Big Fish

by Daniel Wallace

  “What, Dad?”

  “‘You owe me three-fifty,’ he says.”

  “That’s funny,” I say.

  “Well, laughter is the best medicine,” he says, though neither of us is laughing. Neither of us even smiles. He just looks at me with a deepening sadness, the way it happens sometimes with him, going from one emotion to another the way some people channel surf.

  “I guess it’s kind of appropriate,” he says. “Me using the guest room.”

  “How’s that?” I say, though I know the answer. This is not the first time he’s made mention of it, even though it was his decision to move out of the bedroom he shared with Mother. “I don’t want her to go to bed every night after I’m gone looking over at my side and shivering, if you know what I mean.” He somehow feels his sequestration here to be emblematic.

  “Appropriate inasmuch as I’m a kind of guest,” he says, looking around the oddly formal room. My mother always felt that guests had to have things just so, so she made the room look as much like a hotel as possible. You’ve got your little chair, bedside table, harmless oil reproduction by some Old Master hanging above the chest of drawers. “I haven’t really been around here so much, you know. At home. Not as much as we all would have liked. Look at you, you’re a grown man and I—I completely missed it.” He swallows, which for him is a real workout. “I wasn’t there for you, was I, son?”

  “No,” I say, perhaps too quickly but with as much kind­ness as the word can possibly hold.

  “Hey,” he says, after which he coughs for a bit. “Don’t hold back or anything, just ’cause I’m, you know.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “The truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “So help me—”

  “God. Fred. Whoever.”

  He takes another sip of water. It seems not to be a matter of thirst so much as it is a desire for this element, to feel it on his tongue, his lips: he loves the water. Once upon a time he swam.

  “But you know, my father was gone a lot, too,” he says, his voice crackling soft. “So I know what it’s like. My dad was a farmer. I told you that, didn’t I? I remember once he had to go off somewhere to get a special kind of seed to plant in the fields. Hopped a freight. Said he’d be back that night. One thing and another happened and he couldn’t get off. Rode it all the way out to California. Gone most of the spring. Planting time came and went. But when he came back he had the most marvelous seeds.”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “He planted them and a huge vine grew up into the clouds, and at the top of the clouds was a castle, where a giant lived.”

  “How did you know?”

  “And a two-headed woman who served him tea, no doubt.”

  At this my father tweaks his eyebrows and smiles, for a moment deep in pleasure.

  “You remember,” he says.

  “Sure.”

  “Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”

  I shake my head.

  “It does. You never really believed that one though, did you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He looks at me.

  “No,” he says. Then, “Yes. I don’t know. At least you remembered. The point is, I think—the point is I tried to get home more. I did. Things happened, though. Natural disasters. The earth split once I think, the sky opened several times. Sometimes I barely made it out alive.”

  His old scaly hand crawls over to touch my knee. His fingers are white, the nails cracking and dull, like old silver.

  “I’d say I’d missed you,” I say, “if I knew what I was missing.”

  “I’ll tell you what the problem was,” he says, lifting his hand from my knee and motioning for me to come closer. And I do. I want to hear. The next word could be his last.

  “I wanted to be a great man,” he whispers.

  “Really?” I say, as if this comes as some sort of surprise to me.

  “Really,” he says. His words come slow and weak but steady and strong in feeling and thought. “Can you believe it? I thought it was my destiny. A big fish in a big pond—that’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted from day one. I started small. For a long time I worked for other people. Then I started my own business. I got these molds and I made candles in the basement. That business failed. I sold baby’s breath to floral shops. That failed. Finally, though, I got into import/export and everything took off. I had dinner with a prime minister once, William. A prime minister! Can you imagine, this boy from Ashland having dinner in the same room with a—. There’s not a continent I haven’t set foot on. Not one. There are seven of them, right? I’m start­ing to forget which ones I . . . never mind. Now all that seems so unimportant, you know? I mean, I don’t even know what a great man is anymore—the, uh, prerequisites. Do you, William?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Know,” he says. “Know what makes a man great.”

  I think about this for a long time, secretly hoping he forgets he ever asked the question. His mind has a way of wandering, but something in the way he looks at me says he’s not forgetting anything now, he’s holding on tight to that thought, and he’s waiting for my answer. I don’t know what makes a man great. I’ve never thought about it before. But at a time like this “I don’t know” just won’t do. This is an occasion one rises to, and so I make myself as light as possible and wait for a lift.

  “I think,” I say after a while, waiting for the right words to come, “that if a man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be considered great.”

  For this is the only power I have, to bestow upon my father the mantle of greatness, a thing he sought in the wider world, but one that, in a surprise turn of events, was here at home all along.

  “Ah,” he says, “those parameters,” he says, stumbling over the word, all of a sudden seeming slightly woozy. “Never thought about it in those terms, exactly. Now that we are, though, thinking about it like that, I mean, in this case,” he says, “in this very specific case, mine—”

  “Yeah,” I say. “You are hereby and forever after my fa­ther, Edward Bloom, a Very Great Man. So help you Fred.”

