The Dead Fish Museum (26 page)

They’d only taken a simple wrong turn somewhere—taken a wrong exit off the freeway, then got caught downtown in a maze of one-way streets—but to D’Angelo it was as if they’d traveled back in time to the nineteenth century. He looked out the Caddy’s tinted window and saw, through a haze of watery green, a few Chinese men in loose slacks struggling up the steep hillclimb, old coolie stock, it seemed to him, stooped over as if still shouldering the weight of a maul. “Look at those chinks,” he said. “I bet they laid some track in their day.” Kype found the street he wanted and steered the car north through Pioneer Square. An Indian sat on the curb with his head in his hands, tying back two slick wings of crow-black hair with a faded blue bandana. A pair of broken-heeled cowboy boots lay in the gutter while he aired his bare feet. D’Angelo rolled down his window, waved a gun in the air, took a bead, and dry-fired. The hammer struck three times against empty chambers, but in his mind D’Angelo had dropped the Indian, right there on the sidewalk. He raised the barrel to his lips and blew away an imaginary wisp of smoke.

“What if that had been loaded?” Kype said.

D’Angelo grinned, and fired the gun at Kype’s face. “It isn’t, is it?”

“Jesus.” Kype said, grabbing the gun. He tossed it in the back seat. “Cut the cowboy crap.”

D’Angelo just smiled and watched a couple of Filipino hookers shuffle under the awning of an expedition outfitter and guide service. Behind them, in the display window, a stuffed grizzly bear reared up on its hind legs. Kype palmed the steering wheel into another sharp turn, the Cadillac’s tires squealing rubber on the warm asphalt. A container of ashes rocked in the seat. D’Angelo picked up the decorative urn and unscrewed the lid. Caught in a gust of wind, a cloud of gray ash eddied through the car. Kype coughed and fanned the air as some of the powdery remains of his grandfather drifted under his nose and blew into the street. He ran his tongue over his lips, tast-ing ash.

“Damn, man,” Kype said, spitting.

“Ashes to ashes,” D’Angelo said. He screwed down the lid and gave the urn a shake. Something inside rattled. “Bones,” he said. “Teeth.”

Kype snatched the urn from D’Angelo and set it in the back seat with the gun. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was hot, and he hadn’t bathed in more than a week.

“How old was he?” D’Angelo asked.

“Ninety-nine,” Kype said.

“I hope I don’t live that long.”

“Grandpa lived a good life.”

“Some of those old boys just spend the golden years fouling their drawers.”

“Grandpa maintained his dignity,” Kype said.

“I can’t get into old people,” D’Angelo said. “I never seen my grandparents.”

“They still alive?”

“Somewhere. Maybe. I don’t know.”

D’Angelo took a quick pull off the bourbon and eased back in his seat. He was wearing a red Western shirt with pearlish plastic snaps and a turquoise bolo tie, an outfit he’d bought in a tack shop in Tonasket, near the Canadian border. He’d hoped the shirt and tie would give him a Western look, but he was chubby and short and he still wore the baggy pin-striped slacks and red hi-top sneakers he’d left Brooklyn in six months ago. To Kype he looked like one of those midget clowns that rode Shetland ponies at rodeo intermissions.

“A century,” Kype said, thinking of his grandfather. “He almost lived a century. Washington wasn’t even a state when he was born. It was just a territory.”

“You live that long,” D’Angelo said, “there just aren’t many people left to bury you. That’s why you’re out here, driving around like the Buddha, looking for the spot.”

Kype let the conversation die and navigated the old Cadillac Eldorado along the waterfront. The car had belonged to his grandfather, a tall, lean white-haired patriarch who had remained vigorous—still splitting and stacking his own cordwood, still fishing at dawn for kings and silvers off Camano Head—until one evening two weeks ago when he said, “I’m awfully goddamn tired,” and then sat down on the davenport, shut his eyes, and died. Later that night, sharply missing the old man, Kype had looked through his grandfather’s address book and seen something that resembled the score sheet of a high-200 bowler—all spares and strikes, thick black diagonal slashes and X’s drawn through name after name, as one by one all his friends had passed away.

The Eldorado was the last car let on the ferry. Kype and D’Angelo stood up front, gripping the gate chains, the stiff onshore wind whipping their faces.

