City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Just watch me, brother.” He took the liver and raw meat scraps and laid them out carefully on our sleeping dog. He had sworn that the stuff he’d given Buck wouldn’t hurt him, just make him sleep, and the old dog did seem to be breathing regularly—but you had to look close; from the doorway he looked dead, and with all that blood and raw meat—torn up something awful.

  It was true; I didn’t like going hunting with Dad. He’d shoot every game animal in sight, and throw away more than half of everything he killed. None of us enjoyed eating squirrel, dove, or deer, not even him. He just liked the shooting.

  Once he’d made fun of me for refusing to shoot a bird. Said I was growing up too slow—that hunting was a great way to build character and that I was missing a golden opportunity. Then he laughed at the way I looked when he put the rifle in my hands. That was the only time I remember ever actually hating my father. I thought about that as I laid his hunting rifle down by our dog. My father loved that dog.

  We waited behind the garage. I remember my brother grinning—a skull-grin, a rictus—as my father’s car pulled up to the garage.

  My father screaming. My brother grinning. And my own quiet satisfaction.

  I ran outside, into a virtual wall of people in animal masks: monkeys and bats, parrots and cats and dogs, the hideous face of a deranged rhino. The people wore evening dress with their masks, which made their grotesque heads even more hideous. I thought about Samhain, Lord of the Dead, and Druids sacrificing animals before him. For a crazy moment I thought there might be truth in that old story: that if I ripped the animal masks from these people’s faces I would find the same animal face beneath. They were the dead, walking among us, doomed to walk the earth in animal form until midnight tomorrow night, when Lord Samhain would harvest them with one great sweep of his gigantic, terrible scythe. I could hear someone laughing in their midst. Alex’s laugh. A glimpse of a wide, luminous grin, one tooth missing. I twisted away from the crowd, ran into the street to avoid them. I couldn’t bear the thought of touching even their fancy clothes.

  A car stopped with a screech behind me. I turned and stared at the windshield. Then down at my knees, inches from the bumper. I thought I was going to cry, until Marcie jumped out from the driver’s side, grabbed me, and pushed me into the car.

  She was quiet for a long time. She was always patient with me; she was patient now. But she was angry. She tossed her head irritably and the shadows of black hair flowed, and then settled down around her shoulders.

  “Want to tell me ’bout it?” she asked quietly.

  “Alex. It was Alex. In the lizard suit.”

  She didn’t sigh; she held onto it. “I really wish you wouldn’t do this to yourself. I … know it’s hard, but this is going to drive both of us crazy.” Then, “Your brother’s dead, Greg.”

  “I know he is,” I said immediately, not even thinking about it. Then I thought about it, and I was convinced that he was dead. But maybe he was waiting around now, after death. Waiting to be harvested …

  I didn’t see my brother much after high school. Occasionally there’d be an odd letter, or a strange picture or cryptic message in the mail. Sent anonymously, like some communication from the dark side of myself. But I always knew who sent the things; who else would do something like that? Once it was a picture of a woman working in a bomb factory. He had pasted a cartoon balloon next to her mouth saying, “I eat my dead children.” Another time it was a shrunken head. I was afraid to get it authenticated.

  I do know he dropped out, or was kicked out, of several colleges for his usual range of pranks. I know he got one midwestern fraternity shut down and forever banned because of his term as pledge master.

  Then there was the letter to my parents, a sincere letter on the surface, confessing that he was gay. I didn’t care, but of course my parents did. I’ve always wondered how much truth was in that letter—I suppose his usual haunts in the Bay area would confirm his story, but it would be hard to tell with Alex. I suspect he was bisexual, given his penchant for experimentation. Or maybe asexual. It’s hard to imagine him loving, or even lusting after, anything more than he loved the dark and death.

  It saddened me that I knew so little about my brother.

  A few times as adults we did run into one another. One of the times was just after I’d married Marcie, and although we had sent him an invitation to the wedding it had been returned, addressee unknown.

