Fishboy Page 4

  Fishboy! roared the fire around me.

  I tipped forward to the edge of the dock ahead of the fire spilling sizzling tar at my heels. The ship backed and backed across the creek into the other shore, its propeller cutting into the bank so that its stern climbed out of the water and began to break the low limbs of the shorelining trees. The stern beat against an old oak until from its crown dropped the two men in prison blues shackled at the wrists from their hiding place. They fell and rolled awkwardly onto the deck, on their pale frightened faces the set resignation of their addition to the ship’s manifest.

  Flames were up my back and I teetered. Clanking and clattering, shifting gears with a blast of boiler smoke, the small ship headed straight to me on the dock. It seemed to take so long that I wondered if I would get one more chance to pull myself aboard before the heat of the fire would shove me in the creek.

  As I fanned my arms for balance and tried to focus my eyes I went dreamy again. I felt myself fall forward and bathe in coolness. Everything was quiet in my dream. In my dream I saw the bow of the ship splinter the last of the dock I was standing on, and the wheelhouse, shouldering the smashed burning timbers, break open its hatch. I was grabbed by the scruff of my neck and taken in a geography of embrace, sinewy muscles of arms like red clay banks along a river, boulders for teeth in a mouth set like a cave in a silver waterfall, eyes like the first evening stars at the end of the day, the end of a day when the fishhouse burned, the purple bus delivered naked people home, and a truant soft-skulled child sought shelter in the ruins of my cartonated encampment.

  In this true dream the failing sky was lit by a small burning kite.

  I was dead and drowned. I lay on the bottom of the fishhouse creek looking up at the night sky through a low tide. I could make out amber lights of stars and the moon dulled by the peat water of the creek. I was a carcass comfortable in the cool shifting underwater eddies. My bed must have been made of sluice spillage, what the shuckers and the filleters in the cutting shed gutted from the fish and seashells they cut, bowels and bladders for my pillow, ribbons of brain woven with strings of eyes for a blanket. Around me things seemed suspended in front of my badly focused eyes, inner organ things still alive, floating and falling, aborting, bursting and blinded, draping everything everywhere dying and foul.

  And I was dead. And I was thinking how I must have died, and thinking of that I remembered the fishhouse fire and how my butter-turned knife went into Big Miss Magine until my fingers ticked against her heart. Thinking of that I thought I would hold my arm to my face to see if I could see it, being dead, and I stirred. Having made murder I was not surprised when I heard a man’s voice say Fishboy.

  Knowing who that was, I thought to myself Yes, Devil?

  It was like my bed shifted and my covers were thrown off, and for the first time I had the notion that for being dead underwater, my breath was not wet.

  I’m going to set you down now, Fishboy, the man’s voice said again. Do you think you can stand up?

  My head rolled as the devil set me down, and I saw that what I thought were fish and seashell guts were red wet tendons and pink bones tipped in yellow fingernail, pulsing in little trembles, and I saw the arms were like clay bars in a river that ran out from a damp khaki shirt. I looked up and there were the long lengths of silver waterfall hair, the hair well brushed and clean, the hair hiding much of the face except the lower part, webs of muscle and fat lathered by the obvious tongue when the man spoke, the tongue slipping over the ivory edges of teeth, bright to the molars when he said Don’t be frightened, Fishboy, I’m not going to hurt you.

  Still, I backed away as anybody would, reaching behind me, now not sure if I was in the creek bottom dead or alive somewhere else, and my hands that reached behind me touched a spoked wheel taller than myself, and my eyes focused on the stars I had seen and the moon, and I saw that the stars were the little lights from an electric set of radios and compasses and boxes that could tell directions in an unremarkable sea, and the moon, the moon was the sun when you looked at the sun through dark smoked glass, like the dark smoked glass of John and Lonny’s ship’s wheelhouse, and that is where I was.

  I heard them call you Fishboy around the dock, said the man turned inside out. My name is Watt. I sometimes steer the ship but don’t call me Captain.

