by Brad Barkley
He stared at me a moment, then shook his head. “The funny part is, it doesn’t even matter anymore. You know what I think? I think Dad would’ve been happier if he’d kept driving his delivery truck.”
“But I don’t get it,” I said. “Why do you want to leave?”
“You don’t have to end up like Dad, Carlton. If you like his damn fish, then go to the Bahamas, dive in the ocean and see the real thing. Get out of the basement.”
“You’ve hardly even looked at his aquariums.”
“I don’t have to look at them. I live in one.”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t even have any place to go, David,” I said. “This whole thing is stupid.” His face darkened; he reached across his shoulder and snatched an arrow from the quiver.
“Okay, Carlton, here’s what it feels like for me every day I live here.” Before I could ask what he meant, he notched the arrow onto the bowstring, arched his back and let the arrow fly, straight up. I watched till it flew out of sight.
“It’s coming down,” he said. I looked up for it, squinting, then covered my head and moved toward the side. David grabbed my arm and held me back.
“Let go of me,” I yelled.
“No, don’t leave,” he said with exaggerated slowness. “I want you to stay here.” I looked up again into the white sky and saw nothing. We waited a minute more, but the arrow did not come back. I imagined it flying away, like a bird set loose. I tore my arm from David’s grip and made my way to the side of the pool.
“Don’t forget your window,” he called after me.
Later that day my father’s fish were delivered in crates lined with thick plastic bags. There were three each of the electric fish and the eyeless fish, swimming in the clear bags. The dull brown color of the electric fish disappointed me; I had expected them to look like bolts of lightning. The cave fish were pink-white, pale almost to the point of transparency. He placed the bags in the tank to warm, then walked out of the cave and stood beside me, his arms dripping below pushed-up sleeves.
“They’re fragile fish,” he said. “Sensitive to temperature, pH, salinity, you name it.” We stood together, looking into the cave.
“I hope they make it,” he said.
“They look okay to me.”
“Well, it’s too early to tell.” He rapped his knuckles on the plaster cave. The fish circled in the bags, above the rocks and coral. “We’ll come back tonight and let them try out their new home.”
I thought of how far those fish had come to make it here, to my own basement, and it seemed impossible that the world could be so large. Earlier, I’d found my mother in her new kitchen, just standing, looking around.
“This place is so big now,” she said. “When you two are gone it’ll seem haunted.” I thought of David, his plans for leaving.
“Maybe I won’t go,” I said.
She smiled. I was taller than her now by an inch or so. I noticed strands of gray in her auburn hair.
“No,” she said, “not for a long time.”
David and I spent that afternoon in the backyard hole, tossing the football. His strong arm threw hard spirals, centered on my chest. My own throws were loopy and crooked; twice they flew over David’s head and toppled his cardboard deer.
“David,” I said, “if you leave, are you coming back?”
“Not if,” he said. “When.”
I shrugged. “Well, are you?”
I watched him, the ease with which he handled the ball. “If I ever need to.” I threw a high, arching pass he had to get under to catch.
“You mean if you blow all your money.” He drilled a spiral at my breastbone.
“I’m too smart to run out of money.”
“When are you going?” I said.
“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “You’ll have your answer soon enough.” I nodded, but wondered exactly how I would figure it out.
Just then my father appeared at the edge of the hole, against the gray sky. I hadn’t seen him outdoors in a while. His face was pale, and the way he blinked made him look startled. I wondered what he had heard of our conversation.
He scratched his head. “We’ll have to finish this pool come summer,” he said, though I believed the pool would never be finished. He jumped into the hole and lifted his hands for a pass. He caught the ball and handed it to me, and I tossed it to David. We continued in that way, from David, to my father, to me.
“You know, boys,” my father said, “that money in there doesn’t matter to me. If I lost it tomorrow I’d be just as happy.”
David laughed. “You’re lying your ass off.”
My father set the ball down in the dirt. “You come here,” he said to David.
