Fishboy (21 page)

I lifted my head to look at Mr. Watt, and at that moment a shudder struck the water and the sharks I could see turned and shot out in different directions. John, weak, also watched on the stern, staining everything with his blood as he breathed. In the sea of red, rumps of gray came humping toward us, scattering the sharks, bottle-nosed streaks of grace, the dolphins sending the sharks to flee to deeper depths, threatening with their shark-ramming snouts. A way was parted off our stern as if we had a wake, as if our propeller were not frozen in broken engine wreckage. John staggered and bled. He watched and I watched, and in our wake swam a woman, and the woman swam right for us until she was in the water beneath our rail and only John could see
her, looking down. He looked down and wept with joy, trying to make words to thank God skyward, but his throat was choked by the racking bloody cough, and he barely had the strength to shed his muleskin cloak and climb the rail, but he did, and he let himself fall into the sea off our stern. I could hear him trying to exclaim and trying to breathe, knowing he still bled, and in their embrace they drifted away a little, and I could see them, I could see the woman and she seemed old, her hair was very gray, and she saw me looking and she smiled at me, and I saw her teeth were like dog’s teeth. She made a way to hold on to John, her arm around his neck in a rescue of embrace, John lying on his naked back in the water breathing blood. I saw as she began to swim away with him that she was not entirely woman, and all I can say is that she was woman where she needed to be woman and something else where she needed to be something else.

And she started to swim away with John under her arm, leaping dolphins leading, and in the last of John’s face I could see deep rapture, his broken lungs and heart still pumping a trail of red that followed them toward the setting sun, John’s dimming eyes seeing mine, and his arm, the one on which his story began, rose and fell with every wave and powerful stroke his woman put them through, and the way his storied arm rose and fell I did
not know if he was beckoning me to follow or just waving goodbye, and weak, I just watched as they bled away from us, the sea deep crimson, the bloody foam coughed from his lungs rising in cumulus tiers towering in the sky, the pink froth brilliant, the warm red stains finally extinguished with the setting sun.

The sea began to flood our sinking decks. Mr. Watt awoke in the briny chill and stumbled groping for John in the stern. He picked up John’s muleskin wrap, and felt it, saying
Poor John, gone to fight one last fish
, and I was too weak myself to tell him what I had seen. Mr. Watt put the muleskin around his shoulders, thought differently, and then came and laid it over me in the bottom of the small lifeboat. Mr. Watt pushed the boom over, broke the davits, and cranked our craft into the ocean.
I would have put you in the big lifeboat
, he said,
but Black Master Chief Harold’s damned hobby project is in it and I’m too tired to move a motorcycle tonight. I’ll lower it with Ira Dench in it, and maybe somebody will spot the two boats instead of just the one
.

Mr. Watt kissed my head before he shoved us off, saying
May your bowstem break in bulrushes
.

In the dark ocean I could hear the Idiot turning around in his seat in fear, making odd noises, standing up enough to rock the boat, banging me from side to side in the bottom, stepping on my feet and legs. The Idiot quieted
briefly when we heard Mr. Watt’s faint voice across the water. We heard Mr. Watt say
Come on now, Ira, stop this nonsense, I’m going to put you in the damned boat, don’t fight me
, and it must have been just when Mr. Watt untied Ira Dench from the mast that the rogue wave struck us, I heard its curl and the stars were blanked, and the falling phosphorescent foam lit the Idiot’s bug-eyed upturned face one instant before the wave rushed down upon us, sending us surfing across the sea.

T
he rogue wave that carried us was more a carousing straggler, more a careless wanderer borne off the storm front from a few days before, more of a shouldering encouragement than a wall of charging foam. We traveled in its gurgling crest for two days before it lay suddenly spent on the ocean, mingling itself on an upper current, laying itself to rest.

By then the Idiot had either drunk or spilled the flasks of fresh water Mr. Watt had filled for us without offering me any as I lay sick in the bottom of the lifeboat. When it was cool in the evening he took my muleskin. Unable to tie it around his waist, he draped it forgotten on a gunwale and it was soon overboard. He once or
twice nibbled at the souring fish we carried and then played with them in the water, leaning over so that his big butt mooned hairy and pimpled. He leaned over, almost capsizing us, playing with the dead fish in the water, flapping the flatfish around until something large and toothy made a rush from below and the Idiot came away with bloody nipped fingertips. That was the end of playtime.

The chills and fevers were still on me; my body was corrupt. My fingers were not strong enough to unbutton my sharkskin clothes. In the afternoon of the third day my sleeps became deeper and I felt my life closing. I fell asleep once and was awakened by feathers brushing my face. When I opened my eyes I saw a man in white robes rowing our boat, the wings that sprouted from his back wagged against my face as he bent to dip and pull the oar handles. I tried to call out. The man turned and looked at me and I saw that the man in white robes had the Idiot’s face and blubbering mouth, the distended tongue that now, when I listened, whistled the two-note work of rowing. I fell back asleep. I felt the feathers again. I opened my eyes and a seagull was sitting on my chest pecking at the sharkteeth buttons of my sharkskin suit.

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
.

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.