  We had just come back from a party in Berkeley. I walked into our bedroom—

  a little drunk, disoriented—and saw that there was a light on in the bathroom—I distinctly remembered turning that light out when we left the house. I stumbled in that general direction, and suddenly there was a deafening explosion at the back of my head and I fell unconscious.

  It could be my imagination, but I have the distinct impression I saw my brother’s face as I went down: narrow and skeletal, grinning.

  Marcie told me later that when she went into the room she was struck by this awful smell, as if an animal had died in our bedroom. Then a soft voice—she thought it was my voice—said come to bed; I need you, Marcie. She walked over and switched on the bed table lamp and there I was lying on top of the covers, obviously dead, my skin peeling, my body reeking of corruption. She screamed and the light went out.

  It was Alex, of course. When I came to, he was still in makeup; for my benefit, I suppose. His skills had definitely improved since our teen years; he looked exactly like me, identical to me, only dead. My stomach turned.

  “Just thought I’d congratulate you and the missus, brother!” That was all he had to say.

  Marcie started screaming at him. “Get out! Get out! What kind of sick thing are you, anyway? Why don’t you crawl back into your slimy grave and leave normal people alone! Is that why you did this to us? Is that the only way you can get close to people?”

  Then something odd happened. My brother stripped off his makeup and just stared at her. I’d never seen such hatred, such revulsion, in his face before. His face took on almost an animal aspect—a wolf or a coyote. But then it changed into something else. Loss, or disappointment—

  I don’t know—but he suddenly seemed such an outsider, something so alien that my heart went out to him for an instant as it never had before. He got up and walked silently out of the house. Wraithlike. We didn’t even hear the outer door open and close. It was as if he’d never been there.

  Marcie drove me away from Fisherman’s Wharf, fighting her way through the goblins and witches, the bees and frogs that had gathered around us, up to the Cliff House restaurant overlooking the ocean. I discovered that I couldn’t quite look at her, and instead kept turning to look out at the waves pummeling the rocky island a short distance offshore, and back to the other tables: bowls full of apples and nuts, a man in a cockroach suit, a woman wearing sequins glued to her cheeks in elaborate, spirograph patterns, and a man in a clown mask who seemed to be by himself, staring at me. The mask had blue gauze pasted over the eyeholes so he could see me, but I couldn’t see his eyes, just two blue ovals.

  I couldn’t take my eyes away from him the second time I looked his way. No one was serving him. It was as if no one else saw him. Then Marcie touched my arm.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “He’s still alive.” It was all I could say. The man in the clown mask still stared at me. Under the dim light in the corner he looked like an old photograph, yellowed and cracking, the surface of the photograph beginning to flake away from its backing. He still hadn’t been served. The waitress walked right by him.

  At the next table a group of people in peasant costumes and elegant masks were playing a fortune-telling game with cups of water, potato chips, and dirt. A beautiful blonde wearing a silk blindfold was feeling the outside of each cup, trying to decide in which one to put her fingers. There was a flowerpot behind them; I supposed that’s where they’d gotten the dirt. One of the waitresses glanced at them, frowning.

  “Greg, I know you
’re upset …”

  I looked at her. “I’m sorry, but that was him … or what’s left of him. He’s waiting.”

  “What’s he waiting for, Greg?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s me …”

  I looked away, trying to look at the ocean, the waves breaking, then looked back at the room and saw the grin, the wide glowing grin, one tooth missing. Alex was sitting where the clown had been.

  I leaped out of my chair and stumbled past the drunken costumed figures at their tables. I reached for the grin, tripped, and crashed into the fortune-telling party; I looked down at my hand in the cup of dirt. When I looked at the table where the clown had been, a huge jack-o’-lantern sat there, almost covering the small tabletop, a candle behind the enormous grin, flickering, creating shadows. I grabbed the waitress who had come to help me.

  “The man who was there … at that table … the clown mask …” I gasped.

  She looked at me nervously and pulled away. “No one sat here tonight. This is my station. The pumpkin, you know? We put the pumpkin on this table.”

