The Dead Fish Museum (24 page)

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

We walked to a bar called The Usual, a dark room with a jukebox of corny standards and stools fashioned from old tractor seats. It was empty except for a few older men. Jimmy seemed pensive and distant, as if slowly and vividly picturing to himself everything he said. As he spoke he rattled a fistful of peanuts in his hand like dice, stopping now and then to pop one in his mouth and wash it down with a swallow of beer. His upper arm flexed tightly each time. He had a tattoo of a blue dagger on it. A snake was wreathed around the shaft, a drop of red blood falling from its forked tongue, and the Marine motto,
Semper fi,
was etched across the hilt.

In conversation, he went back to the Philippines.

“I’ve never seen such a fucked-up place,” Jimmy said. “They do this thing, they get a young girl in a boat and dress her in white. Like a wedding dress. And she stands in the boat, spreading her arms out, like an angel. There’s boys in the boat, too, and you throw coins in the water, this canal, this dirty fucking canal with dead dogs and stinking fish, oil slicks, all this floating shit.” He pushed a peanut along the bar with the lid of a matchbook, then flipped the peanut into an ashtray. “The boys dive down in all that shit for the coins.”

I listened, letting him go on. He seemed to want to draw a picture for me.

“They all want to come to America,” he said. “But for twenty-five dollars a month you can get a straw hut and a whore to clean it. She cooks for you, washes your shit, fucks you. Then tour’s up, and it’s goodbye.”

“Where’d you meet Naga?” I asked.

Jimmy looked at me.

“Her people are different,” he said. “They’re sugar people. From the mountains. I met her at church.”

I said she was beautiful.

“She’s perfect,” Jimmy said. “The women over there are great, the good ones, at least. The man’s everything to them. When they get married, they get married, and that’s it. They know what it means. They don’t make you dive in a shit river, that’s for sure.”

I felt a sort of tender condescension toward Jimmy and his need for this purity. In Naga he’d found a girl too young for corruption, whose language was that of a child. She would never call him a dirty little boy.

“Meagan’s happy for you,” I said.

“You mean she’s happy things aren’t worse,” Jimmy said. He pushed his glass forward for another beer. “I’m trying to get this business started.”

“The janitor thing.”

“She probably had a good laugh about it.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“I need to borrow some money to get started.”

“You could get a small-business loan,” I suggested.

“Says who? I don’t even have gas money to get back to California. I was hoping you guys could help.”

“We’re stretched pretty thin, Jimmy.”

“You just bought a house,” he said. Jimmy looked down the dark length of the bar and out the window, a bleached gray square in the wall. Rain washed over the canvas awning; the streets were empty. “You must have some money.”

I didn’t know what to say, and I held my hands up, to show they were empty. Jimmy shrugged.

“Can I have the receipt?” he asked.

“The receipt?”

“For the fishing stuff. Just in case I have to return it.”

“We can return it now,” I said. “I’ll give you the cash.”

“Maybe Dad will give me a birthday check,” Jimmy said. “I don’t think he likes Naga.”

“He’ll come around.”

“I doubt it,” Jimmy said. “But who knows? It’s like with Joey. He cries all the time, and it’s a real pain in the ass. At first I thought to myself, Shit, man, I don’t want that! But now I look at him and think, That’s mine. All mine. I’m just as proud as any father. I’ll play ball with him. We’ll fish. We’ll do those things.”

We finished our beers. Jimmy stood slowly and made a show of fumbling for his wallet but I paid our tab and left a generous tip. The old bartender shuffled over as we left, saw the tip, and said, “Stay dry, fellas.”

