The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  Caroline opened the outhouse door. She wore only her nightgown. Her feet were bare.

  “You must be cold.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I am, but I’m going in.”

  We looked back through the woods to the cabin. A rope of gray smoke curled up through the chimney, rising, it struck me, out of my simplistic imagination.

  “You didn’t shoot that turkey,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “It’s just not you.”

  “I guess,” I said, although I resented the comment, the assumed familiarity. “I’d like to leave early tomorrow.”

  “I’m already packed,” she said. “I’ve got a big week coming up.”

  I held my breath and waited for the scripted words.

  “I got a part,” she said. “A detergent commercial, Monday. We’re shooting in Boston.”

  She was a good liar. She knew to look me directly in the eye. You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you. So that she wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, I nodded, releasing her gaze.

  “Who did?” she asked.

  “Did what?”

  “Shoot the turkey.”

  “Lindy,” I said.

  “I’m freezing,” my wife said. “I’m going in now.”

  I grabbed her by the shoulder, turning her toward me. She tried to shrug free, and I dug my fingers into her shoulders. “Tell me,” I said, tightening my grip until I felt bone roll beneath my thumbs. Her teeth were chattering, and she bit a crease of white in her lower lip, trying to stop them. She was trembling, and her frailty in the cold enraged me. I pulled her in close and then abruptly pushed her away, shaking and shoving until she fell back, breaking through the crust of ice the way children do, making angels. The deep powder closed over her face and her mouth was stopped with snow, and she lay still, her dark eyes staring vacantly up. She tried to rise, flailing her arms, and then, dreamily, she stretched out her hand, reaching for mine.

  I walked away, now trembling myself, but for some reason I turned, and when I did she called my name. I didn’t answer. She was standing by the outhouse, sunk to her knees in the broken drift, her hands clasping her shoulders so that she seemed to be embracing herself. Wind separated the ragged wisp of smoke from the chimney into several twining strands. Her long blond hair held the moonlight. Her nightgown billowed out, fluttering behind her, and she appeared to be hovering, almost drifting, as through water.

  The Scheme of Things

  Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers and buttoned up to his throat. He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist. He bowed to Kirsten with a stagy sweep of his hand and entered the gas station. All business, he returned immediately with the attendant in tow, a kid of sixteen, seventeen.

  “This here’s my wife, Kirsten,” Lance said.

  Kirsten smiled.

  “Pleased,” the kid said. He crawled under the chassis of the car and inspected the tailpipe.

  “Your whole underside’s rusted to hell,” he said, standing up, wiping his hands clean of red dust. “I’m surprised you haven’t fallen through.”

  “I don’t know much about cars,” Lance said.

  “Well,” the kid said, his face bright with expertise, “you should replace everything, right up to the manifold. It’s a big job. It’ll take a day, and it’ll cost you.”

  “You can do it?” Kirsten asked.

  “Sure,” the kid said. “No problem.”

  Lance squinted at the oval patch above the boy’s shirt pocket. “Randy,” he said, “what’s the least we can do?”

  “My name’s Bill,”the kid said “Randy’s a guy used to work here.”

  “So, Bill, what’s the least we can get away with?”

  “Strap it up, I suppose. It’ll probably hold until you get where you’re going. Loud as hell, though.”

  The kid looked at Kirsten. His clear blue eyes lingered on her chest.

  “We represent a charity.” Lance handed the kid one of the printed pamphlets, watching his eyes skim back and forth as he took in the information. “Outside of immediate and necessary expenses, we don’t have much money.”

  “Things are sure going to hell,” the kid said. He shook his head, returning the pamphlet to Lance.

  “Seems that way,” Lance said.

  The kid hurried into the station and brought back a coil of pipe strap. While he was under the car, Lance sat on the warm hood, listening to the wind rustle in the corn. Brown clouds of soil rose from the fields and gave the air a sepia tint. Harvest dust settled over the leaves of a few dying elms, over the windows of a cinder-block building, over the trailers in the courtyard across the street. One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.

  “You got a phone?” Lance asked.

  “Inside,” the kid said.

  Lance looked down and saw the soles of the kid’s work boots beneath the car, a patch of dirty sock visible through the hole widening in one of them. He walked away, into the station.

  ____

  The kid hadn’t charged them a cent, and they now sat at an intersection, trying to decide on a direction. The idle was rough. The car detonated like a bomb.

  “Here’s your gum,” Lance said.

  He emptied his front and back pockets and pulled the cuff of his pants up his leg and reached under the elastic band of his gym socks. Pink and green and blue and red packages of gum piled up in Kirsten’s lap. He pulled a candy bar from his shirt pocket and began sucking away at the chocolate coating.

  “One pack would’ve been fine,” Kirsten said. “A gumball would have been fine.”

  “Land of plenty, sweetheart,” he said.

  Kirsten softened up a piece of pink gum and blew a large round bubble until it burst and the gum hung like flesh from her nose.