David walked over and stood with his hands on his hips. “What?” he said.
“You don’t talk to me that way. Maybe if you’d listen for once you’d learn something.”
“What would I learn from you? Maybe ‘how to throw away your life on a thousand dollars a day’? You should write a book, Dad.”
“Boy,” I said, “it sure will be fun to get the pool finished.”
“David, if you think money’s that important, it will ruin your life.”
“You don’t know what’s important.”
“And I suppose you do,” my father said.
David shrugged. “I have an idea.”
“But showing a little respect to your family, that’s not on the list.”
I wanted nothing more than for the arrow to fall out of the sky and hit one of us and stop the argument. I wanted to tell David to shut up, to tell my father not to push too hard, tell him that David was leaving. But I knew that my father would not stop him, that David would hate me for telling. Somehow, in my mind, they were the cause of each other.
“Sure it is,” David said. “Right behind giving up your life for a bunch of stinking fucking fish.”
It happened so quickly that I almost didn’t register the fact of my father’s open hand swinging up and out, connecting against David’s cheek, the sound of it hollow inside the dirt walls of the swimming pool. David raised up his hands, his arm muscles brown and hard. He’d been lifting weights for years now, his body thick and taut. All my father had ever lifted were boxes of snack foods, and they weighed almost nothing. I knew that David could beat the hell out of him if he wanted. Instead he picked up his ball and looked at me, the mark on his cheek red in the cold air.
“There’s your answer, Carlton,” he said, and walked inside.
“I’m sorry, son,” my father said to me.
I nodded, remembering times when David and I were little kids, four and eight, and our father would take us with him on his delivery route for Tom’s Vending. We would sit in the back where the boxes were kept, leaning into each other on curves. My father would reach into an open box, pull out a few packages of cookies, and hit them against the steering wheel. “Uh oh, boys,” he’d say, “Looks like a few of these got broken. You’ll have to eat these, I’m afraid.” We’d smile at each other, our teeth black with Oreos. There in the swimming pool hole, I realized how I would like us to spend the money: I wanted my father to buy back his old delivery truck, drive us around in it and feed us cookies. But we were too old to be driven around, and there would be no deliveries to make. Whenever we felt like it, we could abandon the truck, and leave it on the roadside to rust.
That night I helped my father untie the bags and pull them up and out of the water, releasing the fish. He told me to be careful, that our hands could contaminate the water. For twenty minutes we watched the fish circle the tank, gliding past the rocks and coral.
“Now watch, Carlton,” my father said. He reached inside the cave opening and twisted the switch to the ultraviolet light. The tank went dark, and I could no longer see the fish. He bent low, his face to the glass.
“Keep watching,” he said, and I bent beside him. We stood, hearing the bubble of the pumps, breathing the salt air, staring into what might have been a tankful of
ink.
“Aren’t they supposed to light up?” I asked. He pressed his lips together and nodded.
“This is not a good sign,” he said. We watched for another ten minutes. When he snapped the tank light back on, one of the cave fish was swimming near the top, upside down.
“Aw, damn it,” my father said. He closed his eyes. “I’m killing these fish, Carlton.”
The pale fish rolled, its gill flap sucking air above the surface of the water. I wanted to throw up. The other cave fish hovered near the bottom, below the electric fish circling the tank. Within fifteen minutes, another cave fish and one of the electric fish had gone belly up. My father worked frantically, checking and rechecking the temperature, monitoring the salinity and pH, adjusting the flow of air through the pump, consulting his books.
“No, no. Please,” he muttered under his breath as he worked. I thought he might cry. I suggested that he just feed them some fish flakes.
He tried to smile at me. “It’s more complicated than that, son,” he said. I felt I was in his way, so I went upstairs to my room and sat on the bed. I heard my mother’s sewing machine running, David’s weight set clanging in the next room. After an hour the sewing machine quit, and I heard other sounds, David talking on the phone, my mother readying for bed, humming to herself. It was quiet awhile, then my door opened and David walked in carrying his backpack. He opened my window and threw out the pack.