Jimmy grabbed his tackle and went inside, and I ran up to the road on the levee for a quick look at the river. Normally an easy emerald green, the Skagit churned muddy brown, sweeping small uprooted trees and bone-gray logs away from its collapsing clay shores. The water was certainly rising. Mr. George’s dog, an old grizzled retriever, stood on the roof of the cabin, soaked and barking, and Mr. George himself, stumbling around under an oppressive olive-drab raincoat, loaded a spare dinghy with supplies and furniture from inside. The dinghy was tethered by a long slack rope to the roof of his house; in it he’d crammed a chair, a stool, a box of books, a lamp, an axe, a fruit crate stuffed with papers, a stack of wooden bowls, a chandelier and silverware and what looked like a toaster, several knotted plastic sacks, a golden trophy of some sort. I watched him lash a blue tarp over the boat. Anything that could be secured was tied down, covered in canvas or caught in fishnet, hung from the eaves of his tiny shack; things that wouldn’t fit in the net or float were left to fend for themselves. I yelled to Mr. George but my voice instantly vanished, lost in the pounding rain, and when he finally saw me on the levee he could only pantomime his helplessness, pointing to the river, and then raising both hands to the sky. I waved farewell and went back across the road to my house.

Meagan and Mr. Boyd were in the midst of making dinner and Jimmy stood under the apple tree, whipping his new fly rod back and forth. He hadn’t loaded it up, so I took his reel out to him, fastened it, ran the line, and snipped the barb along the shank of a fly so he wouldn’t impale himself while he practiced. I watched him work a few tentative and mechanical casts, thrashing his arms in the air, and went inside. Meagan and Mr. Boyd had stopped to watch him through the window. His motions were spastic, but he was smiling.

“How long do you think it’ll be before he quits?” Mr. Boyd asked.

Meagan took up an onion and moved to the cutting board.

“Let’s bet.” Mr. Boyd winked at me, as if he’d found a crony, a sporting collaborator. “Just a friendly wager, huh, Tony?”

“He quits everything,” Meagan said. “That’s not a fun bet.”

“You guys are tough.”

“I say he’ll never catch a fish,” Joe said. “In fact, I’ll lay odds he won’t even get the thing wet.”

“Give him a chance,” I said.

Meagan sliced the onion cleanly in half, peeling the brittle outer skin away. From the living room, we could hear Naga calling to her husband. “Jimmy honey. Honey?” The baby was crying again. “Look, Joey. Look.” She rapped on the window and Jimmy stopped casting and waved to his wife and child. He jerked another feeble cast out onto the wet lawn. Behind him were the field and the far-off lights of a house, the lights low to the horizon and dim against the darkening gray sky. Right then, it looked like Jimmy might stay out there forever. It was raining like hell, and I felt the urge to bet on him.

“Daddy’s got an old friend in LA, a casting agent I should meet with,” Meagan said. She kept chopping, staring down at the cutting board, although her eyes were blurred and glassy.

“You want me to chop for a minute?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m alright.” She wiped her eyes. “I think I’ll go next month, during Spring Break.”

I looked at Mr. Boyd.

“I’m contributing airfare,” he said. “I bought a couple round-trips to help out.”

“It can’t hurt, I suppose.”

Mr. Boyd turned to Meagan and said, “See?” He reached for his shirt pocket, then patted the place above his heart; he’d given up cigarettes, yet still searched for them now and then—an old reflex—always surprised to find nothing there.

Jimmy came in. “D’you see me out there?”

Mr. Boyd smiled. “Catch anything?”

“I lost my leader,” Jimmy said. “Got it tangled up in the tree.”

He went to find Naga.

Moving, we had made our lives smaller, and I didn’t want to talk about careers. I went outside and untangled Jimmy’s fly line from the tree. He’d just left the new rod on the ground. It pissed me off. I went back in and groused to Meagan but she only shrugged and then we worked in silence. Slicing a neat circle from the other half of the onion, Meagan nipped the tip of her finger, one of those clean, shallow cuts that bleed and bleed. I went to find a Band-Aid and when I came back Meagan was crying and sucking her finger.

“God damn it, I shouldn’t have done this.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “next time we won’t.”

She pushed me away, wiped her eyes, and left. A deep purple stain seeped through the ringed layers in the remaining half of the onion. I cut that part out and finished the dicing. Naga came into the kitchen, asking me to hold the baby while she fixed a bottle of formula. He was the tiniest little thing, with hardly any weight to him, and his red puffy eyes and thatch of thin black hair gave him the look of an old man. His entire body clenched like a fist with each cry; his small, astonishing baby hands flailed around blindly until he found my finger and latched on, sticking the tip in his mouth and suckling. Naga took the bottle from the pan and then filled it to the top with water from the tap.

