The Dead Fish Museum (13 page)

“You owed me that squab,” Sandy said. She was drunker than the rest of us, or less capable of hiding it. “You owed me that squab for fucking Katrina.”

“Sandy,” my wife’s mother said.

“Ten years. Ten goddamn years.”

Sandy reached for one of the bottles of wine that had been left to breathe on the sideboard. She rose from her chair and said, “You all just go out and hunt and sit around and swap stories. You all think it’s funny.” She walked unsteadily around the table. “And no one’s ever hurt and it’s all just stories. Ha ha. Oh, yeah.” She bent as if to kiss her husband on the ear. “I hate guns,” she said. “I hate guns. I hate guns.” She straightened up and looked over the table as if waiting for applause, and when none came she filled her glass, and then poured the rest of the bottle of wine over her husband’s head. His knife and fork were poised above his plate, and he smiled patiently as the wine dripped down his face. When the bottle was empty, he put a piece of meat in his mouth and chewed it slowly, then swallowed.

No one said anything.

“I could tell some stories,” Sandy said.

“We can clean up tomorrow,” Lucy said.

“There’s others,” Sandy said.

Lucy insisted. “It’s bedtime for you.”

Sandy put on a red union suit and climbed the ladder into her bunk, and we tried to resume dinner, but soon she was leaning over the edge of the bed, shouting down at us.

“That’s the difference,” she said.

“Go to bed, dear,” Steve said.

“I want to tell you the difference!”

“Okay,” Steve said. “What’s the difference?”

“You all have stories,” Sandy said. “And we have secrets.”

“Good night,” Mr. Jansen said.

“That’s the difference,” she said.

Before bed, I walked across the Jansens’ drive and stood under the awning of the garage. It was snowing lightly. Firelight lit the cabin windows, and I could see my wife, standing at the kitchen sink, framed in an oval of frost where the glass was too warm to freeze. I fumbled with a book of matches as I watched her, this lovely woman carved like a cameo against the window. I was about to head back inside when Mr. Jansen joined me. “You want a light?” he asked, and suddenly the flame from a lighter flared in my face. He lit a cigarette and said, “What’s your problem with Steve?”

My father-in-law’s face was gray with stubble, as if the long day had aged him. He looked tired and uncertain, and I wondered how he’d react if he knew the truth about his friends. This old man could be shattered with a sentence, but in the blind I had begun to lose my grip on the clarity of my dreams. I could no longer imagine the shape of my revenge, the loss I was trying to recoup, the pain I was trying to stop—Caroline’s, or mine. I had been jarred by the end of dinner, sad for Steve, which surprised me, and sad for Sandy—especially Sandy, the way she lived with the rankling knowledge that she existed in her husband’s affections as a thin anecdote, an illustration of his mediocre griefs. I didn’t want to become the sort of man Steve was, and I honestly believed at that moment, as I watched the snow curl around the cabin windows, that I would never tell my wife’s story, that her secret, what little of it I knew, was safe with me.

Mr. Jansen watched his daughter in the window, her face blurring behind a cloud of steam as she poured boiled water into the sink and began washing the dinner dishes.

“It’s a tough haul, acting,” he said. “But she’s good, isn’t she?”

“Better than you know,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. I used to do some acting. That’s where her talent comes from. Someday she’ll be famous. She’ll be well known.”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

For a moment, he seemed to vacate his own face, leaving behind the hollowed eyes and nose and mouth of a mask. He stubbed his smoke in the snow and stumbled across the icy drive back to the cabin. A little while later, I came in and climbed the ladder to our bunk. I lay awake, listening to the subdued voices below. I remember only that my wife used the word “wanker,” and then for a while low whispers were skimming the surface of my sleep until, late in the night, toward dawn, really, I woke and found myself alone.

My heart was racing, pounding with a familiar fear—that Caroline was gone and I would never find her. I hurried down the ladder and opened the cabin door. The temperature had dropped and the snow had glazed over with a sheen of ice. The thin crust cracked underfoot with a distinct breaking sound. I walked along the trampled path, shortening my stride to fit my feet into the frozen mold of previous footprints, losing myself in concentration. At the outhouse, I stood for a moment, listening.

I called her name.

There was no response, and I panicked, as you might in a dream where all your assumptions are not exactly wrong but irrelevant. Far off in the woods, a coyote yipped and howled, and others answered. I leaned my head back and watched the breath stream from my mouth and disappear. The bare winter branches of the alders tangled above my head like a web. Then some black thing raced into the trees in front of me, and I jumped. It crashed through the underbrush and was gone.

The ground was pocked with fallen leaves and pine needles. Bare grass showed in the small circles of warmth beneath the sagging branches of fir trees. Everything that had moved in the woods over the past few days had left a record of its passing; the snow was marked with the tracks of hunters and birds and squirrels and deer and dogs, all the trails crisscrossing and weaving and intersecting, so that, if time were collapsed, you could imagine nothing but hapless collisions, a kind of antic vaudeville.

Caroline opened the outhouse door. She wore only her nightgown. Her feet were bare.

“You must be cold.”

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I am, but I’m going in.”

