A thirty-five pound carp, three and a half feet long.
The fish was netted and brought ashore. My father, my stepbrother, Harry, and I all took pictures with the big carp. I don’t think we caught another fish that day, but it didn’t matter. I’d gotten the fish I came for, the fish I could mount on the wall.
As we left the lake that day, a man offered me twenty dollars for the fish. He and his wife and three kids were out fishing for their dinner but they’d caught nothing. My father told him sorry, that I insisted on keeping it. “We’re getting it mounted,” I said.
That evening my father promised to call the taxidermist who’d mounted his bass and trout. The next time I was over at his house, I asked about the fish. “I sent it off to the taxidermist,” he said. “It’ll be a few months.”
I asked for updates every time I visited my father. I was relentless. Finally, after six months had passed, I received some news. “He’s having trouble with the eyes. Not many people mount carp, so he had to special order the eyes,” my father told me. That sounded plausible enough. Carp do have beautiful eyes.
Eventually a year passed. Then two. Sometimes my father said the carp was on its way, but it never came. I caught other big fish. Nice channel cats, monster crappie, fat rainbow trout, and yet I never gave much thought to mounting them because I knew my carp lay in a taxidermist’s workshop somewhere, and that if only I was patient, my fish would return to me, preserved to last a lifetime.
Years passed and we ceased speaking of the carp even though I still believed. Last year, while visiting my father, I finally asked him what really happened to the carp.
“I threw it in a field,” he said, with a laugh and a sheepish grin. “That was a big-ass fish. It was a shame to kill it. But you can’t mount a carp.”
Somewhere over the years, I lost my desire to mount a trophy on the wall. A hundred yards behind where I live now, a creek runs through the forest. Native cutthroats live there. I’m fine just watching them. I like to eat fish and nothing beats what you’ve caught yourself, yet many of the fish I catch are released without ever leaving the water. Sometimes, though, I think about that thirty-five pound carp and what it would’ve looked like above the fireplace. They say you can’t mount a carp, but someday, I think I will.
They hit Portland a little after sunrise, pull the car over in an industrial area and watch strange barges haul pyramids of dirt up and down the brown river that splits the green city in half.
Sarah sleeps beside Ryan. His arm is numb from her head resting on his shoulder.
“Wake up,” he says, “we’re here.”
She smiles at him through her sleepiness, lands a kiss on his scruff.
Even though they’re down to forty bucks and he’s still uncertain whether the mess they left behind in California will catch up to them or not, he decides right then that he’d go to hell and back for that smile.
He’d endure anything for this girl.
The first order on the agenda is to pawn the car. The second is to find a place to crash. After that, it’s just living. Staying on the down-low, earning money to live.
He has no idea if what they’re doing is the right thing to do. When he considers what they’ve done, all he feels is confused. He’d turn back now, to Bakersfield, if his bones didn’t ache with exhaustion—and if his future there promised to be any less bleak. He’d go to prison and she would too. At least here in Portland they stand a fighting chance at building a life together, if they can go undetected.
He drives, navigating the city streets like a bloodhound, seeking out a place where the car will merit question-free cash.
They strike gold on Southeast 82nd.
A car lot tucked behind a gun and pawn shop offers one-hundred cash for it, no questions asked. It’s less than he hoped for, but he accepts. The car was a piece of shit anyway.
They walk down 82nd Street, one-hundred forty dollars in his pocket.
It’s cold out.
The sky is like a gray egg yolk that seems to pulse, as if any second it will burst.
His mother used to tell him stories about gloomy Portland. It’s where she and his father lived before he was born. She talked of how she and his daddy were so happy here, so in love, that all the darkness seemed hopeful to them. Her stories are really the only reason why he chose this place. Hope that he and the woman he loves can find some of that same happiness.
It starts to rain.
Their clothes soak through in minutes and both of them are so beaten, with nowhere to go, they run inside the nearest establishment.
A hand-painted sign nailed to the side of the place reads FISH MARKET. They enter through a red door that creaks on rusty hinges.