“Maybe it’s this way,” Kype said. He gestured expansively, sweeping his hand west, the sky a wash of leached red as the sun began to set.

D’Angelo drew a dented Marine Band harmonica from his shirt pocket and tried desperately to turn “Home on the Range” into an upbeat blues number. It was the only song he knew, and it sounded awful. He played it incessantly, but Kype, in the two days since he’d picked up D’Angelo, hadn’t heard much improvement.

When the ferry’s horn blasted, Kype tossed a penny into the Sound, something he’d done for luck on every crossing since he was a kid.

D’Angelo said, “He couldn’t have been much of a dad to you.”

“You don’t know,” said Kype.

“You guys never played catch, I know that.”

“Yes we did,” Kype said.

“You got a fem throw,” D’Angelo said. “You got sissy muscles. Nobody ever showed you, I can tell.”

Kype futzed with the zipper of his thin yellow windbreaker, and said, “Throwing isn’t everything.”

“We’ll find the spot.”

The “spot” was the exact right place to cast loose the old man’s ashes. Kype didn’t know where it was exactly, not on any map at least, but he knew he’d recapture a certain feeling when he got there. He’d been traveling back and forth across the state for a week, retracing his grandfather’s steps, visiting his birthplace, his old haunts, looking for that feeling, that spot. Now Kype was headed for the ocean.

The funeral service—a society gala, a rather garish cross between the stilted air of a museum fund-raiser and the drunken sloppiness of a send-off—had seemed ludicrous to Kype—with everyone from old family friends to business cronies to newspaper reporters speculating about the life and times of ancient Henry Kype Green. His grandfather’s wealth came from sources deep in the history and raw materials of the region—trees and fish, mostly—and the old man had been something of a legend, a legend the local newspapers had been rehashing with sycophantic abandon for the past week. The last of the pioneers, the papers were calling him. True enough, during the Volstead days he’d run booze down the Strait of Haro, he’d been big in timber, the fisheries, he’d served a stint or two in the state legislature. Of his generation, he was certainly the last. Now that he was incinerated and resting in an ash urn, suddenly everyone was an authority. In several hectic days a substantial body of myth had collected around those pale gray ashes.

Kype sat beside his drunken mother in the front pew and listened to the encomiums with the same anxiety he’d felt all week when poring over the accounts that had washed up in the wake of what one journalist rather regally called his grandfather’s “demise.” The reverend mounted the pulpit and announced that for a man as great as Henry Kype Green death was a simple passage, a great reward for service rendered: old Kype, having done so much to improve the earthly garden, had long ago earned a providential seat in Paradise. It seemed to Kype a measure of his grandfather’s eminence in the community that the key passages for the sermon and eulogy were taken from the Book of Revelation—
the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, the twenty of this, the seven of that, the angels, the trumpets
!—but then, too, the memorial service had been noisy with senile rumblings, old men and women muttering to themselves, calling out like dreamers, and the whole affair had been a little dotty and obscure and ultimately incomprehensible.

Following the service there was a lavish spread: crustless Walla Walla sweet onion sandwiches, poached sockeye salmon, Dungeness crab, Willapa Bay oysters shucked and bedded in a glacier of shaved ice, mountains of red Delicious apples, all gifts from friends delivered—half in homage, half in throwback to Roman taxation—from the various corners of the state. Kype gave several interviews, but he had the uneasy feeling his words were being reshaped and slotted into a story that had already been written. “My grandfather started out,” he told a reporter from the
Times,
“as a whistle punk in a donkey show.” The woman asking him questions brightened at the prospect of an unseemly revelation about old Kype’s obscure origins, but grew disappointed, then bored, when she learned that a whistle punk and donkey show had nothing to do with sex. Others were interested in Kype himself, the grandson rumored to be the primary beneficiary named in the will. Kype had never known his father, who’d drowned in a boating accident—waterskiing drunk, he’d neglected to let go of the rope and smashed into a dock—shortly before Kype was born. Kype had been raised in his grandfather’s house in the Highlands. With the reading of the will, he’d be filthy rich. The legacy he’d been raised to expect was about to arrive. This made people want to gawk at him, to see the mechanics of money, or wealth, grinding away inside.

