Fishboy (4 page)

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 squirming 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.