Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon (8 page)

Loveyoubye
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When he awoke in the morning, his wife was already gone. He got out of bed and dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before. He was late for work. He ate some sort of breakfast bar and left the house. On the highway, he missed his exit. Instead of getting off and turning back, he kept on going. He drove right out of town. When he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, he looked a little bit less like the man he’d become. He drove north. He stopped for gas and coffee somewhere, gas and a sandwich somewhere else. He tried to avoid seeing himself, but every couple hours he couldn’t help looking or catching a glimpse by accident. Every time, he looked different. The further north he drove, the more he resembled Doug. He guessed it was only natural to become himself, and left it at that. By the time he arrived in Portland, he’d become Doug again. He drove directly to the bait shop. He did not open up for business. Instead, he locked the door after him and went up to his room above the store. He climbed into bed and fell fast asleep even though his back ached from the miles on the road. He had driven very far.

Doug woke in his bed. The young man who’d caught the strange fish sat in a chair beside him. When the young man noticed Doug was awake, he put the book he was reading aside and asked, “How are you feeling?”

“How do I feel?” Doug said, and laughed painfully. “I feel as shitty as the day I was born.”

“You fainted, so I brought you up here.”

Doug shook his head, mumbled, “I didn’t faint. I became someone else.”

“What was that?” the young man said.

“Nothing. You didn’t call an ambulance, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t have health insurance. What time is it?”

The young man looked at his watch. “It’s four in the morning.”

“Good,” Doug said. He groaned and sat up in bed. “Then it’s about time we got started.”

“Started with what?”

“Fishing.”

“You can’t be serious—”

“Look, boy. You showed up here almost twenty-four hours ago with a freak fish in your ice chest. Next thing I know, I’ve lost a day of my life, and trust me, I ain’t got many left. You owe me for that day. You’re going fishing with me.”

But as soon as he’d said it, Doug realized the young man was not in the room with him. He was alone. He’d no idea how many days had passed, one or ten or none at all. He’d no idea how he’d managed to get upstairs to his room.

Gray light filtered in, but not enough to tell if it was early morning or late evening. He moved to the window and looked out. The young man’s Dodge was still in the parking lot. Now it was nearly submerged. Doug’s chest tightened. A flood had rolled in and swallowed the earth. His car had already gone under. He knew his shop was flooded. He’d lose his fish mounts and so much else. His only phone was down there, so that was gone. No chance of calling anyone. The rain continued falling heavy. Soon the truck would also vanish under the roiling waves. Somewhere in a distant town, a man who wasn’t Doug had a wife. Somewhere in this floodwater, the blue-eyed fish with human limbs and such sharp teeth must have dwelled. Maybe it was dead. Maybe not. Maybe a million more like it existed, ready to emerge from the river in this time of flood. Somehow he knew the creature had gotten the young man who’d caught it.

If only he could will himself to be that other man, but he could not. He locked the bedroom door and retrieved the Smith & Wesson from the safe. He sat in the rocking chair by the window, the revolver on his lap, staring out at the strangely desolate world. No people or rescue crews out there. Only dark water, dark sky.

I. The Best is the Worst

They chose to spend Christmas in Japan. She had longed to revisit Tokyo ever since a childhood trip, but cities exacerbated his anxiety, so they’d compromised. Two nights in Tokyo, drinking sake in clubs and eating the best ramen of their life, before traveling north to the island of Hokkaido, where they fished for yamame trout using tenkara rods. On Christmas morning, they walked down to the clear and frigid creek by the lodge. Within the hour they landed two trout apiece and returned to the lodge and cooked the trout over an open fire. They ate the trout with miso soup and green tea, and spent the rest of the day reading. They’d experienced a difficult year, a multitude of circumstances pushing their marriage to the brink. Each had at times threatened to walk away only to remain, as much out of fear as love. Somehow they persisted, and by Halloween they’d rediscovered parts of each other and themselves that had been lost—or at least inaccessible—for a decade. This vacation was well-earned then, and they’d both already proclaimed it the best time they’d had in all their dozen years together, maybe in their whole lives. It felt like growing old even though they were still young. So when he complained that evening of pains in his chest, they didn’t take it seriously. He took it easy on the plum wine and they called it an early night. Hokkaido was so quiet. Even the sound of the sea lapping at the shore seemed more peaceful, as if this side of the Pacific possessed some calming power that the Pacific off the coast of Oregon, where they lived, lacked. He awoke in the night unable to breathe. The constriction in his chest had swelled into his throat, like a large bird trapped inside his chest cavity thrashing about, attempting to peck its way up to freedom through his throat. He reached out for her in the dark. She seemed so far away even though she lay so close they almost touched. She stirred in her sleep. Her back felt warm as he brushed her with his fingers. Gasping for a breath, he shook her. She stirred in the starlight, turned sleepily and asked, “What’s wrong?” A more thorough darkness was compounding on the nighttime darkness of the room. And then the waves of the sea washed over their cabin, and if he was dying they’d never know, because they both drowned anyway.

