The Dead Fish Museum (16 page)

“You’d be surprised how many around here get into drugs,” she said.

“I’m not sure it would surprise me, ma’am,” Kirsten said. “Everywhere I go I hear stories from people who have been touched by this thing.” She sipped her coffee. “This tragedy.”

“I worry about this little one,” the woman said.

Kirsten bit a corner of a Pop-Tart, feeling the hot cinnamon glaze on the roof of her mouth. On the mantel above the fireplace was a collection of ceramic owls. They stared steadily into the room with eyes so wide open and unblinking they looked blind.

“My owls,” the woman said. “I don’t know how it is you start collecting. It just happens innocently, you think one is cute, then all of a sudden”—she waved her hand in the air—“you’ve got dumb owls all over the place.”

“Keep them busy,” Kirsten said.

“What’s that?”

“April, here—and all kids—if they have something to do they won’t have time for drugs.”

“That makes sense.”

“People think of addicts as these lazy, do-nothing sort of people, but really it’s a full-time job. Most of them work at it harder than these farmers I seen in these cornfields. It takes their entire life.”

The woman cupped her hands over her knees, then clasped them together. Either her wedding band was on the sill above the kitchen sink, left there after some chore, or she was divorced. Kirsten felt a rush of new words rise in her throat.

“You know what it’s like to be pregnant, so I don’t have to tell you what it means to have that life in you—and then just imagine feeding your baby poison all day. A baby like that one on the pamphlet, if they’re born at all, they just cry all the time. You can’t get them quiet.”

It was a chaotic purse, and the woman had to burrow down through wadded Kleenex, key rings, and doll clothes before she pulled out a checkbook.

“I never knew my own mother,” Kirsten said.

The woman’s pen was poised above the check, but she set it down to look at Kirsten. It was a look Kirsten had lived with all her life and felt ashamed of, seeing something so small and frail and helpless at the heart of other people’s sympathy. They meant well and it meant nothing.

“And I never really get away from this feeling,” she went on. “Sadness, you could call it. My mother—my true mother, I mean—is out there, but I’ll never know her. I sometimes get a feeling like she’s watching me in the dark, but that’s about it. You know that sense you get, where you think something’s there and you turn around and, you know, there’s nothing there?”

The woman did, she did, with nods of encouragement.

“When I think about it, though, I’m better off than these babies. Just look at that little one’s dark face, his shriveled head. He looks drowned.”

Then the woman filled in an amount and signed her name.

“I wish I was invisible,” Lance said. “I’d just walk into these houses and they wouldn’t even know.”

“And do what?”

“Right now I’d make some toast.”

“Hungry?”

“A little.”

“Wouldn’t they see the bread floating around?”

“Invisible bread.”

“You get that idea from your cowboy brain?”

“Don’t make fun of the cowboy brain,” Lance said. “It got us out of that goddamn detention. It got us over that fence.”

“We’re ghosts to these people, Lance. They already don’t see us.”

“I’d like to kill someone. That’d make them see. They’d believe then.”

“You’re just talking,” Kirsten said. “I think I’m getting my period.”

“Great,” Lance said. “All we need.”

“Fuck you,” Kirsten said. “I haven’t had a period in two years.”

She turned over one of the pamphlets.

Seeing the baby’s inconsolable face reminded Kirsten of a song her foster mother used to sing, but while the melody remained, the lyrics were dead to her, because merely thinking of this mother meant collaborating in a lie and everything in it was somehow corrupted. Words to songs never returned to Kirsten readily—she had to think hard just to recall a Christmas carol.

“Little babies like that one,” she said, “they’ll scream all the time. Their little hands are jittery. They have terrible fits where they keep squeezing their hands real tight and grabbing the air. They can’t stop shaking, but when you try to hold them they turn stiff as a board.”

“To be perfectly honest,” Lance said, “I don’t really give a fuck about those babies.”

“I know.”

“We just need money for gas.”

“I know.”

At the next house, a man answered, and immediately Kirsten smelled the sour odor of settledness through the screen door. A television played in the cramped front room. A spider plant sat on a stereo speaker, still in its plastic pot, the soil dry and hard yet with a pale shoot thriving, growing down to the shag carpet, as if it might find a way to root in the fibers. Pans in the sink he scrubbed as needed, coffee grounds and macaroni on the floor, pennies and dimes caught in clots of dog hair. A somber, unmoving light in rooms where the windows were never opened, the curtains always closed.

“Some got to be addicted,” the man said, after Kirsten explained herself. “They never go away.”

“That may be so,” Kirsten admitted. “I’ve thought the same myself.”

He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

“You want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

The blue air around the television was its own atmosphere, and when the man sank back in his chair it was as if he’d gone there to breathe. He looked at Kirsten’s breasts, then down at her feet, and finally at his own hands, which were clumsy and large, curling tightly around the bottle.

“Where you staying?”

“About a mile out of town,” she said. She handed the man a pamphlet. “I’ve had that same despair you’re talking about. When you feel nothing’s going to change enough to wipe out all the problem.”

“Bunch of niggers, mostly.”

“Did you look at the one there?”

“Tar baby.”

“That kid’s white,” Kirsten said. She had no idea if this was true.

He didn’t say anything.

Kirsten nodded at the television. “Who’s winning?”

“Who’s playing?” the man said. He was using a coat hanger for an aerial. “The blue ones, I guess.”

“But isn’t it enough? If you can save one baby from this life of hell, isn’t that okay?”

“Doesn’t matter much,” he said. “In the scheme of things.”

“It would mean everything,” Kirsten said, “if it was you.”

“But,” he said, “it’s not me.” The blur of the television interested him more. “Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where’d you say you were staying?”

