by Colin Kersey
“What are you doing?” Valerie asked.
“You know, if it’s alright with you, I might crash for a couple of hours until I have to feed the fish.”
“I understand. You sound exhausted. That was something,” she said. “We would have lost all the fish if you hadn’t figured out what was wrong and how to save them. No way Stu would have done what you did.”
Patsy began to whine at something she had found. She pawed at whatever it was that lay underneath the cot.
“What are you doing, girl?” Valerie reached to pet the dog. When she stood, she was holding Vonda’s scarf. “What’s this?”
“Looks like Vonda’s scarf,” I said.
Valerie dropped it on the floor as if it were crawling with bugs. “When was she here?” she demanded. Her pale cheeks had blossomed red.
“Yesterday. She stopped by while I was reading.”
“I see,” she said. “C’mon, Patsy.” She opened the door. As she shut it behind her, I had only a brief second to observe the look of anguish that etched her face.
***
I was feeding the fish their noon meal in a cold, blustery wind that whipped the surface of the ponds and scourged my exposed cheeks and ears when I saw Virgil walking toward me. He still wore the suit he had worn earlier to church.
“Anymore dead rainbows?” he asked.
“None.” I cast another scoop of pellets over the pond and we watched as the fish rose.
Virgil continued looking out over the pond. “You know, something like those trout dying happened to most guys, I wouldn’t expect to see ‘em again. That was a real test of faith. It took guts. Brains, too.”
I shrugged, embarrassed by Virgil’s praise, and threw a second ladle of pellets.
“Nobody asked you to learn about trout rearing,” Virgil continued. “If you had not studied up on it, we might have lost another hundred fish or more before we figured out what was killing them. Make a long story short, I think you’re ready to take over the feeding and care of the trout in addition to your regular duties.”
“What about Stu?”
“Stu’s got a full-time job with the county. I don’t think he will have a problem with it. Besides, as soon as we open, he’ll have plenty to do in his other job.”
“What’s that?”
“Customer service,” Virgil said. He turned to leave. “Oh, one more thing. My daughters said I better give you a raise. From now on, you can expect another hundred dollars a month on top of what you’re already making.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling briefly. “Thanks a lot.”
The saddest part of being alone, I reflected as I watched Virgil trudge up to the house, was having no one to share the good times, or bad times. I cast another scoop of pellets across the pond’s placid surface and watched as the trout fought over the food, their sleek bodies flashing silver in the cold sunlight.
***
Momma said good knives are worth their weight in gold. They do not require sharpening very often because they keep their edge. They cut quick and clean. The handle and blade are balanced so that they feel like they were made especially for your hand. I keep them all in their holder arranged by size. Except the special one. That one I keep in my secret place.
I like how the pain stings. Instant. Intense. Like an E7 note on a violin. Wiping away all the darkness and troubles from my mind. I am here. Now. Alive. If no one is around, sometimes I scream.
Vonda probably wonders why I ask her to buy so many paper towels and bandages. I tell her it is because I am clumsy and cannot see what I am doing when I prepare meals. The truth is I can slice a tomato, carrots, or potatoes faster and better than people who can see.
Oh, there is a lot about me that nobody knows.
“Valerie V-de-de,” Momma would sing to me when I was little, making a sound like the chickadees. “Who knows my Valerie V better than me?”
Nobody. Nobody but you, Momma.
Nobody.
PART II
OPENING DAY
No man can lose what he never had.
-Isaac Walton, The Compleat Angler
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Following the attack on the speedboat, I had lived through unrelenting hell, forced to flee for my life after leaving my identity and everything I owned behind. I had been close to being fired for getting the tractor stuck in the quagmire, then blamed for injuring Valerie’s hand, and nearly fired again for the death of the trout.
That Sunday, the skies finally parted—figuratively at least—and I was finally able to go about my work without worrying about what disaster the next day would bring. All I had to do to stay afloat was to avoid Stu and remain invisible to the rest of the world. How hard could it be?
The gift of the canaries was accepted, if not entirely appreciated. And, after one too many complaints about her cooking, Vonda welcomed my renewed offer of help.
Sunday dinner was my turn to cook. I found an Indian market in Mount Vernon where I shopped for spices and condiments.
“We don’t get many Indian men in here,” the storeowner said as she rang me up. She wore a traditional sari.
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “I don’t think my father knew how to boil water.”
Questions followed about where I was from, where were my parents were from originally, and so forth. Several lies later, I was able to make my escape with the goods.
“Holy smokes. What did you do to the chicken?” Vonda asked.
“I mixed in some ginger root, a little garlic, some tomato sauce, coconut milk, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and, of course, curry powder. I hope it is not too hot. I tried to keep it mild.” An exotic bouquet of scents suffused the entire house.
“What did you do to the rice?” she asked. “It’s delicious.”
“Onions with more cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves, plus almonds and raisins for garnish.”
“It’s like eating in a restaurant,” Vonda said. “Gray can cook anytime he wants as far as I’m concerned.”
“Now he’s going to cook, too?” Stu asked. “What’s next, paying our bills?”
