The Dead Fish Museum (19 page)

Rigo opened a beer and lofted the bottle above his head; it shone like a torch, golden in the dim light, as bubbles streamed to the surface. The outside world might have vanished, the warehouse was so suddenly quiet.

“You might be part nigger,” RB said to Rigo.

Rigo sipped his beer; his face was freckled with paint.

“Spooky, don’t he look like a nigger?”

RB’s initials stood for nothing. “Just RB,” he’d explained, when Ramage asked about his name, “straight up southern.”

“Drink your beer,” Ramage said.

“Look at his nappy head,” RB continued. “Nigger hair. Me and Rigo could be brothers.”

“I am Salvadoran,” Rigo said, a little cold, prideful.

“Used to be, but now you in the U.S. of A., Jack.”

“Drink,” Ramage said.

RB drank, then asked, “When they start shooting?”

“Call’s for seven tomorrow morning,” Ramage said.

“You’re all invited to my debut,” RB said. “Those ladies are fine. They know all sorts a special tricks, too. You get with one of them, you’ll be spoiled for life. I had this one old girlfriend that used to call me the wonder-log.”

“Referring to what?”

“Hell, Spooky—”

“Why do you keep calling me Spooky?”

RB shrugged. “Just do,” he said. “It’s from that cartoon.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Ramage said.

The head full of paint fumes, the numbness in the arms, the reluctant knees, the rigid back—the body’s memory: Ramage felt this, and no one else moved from the bed, as if the day’s work had brought them to a poise. Outside, there was nothing but the separateness of feeling used and spent, of rundown bones and sore muscles and another day and at the narrow end of it a tub of tepid water that would instantly turn tea-brown and drain away, leaving a ring of crud around the porcelain. His first day of work in two months had exhausted Ramage; he was spacey with fatigue; they all were, and for a moment Ramage wished that they might rest and sleep and dream together on this bed until morning.

Back at the motel, Ramage washed his hands and face at the sink, listening to the baby cry next door. He sponged his chest and armpits and put on his clean shirt.

Standing outside, he heard the baby, still crying, and knocked on the door. No one answered. He pushed the door open slowly and saw the baby alone in the room; a crib had been squeezed between the bed and the sliding doors of a closet. Clothes were scattered on the floor, over the nightstand, flung across the TV screen. An empty bottle of strawberry wine with its cap resealed lay in the wastebasket along with a condom wrapper and a plastic straw and a nest of black hair someone had cleaned from a comb. A calendar hung on the wall, but no one had bothered to turn the page since the end of summer.

The baby shrieked. Its tiny hands reached through the slatted cage of the crib, opening and then closing into tight fists. Ramage saw the pacifier that had fallen to the carpet. He picked it up and rinsed the hair and grit away under the faucet. He set the pacifier in the baby’s hand and the baby pitched it back to the floor. Ramage cleaned it off again, and this time stuck the rubber nipple in the baby’s mouth. The baby’s eyes softened and it sucked contentedly. The baby was maybe a year old. It was naked. It wasn’t even diapered. Ramage touched it; he pressed his thumb into the soft skin.

Outside, he saw Rigo working his way up from the beach, over the sand, past a lifeguard station that had been knocked down for the winter. He waited for him to cross the highway.

“Buy you a drink?” Ramage asked.

“Certainly,” Rigo said.

Certainly: it was one of Rigo’s words, a magniloquence in his otherwise lean vocabulary. Ramage ushered him into the bar. Sawdust had been strewn about the floor; oyster shells broke like bones underfoot. A few other people sat at the scattered tables. Ramage saw a man and a woman he thought might be his neighbors at the motel. They were bending into the yellow light of the jukebox, looking for a good song.

Ramage saluted Rigo with a nod of his bottle and they drank down their beers in unison.

“RB, he talk too much,” Rigo said.

“That’s just RB,” Ramage said. “He’s having fun, he’s goofing.”