  “Without money, we’re just trying to open a can of beans with a cucumber,” Lance said. “It doesn’t matter how hungry we are, how desirous of those beans we are—without the right tools, those beans might as well be on the moon.” Lance laughed to himself. “Moon beans,” he said.

  Kirsten got out of the car. The day was turning cold, turning to night. She leaned through the open window, smelling the warm air that was wafting unpleasantly with the mixed scent of chocolate and diesel.

  “What’s your gut feel?” Lance asked.

  “I don’t know, Lance.”

  She walked toward the intersection. Ghosts and witches crossed from house to house, holding paper sacks and pillowcases. The street lights sputtered nervously in the fading twilight. With the cold wind cutting through her T-shirt, Kirsten felt her nipples harden. She was small-breasted and sensitive and the clasp on her only bra had broken. She untucked the shirt and hunched her shoulders forward so that the nipples wouldn’t show, but still the dark circles pressed against the white cotton. The casual clothes that Lance had bought her in Key Biscayne, Florida, had come to seem like a costume and were now especially flimsy and ridiculous here in Tiffin, Iowa.

  A young girl crossed the road, and Kirsten followed her. She thought she might befriend the girl and take her home, a gambit, playing on the gratitude of the worried parents that Kirsten always imagined when she saw a child alone. The pavement gave way to gravel and the gravel to dirt, and finally a narrow path in the weeds dipped through a dragline ditch and vanished into a cornfield. The girl was gone. Kirsten waited at the edge of the field, listening to the wind, until she caught a glimpse of the little girl again, far down one of the rows, sitting and secretly eating candy from her sack.

&
nbsp; “You’ll spoil your dinner,” Kirsten said.

  The girl clutched the neck of her sack and shook her head. Entering the field felt to Kirsten like wading from shore and finding herself, with one fatal step, out to sea. She sat in the dirt, facing the girl. The corn rose over their heads and blew in waves, bending with the wind.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Kirsten said. “I’m cold.”

  “Are you a stranger?” the girl asked.

  “What’s a stranger?”

  “Somebody that kills you.”

  “No, then, I’m not a stranger.”

  Kirsten picked a strand of silk that hung in the little girl’s hair.

  “I’m your friend,” she said. “Why are you hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding. I’m going home.”

  “Through this field?” Kirsten said.

  “I know my way,” the little girl said. The girl was dressed in a calico frock and dirty pink pumps, but Kirsten wasn’t quite sure it was a costume. A rim of red lipstick distorted the girl’s mouth grotesquely, and blue moons of eyeshadow gave her face an unseeing vagueness.

  “What are you supposed to be?” Kirsten asked.

  The girl squeezed a caramel from its cellophane wrapper, and said, “A grown-up.”

  “It’s getting dark,” Kirsten said.” You aren’t scared?”

  The little girl shrugged and chewed the caramel slowly. Juice dribbled down her chin.

  “Let me take you back home.”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “You can’t stay out here all by yourself.”

  The girl recoiled when Kirsten grabbed her hand. “Let me go,” she screamed, her thin body jolting away. “Let me go!” The fury in her voice shocked Kirsten, and she felt the small fingers slip like feathers from her hand. When the girl ran off through the rows of corn, it was as if the wind had taken her away. Instantly, she was nowhere and everywhere. In every direction, the stalks swayed and the dry leaves turned as if the little girl, passing by, had just brushed against them.

  When Kirsten finally found her way out of the field, she was in another part of town. She walked the length of the street, looking for signs, deciding at last on a two-story house in the middle of the block. A trike lay tipped over in the rutted grass, and a plastic pool of water held a scum of leaves. Clay pots with dead marigolds—woolly brown swabs on bent, withered stalks—lined the steps. A family of carved pumpkins sat on the porch rail, smiling toothy candle-lit grins that flickered to black, guttering in laughter with every gust of wind. On the porch, newspapers curled beside a milk crate. Warm yellow light lit the downstairs and a woman’s shadow flitted across a steam-clouded kitchen window.

  Kirsten heard a radio playing. She knocked on the door.

  The woman answered. Her hair was knotted up on her head with a blue rubber band, a few fugitive strands dangling down over her ears, one graying wisp curling around her eye. A smudge of flour dusted her cheek.

  “Yes?” the woman said.

  “Evening, ma’am.” Kirsten handed the woman a pamphlet. “I’m with BAD,” she said. “Babies Addicted to Drugs. Are you busy?”

  The woman switched on the porch light and held the printed flyer close to her face. Closing one eye, she studied the bold-red statistics on the front of the page and then flipped it over and looked into the face of the dark, shriveled baby on the back.

  “Doesn’t hardly look human, does it?” Kirsten said.

  “No, I can’t say it does,” the woman said.

  “That’s what’s happening out there, ma’am. That, and worse.” Kirsten looked off down the road, east to where the town ended and the world opened up to cornfields and darkening sky. She thought of the little girl.

  “Smells nice inside,” Kirsten said.

  “Cookies,” the woman said.

  “You mind if I come in?”

  The woman looked quickly down the road and, seeing nothing there, said, “Sure. For a minute.”

