The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  We were all silent now, and even the smallest sounds—Lindy’s labored breathing or Mr. Jansen absently rubbing his thigh—seemed a gross and fatal intrusion. Steve let the call fall silent for a moment, and then resumed, and when he did we could hear for the first time the low guttural of the old tom’s response. The turkey drummed and strutted in what seemed to me like hesitation, and then, in a sudden dash, hurried straight toward the decoy.

  The gun had a satisfying heft, a weight in my hand that was exactly right. I raised the stock to my shoulder and looked with one eye down the barrel, arranging the red wattle neatly within the notched iron sight. In this snow the dark-brown bird was exposed, and I had a vague sense of understanding the risk it took, the declaration it was making. The tom’s beard blew in the wind, and he began to circle the hen, spreading his wings and fanning his tail. The bird puffed up to three times its size. It was a terrific display, cocky and proud and blustery and, I thought, soon to be irrelevant; my father-in-law gave a nod and I drew a breath and my mind went blank and I let go of the breath as I squeezed the trigger and nothing, nothing at all, happened. I went cold and, confused, stopped sighting the bird. Lindy said, “The fucking safety.” He grabbed the gun, raised it to his shoulder, and fired. A deep blast echoed and unrolled, just as the tom seemed to know it had been fooled. Instantly, the fan of feathers folded and the turkey collapsed.

  We rushed from the blind and gathered in a circle over the bird. The shot had been a good one; the turkey’s head was gone, and its neck was now hardly more than a hose filling a hole in the snow with blood. No one bent to touch it, as if this were the scene of a crime and we were waiting for some other, final authority to arrive. At last, Steve Rababy lit a cigarette and, covering his heart with his hat, gave the bird a brief eulogy.

  “He was looking for pussy and now he’s dead. Let that be a lesson to you liars.”

  Lindy offered a sentimental rephrasing, managing to work a trace of irony into his voice: “He died for love.”

  “Dinner,” Mr. Jansen said, putting his vast appetite where it belonged, before all.

  The shell had detonated inches from my ear. I worked a finger in it to clear the ringing.

  Lindy said to me, “I had to take your shot.”

  “I didn’t know about the safety,” I said.

  “That’s my fault,” Mr. Jansen said.

  “Let’s agree on a story,” Steve said.

  “Fine by me,” Lindy said.

  They looked at Mr. Jansen for ratification, and then he said, “Okay, we’ll say it was Daly.”

  After the high of the hunt, the rest of the afternoon had the long, languid feel of a Sunday. People kept up a compensatory busyness. Mr. Jansen plucked the bird in the garage and brazed the remaining nubs with a blowtorch. He wore an orange watch cap with a comical fur ball dangling from a string, and drank steadily from a cache of beers he’d buried in a mound of snow. Sandy Rababy worked a wooden spoon in a big pink bowl, and Lindy sat on the couch reading the newspaper. Caroline and Lucy discussed acting careers, my wife’s in particular, although now and then my mother-in-law offered an item of gossip she’d gleaned from the tabloids, restating fantasy and rumor as if they were fact. I listened, not so much to the content as to the lilt in my wife’s voice, the English phrasing in some of her sentences, a strange cadence that rose up, seeming to free itself, now and then, from her flat Michigan accent. She had an actor’s gift for mimicry, a hunger for imitation, absorbing the speech of others unself-consciously, and on several occasions in the past her affairs had chillingly registered for me first in a new sound, a surprising word in her vocabulary, a foreign inflection in her voice.

