The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  Kirsten reached behind her and pulled away the blanket. The rear seat was overflowing with ears of corn. Lance had turned the whole back of the car into a crib.

  “Ioway corn,” he said. “Makes me hungry just thinking about it.”

  The Dead Fish Museum

  “This key isn’t working,” Ramage said.

  Behind a thick sheet of acrylic, the desk clerk’s face rushed up at him; it spread and blurred, white and without features, but never seemed to reach the surface. Ramage leaned forward and looked through a circle in the slab of glass, cut like a hole in ice. On the counter was a dinner plate with chicken bones and a few grains of rice hardening in brown gravy, and next to the plate was the splayed and broken spine of a romance. The clerk had been working over the chicken, cracking the bones and sucking the marrow. Her hair was thin and her teeth were leaning gray ruins in her lipless mouth. Her blue eyes were milky and vague, the pupils tiny beads of black. Ramage could not imagine a youth for her—it was if she’d been born fully ruined. She licked her fingers and swiveled heavily on her stool, unhooking a new key from a pegboard on the wall.

  “Off season,” she said. She seemed suspicious of him.

  “I’m here for a job,” Ramage explained. “A movie.”

  “Oh.” A hand flew up to the crimped little mouth. The eyelids batted. “Who’s in it? Anybody famous?”

  “No one,” Ramage said. “No one famous.”

  “A movie, really?” she said. “You an actor?”

  “Yes,” Ramage said, lagging, caught in the confusing over-lap of questions. “No.” He tapped his new key on the counter. “Hope this works,” he said.

  Ramage went back to no. 7 and this time the door unlocked. He set his canvas tool sack in one corner and draped his coat over a doorknob and instantly they seemed to have been there forever. He changed out of his shirt and splashed cold water in his face. Next door, he heard a man and a woman laughing, perhaps making love. He’d gained weight in the hospital—two sedentary months chain-smoking in the dayroom, drugged and without true hunger, yet an emptiness had kept him eating constantly. The food was institutional, flavorless, all of it boiled and pale, except for a bounty of fruit that arrived on the ward in pretty wicker gift baskets that no one wanted. One day a month into his stay, the vibrancy of an apple had started him crying. He’d been alone in the dining room and it was quiet except for the rumbling of the dumbwaiter dropping down to the basement and the singsong of black scullions rising up the shaft from the kitchen. A red apple rested on the windowsill in a beam of white morning light. Waxed and glowing, it was painfully vivid. It was perfect, he remembered thinking, but too far away to eat.

  Ramage put on his coat and lingered in the doorway, trying to decide if he should carry his canvas tool sack with him. In it was everything, his tools, a change of underwear, a clean shirt, a pair of jeans. Buried at the bottom of the sack, wrapped in a purple shop rag, was the gun that he had believed, for the past year, would kill him. The gun was his constant adversary, like a drug, a deep secret that he kept from others, but it was also his passion, a theater where he poured out his lonely ardor, rehearsing scenarios, playing with possibilities. Over time the gun had become a talisman with the power and primitive comfort of a child’s blanket. It would horrify him to lose it. Ramage hid the canvas sack beneath the bed. He locked the door and checked it. Halfway across the parking lot, stricken with doubt, he returned to his room and tested the handle once more, making sure.

  Ramage immediately went and stole an apple and a brick of cheese at a convenience store. The woman behind the cash register sucked on a whip of red licorice and read through a beauty magazine while a tinny radio wept sentimental favorites. As he was leaving, the woman gave Ramage the eye. She knew what he’d done, he was sure, but her stake in the scheme of things didn’t warrant hassling shoplifters. Had she confronted him, he would have handed over the apple and cheese as obediently as a schoolboy. He wouldn’t have run away, he wouldn’t have become violent, he wouldn’t have elaborated a lie. He’d have felt deep shame. Maybe the cashier understood that, maybe she thought he was ridiculous.

