The drive home was uneventful except that he got stuck in traffic. He sat there wondering what a man like himself did in the evenings after work. Did he watch television with his wife? Did he go fishing, like he did in his real life? Did he go out to bars and drink beer and play pool with friends? With limited time and money, there were only so many ways a man could occupy his evening hours. He had never conceived of an evening that did not involve fishing. He recalled the pain he’d felt just before ending up here, and it was almost enough to bring it all back.
I’m a different man now, he thought. Just go with it.
Eventually he pulled into the driveway of a ranch-style home in a suburban housing community named Pheasant Creek or Eagle Springs or some shit like that.
He brought the brown bag holding the Mexican food inside. In the living room, his wife sat on the couch with a laptop on her lap. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. She appeared to be playing Spider Solitaire, but he thought he’d detected the sudden closure of a browser window as he kissed her. He mined his emotional and experiential database and decided that he trusted her. She had never given him any reason not to.
“Come eat,” he said.
On the walls of the living room were photos of a young boy who shared the steely blue eyes he’d seen when he looked at himself in the rearview mirror.
My son is gone.
Certain street and business signs had looked blurry to him as he drove home. At first he thought something must be wrong with his vision. Sunspots, maybe. After all, he was not used to such a bright place. Then he realized what it was. The name of the town. Whatever brought him here was obscuring from him the name of the town. Wherever it appeared, he saw a blur. He imagined that if he heard someone speak the name, he would hear a blur as well.
The fate of his son also remained a mystery. When he had absently begun to order his son’s favorite food, some new kind of sadness began to eat away at him. He’d experienced loss before, a range of it. The loss of a parent, the loss of a trophy fish. This was different. This hurt worse.
He sensed the same sadness in his wife as they sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat. They spoke about their days. The mundane things, the funny things, the frustrating things, some gossip, the happenings of the impending weekend. He wanted to ask about the son. Where was he? Was he around? Was he coming home soon? Away at college? In prison? Dead? There were only so many places a son might be, and none of them a father couldn’t reach.
After dinner they caught up on their favorite television show. The husband drank beer and the wife drank boxed red wine. Throughout the evening, she stepped outside three times for a cigarette. The first time, he touched his breast pocket, feeling for the pack of cigarettes he, Doug, kept there. The reassuring hardness of the rectangular pack was gone, and his fingers sank into the flab of his pectorals. He’d asked the wife for a cigarette and she’d looked at him strangely. He said never mind and told a joke that made no sense in that or any other context, then while she went outside to smoke her cigarette alone, he went into the kitchen to grab another beer. In there he felt dizzy. He found breathing difficult. Each lungful entered him like cotton. He thought of the bad air outside. He pressed a hand to his heart, wondered why its rhythm seemed so wrong, thought he counted off thirty seconds between beats, but his counting must have been wrong. When he heard the front door open, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and returned to the living room to continue watching television with his wife. Their favorite show. The second and third time she went outside for a cigarette, he did not ask her for one and he did not leave the couch. He’d grown afraid there in the kitchen. Afraid of what, he did not know.
In bed that night before they slept, his wife said ‘I love you’ in the dark.
It sounded so much like ‘goodbye’ that tears welled up in his eyes. He trembled and wept. His wife held him, her body soft beneath loose pajamas. She did not ask what was wrong. She only said kind and tender things. This calmed him, yes, but also worried him. The wife’s words and touch confirmed that all his pain was real. He’d wanted so badly for it to be make-believe. He wanted to be done with all this sadness and this fear. Her fingers combed through his hair and she kissed him on the mouth. Beneath the blankets she spread her legs, inviting him. He stirred despite himself. They did not make love so much as they applied a salve to their mutual pain.
Afterward, tangled in the sweaty sheets, he felt whole again. He laid a hand on his wife’s belly and wondered how long it would last. He opened his mouth to ask her a question, to propose that they try again, buy an RV, go on vacation, eat at that four star steakhouse they’d talked about for years—anything to fuel the calm he felt another mile. Something to look forward to. Something to feel good about. By the time he settled upon the ideal proposal, the wife was already asleep. He stayed up half the night and watched her sleep. Life and love had not been easy for them. Despite all that had transpired, in the gloaming she looked beautiful, happy, and at peace. He could not help but celebrate this quiet victory.
Loveyoubye.
When he awoke in the morning, his wife was already gone. He got out of bed and dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before. He was late for work. He ate some sort of breakfast bar and left the house. On the highway, he missed his exit. Instead of getting off and turning back, he kept on going. He drove right out of town. When he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, he looked a little bit less like the man he’d become. He drove north. He stopped for gas and coffee somewhere, gas and a sandwich somewhere else. He tried to avoid seeing himself, but every couple hours he couldn’t help looking or catching a glimpse by accident. Every time, he looked different. The further north he drove, the more he resembled Doug. He guessed it was only natural to become himself, and left it at that. By the time he arrived in Portland, he’d become Doug again. He drove directly to the bait shop. He did not open up for business. Instead, he locked the door after him and went up to his room above the store. He climbed into bed and fell fast asleep even though his back ached from the miles on the road. He had driven very far.
