The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  “And I never really get away from this feeling,” she went on. “Sadness, you could call it. My mother—my true mother, I mean—is out there, but I’ll never know her. I sometimes get a feeling like she’s watching me in the dark, but that’s about it. You know that sense you get, where you think something’s there and you turn around and, you know, there’s nothing there?”

  The woman did, she did, with nods of encouragement.

  “When I think about it, though, I’m better off than these babies. Just look at that little one’s dark face, his shriveled head. He looks drowned.”

  Then the woman filled in an amount and signed her name.

  “I wish I was invisible,” Lance said. “I’d just walk into these houses and they wouldn’t even know.”

  “And do what?”

  “Right now I’d make some toast.”

  “Hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “Wouldn’t they see the bread floating around?”

  “Invisible bread.”

  “You get that idea from your cowboy brain?”

  “Don’t make fun of the cowboy brain,” Lance said. “It got us out of that goddamn detention. It got us over that fence.”

  “We’re ghosts to these people, Lance. They already don’t see us.”

  “I’d like to kill someone. That’d make them see. They’d believe then.”

  “You’re just talking,” Kirsten said. “I think I’m getting my period.”

  “Great,” Lance said. “All we need.”

  “Fuck you,” Kirsten said. “I haven’t had a period in two years.”

  She turned over one of the pamphlets.

  Seeing the baby’s inconsolable face reminded Kirsten of a song her foster mother used to sing, but while the melody remained, the lyrics were dead to her, because merely thinking of this mother meant collaborating in a lie and everything in it was somehow corrupted. Words to songs never returned to Kirsten readily—she had to think hard just to recall a Christmas carol.

  “Little babies like that one,” she said, “they’ll scream all the time. Their little hands are jittery. They have terrible fits where they keep squeezing their hands real tight and grabbing the air. They can’t stop shaking, but when you try to hold them they turn stiff as a board.”

  “To be perfectly honest,” Lance said, “I don’t really give a fuck about those babies.”

  “I know.”

  “We just need money for gas.”

  “I know.”

  At the next house, a man answered, and immediately Kirsten smelled the sour odor of settledness through the screen door. A television played in the cramped front room. A spider plant sat on a stereo speaker, still in its plastic pot, the soil dry and hard yet with a pale shoot thriving, growing down to the shag carpet, as if it might find a way to root in the fibers. Pans in the sink he scrubbed as needed, coffee grounds and macaroni on the floor, pennies and dimes caught in clots of dog hair. A somber, unmoving light in rooms where the windows were never opened, the curtains always closed.

  “Some got to be addicted,” the man said, after Kirsten explained herself. “They never go away.”

  “That may be so,” Kirsten admitted. “I’ve thought the same myself.”

  He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

  “You want a beer?”

  “No thanks.”

  The blue air around the television was its own atmosphere, and when the man sank back in his chair it was as if he’d gone there to breathe. He looked at Kirsten’s breasts, then down at her feet, and finally at his own hands, which were clumsy and large, curling tightly around the bottle.

  “Where you staying?”

  “About a mile out of town,” she said. She handed the man a pamphlet. “I’ve had that same despair you’re talking about. When you feel nothing’s going to change enough to wipe out all the problem.”

  “Bunch of niggers, mostly.”

  “Did you look at the one there?”

  “Tar baby.”

  “That kid’s white,” Kirsten said. She had no idea if this was true.

  He didn’t say anything.

  Kirsten nodded at the television. “Who’s winning?”

  “Who’s playing?” the man said. He was using a coat hanger for an aerial. “The blue ones, I guess.”

  “But isn’t it enough? If you can save one baby from this life of hell, isn’t that okay?”

  “Doesn’t matter much,” he said. “In the scheme of things.”

  “It would mean everything,” Kirsten said, “if it was you.”

  “But,” he said, “it’s not me.” The blur of the television interested him more. “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where’d you say you were staying?”