“With these old people, Effie, Effie and his wife, Gen.”

He dropped the pamphlet on the floor and pushed himself out of the chair. He swayed and stared dumbly into a wallet full of receipts.

“Well, tonight you say hi to them for me. You tell Effie and Gen Johnny says hi.” When he looked at Kirsten, his eyes had gone neutral. “You tell them I’m sorry, and you give them this,” he said, leaning toward Kirsten. Then his lips were gone from her mouth, and he was handing her the last five from his billfold.

When they returned to the farmhouse, their car was sitting in the drive and dinner was cooking. The kitchen windows were steamed, and the moist air, warm and fragrant, settled like a perfume on Kirsten’s skin. She ran hot water and lathered her hands. The ball of soap was as smooth and worn as an old bone, a mosaic assembled from remnants, small pieces thriftily saved and then softened and clumped together. Everything in the house seemed to have that same quality, softened by the touch of hands—hands that had rubbed the brass plating from the doorknobs, hands that had worn the painted handles of spoons and ladles down to bare wood. Kirsten rinsed the soap away, and Gen offered her a towel.

“You don’t have any other clothes, do you?” the old woman asked.

“No, ma’am,” she said.

“Let’s go pull some stuff out of the attic,” Gen said. She drew a level line from the top of her head to the top of Kirsten’s.” We’re about the same size, I figure. You won’t win any fashion awards—it’s just old funny things, some wool pants, a jacket, a couple cardigan sweaters. But you aren’t dressed for Iowa.” She pronounced it “Ioway.”

“I’d appreciate that, ma’am.”

“Doing the kind of work you do, I don’t imagine you can afford the extras,” the old woman said, as they climbed a set of steps off the upstairs hallway. “But in this country we don’t consider a coat extra.”

She tugged a string and a bare bulb lit the attic. In the sudden glare, the room seemed at first to house nothing but a jumble of shadows.” I’ve held on to everything,” she said.

“I met a man in town today,” Kirsten said. “He said he knew you and Effie.”

The old woman slit the tape on a box with her thumbnail and handed Kirsten a sweater that smelled faintly of dust and camphor.

Kirsten held the woman still and kissed her on the lips. “He said to give you that.”

“Johnny?” Gen said. “He won’t come out here.”

Kirsten slipped into the sweater, a cardigan with black leather buttons like a baby’s withered navel, a hardened ball of Kleenex in the pocket. She had never known a world of such economy, where things were saved and a room in a house could be set aside for storage. This woman had lived to pass her things on, but now there was no one to take them.

“It was a combine,” Kirsten said. “It was this time of year.”

The old woman nodded.

“Your little girl doesn’t know she’s dead. She’s still out there.”

“How do I know you know all this?”

“I saw her,” Kirsten said. “And when me and Lance come to the door last night we never knocked.”

From a rack against the wall, the old woman took down a wool overcoat.

“You were waiting up for her. You wait every year.”

Gen stepped in front of a cheval mirror and held the coat against her body, modeling it for a moment.

“It wasn’t Effie’s fault,” Kristen said.

“He feels the guilt all the same,” the old woman said.

“He had to.”

“Had to what?”

“Live,” Kristen said. “He had to live his life, just the same as me and you.”

They set four places with the good plates and silver and flowery napkins in the dining room. There was a ham pricked with cloves and ringed around with pineapple and black olives and green beans and salad and bread. Effie fussed over his wife as if he’d never had dinner with her, passing dishes and offering extra helpings, which she refused each time, saying, “Help yourself.” Kirsten eventually caught on, seeing that this solicitude was the old man’s sly way of offering a compliment and serving himself a little more at the same time. The food was good; it all glistened, the juices from the ham, the butter running off the beans, the oil on the salad. Gen spent most of the meal up on her feet, offering, spooning, heating, filling.

Effie’s conversation made a wide, wandering tour of the land. Jesse James used to hide out in this country, he said. Then he was talking about no-till planting, soil that wasn’t disked or plowed.

“You got corn in just about everything,” he said. “In gasoline, sparkplugs, crayons, toothpaste, disposable diapers—”

“No, really?” Lance said.

“You bet,” the old man went on, “and paint, beer, whiskey. You name it.” He said one out of four hogs produced in this country came from Iowa—which he, too, pronounced “Ioway.” Hogs till Hell wouldn’t have it, he said, thundering the words. The topic of hogs led to a story he’d read about Fidel Castro roasting a pig in a hotel room in New York, and then he told about their travels, a trip to Ireland and another to Hawaii, which he pronounced “Hoy.”

After dinner, there was pumpkin pie—prize-winning, Effie announced, as the pie tin took center stage on the cleared table.

It was delicious, the filling warm with a buttery vanishing feel on Kirsten’s tongue. “What’s in it?” she asked.

“Oh,” Gen said, “cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla—but real pumpkin’s the key.” Gen, satisfied with the satisfaction at her table, smiled at her husband, who gravely put down his fork.

“When you come,” Effie said, “Momma said you mentioned our little girl.”

The old man looked across the table at his wife, checking her eyes, or the turn of her mouth, for subtle signs, searching for agreement. It was as if he found what he needed in the space between them, and spoke aloud only to verify that it was there, that someone else had seen it.

“Our little girl,” Gen said.

“Your daughter,” Kirsten said.

“I wondered if you were an old friend. Maybe from school. Most of them have grown and gone away. I used to see—it would have been so long ago, but . . .” He trailed off, his pale blue eyes sparkling in the weak, splintered light of the chandelier.

Lance said, “Kirsten’s been to the other side. She’s seen it.”