Fishboy (2 page)

A
calendar tide flooded my creek the night the tattooed man swam ashore. I had been hunkered down by my driftwood fire, sipping my finish fish stew, listening to the water surge in small places. Across the creek the rising water shifted a run-aground wreck and bats by the thousands spun up through the smokestacks like the black fur of exhaust blown from boilers stoked by ghosts. The smudge of bats was split here and there by gulls and terns making whitecaps of flight to drier roosts, and from beyond the long dunes blew in a wet mist that my firelight lit like tiers of talcum sunsets.

The flood tide brought a little breeze with it ashore and somewhere I heard a wave begin to pound a loose plank in the pack-out pier. It pounded first like a fist and then like a hoof, like a horse kicking in its stall. Water darkened the sand, pooling in puddles, sprouting from the ground in odd artesian knots.

I kicked up a sand dike around my fire and tried to finish my stew, finish fish and squash and okra from my garden, the planting seeds picked from the animal droppings edging my cartonated encampment. I had seasoned the stew with the pieces of pork gristle Big Miss Magine and her ugly sister had spit from their sandwiches into the weeds around their lunchtime pilings. It was my first crop of squash and the salt air made the fruit small and bitter.

In the dark I could hear birds filling the tops of the trees around me, wings and leaves creaking the limbs of the cypress at the water, the pines along the road, and the hardwoods in the swamp beyond. I could hear a few larger forms turning overhead. I could hear them as I ate and I did not look up. I knew what they wanted. I had felt their ivory vise of talon in my shoulder once when I was weak from a fever, swooped upon and fought over until suddenly I was weightless aloft and my eyes were full of horizon, then dropped in a dry creekbed to break
my head open like a clam on stone. Heavier and stronger later, I still left something out for them, the boiled-out finish fish skin stuck on top of the crossed sticks in my garden, where also hung my plastic-fronted apron to dry. It turned in the breezes, an effigy of myself, an offering, a scarecrow to no thing, the gills in the fishhead sometimes whistling in the evening winds, and something always answered it, something always answered from deep in the swamp behind my cartonated encampment, a low-octave note that made me stoke my fire and brace my box, to keep my fingers curled around my butter-turned knife as I slept in wait of the morning’s purple bus.

I sipped my stew from the old Hessian bowl I had found in a gulley and listened to the earth shoulder its water away from the moon, listened to the creek swell and the waves pound, and out there in the creek’s middle something like a big fish broke and I heard a man cough and gasp, and I set down my bowl with my eyes level to the noise and picked up my knife. In the dimness I could see a man waist-high in water that I knew should have been over his head. I could see him coughing, flinging a ragged mop of seaweed hair back and forth in arcing arms of spray. He was trying to cough up something stuck lung-deep. He coughed and coughed, blowing foams of snot from his nose until he hawked up something
slippery in his mouth and he spit it out, it looking like a small flounder that clapped into the creek swimming seaward.

The man began to wade to my shore, rubbing his eyes and bouncing his head from side to side releasing torrents of water from his ears. I back-crawled along the side of my cartonated box and scrambled for the foliage of my garden.

Hiding in my beanstalk leaves I watched the large man mend my fire with some cypress knees and sheets of fishwrap paper. He squatted down and I saw his arms stenciled with black tattoos and what hung between his legs was like a stillborn calf I once found washed up in the creek. The tattoos on his wrists and chins were cut with scars of what looked like shark strikes, and when he turned a leg to pick at it in the firelight there was a fresh curving sweep of leaking blood and broken-off triangles of cartilage teeth.

He coughed again and spit sizzle into my fire. He drank my water, gulped at my stew until halfway through gulping he spit the stew out and flung my Hessian bowl way up in the woods. When he stood, picking bone and scale off his tongue, his belly was scraped and muddy as if he had been dragged across the ocean floor. He reached close to me in the garden and uprooted my scarecrow sticks. Across the sticks he stretched my
plastic apron and tied the corners into a crude kite. Upending my cartonated box, he shook out my other possessions: my only other shirt, my sow’s ear purse of soda nickels, and my pallet bed of pine straw stuffed into a burlap bag. He ripped my shirt and the burlap bag into strips that he tied as a tail to the kite which he bridled with the miles of gourd vines that latticed my garden.

The man shook the kite’s tail into the fire to light it, and then with the seaward wind to his back, he let his toy go. I watched my shirt and bed wink away burning in bits of glow and ash. Higher and higher the man pumped the kite, feeding it lengths and lengths of vine, unraveling my garden, ripping and snatching up roots that showered me with dirt, tearing away the leaf cover where I had been hidden.

The wind took the kite and roared it from over the fishhouse to over the shipwrecks on the quay, then to beyond, and I watched my shirt and bed finish burning farther and farther like a dim star that burst into a nova when the fire blazed up the plastic front of the apron kite. It was a greasy gleaming before the scarecrow sticks caught fire high overhead, a burning cross that fell and spiked itself out on the fishhouse rooftop.

Just as the line went lax in the man’s hand my snakebite-sharpened ears picked up a sound from out beyond where the sea dunes and sand waves fold over.
From where there is no channel in and no channel out, I heard what I saw the smiling man heard, two long pulls on a mournful ship’s horn.

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
.

L
ate 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.