Big Fish

by Daniel Wallace

  Three weeks had passed since their first date, and between then and now many words had passed between Edward and Sandra. They’d gone to a movie together, split a couple of malts, he’d even told her a joke or two. Simply by being who he was—no more, no less—my father was winning my mother’s heart. Things were getting serious: when he touched her hand, she blushed. She’d forget the end of sentences she’d begun. It wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with my father, yet. But she saw that she could.

  Maybe she had a lot more thinking to do.

  This night would be an important part of the whole thinking process. It was the night of The Drive. After a few miles of driving aimlessly they’d find themselves at the end of some country dead-end road, alone in the dark woods, and as the silence surrounded them he would lean toward her and she’d move imperceptibly toward him and they would fall into a kiss. And they were heading that way when in the rearview mirror my father saw a pair of headlights, small at first but getting larger, heading fast down the thin and twisting road on Piney Mountain. Edward didn’t know it was Don Price. He only knew it was a car coming up behind them at a dangerous speed, and so he slowed down, the better to make a wise decision if something was to happen.

  Suddenly the car was directly behind them, its headlights glaring in the rearview mirror. Edward rolled down his window and motioned the car by, but when he did so it bumped his fender. Sandra gasped, and my father touched her leg with his hand to calm her.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Probably some drunk kid.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s Don.”

  And my father understood. Without another word, the situation was clear, just as it would have been one hundred years before in a frontier town out west and Don had met him in the middle of a dusty street, hand on his holster. This was a showdown.

  Don’s car bumped the fender again, and my father hit the gas. Edward had to prove that if fast was what Don Price wanted, Edward could be fast, and being fast he sped around the next curve, leaving Don Price in the distance behind him.

  He was back, though, in just seconds, no longer bumping from behind but side by side now, the two cars taking up the entire road, speeding over hills and turns that would have led weaker hearts to stop, then and there. Don Price edged his car into my father’s lane, and my father edged back, the two cars scraping door to door. My father knew he could drive this road as long as he needed to, but he wasn’t sure about Don Price, whose face he caught a glimpse of as their cars veered back and forth, reeling from the jouncing. The boy had been drinking, for sure.

  My father gave the car one last shot of acceleration, pulled ahead, and turned the wheel abruptly, blocking the road with his car. Don Price braked just feet away, and both men were out of their cars in an instant, eye to eye and only an arm’s length away.

  “She’s mine,” Don Price said.

  He was as big as Edward, even bigger around the shoulders. His father owned a trucking company, where Don worked summers loading and unloading tractor trailers, and it showed.

  “I didn’t know that she belonged to anybody,” my father said.

  “Well, now you do, farm boy,” Don said.

  Don looked at her, still sitting in the car.

  “Sandra,” he said.

  But she didn’t move. She just sat there, thinking.

  “We’re getting married,” Don said to my father. “I’ve asked her to marry me, farm boy. Or didn’t she tell you?”

  “The question is, what did she tell you?”

  Don Price didn’t say anything, but his breathing came faster and his eyes narrowed, like a bull about to charge.

  “I could tear you apart like a paper doll,” he said.

  “There’s no reason for that,” my father said.

  “You better hope there’s not,” Don Price said. “As long as Sandy gets in my car. Now.”

  “She’s not going to be doing that, Don,” my father said.

  Don Price laughed.

  “Who the hell are you to say?”

  “You’re drunk, Don,” he said. “I’ll drive her down off the mountain, and then if she wants to go with you she can. How about that?”

  But this just made Don Price laugh even harder. Even though he remembered what he had seen in the glass of the old lady’s eye many weeks ago, Don Price just laughed.

  “Thanks for giving me a goddamn choice, farm boy,” he said. “But no thanks.”

  And Don Price came at my father with the fury of ten men, but my father had the strength of many more, and they fought for some time, beating each other with their fists. Blood covered both their faces, streaming from their noses and lips, but in the end Don Price fell and did not get up, and my father stood over him, triumphant. Then he placed his opponent’s limp and aching body into the back seat of his car, and drove Don Price and my mother off the mountain and back into town. He drove until they arrived at my mother’s dorm, and parked in the darkness of the late night, with Don Price still moaning softly in the back.

  Neither my mother nor my father spoke for a long time. It was a silence so still one could almost hear the other’s thoughts. Then my father said, “He asked you to marry him, Sandy?”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “He did.”

  “And so what did you tell him?” he asked her.

  “I told him that I’d think about it,” she said.

  “And?” my father said.

  “And I’ve thought about it,” she said, taking my father’s bloody hand in her own.

  They fell into a kiss.

  On Meeting the In-Laws

  According to my father, my mother’s father had no hair anywhere on his body. He owned a farm in the country, where he lived with his wife, bedridden by then for ten years, unable to feed herself or talk, and he rode a great horse, as big as any horse there was, and black, with a spot of white on each of its legs just above the hooves.

  He adored my mother. He had told amazing stories about her since she was little, and now that he was old and had lost some of his mind it appeared that he had begun to believe them.

  He thought she hung the moon. He actually believed this from time to time. He believed the moon wouldn’t have been there but that she’d hung it. He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true. For her, his daughter. He had told her this when she was little to make her happy, and now that he was old he believed it, because it made him happy and because he was so very old.

