Fishboy (3 page)

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 more 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.

B
y
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.

B
ird 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.

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.

L
unchtime!

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.