Inside, they’re hit by an overwhelming fishy odor. He gags a little, the fishiness is so strong.
There’s a glass display case filled with a variety of whole fish. He grew up fishing in farm ponds and the California Aqueduct. His catch often provided the only food for his family for weeks at a time, so he’s familiar with some of the species in the case. The catfish and carp. But there are other kinds too. The one that catches his eye is long, gray, and plated, like some prehistoric amphibian. He has never seen a fish like this before and something about it scares him.
A door opens and a skeletal man with stringy black hair and leathery flesh appears behind the counter. The door swinging behind him reveals a little apartment with a bed and a small, dirty stove.
Before Ryan really knows what he’s saying, he blurts out, “We need a place to crash. Just for a night or two.”
He’s sleep-deprived, starved, and rain-soaked. It’s no surprise he sounds so desperate.
Motels will be out of the question. They were forced to leave in a hurry and didn’t think to grab Ryan’s stash of fake IDs. Besides, they need a place nobody will ever look for them. This could be that place.
The fishmonger stares at Sarah, as if she was the one who spoke.
Finally, the fishmonger says, “How much trouble are you in?”
“We just need to lie low for a bit,” Ryan says. “We can pay cash.”
The man appears unmoved. He sighs.
“Or if you want something more…” Sarah adds, and it’s painfully clear by her tone what she means by ‘something more.’
Ryan looks at her as if to say, What the fuck?
She grabs his hand and stares at him with a steady resolve. She doesn’t seem nervous. He realizes that she has done this before. He finds this discovery painful, so he shelves it away in his mind, to be ignored, possibly forever.
What else doesn’t he know about her?
The man nods once. “Okay, follow me.”
Ryan steps forward, debating in his mind how much to offer the man. He decides to scope out the situation first. If he’s offering a bed to sleep in, twenty a night. A floor, ten.
Then the man does the last thing Ryan would’ve expected him to do, and it stuns him.
He holds up a hand like a crossing guard and says, “Uh-uh, not you. The girl.”
Sarah unclasps her hand from Ryan’s even though he’s squeezing, desperate not to let go of her. She goes behind the fish counter. The man leads her into a back room and shuts the door. Ryan hears a deadbolt turn, followed by the clasp of a door chain sliding locked. The buzz of the yellowed overhead lights is all he’s left with, along with the gutted fish rotting on beds of melted ice.
When sex sounds start, he thinks he’s going to die. Flesh pounding flesh. The creak of bedsprings. An ass-smack. A pained gasp escaping Sarah.
He has never been so helpless in his entire life.
He thought he knew what they were doing.
He thought he was in control.
They had a plan for a life together.
He stands paralyzed.
Outside the rain comes down like a mist of acid that would burn his flesh if he stepped out into it, leaving him as a skeleton with dissolving organs, a heart pumping nothing into a network of vanished veins.
>
His eyes fail to focus and he’s trembling, so he makes a conscious effort to stare at the fish in the meat case. He fixates on the fish that scares him, the one with spikes on its gray back, its mouth more like a penis than a mouth.
“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me.” Ryan’s not sure who spoke until the bizarre fish raises its head and looks straight at him. “I said don’t you fuckin’ look at me.”
Its eyes are like a dog’s, and sad.
“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me, you little bitch,” the fish says, and then its head drops back down onto the ice with an audible smack.
Ryan takes up a fillet knife and moves toward the case, prepared to stab the fish if it raises its head again.
Minutes pass and the fish doesn’t move, so he positions himself to one side of the door. When the door opens, he will charge into the room and kill the man. He will kill him in place of the fish.
He’s hardly surprised when the door opens and he finds that he’s already set the knife down. He’s not a killer anymore.
The man moves past him as if Ryan is a ghost.
The man reaches into the case and sifts through a mound of catfish, testing the firmness of the fillets with his delicate fingers.
Sarah comes out of the back room and takes Ryan’s hand and he’s unable to withdraw. Even though he hates the slimy feel of her palm, he holds on.