  He had not been invited to the wedding. How this could happen is simple: no one had. It was not a wedding as much as it was a legal proceeding at the Auburn courthouse, with strangers as witnesses and a febrile old judge as minister, pronouncing in his drawl, with little bits of white spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth, that from this moment forward you are now man and wife till death do you part et cetera. And thus it was done.

  This wasn’t going to be easy to explain to Mr. Templeton, but my father wanted to give it a try. He drove up to the gate of the farm, where there was a sign that read stop blow horn and by coincidence there, too, was his new wife’s father, atop his horse, much bigger than life, suspiciously eyeing the long car, from which his daughter shyly waved. He opened the gate by slipping a piece of wood from a six-inch-wide slit carved into a fence post, and my father drove slowly, so as not to spook the horse.

  He drove on up to the house, Mr. Templeton following on horseback. My mother and father were quiet. He looked over at her and smiled.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said.

  “Who’s worried?” she said, laughing.

  Though neither of them seemed particularly reassured.

  “DADDY,” SHE SAID UP at the house, “I want you to meet Edward Bloom. Edward, Seth Templeton. Now y’all shake hands.”

  They did.

  Mr. Templeton looked at his daughter.

  “Why am I doing this?” he said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Shaking this man’s hand?”
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  “’Cause he’s my husband,” she said. “We got married, Daddy.”

  He kept shaking, looking deep into Edward’s eyes. Then he laughed. It sounded like the burst from a firecracker.

  “Married!” he said, and he walked inside. The newlyweds followed. He brought them a couple of Cokes from the icebox, and they sat down in the living room, where Mr. Templeton stuffed an ivory-stemmed pipe full of black tobacco and lit it, and the room was suddenly overcast with a thin layer of smoke, which hung just above their heads.

  “So what’s all this about?” he said, sucking away and coughing.

  It was a question that seemed difficult to answer, so neither of them said anything. They just smiled. Edward stared at the man’s hairless, egglike head, then into his eyes.

  “I love your daughter, Mr. Templeton,” my father said. “And I’m going to love her and take care of her for the rest of my life.”

  My father had thought of what he was going to say for a long time, and he’d come up with these simple, yet profound, words. He thought they said everything that needed saying, and hoped Mr. Templeton would think so, too.

  “Bloom, you say?” Mr. Templeton said, squinting. “Knew a man named Bloom once. Rode with him. 1918, 1919, I was in the cavalry. Stationed in Yellowstone. In those days there were bandits. You may not have realized that. Mexican bandits mostly. Horse thieves and just regular thieves. We chased our share of them, Bloom and me. Along with the others, of course. Rogerson, Mayberry, Stimson. Right into Mexico. Oh yes. Our share. We chased them. Right into Mexico, Mr. Bloom. Right into Mexico.”

  My father nodded, smiled, sipped on his Coke. Mr. Templeton hadn’t heard a word he said.

  “You have a nice-looking horse out there,” my father said.

  “You know about horses, then?” he said, and laughed again—popping, gravelly sounds. “You’ve found a man who knows something about horses, haven’t you, dear?”

  “I think I have, Daddy,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he said, nodding. “That’s very good.”

  The day passed in just this way. Mr. Templeton told stories of his days in the cavalry, and laughed, and the conversation turned to religion and Jesus, a favorite topic of Mr. Templeton’s, for it was his belief that the crucifixion was an especially dastardly act, seeing as how Pontius Pilate and Jesus had been roommates at Oxford. In this light Pontius Pilate had really done the Lord dirty. No more mention was made of the marriage the rest of that afternoon—Mr. Templeton, in fact, seemed to forget why they were there at all—and as dusk came on it was time to leave.

  The three of them stood, the men shook hands again, and they walked past the closed bedroom door and slowed there. Sandra looked at her father, who shook his head.

  “Not a good day,” he said. “Best not disturb her.”

  And so they left, the two of them, waving at the old man through the darkening light, and him waving back at them and pointing, with a child’s delight, toward the starry sky.

  His Three Labors

  Because it was a great metropolis full of hope, my parents moved to Birm­ingham, Alabama, where my father sought his fortune. Word of his great strength, intelligence, and perseverance had spread even this far, and yet his youth was such that my father knew he must perform many great labors before he assumed his rightful place.

  His first labor was to work as a veterinarian’s assistant. As a veterinarian’s assistant, his most important responsibility was to clean out the dog kennels and cat cages. Every morning when he arrived, the cages and kennels would be nearly filled with feces. Some of it would lie on the paper he’d placed down the night before, but still more would be smeared on the walls, and some of it on the very animals themselves. My father cleaned this mess up every morning and every evening. He did it until the cages shone, until you could have eaten a meal off the surface of the floor, so spotless and clean had he left it. But it would only take a few seconds for it to get soiled again, and this was the job’s terrible Sisyphean frustration: a dog might look straight at you, just as you were locking him into his lovely, newly cleaned cage, and shit.

