Fishboy Read online

  When I saw Big Miss Magine come walking out the aft cabin door and sort through the pile of finish fish I had thoughts I would never have believed I could have thought. My first thought was to hug myself with homesickness, wondering if ever I would be back safe and warm, smelling damp cardboard where I drooled and dreamed asleep in my cartonated box. Then I thought how glad I was that Big Miss Magine was not dead after all, that maybe she would forgive me and I would let her go ahead and snatch me up and blow that blue breath of hers on me. Then I thought Wait a minute, this black bitch may have been trying to kill me to eat me, and here I am playing nice when I should be playing evil, and the evil thoughts were the ones I was going to work up, and while Big Miss Magine picked around the finish pile of rotting fish and groceries I went to where Lonny’s big axes were crisscrossed on the hatch. I took hold of the handle of one and started to drag the ax quietly across the deck. I betted that old bitch had never seen so many finish fish to choose from, and I was going to send her straight back to hell with an armful, and as I drug the ax up closer behind her, I had another funny thought, and that was that for a dead person she didn’t seem to float very well, her footing in the slimy fish was slippery, and then I figured that was just the rigor mortis set in, making her arms and legs stiff and achy, and I felt bad for a second thinking I had caused that, until I got myself worked up again to heave the big ax in one arc, one arc all I had strength for, to cleave Big Miss Magine in half like Lonny would a cook.

  I knew, being evil, I had hate in my heart but at the last moment I could not find it, and that was just as well, because the ax was too heavy to lift and I dropped it on the deck.

  Big Miss Magine turned slowly around with her armload of finish fish. Her swirling blue fog breath wreathed her face. I backed away, bracing for whatever she was about to do to me, and I saw she had a hand-rolled cigarette hung in the corner of her mouth that spiraled out blue smoke, and in the dim brown light I saw her face was bristly with old beard and spotted with poxlike welts.

  What the hell is with you? said the rumored cook, and I saw that it was just him, an armload of old fish and groceries, Big Miss Magine’s stolen dress the only thing he could scavenge to fit him from the things the crew had robbed from the cratered lake people, the neckline torn and already sweat-soaked from his lighting a fire in the galley stove.

  I was just going to help you, I said, and I made myself useful collecting fish and showing him where the lanterns were in the galley to light the place with.

  All night I scraped the galley table, chipped out the oven, swabbed the floor, and scoured the sink. In the dimness of the lantern light I watched the rumored cook, I watched him bent over the fish he filleted, the globe shade cutting off his head, Big Miss Magine’s dress splitting at the seams, his legs like her legs, the same coarse dirty brown feet, his calves spotted with red marks that I leaned to see if they were pox welts or bee stings, not being able to decide either. I worked and watched the cook, and I could tell he wanted to ask me a question, but for hours he did not speak to me.

