Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish (2 page)

Beyond her, in the dark water, there would appear a golden ripple, the flash of a swirling fin, the swish of deep, disturbed currents, the glint of an enormous eye, the whirl of primeval forces.

“Kitty, kitty, kitty.”

Weezie would peer into the darkness. Then she would move slowly, deeper into the sewer. Weezie wasn’t the kind to give up on a kitten.

“Kitty?”

A sudden stillness would fall in the sewer. Things are quiet around here, Weezie would think. In her mind a voice would answer, Too quiet.

But before she could heed the warning, it would come. BLOOOOOP! The warning bubble, and then the water would churn furiously, a golden form would rise up from the water, majestic and terrible, and then the awesome slurping noise, the fading scream of a young girl, and then, silence.

Warren sighed. He felt a pang of guilt. He always did when he allowed his relatives to be the victims in his horror movies. After he had allowed Bossy to squirt radioactive milk on Grandma, he had not slept well for two nights.

He got himself back to normal by reminding himself that he had warned her. “Don’t go out, Grandma, please” had been his exact words. “The cow may squirt tonight.”

“I’d like to see any cow squirt me!”

Well, she had.

Anyway, he would make up for letting Weezie be ingested by going out when his Grandma asked him to search for her. His grandma did that all the time. “Warren, go find Weezie” was a nightly order.

He heard his grandmother come out of her bedroom, and he waited, his face turned away. He opened his mouth at the same time she did, and he mouthed with her the words, “Warren, go find Weezie.”

“Why do I always have to go find Weezie?” he asked. He turned, frowning. He was going to go, but it never hurt to put up a struggle.

“You want me to do it? Sixty years old and legs like balloons?”

“Why does anybody have to do it? Weezie can get home by herself. Nobody’s going to mug her, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Weezie’s big. Muggers only go after weak, pitiful targets—like me.”

“Go.”

“Well, I haven’t finished eating yet.”

“So eat.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.” He put the cold bean in his mouth.

“Now go.”

“One bean is eating? Oh, all right!” He got up slowly, as if he were as old as his grandmother. “Why don’t you just call the library?” he asked. “You know that’s where she is.”

She watched him without speaking.

“That’s what you’d do to me. ‘Is Warren Otis in the theater? Warren Otis, go home.’ How do you think that makes me feel?”

“It should make you want to be home on time.”

“Well, it doesn’t.”

“And when you find her, you two come straight home.”

He left the apartment, slipped down the stairs and out into the night. He zipped his jacket up against the cold.

Now that he was outside, he walked slower. The only person who had never been a victim in one of his horror movies was his mother. Even he, himself, had been carried off by rabid bats.

And in
The Revenge of the Snails,
a budget horror movie he had created for television, he had narrowly missed being slimed to death, which had to be one of the least pleasant ways to die he could imagine.

He and his friend Eddie had gone to the old fishing hole and had been drawn by curiosity to the odd crust on top and the slime around the sides. They had stepped closer.

“Snails! Millions of snails, man-eating snails,” he had said. “It’s the slime of centuries.”

“I know. Don’t slip.”

At that very moment Warren’s foot had slid out from under him. “Aaaaaaa—” He had fallen into the pond. If he hadn’t been quick-witted, if he hadn’t scrambled up as soon as he heard the dreaded crunch of shells, if Eddie hadn’t extended a hand and pulled him up, well, then he would have been done for.

But his mother—nothing bad happened to her. He wouldn’t let it. Maybe that was because, of them all, his mother was the most likely to have something happen to her in real life. She had enough danger without radioactive cows and man-eating snails.

He rounded the corner. The library was just ahead. Warren slowed down. He was planning to enter the sewer himself and discover that Weezie was missing. Her books would be there, her name written carefully inside them, and he would—

Suddenly Warren stopped. He saw that Weezie was in the phone booth in front of the library. She was talking to somebody on the phone. Warren moved closer.

