The Dead Fish Museum Page 4

  “Is that typical?” she asked. “That kind of talk?”

  Drummond sat on his stool. “Yeah,” he said.

  “And the dyskinesia?”

  Drummond nodded—tardive dyskinesia. Half the words he needed to describe his son he couldn’t spell, and all of them sounded as fantastic and as far away as the Mesozoic monsters he had loved so much as a child. He remembered paging through The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs as if it were yesterday. The illustrations were lurid and the narrative encompassed the soupy advent and sad passing of an entire world. Now his boy was the incredible creature, and Drummond’s vocabulary had become lumbering and dinosauric, plodding with polysyllables.

  When the boy returned, he announced that he’d looked in the bathroom mirror and couldn’t see any love in his eyes. Without saying goodbye to the social worker, he picked up his broken umbrella, tapping the chrome spike across the carpeted floor on his way outside to smoke.

  “Are you a believer?” Drummond asked.

  “No,” the young woman said.

  “He suffers,” Drummond said. “The suffering—”

  The woman nodded. Drummond told her how the boy saw faces disintegrate before his eyes, faces that fell to pieces, then disappeared, leaving a hole. He told her how in the early days of the illness they’d taken the beloved family dog to the pound because it was talking to Pete and could read his mind and Pete was afraid the dog would tear him apart. Two weeks ago it was the shop radio, an old Philco that had been Drummond’s father’s—they couldn’t listen anymore. When the announcers laughed, Pete thought they were laughing at him. They would say exactly what he was thinking, predicting his thoughts. Last week the boy was so afraid that he’d only walk backward in public, convinced that someone was following him. He stumbled in reverse up the steps of the bus, and walked backward down the aisle.

  Drummond said, “It’s Friday, so, what—Wednesday night, I guess—he smelled burning flesh in the house. I always check on him before I go to bed, just to make sure he’s okay.” He sighed. “When I went in that night, he had raw eggs all around his bed. So I thought it was time to call you.”

  “You said your wife is gone?”

  “I think so,” Drummond said. Even though he knew the interview was over, he let the matter drift because he was uncomfortable with sympathy. “If anything happened to me,” he said, “I don’t know—”

  “That’s got to have you worried,” the woman said. She was very professional and understanding and Drummond realized how little conversation he’d had since his wife left. The interview, though, was a botch. When the social worker mentioned a waiting list, halfheartedly, Drummond saw that his growing need for help was exactly the thing disqualifying him for help from this woman.

  “These things don’t really bother me,” he said feebly. “Because—because I understand him, you see.”

  Drummond taped a sign on the door and locked the shop. He and the boy walked in the rain to the drugstore. Pete twirled his ragged, useless umbrella over their heads.

  “I decided against a halfway house,” Drummond said.

  “You have to forsake me,” the boy said. “I see that eventually happening.”

  “You don’t see, not if that’s what you think.”

  “Maybe I just see better. I’m like a prophet. And you’re sort of unevolved.”

  “Okay,” Drummond said. “All right, maybe. I’m unevolved. Sure.”

  They picked up a bottle of hand lotion and then at the rack by the register Pete tried on a pair of glasses. The gold-rimmed frames sat cockeyed on his nose, and the left lens was stamped with the manufacturer’s name: Optivision. The large square lenses themselves were neutral, as clear as windowpanes. Pete looked longingly at himself in the mirror, blinking his green eyes. Drummond wasn’t sure whether to dissuade him; from a distance the boy, bespectacled, looked oddly more balanced, his elusive deranged face suddenly pulled into focus.

  “You don’t really need glasses,”Drummond said.

  “I do.”

  “Your eyes were fine last time we had them checked.”