Doug woke in his bed. The young man who’d caught the strange fish sat in a chair beside him. When the young man noticed Doug was awake, he put the book he was reading aside and asked, “How are you feeling?”
“How do I feel?” Doug said, and laughed painfully. “I feel as shitty as the day I was born.”
“You fainted, so I brought you up here.”
Doug shook his head, mumbled, “I didn’t faint. I became someone else.”
“What was that?” the young man said.
“Nothing. You didn’t call an ambulance, did you?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t have health insurance. What time is it?”
The young man looked at his watch. “It’s four in the morning.”
“Good,” Doug said. He groaned and sat up in bed. “Then it’s about time we got started.”
“Started with what?”
“Fishing.”
“You can’t be serious—”
“Look, boy. You showed up here almost twenty-four hours ago with a freak fish in your ice chest. Next thing I know, I’ve lost a day of my life, and trust me, I ain’t got many left. You owe me for that day. You’re going fishing with me.”
But as soon as he’d said it, Doug realized the young man was not in the room with him. He was alone. He’d no idea how many days had passed, one or ten or none at all. He’d no idea how he’d managed to get upstairs to his room.
Gray light filtered in, but not enough to tell if it was early morning or late evening. He moved to the window and looked out. The young man’s Dodge was still in the parking lot. Now it was nearly submerged. Doug’s chest tightened. A flood had rolled in and swallowed the earth. His car had already gone under. He knew his shop was flooded. He’d lose his fish mounts and so much else. His only phone was down there, so that was gone. No chance of calling anyone. The rain continued falling heav
y. Soon the truck would also vanish under the roiling waves. Somewhere in a distant town, a man who wasn’t Doug had a wife. Somewhere in this floodwater, the blue-eyed fish with human limbs and such sharp teeth must have dwelled. Maybe it was dead. Maybe not. Maybe a million more like it existed, ready to emerge from the river in this time of flood. Somehow he knew the creature had gotten the young man who’d caught it.
If only he could will himself to be that other man, but he could not. He locked the bedroom door and retrieved the Smith & Wesson from the safe. He sat in the rocking chair by the window, the revolver on his lap, staring out at the strangely desolate world. No people or rescue crews out there. Only dark water, dark sky.
I. The Best is the Worst
They chose to spend Christmas in Japan. She had longed to revisit Tokyo ever since a childhood trip, but cities exacerbated his anxiety, so they’d compromised. Two nights in Tokyo, drinking sake in clubs and eating the best ramen of their life, before traveling north to the island of Hokkaido, where they fished for yamame trout using tenkara rods. On Christmas morning, they walked down to the clear and frigid creek by the lodge. Within the hour they landed two trout apiece and returned to the lodge and cooked the trout over an open fire. They ate the trout with miso soup and green tea, and spent the rest of the day reading. They’d experienced a difficult year, a multitude of circumstances pushing their marriage to the brink. Each had at times threatened to walk away only to remain, as much out of fear as love. Somehow they persisted, and by Halloween they’d rediscovered parts of each other and themselves that had been lost—or at least inaccessible—for a decade. This vacation was well-earned then, and they’d both already proclaimed it the best time they’d had in all their dozen years together, maybe in their whole lives. It felt like growing old even though they were still young. So when he complained that evening of pains in his chest, they didn’t take it seriously. He took it easy on the plum wine and they called it an early night. Hokkaido was so quiet. Even the sound of the sea lapping at the shore seemed more peaceful, as if this side of the Pacific possessed some calming power that the Pacific off the coast of Oregon, where they lived, lacked. He awoke in the night unable to breathe. The constriction in his chest had swelled into his throat, like a large bird trapped inside his chest cavity thrashing about, attempting to peck its way up to freedom through his throat. He reached out for her in the dark. She seemed so far away even though she lay so close they almost touched. She stirred in her sleep. Her back felt warm as he brushed her with his fingers. Gasping for a breath, he shook her. She stirred in the starlight, turned sleepily and asked, “What’s wrong?” A more thorough darkness was compounding on the nighttime darkness of the room. And then the waves of the sea washed over their cabin, and if he was dying they’d never know, because they both drowned anyway.
II. Fishing and Beer
Frank knew as well as goddamn anyone that the Pacific was the Pacific. He’d grown up on it, learned to drink and fuck and fight on it. Still spent eighty hours a week on or near it, taking those who could afford it out for salmon and tuna and halibut and sturgeon and lings. Hell, he’d once stabbed a great white in the head with a knife. That’s how well he knew the Pacific. Everywhere it was the same. Dark and merciless, but willing to give back to those who sacrificed, to those whose skin had turned to leather, to those with salt in their blood.
