Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish (3 page)

She turned over, pulling the covers around her, and sighed. He continued to watch his sister. He knew she was not asleep.

He shifted, rubbed one foot over the other. “
Were
you talking to Mom?”

As Warren stood there, waiting for an answer, he felt as if he had spent most of his life pleading with women, waiting for answers. Usually, though, with Weezie, he just had to beg her to listen to his movies.

“Want to hear a movie I’m planning?”

“In a word—no.”

“Please, Weezie, you’ll like this one. Please. It starts out with an explosion in the desert and some scientists come to investigate and they look down inside this enormous crack in the surface of the earth and they see something stirring. One of the scientists says, ‘There’s something down there. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why, but there is something down there.’ And the other one answers, ‘And heaven help us if it ever decides to come up.’ ”

He hated to plead with people. It made him feel smaller somehow. He watched Weezie’s back. He cleared his throat and said again, “
Was
it Mom?”

Suddenly Weezie came up out of the covers like a tornado. She whirled to face him, throwing back the sheet. Her hands fell on her hips as naturally as tree limbs spring back into place.

“All right, just try to be sensible for once in your life,” she snapped. “How do you think I could be talking to Mom?” Her voice was more scornful than Warren had feared.

“I don’t know … exactly.”

“The last time we heard from her was four months ago, do you realize that? A postcard from California. ‘Having a wonderful time, glad you aren’t here.’ ”

“That was the last time
I
heard from her,” he said pointedly.

“So, do you think I have some secret line of communication? What? You think I send out pigeons? Smoke signals? Wireless messages? Voodoo drums? Call me tonight at sevennnnn.” Her hands fluttered mysteriously to make it all seem more impossible.

“I think … somehow … the telephone.”

Weezie exhaled with disgust. “Oh, go to bed, Warren.” She fell back onto her pillow to show that the conversation was over.

Warren waited in silence. In his movies, discoveries came so easily. “These scorpions are from the Incan cave.” “This woman was squirted by radioactive milk with two percent butterfat.” It was only in real life that you couldn’t get answers. “I’m not going, Weezie, until you tell me who you were talking to.”

“All right. I was talking to a girl from school.”

“I don’t believe you. A girl from school made you cry? Come on. I’ve seen the girls at your school, and there’s not one who—”

“All right, a boy from my school.”

“I don’t believe that either.”

“He was going to take me to the prom, and now he’s going to take Isolee Watkins.” She looked at him through her lashes. Then she raised her head. “Satisfied?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s all you’re going to get.”

The way she looked at him then, with her eyes as hard as stone, her mouth set, told Warren it was hopeless. He had seen that look before.

He turned and walked to his room, past the living room where the blank TV crackled. As he lay down and turned his face to the wall, his mouth was as set as hers.

“No, no, it can’t be. No goldfish can weigh two thousand pounds. Why, a goldfish that big could ingest …”

“Go ahead and finish, Chief. Could ingest two sewer workers.”

“G
ET UP IF YOU’RE
going to Pepper’s,” his grandmother called from the doorway.

“What?”

“Get up.”

Warren lay blinking in the sunlight from the window. All night he had suffered through one dream after another. He was never lucky enough to have good scary dreams with monsters and space creatures.

In his dreams he searched for lost homework, was sent to a blackboard too tall to reach, worked with pencils that squealed and caused students to laugh, and wrote on paper that spread across his desk like milk. Now he lay on his dirty sheets, more tired than if he had not slept at all.

“Is Weezie going?” he called.

“To Pepper’s? No.”

“Then I’m not going either.”

“Well, then you’ll be here all day by yourself.”

He rose on one elbow, alert at last. “Why? Where’s Weezie?”

“She went out. Now come on, get dressed. We’ll miss the bus.”

“Where did Weezie go?”

“I don’t know. To the library.”

“The library’s not open on Sunday morning.”

“Well, I don’t know. She said she was going to study with somebody. Maria maybe. Or Isolee.”

In one move he was on the floor, looking out the window at the street below.

