The Dead Fish Museum (30 page)

Climbing out of the cove, winding his way up the crooked path, Kype got banged up pretty good, but he had his ashes and his gun, and over there, parked in front of the chief’s yard, was the Eldorado. He felt in his pocket for his car keys and found a couple of the hasty IOUs he’d written. In the light of a new day he was no longer able to imagine how Nell could possibly have believed that the bone game was for real. The whole fantastic ordeal seemed like a fevered dream, and as the remnants of last night’s hour of faith faded he felt strangely deserted. The sun rose over the water and the wind came up, blowing sand and dust across the plaza. The small white shacks started to glow. The old woman came outside and sat with her blanket and wicker hat, warming her face in the sun. The scene was as stubborn and enduring as a monument, and to Kype it seemed as if the dust rising in whorls off the road had claimed these people, all of them overtaken and turned to stone and standing around like statues, arranged just as they had been the day before. The little girl stood in the street, looking east, shielding her eyes against the rising sun. The old man walked by with the same hesitant shuffle, his feet dragging through the dust as he stooped forward and followed his shadow across the road. The engine swayed above the old DeSoto and the open toolbox and the coffee cup still rested on the fender, as if work might begin at any moment. Salmon season was over, but otherwise nothing had changed.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Carin Besser for her invaluable work on so many of these stories. Thanks as well to my longtime readers Mary Evans, Tom Grimes, and Jordan Pavlin.

The italicized passage on page 219 is taken from an oral account of the first Native American encounter with Captain Cook and is fairly well known to people who grew up in the Northwest. It can be found in many sources, but acknowledgment is owed to Mrs. Winnifred David, a Nuu-chah-nulth elder, who originally told the story. I stripped the historical references from the passage and slightly rewrote the sentences to suit my needs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of
The Point,
and
Orphans,
a collection of essays. His fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story,
and
A Public Space.

ALSO BY CHARLES D’AMBROSIO

The Point

Orphans

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2006 by Charles D’Ambrosio

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

“The Dead Fish Museum” originally appeared in
A Public Space
(Issue 1, Spring 2006). The following stories previously appeared in
The New Yorker:
“Drummond & Son,” “Screenwriter,” “The High Divide,” “The Scheme of Things,” and “Up North.”

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
D’Ambrosio, Charles.
The dead fish museum / by Charles D’Ambrosio.
p.   cm.
eISBN-13: 978-0-307-26473-2
eISBN-10: 0-307-26473-4
I. Title

PS
3554.
A
469
D
43 2006      813′.54—dc22      2005044672

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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