The Dead Fish Museum (4 page)

Shortly after his dad died, Drummond had started bringing Pete to the shop, and he sometimes guessed that his wife, free of the boy for the first time in years, had discovered she liked living without the burden. She had hinted as much in a letter he recently received, postmarked from her new address in Portland, suggesting that he meet with a social worker to discuss “the future.” He missed his wife tremendously when he opened the envelope and saw the beautiful loops of blue cursive running across the page. He hadn’t written back yet, because he wasn’t sure what to say to this woman whose absence rendered his life so strange. They had eloped during his senior year at West Seattle High, and this would have been their silver anniversary. Without her he felt lonely, but he wasn’t angry, and he wondered if their marriage, after twenty-five years, had simply run its course.

The sheets of white paper in the twenty or so typewriters on display waved in unison when Pete opened the door after smoking his cigarette.

“Now is the time, now is the time, now is the time,” the boy said, sweeping along the shelf and inspecting the sheets.

“You want to do some keys?” Drummond asked.

“Not now,” Pete said, sitting in his brown recliner.

Drummond wore a blue smock and leaned under a bright fluorescent lamp like a jeweler or a dentist, dipping a Q-tip in solvent and dabbing inked dust off the type heads of an Olivetti Lettera 32. The machine belonged to a writer, a young man, about Pete’s age, who worked next door, at La Bas Books, and was struggling to finish his first novel. The machine was a mess. Divots pocked the platen and the keys had a cranky, uneven touch, so that they punched through the paper or, on the really recalcitrant letters, the “A” or “Q,” stuck midway and swung impotently at the empty air. Using so much muscle made a crescent moon of every comma, a pinprick of every period. Drummond offered to sell the young man an identical Olivetti, pristine, with case and original instruction manual, but was refused. Like a lot of writers, as Drummond had discovered, the kid believed a resident genie was housed inside his machine. He had to have this one. “Just not so totally fucked up,” he’d said.

Hardly anybody used typewriters these days, but with the epochal change in clientele brought on by computers Drummond’s business shifted in small ways and remained profitably intact. He had a steady stream of customers, some loyally held over from the old days, some new. Drummond was a good mechanic, and word spread among an emerging breed of hobbyist. Collectors came to him from around the city, mostly men, often retired, fussy and strange, a little contrary, who liked the smell of solvents and enjoyed talking shop and seemed to believe an unwritten life was stubbornly buried away in the dusty machines they brought in for restoration. His business had become more sociable as a growing tribe of holdouts banded together. He now kept a coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups next to the register, for customers who liked to hang out. There were pockets of people who warily refused the future or the promise or whatever it was computers were offering and stuck by their typewriters. Some of them were secretaries who filled out forms, and others were writers, a sudden surge of them from all over Seattle. There were professors and poets and young women with colored hair who wrote for the local weeklies. There were aging lefties who made carbons of their correspondence or owned mimeographs and hand-cranked the ink drums and dittoed urgent newsletters that smelled of freshly laundered cotton for their dwindling coteries. Now and then, too, customers walked in off the street, a trickle of curious shoppers who simply wanted to touch the machines, tapping the keys and slapping back the carriage when the bell rang out, leaving a couple of sentences behind.

Drummond tore down the old Olivetti. While he worked, he could hear his son laughing to himself.

“What’s so funny?” Drummond asked.

“Nothing,” the boy said.

“You always say ‘nothing,’ ” Drummond said, “but you keep on laughing. I’d sure like to know for once what you find so funny all the time.”

The boy’s face hadn’t been moved by a real smile in years and he never cried. He had been quite close to Drummond’s father—who doted on his only grandchild—but the boy’s reaction at the funeral was unreadable: blanker and less emotional than that of a stranger, who at least might have reflected selfishly on his own death, or the death of friends, or death generally, digging up some connection.

But on the short drive from the church to the cemetary, Pete had only sat slumped in his seat, staring out at the rain-swept gray city, laughing.

“What are you laughing at?” Drummond had asked.

“Nothing.”

