Fishboy Read online

  The Idiot’s eyes were focused far ahead and I hoped, by the Idiot’s look and by seeing the bird, that land was near. The Idiot sat and grunted, sitting in the stern seat, his hands on the rails and rocking us so that the afternoon sky waved back and forth. The Idiot sat holding the lifeboat rails like he had held on to the sides of the buckboard wagon John had brought him to the fishhouse lot in, and I wondered if he was going to spill us. Once, I felt our keel scrape, and I thought Shallows! and when the Idiot did not jump out, I thought Sandbar, and then I heard a familiar sound that I had heard in my outermost travels from my cartonated encampment, I heard sand waves and sea dunes folding over, and I smelled rotted marsh grass even over the stench of the souring fish and ourselves, and the seagulls began to hover and then hop around us, only the Idiot trying to catch one keeping them away.

  The lifeboat leveled out now, out of the sea, and something went by chuttering, its wake rocking us, the Idiot following it with his eyes. Someone called out and offered us a tow, and the chuttering sound came around again, a line fastened on our bow. Soon I smelled fish guts and fresh fillet. I began to hear clattering sounds like plates and platters, I could hear scraping sounds like the workings of butter-turned knives. And then I heard my name. Fishboy! More fish, more shellcut. Fishboy! I tried to sit up and I could not, my body weak and my eyes dimming, only my orbiting eye having a turn of focus, focusing on the Idiot’s face, the only mirror of our surroundings for me, and so I watched his face, and I watched it when it was startled as it was struck by a line thrown from the dock, and he picked it up and held it, and I felt us being drawn until our lifeboat was in the shadow of the pack-out pier of the fishhouse. And there standing over us was the red-rimmed drunkard, blind from the snake stick. He told the Idiot he was lucky, that this was the last boat they were going to pack out that day, and then I heard the red-rimmed drunkard say Fishboy, drop a basket in here, and another head appeared looking down, and it was the soft-skulled child, and then he was down in the bottom of the lifeboat with me, raking and shoveling the souring fish into the wire basket, and then struggling to put me into it too. The red-rimmed drunkard, hearing the child struggle, asked what kind of fish did he suppose I was, and the soft-skulled child said he supposed I was a red speckled something left out too long in the sun.

  I was hauled up on the fishhouse pack-out pier by the rope boom and set down in the shade of a brand-new metal cutting shed, new raw wooden tables and chain-sawed beams, the wreckage of the old place burned by the weeping man who said Fuck and our ship’s crew pushed into a charred pile in the corner of the fishhouse parking lot. I took my first look again at the big black women tabulating their work and collecting their chits from the red-rimmed drunkard, the Idiot standing stupidly by, the red-rimmed drunkard giving him two copper coins that the Idiot just stared at, And not a cent more! said the red-rimmed drunkard, the soft-skulled child shaking out the basket I lay in on the new concrete floor, him singing Finish fish! Finish fish! Come and get your finish fish! My fish-eyed look and sharkskinned appearance put the women off, as something inedible, them reaching around me for some of the other slimy fish, woman after woman spitting complaint at the poor pickings until I lay by myself on the concrete. Then bending over me was Big Miss Magine’s ugly sister. She reached down and lifted me up, rolling me in her plastic-fronted apron, her finish fish of the day.

  Big Miss Magine’s ugly sister carried me as a bundle through the fishhouse lot, past where the soft-skulled child was building his cooking fire in his blackened board encampment with charred timbers salvaged from the fishhouse fire. There were his things, a broken deck chair, a bare-ribbed parasol planted in the sand to dry his one pair of socks and one brown shirt and his plastic-fronted apron. No garden yet, but I could see a seeded plot marked and guarded from rabbits with cast-off netting and pounded stakes.

  I rode in the purple bus on our way around the cratered lake, laid in Big Miss Magine’s ugly sister’s ample lap, cushioned soft from the shocks to the springs and the tipping corners, hearing the gobbletalk, the light leaving the sky, the sun slipping, I knew, a figure eight of flame into the cratered lake. I got off the bus as the bundle beneath Big Miss Magine’s ugly sister’s arm, was taken to the outdoor sideboard to be unrolled and cleaned, but the sharkskin resisted the fish scraper, and she was tired from her day at the fishhouse, so I was brought in whole and laid on the counter until she could get the stone-scoured pot lit and boiling, and there she was, herself laid on an old rotten cot like she was a poured sleeve of tar, Big Miss Magine naked and lean, shriveled from her punctured guts, a yellow stained plaster applied to the hole my butter-turned knife had made. This’ll make a good soup cure, said the ugly sister, patting me, talking in the way people talking to the dying talk after every remedy has been tried and every remedy has failed, and Big Miss Magine smiled and nodded and looked right into my rolling orbiting fish eye. And I lay on the counter a long time, long into the evening waiting for the solid stone-scoured pot to boil, and no matter how long or how often I looked away, I always turned my fish eye back to Big Miss Magine as she lay in her rotten cot, her big red-blue-purple egg of an eye staring straight back into my own. We stared until the ugly sister said my skin was too tough to gut and Big Miss Magine nodded to put me in the pot whole, this special red speckled something fish, organs and all, and the ugly sister slipped me into the stone-scoured pot and I felt myself slipping away, I felt myself leaving, even as the sharkskin suit floated away and my ears filled with boiling water, the white broth over my eyes, I could still see, the sight of my fish eye hovering over the scene below, I filled the room as curling lisps of steam, I could still see, and I even saw myself leak out of Big Miss Magine’s butter-turned punctured gut and seep beneath the yellow plaster when her ugly sister held a bowl of my broth up to her lips to drink.

  I am sometimes in the dune lines, and in the afternoons I am deep within the woods. I know the place where a cap with a sheriff’s pin floats atop a quicksand pool, the Idiot chased there by men with bullwhipped dogs, betrayed by the fishhouse women who said a large man they had seen before had come ashore dressed in muleskin.

  At dusk I wander the side road so that by evening you can find me at the edge of the soft-skulled encampment. I am the watching face that flickers just beyond the firelight. I come to study the child as he sips his finish fish soup. I listen for the fear in his voice as he calls out to me, Who’s there? I watch him reach for the shovel of fire that brightens me away.

  I mist inside your house. I linger in your curtains. I wait until you are asleep so that I can speak to you in your dreams. I am as close to you as the veins in your neck when I say to you, in my whispering lisp, I, too, began as a boy.

  about the author

  Mark Richard was born in Louisiana and raised in Texas and Virginia. At age thirteen he became the youngest radio announcer in the country, with a music and news show on WYSR-AM in Franklin, Virginia. He attended Washington and Lee University. After his third year there he left to work on oceangoing trawlers and fishing boats from Georges Bank to Cuba. After three years on the water he returned to school and earned a degree in journalism. Since that time, Mark Richard has been employed as a radio announcer, aerial photographer, house painter, advertising copywriter, naval correspondent for a newspaper, magazine editor, bartender, private investigator, and teacher. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Shenandoah, Grand Street, Antaeus, and The Quarterly, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and the Pushcart Prize. His first collection of short stories received the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first published book of fiction.

  Mark Richard lives in New York City. This is his first novel.

 

 

 
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