  And in lieu of a sword I touch him once, gently, on the shoulder.

  With these words he seems to rest. His eyes close heavily, and with an eerie sort of finality that I recognize as the beginning of a departure. When the window curtains part as though of their own accord I believe for a moment that this must be the passage of his spirit going from this world to the next. But it’s only the central air coming on.

  “About that two-headed lady,” he says with his eyes closed, murmuring, as if falling into a sleep.

  “I’ve heard about the two-headed lady,” I say, shaking him gently by the shoulder. “I don’t want to hear about her anymore, Dad. Okay?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you about the two-headed lady, Mr. Smarty-pants,” he says.

  “You weren’t?”

  “I was going to tell you about her sister.”

  “She had a sister?”

  “Hey,” he says, opening his eyes now, getting his second wind. “Would I kid you about something like that?”

  The Girl in the River

  Near the banks of the Blue River was an oak tree where my father used to stop and rest. The tree spread its branches wide, providing shade, and around its base was a soft, cool green moss, on which he would lay his head and sometimes sleep, the river soothing him with its smooth sounds. It’s here he came one day, and as he was drifting off into a dream woke to see a beautiful young woman bathing in the river. Her long hair shone like gold itself and curled to her bare shoulders. Her breasts were small and round. Cupping the cool water in her hands, she let it run down her face, her chest, and back into the river.

  Edward tried to remain calm. He kept telling himself, Don’t move. If you move an inch she’ll see you. He didn’t want to scare her. And, honestly, he had never glimpsed a woman in her natural state before, and wanted to study he
r a little longer before she left him.

  That’s when he saw the snake. Cottonmouth, had to be. Making a little break in the water as it glided toward her, its small reptilian head angling for flesh. Hard to believe a snake that size could kill you, but it could. A snake that size killed Calvin Bryant. It bit him on the ankle and seconds later he was dead. Calvin Bryant was two times bigger than her.

  So there was no real decision to be made. My father relied on instinct and dove head first into the river, hands outstretched, just as the cottonmouth was getting set to place his two small fangs into her small waist. She screamed, of course. A man coming at you, diving into the water—you bet she screamed. And he rose out of the water with that snake writhing in his hands, mouth searching for something to lay into, and she screamed again. Finally he was able to wrap the snake up in his shirt. Didn’t believe in killing, my dad. He’d take it to a friend who collected snakes.

  Here’s the scene now, though: a young man and a young woman both standing waist deep in the Blue River with their shirts off, looking at each other. Sun breaking through in places, shining, glinting off the water. But these two mostly in shadow. One studying the other. All quiet except for the nature around them. Hard to talk now because what do you say? My name is Edward, what’s yours? You don’t say that. You say what she said, the moment she was able to speak.

  “You saved my life.”

  And he had, hadn’t he? She was about to get bitten by a poisonous snake and he had saved her. Risked his own life to do it, too. Though neither of them mentioned that. Didn’t have to. They both knew it.

  “You’re brave,” she said.

  “No ma’am,” he said, though she couldn’t have been much older than he. “I just saw you, and I saw that snake, and I—I jumped.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Edward,” he said.

  “Okay, Edward. From now on this is your place. We’ll call it . . . Edward’s Grove. The tree, this part of the river, this water, everything. And whenever you’re not feeling good or need something to happen, you come down here and just rest, and think about it.”

  “Okay,” he said, though he would have said okay to about anything then. Though way above water, his head was swimming. He felt as though he had left this world for a brief time. Hadn’t come back yet.

  She smiled.

  “Now you turn around,” she said, “and I’ll get dressed.”

  “Okay.”

  And he turned around, flushed with an almost intolerable good feeling. So good he could hardly stand it. As though he’d been made over, better, and all new.

  He didn’t know how long it might take a woman to dress, so he gave her a full five minutes. And when he turned around of course she was gone—vanished. Hadn’t heard her go but she was gone. He might have called after her—would’ve liked to—but he didn’t know what to call. Wished he’d asked now, first thing.

  The wind blew through the oak tree, and the water ran its course. And she was gone. And in his shirt no snake at all, but a stick. A small brown stick.

  It looked like a snake, though—it did. Especially when he threw it in the river and watched it swim away.

  His Quiet Charm

  They say he had a special charm, a flair for understatement, a knack for a sudden thoughtfulness. He was—shy. Still: sought out, my father, by women. Call it a quiet charm. He was quite handsome, too, though he never let this go to his head. He was a friend to all, and everybody was his friend.

  They say he was funny, even then. They say he knew a few good jokes. Not in large groups, where he’d keep to himself, but get him alone—as many female Ashlanders apparently tried to do!—and he could really make you laugh. They say you could hear them laughing into the night, my father and these sweet young girls, hear their laughter echoing through town in the night, on his front porch, swinging. Laughter was the sound of choice to sleep by in Ashland. That’s the way it was, back then.