“In Jersey City,” Rigo said, “outside my apartment, there is a telephone. All night, the niggers out there. They play their music, they talk their talk. I call police—nothing.”

Rigo finished his beer, ordered another round. Ramage insisted on paying; he considered it part of his position as foreman of the crew, a way of building esprit de corps.

“So I take care of business myself, as a man must,” Rigo said. “I chase them with a baseball bat. I chase them every night. They always come back.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Ramage said.

“RB is nigger, not me.”

“Don’t call him that. Not to his face, anyway.”

“He calls that to us, to our face.”

“What were you doing on the beach?” Ramage asked, changing the subject, although he knew the answer: Rigo was sleeping down there, saving the expense of a motel room, pocketing the modest per diem. RB’s riff on refugees had not been far off. Rigo wired a remittance every month to an uncle exiled in Honduras.

“I love the ocean, Ramage.” Rigo looked at his dirty hands, a little embarrassed. Then he said, “When I first come with my family to Jersey City, every day I fish. Every morning I go with my bucket to the park where I have a view of the
Estatua—Estatua de la Libertad.
They are cleaning her, she is—all everywhere—they put—”

“Scaffolding?” Ramage guessed.

“Scaffolding,” Rigo repeated, reciting the lesson. “I catch many fish. I bring fish home I do not know the name of.” Rigo broke off. He seemed bewildered, recalling the beginning, before names. “My wife, she no say the word ‘refrigerator’ so good. She just learning. She say it, ‘the dead fish museum.’ ”

“I like that,” Ramage said. “The dead fish museum.”

“We can no eat all that I catch.”

“I’m surprised you ate any of it,” Ramage said.

The bar door opened, and the blond star took up a stool near the register. Her drink came in a goblet and the bartender had produced a faded paper parasol, cocked over the frosted rim of the glass. It was a summer garnish, but in the dim slow bar the parasol failed to add much in the way of gaiety.

“In El Salvador,” Rigo said, “you go to the beach with the children, Sunday, you stay all day. The sand is clean and white and the man, he comes with
las ostras
for you.
Limón,
tabasco, pepper: you go down like nothing.”

“I can taste them now,” Ramage said.

“Certainly,” Rigo said. “Here, the beach is garbage. Everything wash up. Tonight, I find a door to the house. A door to the man’s house, Ramish.”

Rigo held his hands above the bar, staring into the empty space they created. He seemed to be picturing the thing his words had just described, trying to put his hands around the hallucination of it; they tensed with frustration; he could not hold the thing, and the picture in his mind floated away. Rigo grabbed his beer and finished it off. He ordered another.

“I no eat on the beach here,” he said. “But the ocean, she is the ocean still.”

They crossed the necks of their bottles together in a sloppy swashbuckling salute, and Ramage drank with the image of blue water, of open sea, before him. The soreness deep in his body had risen into a pleasant hum on the surface of his skin. He felt loose and shallow.

“I do not know what kind of movie this is,” Rigo said.

“No,” Ramage said. “I didn’t tell you.”

“Now I know,” Rigo said.

Rigo drank his whiskey and spun the empty shot glass like a top on a tilted axis. The glass wobbled violently; it stopped and he spun it again. He seemed torn between maintaining dignity and getting trashed. Each word was the end of a very long journey. Every sentence jeopardized his loyalties.

“I am surprise how things are,” Rigo said.

Ramage said, “It’s only three days.”

“Salvador,” Rigo said, raising his bottle.

“Salvador,” Ramage said.

They toasted each other, the bar, the empty tables, the jukebox that had fallen silent.

“Salvador,” Rigo said again.

Another drink, and another after that: Ramage couldn’t keep pace.

“I no choice. I must go away or die. I die, my family die. I come here. I don’t know to what. To what, Ramish—
to what
?”

“You going back someday?” Ramage asked.

“They rape the women with rats,” Rigo said. “A man from my town has a nail”—he pounded the air—“in his head, his—” and with a balled fist he knocked on his forehead.

