Outside the arena the air was much cooler and sweet scented. And if not for the crowding of cars and pickup trucks and the muffled din drifting out of the building to their backs, it would have seemed another world. As they picked their way through the parking lot there came the faint sound of ranchera music being played on a car radio. Willy began to hum along to it, and when Franklin heard the voices, he thought it was Willy singing.
“Denos su dinero.”
Franklin had taken a few more steps before he realized that the others had stopped walking. When he turned around he didn’t see the two men, not until the one said, “Sobre aquí, imbécil,” and stepped toward him with the knife. He moved it slowly back and forth so that the moonlight caught its edge. All Franklin could think was, It doesn’t even look real.
“Denos su dinero,” the one with the knife said again.
The other man, who was slightly taller, and wore his straw cowboy hat pushed back off his forehead, motioned toward the young baker and said, “Y la cámara.”
Franklin looked at Willy; he had his hands raised high over his head.
“I think,” he said, “we should do as they say.”
When he was fourteen years old, three kids in the grade above Franklin had caught him in the school washroom. While two of the boys held him down, pinning his shoulders against the cold parquet floor, the third leaned over him and dribbled spit onto his face. They laughed as the string of gob fell onto the bridge of his nose, then snailed its way along his cheek until it pooled in the recess of his ear. Afterward, the boys emptied the books from his bag and stuffed them into a toilet; they made Franklin flush the toilet before they left him.
In the wake of this assault, Franklin was left feeling not so much frightened as completely hollow. It was as if the fear that had first entered him had somehow eaten its way out of his body, leaving behind only his shell. He left his books in the toilet bowl, swollen and ruined, and ran the four blocks from the school to the house on Montrose Avenue. He did not tell Mavis what had happened, but asked to be fed. For the rest of the afternoon he ate everything that she put before him, trying to fill the emptiness he’d been left with. He ate so much that he was sick; and then after he was sick, he ate more.
Sitting in La Bodequita he felt that same emptiness again. But it wasn’t the two men who made him feel this way; rather, it was Willy. Willy, who sat across the table and filled their glasses again with ice that he’d taken from the bucket with his hands; Willy, who poured whisky over the ice so that it cracked loudly as it began to melt; Willy, who picked up his own tumbler and sat back in his chair looking satisfied with himself.
“But what I want to know,” Franklin said, “is why?”
“Oh, come on, Fowler. It was just a bit of fun.”
Franklin shook his head. “They were really scared.”
“Nonsense,” Willy said, taking a drink. “I gave them a wonderful story to take home and tell their friends.”
“I don’t think Christina thought it was wonderful,” said Franklin, recalling the blankness of the expression on her face and the way her hands shook as she emptied her pockets for them.
“Ah, yes.” Willy smiled. “Darling Christina.” Franklin didn’t like the way he said her name, how he pursed his lips afterward and ran his tongue across his teeth, as if he tasted the remnants of her.
“I thought you were in there, Fowler.” “What do you mean?” said Franklin.
“Our little Ms Leggett; our dear Christina,” Willy said, his smile becoming a leer. “I thought you were made in the shade, in like Flynn. What with the way she was rubbing up against you at the fights. And then the way she looked to you when Juan and Simón did their piece.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Franklin said. He picked up his glass and took a long sip—the empty feeling, he thought he might be able to drink it away.
“Now I’ll admit,” Willy went on, “at first I considered her for myself. But she was a little too matronly for my tastes, a little too Mother Hubbard. Know what I mean? A bit too dowager. I like mine a touch more frisky. Still, she was good for you, I thought. Tell you something else: I was half hoping that you were going to put on a show for her. You know, have it out with Juan right there in the car park. He’d have been up for it, would of given you a good little tussle. Nothing too rough, of course. He’s a good lad, that one. Now Simón. He would of dropped the bloody knife and legged it. He’s useless, he is. Still, either one would of done it for you, would of delivered the lovely Christina wrapped up in a bow.”
Looking at him, Franklin noticed for the first time how truly ugly Willy Booth actually was: his big belly stretching out his shirt, his arms fat and smooth, his hair cut short to distract from his growing baldness, his limpid eyes lost in a face that was a crimson map of alcoholic rosacea. And seeing all this, Franklin felt sorry for him.
