Fishboy Page 3

  Hands on hips, Big Miss Magine surveyed my torn-up garden and my scorched-earth cartonated encampment. Her ugly sister came down off the bus, then the soft-skulled child, the red-rimmed drunkard, and the rest of the crater-lake crowd, gobbletalk and hissing. They took a wide path past the trawler and slid open the cutting shed doors. Roped baskets on booms swung out to the waiting dugouts and the shallow-draft schooner, the water sluice spewed into the creek clear then foul with the inner strings and organs of fish and shell. Big Miss Magine sat for a time, not as long as she could have, sifting and stirring through my ashes.

  Fishboy! Fishboy! was the call below me in my bird’s nest hideout. In my truant deafness I picked at the white cruds of osprey with the point of my butter-turned knife.

  Lunchtime!

  Soda time!

  No call for Fishboy.

  There was no call for Fishboy because the soft-skulled child, the child I had built a step for so he could stand at the cutting trough and shuck for food, the soft-skulled child was stripped down and diving into the wastewater creek to fetch the cold sodas for the big black women perched on their pilings, eating from their jars and greasy bags, spitting gobbletalk gristle. The women shook their fetishes against the crew they watched roasting their fresh meat on a broken-cart fire, me chewing the inside of my cheeks against the way the smoking meat made the air smell.

  I was hungry and thirsty in my hideout, and it was good-smelling meat, whatever kind of meat it was.

  It was meat John had brought to them. John had come back that morning mostly asleep on the driver’s bench of a wagon, the reins to the mule wrapped around his fillet-knife fingers, his nodding head snoring his chin into his chest as if to chew at the heart within.

  In the mule-drawn cart were four men, two shackled together in prison blues, an idiot, and the corpse of the sheriff. There was no color in the faces of the prison-blue men. The Idiot wore a cap that he turned around and around on his head. The sheriff’s corpse sat beside John on the driver’s bench, its throat slit open like gills.

  I was seeing how to make myself useful to John. I was seeing where I could help him bury that corpse like I had helped him bury the cook’s, even already thinking of a secret hole to do it in.

  I was seeing where I could help him, tell him how the red-rimmed drunkard was giving out lead sticks like the women used to stun fish, I would tell John how there was rising action going on just under where my hideout was, the red-rimmed drunkard handing out lead sticks and clubs against the crew, and how he was letting the big black women sharpen their gutting knives down to the handle on his own whetstone. I was even seeing how I, if I could just slip past Big Miss Magine, how I could come down and help unhitch the mule, like it looked like he was trying to do the wrong way, the way he was cradling the mule’s head with an arm under its reins. Even I could unhitch a mule the right way, brush it down and graze it in the sea-oat patch.

  I was just getting ready to slip down from my osprey nest to unhitch the mule when I did not. And it was a sound that made me not come down, a sound that made my shoulders ride up on my neck. It was the sound that John made happen when after he had whispered in the mule’s quilled ear and bit it gently like an animal-mounting bite, a bite that made one of the mule’s rear legs quiver and stamp slightly, the sound John made was the stem-popping sound coming from the mule’s neck of John turning the mule’s head impossibly to look backward to the pale-faced men and the Idiot in the cart behind him.

  I swung my leg back into the nest to see what next.

  The mule buckled dead-kneed in its traces as Lonny came off the ship with an ax. The pale-faced men in prison blues shackled at the wrists looked from John and the mule to Lonny coming at them with the ax, and they leapt out of the buckboard and fled to the creek.

  Hey! shouted Lonny after the prison-shackled men, can any of you cook? but the shackled men did a three-armed creek swim and scrambled up the far shorebank.

  John held the mule up by its throat and opened its chest with his fillet-nailed hand, entrail and offal spilling onto the sand, dressing the animal out. Lonny started chopping up the wagon for firewood and kindling even as the Idiot sat in it, inching away from the hacking blade.

  Come on out, said Lonny as he swung.

  It’s an idiot, said John, stripping off the mule hide into a wet cloak.

  Can it cook? said Lonny.

  It’s an idiot, said John, stripping the leather reins from the harness, fashioning a crude belt for his crude cloak.

  What does it take to cook? said Lonny, grabbing at the Idiot to get him out of the cart.

