The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The High Divide

  Drummond & Son

  Screenwriter

  Up North

  The Scheme of Things

  The Dead Fish Museum

  Blessing

  The Bone Game

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Charles D’Ambrosio

  Copyright Page

  For Heather Larimer

  The desperate man has no native land.

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  The High Divide

  At the Home I’d get up early, when the Sisters were still asleep, and head to the ancient Chinese man’s store. The ancient Chinese man was a brown, knotted, shriveled man who looked like a chunk of gingerroot and ran one of those tiny stores that sells grapefruits, wine, and toilet paper, and no one can ever figure out how they survive. But he survived, he figured it out. His ancient Chinese wife was a little twig of a woman who sat in a chair and never said a word. He spoke only enough English to conduct business, to say hello and goodbye, to make change, although every morning, when I came for my grapefruit, I tried to teach him some useful vocabulary.

  I came out of the gray drizzle through the glass door with the old Fishback Appliance Repair sign still stenciled on it, a copper cowbell clanging above me, and the store was cold, the lights weren’t even on. I went to the bin and picked through the grapefruits and found one that wasn’t bad, a yellow ball, soft and square from sitting too long in the box, and then I went to the counter. The Chinese man wasn’t there. His tiny branchlike wife was sitting in her chair, all bent up. I searched my pockets for show, knowing all along that I’d be a little short. I came up with twenty-seven cents, half a paper clip, a pen cap, and a ball of blue lint. I put the money in her hand and she stared at it. By the lonesome sound my nickels and pennies made when she sorted them into their slots I also knew that the till was empty. I looked behind her through the beaded curtain to the small apartment behind the shop. Next to the kitchen sink was an apple with a bite out of it, the bite turned brown like an old laugh.

  I held my grapefruit, tossed it up in the air, caught it.

  Where is he? I asked.

  She was chewing on a slice of ginger and offered me a piece, which I accepted. In the morning, they chewed ginger instead of drinking coffee.

  Husband? I said.

  She blinked and spat on the floor. Meiyou xiwang, she said. Meiyou xiwang.

  She folded her hands, tangling the tiny brown roots together. Meiyou xiwang, she said, touching her heart, and sending her hands flying apart. Her singsong voice beat an echo against the bare walls. Her hands flapped like a bat. I shook my head. Meiyou xiwang, she insisted. Huh? I said, but I knew we could go on forever not making any sense. She hugged herself, like she was cold. I didn’t know what to say. She’d traveled all this way, she’d left China and crossed the ocean and come to Bremerton and opened a little store and put grapefruit in the bins and Mogen David on the shelves, but she’d gone too far, because now she couldn’t tell anybody what was happening to her anymore.

  I had two projects at the Home. I was reading the encyclopedia, working through the whole circle of learning available to man, as the introduction said. I’d started with Ignatius Loyola, because I’m named after him, and the Inquisition, and this led me right into the topic of torture.

  My other project involved learning Latin so I could be an altar boy. I got the idea one morning at Sacred Heart while I was staring at the cold altar and the Cross and winking at the nailed-up Christ to see if He’d wink back. Our priest said that he didn’t go for the vernacular because it was vulgar. If you were God Eternal, he said, would you want to listen to such yowling? He said that everything in the Church was a sign for something else, and a priest was a man who knew all the signs, but an altar boy knew a few of them, too. I looked around the sanctuary. With the snowy marble slab of altar, the gilt dome of the tabernacle and its tiny doors, the chalices and cruets, the fresh-cut flowers, the sparkling candlelight, the sanctuary was like a foreign country, and if I knew the language I could go there.

  Several times I read the Missal as far as the Minor Elevation, the part of the Mass just after you pray for the dead. Per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen. World without end. Amen. But I was trying to learn Latin with phonetics—the Missal was Latin on one side, English on the other—and, needless to say, my comprehension was zero, and I was always finding myself back at the beginning, starting over. Per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen!