“I don’t think we should be talking about Ms Leggett this way,” he said.
Willy just shook his head. “Ninguna aventura. Ningún romance,” he said. “You remember me saying that?”
“Yes,” Franklin said, knowing that Willy was right. There had been a moment there in the car park, though to call it an opportunity would be crude. It was a chance to act; Franklin recognized it when Simón looked to Willy, as if for direction, before he and Juan fled into the night. What would Christina have thought if he’d stepped forward in the instant, taken things in hand? He would never know. “It was just a cruel trick, Willy.”
“Oh, for Chrissakes, Fowler. They got exactly what they wanted,” said Willy, sounding indignant now. “Besides, that bloody Pollack is a little prick. He deserved to have the shit scared out of him. I’ve a mind to let Simón keep his pissy little camera.”
Willy got quiet after that, but as he sat there the redness in his face deepened, and watching him, Franklin got the impression that he was very much like a shaken bottle of soda, the pressure building from within. But then Willy laughed. He leaned forward in his chair and set his glass on the table, and was laughing still as he picked up the bottle and poured himself more whisky.
“‘Travel is a fool’s paradise,’” he said through his happy grin. “You ever hear that saying, Fowler? ‘Travel is a fool’s paradise.’”
“Yes,” Franklin said. “It’s Emerson.”
“If you say so,” said Willy. “You’re the one who knows the books. I just think it’s funny. Maybe I’ll use it as my motto. Stick it up in the office, right over my desk. I’ll look up at it every time I have to deal with the likes of that Pollack.”
“‘We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing.’”
“What’s that then?” asked Willy.
“It’s the rest of the quote,” said Franklin.
“Yeah?” said Willy. “I don’t know if I like that part much. Bit wordy, that.”
Franklin just shrugged.
“You going to stay for one more?” asked Willy, holding up the bottle.
Franklin closed his eyes a moment and thought of La Casa de Mavis, and of his mother’s photograph waiting for him on the night table beside his bed, and of the empty journal and the Mont Blanc fountain pen and the statue of Shakespeare looking out toward the salt marsh in the dark. And of Christina Leggett in her room upstairs, a chair wedged under her door handle, the shutters to her balcony locked, her covers pulled up tight under her chin, awake and frightened— or maybe she was asleep and dreaming something nice.
He pushed his glass across the table. “Sure, Willy,” he said. “Why not.”
MAXIM’S TROUT
THE FAMILIAR PAIN FLARES in his belly: a charcoal briquette beneath his ribcage, waiting for the lighter fluid of his daily life to feed it with flame. To imagine his ailment in terms of a barbecue is the only way Bull Maxim can deal with the discomfort. It makes the whole thing somehow more manageable: he knows his way around a barbecue. He unscrews the top from the economy-size bottle of Maalox and takes a long swallow, envisioning t
he cloudy fluid racing down into the fat-boy Hibachi and smothering the cinders. It doesn’t work, of course. The antacid lost its curative value some months back. Bull drinks it now simply for the taste. The cool, chalky flavour soothes him. More often now, Bull finds that when he awakes in the night with a thirst it isn’t Marlene’s homemade iced tea or Darryl’s diet cola he reaches for, but the Maalox. He likes how it leaves a gluey film on his tongue, even if it does sour his breath. Then again, Marlene kisses him so infrequently now that it doesn’t seem to matter.
Bull had been hopeful that Dr Carey could help him, even accepted his advice and went to a city hospital. He swallowed barium, lay still like an expectant mother for an ultrasound, closed his eyes for the proctologist, but there was nothing. His gallbladder was fine, as were his liver, pancreas and appendix. There were no tumours on his colon, no tears in his oesophagus, no ulcers in his stomach. “A nervous tummy, is all,” Dr Carey said in the end. His only suggestion was to stay away from Marlene’s chili. “Just relax and enjoy life, Bull.”
