Fishboy Read online

  The tattooed man broke apart my cartonated box to feed the fire, first throwing in my walls and my front door flap. In the new glow he saw me standing in the pulled-up place where my garden had been. I could see him see me, I could see him see me as some lost child with a torn-off ear like a mongrel dog, a dirty shirt, a tiny dull blade of a knife clenched in my fist. I can shuck seventy-seven bushels of shellcut, sir, I wanted to say, but my tongue sliced my s’s and it came out sounding like I was stammering in fear and cold.

  I could see him see me as not worth the atom of energy it would take him to pinch my head off like a shrimp.

  Go home, son, he said, brightening his fire with my moon-cut hole.

  I looked at this man from some ship riding the calendar flood, his tar-stained feet, his shark-struck legs, his fingernails sharpened into blades, the charts of the world stenciled in his skin.

  I looked and saw the deficit of my garden, the deficit of my shirt, the deficit of my cartonated box.

  No sir, I thought at him. No sir, I am on you like a tick.

  Late that night, to escape the rising water, I shimmied up a fishhouse drainpipe and crawled into a vacant osprey nest. It was a saucer-shaped work of knitted twigs and sticks twisted atop the drainspout. Bird lice bit my flesh and it was a rank place of chalky dung and hatchlings’ crust. It was a good roost from which to watch the sleeping tattooed man and to wait for any ship that would come up our tidal creek. I waited and watched and waited and watched until my eyes went tired and I fell asleep.

  A ringing noise woke me and I wasn’t sure where I was until I saw the sky red and runny in the east. There was another RING! and an answering RING! like the metal-forging noise of hammered anvil in a blacksmith’s shop. It went RING! RING! and then JING! and then there was a thud of something hard, heavy, and handheld striking something soft and firm, wood or bone. I shifted on my belly, my eyes like bird eggs on the edge of the nest.

  Sometime in the night some thing had tied up to the dock below me, coal-fired, low in the water, its over-thick mooring lines gripping the pilings like fingers, the lines gripping against the suck of the outgoing calendar tide and creaking and pulling against the dock like the thing was about to heave itself out of the water and stalk the fishhouse lot. I could hear the ringing more clearly now, and for a moment two figures passed beneath a shaded red-amber lantern that lit a catwalk and stained the air with the smell of kerosene. Another lantern with a broken shade lit a trio of barrel-sized exhaust pipes, their spark-streaked smoke leaking ink to blot out the remaining morning stars. A single running light burned brown on the mast; the reflection of this thing shimmered in the creek like a coal-fired jack-o’-lantern smile.

  Two figures stalked the small ship in the oily sheen of first light, two figures ringing and smashing and hammering in the ship’s stern, trying to kill something with axes. At first I thought a rabid animal, or a big rat, or one of those log-sized sea snakes, something that was cowering or scrambling or twisting away from the blows of the men’s steel axes, some of their blows bouncing back to their sweat-soaked and salt-worn shirt breasts, these men having such a hard time putting to rest quickly the thing they so much wanted to kill. As the slow opening sun’s eye stared light into the scupper corners and waste bins, I looked for the thing from my perch in the osprey nest, thinking the thing the men wanted to kill had slipped unseen into the creek, where I wouldn’t go swimming for a couple of days, or maybe had wound itself up through the rigging to the crow’s nest on the mast. I could not think where the thing had gone, could not think how the thing could have escaped the ringing of the blows to smash its back or cleave its head. I was not thinking any thoughts of someone who had ever seen men fight with axes before.

  The sun came close to watch. In its gray yolk of light I could see the men more clearly, beards, weary faces, clothes of rotted knots, heaving the big, block-headed axes, axes so heavy that one brawny blow could slice through a shark so cleanly and quickly that its head would snap at you as you stepped past to dress out its carcass for steaks. Axes: one easy stroke to split a man from crown to groin.

  An aft cabin door blew out char-fringed faces, more miserable men in less than knotted rags, men spitting and blowing their faces into their hands, beginning to seine their lousy hair with steel brushes, crushing, the bugs they combed between black cracked nails; filthy men drawing buckets of gasoline to bathe in, taunting each other with lit matches, men moving between the swings of the block-headed axes to do their business and to watch, to climb the winches and the aft rigging, making noises like they had lost at sea their tongues to talk, low grunts of the blood-seeking sort. Lay one in him, Lonny, they would say, Split him once down the middle, lay his busted guts out! they said. Do it, Lonny, they said. Do it! they demanded.