Drummond had pressed the boy. On such a momentous day, the laughing had got to him.

“Tell me,” he’d said impatiently.

“I just start to laugh when I see something sad,” Pete had said.

“You think it’s funny?”

“I don’t think I find it funny. But I laugh anyway.”

“Some of these are crooked as hell,” Drummond said now, gently twisting the “T” with a pair of needle-nose pliers. “They’ll never seat right in the guides, even if I could straighten them out. You see that?” He turned in his stool and showed the boy the bent type bar, just as his father had shown him ages ago. “Not with the precision you want, anyway. A good typewriter needs to work like a watch.”

The boy couldn’t carry his end of a conversation, not even with nods of feigned interest. His moods were a kind of unsettled weather, either wind-whipped and stormy with crazy words or becalmed by an overcasting silence. His face, blunt and drawn inward, was now and then seized by spasms, and his body, boggy and soft, was racked by jerky, purposeless movements. He wore slipshod saddle shoes that had flattened and grown wide at the toe like a clown’s, collapsing under his monotonous tread. His button-down blue oxford shirt and his khakis were neatly pressed; Drummond ironed them every morning on a board built into a cupboard in the kitchen. He spritzed them as he’d seen his wife do, putting an orderly crease in slacks that were otherwise so deeply soiled with a greasy sheen that he was never able to wash the stain out.

“I think I’ll go outside,” Pete said.

“You sure smoke a lot,” Drummond told him.

“Am I smiling?”

He wasn’t, but Drummond smiled and said that he was.

“I feel like I am inside,” Pete said.

It was a gray Seattle day. There was a bus stop in front of the shop, and often the people who came in and browsed among the typewriters were just trying to escape the cold. A big, boxy heater with louvred vents hung from the ceiling on threaded pipe, warmly humming, and wet kids would gather in the right spot, huddled with upturned faces under the canted currents of streaming heat. Drummond let them be. He found the familiar moods and rhythms satisfying, the tapping keys enclosed in the larger tapping of the rain. Almost everyone who entered the shop left at least a word behind—their name, some scat, a quote. Even kids who typed a line of gobbledygook managed to communicate their hunger or hurt by an anemic touch or an angry jab. The sullen strokes of a stiffly pointing finger, the frustrated, hammering fist, the tentative, tinkering notes that opened to a torrent as the feel of the machine returned to the hand—all of it was like a single line of type, a continuous sentence. As far back as Drummond could recall, he’d had typewriter parts in his pockets and ink in the crevices of his fingers and a light sheen of Remington gun oil on his skin. His own stained hands were really just a replica of his father’s, a version of the original he could still see, smeared violet from handling silk ribbons, the blunt blue-black nails squeezing soft white bread as the first team of Drummond & Son, taking a lunch break, ate their baloney-and-sweet-pickle sandwiches on Saturday afternoons.

A rosary of maroon beads dangled between the boy’s legs, faintly ticking, as he rocked in his recliner and kept track of the decades. A silent prayer moved his lips.

“Jesus Christ was brain-dead,” Pete said. “That’s what I’ve been thinking lately. “

Drummond turned on his stool. “Sometimes your illness tells you things, Pete. You know that.” The smutted skin on the boy’s hands was cracked and bleeding. “You need some lotion,” Drummond said. Dead flakes sloughed to the floor, and a snow of scurf whitened the boy’s lap. “You like that Vaseline, don’t you?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“You know I worry,” Drummond said.

“Especially when I talk about God.”

“Yeah, especially.”

“You believe.”

“I do,” Drummond said, although of late he wasn’t sure that was true. “But that’s different.”

“There’s only one true God,” the boy said.

“I know.”

“I was thinking of writing a symphony to prove it.”

“You want some classical?” Drummond asked, reaching for the radio knob.

“Don’t,” Pete said.

“Okay, okay.”

“I’d show how many ways, how many ideas all lead to one idea. God. I’d get the main structure, and jam around it. The whole thing could be a jam.”

