Big Fish

by Daniel Wallace

  “They’re stupid?”

  “I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just for a little while,” I say, “let’s talk, okay? Man to man, father to son. No more stories.”

  “Stories? You think I tell stories? You wouldn’t believe the stories my dad used to tell me. You think I tell you stories, when I was boy I heard stories. He’d wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me a story. It was awful.”

  “But even that’s a story, Dad. I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “You’re not necessarily supposed to believe it,” he says wearily. “You’re just supposed to believe in it. It’s like—a metaphor.”

  “I forget,” I say. “What’s a metaphor?”

  “Cows and sheep mostly,” he says, wincing a bit as he says it.

  “See?” I say. “Even when you’re serious you can’t keep from joking. It’s frustrating, Dad. It keeps me at arm’s length. It’s like—you’re scared of me or something.”

  “Scared of you?” he says, rolling his eyes. “I’m dying and I’m supposed to be scared of you?”

  “Scared of getting close to me.”

  He takes this in, my old man, and looks away, into his past.

  “It must have something to do with my father,” he says. “My father was a drunk. I never told you that, did I? He was a terrible drunk, the worst kind. Sometimes he was too drunk to get it for himself. He had me get it for him for a while but then I stopped, refused. Finally, he taught his dog, Juniper, to go get it. Carried an empty bucket to the corner saloon and had him bring it back full of beer. Paid for it by sticking a dollar bill into the dog’s collar. One day he didn’t have any ones, all he had was a five, so he stuck that in his collar.

  “The dog didn’t come back. Drunk as he was, my father went down to the bar and found the dog sitting there on a stool, drinking a double martini.

  “My dad was angry and hurt.

  “‘You never did anything like this before,’ my dad said to Juniper.

  “‘I never had the money before,’ Juniper said.”

  And he looks at me, unrepentant.

  “You can’t do it, can you?” I say, voice rising, teeth grinding.

  “Sure I can,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Do it. Tell me something. Tell me about the place you come from.”

  “Ashland,” he says, licking his lips.

  “Ashland. What was it like?”

  “Small,” he says, mind drifting. “So small.”

  “How small?”

  “It was so small,” says he, “that when you plugged in an electric razor, the street light dimmed.”

  “Not a good start,” I say.

  “People were so cheap there,” he says, “they ate beans to save on bubble bath.”

  “I love you, Dad,” I say, getting closer to him. “We de­serve better than this. But you’re making this too hard. Help me, here. What were you like as a boy?”

  “I was a fat boy,” he says. “Nobody would ever play with me. I was so fat I could only play seek. That’s how fat I was,” he says, “so fat I had to make two trips just to leave the house,” not smiling now because he’s not trying to be funny, he is just being him, something he can’t not be. Beneath one facade there’s another facade and then another, and beneath that the aching dark place, his life, something that neither of us understands. All I can say is, “One more chance. I’ll give you one more chance and then I’m leaving, I’m going, and I don’t know if I’m coming back. I’m not going to be your straight man anymore.”

  And so he says to me, my father, the very father who is dying here in front of me, though today he looks good for someone in his condition, he says, “You’re not yourself today son,” in his best Groucho, winking just in case—and this is a long shot—I take him seriously, “and it’s a great improvement.”

  But I do take him seriously; this is the problem. I stand to go but as I stand he grabs me by the wrist and holds me with a power I didn’t think he had any longer. I look at him.

  “I know when I’m going to die,” he says, looking deep into my eyes. “I’ve seen it. I know when and how it’s going to happen and it’s not today, so don’t worry.”

  He is completely serious, and I believe him. I actually believe him. He knows. I have a thousand thoughts in my head but can speak none of them. Our eyes are locked and I’m filled with a wonder. He knows.

  “How do you—why—”

  “I’ve always known,” he says, softly, “always had this power, this vision. I’ve had it since I was a boy. When I was a boy I had a series of dreams. They woke me up screaming. My father came to me on the first night and asked me what was wrong and I told him. I told him I’d dreamed my aunt Stacy had died. He assured me that Aunt Stacy was fine and I went back to bed.

  “But the next day she died.

  “A week or so later the same thing happened. Another dream, I woke up screaming. He came to my room and asked me what had happened. I told him I dreamed Gramps had died. Again he told me—though with perhaps a bit of trepidation in his voice—that Gramps was fine, and so I went back to sleep.

  “The next day, of course, Gramps died.

  “For a few weeks I didn’t have another dream. Then I did, I had another, and Father came and asked me what I had dreamed and I told him: I dreamed that my father had died. He of course assured me that he was fine and to think no more of it, but I could tell it rattled him, and I heard him pacing the floor all night, and the next day he was not himself, always looking this way and that as if something was going to fall on his head, and he went into town early and was gone for a long time. When he came back he looked terrible, as if he had been waiting for the ax to fall all day.

  “‘Good God,’ he said to my mother when he saw her. ‘I’ve had the worst day of my entire life!’

  “‘You think you’ve had a bad day,’ she says. ‘The milkman dropped dead on the porch this morning!’”

