The Dead Fish Museum (28 page)

So they went ashore and they told the big chief, “You know what we saw? They’ve got white skin. But we’re pretty sure that those people on the floating thing there, they must have been fish. But they’ve come here as people.”

Kype looked at the old wooden woman, whose silver eyes had closed, the leather of her lids lowered like shades. He was still hearing the story, a steady somewhat distant drone of words, like the sound of an alarm in another room that’s heard from inside a dream. He swallowed hard to clear the pressure in his ears and reached for a lamp stand, trying to steady himself, but his hand clutched empty air as the house yawed and his rubbery legs buckled. He turned and bolted aft, up the steps to deck level, down the crooked gangway, through the cavernous tunnel and out. He ran into the middle of the road and waited in the white dusty light until Nell and D’Angelo emerged from the boat, blinking like tired children.

Nell led them to a corrugated-tin shed, where they found, in a walk-in refrigerator, cases of milk in pint cartons, stacked to the ceiling. D’Angelo hoisted one of the cases onto his shoulder and they marched off along a path spongy with duff and down a steep crooked slope with worn steps of rocks and exposed roots until they came to a tiny inlet. A small stream, not ten feet wide, spilled into an estuarial flat choked with eelgrass and then into the ocean. They forded the stream and came to a campsite. A bleached stick, pitted like old bone, had been jabbed in the sand. Bird feathers, clamshells, and the pinnate fronds of a sword fern, dried brown, were strung together, dangling from the stick and fluttering in the wind. Nell sat down and hitched her skirt up over her knees, gathering the loose folds in her hands.

“You can light a fire there,” she said.

Kype and D’Angelo stared at one another.

“Are you men or what?” Nell asked. “Gather wood and light a fire or we’re gonna freeze our asses when the sun goes down.”

They stripped moss and bark from the trees and hauled several loads of driftwood and then stopped by the stream for a drink. It was a beautiful little stream, the water pure and clear as crystal, shining with light, but the banks were stacked with dead fish. They were drying in the sand and swarming with flies, their skin baked a golden bronze by the sun, or they were caught up in the weeds along shore, rotting in the shallow water. Their eye sockets were ghostly accusing hollows like the gaze of a vacant mask and their long ragged teeth were bared as if to scare away scavengers. “I guess I’m not thirsty,” D’Angelo said. “What the fuck’s wrong with these fish?” The living didn’t look any better than the dead. They were thin and weak and mutilated, their flesh ripped and trailing from their bodies like rags. Their scales had coarsened, rough and crude as chain mail, and their gaunt skeletal faces were filled with sharp canine teeth. Some of these haunted fish were hardly motile, finning drowsily in the shallow stream, while others fought for position over the redds, weaving in and out, and others still, ravaged by parasites, were alive but so near death they were already decomposing.

“You gonna cook that salmon?” Nell asked, when the fire caught and began to bank up.

“Sure he is,” D’Angelo said.

Kype asked, “Who was that old woman?”

“That’s my great-grandma,” Nell said. “I bet she’s older ’n your grandpa and she ain’t in no jewelry box either.”

“She wasn’t what you’d call friendly.” Kype hadn’t brought a knife but he patted his pockets anyway.

“She probably didn’t even know you were there. She’s blind.”

“Bullshit,” Kype said.

“Bullshit you,” Nell said.

“She looked right at me. She knew I was there alright. She talked to me. She told me a story.”

“You maybe heard something, but you didn’t hear her. She doesn’t talk. She stopped a while back.”

“I’m telling you, she spoke to me.”

“Cut up that fish,” Nell said.

“I didn’t bring a knife.”

D’Angelo hopped to, arranging a row of the square pint cartons along the top of a gray driftlog. Empty shotgun shells and spent casings marked the location of an earlier milk massacre. Old cartons sat in the sand, bled dry but still giving off a soured reek.

“Gummerment milk,” Nell explained. “We don’t know what to do with it all. We drink a little and shoot the rest.”

D’Angelo said, “I can’t wait.”

“My grandfather got that gun out of the Everett morgue,” Kype said. “From a friend who worked there. He had a bucket of guns just laying around.”

D’Angelo said, “That musta been way back yonder in nineteen aught something or other, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Kype said glumly.