  Most of our schoolwork focused on how to get into Heaven. Sister Eulalia, the catechism nun, taught us about sin and the opportunities for salvation. She was a short, wide old woman with thick glasses and blue eyes that drifted behind them like tropical fish. She kept calling Jesus the Holy Victim and the Word Made Flesh and the Unspotted Sacrifice. She said that sacrifice didn’t mean to kill but to make holy. We are made in the image of God’s great mystery but through our ignorance and despair our vision is clouded. Salvation, she told us, is our presence in a bright light where we at last become the perfect image and reflection of our Creator.

  We saw a slide show on the scapular. A boy was riding by a gas station on his bicycle. A man was pumping gas and a family was waiting in a car. Then the gas station was blowing up and the boy was flying through the air. Everybody died but the boy, who was wearing his scapular. Sister Eulalia passed around blank order forms and said to fill them out and bring $2.50 if you thought it was prudent to have a scapular for yourself. I’d spent all my money on grapefruits, though.

  At night, in bed, I practiced my prayers. We had to memorize so many at the Home: Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Act of Faith, of Hope, of Love, of Contrition. Praying either put me to sleep or made me think of girls. Once, I passed a girl a note during class and Sister Josephine, the discipline nun, intercepted it and said someone my age doesn’t know the least thing about love and shouldn’t use that word the way I did. That kind of love is special, she said. It’s a rare gift from God, it’s the consummation of a union, and it’s certainly nothing for children. Sister Josephine called it The Marriage Act. It’s embarrassing for me to admit, but she made me cry, she was yelling so much. I never sent another note. Still, I attached a vague feeling of hope to different girls, a feeling of, I don’t know, of whatever, that came out, some nights, when I said prayers.

  We had to learn the prayers because we prayed for everything: we prayed for food, we prayed for sleep, we prayed for new basketballs. Three times a day, Sister Catherine, the food nun, took us to the church cafeteria for our meals. Volunteer ladies served us—they were all old and kind and had science-fiction hair, clouds of blue gas, burning white-hot rocket fuel, explosions of atomic frizz. I loved the endless stacks of white bread and the cold slabs of butter. When the nuns said I was underfoot, I went downstairs and studied the encyclopedias or read Latin or went outside and shot buses with my pump gun. Buses passed the Home every twenty-six minutes. I built up my arm pitching rocks at a tree until a circle of pulpy white wood was exposed in the bark. One afternoon I planted a sunflower in a milk carton.

  I longed to go somewhere but there wasn’t anywhere good that I knew of. Then one day I found the public-school yard.

  What’re you doing here, you stupid shit? asked one kid, a pudgy boy with skin like a baby.

  He and some other boys pushed around me in a circle.

  The pudge said, Who are you?

  When I didn’t answer, he said, You’re one of those orphan bastards, right?

  The boys crowded in closer and I was afraid to speak. People could tell you were from the Home by yo
ur haircut. We were all shaved up like the Dalai Lama.

  Finally I smiled and mumbled, If you say so.

  What? the pudge said. I didn’t hear you.

  The circle of boys cinched like a knot. Their looming heads were way up in the sky.

  Yeah, I said.

  After that I sat below the monkey bars and chewed a butter sandwich and watched pudge-boy and his gang over by the water fountain with some girls and I knew I was going to have to kick his ass sooner or later. Everything else was new and strange but this seemed predictable and something I could rely on.

  That spring the pudge had the nerve to try out for baseball. He wore brand-new cleats and threw like a fem and his mitt, also brand-new, very orange and stiff, wouldn’t close. He might as well have been standing in right field with a piece of toast. He dropped everything. The second day of practice, we had an intrasquad game and I nailed him three times. I just chose places on his fat body and threw the ball at them. Eventually, pudge-boy was afraid to stand in the batter’s box. The coach thought I had a control problem but I didn’t. My control was perfect.

