The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  The Boy Scouts sounded off with taps. Donny and I shared a smokewood stogie—a kind of gray stick you could smoke—and when it was quiet Mr. Cheetam cupped his hands around his mouth and moaned, Who stole my Golden Arm? Whoooo stooole my Goool-den Aaarm? You could hear his voice echoing in the forest. Whoooo stooole my Goool-den Aaarm? You did! Mr. Cheetam shouted, grabbing Donny. We crawled into our tents and I started laughing and Donny got hysterical, too. Mr. Cheetam had a different tent and told us to shut up.

  Donny whispered how he hated the Japs and never wanted to be captured by them—they knew how to make you talk. I told him about the Inquisition and all the tortures they’d invented for getting confessions.

  They had this one thing called the press, I said. If you were accused of a crime and didn’t make a plea, the King ordered you to lie down. Then he piled rocks on you until you confessed the truth or got crushed.

  How big were the rocks? Donny asked.

  I don’t know.

  What if you had thirty—what if you had a hundred—no, wait, what if you had a thousand rocks on you and then you decided to tell the truth?

  You could, I said. But if you said you didn’t do anything, the King didn’t want to hear that, and he’d just go ahead with another rock, until you admitted you did do it.

  Donny hesitated, and I thought I understood.

  I know, I said. I know.

  At the next camp, only two people were around, a man and a woman, who were sitting naked on a rock in the river when we first arrived, but kept to themselves afterward. Donny and Mr. Cheetam fished for a while but quit after Donny’s hook got caught in the trees too many times. Mr. Cheetam said, Don’t worry about it, Donny. It’s no good down here. Higher up the water’s colder and we’ll catch tons of rainbows, maybe some Dolly Varden.

  We ate a great meal of dehydrated chicken tetrazzini and pilot biscuits and chocolate for dessert. Donny and I shared more smokewood. Now and then we added sticks to the fire and the light breathed out and made a circle around us. I love getting away from it all, Mr. Cheetam said.

  He tipped back his flask and in the bright curved silver I could see the fire flaming up.

  Once upon a time, Mr. Cheetam said, there was a boy and girl who were very much in love.

  Where was this? Donny asked.

  Oh, Mr. Cheetam said, it doesn’t matter, does it? Love’s the same everywhere you go, so let’s just make up a place.

  How about the Eurekan Territory? I said.

  Okay, Mr. Cheetam said. The Eurekan Territory, that’s where they were in love. It was a small place, and everybody knew everybody else, so eventually people figured out this boy and girl had a thing going. You know what a thing is, right?

  Donny said he did.

  Good for you, Mr. Cheetam said. Well, this thing was frowned on by everyone. People took different sides, against the boy, or against the girl, everybody blaming everybody else. But the boy and girl were madly in love and you can’t stop love, not when it’s the real thing.

  He went to his pack and pulled out a big bottle and refilled his flask. When he came back he said, You know what that’s like, to have a real thing?

  Donny said, Yeah, I know.

  I mean really real, Mr. Cheetam said.

  How real? I said.

  Mr. Cheetam ignored me. To hell with what anybody thinks, these kids, these lovers, said. So one night the boy meets the girl on the edge of town and they drive up a dark winding road to a lovers’ leap. They can see everything from up there, but they’re not looking. No sirree, Bob. The boy and the girl sit in the car, spooning, as we used to call it back in the days—making out, and listening to love songs on the radio, until one of the songs is interrupted by a special bulletin. A prisoner has escaped!

  Does the prisoner have hooks instead of hands? I asked.

  Yeah, Mr. Cheetam said, that’s the guy.

  How’d you know? Donny asked.

  I knew because the story wasn’t true. The girl hears something outside, and the boy says, Oh, baby baby, don’t worry, we’re way up here above everything, we’re safe. The boy tries to get at the girl, and the girl keeps hearing something outside, so eventually it’s no fun, and they go home. When the boy opens the door for the girl to drop her out he finds a hook clawing and banging at the door handle, just clinging there, ripped right off the prisoner’s arm. Mr. Cheetam didn’t scare me, but Donny was scared.