  I wondered if it was up to me to warn the rumored cook about the possibility of being severed into two pieces. I wondered if Lonny would kill him. I wondered if Lonny would split him in two with his ax. I wondered if this was the type of cook Lonny hated, the kind I heard about when the union-scripted ships were in, the cooks with the loud complaints against the crew that they feared while at sea, cooks brave now on land to admit that maybe the pork and potatoes they had served had been spoiled a little from leaving them out too long in the weather beneath the companionway steps, or from not icing the groceries properly in the hold or forgetting to ice them at all. To hell with you heathens! Just give me my fair share! these cooks would demand, each tucking his full share into his apron pocket along with the money he had made selling the rotten grocery remnants to the black women going home on the purple bus. These cooks with idle hours and bunks forward above the oven, bunks that they did not have to share in rotation, bunks warm and dry when the watches would come in with ice in their beards and bleeding hands for a cup of coffee the cook had let grow tepid because he had been reading a detective novel and had fallen asleep with it spine-split on his snoring chest, the crumbs and buttery brown flecks of hidden-away private desserts littering his coverlet. Cooks that always seemed to have friends in every port with a carriage or a car to take them into town to cash their checks in the last five minutes of the last banking day at the week’s end, waving and honking as they drove past the bone-weary and burned-out sailors hitchhiking into town to miss the bank’s last bell, to miss having pocket money for their forty-eight hours of liberty before another forty-eight days at sea. Cooks who taped pinups along the galley walls of beautiful women with their legs spread and their breasts just so, the cook’s running commentary punctuated by a pointed ladle—See the swell curve here, the ankles on that one!—waving the ladle above the seated sailors, dripping on their heads the thin gruel their hungry stomachs grumbled for, a soup thin and gristled, the cook having cut away the lean meat for his own pot pie simmering with peas and carrots in the back of the oven. Cooks with a coat of clean finery folded away in a dry locker, away from where the other sailors had to stow their garments in canvas sacks, clothes that never dried, clothes tossed from bunks and flung from hooks to the floor in the ship’s pitchings and rollings, clothes stepped on by comatose sailors going on watch and trampled by staggering men seeking sleep, clothes smeared with winch grease and mud from the ocean floor, wet, fungoid, and torn, never the time to mend a tear in them like the cook had time, like the cook had time at midnight, his detective novel put aside, some herbal tea before retiring to his warm bed over the oven, the cook primly stitching a button onto a greatcoat stolen from a friend’s closet in the last port of call. Cooks, the first to leave ship with no deck watch and the last to report aboard, just as the ship throws off its lines, just as it is about to ease itself from the dock, the cook strolls aboard, all the time in the world, deposited dockside by a carload of painted women, the worst hag better than any of the other sailors has known, the other sailors having had to sit aboard and play cards and throw knives during their forty-eight hours of liberty, their paychecks read and folded, read and folded all weekend in their pockets, folded and uncashed, missing the bank’s last bell by fifteen minutes after the cook had driven past, some generous soul trading a thousand-hour-carved scrimshaw to some lowlife dockmaster for a small bottle of cheap rum for the whole crew, a whole weekend, some scrimshaw sweetheart across the sea cheated of her treasure. A cook, strolling aboard reeking of cheap perfume and flushed with brandy, his stolen overcoat pockets full of candies and tins of store-bought tobacco, strolling aboard in a real shirt and real trousers, never ever a cook dressed like the rumored cook I was looking at, a poxy naked cook covered in a sheer homespun cotton blue-and-green-flowered dress more drape or dropcloth than dress, the thing our rumored cook stood in at the sink while I watched him skinning a fish with no complaint, a nagging question in his head instead of buzzing bees, and watching him in the dim lantern light I thought maybe he was not the kind of man I would have to warn of Lonny’s double-headed cook-splitting axes after all.

  Draw me some flour, the man said to me.

  I took up the sifter and opened the dry locker I had been sitting on studying the cook. There was a bag of rice, a block of salt, and a stale sack of flour that the large black rat was guarding.

  Don’t touch me, don’t fuck with me, I’ll bite your little fucking arm off, so help me I will, said the rat and I let the top of the locker drop.

  What’s the matter? said the cook, and I tried to tell him there was a rat in the locker.

  A rat? I can’t abide rats, said the cook, and he picked up a wooden meat mallet but when he opened the locker the rat was gone.

  Don’t run tricks on me, said the cook, and he said it without anger in a way that I knew he wanted to carry on talking, and I was right about him wanting to ask a question, I was just wrong in the wa
y I didn’t answer fast enough.

  The cook asked me his question after he scooped a sifter of flour and was taking it to the counter to make dough, and I could tell it would be an important question to him that he was trying to ask in a way that made it seem like a small question to ask a small boy.