  I whiffed nine guys and made the team and the pudge was cut. He walked away, crying. I ran down the hill and jumped on his back. I hit him in the face and the neck and beat on his ear over and over. You hear that? I shouted. You hear that, you fat fucker? Now that I had him alone I was insane. The pudge rolled away on the grass, holding his ear. Blood was coming out. He was bawling, and I hawked a gob of spit right into his black wailing mouth and said, You bastard.

  That night, I was asleep with the encyclopedia pitched like a tent over my nose when Sister Celestine, the head nun, came in.

  Why weren’t you at dinner?

  I could hear the polished rocks of Sister Celestine’s rosary rattling as she worried them between her fingers.

  She pulled the encyclopedia off my head.

  Won’t you talk? Sister said.

  She tucked a dry, stray shaft of hair back beneath her habit. Maybe you’d feel more comfortable making a confession?

  I picked at the fuzzballs on my blanket.

  I just got off the phone with that boy’s mother, she said.

  She touched a cut on my lip and took a deep breath. She said, You called him a name. Do you know what that name means?

  I shook my head.

  She took off her scapular and put it around my neck. Two small pieces of brown wool hung on a cord, one in back, the other in front.

  I rubbed the wool between my finger and thumb.

  It’s not magic, she said.

  No?

  More like a sign, she said, that helps guide people—she paused—like us. When you pray to it you never say amen, because the prayer is continuous. It doesn’t have an end. Before I received my calling, she said, I used to be a lot like you. I felt trapped. It was like I lived in a dark little corner of my own mind. She sighed. Ignatius, do you know what the opposite of love is?

  Hate, I said.

  Despair, Sister said. Despair is the opposite of love.

  When the pudge came to the yard, he was obviously beat-up and everybody wanted to know what happened. Before I could say anything, he came charging across the lot and said, Truce, truce. We shook hands and sat under the monkey bars, which had become my private territory.

  I thought Catholics were pansies, he said.

  Ignatius Loyola was a warrior, I said.

  That’s a weird name, the pudge said. My name’s Donny.

  Ignatius, I told him.

  I’m sorry I called you a bastard, Donny said. He peeled a strip of red rubber off his tennis shoe and stretched and snapped it in the air. Then he put it in his mouth and chewed on it.

  You should meet my dad, he said.

  My dad used to race pigeons, I said. He had about a hundred of them.

  Donny looked impressed. How do you race pigeons? he asked.

  You just drive out to the country and let them go—they always find their way back to the coop. You can use pigeons to send messages.

  My dad ate a pigeon once, Donny said. In France.

  Donny told me about the Eurekan Territory, which was something he’d made up on summer vacation. The Eurekan Territory came from Eureka, California, where he had relatives he didn’t like. All they did was drink greyhounds, he said, and talk about people you didn’t know. They were always slapping their knees and saying, Gosh, isn’t that funny? when nothing was funny.

  Donny wasn’t a Catholic but I let him wear my scapular, which he kept on calling a spatula.

  You should come over to our house, Donny said. It’s big. My dad rakes it in.

  I said, You want to go see my dad?

  Donny looked at me. Where? he said.

  What do you mean, where?

  Isn’t he dead?

  Follow me, I said.

  St. Jude’s Hospital was a huge old brick building. A hurricane fence caged in a patio that was scattered with benches and garbage cans. We walked around the fence, plucking the cold wires with our fingers.

  My dad was sitting on a bench with a loaf of bread and an orange. He wore a paper nightgown with snaps in the back. His eyes were like blown fuses, and dry white yuck made a crust around his mouth. Wind ruffled his hair. It was too cold to be outside in a paper outfit.

  Don’t you want a sweater? I said.

  I climbed up the chain-link fence.

  This is my friend Donny, I said. Donny, this is my dad, Tony Banner.

  Dad was barefoot on one foot and wore a foam rubber slipper on the other. He grabbed the fence and the links shivered. He looked out west, toward the Olympic Mountains, and we looked, too. It was getting dark.

  Hey, Dad?