  How He Tamed the Giant

  My father’s youthful exploits were many, and the stories told even to this day are beyond counting. But perhaps his most formidable task was facing Karl, the Giant, for in doing so he was risking his very life. Karl was as tall as any two men, as wide as any three, and as strong as any ten. His face and arms bore the scars of a life lived brutally, a life closer to that of animals than of men. And such was his demeanor. They say Karl was born of woman like any mortal, but it became clear soon enough that a mistake had been made. He was just too huge. His mother would buy him clothes in the morning, and by afternoon the seams would tear, so fast was his body growing. At night he’d go to sleep in a bed made to his size by a woodsman, and by morning his feet would be hanging over the edge. And he was eating constantly! It didn’t matter how much food she bought or produced from her own fields: her cupboards were always bare by nightfall, and still he complained of an empty stomach. His great fist pounded the table for more food—“Now!” he screamed. “Mother, now!” After fourteen years of this she could no longer stand it, and one day while Karl’s face was buried in a side of venison she packed her bags and left by the backdoor, never to return; her absence went unnoticed until the food was gone. Then he became bitter and angry and—most of all—hungry.

  This is when he came to Ashland. At night, while the townsfolk slept, Karl crept through the yards and gardens in search of food. In the beginning, he took only what they grew there; morning would come and the people of Ashland would find whole cornfields ravaged, their apple trees bare, the water tower dry. No one knew what to do. Karl, having grown too large for it, had moved from his home into the mountains surrounding town. Who cared to face him in such terrain? And what would they do, these people, before the ghastly monstrosity Karl had become?

  This pillaging went on for some time, until one day half a dozen dogs came up missing. It seemed the very life of the town was threatened. Something had to be done—but what?

  My father came up with a plan. It was dangerous, but there seemed to be nothing else to do, and with the blessing of the town one fine summer morning father set out on his way. He headed for the mountains, where he knew of a cave. This is where he thought Karl lived.

  The cave was hidden behind a stand of pine and a great pile of stones, and my father knew of it from having rescued a young girl who had wandered into its depths many years ago. He stood before the cave and shouted.

  “Karl!”

  He heard his voice come back to him in an echo.

  “Show yourself! I know you’re in there. I have come with a message from our town.”

  Moments passed in the silence of the deep woods before my father heard a rustling, and a tremor seemed to move the earth itself. Then from the darkness of the cave rose Karl. He was bigger even than my father had dared to dream. And oh, but his was a grisly visage! Covered in cuts and bruises from living in the wild—and being so hungry at times that he didn’t wait for his food to die, and sometimes his food fought back. His black hair was long and full of grease, his thick and tangled beard full of food as well as the soft and spineless crawly bugs that dined there on his crumbs.

  When he saw my father he began to laugh.

  “What is it you want, little person?” he said with a terrible grin.

  “You must stop coming into Ashland for your food,” my father said. “Our farmers are losing their crops, and the children miss their dogs.”

  “What? And you intend to stop me?” he said, his voice booming through the valleys, no doubt all the way back to Ashland itself. “Why, I could snap you in my hands like a branch off a tree!”

  And to demonstrate he grabbed the branch of a nearby pine and ground it to dust in his fingers.

  “Why,” he went on, “I could eat you and be done with you in a moment! I could!”

  “And that is why I have come,” my father said.

  Karl’s face twitched then, either from confusion or from one of the bugs that had crawled from his beard and up his cheek.

  “What do yo
u mean, that’s why you’ve come?”

  “For you to eat me,” he said. “I am the first sacrifice.”

  “The first . . . sacrifice?”

  “To you, O great Karl! We submit to your power. In order to save the many, we realize we must sacrifice a few. That makes me—what?—lunch?”

  Karl seemed confounded by my father’s words. He shook his head to clear it, and a dozen creeping bugs flew from his beard and fell to the ground. His body began to shake, and for a moment he appeared about to fall, and had to right himself by leaning against the mountain wall.

  It was as if he had been struck by a weapon of some kind. It was as if he had been wounded in battle.

  “I . . . ” he said quite softly, even sadly. “I don’t want to eat you.”

  “You don’t?” my father said, greatly relieved.

  “No,” Karl said. “I don’t want to eat anybody,” and a giant tear rolled down his beaten face. “I just get so hungry,” he said. “My mother used to cook the most wonderful meals, but then she left, and I didn’t know what to do. The dogs—I’m sorry about the dogs. I’m sorry about everything.”

  “I understand,” my father said.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” Karl said. “Look at me—I’m huge! I have to eat to live. But I’m all on my own now, and I don’t know how to—”

  “Cook,” my father said. “Grow food. Tend animals.”

  “Exactly,” Karl said. “I suppose I should just wander into the back of this cave and never come out. I’ve caused you too much trouble.”

  “We could teach you,” my father said.

  It took Karl a moment to understand my father’s words.

  “Teach me what?”

  “To cook, grow food. There are acres and acres of fields here.”