  You have always seemed real particular, said John. How do you like my new coat?

  Get this idiot out of the cart, said Lonny.

  John ripped the sheriff’s bright star off the sheriff’s patched pocket and pinned it to the peak of the Idiot’s cap. Hoisting the sheriff’s corpse on his shoulder, he clapped his leg and whistled; the Idiot came loping behind like a puppy.

  The man who played with string they called Ira Dench, and Ira Dench brought down to where Lonny cooked the butchered mule a wicker basket trimmed in red-and-white checkerboard. They put seared slabs of bloody meat on china plates and passed them to the crew that John had gathered from their ship, the man who said Fuck and the chief engineer and his two boiler monkeys. Just the appearance of the chief engineer and his two boiler monkeys did much to frighten the red-rimmed drunkard’s band of cratered lake women with their concealed lead sticks and clubs, their knives honed to razors. I had seen chief engineers and boiler monkeys before and I was not frightened, but these were particularly scorched and blackened, as if they had been living in a soot box or cinder bin. They could have just come up from hell itself and found the upper earth foul and disagreeable with its fresh air free of smoke and steam and fume.

  I saw one thing. I saw John heap a plate with mule meat and send it to the wheelhouse with the darkened windows and welded hatches. I never saw the meat go but later I noticed that the plate on the catwalk had been licked clean.

  I can’t say whether the Idiot’s wandering started off the looting and pillage. It was the noise the Idiot made that was the first alarm, the Idiot made a noise like a mule braying, and I say this because the Idiot’s mule noise was so like a mule braying that for a moment, when they first heard it, John and his crew stopped in mid-chew to consider the slaughtered carcass head buzzing with flies beside them. I think the Idiot must have come into where the cratered lake people were gathered lunching on their pilings, and the Idiot wanted the figurine fetishes the people were shaking at him to keep him away. He would reach out for a cornhusk doll dressed to ward off the evil eye and a woman would shake the doll at the Idiot and then withdraw it as he approached. It was a game at first that went bad, when the Idiot stamped around in fury, turning around and around on his muddled head the cap bright with the pointed sheriff’s star. I could see the red-rimmed drunkard considering a club to use on the Idiot but thinking better of using the snake stick we used to pin down the heads of the water moccasins when they crawled up the pilings from the creek. The red-rimmed drunkard stepped up and jabbed at the large Idiot with the stick that was forked with sharp ends, and the Idiot snatched it from him, and in a rage of mimicry poked it back at the red-rimmed drunkard, who may have met it partway in his usual stumbles. When he met the stick it was with his eyes and in a moment he was blind.

  Now a club swung out from behind a plastic apron and caught the Idiot upside his head. Now a lead stick bent across his shoulders in a swing a woman would make. Now some knives came up and sliced at the Idiots arms as he hid his face, the Idiot letting off his awful bawl.

  Lonny, the weeping man who said Fuck, and Ira Dench rushed the fray with pistols and an ax and pulled the Idiot out of the gobble squall and inflictions. They could not calm the Idiot and he threw them off with tremendous strength. Goddamnit, said Lonny, all he wanted was just a toy on a string, and he ripped the nearest fetish from a woman’s neck and pressed
it into the Idiot’s bloody hands. The Idiot beheld his new toy as Ira Dench bent to the red-rimmed drunkard spinning and kicking on the ground, grinding his fists into the deflated spaces of his empty eye sockets.

  Hope that never happens to me, said Ira Dench.

  Careful, boys, shouted John, still hunkered by the picnic, they’re putting the evil eye and the whammy-jammy on you.

  And it was true, all around, the women were hissing and clucking and making invocations. They were seized with spitting fits, and they broke open seedpods and salted Lonny, Ira Dench, and the man who said Fuck with dirt and powders.

  It put Lonny on a rage, and he swung his ax over their heads and herded them into the cutting shed. Goddamnit, I heard him say, now give it up, give me all them toys, and Ira Dench collected the fetishes first under shaky-handed pistol cover of the weeping man who said Fuck, then they stripped the people of their knives and then their clothes which they threw aboard the small dark ship by the bundle.

  Now stay in here till we’re done, won’t no more bodies get hurt, Lonny said, Lonny and his crew backing out of the shed below me so close I could have leapt onto their shoulders.