  He dropped a piece of bread through the fence, and a cou-ple of cooing pigeons bobbed along the gutter and fought each other for it. They were ugly pigeons, dirty like a sidewalk. They were right under me and Donny’s feet. I kicked one in the head. It fell over and beat the dirt with its wings.

  I’m learning quite a lot of prayers at school, I said.

  That got him to laugh. The cuts on his hands were healing. That last week at our house he emptied all the soup cans in the garage and kept the rusty nails in his pockets. One morning for breakfast he served me a bowl of nails with milk and then squeezed a fistful of them in his hand until blood came out. He kept saying with his voice very loud and fast, I got the nails, I got the nails right here, boy—where’s my cross, eh? Now he was gentle. He pushed bread through the fence until the loaf was gone and the pigeons flew away, except the one I’d kicked.

  I gotta go home and eat, Donny said to me.

  Donny’s gotta go home and eat, I told my dad, translating for him. I’ve got to go eat, too.

  I turned around once, real quick, and he was gripping the fence, looking off nowhere, then Donny and I crawled through a hole in the hedge.

  Donny’s dad asked us, Who wants to get the hell out of here? Who wants to go hiking in the Olympics?

  I’d spent most of my summer at Donny’s house, so I knew his parents. Mrs. Cheetam was a beautiful woman with silver-and-gold hair. Mr. Cheetam was a traveling salesman and wasn’t home much, but it was true, he raked it in. They bought Donny everything. Donny told me he had a sister who died of leukemia. He played me a cassette of her last farewell. Near the end of the tape she said, Donny? I love you, remember that. I want you to know that wherever I am, and wherever you are, I’ll be watching. I’ll be with you always. I love you. Do you hear me? Donny?

  When she said that—I love you. Do you hear me? Donny?—I got a lonely sort of chill.

  We’re now leaving the Eurekan Territory! Donny said as we drove away, and I said, That’s right. Goodbye, Eurekan Territory!

  Mr. Cheetam listened to different tapes from a big collection he kept in a suitcase. They were old radio shows, and one I liked was called The Shadow: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Mr. Cheetam and Donny knew all the words and talked right along with the tapes. The Shadow knows, they said, ha ha ha! />
  Later Donny woke up and asked, Where are we? Mr. Cheetam said, You see that river there, Donny? That’s the Quinault River, and we’re going to hike up along what’s called the High Divide, and when we get to the top we’ll be at the source of that river. You’ll be able to skip right over it, he said, so remember how big it is now. Donny asked, What if we see the Sasquatch? I said we’d be famous, if we captured it. Or took a picture, Donny said. But I don’t want to see it, he added. We parked at the ranger station and signed in. It was silent and we could hear our feet crunching the gravel. We cinched up our pack straps and looked at each other. This is it, Mr. Cheetam said. He looked up the trail. This is where we separate the men from the boys.

  After about an hour, we cut off the main path and headed toward the river. This is where I buried my dad, Mr. Cheetam explained. I always visit once a year. Right beside the river was a tree, hanging over the water and shadowing everything. Initials were carved in the tree on the side facing the river. BC is Billy Cheetam, Donny said. That’s my grandpa. Is he under the tree? I asked. No, no, Mr. Cheetam laughed. He was cremated and I scattered his ashes in the river. But this is the spot, he said. The river was deep and wide at that point. Mr. Cheetam asked if he and Donny could be alone to think and remember and I hiked back out to the main trail. I sat against a fallen log until Donny came back. He talks to him, Donny said. What’s he say? I asked, but Donny didn’t know.

  Our first camp was disappointing because we could hear Boy Scouts hooting and farting around, a troop of about sixty in green uniforms with red or yellow hankies around their necks. It was like the Army, with pup tents everywhere. Mr. Cheetam said not to worry, higher up there won’t be any Scouts.

  We found wood and lit a campfire and made dinner—beef Stroganoff—and I sopped up all the gravy with my fingers. We washed the pots and pans with pebbles and sand in the river. Mr. Cheetam drank whiskey from a silver flask, wiping his lips and saying, Aaahhh, this is living!