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Authors: Mark Richard

Fishboy (6 page)

BOOK: Fishboy
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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
.

 

A
t 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 wave
, 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.

Big Miss Magine’s bloodstain was starting to wear off my arm, but in the bright decklight it showed plain in the creases of my wrist and knuckles, and it gave my fingernails a look that if you had ever seen human blood dried on someone’s hand, you would have known I had plenty of it dried on mine. A sea hose was running cold salt water by a scupper and I knelt there pulling off my shirt to scrub with. It was a good scrub for the shirt as well, still steeped with the cook’s spillage. The stains on my flesh were stubborn and resistant to salt water and spit and the scrubbing of my rough shirt, and the way the rocking ship cast its decklight and lanterns around, what sometimes I thought was stain was just shadow, and sometimes the shadow seeped deeper within my skin.

I had just finished as much as I could do when the sparrow fluttered from my hair and began to sip at the seawater running from the hose. The bird was dull-eyed and slow from drinking the salty water and was easy to catch, so I caught it and flung it over the rail toward
where only about three pinpricks of light were left on the shoreline. Our decklights and lanterns, and even a star or two above, were brighter, and I watched the sparrow do a weak turn and light itself on the hatch near the Idiot.

The Idiot had already broken apart most of his cornhusk and rag-stick fetishes, and when he caught sight of the sparrow he let out a little jackass bray and crawled toward the bird, the pot-stuck foot clunking across the hatch cover.

Stay and play nicely, goddamn you
, I heard Lonny say to the Idiot as Lonny worked the lifting lines to free the net bar hung in the rigging. The Idiot still made for the sparrow and I felt bad for the bird and angry with it at the same time. I figured to go fetch it and give it one more toss toward shore and then be done with it. I was doing more to save it than it was to save itself.

I put on my wet shirt and then made myself invisible in the way that you can, my head turned down, my eyes on my pinched-toe feet making careful quick steps across the deck, leaning into the walls of net and ducking now and then. I was almost to the hatch when a fireball came roaring out of heaven and struck me down squarely. I scrambled up and the divine fire spun down and laid me out again, and I was sure if I had not just wet my shirt I would have been set ablaze.

I heard it hovering overhead again, and in cringing
anticipation I looked over my shoulder at the thing, and it was in its final glory, its flames devouring the gasoline-soaked strips of black women’s clothes with the click and pop of lice and ticks, then the mainsheet sail went red onto the crossed sticks that sputtered in colors of bruise and infection.

John hailed us from the skirt of a sea buoy, a round nun kind meant to ring, but the bell looked broken by some ship’s passing cannon practice and its habit was pockmarked and rife with rifleshots and seabird splatter. John coiled his kite’s line around his flexed arm and flung it aboard, leaping the rail himself as we passed near. In the white decklight I could see John’s hair and beard were a tangle of seaweed, broken fishing line, and old anchor chains. Mr. Watt straightened our rudder and beneath a fresh plume of exhaust that showered us with cinders our ship tossed the buoy in its wake. Moored to the floor, the clapper snapping in the jagged shards of its bell, the buoy leaned after us like a watchdog straining at its chain.

My ears is clogged
, said John, bouncing his head.

I can’t help you yet
, said Lonny,
I got to hold this line until we can put a whip line on that net bar
. The weeping man who said
Fuck
was climbing up a net wing that Lonny held fast by the winch.

What?
said John.

I said GET YOUR OWN GODDAMN EARDROPS OUT OF THE GEAR SHED!
said Lonny.

I saw that John could not hear Lonny, and I saw the gear shed and I thought that if I could find the eardrops I would be on my way to becoming useful.

In the shed a fire extinguisher was all the eardrops could be and I took it over to John still trying to pass off a little invisibility. John pumped the canister while looking at me and then squirted some of the stuff in his ears. The stuff smelled like laundry soap cut with paint thinner. A clump of fungus fell from one ear and a mollusk from the other.

Where’s this child come from, Lonny?
John said.
Is it one of yours?

Lonny leaned back from the winch still holding the wing net line and said
What child? That child? That ain’t one of mine unless it wants to be
.

Fetch me that sea hose
, John said to me and I jumped to it and held it as he washed, the thick gray mud from the ocean floor flushing away, revealing the mazes of tattooed cartographies on his arms, chest, and back, the sea island atolls shifting and mountain peaks lifting as he bent to scrub his legs. There was a fresh shark strike on one calf; the other one I had first noticed in my gourd garden already healing, several cartilage teeth still embedded and molded over with a thin veneer of skin.

Can you work net?
John said to me.
Can you mend meshes and haul in the lines? Can you run a winch without killing somebody?

I looked down at my pinched-toed feet and balled up my fists in the front of my shirt. I did not know how to do those things.

Hey
, said Lonny,
can he cook? We’re all about to starve to death
.

Can you cook?
John asked me and I remembered the warning about cooking the last cook had told me just before he died. I shook my head no. I could not cook.

Well, son
, said John.
I think you have two choices. I think you can either cook or you can swim
. When John said that, I turned and looked for what was left of the bright pinpointed skyline, but it had dulled and disappeared. There was nothing to swim to, nowhere to swim for, nothing out beyond our ship but the stars and the white wake hissing behind us.

So I nodded okay and Lonny said
And some biscuits, make me a whole basket of biscuits. I’m real hungry. And gravy. Biscuits and gravy. And fried steak with a chicken crust, maybe some mashed potatoes. Stew up some collard greens and tomatoes with brown sugar, I could go for that
.

I drug myself along to the aft cabin door that led to the galley.
Hey
, Lonny said,
also don’t forget my eggs. I
always like to have a side of eggs, and don’t make them greasy, I can’t abide greasy eggs, you hear me?

I heard him as I drug myself along, hearing everything he asked for taking piece after piece of hope from me of ever getting through my life not split in two with an ax.

 

I
n the galley was a pot big enough for me to swim in. I put it on the stove and filled it bucket by bucket from the spittoon sink. I put the flame to it. I guess the men in prison blues had ransacked the big blade board, it was full of empty outlines where knives and cleavers should have gone, and when I took a pan out on the deck to gather some fish and tuber fruit for finish fish stew, the prison men fairly clanked with cutlery when they moved. John had come in to rest on his carpet of hides so the men in prison blues had begun to amuse themselves by knocking off the Idiot’s cap and then kicking him in the seat of his pants when he bent over to pick it up. Shackled as they were, it took certain steps to do this, and they managed it as if they were dancing a reel.

BOOK: Fishboy
8.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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