  And Lonny swung harder, his own weight thrown by the throw of his block-headed axe, a hard heave of the blade that just missed the other man and pulled Lonny forward from off his heels.

  That’s it, Lonny! said the men in the rigging, black spiders in the tarred woven threads, That’s it! they said. We’ll have no more of it now! And Lonny swung again, and missed again, his blade sunk half a head into a hatch cover. Look it, Lonny! they said, and the other man brought a terrific blow to the deck by Lonny’s foot. Oh, Lonny! they said.

  By the time the sun sought overhead to spread more light to see by, the two men still stalked each other on the littered afterdeck. The deck and hatches suffered scores of deep grooves and splintered gashes, the thrown blows, the near misses. Staggering, Lonny and the other man were dragging their axes now, not favoring the single-handed stroke of before but bringing the axes to bear with both fists, the blows fewer but firmer, the men’s wrists strained and swollen from the glancing throws of the now dulled blades, dulled from striking steel plate and stanchion instead of flesh, dulled to bludgeon instead of to sever, dulled to bounce instead of to bite, as dangerous now to the wielder as to the mark of the man. Lonny bled from a rout earlier, when the other man, the ship’s cook, had managed him in through the aft cabin door. Don’t, Lonny! the men had warned, He’s in home! but Lonny had followed the fight into the cramped galley and had lost a slice of cheek through a thrown meat cleaver before hacking his way back out the bolted port hatch. See, Lonny? the men said.

  The sun seemed wanting to stay but started slipping out beyond to extinguish itself in the round cratered lake, the sun giving its last stare so hard on the scene below, staring so hotly that it seemed to hiss as it struck the surface of the distant lake, and in that last glare of brilliance came the moment that comes in all fights men have, when they finally call up the thing that everyone has been waiting so long for, and Lonny seemed to sense that the last bright blast of sun was his for himself to see by, and taking a deep breath while the cook rolled over on his haunch from a badly thrown blow to the rail, Lonny reached back with his ax, his nose wedged in the crook of his arm which his eyes clearly glared over, he reached back like he would indeed have to pull down over his shoulder the curtain of the world around him, and yet he would do it, and he did do it, the quickest blow of the day while the cook rose to meet it and was back down again under the weight of the ax while the blade of the thing bit on.

  Lonny let go of the handle. It shuddered from somewhere deep inside the cook. The men swung down from the rigging, a joke about no more greasy eggs was answered with a cuff on the ear, the men a single file of filth trudging back inside the small ship’s aft cabin door. I was perched on the nest’s edge out of reach of the calendar tide which had flooded the roads and kept the purple bus away that day. I was just perched, a small cannonball of boy, my chin in my knees, my ankles squeezed, watching the fighting and keeping an eye on the man asleep in my garden, the sun closing behind us a sad eye of sleep.

  Lonny cradled the cook in the stern quarter where he had fallen, the cook’s neck gone to rubber, his face bent up to Lonny’s own. I’m cold, Lonny, the cook said, his arms aquiver. Lonny pulled off his shirt, looking around for m
ore cover amidst the splintered deck and the smashed hatches.

  The tattooed man stirred in the falling dark and sudden quiet, and I started slipping down the drainpipe. I meant to be on him, to be in his fading shadow when he stood.

  You, said Lonny, pointing a bloody finger at me. Get me a wrap or towel, a blanket if you have one. Inside the fishhouse were some oyster sacks, and I meant to pitch one on deck as I passed but Lonny said to fetch it to him.

  I’m so cold, Lonny, the cook said. Lonny told the cook that it would be all right, the cook’s violent shuddering arms throwing off the comforting cover of Lonny’s shirt so that Lonny had to hold it down.

  Bring that wrap up to me, Lonny said, and I walked a spring line aboard and swung the rail. The oyster sack seemed small when I pressed it on the cook, fitting it like a bib napkin, as if the cook, who smelled of wet herbs and old seasonings, was preparing to eat.