  Marcie got me out to the car, holding me up when I stumbled. Several people grinned at us, thinking I was drunk, I suppose. I kept turning back to the restaurant, the dark line of ocean, looking, looking. And just before Marcie shoved me into the passenger seat I saw the clown again, standing on the cliff beside the restaurant, taking off his mask.

  And revealing another mask, a white glistening face, beneath it.

  Marcie was quiet for most of the ride back into town. Then she glanced over at my dirt-encrusted hand. “You got pretty dirty there. What were they doing with those cups anyway?”

  “Fortune-telling,” I said, staring at the road, waiting for something, anything to cross the path of the speeding car. I had the unnerving sensation of shadows in my peripheral vision. “You use dishes: one of water, one of meal—they used potato chips for the meal—and one of dirt. The one you put your fingers in reveals your destiny.”

  “And dirt? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Death,” I said.

  Marcie and I lived on Irving Street, down by Golden Gate Park. A small apartment, but I loved the location. I jogged every morning in the park and took walks through the gardens. When she pulled in to the curb, I reached over and covered her hand with the keys in it. “I want to drive around the park,” I said quietly. “Just for a few minutes before bed.”

  She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. “You scare me, Greg.”

  “I’m okay. Really.” I leaned over and kissed her. “I just need to be by myself a little bit. Really, I’m fine.” She waited on the street until I’d pulled around the corner.

  I drove down Lincoln and parked near a Mohawk station on Ninth. Then I got out and walked. I’m always struck by the defensive nature of San Francisco architecture, particularly at night: security garage doors, bars on the windows, and a flight of steps leading up to the heavy entrance door. Bay windows on each side. I passed house after house like that, long rows of them. Like well-mannered old people on armored stilts, afraid of being bitten.

  Golden Gate Park is not a good place to be at night. It’s pitch dark, and if you hear a movement in the undergrowth you can never be sure if it’s an animal or someone ready to deprive you of your money or life. I knew my brother had lived there, in the park, for three months one time, wandering around at night, sometimes leaping out in front of cars driving on Lincoln or one of the other bordering streets. He’d said it was one of his favorite places.

  I thought of it as his favorite haunt.

  I entered the park at Ninth and walked past the flower gardens. Then I turned toward the science museum.

  A hill rose on my right, shrouded in trees and undergrowth. Like a Neolithic burial mound, I thought, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if some small misshapen fairies had climbed down out of the trees and carried me off.

  I stopped at the giant bust of Beethoven. I looked up; I couldn’t make out most of his features in the dark, but I could see that he was grinning.

  When I turned and looked behind me, there was a fire in Tiffany Square.

  It became clearer as I crossed the street and headed down the steps leading into the square. Someone had piled up leaves and wood and built a bonfire. I walked around it; there was no one there. There were a few wooden chairs burning, charring to ash, and what looked like an upside-down cross, or maybe it was just a broken piece of wood.

  Pumpkins were scattered around the fire, as if they had been dropped in flight, their grins cracked or shattered. At midnight all the pumpkins leave their vines and dance merrily across the field … It was from an old story, or a song. I couldn’t remember. I thought about the pumpkin farms on Half Moon Bay and wondered what might be happening there that night.

  Hey, brother….

  I thought I heard it, but perhaps it was the fire chasing the leaves with slow explosions. There was a basket, or a wicker cage, lying among some of the pumpkins, something black inside. Something burned.

  I crouched low and held my hand over my mouth.

  Hey, brother….

  It was a black cat, had been a cat. Raw red skin where the fur had burned away, eyes like red jelly.

  Hey, brother….

  I ran out of the park. The wind had picked up; a dog, something, scurried out of my way. The city lights made a milky nimbus over the treetops. I don’t remember starting the car. I was already on Union, miles away, before I realized what I was doing.

  Then I saw the orange glow in the rearview mirror, the jack-o’-lantern grinning through my back window. I could feel the heat of my brother’s eyes in the glowing holes.