  Pete said he wanted these glasses, these, with the gold frames, so that people would see the love. In the end, it was only another of the seemingly endless list of lunatic errands Drummond had grown accustomed to, and he gave up, paying for the glasses. They stepped next door and bought their usual lunch of doughnuts, of crullers and old-fashioneds, from the Greek. Drummond was still wary of the Greek, since the day, several months ago, when he’d asked Pete, rather loudly and obviously playing to an audience, if he wanted the psycho special. Drummond had been standing right beside Pete, but the Greek hadn’t realized they were together. Pete’s illness chipped away at the family resemblance and people often took them for strangers. The Greek had apologized, and Pete had forgotten the incident—if, indeed, he’d ever noticed it—but the day lingered in Drummond’s mind, a slight defensive hitch, every time he walked through the door of Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “I love Seattle,” Pete said, as they started back to the shop. He held the tattered umbrella in one hand and the white sack of doughnuts in the other. “I think Seattle’s one of the most happening places on the face of the globe at this point in time. We’re gonna determine civilization in the next century. I’ve never met so many movie stars—this is where it’s at. Literally, one of the hot spots of the nation is Seattle, USA.” He looked at his father through the rain-beaded, fogged lenses of his new glasses, which hung askew on the tip of his nose. “Just the other day, I ran into John Denver in the street. I said, ‘Oh, John, I’m writing an album and mailing it to you. It’s called Donuts.”

  Drummond let the conversation blow away in the rain. He hooked his arm through his son’s and hurried him on, but Pete shrugged him off. People glanced sideways at the two men as they made their strange way down Second Avenue. The boy’s umbrella was a blasted tangle of snapping fabric and flailing spokes. Drummond’s smock flew out behind him. He lowered his head against the wind and the rain and the faces. His fondest boyhood memories were of walking down this same street with his father, strolling and waving as if the elder Drummond were the mayor of the avenue. Now his father was dead and he was the father, and this was his son.

  “I love finding stuff in the street. Like this umbrella . . .” The boy lurched along, planting each foot directly in front of the other. “I went to a sculpture show. That’s what the umbrella’s all about. It didn’t occur to me until I was walking up the street and it broke. I knew it was going to break, but I didn’t know what I would do with it after. Then I thought, A sculpture. Of course. A sculpture. What else? I call it Salvador. After Salvador Allende, the city Salvador, and Salvador Dalí. It’s a triumvirate piece of sculpture. Covering all three bases.”

  About a block from the shop, as they were crossing Bell Street, the boy knelt down in the intersection. He took up a storybook prayer posture, kneeling, his hands folded together in the shape of a candle flame and his head solemnly bowed with his lips touching the tips of his fingers. The sack of doughnuts split open in the rain and the umbrella skittered away in the wind. People paused to look down at the odd penitent praying in the crosswalk. Drummond saw a shiny patch on the asphalt turn from red to green, and then a few cars drove around, slowly. On either side of the crosswalk, a waiting crowd of pedestrians jostled one another at the curb for a view, and Drummond had a familiar passing urge to explain. It seemed the boy would never get up, but then suddenly he made the sign of the cross, rose, and resumed walking, contemplatively, toward the shop.

  They had not made much progress when the boy again fell to the sidewalk, again crossing himself and praying, the whole thing repeated like a liturgical rite, as if the boy were kneeling for the Stations. A moment of prayer, the stream of people parting, the stares so blank they seemed to Drummond like pity or hatred, then the boy rising and picking his way cautiously along a fixed, narrow path, again dropping like a supplicant to the sidewalk. Drummond fell to his knees beside his son,
imploring him to get up. The boy’s glasses were gone and his thin, oily hair was pasted flat on his scalp. Drummond’s long smock, saturated, clung darkly to his back. Pete rose again and put his foot down on a seam in the concrete and followed the cracked path and again began praying. Women in the beauty salon next to the shop watched at the window as Drummond knelt with his son in the rain. He tried to hoist him up by his armpits, but the boy was a heavy dead weight. He lugged him across the sidewalk, heaving him a few feet at a time, until they made it safely to the shop door.