  We were quiet for a minute, and then I told them about when my dad was driving in his car. The other car came out of nowhere, I said. And my dad was hanging half out the door. His foot was stuck under the clutch and his head was banging on the road. He was dragged about two hundred feet. He was in the hospital for a month. My mom died.

  No one said anything, so I added, That’s a true-life story.

  You don’t think mine was? Mr. Cheetam asked. He looked at me strangely and winked.

  Well, I said, yeah, I do. I know it is. I heard about those lovers before.

  Mr. Cheetam stood up, stretched, and fell down. Donny and I looked at each other, then we got in our sleeping bags.

  Your dad sure enjoys whiskey, I said.

  In the middle of the night, Donny said, Hey, you hear that?

  Come off it, I said.

  I swear I heard something.

  There’s nothing out there, I said, but Donny went over to sleep in his dad’s tent anyway.

  We reached a sign that pointed different ways: the High Divide and the Low Divide. We took the high, up and up. There were fewer trees, and we climbed on loose rock called scree, and the air was thinner. Donny had an ugly blister on his heel and complained, and Mr. Cheetam got impatient with him. Just pull yourself up and get going, he said. Don’t fall behind. Finally we crossed a field full of pink and yellow wildflowers, and at the far end, where the path ended, was a lake. The surface was perfectly clear and placid and we could see ourselves.

  Here we are, Mr. Cheetam said.

  Skinny-dipping, Donny said.

  First things first, girls, Mr. Cheetam said, so we hopped to, setting up camp and scrounging enough wood for the night.

  Donny and I stripped naked and jumped off the cliffs. No one else was around, but when we swam and shouted and splashed, our voices bounced back and forth off the rocks. Ricochet, we yelled. We dove and dove. Then we lay on a hot flat rock. I noticed that Donny had hair on his balls and he probably noticed so did I. You want to smoke a stogerooni? Donny asked. Nah, later, I said. We were stretched out and quiet: blue sky, yellow sun, white mountain—everything was perfect but Donny got antsy doing nothing for so long and took another dip. He came up fast and said, A fish! I saw a fish! And he got his fishing pole and caught a rainbow, like pulling a prayer from the water.

  Good work, Donny, Mr. Cheetam said.

  The fish wasn’t all the way dead yet and Mr. Cheetam had to slap its head against a rock. Blood came out the eyes. The knife blade sank into the skin with a ripping sound. What do we do with the guts? I asked. Toss ’em in the lake, Mr. Cheetam said. We don’t want any animals coming into camp. Bears? Donny said. It’s not impossible, Mr. Cheetam said, but not likely, either. Maybe the Sasquatch, Donny said. Mr. Cheetam said to shut up about that damned Sasquatch. It’s time you grow up, he said, shaking Donny’s arm. Jesus, Donny said, rubbing himself.

  Mr. Cheetam wrapped the fillets in foil and set them on the fire. It was soft out now, not dark but not light, either. Our shadows were weak around the fire, and Mount Olympus was tinged pink and purple, and the wind died down.

  Hey, I said, what about the Quinault?

  Yeah, the Quinault! Donny said. You said I’d get to walk across it.

  Oh crap, what was I thinking? Mr. Cheetam asked himself. You already did and I forgot, God damn it!

  We ran back through the darkening wildflowers. We found a little stream about a foot wide and three inches deep that you would never think was a river but it was. There’s your mighty Quinault, Donny, Mr. Cheetam said. Donny asked if we built a dam wou
ld the river dry up below and Mr. Cheetam laughed, saying, No, I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. We bent down and drank and splashed our faces in the water. We listened to the little river, trickling in a whisper. It was almost like nothing.

  The fish was all burned to hell when we got back to camp. Donny was upset and kept whining. I’m sorry, Mr. Cheetam said, but things happen. What can I say? Then he offered, Tomorrow? You want to stay another day? Donny looked at me, then said, Stay! Stay! Okay, Mr. Cheetam said, I think we’ve got everything we need—plenty of provisions—and we’ll catch some more fish.