The sidewalks were empty except for two dogs lying in front of the corner grocery store. These two dogs made up the neighborhood pack. The dog warden had been trying to catch them for years, but they were too smart for him. They knew the crawl spaces under every house, the broken slats in every fence. Now, sensing it was Sunday, the warden’s day off, they lay openly soaking up the morning sun.

“Why didn’t you tell me Weezie was going out?” He struck the windowsill with his fists.

“Why all this sudden interest in Weezie’s goings and comings?”

“Nothing. I just like to know what she’s doing.”

“She’s studying.”

“She
says
she’s studying.”

He turned away from the sunny window and looked at his grandmother. She watched him for a moment and then shrugged. “Weezie’s generally doing what she says she’s doing.”

“A lot you know.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me something about your sister?”

He sighed. “No.”

“Then get dressed and let’s go.”

Warren stood on the dusty floor. His grandmother thought it was a waste of energy to sweep floors more than once a month. He pulled on his clothes, the same he had worn yesterday. His grandmother didn’t believe in washing clothes often either.

Then he continued to stand in the middle of the floor, his teeth clamped tightly together, wondering where his sister was, what she was doing. He had the feeling she was contacting his mother, phoning her, maybe even going to see her. He struck an imaginary windowsill.

“You ready?”

“Yes.”

He went out of the apartment and down the stairs behind his grandmother. She took the steps slowly, one by one, like a child.

Warren paused on the landing. He put on his aviator sunglasses, hiding the fury in his eyes. Never before, in all the years of his mother’s absence—years in which he had missed her and longed for her and wept more tears for her than anybody—never in all those years had he even considered the possibility of finding her. If he had thought it was possible he would have been roaming the earth like a nomad.

And now Weezie had—

“Come on. I hear the bus,” his grandmother called up, holding the door open. “It’s coming.”

He ran down the rest of the steps and out onto the sidewalk. His grandmother was at the curb, ready to board.

And now, he thought, Weezie had done that. She had somehow found their mother, had talked to her, maybe at this very moment was on her way to see her.

“How’s it going?” his grandmother asked the driver as she climbed up. She always sat behind the driver, ignoring the signs, and spent the time chatting. “My daughter Pepper’s having us to dinner. You know Pepper?” she asked as she settled herself in the side seat.

“No’m.”

“She rides this bus—a tall girl, light red hair?”

“Lots of redheads on this route.”

“I thought you might remember her because when she was living in New York she had a part in a soap opera.”

“My wife might. She watches all them shows.”

“I remember when Pepper got the part. I sat back and thought, Well, now I’ll have the pleasure of watching my daughter every afternoon. She’ll get married and divorced and go crazy and attempt suicide. Only guess what?”

The driver shook his head.

“She was on seven episodes and got killed in a car crash. Burned up. They never found the body.”

“My, my.”

“For a while I hoped she didn’t really get killed, just thrown clear of the wreck and was wandering around somewhere with amnesia. Only it’s been three years now, so I guess it won’t happen.”

“Don’t look like it.”

“I have two daughters.” She glanced sideways at Warren. “The other daughter’s a singer in—Oh, here’s our stop.” She got up and Warren followed. She went down the steps slowly. “I got bad legs,” she explained to the driver.

“Take your time,” he answered.

They walked the block to Pepper’s apartment while his grandmother talked about bus drivers. She liked them. No bus driver had ever—in her fifty years of riding buses—been rude to her.

She shuffled along the sidewalk. She wore her best bedroom slippers. “And I’m not the ideal fare,” she admitted. “I don’t get on fast. Half the time I don’t have the right change. I—” She paused to ring the bell to Pepper’s apartment.

“Come on in,” Pepper called. “I’m cooking.”

“That’s encouraging. Usually she’s defrosting.”

“Grandma!”

Grandma felt her way to the sofa and put her swollen legs up on the coffee table. “You two socialize,” she said. “I’ll rest.”

Warren went into the kitchen where Aunt Pepper was reading the instructions on a package of frozen lasagna. “Sit down,” she said with a grin, “and tell me about your latest movie.” Aunt Pepper was the only person who was really interested in his plots. “I hope there’s a good part for me.”