Just relax and enjoy life, Bull thinks, as he quietly pulls a chair out from the kitchen table. He can’t even relax and enjoy sleep. The last time he made it all the way through to morning is a distant memory. If it isn’t Marlene’s indifference playing on his mind, it’s Darlene’s bitterness. His daughter hates him, more now than ever. And there’s Darryl and his flower picking. Bull takes another swallow of Maalox and looks down at himself. His big barrel of a chest and wide round belly hide his briefs from view so that his slightly bowed, newel-post legs appear to sprout from either side of his navel. His hands are meaty and his arms like shanks. His mother named him Rudolph after Valentino, but everyone else just calls him Bull. When he was in high school so many years ago, before football players dressed like spacemen, the people used to chant “Toro, toro” when he stepped onto the field. Four years all-county MVP and Rudolph was gone forever. Even when Marlene agreed to take him at the altar, it was Bull.
With antacid in hand, Bull gets up from the table and creeps out of the kitchen. On the front porch he takes a deep breath. The air is still warm from the day and, though he knows it isn’t possible, Bull thinks he can smell Morrow. Just knowing that he is out there in the woods with his army of scraggly haired minions seems enough to effect his odour. What they are doing he doesn’t want to imagine. There is talk that they are tunnelling, but that makes no sense to Bull. Tunnellers protest logging and this has nothing to do with trees.
A breeze picks up and Bull feels a slight chill. He considers going back inside for his robe; it wouldn’t do to have the mayor seen wandering about in the middle of the night in his underpants. But the thought of perhaps waking Marlene stops him. Besides, the mayor in his skivvies wouldn’t be much of an oddity. Not any more.
The pain in his belly flares again.
“Goddamn fish,” Bull mutters.
Billy Finnegan brought it to him. Dropped it in the dirt at his feet. Bull had been pulling weeds from between his tomatoes and had only just stood to ease the ache in his lower back. When the kids were younger they used to help him with the garden. Marlene helped then, too. Now Bull tended the vegetable patch on his own. He was wiping sweat from the back of his thick neck when Finnegan appeared.
“What the hell is that?” Bull asked.
“It’s a fish,” Finnegan said.
“I can see that, Billy. What I want to know is why the hell you’re throwing it in my garden?”
“I pulled it out of the old quarry.”
Billy Finnegan was a poacher. A not very good one, as far as Bull was concerned. During his time as a game warden, before he became mayor, Bull had had many dealings with Finnegan. He was a sloppy trapper and moved through the bush like a bulldozer. It took very little effort for Bull to track him. And more often than not, Bull would find a thankful Billy waiting for him, his snare wire in a loop on his belt, his illegal game in a bag by his feet, himself lost in the woods. Billy Finnegan’s sense of direction was atrocious.
“How many times I told you, Billy,” Bull said, stepping carefully between the rows, “to stay away from that place? Christ, the kids don’t even go up there drinking any more.”
Finnegan shrugged and bent down for the fish. Two beanstalks succumbed to his heavy boots as he followed Bull.
“You know how many overgrown shafts there are out there?” Bull said, hiding his anger. “The duck hunters don’t even bother with it.” Bull himself wouldn’t venture out to the old marble quarry. The landscape was speckled with flues that had been dug in the last few years before the quarry shut down; they’d swallowed up enough good bird dogs to convince even the most fanatical hunters that the river was the place to shoot.
Bull offered Finnegan a seat, and watched as the weedy man misjudged the depth and landed with a thump that jarred the fish loose from his grasp. Finnegan left the fish in the grass and rubbed his buttocks.
“So, what can I do for you, Billy,” Bull asked, taking a seat beside him.
“It’s this thing,” Finnegan said, pushing the fish toward Bull with the toe of his boot. “What do you make of it?”
“A trout,” Bull said, uninterested.
“Yeah,” Finnegan said, leaning forward. “But what kind? I ain’t never seen anything like it.”
Bull took a closer look. There was no question that it was a trout. The sleek but strong body with its thick tail, the cut of the dorsal and caudal fins said as much. But the colours, Bull thought, weren’t right. For a moment he considered it might be a brook, but there were no speckles or spots, and the olive green of its back was far too dark. Then there was the silver colouring on the leading edge of its pectoral fins. It was no brook trout.