  I shot up the first steep turnoff, the engine straining, whining in my ears. Crazy. As if I could outrun the apparition. But every time I looked into the rearview mirror it was still there, its grin burning brighter each time I looked. My hands were wet, even in the cold air of the car, and I felt the slightest pull, left sometimes, then right, as if something were fighting for possession of my hands on the wheel.

  Dropping down Lombard Street, I sweated out each tortuous bend, wondering what could have possessed me to go onto that street, “the crookedest street in America,” a street only the curious tourist would drive—faster and faster, until the bumpers were scraping the low walls separating that serpent of a street from the flower beds planted in the loops. Something jerked the wheel out of my hands and I screamed as the car slalomed down several more streets and I began to fall asleep, losing my grip on the steering wheel, hearing my brother whispering to me … news of his latest trick….

  I woke up in the Castro, near where my brother was murdered. The pumpkin was gone from the back window. The car wouldn’t start—dead. I would have to get out and walk.

  I started checking out bars—I don’t know why—maybe looking for a grinning face with bright red hair, maybe a guy in a clown mask. I wasn’t stared at when I entered those places, much to my surprise. As if they’d seen me before, as if I were a regular. As if I belonged there. A leather shoulder turning. An eye deepened with blue mascara. A little rear-end cleavage. Hips sliding away to let me into the bar. A rattle of chrome-plated chains.

  Things were different down in the Castro, Polk Street, this Halloween. The punk kids roving the streets in previous years had driven Halloween indoors. And Ernie of Cliff’s Variety Store had died, ending the annual costume contest on the huge stage in front of the store. The cops had little to do. They’d find more rowdiness among the jet set at the Cinderella Ball at the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

  I found the place—thought I’d found the place—where Alex was murdered. I wasn’t sure; at the time I hadn’t come down to the site. I identified his body at the morgue. It had been his body, hadn’t it?

  “You aren’t playing with me now, Alex? Are you?” I whispered into the wet gray mouth of the alley.

  I could hear rats scurrying inside. Then glimpses of…something far back in the alley, occasionally catching th
e street light. Fur…claws…a wolf mask…a raven’s head. “Alex?”

  I heard a bell. Low and full, mournful.

  A soul cake, a soul cake…

  Have mercy on all Christian souls

  For a soul cake…

  The crier stepped out of the dark alley, ringing his bell. He was dressed in blacks: soot black, lamp black, dark black of the soul … I laughed nervously. He had the clown mask on.

  “Alex?”

  Hey, brother…

  He walked up the street. I followed him. He pulled a piece of bread out of his dark costume and began to munch on it.

  a picnic in the cemetery, brother…

  He passed through a band of shadow and I heard bells tinkling. He turned, in a jester’s costume now, white face, black grinning lips.

  a soul can be helped through purgatory, brother…

  He went down another alley, and I followed. He turned into a doorway, stepping soundlessly through the trash, and I followed.

  It was a small room. Dark. The figure sitting on the edge of the bed turned its face toward me and the halo of city fire outside the window caught the pale flat cheekbones, the bright red hair. He held out his arms as if to embrace me.

  “Another trick, Alex?”

  But the figure on the bed stared at me sadly. He wasn’t grinning now. There was such…loss…in those dull eyes. My heart went out to my brother, my aimless, wandering brother. Alone even in death. I let my heart go out to him, let myself love him at that moment. I couldn’t know … he was still doing it to me …

  And suddenly it was me on the bed. And my brother in my body, my disguise, standing in the doorway. Grinning his grin. His laughter was drawn out, almost animal-like as he turned and walked away.

  I couldn’t move. I was frozen to the bed, fixed in shadow, and as night turned to day and the day ticked off into evening shadows again, a cool edge coming into the air, a silver edge to the black clouds in a blacker sky, I realized I was approaching the midnight of November 1, Lord Samhain’s Night. I felt increasingly … insubstantial, although when I looked at my reflection in the window I could still see a face—my brother’s face, with the feral look it always had. The elongated jaw, wolf-like. Fox-red hair. The grin that would not go away, no matter how hard I tried. My brother was always the clever one, and I always envied him.