  Back in his room, Ramage took a hacksaw blade from his tool sack and sliced up his apple, fanning the pieces out on the nightstand. He cut the brick of cheese and paired up a dozen openfaced sandwiches. Next door, a baby cried, and then a man yelled, telling it to shut the fuck up. A woman shouted, “For christsake, it’s just a baby. It might be hungry or something.” Ramage turned on his TV and blotted out the noise. He felt evil around young children; he avoided them on buses, in waiting rooms, in city parks. The night of his release, he’d been seated in a restaurant next to a family with a baby, not six months old. The child was dressed snugly in blue footed pyjamas, gurgling and burping a white liquid all over itself. After a few minutes, Ramage moved his steak knife to the other side of his plate. Something wildly uncentered in his mind had told him he was going to stab the baby in the eye.

  The memory made him shudder, and he stepped outside for fresh air. The tourists were gone, and everything in town—the souvenir vendors, the picture postcard shops, the ice-cream parlors and arcades—had been closed for the season. Bits of popcorn blew across the highway; paper cones that had once held wigs of blue and pink cotton candy lay dirty and trampled flat in the parking lot. Ramage drew a deep breath and smelled sage or basil—something cooking in the spice factory down the street. A single stranded palm tree and the motel’s blue vacancy sign stood at the edge of the lot. Toilet paper fluttered from the fender of his neighbor’s car, a few crushed tin cans were strung from the bumper, and a Burma-Shave heart, pierced by an arrow, dripped from the rear window.

  “This is the back road to Hollywood,” Greenfield said, early the next morning.

  A steady procession of people moved from the van to the warehouse: a woman with a face pierced with pins, a punk with a hackle of red hair, a man with the shaved blue skull of a prisoner. They hauled trunks, hoisted lights and cameras, carried canisters of film, slung coils of cable over their shoulders. Best boys, key grips, gaffers—titles Ramage knew from his old habit of sitting in theaters, after the end, watching the scroll of credits bubble up from the bottom of the screen like a movie’s last breath.

  “Who am I kidding?” Greenfield said. “This doesn’t go anywhere near Hollywood.”

  “You got lots of company,” Ramage said.

  “Everybody wants a little stardust to fall on them.”

  “Success could be all over your face next week,” Ramage said.

  “Sure,” Greenfield said. He took a deep breath. “This town stinks.”

  “There’s a spice factory a few blocks over,” Ramage explained.

  A blond woman lifted a travel bag from the van. Greenfield nodded at her.

  “My star,” he said.

  To Ramage, she looked like a rough outline for someone’s idea of a woman, the main points greatly exaggerated.

  Greenfield fumbled in his pocket and drew out a box of colored Shermans; he lit a pink one. He’d already put the box away when Ramage asked if he could bum a smoke. A cigarette might cut the gnawing in his stomach. Greenfield took a deep drag, and said, “Finish this one.”

  Ramage smoked. “You still pay in cash?” he asked.

  “Bien sûr.” Greenfield lovingly patted a black shoulder bag at his side.

  “How about an advance?”

  “I can’t do that,” Greenfield said. “I’ve had people run out on me.”

  “Would it matter if I said I was broke?”

  “Not much,” Greenfield said. “How broke are you?”

  “We’ve known each other a long time,” Ramage said.

  “I heard you were in the bin.”

  Ramage nodded.

  “What’s the least you need?” Greenfield said.

  It was clear that asking for the full thousand would only bring derision. Ramage said, “Half.”

  Greenfield reached in his bag and separated two crisp bills from a
bound stack. “Here’s two hundred,” he said. He held the two bills toward Ramage, then drew them back. “This doesn’t mean I trust you.”

  Greenfield was wearing his signature black shirt and black pants; his cowboy boots were made of green snakeskin, buffed and shiny except where fine lines of dust had settled between the scales. Ramage had worked with him off and on for twelve years, beginning shortly after he’d moved to New York. Before his hospitalization, Ramage had been rehabbing the homes of the rich, but he was still loosely connected to an underground of carpenters and waitresses and bookstore clerks who, in successive waves, struggled to make films. Greenfield had been a rising star ten years ago; porn was only supposed to occupy the space of an anecdote, a moment of amusement as he looked back, a dark tint in an otherwise bright career. Ditto for Ramage: he’d scripted the movie that established Greenfield’s promise a decade ago.