  I slam the door behind me when I leave, hoping he has a heart attack, dies quickly, so we can get this whole thing over with. I’ve already started grieving, after all.

  “Hey!” I hear him call to me through the door. “Where’s your sense of humor? And if not your sense of humor, your pity? Come back!” he calls to me. “Give me a break, son, please! I’m dying in here!”

  The Day I Was Born

  The day I was born Edward Bloom was listening to a football game on a transistor radio he had tucked into his shirt pocket. He was also mowing the lawn and smoking a cigarette. It had been a wet summer and the grass was high, but today the sun beat down on my father and my father’s yard with an intensity recalling an earlier time when the sun was hotter, the way everything in the world used to be hotter or bigger or better or simpler than things were right about now. The tops of his shoulders were as red as an apple, but he didn’t notice because he was listening to the biggest football game of the year, the one that pitted his school team, Auburn, against their nemesis, Alabama, a game that Alabama invariably won.

  He thought of my mother, briefly, who was inside the house, looking at the electric bill. The house was as cold as an icebox, but still she was sweating.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the electric bill when she felt me urging her along, dropping into po­sition.

  Soon, she thought, taking a breath in quickly, but she didn’t get up, or even stop looking at the bill. She just thought that one word. Soon.

  Outside, as he mowed the lawn, it wasn’t looking good for Auburn. Never did. It was the same every time: you went into the game believing that this was going to be the year they did it, this was going to be it, finally, and it never was.

  It was almost halftime, and Auburn was already down ten.

  On the day I was born, my father finished the front and then started the backyard with a renewed sense of optimism. In the second half Auburn came out charging and scored a touchdown on their first possession.
Now down only three, anything was possible.

  Alabama scored just as quickly, and then, off a fumble, they scored a field goal.

  My mother placed the electric bill flat on the table, and pressed it with her hands as though trying to get out the wrinkles. She didn’t know that all my father’s hard work and perseverance would, in a matter of only a few days, pay off handsomely, and that she would never have to worry about an electric bill again. For now the world, the entire planetary solar system, seemed to orbit around the center that was this bill for $42.27. But she had to have the house cool. She was carrying around all this weight. Naturally she was a slim woman but she was as big as a house now with me inside her. And she liked it cool.

  She heard my father in the backyard, mowing. Her eyes widened: I was coming. Now. I was coming now.

  Auburn was making a comeback.

  Time passed. She calmly gathered her hospital things. Auburn had the ball with but a few seconds remaining. Time for a field goal.

  On the day I was born, my father stopped mowing the lawn and listened to the announcer’s voice on the radio. He stood like a statue in his backyard, half of which had been mown, half to go. He knew they were going to lose.

  On the day I was born, the world became a small and joyous place.

  My mother screamed, my father screamed.

  On the day I was born, they won.

  How He Saw Me

  I was unimpressive at first—small and pink, helpless, with no real skills to speak of. I couldn’t even roll over. When my father was a boy, a child, a baby—he had brought more into the world with him than I did. Times were different then, and more was asked of everybody, even the babies. Even the babies had to pull their weight.

  But as a baby I didn’t know those hard times. Born in a real hospital, with the best medical care and all kinds of drugs for my mother, I just didn’t know what birth was like in the old days. Though this didn’t change anything: Edward loved me. He did. He’d always wanted a boy and here I was. He’d expected more, of course, from my arrival. A muted brilliance, a glow, maybe even a halo of some kind. That mystical feeling of completion. But none of that came. I was just a baby, like any other—except, of course, that I belonged to him, and that made me special. I cried a lot and slept a lot and that was about it; my repertoire was very limited, though there were those moments of peaceful clarity and joy when I stared up at my father from his lap, my eyes beaming, as though he were a god—which, in a way, he was. Or godlike anyway, having created this life, having planted the magic seed. At those times he could see how smart I was, how bright, he could visualize my potential in the world. So much was possible.

  But then I would start to cry again, or my diaper would need changing, and he would have to hand me over to my mother who fixed all that and fed me, while Edward watched helplessly from his chair, suddenly tired, excruciatingly tired of the noise, the sleepless nights, the smell. Tired of his tired wife. So he missed the old life sometimes, the freedom, the time to think things through—but did that make him different from any other man? It was different with women, they were made to raise a family, they had the attention span for it. Men had to go out of the house and work, that’s the way it had always been, from the time of the hunter-gatherers it was so and still was today. Men were torn in this way; they had to be two people, one at home and another away, while a mother had to be but one.

  IN THOSE FIRST WEEKS he took his job as father quite seriously. Everyone noticed: Edward had changed. He was more thoughtful, deeper, philosophical. While my mother took care of the day-to-day things, he brought vision to the task. He made a list of the virtues he possessed and wanted to pass on to me:

  perseverance

  ambition

  personality

  optimism

  strength

  intelligence

  imagination

  Wrote it on the back of a paper bag. Virtues he’d had to discover himself, he’d be able to share with me, free of charge. Suddenly he saw what a great chance this was, how my empty-handed arrival was actually a blessing. Looking into my eyes he saw a great emptiness, a desire to be filled. And this would be his job, as father: filling me up.