“His skull,” Ramage said.

Rigo shook his head.
“Su cerebro.”

“His brain?”

“Yes, he can no speak with a nail in his brain.”

Rigo fashioned a gun out of his right hand; the hammer of his thumb slammed down rapid fire as he squinted and swept his aim along the glimmering funhouse row of bottles behind the bar.

“They kill my brother,” he said. “But I go home, Ramish. One day I go home.”

He slapped the bar and rose; Ramage watched him weave toward the door; it looked as though he was only taking a rough guess about the way out.

At different junctures, Ramage tried to recall what he and the blond woman were talking about, but he found the words were just falling out of the back of his head as they went along, and he was arriving in the present always empty. When last call was announced, she suggested they buy a bottle and stroll along the boardwalk and keep drinking.

“You’re right,” she was saying. “My name isn’t Desiree Street—good God!—but we can just leave it at that anyway. I prefer it. Let’s make up a name for you instead.”

“Call me Payne, Payne with a ‘y,’ ” Ramage said, “Payne Whitney.”

“Payne’s okay, Payne’s a good porn name. Payne-with-a-y-Whitney. Okay Payne, where to?”

“You smell that?”

As they drifted up from the beach and further from the ocean the damp cloying odor of kelp and sea lettuce was replaced by the arid and spacious scent of oregano cooking in the spice factory. It was if they’d entered a new, fairer latitude. They walked through a back section of town where the sidewalks were cracked and slabs of concrete heaved up to make way for weeds and tree roots. A wooden boat listed in the dirt of a vacant lot; a cat with yellow eyes watched them from the glassless wheelhouse. A brick building dominated by a high square clock tower was just across the street. The clock had a white face and Roman numerals and the black hands were stuck at the pleasant hour of seven, a time of beginnings, of a new day, a new night. They leaned their heads through a window, canted open with a pull-chain; blue smoke rose from the ovens and spread and was sucked away by a whirring exhaust fan. Ramage shushed drunkenly with a warning finger to his lips. “Look,” he whispered, “natives.” Two men and a woman stood in front of a large spinning machine; they were dressed in white smocks and paper hats and surgical masks; behind them glass bottles filled with spice and were shunted down a metal chute and conveyed up a rubber ramp into waiting boxes; the clinking bottles made a cool Latin-flavored jazz in the cavernous factory; particles of oregano rained down in a fine green dust that settled over the cement floor; a faint trail of foot-prints was visible, the tread of sneakers stamped into the green spice, and the men and the woman were coated in green dust, too. Ramage leaned in and inhaled the warm fragrant air, and he started choking and hacking; the woman inside the factory, laughing at the conclusion of some joke or story, lightly touched the elbow of the man beside her. They stiffened and the laughter went out of them. They stared uncertainly at Ramage and Desiree in the window; they ventured a wave. Ramage waved back.

“Somebody got married,” Desiree said, when they’d returned to the motel. She pointed to the neighbor’s car.

“They’re on their honeymoon,” Ramage said. “That’s why they came to this paradise.”

“You are wasted.”

“I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

Ramage put a finger to his lips. He led her to his neighbor’s room and tested the knob and it turned. Inside, the man and the woman slept naked on top of a tangle of sheets, the baby nestled between them like a puzzle piece. Whatever it was inside of Ramage that understood that he was outrageously drunk stifled the urge to scream. He quietly shut the door.

He put the key in the lock to his own room and then flopped over the threshold and crawled on his knees across the carpet to his canvas tool sack. He unzipped the bag and fumbled through an omnium-gatherum of plumb lines and box wrenches and pencil stubs and ratchets and tape measures until he found his gun. Further searching produced a plastic case of shells. “Look,” he said. He lay on his back like a playing child, holding the gun in one hand, the shells in the other. He smashed the gun and the case against one another and shells rained down on his face.

“Hello, gun,” he pantomimed. “Hi, bullet.” The black polymer barrel waggled as the gun asked, “Will you marry me?”