The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  “You want to do some keys?” Drummond asked.

  “Not now,” Pete said, sitting in his brown recliner.

  Drummond wore a blue smock and leaned under a bright fluorescent lamp like a jeweler or a dentist, dipping a Q-tip in solvent and dabbing inked dust off the type heads of an Olivetti Lettera 32. The machine belonged to a writer, a young man, about Pete’s age, who worked next door, at La Bas Books, and was struggling to finish his first novel. The machine was a mess. Divots pocked the platen and the keys had a cranky, uneven touch, so that they punched through the paper or, on the really recalcitrant letters, the “A” or “Q,” stuck midway and swung impotently at the empty air. Using so much muscle made a crescent moon of every comma, a pinprick of every period. Drummond offered to sell the young man an identical Olivetti, pristine, with case and original instruction manual, but was refused. Like a lot of writers, as Drummond had discovered, the kid believed a resident genie was housed inside his machine. He had to have this one. “Just not so totally fucked up,” he’d said.

  Hardly anybody used typewriters these days, but with the epochal change in clientele brought on by computers Drummond’s business shifted in small ways and remained profitably intact. He had a steady stream of customers, some loyally held over from the old days, some new. Drummond was a good mechanic, and word spread among an emerging breed of hobbyist. Collectors came to him from around the city, mostly men, often retired, fussy and strange, a little contrary, who liked the smell of solvents and enjoyed talking shop and seemed to believe an unwritten life was stubbornly buried away in the dusty machines they brought in for restoration. His business had become more sociable as a growing tribe of holdouts banded together. He now kept a coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups next to the register, for customers who liked to hang out. There were pockets of people who warily refused the future or the promise or whatever it was computers were offering and stuck by their typewriters. Some of them were secretaries who filled out forms, and others were writers, a sudden surge of them from all over Seattle. There were professors and poets and young women with colored hair who wrote for the local weeklies. There were aging lefties who made carbons of their correspondence or owned mimeographs and hand-cranked the ink drums and dittoed urgent newsletters that smelled of freshly laundered cotton for their dwindling coteries. Now and then, too, customers walked in off the street, a trickle of curious shoppers who simply wanted to touch the machines, tapping the keys and slapping back the carriage when the bell rang out, leaving a couple of sentences behind.

  Drummond tore down the old Olivetti. While he worked, he could hear his son laughing to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” Drummond asked.

  “Nothing,” the boy said.

  “You always say ‘nothing,’ ” Drummond said, “but you keep on laughing. I’d sure like to know for once what you find so funny all the time.”

  The boy’s face hadn’t been moved by a real smile in years and he never cried. He had been quite close to Drummond’s father—who doted on his only grandchild—but the boy’s reaction at the funeral was unreadable: blanker and less emotional than that of a stranger, who at least might have reflected selfishly on his own death, or the death of friends, or death generally, digging up some connection.

  But on the short drive from the church to the cemetary, Pete had only sat slumped in his seat, staring out at the rain-swept gray city, laughing.

  “What are you laughing at?” Drummond had asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Drummond had pressed the boy. On such a momentous day, the laughing had got to him.

  “Tell me,” he’d said impatiently.

  “I just start to laugh when I see something sad,” Pete had said.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “I don’t think I find it funny. But I laugh anyway.”

  “Some of these are crooked as hell,” Drummond said now, gently twisting the “T” with a pair of needle-nose pliers. “They’ll never seat right in the guides, even if I could straighten them out. You see that?” He turned in his stool and showed the boy the bent type bar, just as his father had shown him ages ago. “Not with the precision you want, anyway. A good typewriter needs to work like a watch.”