“You can’t dilute the formula,” I said. “No water.”

“Lasts longer,” Naga said.

“That’s why he’s crying,” I said. “He’s hungry.”

“Very expensive, Anthony.”

“But you can’t do that. Do you understand? He’s starving.”

Late in the afternoon, needing a little quiet, I found a way into the attic through a hatch in the upstairs hall closet. I stayed up there to investigate and linger over the odd bits and pieces the previous owner had left behind. He’d jettisoned half a lifetime, throwing out what I, at least, considered collectables: old clothes Meagan could tailor and wear or donate to the costume shop at the community college, blue and yellow medicine bottles for curing ailments I’d never heard of, and enough dusty old cookbooks to stock an entire shelf in the kitchen. Among them was
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book,
by Fannie Merritt Farmer. I knew Miss Farmer’s work from my mother’s kitchen and felt, to a certain extent—like a loving aunt or resident muse—that she’d helped raise me. She was listed on the title page as the author of
A New Book of Cookery, Chafing Dish Possibilities,
and
Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent.
The book was dedicated to Mrs. William B. Sewall, “in appreciation of her helpful encouragement and untiring efforts in promoting the work of scientific cookery, which means the elevation of the human race.” Hardly scientific, it was more like a work of witchcraft or alchemy, and it actually began with an arcane discussion of the elements, air, water, and fire—progress had antiquated Miss Farmer, as it had my mother and, for that matter, my childhood. No one I knew ate like this anymore.

In addition to the cookbooks, I found a learned work on playing cards, a dour gray volume explaining the evolution of the pack from its outlaw Gypsy days in the fourteenth century to its increasing acceptance in modern times. Apparently the Jack, or Knave, was based on a rogue who at one time rode beside Joan of Arc—not too far, wisely enough. That was interesting, but leafing through its molding pages made me a bit melancholy. It seemed like such an eccentric effort, an orphaned, unloved book, authored by a man who doggedly persisted in penning it, I supposed, by shoving aside the disturbing questions of doom and oblivion at every turn. He was authoritative, insistent, and priggish, perhaps overly conscious and somewhat resentful of the world’s silence and the loneliness of his pursuit. The writer’s name was W. Gurney Benham, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S. I had no idea what those initials stood for or what weight they carried as credentials, but I imagined an elderly bachelor before a dying fire, a damp stone cottage, slugs crawling toward the door on the flagstone walkway outside. I could almost hear Mr. Benham’s pen scratch across the sheaf of paper, could almost see the ink fade and run dry in midsentence; I thought of him pausing to moisten the nib with his tongue, and pressing on, and I decided right then to give the book a final home on the coffee table.

I came across many other things, too many to list, but I’d like to mention one more. In a plain white envelope, folded neatly, once, I found a Christmas card. In one corner was written “Christmas, 1947,” and then in the middle of the page, scribbled in terse black strokes, was the forlorn message “I hope these help. Love, Milt.” There was no indication on the card about what “these” were, or who or what, exactly, was in need of “help,” or how all of this was to connect up and suceed, but something about the message, along with the signature, and the lack of specific reference, gave the note a timelessness by accident that neither Farmer nor Benham had achieved by effort. But I couldn’t quite finger what really distinguished Milt from Farmer and Benham, and it puzzled me. They shared a similar degree of anonymity, although I supposed Milt’s was deeper, and I felt equally responsible for each of them, as if entrusted and obligated by an almost filial bond. This was my house, I thought, ghosts and all. At last I decided the difference had to do with the hint of uncertainty in Milt’s note. Whereas Farmer and Benham presumed absolute knowledge and final clarity in their respective works, Milt was tentative and doubtful, perhaps rootedly skeptical about the efficacy and outcome of his gift. Yet in the note “love” stood firm, like a constant in an equation full of variables and unknowns. I tucked the mute, prayerful note away in my shirt pocket. I liked Milt, who, by the way, was not the previous owner of our house. I had no idea who he was.