  I watched them go aboard their ship and then brace ladders across the rail to the dock as if to lay siege to the shore.

  Don’t forget to get the nets, John said to Lonny.

  Lonny and the crew carried aboard sacks of oysters snatched from the dugouts, boxes of fresh fish from the shallow-draft schooner. They carried away cartons of fresh gourds and tuber fruit from my ruined garden, fresh hackberries gathered by the hatful. They took pots of paint aboard that the Idiot immediately stepped in, tracking color across the deck; they took light bulbs twisted from their sockets, boxes of tacks, and bundles of shingles; from the bottom of the creek they hoisted up the soda machine and took that too. Where they saw a mound of coal and a wheelbarrow to haul it, they took both. They laid hoses from the fishhouse pumps and filled their tanks: fresh water, fuel oil, and kerosene. And when there wasn’t much else left to take, they pried open their aft hatches and the soft-skulled child, the one who I had built a step for so he could shuck and eat, the same one who had just been going down in my place to fetch cold sodas from the creek bottom for my nickels, the soft-skulled child showed them where to find the ice that he volunteered to go aboard and help them shovel. He was just about to go aboard and clean the ’tween-deck spaces with a rag on a stick when one of his mothers snatched him away and made him sit on the bus where Lonny was robbing the white-eyed driver of his clothes and a fishtooth comb.

  Don’t forget these nets, John said, pointing down into the shallow-draft schooner. Fire up the boilers, Master Chief, John said to Black Master Chief Harold and his boiler monkeys. John set foot on the schooner and broke off its mast and split a spar over his knee. He crossed the mast and spar and covered it with sail, cinching the corners with thick cord. For his new kite he tied strips of dress rags from the cratered lake women’s clothing. He packed a flask of gasoline, some matches dipped in wax, and a coil of lanyard hemp. I watched John fold his kite into a long rolled package like a longbow and quiver that he strapped to his back with his wagon-rein belt. Send these to the cleaners, he said to Lonny, handing up the rough muleskin cloak and grunged white nightshirt.

  Until that time I had been feeling less than useless to the man I had set myself to be like a tick upon. I was sure there was no way I could ever be useful to such a man, who needed convicts for crew, mule meat to eat, kites built from the rigging of ships. I was figuring no way for me to fetch in with such a man until I heard and saw he wanted his cleaning done, and I could do it, I could boil and scrub that nightshirt cleaner than white, scrape that mulehide soft with a clamshell, and work the ragged poncho into a proper cloak. I could do it, would do it, and I knew it would be done in the right way, not what Lonny had done with it, not by just running it up the mainmast to dry out crisp and hairy in the sun.

  Now Fishboy would come down out of his nest. Hadn’t it been me, the human-being boy, who’d helped bury the dead cook? Had swabbed his slippery spillage? Had brought gas and water in which to bathe? And wasn’t it my cartonated encampment burnt down and my garden ruint and my work not to be done again at John’s own hands? Yes sir, I thought as I readied myself to come down and sign on aboard, I am on you like a tick.

  I was going to be on him like a tick until in a quick splash of time he disappeared. He had just been standing there naked with his kite package on his tattooed back. He had just been standing there holding Lonny and Ira Dench apart arguing over the mulehead, Lonny wanting to use it as bait on a rope for eels, Ira Dench wanting to split it open to make sweetbread. John settled the matter by picking up the mulehead and piking it in the bow of the ship, a furry figurehead dripping thickly into the creek. John considered the mulehead for a moment, checked his shoulder-slung parcel, and took a breath that seemed to last for several minutes. He took a breath so deep that I watched his back bellows out so that the tattoos there grew and grayed, and then John dove straight into the stain on the creek the dripping head had made. For as long as I could watch down the creek I did watch, and I never saw him surface.

  Let’s not forget John’s nets, I heard Lonny say, or we’ll have to come all the way back for them. I slunk back down in my nest wondering if I should go ahead and get aboard with Lonny and his crew, even knowing there had been something wrong with the way Lonny looked at me and talked to me as I scrubbed his back the first night with gasoline.