  I shook my head no, I wouldn’t.

  You should stay up here in the wheelhouse until we pick up John this evening, said Mr. Watt. We can then find something for you to do.

  I nodded my head yes.

  Something small fluttered through the air over us and left oily marks on the inside of the smoked glass as it struck and burst against it.

  Shoo out that sparrow before we get too far from shore, said Mr. Watt.

  It was my first job aboard a ship. It was my first job being back alive.

  I chased that bird around the wheelhouse under Mr. Watt’s pedestaled captain’s chair. I chased the bird across the electric boxes and through the tangle of wires that came out behind them. I chased that bird across the empty chart tubes to a dog-door hatch that led to the rest of the ship. The bird went out and I followed.

  I followed the sparrow down a passageway past a stateroom strong with the smell of large animal skins—elk, deer, and horse.

  Beyond the stateroom was a sealed hatch hot to the touch. I swung it open to a hot roar, and two steps led down to a floor of cumulus cloudbanks ripping with thunder and lightning. The tapered top of a ladder rose up from the middle of this place I figured to be the way down to the engine room.

  I sealed the hatch and went down the passage shooing the sparrow along into the galley. I found the galley just as the crew had recently left it sacking for food. Broken cupboard doors opened and clapped shut. Condiment bottles rolled across the floor as the ship dipped and eased along. A crock of rancid butter and a jar of syrup were stuck to the table, the spoons the sailors had used to eat from them cemented wherever they had been tossed. The crude sink was more spittoon than wash-place, and a tub of something rolled around with the fingerprints of each man who tasted of it for something edible other than what it actually was, lard. A large tin of spent grease had another record of its own, samples of several flying insect species collected from several ports of call along several coasts. Beside this the brown-and-black sparrow pecked at a bag of spilled rice.

  I scooped up the sparrow and went to the aft cabin door which opened onto the deck. I opened the door and the air was bright and fresh, the sun strong on my face. I tossed the bird skyward but it fluttered back in fear and now beat around my face like a horsefly would. It finally lit on my head and nested itself in my hair.

  Out on deck Lonny was running lifting lines down into the lazaret, the cargo storage in the stern, to bring up mounds and mountains of nets. Ira Dench and the weeping man who said Fuck were mending and weaving together the odd-fitting nets they had stolen at the fishhouse. I had never seen such mending and weaving, the way they used their teeth to hold and cut the twines, spreading the meshes between their knees and elbows. Near them on the main hatch sat the Idiot, safely out of the way, playing with a clutch of fetishes, his right foot stuck in a pot of red paint.

  In the crease of the port rail the two men in prison blues were scattering tools from a toolbox, working at the shackles that held them together at the wrists. It was an exasperating huddle of cursing, dulling files, and breaking saws. As they did their work, they cut their eyes around them and muttered, secreting sharp punches and shanks of broken blades into their institutional boots.

  In the stern quarter the sheriff’s corpse sat tilted on a nail keg. The way his head leaned over the rail it appeared he was blissfully considering our wake.

  Fishboy!

  Slimy strong fingers pinched my neck skin and hefted me off my feet, the aft cabin door slamming and my feet cracking back and forth across the passageway walls as Mr. Watt took me back into the wheelhouse.

  I told you to stay up here with me in the wheelhouse,
he shouted at me, his apparent redness everywhere flushed and twisting. You stay up here until John is aboard, and stay away from Lonny.

  He sat me roughly down in the bottom of a calendar clock case. Claws dug into my scalp as the sparrow fluffed itself down, hiding deeper in the nest of my hair.

  Well, at least you got the bird out, he said, and I wondered about his eyes. Mr. Watt turned the wheel a spoke and put a looped line on it.

  They follow us out, drink salt water, and die, he said. At night sometimes we get a whole migrating flock attracted by our lights.

  I didn’t mean to flinch when Mr. Watt stood over me, but I had never seen a man turned inside out before.