“I’m coming back later for the money, when everybody’s asleep,” he said.
“And then you’re leaving.”
He nodded. “You could go with me if you wanted. You should go.”
“I’ll see you,” I said, and he disappeared out the window into the tree.
A half-hour later my father tapped on my door and leaned in.
“Two electric fish left, that’s it,” he said. “I’ve got them stabilized, but they’re still in shock. I’ll have to watch them overnight.” He sounded like a TV doctor discussing a patient.
“A long night,” he said. “I could use some help.”
“I’m kinda sleepy,” I said, and faked a yawn.
“Well, that’s okay then,” he said. He left, and I heard his footsteps on the stairs, descending into our house. Everything was quiet. I took the money from my gym sock and looked at it. I had lost count of how much I had, and it didn’t seem to matter. I thought of adding it to what David planned to take from my father’s drawer, the way I had given my fifty dollars for the car, and I knew that with so much money, we wouldn’t need to come home for a long time.
I sat in a chair by the window so I wouldn’t chance falling asleep and missing David. For a few minutes I did sleep, my chin on my chest, and awakened myself with a dream of the Camaro coasting noiselessly down our block. I jumped up and threw open the window, leaned out into the dark.
“David,” I called in a loud whisper. The winter air cut brittle across my face. My eyes pulsed with the widening of my pupils against the black. There was no light, not even from Mr. Stone’s window next door. I listened for the scratch of road beneath the tires of the Camaro, for the scrape of its wheels against the curb. There was only quiet and dark. I drew back inside and closed the window against the cold. Downstairs, my father sat holding a vigil for his fish, urging them to light up, to live in the world he had made for them. Before I left my room to join him, I reached for the window and snapped closed the brass lock.
YAGI-UDA
THE trouble began on a recent Friday evening, when, as a matter of habit, I had arranged myself in the easy chair. Both hearing-aid receivers—the old-style transistor-radio type—sat balanced on my lap, and between them a bowl of shelled walnuts. On the magazine table I placed a bamboo coaster cradling a tumbler of scotch eased down with ice water. I wore electric hunting socks because my feet will chill in winter, no matter how warm the house. Wired up, literally, from head to toe, I pointed the remote control and clicked on WAMR to hear The Friday Night Big Band Revue, that week featuring Artie Shaw.
I watched the display on the stereo light up like an airport. I leaned back my head and closed my eyes. Then, instead of music, the speakers burst through with a violent hiss of white noise that startled me so, I spilled my walnuts. The problem, I decided, had to be signal interference from the microwave towers that muck up the fairways across the Naval Academy back nine. When I adjusted the tuner, I found noise across the entire band. With no CDs for the new stereo, no music, no walnuts, no good reason to drink my scotch, I sat there, stuck.
Outside, in the cold, my neighbors’ houses shone with strings of colored lights and floodlit cutouts of Santa and his reindeer. I pointed a flashlight at my roof and saw my antenna leaning on its side, blown over by the strong winds blown off the bay. The stuffed owl I had rigged beside the antenna to scare away the seagulls had rolled down against the gutter, its wire feet sticking out. No one bothers with the owls anymore. I remember when every rooftop had one, when boys sold them door-to-door. Now my neighbors’ shingles are white spattered with droppings; the rowdy gulls float over their dormers, roost in their chimneys.
After assessing the damage, I went inside and called Janey on the hearing-aid phone she bought me last Christmas.
“Listen, Janey,” I told her, “I have to go up and fix the antenna. How about if you and Pete come steady the ladder for me, hold the flashlight.”
“Dad, it’s nighttime, and there’s snow falling. And anyway, you do not set foot on any ladder. You know you get dizzy.”
“Pshaw,” I said, a word not part of my ordinary vocabulary, but something I’ll say to exasperate her. “I’m not too old to climb my own roof.”
“I want you to promise me you won’t.”
