lucy said.

“Well, don’t swallow any,” Steve said.

Lucy said, “But won’t it taint the meat around it, too?”

Sandy said, “The whole bird is poisoned!”

“Goddam,” Steve said.

“I don’t like being reminded of this dead thing that was alive,” Sandy said. “That’s my other point. I for sure don’t like biting into the bullets that killed it during dinner.”

“Those aren’t bullets, for fuck’s sake,” her husband said. “It’s just shot, number-six shot.”

Sandy said, “I like to make believe my turkey was grown on a tree or bush.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t,” Mr. Jansen said.

“You liked that fancy squab in Paris plenty,” Steve said to his wife, working the hypocrisy angle that always seemed to crop up at the end of these discussions. It was as if the interminable debate—men on one side, women on the other—would end only when it swallowed its own tail.