  Late in the afternoon, in guest mode, with no specific chore, I went for a walk. The trail I took led through a stand of white pine, ending at the lake behind the Jansens’ cabin. A diving raft was beached on the icy shore, and a string of rental boats was chained to a tree, each boat filled with snow, its gunwales whelmed by deep drifts. I felt as though I were seeing a sculptor’s rendition of my wife’s memories, a summer dream hacked into ice. The lake was fairly large, the surface sealed shut as though paraffin had been poured over it. I walked to the end of the dock. Below the ice, a blue sand pail and a yellow shovel from summer had sunk into the murk. Then I saw my wife out on the lake, perhaps half a mile from the dock, bundled in a shapeless red snowsuit. Her progress over the ice was painfully slow, as though she feared falling through, but then she was gone, and I heard a loon and tilted my good ear toward its call. A loon’s cry makes a haunting music on summer evenings, a tremolo you hear in the dark—eerie, because the two alternating notes mimic the sound of an echo, a call going out and then returning unanswered, a prayerful lament without a response. It was very late in the season to be migrating. The black bird was standing on the ice. Loons are ungainly, barely able to walk, achieving flight only after a long awkward struggle. In the air, they’re graceful and capable of flying sixty miles an hour. I watched until the bird rose up and the black speck, clearing the trees, dissolved like a drop of tint in the darkening sky.

  Trussed and displayed, our bird seemed to have been sitting on the table for ages, waiting for a banquet to begin. On either side of it, tall white candles flickered in a crosscurrent of the cabin’s many drafts, sending uncertain shadows over the table and lending a layer of depth to the setting. McIntosh apples were mounded in a bowl lined with yellow and brown satin leaves, and a wicker cornucopia at the opposite end of the table had been filled with Indian corn, along with acorns and walnuts and filberts, gourds, sprigs of dried sweet william, figs, a pomegranate—the open mouth of it overflowing with the stuff of harvest. A basket of warm glazed buns was wrapped in a white cloth, and a rich, earthy stuffing, steaming like a bog, was kept hot in a glass-lidded serving dish. China and silver settings had been brought north from Detroit, and there were goblets for both wine and water. With the pipes broken, water was the scarcer commodity. But there was wine. Two bottles had been uncorked and were breathing on the table, and six more sat on a sideboard, above which, on the wall, a large ornately framed mirror, slightly canted, held the whole scene like a still life.

  Mr. Jansen poured wine for everyone, and then, as people settled into their seats, stood at the head of the table, flipping open the brass latches of a wooden box and pulling his carving knife and fork from a bed of red crushed velvet. He scraped the knife against a hone, crossing them above his head like a swashbuckler, and then, asking for silence, cleanly cut a first slice of white meat and placed it ceremoniously on my plate. The others clapped and cheered and stomped their feet, and I felt that my face must have reddened. I looked into the mirror and was able to see, as if I were hovering above the table, everyone but myself.

  “To Daly, after all these years,” Lucy said.

  “Hear! Hear!” Steve and Lindy and Mr. Jansen all said together.

  The toast’s concluding ring of crystal rang dully in my right ear, still numb from the shotgun blast. We all drank in my honor, and then drank again when Steve, winking my way, rose to salute the turkey I’d shot.

  “I’m surprised,” Caroline said. “It doesn’t seem like you, Daly.”

  A gravy boat came down the line, and I ladled a thick, brown, floury paste over everything.

  “Yeah,” Lucy said.

  “Well . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

  Mr. Jansen jumped in. “Why not, Lucille? What, may I ask, is your idea of him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sandy answered. “More passive—not passive but, like, more a pacifist, I mean, a pacifist, not a killer.”

  “Oh, no,” Lindy said. “Not the killer conversation again.”

  “Hunting,” Steve said, cluing me in, somewhat vaguely, as he had with his politics. His assumption that we shared something unspoken only sharpened my resentment of him.

  “You eat, you can’t complain,” Mr. Jansen said.

  “But it’s true,” my wife said. “He’s a major bird-watc
her. He keeps this stupid little book— I’m sorry, I don’t mean stupid. I mean . . . you know what I mean.” She paused, patting my forearm, and then, covering the awkward silence, continued. “You should have seen how excited he was the day he saw a pileated woodpecker in Central Park.”

  “I’ll show you a pileated woodpecker,” Steve said.

  “Oh, God, not that pecker conversation again,” Sandy yelled.

  “What’s the point of that, anyway, Daly?” Mr. Jansen asked, steering the conversation off the subject of sex. For a pleasure-loving, hard-drinking barfly, my wife’s father was surprisingly prudish. His face was flushed. He’d tucked a corner of his napkin into his shirtfront, like a little boy. As the discussion jumped around, he swiveled his head from side to side, slashing his knife and fork in the air, as if he were trying to stab a word out of the conversation and eat it. “And what’s a pileated? That needs to be cleared up.”