“You’re treating me like a child, Janey.”
She sighed. “Pete and I will do it, Dad, but not tonight.”
The antenna in question is nothing more than a simple yagi-uda modification. Not much on range, but it pulls in the signals of the local stations well enough. I had originally rigged it up for my wife’s television. She would watch game shows and shout at the contestants on the screen while she ironed clothes. Sometime after Agnes passed on, I bought my first hi-fi stereo. Pete, Janey, and I climbed to the roof and connected the antenna to the stereo’s receiver, then stood and examined the results of our efforts. Not until a few years later did this strike me as strange—standing on the roof with my daughter and the man she would eventually marry, the three of us making small talk like strangers at a cocktail party.
“Raymond, tell me again about this antenna,” I remember Pete saying, the wind lifting his hair from his bald spot. “You helped design it or something?”
I repeated the story of my study and work on the yagiuda, as I’d done for him half a dozen times before, at his request. I knew it was his way of humoring me, of making conversation, getting along. At the time I was still Senior Research Engineer at ENTEC; I retired last August on disability. Janey did not listen to the story. She had heard it enough times before.
“Listen,” I said into the phone, “you have no business on ladders yourself.”
“Dad, I’m only three months. I’m not even showing.” I could hear the blush in her voice at my mention of her pregnancy.
Every Christmas Eve when Janey was a child, Agnes would have me climb to the roof to stomp around in my muddy work boots. “Hurry off to bed!” Agnes would tell Janey, “Santa’s here!” After ten minutes I’d stop and sit on the asphalt shingles to smoke a pipe and enjoy the quiet cold. Through the joists and beams I’d feel the bass drum of her running steps: from the den to the bathroom to her bedroom. Remembering all of this, I forgot to speak.
“Dad?”
“I need my music, Janey. There’s nothing else I can say on the matter. This is non-negotiable.”
“Please don’t do anything on the roof. Pete and I will stop by tomorrow.”
I treat my deafness as a kind of footrace between debility and technology. As my nerve damage progresses, the world is slowl
y muted. I even things out with better hearing aids, more powerful stereo equipment. This strategy lets me keep my music—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum—but listening through the earpiece is no better than listening through a tin cup. A matter of poor design. This current stereo was given to me by Janey and Pete just last month, my birthday. Cutting edge hardware, with a remote-controlled multi-disc CD player and a quartz-lock digital FM tuner, but no turntable for my 78s. I admit to this nostalgia, hanging onto those ancient wax sides, stacked away in the basement like some rubber sword I keep to wave in the face of obsolescence. I make no apologies.
The next morning I pulled the ladder from the shed and propped it against the house. The ladder is cracked in places, paint-spattered and held together with duct tape; I won’t trouble buying a new one. This past June, I failed to hear the burned-out bearing in the motor of my electric hedge trimmer, and spent the morning shaping my boxwoods until the trimmer smoked and caught fire in my hands. I threw it to the ground, my palms and fingertips seared. Janey and Pete came by the next day and loaded my power tools into the trunk of their Honda. “For your own good,” they told me. They hired a boy to come out once a week and care for the lawn. Now she wants me to sell the house—I tell her my clothes, by God, I’m keeping.
During the afternoon the doorbell buzzed, and I expected Janey and Pete. Instead there stood a young woman from down the block—Kate Warner—with her child Mindy in tow. Kate Warner reminds me a bit of Janey—wide, brown eyes and straight hair. Pretty. She smiled and motioned over her shoulder, saying words that sounded like an electric hum to my ears.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t understand.” I nudged the volume controls on the receivers in my vest. She leaned toward me, her soap smell pushing into the house.
“Your TV antenna, Mr. Hopkins. It’s blown over.” The little girl looked up at me.
“A dead bird’s in your rain spout,” she said. I leaned down, as much as my back would allow.
“Well, you’re mighty observant, aren’t you?”
“What’s aservant?” she asked, and hid behind her mother’s leg.