The smile that crosses her face is sad, but maybe she always looks that way. “I love you, baby,” she says.
Yeah, that’s her normal smile. It’s always been sad. He just never noticed.
“I love you too,” he says, and he means it.
The man hovers over a deep-fryer, cooking up the catfish. “Have a drink,” he says, gesturing to a shelf lined with liquor bottles.
Sarah kisses Ryan on the cheek. She pulls down a bottle of whiskey, fills two dirty mugs. She hands one to Ryan. He throws back the mug, surprised how good the burn feels going down. She pours him some more and he relaxes enough to sit at the foldout table in the center of the shop.
He wonders if these things he thinks he’s learning reflect only his own doubts and insecurities, not anything about Sarah at all.
The man brings over a plate stacked high with fried catfish. He sits down in the third chair at the table as if the three of them have all done this before, shared this meal together in the waning light as darkness eats the day’s remains.
The fish is too hot and scalds Ryan’s mouth, but he digs in anyway. This is the beginning of their life together, not the life they’ve always dreamed of, but at least there’s love here. Love, or something like it.
The man swerves across the double yellow. His daddy dances in the road just ahead, dances on his leg stumps. His wife, she’s crying back at home. A bright woman. A beautiful woman. Did he steal this truck he’s driving? He stole this truck. Got to catch up with his daddy. He used to sell kites, this man swerving. Tiny kites. Children loved his tiny kites. Before that, he worked in the watermelon fields. He worked from sunup to noon in the fields and then he fished all day and drank whiskey and played guitar with his boys at night, but his boys all got married or got killed, so the music’s over. It’s all over. Where is he? He fights with his wife. He walks to Bear Naked, the nudie bar up the street. He gets drunk. He goes out for a cigarette, sees his daddy’s ghost run by at supersonic speed, unnatural for the ghost of an amputee. Must be chasing that big devil fish. He steals a truck to follow. He follows, sometimes closing his eyes as he drives because where else could his dead daddy lead him. To the lake, where he caught that thirty-five pound carp that got his picture in the newspaper. His daddy was so proud when he caught that carp. They caught so many fish in the lake together. Carp, channel catfish, blue catfish, largemouth and smallmouth bass, rainbow trout, brown trout, crappie, bluegill, and once a fish they never spoke of, a fish so unnatural it knifed a silence in their lives for weeks. They stomped its head in, made a blackened, burbling mush of it, and yet they knew it lived on somehow, and that it would return. And in recent times it had returned, fish head leering in windows, tormenting the man.
Tonight, the man thinks, tonight the fish we never spoke of will go back to that dark water.
His daddy’s ghost is there to lead him.
How did his daddy lose his legs? He lost them on account of the tiny kites his son used to sell. Selling tiny kites put the son in a state of constant agitation. The tiny kite business is more stressful than most people know. The son filled up with sadness and anxiety, and eventually, rage. He didn’t kill his daddy. No. Killing daddies is bad.
One Sunday evening, he and his daddy and his wife had themselves a summer barbecue. They barbecued catfish the man and his daddy had caught and they ate the catfish with potato salad and cornbread made by the wife. They ate slices of watermelon for dessert. They sat in plastic chairs on the front lawn and ate their food and drank mint juleps. This barbecue was held to celebrate the success of the man’s tiny kite business. In just over a month of selling tiny kites, he’d made his first thousand dollars. He was well on his way to becoming a premium salesman of tiny kites. He’d already coined his own pitch line. “Easiest kites there are to fly,” he’d say, flying two tiny kites at once. This sold him a lot of kites, but it also impacted his relationship with his wife and his daddy because he’d taken to saying it all the goddamn time. After making love to his wife, he’d roll over and lie on his back and sigh contentedly and exhale a long breath, then say in a voice just above a whisper, “Easiest kites there are to fly.” Out fishing with his daddy, every time he caught a fish, in this time when he was becoming a successful tiny kite salesman, he’d raise the fish by its lip, kiss it on its big old slimy head, and say, “Easiest kites there are to fly.” The man became obsessed in his first month of selling tiny kites, so that finally, on the night of the barbecue to celebrate his success, his daddy said to him, “Son, shut up about those stupid kites. They make you a living but a living’s not a life. There are more important things than tiny kites.”