  “With these old people, Effie, Effie and his wife, Gen.”

  He dropped the pamphlet on the floor and pushed himself out of the chair. He swayed and stared dumbly into a wallet full of receipts.

  “Well, tonight you say hi to them for me. You tell Effie and Gen Johnny says hi.” When he looked at Kirsten, his eyes had gone neutral. “You tell them I’m sorry, and you give them this,” he said, leaning toward Kirsten. Then his lips were gone from her mouth, and he was handing her the last five from his billfold.

  When they returned to the farmhouse, their car was sitting in the drive and dinner was cooking. The kitchen windows were steamed, and the moist air, warm and fragrant, settled like a perfume on Kirsten’s skin. She ran hot water and lathered her hands. The ball of soap was as smooth and worn as an old bone, a mosaic assembled from remnants, small pieces thriftily saved and then softened and clumped together. Everything in the house seemed to have that same quality, softened by the touch of hands—hands that had rubbed the brass plating from the doorknobs, hands that had worn the painted handles of spoons and ladles down to bare wood. Kirsten rinsed the soap away, and Gen offered her a towel.

  “You don’t have any other clothes, do you?” the old woman asked.

  “No, ma’am,” she said.

  “Let’s go pull some stuff out of the attic,” Gen said. She drew a level line from the top of her head to the top of Kirsten’s.” We’re about the same size, I figure. You won’t win any fashion awards—it’s just old funny things, some wool pants, a jacket, a couple cardigan sweaters. But you aren’t dressed for Iowa.” She pronounced it “Ioway.”

  “I’d appreciate that, ma’am.”

  “Doing the kind of work you do, I don’t imagine you can afford the extras,” the old woman said, as they climbed a set of steps off the upstairs hallway. “But in this country we don’t consider a coat extra.”

  She tugged a string and a bare bulb lit the attic. In the sudden glare, the room seemed at first to house nothing but a jumble of shadows.” I’ve held on to everything,” she said.

  “I met a man in town today,” Kirsten said. “He said he knew you and Effie.”

  The old woman slit the tape on a box with her thumbnail and handed Kirsten a sweater that smelled faintly of dust and camphor.

  Kirsten held the woman still and kissed her on the lips. “He said to give you that.”

  “Johnny?” Gen said. “He won’t come out here.”

  Kirsten slipped into the sweater, a cardigan with black leather buttons like a baby’s withered navel, a hardened ball of Kleenex in the pocket. She had never known a world of such economy, where things were saved and a room in a house could be set aside for storage. This woman had lived to pass her things on, but now there was no one to take them.

  “It was a combine,” Kirsten said. “It was this time of year.”

  The old woman nodded.

  “Your little girl doesn’t know she’s dead. She’s still out there.”

  “How do I know you know all this?”

  “I saw her,” Kirsten said. “And when me and Lance come to the door last night we never knocked.”

  From a rack against the wall, the old woman took down a wool overcoat.

>   “You were waiting up for her. You wait every year.”

  Gen stepped in front of a cheval mirror and held the coat against her body, modeling it for a moment.

  “It wasn’t Effie’s fault,” Kristen said.

  “He feels the guilt all the same,” the old woman said.

  “He had to.”

  “Had to what?”

  “Live,” Kristen said. “He had to live his life, just the same as me and you.”

  They set four places with the good plates and silver and flowery napkins in the dining room. There was a ham pricked with cloves and ringed around with pineapple and black olives and green beans and salad and bread. Effie fussed over his wife as if he’d never had dinner with her, passing dishes and offering extra helpings, which she refused each time, saying, “Help yourself.” Kirsten eventually caught on, seeing that this solicitude was the old man’s sly way of offering a compliment and serving himself a little more at the same time. The food was good; it all glistened, the juices from the ham, the butter running off the beans, the oil on the salad. Gen spent most of the meal up on her feet, offering, spooning, heating, filling.