  Lonny had let the cratered lake people file out to the bus, there being no call for finish fish that day. All the finish fish were stacked in boxes on the deck of the ship. Lonny and the weeping man who said Fuck stripped the nets from the dugouts and robbed the net house, hauling purse seines, bottom nets, stake nets, and drift nets. Any scrap of webbing with a line and cable on it they put aboard their ship.

  Fishboy was the whisper.

  It was close.

  Fishboy was the whisper again.

  It was real close. The bottom of my osprey hideout began to fill with blue fog, blue fog blowing up the drainpipe, blue fog creeping around my knees. I leaned over the nest’s edge and looked down, and there she was, Big Miss Magine on her hands and knees, elephantine black and bare, Lonny having stripped her of her dropcloth floral sundress, her brown lips around the downspout of the drainpipe, blowing her blue breath up to me, then whispering

  Fishboy? Where my fìnish fìsh, Fishboy?

  She put her lips back around the drainspout and blew more blue fog up to me, then began to suck it out. I knew I wouldn’t be sucked through the bottom of the osprey nest and through the pipe but I stepped around trying to step out of the fog, and I must have stepped on a weak place in the wattled wall, a place from which I had picked twigs to whittle.

  The best about crashing out the bottom of the osprey nest was that the hole was small and fingered with sharp sticks that scraped my lice bites as I fell past them. I had never had an itching scratched so complete at once. I was in a scratched-itch ecstasy when I splatted deep in the valley of Big Miss Magine’s black bare bosoms. She had caught me square and clapped her arms around me so that I was smothered and obliged to snorkel breaths that flubbered against her skin like a snore. Her own breathing was excited deep and rattly, and when she spoke, my ear pressed to her breast, it was the sound like when you hold your own ears and talk, except you would never say to yourself You is mine, Fishboy, you is all mine.

  Help! I said, as I felt her carry me away, my arms pinned in her embrace, my legs a little free to kick her gut as hard as I was able.

  Help! I said, and she had a coughy rattling laugh, phlegmy, and I wondered was this the source of blue fog, something dead in her lungs. Smothered as I was against her nakedness, I could not smell her breath, I could only smell fish oil in her sweat and the acrid smell of the bus tires the cratered lake people burned outside their houses at night to smoke away their mosquitoes.

  The valley of her breasts was slick with my squ
irming and her fish-oil sweat and I slid up a little higher to get my head out of the skin. I turned my head around to see she was taking us into the empty cutting shed. Big Miss Magine nuzzled me and bit into my only earlobe in a way I knew she was blood-hungry, beyond playful, bit in a way I was sure to be eaten alive.

  The weeping man who said Fuck came into the cutting shed slopping gasoline across the floor. Help! I shouted to him, but I could see that to him I was just a small last finish fish some old nigger woman was about to stun with a lead stick in the darkness of just one more cutting shed he was set on to burn. Help! I yelled anyway, as anybody would.

  Hush, Fishboy, I have you now, said Big Miss Magine and my head was rapped sharply, sharply, so that one of my eyes was knocked a little into orbit and the things I heard and saw went dreamy, the backfire of the purple bus leaving the lot, Lonny’s shouts just outside to get ready to cast off, the way the small ship’s smoke curled into the cutting shed and mixed in spirals with the flames that roamed the buildings and followed the trails of slopping gasoline.

  Big Miss Magine stroked me down on the table, her thumb working into my neck as if to find a good gill place to put in the knife and jig out a fillet.

  When I felt something sharp against my neck I beat and pushed her from me.

  I beat and pushed with my fists, and in one of my fists was my butter-turned knife.

  I pushed from Big Miss Magine with my butter-turned knife until I felt my fingers enter her skin and tick against her heart.

  Her grip on my neck let go and I pitched off the cutting table, stepping into the slippery sluice. The ceiling of rolling smoke came lower as I clambered outside onto the dock. My eyes were unfocused and dreamy, one eye seeing the propeller-churned creek water brown and frothy, the other eye seeing how close the small ship’s bow swung in its turn over my head so that my face was licked by the side-hung tongue of the figureheaded mule. I made a grab at a loop of bowline and saw that one of my arms was bloody to the elbow. I drew my arm back but it was as if the ship was repulsed by what it had seen. As it backed away into the creek I could see myself, the murderous Fishboy, reflected in the dark wheelhouse windows, a small figure framed by the rolling flames, all pumpkin orange and chiminey red.