Now, this was a thing the man knew. Of course there were more important things. But the man was not himself then. He was mad with mint juleps and even madder with tiny kites, so far gone in fact that he struck his daddy across the face. He said, “Daddy, don’t you trample on my success. I shed blood and tears to get to a point in my life where I can sell tiny kites. Don’t you trample that.”
His daddy rubbed his head. “I’m not trampling your success, son. I’m proud of you. You make me nothing but proud.”
“Proud my ass,” the man said, and he struck his father again, for his heart had been blinded by his ambition.
His wife screamed for him to stop but he kept on hitting his daddy, even as the old man scrambled across the lawn to his dinky-ass car in the driveway. The man chased his daddy’s car halfway down the block before turning back, and the expression of horror fixed on his wife’s face told him he was a poisoned man.
On his drive home from the barbecue, the man’s daddy was so distraught, so heartbroken, he wept into the steering wheel and in that way blew through a stop sign at a four way intersection and slammed into a minivan carrying a family on their way home from evening mass. The man’s daddy was drunk and got slapped with a DUI, but that was not the worst or even the second worst thing to happen. The front of his car caved in like it was made of tinfoil and his legs were crushed so bad they had to be amputated. And a boy in the back of the minivan wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, and upon impact he bounced around the inside of the minivan like a pinball, dying pretty much instantly. So upon his release from the hospital, the man’s daddy went straight to prison and served time for vehicular manslaughter, all because his son had let those tiny kites go to his head.
The man gave up selling tiny kites after that. He went into other lines of work. Going door to door for the Census Bureau. Installing solar panels on rich people’s houses. Freezing his ass off in an ice cream warehouse. The man found all sorts of work, although he really didn’t have
to do all that much of it. The man and his wife lived a simple life. She worked at a pet store and he did his thing and that was that. They went dancing on Saturday nights and sometimes to a movie on Friday. He fished morning and night and sometimes fiddled with the guitar and she knitted and read romance novels and baked elaborate cakes that she entered in the county fair each autumn.
Excepting the period when the man went crazy with tiny kites, they lived a good and simple life. The man and his daddy reconciled once his daddy became a free man again. They fished on the lake, although now the man’s daddy was bound to a wheelchair and had to be pushed around. They still held the occasional barbecue on the front lawn. Everything was fine like that for a year or so, until one day when the man’s daddy’s heart failed and the old man dropped dead. It was a real shame too. The big trout opener had been coming up and the man’s daddy was looking forward to catching one of the trophy browns they were stocking in the lake. The man’s daddy had always wanted to catch a trophy brown.
After his daddy’s funeral, the man took to whiskey harder than he had since his days staying out late with his boys. He rarely went fishing. He sat on the edge of the bed facing the wall, absently strumming his out-of-tune guitar. He sang songs that made little sense to his wife. “Your songs don’t make any sense,” she’d tell him. “I don’t get it.”
The man didn’t get it either. Another darkness had entered his life. At his daddy’s funeral, an unexpected visitor had showed. That unspeakable fish they caught years before hovered above his daddy’s coffin. Nobody else noticed or acknowledged, but the man, he wept in fear. His wife squeezed his hand and wept harder herself. People around him issued little nods as if to say, “We feel you, son. We feel your pain.” When the fish lowered itself onto the coffin, sliming the lacquered lid, the man could no longer contain himself. He cried out, “Go away!”
People thought he spoke of pain and death. Go away, pain. Go away, death. But the man had no beef with pain or death. No move could ever be made in life without inflicting hurt on someone or something else. Every true fisherman knew that, and the man was a true fisherman. This evil fish they’d caught and killed and justifiably feared would live again, this fish juicing on his daddy’s coffin, lived beyond the human world of pain and death.
Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Page 7