  They walked into the building and rode the freight elevator upstairs. “First thing you do,” Greenfield said, “is board up all the windows. This is a nonunion job.”

  “A union for porn?” Ramage said.

  “Erotica,” Greenfield corrected him. “There’s a street tax we’re not paying.”

  “What’s the plot of this one?” Ramage asked.

  Greenfield lowered his glasses and looked at him over the rims as if he were stupid.

  “Boy meets girl,” he said.

  Ramage ran the carpentry crew. They’d boarded shut the windows and now, with fumes of fresh paint filling the warehouse, Ramage felt woozy; as a precaution, he set his hammer down and stepped off the ladder and waited for the room to resolve back into focus. With a pry bar he yanked the nails from a sheet of plywood over one of the windows; the board crashed to the floor and the air rushed in. He was slightly winded by the effort. He took off his shirt and squatted against the wall and drank from a quart of warm beer and lit his last cigarette. He crushed the empty pack, feeling weak and isolated and craven; already he was dreading the next wave of desire. There would be no one in the crew to borrow from. RB smoked snowballs that tasted medicinal and Rigo didn’t smoke at all.

  Rigo was in the next room rolling red paint over the walls. He was a short, stocky man with a broad, flat plate of a face whose perfect roundness was carried out thematically in his dark eyes and in the purple fleshy pouches encircling them and then again in the two wide discs of his jutting ears. These redundant open circles gave Rigo’s face a spacious, uncrowded look that people routinely mistook for simplemindedness.

  RB, the other carpenter, had watched Ramage step down from the ladder, and saw this as a cue to take another break.

  “What-say, Spooky?” he said, sitting beside Ramage. He took a swig from the quart and swished the beer around in his mouth. “You see the ladies out there this morning?” He held his hands out in front of him to suggest breasts. He shook his head in disbelief. He looked at his empty hands and said, “I saw that blonde do a midget once. She’s famous.”

  Ramage nodded neutrally.

  “This little itty-bitty midget,” RB said. “But he had the pecker of a full-grown man. About as long as his arm. Hey Rigoberto, how about pecker? You know what a pecker is?”

  Rigo paused and held his roller aloft and red paint dribbled like blood between his fingers and down his arm. He had been a lieutenant in the army in El Salvador and his bearing was military; one could still sense in him the faint trace of his training at the hands of US advisors. He never fully relaxed and he held to odd protocols—after a day’s work he cleaned and organized Ramage’s tools and insisted on carrying the canvas sack for him, moving the bag to and from the job like a bellhop. Leftist rebels had raided his house on the outskirts of San Salvador and shot his brother, who’d been spending the night, and sleeping in Rigo’s bed. The bullet had been meant for Rigo, who’d skipped the funeral and fled El Salvador with his family, deserting the army and leaving the civil war behind. Now a jackleg carpenter who spoke only a crude, cobbled English, he worked with indefatigable energy, compensating for RB’s tendency to goldbrick. He lacked a green card and preferred the clarity of labor, no matter how arduous, to the vagaries of talking in a language where even the simplest notion plunged him into loss and confusion. He was still learning the names of the tools he was using.

  “Pecker?” Rigo said.

  “Like dong, dink, dick,” RB said. He spread his legs and pointed at his crotch. “Penis.”

  Rigo allowed a thin smile of recognition.

  “Little guy doesn’t know where he’s at,” RB said. He fingered a scar that cut across the base of his throat. The original wound had been stitched together without much concern for cosmetics; against his oily black skin, the tissue was red and smooth and protuberant, like a worm. “We watched fuck-flicks all the time in reform school.”

  “You were in reform school?” Ramage asked.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You’ve never mentioned it before. How’d you end up there?”

  “I got crossed by a guy I sold some chain saws to.”

  “Seems to me they wouldn’t allow porn.”

  “Shit,” RB said. “Everything was allowed.”

  “You finish taping?”

  “No.”

  “I guess you got that disease again.”

  “What disease?”

  “That sit-around-on-your-ass disease.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding. I get it.”

  “I’m not kidding, RB. You hardly did jack today.”