He was curious. Weezie was not the type to talk on the phone unless there was a reason. Suddenly he wanted to know what that reason was. It might be something secret, and he could hold it over her, make her do things for him. Keeping close to the buildings, out of the streetlight, he moved toward the phone booth.

As he got closer he saw that Weezie was listening, not talking. She was so intent, he felt she would not have noticed him even if he had rapped on the glass door.

He went closer. There were tears on Weezie’s cheeks. He was stunned. He had never known Weezie to cry, had never been aware she could cry. It was like learning that Muhammad Ali cries.

He stood in the shadows, staring in awe at his sister. She hung up the phone and waited with her head bowed. To Warren it was like the moment in a horror movie when the werewolf has changed back into human form and needs a moment to compose himself before going back to the world.

Weezie lifted her head, opened the door to the booth, and stepped out into the night air.

“Who were you talking to?” Warren asked abruptly, counting on surprise to get an answer.

Weezie spun around. She crossed the sidewalk in three steps. “What are you doing here?” She grabbed him by the upper arm.

“Ow! Let go! Grandma sent me!”

She stared at him and then abruptly let him free. He moved back a step, out of reach. He rubbed his arm. “Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody.”

“Is that why you were
crying
?” he went on, sneering slightly. “Because it was nobody?”

“I was not crying.”

“Your cheeks are still wet.”

“I was not crying!” She towered over him now, as menacing as anything he had ever created in his movies.

“You were!”

“And if you mention to Grandma, just mention, that I was on the phone …” She trailed off, leaving the threat hanging.

“If I mention it to Grandma, then what?”

“I promise you will be sorry.”

She turned and started for home. He watched her, her high, straight back, her long legs. There was something so imposing in her walk—it reminded him of John Wayne—Warren decided not to say anything.

“I’ll tell if I want to!” he yelled defiantly.

She did not turn around, and after a moment he began to follow, the two-thousand-pound goldfish forgotten for the moment.

“There’s something down there. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why. But there is something down there.”

“And heaven help us if it ever decides to come up.”

W
ARREN LAY IN BED,
watching the reflection of car lights on the ceiling. He could not sleep. He could not get Weezie’s phone call out of his mind. He wanted to know who had made Weezie cry. It was no mere boyfriend, no girl friend. He was sure of that. It was no clerk at a store, no operator, no—

And then it came to him. Weezie had been talking to their mother!

He sat up in bed, mouth open, staring ahead without seeing. He didn’t know how it could be possible—everything told him it couldn’t be—and yet he knew,
knew
that’s who it had been.

He leaned forward over his knees. He felt as if his entire body had been thrown into a higher gear, that his thoughts, his blood, everything was moving faster. His mother!

For the past three years Warren had seen his mother only on the evening news and in newspaper pictures. The postcards she sent them were mailed from places where she had never been. This was in case the FBI was watching the mail. Warren’s mother lived in a fugitive world that Warren only half understood.

Warren’s actual memory of his mother—drawn from the first five years of his life—was that of a woman always on the move, a woman with a sort of frantic urgency in her voice and movements. She carried signs protesting the Vietnam War in front of the White House. She lay down in front of nuclear power plants that polluted the environment. She was carried kicking and struggling to a patrol car to call attention to the dangers of pesticides.

His mother took on the glow, the mystery, of Wonder Woman, a person bigger than life, strong enough to make the world right. He saw her as being like Atlas, with the entire world on her shoulders.

When he was five, everything changed. Warren’s mother became part of a movement that was no longer peaceful. She went from putting stink bombs in the ventilating system of the Hilton, where a nuclear energy conference was being held, to pipe bombs exploded at night in chemical plants, Molotov cocktails thrown at executive limousines. And Warren’s mother became wanted by the FBI, and she could never come home again.

Warren could no longer picture his mother in his mind. She had used so many names, worn so many disguises. Sometimes in newspaper pictures her hair was black, sometimes blond. Sometimes she wore white-rimmed Woolworth’s sunglasses, sometimes wire spectacles. Sometimes she was old, sometimes young. He was painfully aware that he would no longer recognize his mother if he passed her on the street.