Stu had arrived home late Sunday afternoon only to learn that the trout had been saved from oxygen depletion and that I had broken into his locked closet. His irritation with me was palpable; he was now on his third vodka and Squirt.
“I still say we should have fired his ass when he messed up the lawn with the tractor—which I had to pay for by the way. Then he injures Valerie, so she can’t cook.”
“There’s no proof he did it,” Vonda said.
“Yes, there is,” Stu said. “I saw him.”
I felt myself flush. I started to object, but Valerie found my arm with her hand as if to quiet me.
“If you saw him put the knife in the dishwasher wrong, why didn’t you make it right?” Vonda said.
Stu glared at me but said nothing.
Valerie remained silent as she sampled the food in tiny bites. She hesitated when she came to the artichoke. “What is this?”
“It’s an artichoke,” I said. “You peel off the leaves and dip the fat part into lemon yogurt sauce, then drag it between your teeth.”
The artichoke had been my idea based on a simple recipe Heide once tried. I thought she would approve.
It took Valerie a couple of tries, but there was no doubt from her expression that she was warming up to the experience.
“It’s like velvet. Smooth. Sensual.”
“I’m surprised you know that word,” Vonda said.
“Heard it on TV once or twice,” Valerie said innocently.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” Vonda asked.
“My mother. I am not anywhere near as good as she is. Was,” I added. Always better to cover my tracks, I realized. She would no doubt have offered numerous suggestions for improvement, but I thought she would have been pleased to see that her Indian culinary education efforts had not gone completely to waste.
Virgil had pushed up his glasses and w
as studying the artichoke as if it were an artifact from another planet. “Don’t it make you wonder who it was first thought to try eating one of these?”
“More than likely someone who was starving to death and didn’t have any real food to eat,” Stu said.
“Speaking of starving to death,” Virgil said, “it’s a miracle we didn’t lose a lot of our fish this weekend while you were enjoying yourself down in Seattle. If Gray had not done some reading up on trout—something he was not asked to do—those fish would have starved from not enough oxygen. When was the last time you checked the water chemistry, Stu?”
“Yeah, Stu,” Valerie jumped in. “It’s almost like you wanted the fish to die so you could blame it on Gray.”
“Well?” Vonda asked.
Stu had been studiously avoiding looking at everyone. Now he glared at each of us like a wounded animal.
“For your information, I wasn’t in Seattle enjoying myself,” he growled. “I was attending an important conference for my job. Also, those chemicals and strips degrade over time, which is why I was storing them in a closet. If you…”
Virgil cut him off. “Frankly, Stu, I don’t want to hear any more excuses. As of this minute, I am putting Gray in charge of the trout, including feeding them and maintaining the chemical balance of the water. You got a problem with that?”
Stu stood, tossed his napkin on the table, and left without saying anything.
***
The weather stayed stubbornly cold and wet the following week. Herds of slow-moving nimbostratus beasts filled the sky from horizon to horizon, day after day, offering no relief from their dreary monotony. From my meager wages, I bought a new hat and jacket at Walmart. Stu seemed unperturbed that I had taken over feeding the fish but expressed outrage that I had broken into his storage closet.
“I specifically told you to stay away from my stuff.” We were standing in the small building where the fish food was kept. Stu had nailed the closet door shut as soon as he arrived home and saw the damage.
I shrugged. “I needed to save the trout.”
“What else did you see?” he asked.
“I wasn’t taking inventory.”
Stu studied me.
“I guess I saw a shotgun. Other than that, I was in too much of a hurry to worry about what else you might be hiding. Locking up the testing kit like that almost makes me think Valerie was right; you wanted those fish to die so you could blame it on me.”
“Don’t mess with my stuff again,” Stu poked me in the chest with his finger, “or there will be consequences.”
Being poked by Stu was becoming tiresome and I knocked his hand away. “Keep your hands off me, Stu.”
Stu stared at me, rolling the toothpick in his mouth, then grinned before leaving.
Nearly as worrisome as Stu’s paranoia was Valerie’s moodiness. Since finding Vonda’s scarf in my cabin, she had withdrawn into her own private world. For several days, she did not appear for breakfast. While she still prepared dinner, she did not speak unless spoken to and then retreated to her room as soon as she finished eating, leaving cleaning up to me, with the occasional visit from Vonda. An uncomfortable silence, as gloomy as the weather cloaked the dining table whenever she was present.
I did not see myself as a meddler in other peoples’ affairs. Because of my own troubles and loneliness, however, I was perhaps more attuned to Valerie’s mood swings than the rest of the family. From what I had observed, she had no friends and no activities outside the farm other than occasional walks with her seeing-eye dog. While it seemed obvious to me that she was unhappy, the other family members appeared not to notice, or, if they did, not to care.
I missed her midday visits with Patsy when she would appear carrying a brown bag containing a sandwich that was often a strange combination of ingredients, always intriguing to the taste buds but sometimes barely edible. Blackberry jam and fried egg was surprisingly tasty, but catsup and cucumber were a failure. More than the food, however, I missed her comradery. She had been the first of the family to welcome me and my biggest defender. As petite and unappreciated as she was, I could not help but feel protective. And those rare times when she smiled, well that was something special.