  The cook said he was sorry to Lonny, sorry to cook his eggs so greasy, sorry to salt the coffee, sorry to make stew from boiling his apron, sorry to blow snot into the beans, sorry that he was the cook at all, saying he had always wanted to be a blacksmith but that he was frightened of horses, and Lonny said that it was all right.

  The cook shuddered and I pressed the oyster sack against him to keep his inside things from sliding out.

  The cook felt my pressure and looked down at me.

  Never learn to cook, the cook said to me and I shook my head that I never would.

  The cook said that he was cold straight down the middle, could Lonny get him a nice piece of felt blanket, and Lonny said Sure and held the cook tighter. Lonny did not fight the quaking arms as they rose and fell against us, Lonny letting one arm finally reach around his neck as I felt the other pull me deeper into the divide of the big split body.

  I am so sorry, said the cook, and Lonny said it was all right, it was all all right, and Lonny closed us tighter inside the cook’s succoring, still embrace.

  By the light of the lantern I held, the tattooed giant whom the men called John said God, take from us the soul of this, your nearly split-in-two servant here, the Cook, and let him taste the Gruel and Slop of Everlasting Afterlife, that is, if he has indeed risen to serve in Your Galley, instead of broiling in Your Eternal Oven where his shipmate Lonny here who suffered his cooking thinks he deserves to go.

  Amen, said Lonny.

  And God, John said, John dressed in a nightshirt of white gauze, we are actually thankful for delivering us from his fare that gave us the shits, this cook’s heart so small he cheated us at our rations, harboring that broken bag of lemon sours and that flask of lime juice when the scurvy was upon us, our gums bleeding and us swallowing our teeth; but most importantly we thank You for taking him so quickly so that he didn’t suffer that much, really. How mercifully You took him from this wretched earth, no longer must he toil for his wages of sin, no longer is he tempted by the siren call of that blind toothless woman by the side of the road to the capital. No longer is his flesh vulnerable to skin ravages and internal sores, shingles, bloody warts, no longer has he the fear of contracting that parasitic worm that begins to grow out of the end of your penis so that you have to carefully wind it around a matchstick, careful it doesn’t break apart and die and kill you …

  I think he had that, Lonny said.

  John told Lonny to have some respect for the dead or over Lonny’s grave he would pray the label from a venereal liniment bottle.

  So God, said John, I guess the cook is no longer liable in the death of that woman and that woman’s prize pig on that island we anchored off of last trip, him going ashore to scrounge victuals, us too weak from scurvy and hunger to lift an oar into an oarlock, and then on the evening breeze we smelled roasted pork, and he returned greasy-fingered and fat with a woman’s rhinestone hairclip on his belt, us having to painfully haul in the anchor when the natives came out in their painted war canoes. We even tolerated him when he told us they had chased him away from the fire before he could grab the pig but later we saw the pork worms in his stool, the bastard, oh, the lucky, lucky bastard, You see, Lord, there is no meanness in how I just settle the folds in the funeral shroud with my foot here, and here, and here and STEP AWAY LONNY! I didn’t mean to set a bad example! THAT’S ENOUGH KICKING! LEAVE OFF from kicking the carcass! I said. So God, take this very, very lucky bastard from us and back into Your employ to serve up boot biscuits and snot-rag stew to Your Legion of Angels who always fail us, those bright-eyed nancies with mighty swords and lacy pants.

  And one last thing, said John quietly. Help me keep my foot on the necks of these your serpents, servants.

  And let me finally net my loved one.

  And send us soon another cook, real soon, added Lonny.

  Amen, said John, and we buried the cook in the mud of the creek at the mark of its lowest tide.

  Bird lice were biting my flesh again in the morning when the big purple bus tottered into the fishhouse lot. I had heard its distant backfire, had heard its ratching bad brakes as I slumped in the osprey nest again whittling twigs with my butter-turned knife. I thinned the walls of the nest whittling, thinking it had been me who’d trussed the dead cook in a rotten canvas shroud, me who’d held the lantern in the prayer, and me who’d filled in the grave. It had been me who’d found some coarse thread to sew up Lonny’s cleavered cheek, who’d brought Lonny a bucket of gasoline to bathe in, scrubbing his back with a wire brush, scrubbing so that where the skin began to show it was bright pink and raw, the dirt and grime so old and thick that it fell away like pieces of rotten hide.