He removed his boat shoes and burrowed his pale pink feet in the sand. He stepped into the stream and started walking through the throng of dead and dying salmon toward the beach. A glassy wet margin of sand where the waves of a rising tide turned back left a wrack of sea lettuce and sand dollars and long whiplike ropes of kelp. Out to sea the lowering sun brought the craggy silhouettes of rocks into relief. Kype stood in the churning white froth, waves collapsing around him, growing cold; a blueness had crept into the light. Cormorants gathered on the rocks and dried their wings, a strange apostolate with their heads turned aside and their black wings outspread, like robed priests offering a benediction.

When Kype returned, Nell was gutting their salmon with the shell of a razor clam she’d whetted against a rock. He stood behind her and saw how the firelight brought the red in her hair to the surface. She’d been singing to herself and then she stopped and turned and said, “Hey, asshole.” He moved out of her light and her song resumed. Nell skewered the salmon with sticks, interlacing several deft sutures through the meat, and then she cantilevered the whole fish over the fire with a tree branch staked in the sand. The unadorned fillets began sizzling, the skin dripping gobbets of crackling fat on the coals.

“Kype.” D’Angelo’s voice echoed off the wet rock walls of the tiny cove and, reverberating, seemed to call Kype’s name from out at sea. “I’d say this is your spot.”

“I’m not feeling it.”

“You’re running out of choices, Buddha-boy.”

“I think I’ll head back,” Kype said. “It’s been a long day.”

“You can’t leave me out here.”

“You can’t leave period,” Nell said.

“Three’s a crowd. You guys enjoy the salmon.”

“The trail’s under water,” Nell said. “You have to wait for the tide to change.”

“Under water?”

“Not forever. It goes back out, dontcha know? All you have to do is wait.”

Kype pulled at the salmon with his fingers. The pink flesh was fatty and moist, with a smoky wood flavor. He folded the crisp skin in half and ate that, too. Finished, he picked his teeth with a white bone and said, “The old woman told me we were fish.”

Nell said, “You were hearing things.”

“I know what I heard,” Kype said.

“She don’t talk.”

“She talked to me.”

“Well, I’m just a dumb injun,” Nell said. “Maybe it’s me that’s gone deaf.”

Kype remembered how his own grandfather had gone selectively deaf in his last years, dialing down his hearing aid at dinner to cut out the highs, the yammering treble of his drunken daughter and Kype’s own adolescent screech, or blasting the volume on the television when the conversation bored him. In truth, he’d been a nasty old man most of Kype’s life, except in the early days. Then, briefly, out of pity for the fatherless boy, he’d mounted an effort, teaching him the sort of folksy wisdom and woodlore that was supposed to build character—in 1937 or whatever. Out camping, the vast gap in age between his grandfather and himself had left Kype with deep feelings of incompetence. Back home, the ancient objects in the house—the dim dusty lampshades, the brass doorknobs that had blackened with time, the monumental rolltop desk where the old man kept his leather-bound ledgers, even the quiver of sharpened pencils in their hammered pewter cup—filled him with a pervasive sorrow, as if the future itself were a legendary relic. He’d been raised to revere a forgotten, disappearing world, a tomorrow so filled with the glories of yesterday that he was forbidden to touch any of it. Nothing in that old house in the Highlands ever changed; in Kype’s memory, even the shadows seemed to have been nailed to the walls.

“How long until the tide changes?” he asked.

“Quit whining,” Nell said. “But, uh, you only bring that one bottle?”

“Let’s do some shooting,” D’Angelo said.

They left Nell by the fire, walking off thirty paces, arguing ballistics as they searched for an angle where they weren’t likely to get themselves killed by ricocheting bullets.

Kype loaded the gun. “Let’s wager,” he said.

“Oh, a wager, how delightful,” D’Angelo said, in a mocking hifalutin accent. “Well okay, old chap, old sport, let’s see—my harmonica against your Cadillac.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Fuck fair, Kype. You’re about to inherit a fortune. You’re done with fair.” He ran a hand through his greasy hair and said, “I’ll throw in my bolo.”

“I want Nell.”

“Oh,” D’Angelo said. “Okay.”

Kype shot first and missed. He’d never used a gun before, and he had expected something monumental, a big bang and some kick, but the pistol was tiny, nearly a toy, and it only made a faint, insignificant pop against the waves resounding in the cove.

“My turn,” D’Angelo said.

“I only get one shot?”