  After dinner, Mr. Cheetam drew out his flask again. His face was like my dad’s had been in the last days, rough and black. One night toward the end I’d found him, my dad, in our broom closet. He had all his Bob Dylan records out and was writing new lyrics on them with a nail. Other things happened that I prefer to keep to myself. All week his loud voice was like the echo of thoughts he’d had a long time ago. Then one morning at the very end I heard him calling me in the rain. He was on top of our house in boxer shorts, yelling. Our neighbor tried to drive him off the roof by throwing a pot of geraniums at him. My dad started ripping apart the chimney and pitching bricks down on me and everybody else on the front lawn. We had to call the authorities. For a while he thought he was Jesus in a hospital called St. Judas, but it was really St. Jude’s and my dad, of course, wasn’t Jesus. The same people who took him to the hospital brought me to the Home. I hadn’t eaten in three days.

  Nearby we saw field mice hopping around, and Mr. Cheetam said that we’d better keep our packs inside the tents tonight. He hooked his arm around Donny’s neck and said, How’d you like to go to California?

  Not Eureka, Donny said.

  No, Mr. Cheetam said, LA.

  Donny said he didn’t know anything about LA. Mr. Cheetam fussed with the fire, arranging the coals. When that goes out that’s it until morning, he said. He tipped back the flask. Then he capped it and said, That’s it for that, too. He stretched and groaned and walked out where the firelight failed. I heard him whistling in the dark.

  Son? Mr. Cheetam said.

  What? Donny asked.

  Come on over here a minute, Mr. Cheetam said.

  They were in the shadows. I heard Donny say, What does Mom think?

  That’s the thing, Mr. Cheetam said. Your mother would stay.

  I don’t know, Donny said. How long would we be gone?

  Donald, Mr. Cheetam said, don’t be stupid. We’re divorcing, your mom and I. You see, we won’t come back—we’ll live in a brand-new house there.

  Donny begged, But why?

  Donald, come on. You see how things are.

  The two of them were quiet and staring ahead, like their next thoughts might fall out of the sky.

  What can I say? Mr. Cheetam said.

  Nothing, Donny said.

  I love you, Donald. You know that.

  I crawled inside our tent. A little while later, Donny got in his bag, buried down inside. He was crying and choking. I whispered, Donny, hey, hey Donny? Donny? I think I hear something out there. Do you hear it? Let’s go look! I hugged my arm around him and he started jerking in his bag and sat up and cried to me, Here’s your stupid spatula! Then he crossed over into Mr. Cheetam’s tent but kept crying and begging even louder for no divorce.

  Look, I heard Mr. Cheetam say, after your sister died—His voice fell apart. That’s too easy, he said. I’ve met someone else. He was quiet a minute. That’s the truth.

  I thought the crying would go on forever, but eventually Donny must have fallen asleep.

  I turned over and over in my sleeping bag, and then I put on Sister Celestine’s scapular and grabbed the flashlight and crawled out of the tent. The fire made a hiss and I kicked the last few embers around in the bed of ash. Mr. Cheetam snorted in his sleep and I heard Donny say, Dad? and Mr. Cheetam say, What? but there was nothing after that, even though I stood outside their tent a long time, listening.

  I aimed my flashlight ahead to the flat rock rim of the lake and followed the narrow beam up there. I sat, dangling my feet, and snapped off the light. I think I was feeling sorry for myself. Suddenly it felt like we’d been gone for ages. Was it Sunday? I gathered up ten rocks for a rosary, to count my prayers. I rattled them in my hands and started the Our Father but my voice was weird. I shook the rocks in my fist like dice. I threw one in the lake, and a little while later I heard the splash. Circles opened out where the stone had vanished. I thought of saying something in Latin but couldn’t recall a single word, except amen. I yelled out, A-men! and heard back, Hey-men, hey-men, hey-men, smaller and smaller.

  I stretched out on the rock. Sister Celestine’s scapular was old, the wool worn soft from handling. Once, at the Home, I had climbed the stairs, six flights up from my room in the basement, to see where she lived. We weren’t supposed to go up there. I saw why. Hosiery hung from the water pipes. Candy wrappers were crumpled on the floor. A black habit lay like an empty sack beside the bed. The bed was unmade, and I could see the hollow where Sister Celestine slept. A pale green blanket and a thin yellow top sheet had been twisted into a tight braid and kicked off the end of the mattress. The only decoration was a black wooden crucifix, nailed on the wall above the bed like a permanent shadow.