  And it had been me fetching John a bucket of fresh water for his face, stealing him a plug of Indian tobacco from the red-rimmed drunkard’s secret fishhouse rafter stash for his pipe. It had been me sitting up with John all night watching him watch the desertions from his ship, bent men stumbling without their sea legs ashore, the weight of their sea chests crumbling them into the sand, fading across the fishhouse lot with an over-the-shoulder curse at their former captain.

  And it had been me swabbing the cook’s human spillage off the deck with a rag on a stick, kneeling with a brush where the stain of his insides was stubborn, my clothes smelling like a spice rack in a slaughterhouse.

  For all I had done, it was me who John sent away from him when he set out on the road to gather another crew. I was following him in his shadow when he turned and said for me not to walk behind him. I walked ahead of John, and not knowing where he would turn off the road I kept looking back and he said the sight of me put him off, first thing in the morning. So then I tried walking alongside him, trying to match him stride for stride, his long lengths scissoring quickly, my pinched-toe trot so awkward once I fell against the white gauze of his nightshirt.

  Go away from me and stay off my ship, he said, shaking me off like I was a humping dog. I told you once before to go home, he said, now go home! and he kicked me so I rolled in the dust of the road. Where I sat watching him walk away was an ant hole. I stuck my finger in the ant hole and said to myself that I wasn’t going to take my finger out until he came back, but after a while the ants organized and were fierce, so I stood up, brushed off, and walked back to the fishhouse.

  In the osprey nest I whittled and watched Lonny and what was left of some of the crew, a man who played cat’s cradle with string and a man who only seemed able to cry and to say Fuck. I watched them dynamite the brass propeller off the old steamer bankrupt on a shoal across the quay. What other brass and fittings they could take from the wreck they took, finally shooting out the portholes with cap-and-ball pistols and a musket from the crow’s nest of their ship. The noise they made sent up swarm after swarm of birds from the side road and the swamp, filling the sky with circling and bird talk, and when the men brought shotguns to the rail they felled hundreds of birds in a rain of feathers and blown-apart pieces until I heard them decide there really was not much sport to it.

  The day-late tide-delayed purple bus pulled, brakes squealing, into the fishhouse
lot. I cut a plug of osprey wall to watch and kept my head truantly low. They in the bus saw the small dark ship listing against the pack-out pier, the wheelhouse windows black glass and sealed. They saw the men on the ship’s deck with guns, and they saw the fresh grave the tide was folding over, and I knew at least one set of eyes on the bus saw the ruined garden, the burned encampment, with no sign of Fishboy about.

  Two diesel dugouts with baskets of fish and a shallow-draft oyster schooner were tied up at the dock, two dim men fetching up the schooner’s cargo like sacks of rocks. There were hours of work in the cutting shed but inside the purple bus the people from around the cratered lake made fists around the fetishes that hung from their necks on string. They fogged the bus windows with their breath and drew designs against the things they saw. From their throats came high trillings and triple-time gobbles, and they shook their fists at the men on the ship and touched each other’s mouths for reassurance against the memories that swept through the bus, memories longer than their lives, memories of ships with bellyfuls of tar-colored people, people linked ankle to ankle in perfect patterns like the endless imprints of the bus tires in sand, memories of how the paths around the cratered lake were first cleared by the sweep of shackle and chain across the brush, memories of fleets of ships like this one, empty holes afloat the ocean, come ashore for people’s souls.

  Lonny and the man who played cat’s cradle with string and the crying man who said Fuck answered the high shouts of calling and trilling responses coming from the bus with their own ooga-boogas, cocking their gripped groins and fanning their fingers from their ears. They were doing it up until Big Miss Magine unburdened herself first from the bus, Big Miss Magine in a blue floral dropsheet dress, as one pink-bottomed big black foot planted down from the doorway step raised dust, the other foot held the tipping balance of the bad suspension, the purple vehicle rocking back and forth as she departed. Big Miss Magine waded across the fishhouse lot to my burned-out encampment, her rolling turbulent wake silencing Lonny and his crewmates as it lapped them in her passing.