He went outside and pulled a beer from the icebox on the porch. The fridge had died a month before and he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The beer was lukewarm, but strong and dark. The grass in the yard was overgrown. Dandelions swayed amidst the green.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife had eliminated all sturgeon retention for the foreseeable future and Frank had only managed to convince one client to go on a catch-and-release trip. The rest canceled. He was forced to return their deposits. The bitch of it was, he’d already spent all the deposit money. Fifteen years of back child support finally caught up to him and rather than face potential jail time, he paid it and prayed to God the state would leave those prehistoric fish for the slaughter. And it’d been a hell of a year, all right. Limits for every client, every day. It seemed everyone else had experienced similar success and the quota was exceeded. Retention would likely remain closed for several years. So now he found himself nearly ten grand in the hole, with several more weeks of nothing to do, at least nothing gainful. Aimless days of waste and wander. Drunk as fuck and restless. The least he could do was fix the refrigerator and mow the grass, maybe clean the place up, but the idea just pissed him off. Everything pissed him off these days. Everything except being out on the water. It didn’t even matter if he was on the ocean or river. He loved the treacherous nature of it all. There were times he considered buying a big enough boat to live on. The only thing keeping him anchored to land was Llewellyn Holloway. He hoped to someday make her Llewellyn Decker, even though she said the name didn’t have a good ring to it. Above all, he wanted to start a family with her. He was thirty-eight years old and felt the approach of his final chance to prove he was a good man.
The rain started up and he went back inside. He sat at the kitchen table, pushed aside the dirty dishes and opened up one of the pocket lunar charts he kept around. He stared at the moon’s cycle for the year, signified by dots shaded some amount of black and white. He closed his eyes and imagined the sea under a full moon in July, how much it differed from a full moon in December. He finished the beer and went for another. Then another. The rain pelted the tin roof so loud there wasn’t any use turning on the television or the radio. He wouldn’t be able to hear a damn thing anyway. “The moon don’t mean shit to me,” he said, after staring at the lunar chart for an hour more. He didn’t mean it. The moon was like a cold and distant god to him.
He thought about calling up Llewellyn, but she was tending bar at the Fighting Salmon. Besides, she could not cure the loneliness that ate at him. Only two things could save him now. Fishing or beer. And what remained of sturgeon fishing had been canceled.
III. The Stranger
The olive-skinned stranger in snakeskin boots entered the Fighting Salmon a quarter past eleven. He looked like he’d been sculpted out of finer materials than flesh and bone. He hung his leather bomber jacket up to dry at the coat rack by the door and approached the bar, set his motorcycle helmet—black, half-shell—on a barstool and sat down beside it. “Do you have like uh…a seafood stew?” he said.
“Sure do,” Llewellyn said. “Got a chowder with salmon, halibut, oysters, clams, mussels, and prawns. Comes in a bread bowl.”
“I’ll have that.”
“Can I see your ID, hon?”
No way was he younger than thirty, but Llewellyn was smitten. She wanted to know his name. He handed over his driver’s license. New Mexico.
“Anisedias. I’ve never heard a name like that before. What brings you all the way here from New Mexico?”
“I’m not from New Mexico,” he said.
“But your license is—”
Anisedias was not listening. He craned his head to watch the Trail Blazers game on the television behind the bar.
“Can I getcha anything to drink?” Llewellyn said.
“Water’s fine.”
She filled a pint glass with water and set it on the bar. As she went into the kitchen to tell Larry to ladle up the seafood stew, she could hardly contain herself.
Anisedias.
The name of a god.
And even though Llewellyn didn’t believe in true love, she wanted to believe this stranger was sent here for a reason. To carry her far away from this place, rescue her from settling down with Frank, who was fun to go with and not at all a bad guy, but marrying Frank and having children with him and slowly decaying with him would prove true the one fact she could never accept: that she was no different than everybody else who had never escaped this town. Born, raised, and laid to rest within sight of where the mighty Columbia met the Pacific. Neither river people nor ocean people, but a fucked-up thing that existed i
n between. Never knowing which way to go, so going nowhere at all.
Llewellyn filled a cup two-thirds full with ice and Diet Coke, then stepped into the freezer. The sweat on her brow cooled, turned frosty. She breathed in deep and didn’t mind that it hurt. Larry and the other cooks kept a stash of liquor behind the beef patties. They let Llewellyn and a few of their other favorite bartenders and waitresses in on it, so long as nobody ratted them out. Llewellyn moved aside a box of beef patties and grabbed the fifth of rum. She filled her cup to the rim.
Out of the freezer, she fit a plastic lid over the cup and punctured the lid’s starfish-shaped hole with a straw. The first sip was mostly rum.
IV. What Followed Him North
Roswell was a hell of a way from here. He’d jumped on his bike on Tuesday, driven straight through except for gas and bathroom breaks. He drank nothing but water. He never much cared for coffee or soda. Never even cracked the tab on an energy drink. Iced tea was alright, unsweetened.
Somewhere along the way, he acquired a five pound bag of beef jerky. Somewhere along the way, he reached into the bag and found it empty. He’d eaten five pounds of beef jerky and one banana since Tuesday. What day was it anyway?
The Trail Blazers clung to a narrow lead with less than three minutes remaining in the fourth. How would they let him down this time?
The bartender leaned against the serving window, staring at him, sucking on a drink spiked with something. The chemical sweetness of her Diet Coke did nothing to mask the scent of cheap liquor.
Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Page 5