  Effie’s conversation made a wide, wandering tour of the land. Jesse James used to hide out in this country, he said. Then he was talking about no-till planting, soil that wasn’t disked or plowed.

  “You got corn in just about everything,” he said. “In gasoline, sparkplugs, crayons, toothpaste, disposable diapers—”

  “No, really?” Lance said.

  “You bet,” the old man went on, “and paint, beer, whiskey. You name it.” He said one out of four hogs produced in this country came from Iowa—which he, too, pronounced “Ioway.” Hogs till Hell wouldn’t have it, he said, thundering the words. The topic of hogs led to a story he’d read about Fidel Castro roasting a pig in a hotel room in New York, and then he told about their travels, a trip to Ireland and another to Hawaii, which he pronounced “Hoy.”

  After dinner, there was pumpkin pie—prize-winning, Effie announced, as the pie tin took center stage on the cleared table.

  It was delicious, the filling warm with a buttery vanishing feel on Kirsten’s tongue. “What’s in it?” she asked.

  “Oh,” Gen said, “cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla—but real pumpkin’s the key.” Gen, satisfied with the satisfaction at her table, smiled at her husband, who gravely put down his fork.

  “When you come,” Effie said, “Momma said you mentioned our little girl.”

  The old man looked across the table at his wife, checking her eyes, or the turn of her mouth, for subtle signs, searching for agreement. It was as if he found what he needed in the space between them, and spoke aloud only to verify that it was there, that someone else had seen it.

  “Our little girl,” Gen said.

  “Your daughter,” Kirsten said.

  “I wondered if you were an old friend. Maybe from school. Most of them have grown and gone away. I used to see—it would have been so long ago, but . . .” He trailed off, his pale blue eyes sparkling in the weak, splintered light of the chandelier.

  Lance said, “Kirsten’s been to the other side. She’s seen it.”

  “I would believe you,” Effie said. “Some around here don’t credit dowsers, but we always have. We never had reason not to. We always had plenty of water.” He cleared his throat. “I’d pay anything if you could tell us—something.”

  “There’s the babies,” Lance said.

  “I’ll help with those babies of yours. I’ll donate to your cause. Where you going after this?”

  “We’re aiming west,” Lance said.

  Effie squared his fork with the edge of the table. “Well?”

  Kirsten was about to speak when she felt a hand slide over her knee, the fingers feeling their way until they rested warmly in her hand, holding it tight. She glanced at the old woman.

  “It was only that picture on your wall,” she said to Effie.

  The picture was the one every child drew a hundred times—the house, the leafy tree, the sun in one corner, the birds overhead, the walkway widening like a river as it flows out from the front door, the family standing on the green grass, a brother, a sister, a mother with her triangle dress, the father twice as big as everybody, the stick fingers overlapping—and that no one ever saved.

  “It was just that picture,” Kirsten said. “I wish I could say it was more, but it wasn’t.”

  Effie picked up his fork and pressed it against the crumbs of piecrust still on his plate, gathering them. He looked as though he had another question in mind.

  “That was the last picture,” the old woman said.

  “She just drawn it at school,” he said. “She put me and Gen in, her and her brother.”

  “Stephanie,” Kirsten said, “and Johnny.”

  The old man glanced at his wife.

  “She spelled all the names on the picture,” Kirsten said.

  Gen whispered yes, but it was Effie who had to speak up. “I never breathed right or walked right after,” he said. “Never farmed, neither, except for my little garden out back.”

  “That was the best pie I ever had,” Kirsten said.

  “Show your ribbons, Momma,” Effie said.

  “Oh, no,” Gen said, waving her hand, shooing away the approach, the temptation of something immodest.

  “Well, that’s right,” Effie said. “The pie’s right here, huh?” He looked around the table. “The pie’s right here.”