We looked back through the woods to the cabin. A rope of gray smoke curled up through the chimney, rising, it struck me, out of my simplistic imagination.

“You didn’t shoot that turkey,” she said.

“How do you know?”

She smiled and shook her head. “It’s just not you.”

“I guess,” I said, although I resented the comment, the assumed familiarity. “I’d like to leave early tomorrow.”

“I’m already packed,” she said. “I’ve got a big week coming up.”

I held my breath and waited for the scripted words.

“I got a part,” she said. “A detergent commercial, Monday. We’re shooting in Boston.”

She was a good liar. She knew to look me directly in the eye. You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you. So that she wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, I nodded, releasing her gaze.

“Who did?” she asked.

“Did what?”

“Shoot the turkey.”

“Lindy,” I said.

“I’m freezing,” my wife said. “I’m going in now.”

I grabbed her by the shoulder, turning her toward me. She tried to shrug free, and I dug my fingers into her shoulders. “Tell me,” I said, tightening my grip until I felt bone roll beneath my thumbs. Her teeth were chattering, and she bit a crease of white in her lower lip, trying to stop them. She was trembling, and her frailty in the cold enraged me. I pulled her in close and then abruptly pushed her away, shaking and shoving until she fell back, breaking through the crust of ice the way children do, making angels. The deep powder closed over her face and her mouth was stopped with snow, and she lay still, her dark eyes staring vacantly up. She tried to rise, flailing her arms, and then, dreamily, she stretched out her hand, reaching for mine.

I walked away, now trembling myself, but for some reason I turned, and when I did she called my name. I didn’t answer. She was standing by the outhouse, sunk to her knees in the broken drift, her hands clasping her shoulders so that she seemed to be embracing herself. Wind separated the ragged wisp of smoke from the chimney into several twining strands. Her long blond hair held the moonlight. Her nightgown billowed out, fluttering behind her, and she appeared to be hovering, almost drifting, as through water.

Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers and buttoned up to his throat. He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist. He bowed to Kirsten with a stagy sweep of his hand and entered the gas station. All business, he returned immediately with the attendant in tow, a kid of sixteen, seventeen.

“This here’s my wife, Kirsten,” Lance said.

Kirsten smiled.

“Pleased,” the kid said. He crawled under the chassis of the car and inspected the tailpipe.

“Your whole underside’s rusted to hell,” he said, standing up, wiping his hands clean of red dust. “I’m surprised you haven’t fallen through.”

“I don’t know much about cars,” Lance said.

“Well,” the kid said, his face bright with expertise, “you should replace everything, right up to the manifold. It’s a big job. It’ll take a day, and it’ll cost you.”

“You can do it?” Kirsten asked.

“Sure,” the kid said. “No problem.”

Lance squinted at the oval patch above the boy’s shirt pocket. “Randy,” he said, “what’s the least we can do?”

“My name’s Bill,”the kid said “Randy’s a guy used to work here.”

“So, Bill, what’s the least we can get away with?”

“Strap it up, I suppose. It’ll probably hold until you get where you’re going. Loud as hell, though.”

The kid looked at Kirsten. His clear blue eyes lingered on her chest.

“We represent a charity.” Lance handed the kid one of the printed pamphlets, watching his eyes skim back and forth as he took in the information. “Outside of immediate and necessary expenses, we don’t have much money.”

“Things are sure going to hell,” the kid said. He shook his head, returning the pamphlet to Lance.

“Seems that way,” Lance said.

The kid hurried into the station and brought back a coil of pipe strap. While he was under the car, Lance sat on the warm hood, listening to the wind rustle in the corn. Brown clouds of soil rose from the fields and gave the air a sepia tint. Harvest dust settled over the leaves of a few dying elms, over the windows of a cinder-block building, over the trailers in the courtyard across the street. One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.

“You got a phone?” Lance asked.

“Inside,” the kid said.

Lance looked down and saw the soles of the kid’s work boots beneath the car, a patch of dirty sock visible through the hole widening in one of them. He walked away, into the station.

The kid hadn’t charged them a cent, and they now sat at an intersection, trying to decide on a direction. The idle was rough. The car detonated like a bomb.

“Here’s your gum,” Lance said.

He emptied his front and back pockets and pulled the cuff of his pants up his leg and reached under the elastic band of his gym socks. Pink and green and blue and red packages of gum piled up in Kirsten’s lap. He pulled a candy bar from his shirt pocket and began sucking away at the chocolate coating.

“One pack would’ve been fine,” Kirsten said. “A gumball would have been fine.”

“Land of plenty, sweetheart,” he said.

Kirsten softened up a piece of pink gum and blew a large round bubble until it burst and the gum hung like flesh from her nose.

“Without money, we’re just trying to open a can of beans with a cucumber,” Lance said. “It doesn’t matter how hungry we are, how desirous of those beans we are—without the right tools, those beans might as well be on the moon.” Lance laughed to himself. “Moon beans,” he said.

Kirsten got out of the car. The day was turning cold, turning to night. She leaned through the open window, smelling the warm air that was wafting unpleasantly with the mixed scent of chocolate and diesel.