Drummond futzed with the novelist’s machine while he listened to the boy. The old platen’s rubber, cracked and hard as concrete, was partially responsible for chewing up the paper and shredding the ribbons. Pressing his thumbnail into a new one, Drummond found that it was properly soft and pliant, in near-mint condition, and he began pulling out the old platen. Drummond had been one of those kids who, after taking apart an old clock or a radio, actually put it back together again, and his satisfaction at the end of any job still drew on the pleasure of that original competence.

“I’d rather record on a computer,” the boy continued. “Instead of a static piece of stuff, like an album, you go right to the people, right into their brain. You can do that with a computer.”

“You remember about your visitor?”

“Yeah.”

“Today is going to be a little different,” Drummond said. “We’re not going to Dunkin’ Donuts right away.”

“I like the Dunkin’ Donuts,”Pete said.

“I know you do.” Drummond took a deep breath and said firmly, “Today we’re doing things just a little different from normal. You’re having a visitor. She’s a nice lady, and she wants to ask you some questions.”

“I think I’d like to become a baker.”

“What happened to being a janitor?”

“Maybe a janitor at a bakery.”

“Now you’re thinking.” Drummond turned on his stool and looked his son in the eye. “Remember how Mom used to bake bread?”

“No,” said the boy.

“No?” Drummond absently cleaned ink from a fingernail with the blade of a screwdriver. “Of course you do. She’d put a damp towel over the bowl, and you’d sing to her. She used to tell you that it was your singing that made the dough rise, remember?”

Drummond turned back to his workbench and listened to the rain and to the boy praying and telling the beads. The wall in front of his bench was covered with pinups of writers posed beside their typewriters. Drummond wasn’t particularly well read but he knew a lot about literature through the machines that made it. This knowledge was handy in selling a Royal Quiet De Luxe to an aspiring writer whose hero was Hemingway or a Hermes Baby Rocket to a Steinbeck fan. A curiosity he’d never been able to figure out was that many of these writers didn’t really know how to type. They hung like vultures over their machines, clawing at the keyboard with two fingers and sometimes a thumb, and while they were often hugely prolific, they went about it desperately, hunting and pecking, as though scratching sentences out of the dirt. Given their technique, it was a miracle some of them managed to say anything. An editorialist for the
Seattle Times
told Drummond that he just sat there and hit the machine until, letter by letter, it coughed up the words he wanted. Even Michener, a man Drummond had read and esteemed highly, in part for having typed more than anyone on earth, except perhaps a few unsung women from the bygone era of the secretarial pool, was a clod at the keys.

“You had a really good voice,” Drummond said.

At twenty-minute intervals, the sidewalk filled and then emptied, the shopwindow blooming with successive crops of black umbrellas as buses came and went. The hour for the appointment with the social worker approached, and Drummond found that he could no longer concentrate. He rolled two sheets of paper into the novelist’s Olivetti, typing the date and a salutation to his wife, then sat with his elbows on the workbench, staring. He wondered if he should drop “Dear” and go simply with “Theresa,” keeping things businesslike, a touch cold. Whenever Drummond opened a machine, he saw a life in the amphitheater of seated type bars, just as a dentist, peering into a mouth for the first time, probably understood something about the person, his age and habits and vices. Letters were gnawed and ground down like teeth, gunked up with ink and the plaque of gum erasers, stained with everything from coffee to nicotine and lipstick, but none of his knowledge helped him now. Drummond wanted to type a letter and update his wife, but the mechanic in him felt as though the soul of what he had to say just wasn’t in the machine. He looked at the greeting again and noticed that the capital “T” in his wife’s name was faintly blurred. That sometimes happened when the type bar struck the guide and slipped sideways on impact, indicating a slight misalignment.

Drummond had been expecting a rendition of his wife, but the woman who walked in the door shortly after noon was nothing like Theresa. She couldn’t have been much older than Pete, and she wore faded jeans and a soft, sloppy V-necked sweater with the sleeves casually bunched up at her elbows. Her hair was long and her eyes were gray and her nose, though small, was bulbous. Drummond offered her a stool at the back of the shop and brought her a cup of coffee.