  The boy couldn’t carry his end of a conversation, not even with nods of feigned interest. His moods were a kind of unsettled weather, either wind-whipped and stormy with crazy words or becalmed by an overcasting silence. His face, blunt and drawn inward, was now and then seized by spasms, and his body, boggy and soft, was racked by jerky, purposeless movements. He wore slipshod saddle shoes that had flattened and grown wide at the toe like a clown’s, collapsing under his monotonous tread. His button-down blue oxford shirt and his khakis were neatly pressed; Drummond ironed them every morning on a board built into a cupboard in the kitchen. He spritzed them as he’d seen his wife do, putting an orderly crease in slacks that were otherwise so deeply soiled with a greasy sheen that he was never able to wash the stain out.

  “I think I’ll go outside,” Pete said.

  “You sure smoke a lot,” Drummond told him.

  “Am I smiling?”

  He wasn’t, but Drummond smiled and said that he was.

  “I feel like I am inside,” Pete said.

  It was a gray Seattle day. There was a bus stop in front of the shop, and often the people who came in and browsed among the typewriters were just trying to escape the cold. A big, boxy heater with louvred vents hung from the ceiling on threaded pipe, warmly humming, and wet kids would gather in the right spot, huddled with upturned faces under the canted currents of streaming heat. Drummond let them be. He found the familiar moods and rhythms satisfying, the tapping keys enclosed in the larger tapping of the rain. Almost everyone who entered the shop left at least a word behind—their name, some scat, a quote. Even kids who typed a line of gobbledygook managed to communicate their hunger or hurt by an anemic touch or an angry jab. The sullen strokes of a stiffly pointing finger, the frustrated, hammering fist, the tentative, tinkering notes that opened to a torrent as the feel of the machine returned to the hand—all of it was like a single line of type, a continuous sentence. As far back as Drummond could recall, he’d had typewriter parts in his pockets and ink in the crevices of his fingers and a light sheen of Remington gun oil on his skin. His own stained hands were really just a replica of his father’s, a version of the original he could still see, smeared violet from handling silk ribbons, the blunt blue-black nails squeezing soft white bread as the first team of Drummond & Son, taking a lunch break, ate their baloney-and-sweet-pickle sandwiches on Saturday afternoons.

  A rosary of maroon beads dangled between the boy’s legs, faintly ticking, as he rocked in his recliner and kept track of the decades. A silent prayer moved his lips.

  “Jesus Christ was brain-dead,” Pete said. “That’s what I’ve been thinking lately. “

  Drummond turned on his stool. “Sometimes your illness tells you things, Pete. You know that.” The smutted skin on the boy’s hands was cracked and bleeding. “You need some lotion,” Drummond said. Dead flakes sloughed to the floor, and a snow of scurf whitened the boy’s lap. “You like that Vaseline, don’t you?”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “You know I worry,” Drummond said.

  “Especially when I talk about God.”

  “Yeah, especially.”

  “You believe.”

  “I do,” Drummond said, although of late he wasn’t sure that was true. “But that’s different.”

  “There’s only one true God,” the boy said.

  “I know.”

  “I was thinking of writing a symphony to prove it.”

  “You want some classical?” Drummond asked, reaching for the radio knob.

  “Don’t,” Pete said.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I’d show how many ways, how many ideas all lead to one idea. God. I’d get the main structure, and jam around it. The whole thing could be a jam.”


  Drummond futzed with the novelist’s machine while he listened to the boy. The old platen’s rubber, cracked and hard as concrete, was partially responsible for chewing up the paper and shredding the ribbons. Pressing his thumbnail into a new one, Drummond found that it was properly soft and pliant, in near-mint condition, and he began pulling out the old platen. Drummond had been one of those kids who, after taking apart an old clock or a radio, actually put it back together again, and his satisfaction at the end of any job still drew on the pleasure of that original competence.

  “I’d rather record on a computer,” the boy continued. “Instead of a static piece of stuff, like an album, you go right to the people, right into their brain. You can do that with a computer.”

  “You remember about your visitor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Today is going to be a little different,” Drummond said. “We’re not going to Dunkin’ Donuts right away.”

  “I like the Dunkin’ Donuts,”Pete said.