  “What’s the point of what?” I asked stiffly. I was seated at the far end of the table, with everyone to my right, and I couldn’t keep pace with the conversation. I was beginning to think my eardrum was punctured. A warm fluid seemed to be leaking from it.

  “Watching birds.” Between the sound of his booming voice and my comprehension, there was a distracting lag, and the only replies I could make were serious and plodding, out of sync with the rising hilarity.

  “A pileum,” I said, “is the top of a bird’s head.”

  “Don’t all birds have tops to their heads?”

  “Some birds are topless,” Lindy said.

  All this badinage was just crashing and piling up in front of me. It seemed really cornball and canned, but I couldn’t quite catch the tone and join in. I reached for my water and held the glass in my palm, cool against my skin.

  “Come again,” I said.

  “What?” Lindy said. “Huh?”

  “What—” I began, and then everyone at the table started in.

  “What? What?”

  “What? What? What?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t hear.”

  “Ah,” Steve said, “from the shotgun.”

  “Just in my right,” I said.

  Steve stood beside me with his plate and utensils in hand.

  “Trade places,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, come on. You still got one good ear, right? Let’s switch. It’s no problem.”

  Stubbornly insisting on my seat would only have caused a scene at this point.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to hear,” Lindy said.

  Sandy laughed. “Lord knows, he’s better off.”

  “Switch over,” Mr. Jansen said with a preemptive wave of his knife. By the time I was seated again, the entire conversation had moved on. Caroline was playing with her food, and I wondered what she was thinking. The silver earrings SJ had given her caught the firelight and flickered as she brought her hand to her lips. Something dropped on her plate, tinging loudly enough for all of us to hear.

  Her mother said, “I got one, too.”

  “Lead?” Mr. Jansen asked.

  “Me, too. That’s lead?” Sandy turned to her husband. “Isn’t lead illegal? That’s what you told me.”

  “Baiting turkey itself is illegal,” Steve said. “So whether or not we used a little lead didn’t seem to matter much.” Sandy looked at me, and I made an exaggerated shrug, absolving myself of any accessory role in the crime.

  “There’s nothing really wrong with it,” Steve said.

  “Except it causes brain damage,” Lucy said.

  “Well, don’t swallow any,” Steve said.

  Lucy said, “But won’t it taint the meat around it, too?”

  Sandy said, “The whole bird is poisoned!”

  “Goddam,” Steve said.

  “I don’t like being reminded of this dead thing that was alive,” Sandy said. “That’s my other point. I for sure don’t like biting into the bullets that killed it during dinner.”

  “Those aren’t bullets, for fuck’s sake,” her husband said. “It’s just shot, number-six shot.”

  Sandy said, “I like to make believe my turkey was grown on a tree or bush.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t,” Mr. Jansen said.

  “You liked that fancy squab in Paris plenty,” Steve said to his wife, working the hypocrisy angle that always seemed to crop up at the end of these discussions. It was as if the interminable debate—men on one side, women on the other—would end only when it swallowed its own tail.

  “You owed me that squab,” Sandy said. She was drunker than the rest of us, or less capable of hiding it. “You owed me that squab for fucking Katrina.”

  “Sandy,” my wife’s mother said.

  “Ten years. Ten goddamn years.”

  Sandy reached for one of the bottles of wine that had been left to breathe on the sideboard. She rose from her chair and said, “You all just go out and hunt and sit around and swap stories. You all think it’s funny.” She walked unsteadily around the table. “And no one’s ever hurt and it’s all just stories. Ha ha. Oh, yeah.” She bent as if to kiss her husband on the ear. “I hate guns,” she said. “I hate guns. I hate guns.” She straightened up and looked over the table as if waiting for applause, and when none came she filled her glass, and then poured the rest of the bottle of wine over her husband’s head. His knife and fork were poised above his plate, and he smiled patiently as the wine dripped down his face. When the bottle was empty, he put a piece of meat in his mouth and chewed it slowly, then swallowed.