  Kirsten sat in a Naugahyde recliner that had been angled to face the television. Across from her was a couch covered with a clear plastic sheet. The woman returned with a plate of cookies. She set them in front of Kirsten and slipped a coaster under a coffee cup full of milk.

  “My partner and me have been assigned to the Midwest territory,” Kirsten said. “I got into this when I was living in New Jersey and saw it all with my own eyes and couldn’t stand by and do nothing. Those babies were just calling out to me for help.”

  “I’ve got three children myself,” the woman said.

  “That’s what the cookies are for,” Kirsten said. She bit into one and tasted the warm chocolate.

  “Homemade,” the woman said. “But the kids like store-bought. All they want is Wing Dings or what have you.”

  “They’ll appreciate it later, ma’am. I know they will. They’ll remember it and love you.”

  In the low light, Kirsten again noticed the spectral smudge of flour on the woman’s cheek—she had reached to touch herself in a still, private moment as she thought of something she couldn’t quite recall, a doubt too weak to claim a place in the clamor of her day.

  “That baby on the flyer isn’t getting any homemade cookies. That baby was born addicted to drugs. There’s women I’ve personally met who would do anything to get their drugs and don’t care what-all happens to their kids. There’s babies getting pitched out windows and dumped in trash cans and born in public lavatories.”

  “Things are terrible, I’m sure, but I can’t give you any money. I worked all day making the kids’ Halloween costumes—they want store-bought, of course, but they can’t have them, not this year.”

  “What’re they going to be?”

  “Janie’s a farmer, Randall’s a ghost. Kenny’s costume was the hardest. He’s a devil with a cape and hood and a tail.” If she could coax five dollars out of this woman, Kirsten thought, she could buy a cheap bra out of a bin at the dime store. Her breasts ached. When she’d seen the trike on the lawn out front, she’d assumed that this woman would reach immediately for her pocketbook.

  “With a ten-dollar donation, you get your choice of two magazine subscriptions, free of charge for a year.” Kirsten showed the woman the list of magazines “Cosmo,” she said. “Vogue, Redbook, all them.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said.

  The front window washed with white light.

  “You had better go.” The woman stood up. “I don’t have any use for your magazines.”

  On the porch, they met a man, his face darkened with the same brown dirt and dust that had rolled through and clouded the sky that day. Spikes of straw stabbed his hair and the pale gray molt of a barn swallow clung to his plaid shirt. A silent look passed between the man and the woman, and Kirsten hurried away, down the steps.

  “I thought she was trick-or-treating,” the woman said as she shut the door.

  “Nothing?” Lance said. “Nothing?”

  Kirsten tore the wrapping from another piece of gum. They had driven to the outskirts of town, where the light ended and the pavement gave way to gravel and the road, rutted like a washboard, snaked off toward a defile choked with cottonwoods. Every street out of town seemed to dead-end in farmland, and here a lighted combine swept back and forth over the field, rising and falling like a ship over high seas. The combine’s engine roared as it moved past them, crushing a path through the dry corn.

  “A man came home,” Kirsten said.

  “So?”

  “So the lady got all nervous and said I had to go.”

  “Should’ve worked the man,” Lance said. He ran his finger along the outline of her breasts, as if he were drawing a cartoon bust. “We’ve talked about that. A man’ll give money just to be a man about things.”

  “I’m too skinny,” Kirsten said.

  “You’re filling out, I’ve noticed. You’re getting some shape to you.”

  Lance smiled his smile, a wide, white grin with a hole in the middle of it. Two of his teeth had fallen out, owi
ng to a weakness for sweets. He worried his tongue in the empty space, slithering it in and out along the bare gum.

  “I wish I had a fix right now,” Kirsten said. She hugged herself to stop a chill radiating from her spine. The ghost of her habit trailed after her.

  Again the voracious growling of the combine came near. Kirsten watched the golden kernels spray into the holding bin. A man sat up front in a glass booth, smoking a pipe, a yellow cap tilted back on his head.

  “My cowboy brain’s about dead,” Lance said. “What do you think?”

  Kirsten had died once, and had made the mistake, before she understood how superstitious he was, of telling Lance about it. Her heart had stopped and she had drifted toward a white light that rose away from her like a windblown sheet, hovering over what she recognized as her cluttered living room. She was placid and smiling into the faces of people she had never seen before, people she realized instantly were relatives, aunts and uncles, cousins, the mother she had never known. Kirsten had grown up in foster care, but now this true mother reached toward her from within the source of light, her pale pink hands fluttering like the wings of a bird. A sense of calm told Kirsten that this was the afterlife, where brand-new rules obtained. She woke in a Key Biscayne hospital, her foster mother in a metal chair beside the bed, two uniformed cops standing at the door, ready to read Kirsten her rights.

  “Don’t always ask me,” Kirsten said.

  “Just close your eyes, honey. Close ’em and tell me the first thing you see.”

  With her eyes closed, she saw the little girl, alone, running, lost in the corn.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “That’s what you saw?”

  “Start the car, Okay? I can’t explain everything I see.”