“Your mother is dead,” his grandmother would say flatly. She would not even allow her name to be mentioned in the apartment. “I only have two daughters now.”

“You have three!” he used to protest. “Ginger and Pepper
and
Saffron!”

Grandma had named her three daughters for spices. Aunt Pepper had told him that when Grandma used to call them from the window, she sounded like an old spice peddler. “Ginger! Pepper! Saffron!”

Warren’s mom, Saffron, was the only one who had a nickname—Saffee, to him the most beautiful name in the world.

And now Weezie had talked to her on the telephone! He was sure of that. He wanted to rush into her room and shake her awake. “You talked to Mom!”

The impulse was so strong that he actually got up out of bed, against his will, like a sleepwalker. He took a few steps toward the door. He stopped.

He knew how Weezie would react. She would be furious, and as usual her anger would be turned to scorn. Scorn was her best weapon. “Talking to Mom!” she would say, her voice adult and terrible. “Do you still hang on to the precious little dream that Mommie will come home, pick you up, kiss you, and make it all better?”

He moved back and sat on the edge of his bed like someone who had taken a blow. He
had
hung on to that dream for a long time. He had hurried home from school again and again because he had a “feeling” that she would be there, had run up the steps with so much momentum that if she had been there to pick him up, they would have spun around like skaters.

He lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over his shivering body. He stared up at the ceiling. He was as hurt as if his sister had actually said the words to him.

He closed his eyes and tried to get back into the mood of the sewer. He imagined himself walking beneath the dripping walls, shivering, his footsteps echoing hollowly down the long tunnels. He imagined that warning BLOOP, imagined swirling around as the golden form, majestic and terrible, rose from the dark waters, imagined his scream. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa …”

Of course, not wishing to do away with himself so early in the film, he would somehow have to prevent Bubbles from actually ingesting him. Perhaps … His thoughts died from lack of interest.

Usually his movies took him out of his world instantly. Sometimes a single sentence, spoken in a low tone: “No ordinary creature ate this whole herd of cattle.” Well, something like that, and he would be off.

Tonight, nothing would work. Only an hour earlier the sewer had been the realest thing in the world. The sights, smells, and sounds had filled his mind completely. Now the sewer was as foreign as something out of a history lesson.

All of a sudden Warren wanted his mom. And he wanted her in the old dreamlike way. He wanted to be scooped up in her thin arms, spun around, kissed. That was the only thing in the world that could take away this terrible feeling of loneliness.

He threw back his limp covers and kicked them away. He walked slowly into the hall.

He paused to listen. His grandmother was snoring in the living room. She had fallen asleep watching an Elvis Presley movie, and now there was nothing but snow on the screen. In the morning she would complain about missing the end.

He went into Weezie’s room and stumbled over her shoes in the dark.

“Who’s there?” she asked, sitting quickly up in bed.

“It’s just me.”

“What are you doing in here? Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Is Grandma all right?”

“I guess so. She’s snoring.”

“Then go back to bed. You know I don’t like people in my room.”

He stood a few feet away from her, on the latch-hooked rug his grandmother had made from a kit.

“Go on, Warren.”

Warren did not move. He usually avoided the bare floor. When he was little and home alone he would circle the entire apartment, leaping from chair to sofa, crawling over end tables, onto the TV set, over kitchen counters, the stove, anything to keep from stepping on the floor. It was a game he played. All his games back then were escape games, even when the bare floor was all he had to escape. Now, out of habit, he waited on the rug.

“Are you still there?” Weezie asked, her voice rising with irritation. “I do not like people watching me sleep!”

“You weren’t drooling.”

“Warren, get out of here. I mean it now.” She groped on the floor for something to throw at him.

There was a pause. Warren curled his toes down into the soft wool of his grandmother’s rug for strength, a plant taking root. “Were you talking to Mom on the telephone tonight?”

“Mom? Is that what you woke me up for?
Mom?
Don’t be ridiculous. Go back to bed.”