  No one said anything.

  “I could tell some stories,” Sandy said.

  “We can clean up tomorrow,” Lucy said.

  “There’s others,” Sandy said.

  Lucy insisted. “It’s bedtime for you.”

  Sandy put on a red union suit and climbed the ladder into her bunk, and we tried to resume dinner, but soon she was leaning over the edge of the bed, shouting down at us.

  “That’s the difference,” she said.

  “Go to bed, dear,” Steve said.

  “I want to tell you the difference!”

  “Okay,” Steve said. “What’s the difference?”

  “You all have stories,” Sandy said. “And we have secrets.”

  “Good night,” Mr. Jansen said.

  “That’s the difference,” she said.

  Before bed, I walked across the Jansens’ drive and stood under the awning of the garage. It was snowing lightly. Firelight lit the cabin windows, and I could see my wife, standing at the kitchen sink, framed in an oval of frost where the glass was too warm to freeze. I fumbled with a book of matches as I watched her, this lovely woman carved like a cameo against the window. I was about to head back inside when Mr. Jansen joined me. “You want a light?” he asked, and suddenly the flame from a lighter flared in my face. He lit a cigarette and said, “What’s your problem with Steve?”

  My father-in-law’s face was gray with stubble, as if the long day had aged him. He looked tired and uncertain, and I wondered how he’d react if he knew the truth about his friends. This old man could be shattered with a sentence, but in the blind I had begun to lose my grip on the clarity of my dreams. I could no longer imagine the shape of my revenge, the loss I was trying to recoup, the pain I was trying to stop—Caroline’s, or mine. I had been jarred by the end of dinner, sad for Steve, which surprised me, and sad for Sandy—especially Sandy, the way she lived with the rankling knowledge that she existed in her husband’s affections as a thin anecdote, an illustration of his mediocre griefs. I didn’t want to become the sort of man Steve was, and I honestly believed at that moment, as I watched the snow curl around the cabin windows, that I would never tell my wife’s story, that her secret, what little of it I knew, was safe with me.

  Mr. Jansen watched his daughter in the window, her face blurring behind a cloud of steam as she poured boiled water into the sink and began washing the dinner dishes.

  �
��It’s a tough haul, acting,” he said. “But she’s good, isn’t she?”

  “Better than you know,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. I used to do some acting. That’s where her talent comes from. Someday she’ll be famous. She’ll be well known.”

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  For a moment, he seemed to vacate his own face, leaving behind the hollowed eyes and nose and mouth of a mask. He stubbed his smoke in the snow and stumbled across the icy drive back to the cabin. A little while later, I came in and climbed the ladder to our bunk. I lay awake, listening to the subdued voices below. I remember only that my wife used the word “wanker,” and then for a while low whispers were skimming the surface of my sleep until, late in the night, toward dawn, really, I woke and found myself alone.

  My heart was racing, pounding with a familiar fear—that Caroline was gone and I would never find her. I hurried down the ladder and opened the cabin door. The temperature had dropped and the snow had glazed over with a sheen of ice. The thin crust cracked underfoot with a distinct breaking sound. I walked along the trampled path, shortening my stride to fit my feet into the frozen mold of previous footprints, losing myself in concentration. At the outhouse, I stood for a moment, listening.

  I called her name.

  There was no response, and I panicked, as you might in a dream where all your assumptions are not exactly wrong but irrelevant. Far off in the woods, a coyote yipped and howled, and others answered. I leaned my head back and watched the breath stream from my mouth and disappear. The bare winter branches of the alders tangled above my head like a web. Then some black thing raced into the trees in front of me, and I jumped. It crashed through the underbrush and was gone.

  The ground was pocked with fallen leaves and pine needles. Bare grass showed in the small circles of warmth beneath the sagging branches of fir trees. Everything that had moved in the woods over the past few days had left a record of its passing; the snow was marked with the tracks of hunters and birds and squirrels and deer and dogs, all the trails crisscrossing and weaving and intersecting, so that, if time were collapsed, you could imagine nothing but hapless collisions, a kind of antic vaudeville.