  “I know you do.” Drummond took a deep breath and said firmly, “Today we’re doing things just a little different from normal. You’re having a visitor. She’s a nice lady, and she wants to ask you some questions.”

  “I think I’d like to become a baker.”

  “What happened to being a janitor?”

  “Maybe a janitor at a bakery.”

  “Now you’re thinking.” Drummond turned on his stool and looked his son in the eye. “Remember how Mom used to bake bread?”

  “No,” said the boy.

  “No?” Drummond absently cleaned ink from a fingernail with the blade of a screwdriver. “Of course you do. She’d put a damp towel over the bowl, and you’d sing to her. She used to tell you that it was your singing that made the dough rise, remember?”

  Drummond turned back to his workbench and listened to the rain and to the boy praying and telling the beads. The wall in front of his bench was covered with pinups of writers posed beside their typewriters. Drummond wasn’t particularly well read but he knew a lot about literature through the machines that made it. This knowledge was handy in selling a Royal Quiet De Luxe to an aspiring writer whose hero was Hemingway or a Hermes Baby Rocket to a Steinbeck fan. A curiosity he’d never been able to figure out was that many of these writers didn’t really know how to type. They hung like vultures over their machines, clawing at the keyboard with two fingers and sometimes a thumb, and while they were often hugely prolific, they went about it desperately, hunting and pecking, as though scratching sentences out of the dirt. Given their technique, it was a miracle some of them managed to say anything. An editorialist for the Seattle Times told Drummond that he just sat there and hit the machine until, letter by letter, it coughed up the words he wanted. Even Michener, a man Drummond had read and esteemed highly, in part for having typed more than anyone on earth, except perhaps a few unsung women from the bygone era of the secretarial pool, was a clod at the keys.

  “You had a really good voice,” Drummond said.

  At twenty-minute intervals, the sidewalk filled and then emptied, the shopwindow blooming with successive crops of black umbrellas as buses came and went. The hour for the appointment with the social worker approached, and Drummond found that he could no longer concentrate. He rolled two sheets of paper into the novelist’s Olivetti, typing the date and a salutation to his wife, then sat with his elbows on the workbench, staring. He wondered if he should drop “Dear” and go simply with “Theresa,” keeping things businesslike, a touch cold. Whenever Drummond opened a machine, he saw a life in the amphitheater of seated type bars, just as a dentist, peering into a mouth for the first time, probably understood something about the person, his age and habits and vices. Letters were gnawed and ground down like teeth, gunked up with ink and the plaque of gum erasers, stained with everything from coffee to nicotine and lipstick, but none of his knowledge helped him now. Drummond wanted to type a letter and update his wife, but the mechanic in him felt as though the soul of what he had to say just wasn’t in the machine. He looked at the greeting again and noticed that the capital “T” in his wife’s name was faintly blurred. That sometimes happened when the type bar struck the guide and slipped sideways on impact, indicating a slight misalignment.

  Drummond had been expecting a rendition of his wife, but the woman who walked in the door shortly after noon was nothing like Theresa. She couldn’t have been much older than Pete, and she wore faded jeans and a soft, sloppy V-necked sweater with the sleeves casually bunched up at her elbows. Her hair was long and her eyes were gray and her nose, though small, was bulbous. Drummond offered her a stool at the back of the shop and brought her a cup of coffee.

  “So, Peter, I’m from Keystone,” she said. “A halfway house in Fremont.”

  Pete squirmed in his recliner, rubbing his hands over the thighs of his soiled khakis.

  “Nothing’s been decided,” Drummond assured the boy.

  “Do you have many friends?” the social worker asked.

  “No,” Pete said.

  “No one you see on a regular basis?”

  The boy reached for the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and then picked up his rosary beads instead. The long chain trembled in his trembling hands, and his mouth made smacking noises, as though he were slopping down soup.

  “When I talked to your father, he said you were in a day program several years ago. Did you enjoy that?”

  “It was okay.”

  “Why did you stop going?”