  Are there any men with rubber arms aboard this ship? he asked me. I did not know if I had heard him right, and then I had to make a list of everybody so far I had seen and try to remember if they had real arms or rubber arms. The cook took my few seconds to answer as an answer, yes, that there was somebody on the ship who wore rubber arms, and he dropped his sifter of flour and shook me by my own arms. Tell me which one it is, he said, and this new side of the cook made me worry that there might come a time when he might be split in two if he carried on like this with Lonny, and that made me worry that I would have to be the cook again. I did not want to be the cook again. I wanted to leave this world in whole pieces.

  Any evil I had erased from myself pitching in in the galley working and thinking good thoughts about the new cook came back to me when I lied and pointed to the bolted hatch that led to the engine. Down there, I tried to tell him.

  Instead of being afraid, the cook seemed relieved and let go of me. He seemed relieved at least to know where a man with rubber arms might come from to get him. That’s good, said the cook. That’s real good. I’ll be waiting for him.

  I didn’t tell the cook there wasn’t any rubber in this world that wouldn’t melt in the infernal engine room. I didn’t tell him a rubber arm couldn’t crank the latches on that heat-swollen hatch. Stupid cook, I thought at the man when he went back to making his dough. If my mouth hadn’t been so dry from the fright he gave me I would have spit on the floor.

  The cook went back to filling large pots with water and setting them on the stove to boil. He went to the engine room door and tried it, and came around me so that I could see he was thinking of one last thing to say to me, something that would put me in his confidence to help him wait for the rubber-armed man. It was late into the night, and I had known men who were strangers to each other gather at my cartonated encampment just to sit by my cypress-knot and fish-wrapper fire to get in out of the dark and burden each other with things on their mind, things they would never tell anyone in daylight, things that made them, in the morning, shake off each other like they shook off the frost that had grown on them in the dark before the dawn, avoiding each other, taking separate paths out of the fishhouse lot even when the night before in the camaraderie of the road they had promised to travel together against scavenging animals and maybe even against men like themselves.

  The lantern light was low and the galley was lit mainly from the blue flame flowering beneath the pots. The cook sat across the table from me, and I knew he was going to tell me a story about a man with rubber arms, whether it was a true story or not. That did not matter. It only mattered that he wanted to tell it, and was going to tell, and I would listen whether I wanted to or not.

  My brother Brune and I are from the north country, said the cook. We have been sailors all our lives. Brune spent several years seal hunting. He was first a boat puller, then he was a shooter. I saw him once after a typhoon, our wreckage had washed together in the sea. Help me, my brother said. My brother’s arms had been broken by a falling spar. He feared the men on his wreckage would eat him next, that is how things had become. We are starving here also, I told my brother. We had lost all our officers and I was only acting captain because I had saved the sextant and was the only one who knew how to use it to shoot the sun and the north star. The men aboard my wreckage pushed my brother and his cannibals away from us with gaffs and sticks of timber and soon the sea that separated us curved to the sky. I waved to my brother but I did not cry. I had not seen him in sixteen years. He could not raise his broken arms, either to wave to me or to curse me. His eyes were hollow, his mouth hung open, and I felt I could hear his last breaths.

  We had a seer aboard our wreckage. At the time of my brother’s sighting, the seer said I am afraid you will see your brother again.

  The cook paused in his story and rolled a cigarette. Above the hum of our engine I could hear the two-whistle snore of the Idiot outside on the hatch.

  The cook lifted the globe from the lantern to light his cigarette. When he leaned into the flame I saw that the pox marks on his face had deepened into scarlet.

  In the north country, where Brune and I are from, said the cook, every spring when the snows melt, the water fills a basin that warms over a hot place in the earth. The earth begins to steam and the mud is rich and black. The elders believe the mud has great healing properties. Families dig trenches for their elders and bury them up to their faces with shovels, then they scoop out places for themselves. It is very soothing. The elders feel revitalized and the young men feel potent, the young women feel fertile. Do you understand me so far? said the cook and I nodded that I did. I did.

  Every year in the stand of firs near the basin we have Black Night. The aldermen of the village make a lodge by bending sapling firs and lashing their crowns together. The floor of the lodge is made soft with fresh sprigs and ferns. In the middle of the lodge a fire is kept low, kept low and made smoky by adding green branches.