  HIS SECOND LABOR WAS as a sales clerk in the lingerie section of a department store downtown, called Smith’s. The fact that he had been stationed in lingerie seemed a cruel joke, and indeed, he suffered greatly from the sassy comments he heard from the men in other departments—especially from the men in sportswear. But he persevered, and eventually won the trust of the women who regularly shopped at Smith’s, and in fact came to be preferred to the women who worked with him. They valued his keen eye.

  But there was one woman who was never able to accept my father as a sales clerk. Her name was Muriel Rainwater. She had lived in Birmingham all her life, had two husbands, both dead, no children at all, and money beyond counting to get through before she passed on herself. She was almost eighty years old then, and, much like a tree, each year had seen her girth expand until she’d become monumental; still, she was quite vain. While she didn’t care to be much thinner than she was, she certainly wanted to look much thinner, and thus often visited the lingerie department at Smith’s searching for the latest in girdles.

  And so every month Mrs. Rainwater marched down to Smith’s and sat down in one of the large, overstuffed chairs provided for its customers, and, without a word, merely nodded toward a clerk, and that clerk duly brought her the latest in girdle wear. But that clerk was never Edward Bloom.

  This was clearly a snub. But the truth was that Edward was not particularly fond of Mrs. Rainwater, either. No one was—the way her feet smelled of moth balls, her hair like burnt fabric, and the way her arms shook when she pointed at something she wanted. But the fact that she insisted on not allowing him to serve her made her, to Edward, the most desirable customer in the store. He made it his goal to one day wait on Muriel Rainwater.

  To this end he pirated the next shipment of girdles and hid them in a corner of the warehouse, where only he could find them. Mrs. Rainwater came in the very next day. She sat down in an overstuffed chair and pointed at one of the girls.

  “You!” she said. “Bring me the girdle!”

  The girl grew flustered, for she feared Mrs. Rainwater.

  “The girdle?” she said. “But none have arrived!”

  “Oh yes they have!” Mrs. Rainwater said, her mouth wide and gaping like a cave. “I know they have arrived! You!” she said, pointing to another, her arm sloshing like a water balloon. “If she can’t serve me, you can. Bring me the girdle!”

  This girl ran crying from the floor. The next girl fell to her knees before Mrs. Rainwater even said a word.

  Finally, no one was left to point at but my father. He stood at the far end of the showroom floor, tall and proud. She saw him, but pretended not to. She pretended he wasn’t there at all.

  “Can someone please help me?” she screamed. “I want to see the new girdle! Can someone please—”

  My father crossed the showroom floor and stood before her.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Here to serve you, Mrs. Rainwater.”

  Mrs. Rainwater shook her head and stared at her feet; she looked like she wanted to spit.

  “Men don’t belong in this department!” she cried.

  “And yet,” he said, “here I am. And I alone know where the new girdles are. I alone can help you.”

  “No!” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, her big horse eyes plainly shocked. “This can’t be . . . I, I—”

  “I’d be happy to get it for you, Mrs. Rainwater. More than happy.”

  “Fine then!” she said, little bits of spittle collecting at the corners of her mouth. “Get me the girdle!”

  And so he did. Mrs. Rainwater stood. She waddled to the changing room, where the girdle rested on a stool. She slammed the door behind her. My father heard her grunt and groan and snap and tighten and finally, some minutes later, she emerged.

  And she was no longer Mrs. Rainwater. She had been completely t
ransformed. The girdle had taken her, this whale of a woman, and turned her into beauty itself. She did have a bounteous breast, and a rear end of some proportion, but her figure was all wavy and smooth rolls, and she even seemed younger, and sweeter, and certainly a happier woman than before. It was indeed a technological miracle.

  She looked at my father as though he were a god.

  “This is it!” she cried, her voice a melodious tune. “This is the girdle I’ve been waiting for all my life! And to think that you—you—I’ve been so unfair! Can you ever forgive me?”

  Then she turned from him and faced a mirror, where she enthusiastically admired her new self.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh my, yes. This is how I was meant to look. With this, I can probably get a new husband. I never thought girdles could come so far so quickly! But look at me! Just look!”

  She turned and gave my father an adoring glance.

  “You’ll go far here, young man,” she said.

  THE THIRD AND LAST labor Edward Bloom performed had to do with a wild dog. After being speedily promoted from sales clerk to manager, my mother and father moved into a small white house across the street from the elementary school. They were only the second family to live in that house. It had been built by Amos Calloway, sixty years before, and he and his wife had raised a family there, and the children had all moved away. Mrs. Calloway had died many years before, and when Mr. Calloway died, everyone in the neighborhood assumed one of their lovely children would move back there to live. But they didn’t. The children had their own lives rooted in distant towns and cities, and, after burying their father, promptly put the house on the market, which the Blooms felt lucky to have snatched up.

  But the Blooms weren’t welcome—not in Amos Calloway’s house. Amos Calloway’s association with the house he built was so strong that following his death, some in the neighborhood suggested that the structure be razed and a park built for the children there. Now that the Calloways had departed, maybe the house should go, too. For some strange new couple to come in and live there was like—it was like two people trying to squeeze into Amos Calloway’s coffin, his own body just freshly placed there. In short, nobody much liked the Blooms.