  “Ah, Spooky.”

  “Why are you calling me Spooky?”

  RB looked at Ramage, then shrugged. “That cartoon,” he said. He turned to Rigo and shouted, “Hey Rigoberto, take a break. Stop. No paint.”

  “He’s not deaf,” Ramage said.

  “He sure don’t understand.” RB beat on the floor with his fist. “Rigoberto, here, sit. Sit. Sit down. Down, man.”

  Rigo grabbed a wrinkled brown lunch sack he’d stashed behind a stack of Sheetrock. The sack had been folded and saved and used repeatedly. His clothes showed the same habitual thrift. He wore neatly creased khakis and a crimson T-shirt, the HARVARD nearly washed away.

  “You ever killed a man?” RB said.

  Rigo scraped flecks of red paint from his arm and didn’t answer.

  “Me, I don’t have the heart to kill a man. You got to have heart to kill somebody.”

  Using his thumb Rigo made an inconspicuous sign of the cross on his knee and silently said grace and then made the same small cross again before unwrapping the waxed paper from his sandwich.

  “That must be some good-ass sandwich,” RB said. “I hope it is. I sure hope to fucking God it’s not baloney again.”

  Rigo lifted a corner of the sandwich.

  “More baloney!” RB screamed, grabbing Rigo’s sack and sandwich. “Jesus Christ, I swear, you’re just like all them refugees.” Then, as if they were co-conspirators, he said to Ramage, “See how it works, they all get together and send a man over, and he gets his shit together, eatin’ baloney every damn day and savin’ up his money. Never go to a movie or buy ice cream or nothing. Just baloney and baloney and more baloney. Then he sends back money so the whole family can book out of Pago Pago and come over and they all live together, nine of them to one room, everybody eatin’ baloney every minute!” RB lobbed the lunch sack out the window and, his tone lowered and confidential, addressed Rigo again. “America’s so wide open, see, with you people coming here, I call you refugees.”

  “America’s so wide open,” Ramage said, “it seems to have filled up with shitheads. Go get his sack.”

  “Spooky, man, you can’t have a grown man praying for baloney. Not in America! It ain’t right, I’m sorry. Now Harvard, quit praying for that shit.”

  “Go get it.”

  “Every job we do,” RB said, “every week, he eats five days of straight baloney. Not even fried! Give the baloney a break, Harvard. You understand? FUCK. THE. BALONEY.”

  Rigo was gazing into th
e inscrutable square of black sky, out the empty window where his baloney sandwich had flown.

  RB clattered down the fire escape and came back a minute later.

  “The baloney got a little dirty,” he said. He reached for his billfold. “Buy yourself something good to eat, Harvard. My treat. Something special. Get yourself a cheeseburger.”

  Greenfield looked about the warehouse, making no mention of the work that had been completed; it was as if the merest kindness might collapse the hierarchy. He stared up at the ceiling, inspecting a large skylight.

  “I like that,” Greenfield said. “I might use that.”

  Greenfield moved directly under the skylight, where a waning moon was visible like an amulet in the bottom of a black velvet box.

  “I might quote Citizen Kane,” he said. “What do you think? We’ll crane up over the warehouse and drop down through the skylight.” He lit a long red Sherman. It moved obscenely like the tongue of a lizard between his lips. “What do you think of that? Huh?” He was asking RB. “Quoting Citizen Kane? What’s your opinion?”

  RB shrugged. “Whatever gets you off.”

  Ramage said, “You don’t have a crane.”

  “So?” Greenfield said.

  “So you need a crane to quote Citizen Kane.”

  “I’ll call the movie ‘Citizen Cunt,’ ” Greenfield said. He pointed to Rigo and said, “You like that? Would you buy a movie with that title?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “The title’s important,” Greenfield said. “The title’s everything.”

  Ramage felt a tightening at his temples. Impatient, he asked, “You got any more work for us?”

  “Finish painting,” Greenfield said. “I want that black room glossy, like a mirror. Rub some polish on the paint after it dries. Buff it out so we can see our reflections.”

  RB spoke up. “Greenwad, how about putting me in the movie?”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Greenfield said.