  One night every year when the black basin has filled with mud and the elders feel revitalized and the young people feel fertile, the married couples of our village take the mudbath together and then enter the lodge. The light is smoky, the floor is soft and sweet, and everyone swims together in the living mud.

  Do you understand? said the cook and I could only think it must be like when certain fish spin and wriggle in the mud of low tide during a spawning moon. I nodded yes.

  All winter, said the cook, drawing on his cigarette, all winter when it is bitter cold, the men of our village wait for Black Night. During the three-hour Sunday services in our church, the men study the necks and wrists of the women sitting around them, anything that would tell them who they will be in the dark, and after service, leaving church, the men are courtly and bow, shaking the hands of other men’s wives to calculate their weight There are meanings in everyone’s eyes.

  The confusion in my eyes must have betrayed me because the cook said impatiently Look, Brune looks like the butcher, I resemble the portrait of the mayor hanging in town hall. Our sister looks like her mother. Our village is strong and vital.

  On the afternoon our wreckage parted, said the cook, I was certain I would never see my brother again. I was not raised in our church to believe in seers. The seer’s fingers dipped the water while he slept one morning and a large fish pulled him from our raft.

  With the sextant, I was able to sail our breaking-apart raft into a port that had been leveled by the typhoon. The fishing fleet had vanished, the docks were just a few poles leaning in the mud. The only ship at anchor was a slaver just arrived from the wilds. The slaver had lost its first mate overboard in the fringes of the storm. My crew cursed me for delivering them into such a sorry place. I packed away my sextant and signed aboard the slaver. I had little choice, said the cook.

  The cook said that setting sail, he was surprised to see so many black crew members, that there must have been some sort of mutiny. He said that as he set them to work mending the rigging and working the gear, he was able to tell a difference between the black men who were the sailors and the black men who were cargo below. He said he looked for the difference in their speech and in their look, but where he found it most was in the way they smelled.

  Is the smell because of their shipboard diet? the cook said he asked the captain, and the captain said no, that everyone ate the same basic rations, the same wormy biscuits made into wormy mush by adding rancid water, the same rotting rations of salted horsemeat, although the sailors were allowed more of it. The captain told the cook the difference in smell was where they came from. The captain said the sailors were from the coasts and rivers, crafty water traders, and the human cargo was from the landlocked interiors, from
tribes trusting and communal. If you notice, the captain said to the cook one night after their dinner, the sailors still smell of fish and rainwater, while the slaves still smell of game and fruit.

  The captain drank some more wine and offered to show the cook what he meant. The captain opened the door to his large closet and chained inside was a beautiful black woman. A king’s daughter, said the captain. The captain said he already had a buyer for her in the next port, a black gentleman who had made a fortune selling his brothers.

  There were two, twins, the captain said to the cook, but the other refused to eat and died. I had to put her over the side at night through my own porthole. It can’t be known there is a woman on board, especially a beautiful princess. Smell her aroma, the cook said the captain ordered him. I believe she has eaten nothing but rose petals her entire life.

  I did not smell rose petals, said the cook. She smelled of human terror and of fir trees. It is more like a forest smell, the cook told the captain, and the captain said that was only his closet, lined with cedar. The cook said that after the captain had revealed his secret to him, he became suspicious of the cook and took away his sextant.

  Once, said the cook, late on a dogwatch, I was relieving myself over the rail and turned just as the captain was coming up quickly behind me. The captain tucked his arms back into the folds of his greatcoat. It was clear that he had intended to push me over, but I had smelled his approach. We were entering the northern latitudes and the nights were getting cold, and he had taken his greatcoat out of his large closet. In the instant of my last dribble over the rail I had first gleaned homesickness then lust from the waft of cedar, then the smell of terror that turned me around; the scent of the woman on his greatcoat saved my life.