“If you miss it’s not your turn anymore.” D’Angelo frowned, shaking his head. “Everybody knows that.” He steadied the pistol at his side and then yanked it from an imaginary holster, popping off a shot that managed to plug the carton cleanly. “Oh yeah,” he said, stopping to watch the stream of milk bleed into the sand. “That’s the way you do it.” The next shot exploded in a spray of white. The tattered box fell into the river, spilling milk, and drifted away.

“Never thought I’d be shooting milk when I left Brooklyn,” D’Angelo said.

“Why’d you leave?” Kype asked.

“I always had that dream, to hitchhike out west.”

“I never did.”

“Where the hell would you go?” D’Angelo said, sweeping the barrel of the gun across the horizon. “Swimming, I guess.”

“Let me see the gun.”

“I haven’t missed yet, Kype. It’s still my turn. Why don’t you get us some of that –what did you say your grandfather called it, that hootch? This shooting is giving me a thirst.”

Kype went for the bottle but Nell refused to give it up and he returned empty-handed.

“But this isn’t the West anymore,” D’Angelo said. “It’s like west of the West or something.”

“Let me take a shot.”

“Kype, if I have to tell you one more time, I’m going to shoot
you.
”

Kype wondered if the new life awaiting him after probate would be like this, lived among strangers. He would inherit a fortune but never feel entirely at home—it was like a rider in his grandfather’s will.

“I thought there’d be something else,” D’Angelo said. “It’s disappointing. It’s making me lonesome. Nothing but stinking fish and the ocean. It’s no wonder you can’t find your spot, Kype. From out here, you have to go east to get to the West.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need to reload.” D’Angelo handed him the pistol. “But it’s still my turn.”

“Why do you get the girl?”

“Her pussy smells like fish,” D’Angelo said. “Just like everything else around here.”

Kype fed a shell into each chamber and closed the cylinder and gave it a spin. Then he made a break for it. D’Angelo lunged for him, but Kype juked across the beach, and when he reached the log he shoved the barrel of the gun against the belly of the first carton and shot it. He shot the one next to it; and he shot the one next to that. He tossed one of the milks in the air and tried to shoot it on the wing, missing wildly as the carton zoomed out of the sky, but after it caromed off his head and came to rest in the sand, plopping at his feet, he shot it twice for good measure. He mowed them down, picking off carton after carton, and when he ran out of bullets he grabbed the hot barrel and beat the last few milks with the butt of the gun, hammering away until the seams burst and the waxed cardboard turned to pulp. He caught his breath, looking over the carnage. The milks were slaughtered, and his shirt was soaked. Downstream the dark humped backs of the migrating salmon stirred indifferently in water that had turned cloudy white.

“Happy, Buddha-man?” D’Angelo brushed sand off his pleated pants and shook out the cuffs. “Now give me the gun.”

“We’re out of milk, my friend,” Kype said. “I shot the last milk. They’re all dead.”

“Some sport you are.”

“There’s nothing left,” Kype said, handing over the gun and the crumpled box of ammo.

“There’s you,” D’Angelo said. He cinched up his bolo tie, flexed the fingers of his right hand, and squinted at Kype. “And there’s these fucking fish.”

His first shot pierced the eye of an old buck with a bony face and a long, grim snout that curled like a brass coat hook. It had been holding in some quiet water behind a rock, and when the bullet entered its brain, it merely gave up and let go and was borne gently downstream. D’Angelo knelt near the bank and bumped off two more of the weary, spent fish. They flopped in the shallows, their blood pouring out pink as it mixed with the milk. The stream was small, its narrow channel choked with salmon, and D’Angelo hardly bothered to aim. Every blind shot killed. He blasted the adipose fin off of a hen. He popped another fish in the belly. He shot one that was already dead, and the salmon dissolved, drifting away like a cloud. He stopped to reload, slipping the last shell into the chamber while eying Kype, who turned away and watched the stream flow by. The remaining fish, undisturbed, went about their business. The dying ones swam with a pathetic list, twisting in the current as if blown by the wind. Others were still fighting to make it home to their spawning ground. Upriver a mating pair wove in the current above a redd, braiding the water with their bodies, releasing eggs and milt as if pollinating a flower. The hen eventually dropped back to fan gravel over the nest and cover her fertilized eggs and D’Angelo raised the gun and fired and she died without much agony, just a shiver and then her slowly gaping mouth, faintly protesting, as the current drew her down to the sea.