  Kirsten hovered above the field and could hear the rumble of an engine and the crushed stalks snapping, a crackling noise that spread and came from everywhere at once, like fire. The stalks flailed and broke and dust and chaff flew up, and then, ahead, she saw the little girl running down the rows, lost in the maze, unable to search out a safe direction. Suddenly the girl sat on the ground, her stillness an instinct, looking up through the leaves, waiting for the noise to pass. Kirsten saw her there—a little girl being good, quiet, obedient—but when the sound came closer she flattened herself against the dirt, as if the moment might pass her by. When it was too late, she kicked her feet, trying to escape, and was swallowed up. The noise faded, and a scroll of dirt and stover curved over the fields like handwriting. Then it was gone, and Kirsten saw her own reflection floating in the gray haze of the vanity.

  “Lance,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We’re leaving,” she said.

  “Why, what?”

  Kirsten gathered the old woman’s clothes in a garbage sack and had Lance carry them to the car. She made the bed and fluffed the thin pillows. The house was quiet.

  She sat at the small painted vanity, taking a blue crayon from the cup, and wrote a thank-you note. She wrote to the old woman that one second of love is all the love in the world, that one moment is all of them; she wrote that she’d really liked the pumpkin pie, and meant it when she’d said it was the best she’d ever had, adding that she never expected to taste better; she thanked her for the hospitality and for fixing the car; and then she copied down the words to the song the woman she called Mother had sung:

  Where are you going, my little one, little one?

  Where are you going, my baby, my own?

  Turn around and you’re two, turn around and you’re four.

  Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of the door.

  Lance was gone for a long time, and Kirsten, looking over the note, considered tearing it up each time she read it. As she sat and waited, she felt a sudden warmth and reached under the elastic of her underpants. When Lance finally returned, he was covered in dry leaves and strings of tassel, as if he’d been out working in the fields. They went outside and pushed the car down the gravel drive, out to the road. It started up, beautifully quiet.

  “Wait here,” Kirsten said.

  She walked back to the yard. It was cool, and the damp night air released a rich smell of dung and soil and straw, a smell Kirsten was sure belonged only to Iowa, and only at certain hours. S
he pulled her T-shirt over her head. She was reaching for the clothespin that held the old woman’s bra when something made her look up. The old woman was standing at the upstairs window, her hand pressed flat against the glass. Kirsten took the bra from the line and slipped the straps over her shoulders. She fastened the clasp and leaned forward, settling her breasts in the small white cups. The women looked at each other for what seemed like an eternity, and then Kirsten pulled on her shirt and ran back to Lance.

  Under the moonlight, they drove down mazy roads cut through the fields.

  “Goddam, the Lord sure hath provideth the corn around here,” Lance said. He imitated the old man compulsively. “I’ll be plenty glad to get out of this Ioway. Ioway! Christ Almighty. I’m sorry, but those people were corny. And that old guy, jawing on about Castro’s fucking pigs in the bathtub. What’d he say, they cooked a hog in that hotel room? What the hell.” Lance was taking charge, his mind hard, forging connections. He was feeling good, he was feeling certain. “And goddam I hate ham! Smells like piss!” He rolled down the window and yelled, “Goodbye, fucking Ioway!” He brushed corn silk from his sleeve and shook bits of leaves from his hair.

  “Here’s something for you.” He reached in his pocket and handed her a long heavy chain. “Looks to me like gold with emeralds and rubies mixed in,” he said.

  “That’s costume jewelry, Lance.”

  “We’ll get it appraised, and you’ll see. It’s real,” he said, bullying the truth, hating its disadvantages. “They won’t miss it, Kirsten. They’re old, honey. They’re gonna die and they got no heirs, so don’t you worry.” He grinned widely and said, “I got something out of the deal, too.”

  He waited. Kirsten just stared at the cheap, gaudy chain, pouring it like water from one hand to the other.

  Lance said, “Look in back.”

  When she turned around, all she saw through the rear window was a trail of dust turning red in the tail lights.

  “Under the blanket,” Lance said.