  I was still lying there when Donny and Mr. Cheetam came running up the rock in their undies. Hey, what’s going on? they asked. They said they’d heard me shouting and were afraid I’d got lost or seen something.

  Maybe the Sasquatch, Donny said.

  God damn it, Donald, there is no such thing, Mr. Cheetam said. That’s just a myth.

  Oh yeah, Donny said. How do you know?

  Don’t worry, I said. It was nothing.

  You sure? Donny said.

  It was nothing, I said. I’m sure.

  A wind was blowing and it was a little cold on that rock. Nobody knew what to say.

  See out there? Above Mount Olympus? That green star? Mr. Cheetam said, pointing. We all looked—a vague white shadow, a green light. It’s not really a star. That’s a planet—that’s Venus, Mr. Cheetam said. The goddess of love.

  That’s just a myth, Donny said, looking at his father. Bastard.

  I didn’t hear you, Mr. Cheetam said. What did you say?

  Nothing, Donny said.

  Nothing? It didn’t sound like nothing to me.

  I pitched another rock in the lake, way out there, as far as possible. We all listened. Across the water a circle spread out, wider and wider. Then, shaking with cold, Donny folded his arms around himself and yelled out, Hey, and we heard back, Hey, hey, hey, and then I yelled out, Hey, and even Mr. Cheetam joined in, and we kept hearing back, Hey, hey, hey, like there were millions of us everywhere.

  Drummond & Son

  Drummond opened the shop every morning at seven so he and his boy could eat breakfast while the first dropoffs were coming in. The boy liked cereal and sat at the workbench in back, slurping his milk, while Drummond occasionally hustled out to the curb to help a secretary haul a cumbersome IBM from the back seat of a car. The front of the store was a showroom for refurbished machines, displayed on shelves, each with a fresh sheet of white bond rolled into the platen, while the back was a chaos of wrecked typewriters Drummond would either salvage or cannibalize for parts someday. There were two stools and two lamps at the workbench for the rare times when the son felt like joining his father, cleaning keys, but generally after breakfast the boy spent the rest of the day sitting behind Drummond in an old Naugahyde recliner, laughing to himself and saying prayers, or wandering out to the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette. That he step outside to smoke was the only major request Drummond ever made of his son.

  “Next week’s your birthday,” Drummond said.

  “Next week.” The boy finished his cereal, plunking the spoon against the empty bowl. He said, “I think I’ll go outside.”

  “How about rinsing your bowl?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “It’s ra
ining pretty hard out.”

  “That’s okay,” Pete said, grabbing a broken umbrella he’d found in the street, a batty contraption of bent spokes and torn black fabric.

  A clear-plastic curtain separated the two parts of the store, and Drummond kept a careful eye on his son from the bench. Drummond had acquired sole ownership of the business after his father died of emphysema, and he still remembered those last months beside him on the bench, the faint whisper as the plastic tube fed the old man oxygen. He knew the tank was pumping air through his dad’s nose and into his lungs, but day after day it sounded as though the life were leaking out of him. The elder Drummond had just cleaned his glasses with a purple shop rag and nudged them back on the bridge of his nose when he died, and it was as if, for a lingering moment, he were looking over the workbench, among a lifetime’s clutter of keys and type bars, dental tools and unraveling ribbons, for his last breath.

  Shortly after his dad died, Drummond had started bringing Pete to the shop, and he sometimes guessed that his wife, free of the boy for the first time in years, had discovered she liked living without the burden. She had hinted as much in a letter he recently received, postmarked from her new address in Portland, suggesting that he meet with a social worker to discuss “the future.” He missed his wife tremendously when he opened the envelope and saw the beautiful loops of blue cursive running across the page. He hadn’t written back yet, because he wasn’t sure what to say to this woman whose absence rendered his life so strange. They had eloped during his senior year at West Seattle High, and this would have been their silver anniversary. Without her he felt lonely, but he wasn’t angry, and he wondered if their marriage, after twenty-five years, had simply run its course.

  The sheets of white paper in the twenty or so typewriters on display waved in unison when Pete opened the door after smoking his cigarette.

  “Now is the time, now is the time, now is the time,” the boy said, sweeping along the shelf and inspecting the sheets.