“It’s about a goldfish,” he said without his usual enthusiasm.

“What is this? Some sort of a nature study?”

“No, it’s a two-thousand-pound goldfish. See, it got flushed into the sewer and has grown to enormous size because of a chemical in the water.”

“I like that.”

“You like them all.”

“No, no, I did not like
The Revenge of the Snails.
I refused to be slimed to death, remember? I have my principles. Anyway, what does this goldfish do, swallow people?”

“Ingests them.”

“Ah, and somebody says, ‘No, no, it can’t be. No goldfish can weigh two thousand pounds. Why, a goldfish that big could ingest …’ ‘Go ahead and finish, Chief. Could ingest …’ ” She paused and looked at Warren, waiting.

“Two sewer workers,” he supplied.

“This goldfish has ingested two sewer workers? I love it. Can I have a part in the movie?”

He nodded.

“How about this. I come into the sewer. I am pursued by a mugger and I hide behind a pipe. The mugger spots me and starts for me. Suddenly he sees a look of horror come over my face. He thinks, naturally, that I am horrified because of him, but actually it is because I see an enormous, giant goldfish rising out of the water behind him. I scream, ‘Look out behind you!’ He says, ‘Lady, that is the oldest trick in the book,’ and at that moment—” Pepper broke off. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you interested? I was just getting into my role.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

“You can tell me.”

“It’s nothing!”

Aunt Pepper waited. She knew that when Warren claimed nothing was wrong, he usually broke down on his own and told what the trouble was. “Well.” He looked up at his aunt. “What’s wrong is that I think Weezie knows where Mom is.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Weezie talked to Mom on the phone.”

“Did she tell you
that
?”

“No, but I know it’s true. Everybody probably knows where Mom is but me.”

“I don’t know where your mom is, and I don’t think Weezie does either.” She sat down at the table across from Warren. She glanced at the door to the living room and lowered her voice.

“All right, you might as well know this. Once a month—on the first Monday at seven o’clock—your mom calls the phone booth in front of the library. Or that’s when she’s supposed to call. One of us, Weezie or me, goes there and waits. Sometimes she calls and sometimes she doesn’t. It’s her way of keeping in touch.”

He sat up straighter. “How long has this been going on?”

“In the past three years your mom has called maybe six or seven times. She asks about you and Grandma and Weezie, and that’s it. We never talk about where she is or what she’s doing.”

“I want to talk to her.”

“Honey, your mom has broken the law.”

“I know that, but—”

“Once you’ve broken the law, it stays broken It’s like smashing that glass right there. And afterward you can be sorry for what you did, and you can live like a saint, but that doesn’t wipe out what you did.”

“I
know
that!”

“Look at Abbie Hoffman. He’s been living in some town in New York, a model citizen. He served on local committees. A governor commended him for some special service. But none of that wiped out the fact that he broke the law.”

“I don’t want to hear about him.”

“I’m telling you so you can understand why your mom can’t come home and be a mom and why you can’t call her and visit her. Your mom has broken the law, and she’s got two choices. She can live in hiding, or she can go to prison.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t talk to her like you do. Maybe if I talked to her, I could go see her. Maybe I could—”

There was a noise in the doorway. Warren looked up to see his grandmother.

“Mom, we’re talking about Saffee,” Pepper said in a gentle voice.

“I don’t know any Saffee,” his grandmother answered and, turning away, went back and sat heavily on the old sofa.

“It’s got to be destroyed. We can’t have a two-thousand-pound fish swimming under our city.”

“I agree. Our sewer must be made safe for mankind.”

W
ARREN WAS STANDING AT
the window, watching for his sister to return. His grandmother was in the living room in front of the television set. Usually his grandmother turned on the TV first thing, the way other people switch on lights, but tonight the house was dark and silent.

Warren’s thoughts turned from the dreary, empty street to the sewer below it. There Bubbles waited in the dark swirling waters.

Warren had always had strong feelings for his individual monsters. The creatures who attacked in groups—the snails and the cockroaches and the leeches—he could never work up much sentiment about them. But the individuals—Bossy, the giant skunk—he cared about them.