“You say you caught it at the quarry?” Bull said.
“Yessir.”
“How did it fight?”
“Didn’t fight at all. Thing was dead by the time I pulled it in.”
Sitting now on the porch steps, Bull can hear Darlene climbing down the lattice. The thin wood strains under her weight and the vines caught up in her clothes snap free from their hold. It’s a wonder there is any ivy left, she’s made the descent so often. His daughter is escaping later tonight than usual, owing to Bull’s lingering in front of the television— an old black-and-white film he paid little attention to. He’d done so hoping Darlene might fall asleep in her bed and miss her late-night rendezvous. No such luck. His dawdling would succeed in nothing more than strengthening her ire. There seems little Bull can do to staunch his daughter’s ill will. She loathed him even before the fish, but it was an expected malignity: parent and teenage child. Now her mordancy is feral. When she looks at him now there is not only contempt in her eyes, but abhorrence.
He watches her as she slips around the side of the house. Her long hair is tied in knots at the sides and top of her head. He can see the weak gleam of the stud she’s pushed through the bottom of her lip. The skin must be still swollen and tender, he figures, seeing the awkward way she keeps her mouth open. She’s cut the legs off her favourite pair of jeans and wears them over thick black leotards that disappear into an old pair of Darryl’s workboots. An old cardigan of Marlene’s is thrown overtop a newly torn black T-shirt. She must be very warm, Bull thinks.
At the street she stops and turns back to look at him. Bull waits for her to say something, another stinging insult that has become usual in the past few weeks. He misses the old taunts born of adolescent angst: harsh but never hurtful. The ones that made him feel like a father. Now she treats him like the enemy, and her scorn cuts deeply.
Bull waves. Darlene walks away without responding.
“Fantastic!” Morrow said, leaning close to the fish. “No, more than fantastic. Maybe a miracle, at least scientifically speaking. It’s just so beautiful,” he cooed, stroking the stiff scales.
Bull hadn’t wanted to come, but after exhausting his own guidebooks and those of the Marbleton library he didn’t know where else to turn. Morrow was definitely the man. He cal
led himself an aquatic biologist. Bull had no idea what that meant. Nor did Morrow fit with Bull’s notion of a scientist: white lab coat, close-cut hard-parted hair, thick black-framed glasses—like the men from detergent commercials on the television, the ones who placed large checkmarks on their clipboards. As far as Bull was concerned, Morrow looked like a bum, a vagrant off the street. His was gangly and wore a scrubby beard. His hair sprouted like a bush from his scalp, and his clothes looked stiff from lack of washing. Then there was his voice, which croaked and wavered like a pubescent teenager’s. But for Bull, the most unnerving thing about the man was his odour. He smelled like a dead carp lying out in the sun. Granted, Morrow concentrated his efforts on fish, their physiology, cytology, histology and propagation—Bull had many times helped Morrow and his students count pickerel and set lamprey traps—but the tang seemed not to reside on his skin so much as emanate from within.
Bull wasn’t too keen on visiting the university either. First off there was the drive. Not that an hour on the road was overly long, but his old Dodge Ram wasn’t in the greatest of shape. The transmission had been ready to give out for a few months already. So to be sure he could make it to the university and back, Bull drove at half the speed limit, which added another hour to the trip and attracted a wealth of horn blasts and raised fingers.
Neither was it a mean feat trying to find Morrow’s office. First off, the university was not what he’d expected. Bull had imagined it like a high school, only bigger. He’d figured on walking into a reception office and having a secretary direct him down a hallway or two to his destination. Instead, he discovered what at first glance appeared to be a small city. Buildings, some low to the ground, others climbing several storeys into the air, were laid out over countless acres. And there was nothing in the way of signage that identified any of them. After finding a parking spot in one of the farthest lots, Bull made his way along a cinder path that led finally to a wide concrete quadrangle. It was crowded with students, some passing from one building to the next, but most just reclining on benches, enjoying the late-summer sun. The first student Bull asked, a young man with a string of beads in his hair, looked at him and said, “Huh?” When Bull asked again, the man closed his eyes and shook his head. “Sorry, dude,” he said. “Don’t know your guy.”
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