I spent much of the time mowing the damp, heavy grass with the hammerknifer. While Vonda grumbled about the rain, I took satisfaction in a well-ordered routine and a simple, almost monastic lifestyle. After being credited with saving the trout, Stu left me alone to tend the fish and look after the grounds. The work was hard but undemanding mentally. Four weeks after arriving at the Van de Zilver home, my injured ribs were mostly healed, and my strength was back.
For the first time since Heide had died, I began to think less about surviving from moment to moment and more about the future. The intrusion of the past upon the present, while still disruptive, was no longer the constant mental barrage it had once been. My loneliness, however, was growing. Little by little, I could feel it spreading like a cancer within. Once, while washing dishes and overhearing a love song on the radio, I had to squeeze my eyes shut to hide my grief and prevent the tears from spilling down my cheeks.
Even the Graflex camera offered no escape. On a brilliant Saturday morning, I drove to Anacortes and parked on a hill overlooking the ferry terminal. There, I could listen to the deep bass rumble of the ferries’ engines and observe the swirling eddies in the blue-green salt water of Puget Sound, which was caused by the tide change and the churning of the enormous propellers as the huge ferries arrived. Cars, trucks, and people were disgorged and then reloaded before the huge ships departed once again. Through the scratched lens of the Speed Grafic, the bustling seascape was reduced to a 4x5 postcard with the San Juan Islands and the Strait of Juan de Fuca posing in the background. The scene was breathtaking, but I could not enjoy the beauty. It might have been the solitary young woman with short red hair pushing a bicycle onto the ferry. Or the dozen black cormorants perched expectantly on the pilings like funeral attendants that caused the scene to blur before my eyes so that I packed up the camera and departed soon after.
Ironically, it was a question from Stu that pulled me back from the precipice of suicidal thoughts. At the Van de Zilver Sunday dinner, conversation turned to the upcoming fishing season, which was due to open on the last weekend in April.
“Guess you might have figured out already,” he said, “that fishing season opens in three weeks?”
“Why do you wait until then to open?” I asked out of curiosity. “Isn’t that giving away your single most important advantage to your competitors, the state fisheries? I thought the whole idea of a trout fishing farm was that you didn’t need a license.”
As if in accord, one of the canaries let out a peep from the family room. Virgil put down his fork, heavy with mashed potatoes.
“Why not open a week early?” I asked.
Stu eyed me over a bottle of Bud Light. “It’s simple. Partly it is the weather conditions, but mostly it is because people do not think about trout fishing until the television news and the sports section in the newspaper mention it, which is always two, maybe three days before the season opens.”
“People need the media to tell them what to do?” Valerie asked. Several faces turned at once, as if surprised she could still speak after such a lengthy spell of self-imposed silence.
“Stupid as it may sound to you, Sis, that’s pretty much the way it is,” Stu said. “We could open early, and no one would know. We’d be sitting around with nothing to do but twiddle our thumbs.”
“What about advertising?” I asked.
Stu chuckled. “You must be smoking the fish food.”
Vonda snorted.
“Who’s got that kind of money?” Stu asked. “We’re not exactly McDonald’s, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Virgil had not said a word. Now he spoke up. “Wait a minute, Stu. Let’s hear what Gray has to say.”
“Doesn’t cost anything to listen, right?” Vonda said.
Stu rol
led his eyes in disgust.
“Got some paper and a pen or pencil?”
Valerie hurried to the kitchen and brought back a small pad of paper and a pen, no doubt from a carefully organized drawer. I quickly sketched a small space ad with a smiling fish and filled it in with a headline. “What about something like this?”
Vonda read the copy, “Get a jump on the fishing season. Our rainbows can’t wait.”
I added a line of copy at the bottom before handing the notepad back to Vonda.
“You catch ’em, we clean ’em,” she said.
“I like it,” Valerie said.
“What’s something like that cost?” Virgil asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a hundred bucks or so.”
Virgil’s eyebrows rose.
“I’d suggest running it more than once. Probably at least two weeks in the Skagit Valley Herald.”
“How do you expect to make any money throwing it away like that?” Stu asked.
“That’s not all,” I said. “We’ll need some signs. I can paint them, but materials are probably another hundred.”
In the silence that followed, I shrugged. “I’m guessing we won’t make any money the first weekend, or maybe even the next. But we’ll make some happy new customers, and they’ll tell their friends.”
“Can I see that?” Virgil asked. He pushed up his glasses as he studied it.
“What do you think, Daddy?” Vonda asked.
“I can have an ad ready by Wednesday—Thursday latest—for running in next week’s paper.”
“What’s your investment?” Stu asked. “I don’t hear you offering any skin in the game.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll put up the money to run the ads and make the signs. You can pay me back later. If it doesn’t work, it’s my loss.”
“Go for it, Daddy,” Vonda said. “What have you got to lose?”