  Which he did on weekends. He wasn’t there very often during the week, because he was on the road, selling, following money—working. Teaching by example. Were there jobs out there where a man could make a good living without traveling, without getting off his duff and moving, sleeping in hotels, and eating on the run out of to-go containers? Possibly. But they didn’t suit him. The very idea of coming home at the same time every single day made him just a lit­tle nauseated. Regardless of how much he loved his wife, his son, he could only stand so much love. Being alone was lonely, but there was an even greater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him. He needed a break.

  COMING HOME HE FELT like a stranger. Everything had changed. His wife had rearranged the living room, bought a new dress, made new friends, read strange books, which she brazenly placed on her bedside table. And I grew so quickly. His wife couldn’t see it as clearly, but he could. Coming back he saw this incredible growth, and seeing it realized how much smaller this made him, relatively speaking. So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world.

  BEFORE THAT COULD HAPPEN, though, before he disappeared, he was a father, and he did the things a father was supposed to do. He played some catch, he bought the bike. He packed lunch for the picnics to the mountain overlooking the town, the great city of endless promise, from which he could see the spot where he first did this, and then that, and over there where he made his first deal, and there where he kissed that pretty woman, and all the triumph and glory of his short life. This is what he saw when he went there, not the buildings or the skyline, not the tree groves or the hospital where they were building the new wing. No: it was his story, the story of his adult life spread out before him like a landscape, and he would take me there and hold me up so I could see and he would say, “Someday son, this will all be yours.”

  How He Saved My Life

  Edward Bloom saved my life twice that I know of.

  The first time I was five years old, and I was playing in the ditch behind our house. My father always told me, “Stay out of the ditch, William.” He told me this again and again, as if he knew something might happen, that he might be forced to save my life one day. To me it wasn’t a ditch, but some ancient half-dried riverbed, filled with prehistoric stones made flat and smooth by the water flowing over them through time. The only water there now was a constant, though almost negligible stream, not strong enough to carry a twig.

  This is where I played, after I slid down the red clay embankment, sometimes merely minutes after my father might have told me, “Stay out of the ditch, William.” The vision I had of myself, alone between the cool red walls, was powerful enough to override the command. In my secret place I would squat, turning over stone after stone, pocketing the best, the white ones, and the shiny black ones with the white spots. I was so transfixed there that day that I failed to see the rushing wall of water coming for me, as if on a mission to sweep me up and take me away with it. I didn’t see it and I didn’t hear it. I was squatting with my back to it, looking at the stones. And had it not been for my father, who somehow knew what was happening before it happened, I would have gone away with it, too. But he was there, and he lifted me by my shirt tail up and out of the ditch, and onto the bank, where the two of us watched a river flow where no river had flowed before, its foamy crest spilling onto our very toes. Finally, he looked at me.

  “I told you to stay out of the ditch,” he said.

  “What ditch?” I said.

  THE SECOND TIME MY father saved my life we had just moved to a new house on Mayfair Drive. The previous owner had left a swing set behind, and as the movers lugged in our old couches and dining-room ta
ble, I set my sights on seeing just how high that baby would go. I pumped with all I had, shaking the swing with the pulse of my power. Unfortunately, the previous owner hadn’t left the swing behind; they had merely yet to take it. They had released the legs of the frame from the cement that anchored them to the ground, and so as I swung higher and higher I was actually taking the weight of the set itself with me, until, at the top of my highest arc, the set plunged forward, sending me out of the swing and on an unlikely trajectory toward a white picket fence, on which I would assuredly have been impaled. Suddenly I felt my father near me; it was as though he were flying, too, and that we were both falling together. His arms embraced me like a cloak, and I came to rest on the ground beside him. He had plucked me from Heaven and set me down safely on Earth.

  His Immortality

  My father gave me early indications that he would live forever.

  One day he fell off the roof. The yardman had been cleaning the leaves from the gutter and, having gone home without quite finishing, had left the ladder leaning against the house. My father came home from the office, saw the ladder, and climbed it. He wanted to see what the view was from up there. He was, he said, curious to know whether or not he could see his tall office building from the top of our own house.

  I was nine years old by then and I knew danger. I told him not to do it. I said it was dangerous. He stared at me for a long moment, and he winked, the wink meaning any goddamn thing I wanted it to mean.

  Then he climbed the ladder. It was probably the first ladder he had climbed in ten years, but I can only suppose about that. Maybe he climbed ladders all the time. I wouldn’t know.

  After climbing the ladder he stood over by the chimney, turning in circles and staring south, north, east, and west for some sign of his building. He was handsome up there, dressed in his dark suit and shiny black shoes. He seemed finally to have found the place where he might be most advantageously displayed: at the top of a house two stories high. He walked—strolled—back and forth on the roof above me, a hand above his eyes like a ship’s captain looking for land. But he could not see it. His office building remained invisible in the distance.