  Get a good look at me, Fishboy, he said. I lay unflinching, rocking back and forth in the calendar clock case, Mr. Watt telling me about a child turned inside out, a child resting in the coolness of a potato bin, waiting for its father and its brothers and its sisters to finish their dinners and go to bed so that the child’s appearance would not shorten their appetites, and there was the child, waiting in the coolness of the potato bin blackness, sitting on the earthen floor, waiting for its mother to lower the fire in the hearth and extinguish all the candles except the one, and she, its mother, would take that one candle down and coo the child out of the bin, the child coming out slowly and sitting in its mother’s lap, drinking thin gruel from a bowl, suckling the last of its baby brethren’s milk from its mother’s breast, the mother stroking the turned-inside-out child’s hair with her own fine brush, her family silver initial on its handle, gently brushing the child’s tufts and knots into a cascading silver veil, telling the child how beautifully its hair caught the candlelight.

  One night the child awoke from a dream crying out because in its dream it had lost its silver hair, and the child turned inside out wandered out crying into where the family was eating. The brothers and the sisters toppled their crude stools, shouting and screaming, pushing at their brother with a broom, pushing at him with a pike from the fire, with pieces of kindling. Back, back, back into your hole, the enraged father said, beating at the child with a dog whip and then slashing at the mother with it. Bringing such an abomination into this world, demon bitch, said the man as he beat the woman, beating her until she was quiet and seeping on the floor. The child fled back into the potato bin and turned tight circles in the dirt there as the bin doors were locked, then nailed with a shutter. In this way the child learned thirst.

  A famine came across the land and everything anyone might eat in their houses they put into a pot of boiling water, and in his house, the inside-out child trembled in the potato bin just to smell the steam. His father and his sisters and his brothers added to their pot their last ingredients of food and boiled it down: an onion, a hide, seeds for the next planting season; and all throughout their house and all throughout their land there was not vermin nor insects nor tree bark nor soot scraped from the inside of cooking chimneys that had not been put into a boiling pot, and in this way the child’s family learned hunger.

  And it had been weeks since the shutter to the potato bin had been nailed and no sound issued forth, and the father and the brothers and the sisters took counsel, and they said Why should we starve when that thing, they said, pointing to the nailed-shut shutter, when that thing fattens itself on our potatoes?

  Yes, said one of the brothers, why should it have all of the potatoes and carrots while we have nothing?

  Yes, said one of the sisters, it grows fat eating all of our potatoes and carrots and turnips while we starve to death!

  Yes, said the father, the sound of it eating all of our food keeps me awake at night!

  So the ones with strength, that could, took up the pike from beside the fire, took up the hammer, and the rest clawed with their nails upon the shuttered door, and after a weak day and a night they broke away the shutter and opened the lock on the potato bin door. They leaned forward into the dark space, there was no light to see by, the candles boiled for tallow stew, and their eyes were not accustomed to such darkness and they were weak, and they were all too weak to fend off the child turned inside out, whose eyes were more capable than a cat’s and whose strength had been nourished by sucking minerals from the mud of the bin bottom, and nourished by his largest memory, the memory of his mother leaking thickly on the floor. The child had enough sustenance to slay his father and to slay his brothers and to slay his sisters with the tendoned strength of his inside-out muscled hands. And finishing his work, he made a bonfire of the house and sat watching it burn from a hilltop. He sat watching it burn as he worked out the weeks of silver-haired tangles with his mother’s fine initialed brush.

  Mr. Watt turned the ship’s wheel a spoke.

  Get a good look at me, Fishboy, Mr. Watt whispered. I, too, began as a boy.

  At about midnight Mr. Watt roused me from the calendar clock box and set me outside the wheelhouse hatch as if he were putting out the cat. He said they would be picking up John soon and for me to go aft and look useful, like I had been part of the crew all along, as John did not care for stowaways or children around Lonny.