  “I think I’ll go outside.”

  “No,” Drummond said. “Stay here and talk to the lady. She only has a few questions, and then we’re done.”

  The copper cowbell above the shop door clattered and the sheets of paper in the typewriters waved and rustled, giving off the slight dry whisper of skittering leaves. Drummond half listened to the tapping keys and the ringing bells and the ratchet of the returning carriage until the cowbell clanged dully a second time as the customer left. In the ensuing quiet, the sound of his boy working the polished rosary beads between his rough scaly fingers distracted Drummond from the social worker’s questions. The cowbell clapped a third time. A young mother was trying to ease a tandem carriage across the threshold without waking her twin babies. Drummond excused himself and went to help lift the front axle over the bump.

  “My husband would love that,” the woman said. Mindful of her babies, she spoke in a soft voice. “What is it?”

  “That’s a Remington Streamliner,” Drummond said.

  “Do you mind if I give it a try?”

  “No, go right ahead.”

  He set the machine on a desk and held a chair for the woman. Perhaps the new world of computers had taught people timidity, schooling them in the possibility or threat of losing a thing irrevocably with the slightest touch. This woman’s hand pressed the “H” so tentatively that the type bar fell back with an exhausted plop before it reached the paper.

  “Go ahead,” Drummond said. “Give it a good, clean stroke. You won’t hurt it. With a manual typewriter you want a little bounce. You can put your shoulders into it.”

  “Now is the time for all good men now is the time,” the woman typed on the black-lacquered machine, and when the bell rang out, happily ratifying what she’d written, she squealed and clapped her hands.

  “This is the most beautiful typewriter I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s so—so noir! It’s got Hollywood written all over it.”

  “It’s prewar,” Drummond said. “WWII, I mean. What’s your husband do?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” the woman said. “But he’s got that midlife thing going on and wants to try his hand at screenplays. He’s got lots of stories from his days as a public defender. His birthday’s coming up, and I just know he’s going to be depressed.”

  “Hold on,” Drummond said, walking back to his workbench. He pulled a photo off the wall.

  “If your mind’s too great for you,” Pete was saying, “you should just let God take i
t. That’s what Christ did. He was brain-dead. He never thought on his own.”

  “I’ve never heard that before,” the social worker said.

  Drummond took the photograph and, somewhat chagrined at the wacky course the interview was taking, returned to the showroom. “That’s Raymond Chandler,” he said. Chandler wore large owlish glasses and sat with a pipe clenched between his teeth, in a bungalow on the Paramount lot. A sleek gleaming Streamliner rested on his desk.

  The woman ran a slender hand lovingly over the polished casing, as though it were the hood of a car. Drummond told her the price, expecting her to balk, but instead she gave the machine a pat, ticking her wedding band against the metal, and then brought out a checkbook, paying for the machine and purchasing, in addition, extra ribbons, a bottle of Wite-Out, and a foam pad. “It’s just too perfect,” she said. The typewriter was added like a third sleeping baby to the carriage. Drummond helped the woman over the threshold again and watched her go. All the young mothers these days were so lovely in a casual, offhand way. Drummond still dressed like his father, who had always worn a shirt and tie under his smock, as though his job were on a par, in dignity and importance, with the work of a doctor.

  Drummond returned to his son and the social worker.

  “If I let God take my brain, I’d be laughing. I’d know where I was going.”

  The woman wrote something on a clipboard, which was beginning to crawl with tiny, antlike words.

  “Where would you be going?” she asked.

  “I’d be going down.”

  “Down?”

  “I’m trying to figure my brain. What it wants me to do. I think to go down, but I can’t figure out what it’s good for. It’s too much for me.”

  Pete’s lips smacked grotesquely, and he stood up.

  “I think I just want to be a son,” he said. “Not a god.” His elbow jerked involuntarily. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The boy vanished into the back of the shop. Drummond turned to the social worker, whose long straight hair framed a lovely, plain face.