  Inside, Drummond snipped the twine on a new bundle of shop rags and began drying the boy off. He wiped his hair and ran the rag down his neck. He unbuttoned his shirt and toweled off his arms and chest, surprised, as always, to see the boy so hirsute. Drummond used to bathe him as an infant in the kitchen sink, and he remembered the yellow curtains Theresa had sewn, and the steamed window and the sill with the glossy green leaves of potted ivy. Drummond tried to bring back the feeling of those early winter twilights at the sink, he and the boy reflected in the window. He piled the wet rags, one after another, on the workbench, and when the boy was dry he said, “We’re going to close up.”

  Pete nodded.

  “Today’s not working out,” Drummond said. “Some days don’t.”

  “My glasses,” the boy said.

  “Okay,” Drummond said. “Okay.” He sat the boy in the recliner and went out to the sidewalk. Someone had stepped on the glasses. Drummond stared, mystified, at the empty gold frames glinting in the rain. The lenses had popped out. Back at his workbench, he tweaked the bridge of the glasses until it returned to its symmetrical curve and then he gently pressured the right earpiece down so that it was again parallel with the left. He ran a bead of glue around the frames and inserted the lenses, wiping them clean with a cloth diaper. “That’ll do you,” he said, handing them to Pete. Drummond pulled out a pocket comb and neatly parted the boy’s thinning hair and swept it back from his face. When the boy looked up at his father, faint stars of fluorescent light reflected off the glasses.

  “Do your job now,” Drummond said.

  “I think I’ll go outside,” the boy said.

  “Please,” Drummond said under his breath. “Do your job first.”

  Pete began pulling the old paper from the typewriters. He stacked the sheets in a pile, squaring the edges with a couple of sharp taps against the counter. Then he fed blank sheets of paper into the platens, returned the carriages, and hit the tab buttons for the proper indentation, ready for a new paragraph, ready for the next day.

  Drummond was nearly done with the Olivetti. He found the nameplate he needed—“Olivetti Lettera 32”—and glued it in place. He squeezed a daub of car wax on the cloth diaper and wiped down the case, drawing luster out of the old enamel. He called the bookstore and told the kid that he was closing shop but his typewriter was ready.

  While Drummond waited, he straightened up his workbench. The blank letter to his wife lay there. He crumpled the empty sheet and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  When the kid came over, he could hardly believe it was the same machine. He typed the words everyone typed: “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their—”

  “Is it ‘country’ or ‘party’?” he asked.

  “I see it both ways,” Drummond said.

  He wrote up a sales slip while the kid tapped the keys a couple of times more and looked down doubtfully at the machine. There was something off in its rightness and precision, an old and familiar antagonism gone, a testiness his fingers wanted to feel. He missed the adversity of typing across a platen pitted like a minefield, the resistance of the querulous keys that would bunch and clog. Drummond had seen this before. The kid wasn’t ready to say it yet, but half of him wanted the jalopy touch of his broken Olivetti back.

  “It’s different,” he said.

  “What’s the plot of your novel?” Drummond said.

  “It’s hard to explain,” the kid said.

  “Well, is it sci-fi?” he asked. “Romance? Detective thriller?”

  Somewhat snobbily, the kid said, “It doesn’t really fit any of those categories.”

  Pete laughed. Drummond felt the entire length of the day settle in his bones. He said, “Take the machine back and monkey with it. See how it feels. Give yourself some time to get used to it.”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said.

  “Look,” Drummond said. “I kept all the old parts. I could restore it back to broken in ten minutes. Or if you don’t like the way it works just throw it on the floor a few times. But first give it a fair chance.” He pushed the handwritten bill across the counter.

  “Can I pay you tomorrow? It’s been a slow day.”

  “Sure,” Drummond said. “Tomorrow.”

  Drummond and the boy boarded the bus and took their usual seats on the bench in back. Drummond wore an old snap-brim hat with a red feather in the band and a beige overcoat belted at the waist. He pulled a packet of salted nuts from the pocket, sharing them with the boy as the bus made its way slowly through the rush hour. His wife had taken their old green Fiat wagon, and Drummond sometimes wondered if he was supposed to feel foolish, letting her keep it. But he didn’t really mind riding the bus, and during the past few months he and the boy had settled into a routine. They ate a snack and read what people had written during the day, and then, as they crossed the West Seattle Bridge, the boy would time the rest of the trip home, praying and telling the decades of his rosary.