II. Fishing and Beer

Frank knew as well as goddamn anyone that the Pacific was the Pacific. He’d grown up on it, learned to drink and fuck and fight on it. Still spent eighty hours a week on or near it, taking those who could afford it out for salmon and tuna and halibut and sturgeon and lings. Hell, he’d once stabbed a great white in the head with a knife. That’s how well he knew the Pacific. Everywhere it was the same. Dark and merciless, but willing to give back to those who sacrificed, to those whose skin had turned to leather, to those with salt in their blood.

He went outside and pulled a beer from the icebox on the porch. The fridge had died a month before and he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The beer was lukewarm, but strong and dark. The grass in the yard was overgrown. Dandelions swayed amidst the green.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife had eliminated all sturgeon retention for the foreseeable future and Frank had only managed to convince one client to go on a catch-and-release trip. The rest canceled. He was forced to return their deposits. The bitch of it was, he’d already spent all the deposit money. Fifteen years of back child support finally caught up to him and rather than face potential jail time, he paid it and prayed to God the state would leave those prehistoric fish for the slaughter. And it’d been a hell of a year, all right. Limits for every client, every day. It seemed everyone else had experienced similar success and the quota was exceeded. Retention would likely remain closed for several years. So now he found himself nearly ten grand in the hole, with several more weeks of nothing to do, at least nothing gainful. Aimless days of waste and wander. Drunk as fuck and restless. The least he could do was fix the refrigerator and mow the grass, maybe clean the place up, but the idea just pissed him off. Everything pissed him off these days. Everything except being out on the water. It didn’t even matter if he was on the ocean or river. He loved the treacherous nature of it all. There were times he considered buying a big enough boat to live on. The only thing keeping him anchored to land was Llewellyn Holloway. He hoped to someday make her Llewellyn Decker, even though she said the name didn’t have a good ring to it. Above all, he wanted to start a family with her. He was thirty-eight years old and felt the approach of his final chance to prove he was a good man.

The rain started up and he went back inside. He sat at the kitchen table, pushed aside the dirty dishes and opened up one of the pocket lunar charts he kept around. He stared at the moon’s cycle for the year, signified by dots shaded some amount of black and white. He closed his eyes and imagined the sea under a full moon in July, how much it differed from a full moon in December. He finished the beer and went for another. Then another. The rain pelted the tin roof so loud there wasn’t any use turning on the television or the radio. He wouldn’t be able to hear a damn thing anyway. “The moon don’t mean shit to me,” he said, after staring at the lunar chart for an hour more. He didn’t mean it. The moon was like a cold and distant god to him.

He thought about calling up Llewellyn, but she was tending bar at the Fighting Salmon. Besides, she could not cure the loneliness that ate at him. Only two things could save him now. Fishing or beer. And what remained of sturgeon fishing had been canceled.

III. The Stranger

The olive-skinned stranger in snakeskin boots entered the Fighting Salmon a quarter past eleven. He looked like he’d been sculpted out of finer materials than flesh and bone. He hung his leather bomber jacket up to dry at the coat rack by the door and approached the bar, set his motorcycle helmet—black, half-shell—on a barstool and sat down beside it. “Do you have like uh…a seafood stew?” he said.

“Sure do,” Llewellyn said. “Got a chowder with salmon, halibut, oysters, clams, mussels, and prawns. Comes in a bread bowl.”

“I’ll have that.”

“Can I see your ID, hon?”

No way was he younger than thirty, but Llewellyn was smitten. She wanted to know his name. He handed over his driver’s license. New Mexico.

“Anisedias. I’ve never heard a name like that before. What brings you all the way here from New Mexico?”

“I’m not from New Mexico,” he said.

“But your license is—”

Anisedias was not listening. He craned his head to watch the Trail Blazers game on the television behind the bar.

“Can I getcha anything to drink?” Llewellyn said.

“Water’s fine.”

She filled a pint glass with water and set it on the bar. As she went into the kitchen to tell Larry to ladle up the seafood stew, she could hardly contain herself.

Anisedias.

The name of a god.

And even though Llewellyn didn’t believe in true love, she wanted to believe this stranger was sent here for a reason. To carry her far away from this place, rescue her from settling down with Frank, who was fun to go with and not at all a bad guy, but marrying Frank and having children with him and slowly decaying with him would prove true the one fact she could never accept: that she was no different than everybody else who had never escaped this town. Born, raised, and laid to rest within sight of where the mighty Columbia met the Pacific. Neither river people nor ocean people, but a fucked-up thing that existed in between. Never knowing which way to go, so going nowhere at all.

Llewellyn filled a cup two-thirds full with ice and Diet Coke, then stepped into the freezer. The sweat on her brow cooled, turned frosty. She breathed in deep and didn’t mind that it hurt. Larry and the other cooks kept a stash of liquor behind the beef patties. They let Llewellyn and a few of their other favorite bartenders and waitresses in on it, so long as nobody ratted them out. Llewellyn moved aside a box of beef patties and grabbed the fifth of rum. She filled her cup to the rim.

Out of the freezer, she fit a plastic lid over the cup and punctured the lid’s starfish-shaped hole with a straw. The first sip was mostly rum.