Kype slipped out of the hall and walked next door to the church, where his grandfather’s ashes still rested in the urn. He tucked the urn under his arm like a football and quickly made his way out of the church, down the steps, to the corner where the old man’s car was parked. His mother planned to set the urn on a marble shelf in the family mausoleum, but Kype had other ideas, or thought he did, as he turned the key and started up the ancient Eldorado.

The big car’s headlights bored a tunnel through the dense overhang of cedar and blue spruce, a tunnel that opened briefly before them in a shaft of white light and closed immediately behind them in a darkness tinged red from the taillights. It was the dry season near the end of August and there hadn’t been any rain in weeks. In a few of the gypo outfits, makeshift mills set back from the road, they could see wheels of blue sparks spin from the saws and smell fresh-cut wood as the blades bit pulp. Every now and then they passed a crop of white crosses that marked the location of a deadly wreck. The Eldorado sailed along, its generous suspension floating around the bends and curves so that, although he was driving, Kype managed to give himself a touch of seasickness.

At a fork in the highway, a young woman appeared, holding her thumb out. She was wearing tight white shorts, ankle-strap sandals, and a man’s shirt with the tails knotted together high on her waist. She was leaning against a huge searock, an erratic scrawled over with Day-Glo declarations of love.

“Slow down, slow down,” D’Angelo said. “Let’s get a look.”

Kype eased the car onto the shoulder. The woman picked up a woven basket and hopped into the back seat. She didn’t even ask where they were going. She seemed to know.

“Well,” said D’Angelo, “I guess you’ll take a ride. I guess you’re game for going wherever the hell we go, huh? Want a drink?”

“Sure,” she said. She slugged from the bottle and wiped her lips. A rhinestone clip in the shape of a horse sparkled in her hair. “If you’re on this road, there’s only one place to go. You got no choice. Nothing but reservation up ahead.” She took another drink before passing the bottle back to D’Angelo. “And the ocean,” she said. “There’s a big ocean at the end of this road.”

“You from around here?” Kype asked. He tried to catch a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror, but she had sprawled out in the big back seat, out of sight.

“Yep,” she said. “Name’s Nell, Nella Ides.”

“Well, Nella Ides,” D’Angelo said, “this guy’s grandpa died. He was very fucking old, a real big shot. You may have heard of him. Kype, his name was Kype. Just like this guy. His name’s Kype, too. Anyway, me and my friend Kype here, we’re drinking the old man’s bourbon, and we got his old gun, and we’re going to catch the biggest, wildest fish in the ocean with his old fishing pole.”

“Putting the fun back in funeral,” Nell said.

“That’s right, “D’Angelo said. “And since you’re from around here, and you know the lie of the land, you’re invited.”

“Suits me fine,” Nell said. “I got a cousin might be interested, too. For your friend there.”

“My grandfather knew Mungo Martin,” Kype said, looking in the rearview mirror.

“Who’s Mungo Martin?” Nell asked.

“Mungo Martin? Mungo Martin was a tyee, a chief—Satsop or Haida, Bella Coola, maybe Makah.”

“He wasn’t no Makah,” Nell said.

“Some chief, anyway. I don’t really know. Supposedly a great artist or something. He carved totem poles, if that’s art. Grandfather met him negotiating a timber contract after the war.”

“See what I was saying,” D’Angelo said. “This guy’s granddad, old Kype, he was a high-ass muck-a-muck. A very big deal who knew Mungo, another very big deal. It was a high old time in town when old Kype and old Mungo got together.”

“I’d know if he was a Makah. That I’d know.”

“How old are you, Nella Ides?”

“Old,” she said.

Nell’s skin was dark and smelled richly of sweat, smoke, and coconut oil. On her purple lips was the fiery taste of bourbon and deep in her mouth was the sour smell of the beer she’d been drinking earlier that day, in Port Angeles. She’d been starting to sober, standing against that rock, smelling the sea, the dry cedar, and, she’d thought, the stars. The man from PA had dropped her off on his way out to Forks. Before that she’d blacked out, and before that she recollected going to a pink motel with the man, where a suspicious night clerk had forced her to sign the registry. She’d used her Makah name, the long English translation that took up three spaces in the guest book: What-you-get-you-can’t-store-up-because-it-is-so-much.