  I stood at the rail for a moment trying to rake the sparrow from my hair. I stood and considered the sky. I thought how wrong I had been thinking when I was dead lying on the creek bottom that I was looking at a night sky through low water. I had no doubt that I was now looking at the night sky at high tide. Even though there was no way to mark the high water, no jetsam thread along the shore, no rush of fresh surf up a beach, I was sure by the way it felt, standing there considering the billions of brightnesses, that the earth was swollen under the dark canopy of heaven and the ocean was lifting me among the stars.

  Go on, Fishboy, said Mr. Watt, so I went along the dark rail to the aft deck.

  In the edge of the decklight I startled Ira Dench who was taking a break from his mending and trying to summon a weather forecast in the weavings of his cat’s cradles.

  Boy, you gave me fright, he said. You some kind of fish freak? And I guessed it was my eyes, the way one looked one way and the other had its own looking-the-other-way flounder-like orbit. Maybe it was the fish-lipped pinchedness of my face, or the way I hid my bloody arm behind me, the crook of my elbow dorsal finning my back.

  I shook my head no, and he went back to casting with his string, picking up loops with his fingers, cursing when he dropped one.

  Calm seas for two days, humidity all right, barometer on a slight fall, said Ira, reading the string. Thunderstorms later in the week, nothing serious, part of a front moving through. Thunder makes Lonny jumpy, is all. Ira spread his knuckles for me to see the hemp image and I thought I saw what looked like a white embroidery of a thunderbolt in his weave, like those on the caps and collars of sailors who sometimes passed through the fishhouse from the north.

  Now let me give you some fortune, said Ira Dench and he wound the string across the backs of his hands and bit loops that he draped on his thumbs.

  Not so good, Fishfreak, he said. He wound the string and folded it into his pocket.

  He said, If I was to give you a good head-start throw overboard, do you think you could make it to that shoreline? He pointed to a sawtooth profile of pinpointed lights, a skyline we were passing. I had never been to a city, and to see a city from the sea puts your mind against it. I stared at it unconvinced, the thin mirage of brilliance so easily doused by the smallest wave rushing toward it.

  Do you think you could swim that far if I was to give you a good throw? he said.

  I looked at the tiny skyline. I looked at Ira Dench. I looked at the soda machine the crew had stolen from the bottom of the fishhouse creek. Already the men in prison blues had worked on its change box with their files and saws and the soda machine lay ruptured against a hatch. I looked at the soda machine and realized it had always been the distance limit of my swimming.

  I didn’t say anything, and Ira Dench said to decide soon before we got too far out to sea. Then he said he had two words of advice for me.

  Rogue w
ave, he said.

  Ira Dench said every time he spun the string around there was a rogue wave knot coming into the corner of my fortune.

  At first I wondered if him wanting to throw me over was more for his good luck or for mine, him not wanting to be aboard the same ship as someone prone to a rogue wave. And then I wondered just as he could see forward, I wondered just how far he could see back, back a day or so to a boy with his butter-turned knife elbow-deep in a black woman’s bosom.

  I had the feeling there was more that he was going to say to me when he spotted a pole Lonny had fetched aboard that was thick with cratered lake people’s shoes strung by their laces, and Ira Dench began stripping the laces out saying Never underestimate native laces like these handmade with hemp, puts a kind of voodoo on the item if you believe in that type of thing.

  It was easy to skulk and dodge around on the deck because of the mountains of net Lonny had pulled from the lazaret. I had once seen a mile of pound net and judging from what I could figure here, there was about a hundred miles of net in piles that I could hide around until the right moment. The white decklights cast everyone’s face bright and pale, Lonny and the weeping man who said Fuck trying to bring down a steel net bar that had fouled in the rigging overhead, the Idiot still playing with his fetishes on the main hatch, the two men in prison blues roughing up the sheriff’s corpse. Still shackled, one would give the corpse a right-fisted punch in the face and then the other could apply a left-fisted punch, and in between, the sheriff’s nose shifted back and forth from cheek to cheek like a movable festering boil.