  “You want some?” Drummond asked, holding out the sort of small red box of raisins the boy liked. The boy shook his head indifferently, and Drummond slipped the box back into his pocket.

  The boy pulled out the sheets of paper he’d taken from the typewriters. For the most part the sentences were nonsensical, the random crashing of keys, or the repetitive phrases people remembered from typing classes. But some were more interesting, when people typed tantalizing bits of autobiography or quoted a passage of meaningful philosophy. The boy slumped against the window and shuffled through the fluttering sheets while Drummond, looking over his shoulder, followed along.

  “Now is the time for all good men.”

  “The quick brown fox jumped over.”

  “God is Dead.”

  “zrtiENsoina;ldu?/ng;’a!”

  “Tony chief Tony Tony.”

  “Now is the time now.”

  “Jaclyn was here.”

  “???????????!!!!!!!”

  “That interview didn’t work out so great,” Drummond said. The bus rose, crossing over the Duwamish River. A ferry on the Sound, its windows as bright as ingots of gold, seemed to be carting a load of light out of the city, making for the dark headlands of Bainbridge island. Drummond wondered if the boy would like a boat ride for his birthday, or maybe even to go fishing. His father had kept his tackle as meticulously as he had kept his typewriters, and it was still stored with his cane rod in the hall closet. After a trip to Westport or a day on the Sound, his father had sharpened his barbs with a hand file and dried and waxed the spoons and aught-six treble hooks until they shone as brightly as silverware. Nobody Drummond had ever known did that. Even now, a year after the old man’s death, his gear showed no sign of rusting.

  Drummond opened the bottle of lotion and squeezed a dollop into his palm. The lotion was cold, and he massaged it between his hands until it warmed to the touch.

  “Give me your hand,” he said to the boy.

  He rubbed the boy’s hands, smoothing the dry, dead skin between his fingers, feeling the flaking scales soften between his own hands.

  “Your birthday’s Monday,” Drummond said.

  Pete laughed.

  “Any idea what you’d like?”

  “No,” the boy said.

  Theresa would probably call home on Pete’s birthday. She’d always been good that way, calling or writing nice thank-you notes to people. For months Drummond had expected his wife to have a realization, although he was never sure what
she’d realize. When they had eloped during his senior year—her sophomore—she was six months pregnant and beginning to show. She had never had a real honeymoon or even, she had told him bitterly, a real life. The boy had been a tremendous, bewildering amount of work for a girl of sixteen. Drummond supposed that at forty-one she was still a young woman. Now that she was gone, he found most of his social life at church. He was in charge of the coffee urn, and he picked up pastries from a bakery on California Avenue whose owner was an old crony of his father’s. He enjoyed the hour of fellowship after Mass, mingling with people he’d known all his life, people in whose aging faces he still recognized the shortstop from Catholic Youth ball or the remnant of a former May Day queen’s smile. There was one particular lady he thought he might consider asking out on a possible date when the time was right.

  The rain falling against the roof of the bus and the warm amber light inside were familiar. Drummond capped the lotion and put the bottle away. He turned down the brim of his hat anxiously and, checking his watch, realized it was still early. He wanted to stop by the corner store before it closed; he needed to pick up a frozen pizza and some pop and ice cream for dinner. As the bus wound around Alki Point, he looked again at his watch, a Hamilton pocket model, railroad grade, which he wore on a silver fob slipped through his belt. Resting in his palm, it had that satisfying heft well-made things often have, the weight falling just right. It had been his father’s, and before that had belonged to his grandfather, an engineer for the old Great Northern. They’d never had to change the initials on the case, and the center wheel traveled four thousand miles, round and round, in the course of a year. His grandfather had told him that, and now Drummond often saw the image of the elderly frail man as he wound the stem in the morning.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said. “I’ve got some catching up to do.

  “But Monday,” he said, “I’ll take the day off. How’d you like that? We’ll do something, just me and you.