The Dead Fish Museum

by Charles D'Ambrosio

  “I didn’t bring a knife.”

  D’Angelo hopped to, arranging a row of the square pint cartons along the top of a gray driftlog. Empty shotgun shells and spent casings marked the location of an earlier milk massacre. Old cartons sat in the sand, bled dry but still giving off a soured reek.

  “Gummerment milk,” Nell explained. “We don’t know what to do with it all. We drink a little and shoot the rest.”

  D’Angelo said, “I can’t wait.”

  “My grandfather got that gun out of the Everett morgue,” Kype said. “From a friend who worked there. He had a bucket of guns just laying around.”

  D’Angelo said, “That musta been way back yonder in nineteen aught something or other, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Kype said glumly.

  He removed his boat shoes and burrowed his pale pink feet in the sand. He stepped into the stream and started walking through the throng of dead and dying salmon toward the beach. A glassy wet margin of sand where the waves of a rising tide turned back left a wrack of sea lettuce and sand dollars and long whiplike ropes of kelp. Out to sea the lowering sun brought the craggy silhouettes of rocks into relief. Kype stood in the churning white froth, waves collapsing around him, growing cold; a blueness had crept into the light. Cormorants gathered on the rocks and dried their wings, a strange apostolate with their heads turned aside and their black wings outspread, like robed priests offering a benediction.

  When Kype returned, Nell was gutting their salmon with the shell of a razor clam she’d whetted against a rock. He stood behind her and saw how the firelight brought the red in her hair to the surface. She’d been singing to herself and then she stopped and turned and said, “Hey, asshole.” He moved out of her light and her song resumed. Nell skewered the salmon with sticks, interlacing several deft sutures through the meat, and then she cantilevered the whole fish over the fire with a tree branch staked in the sand. The unadorned fillets began sizzling, the skin dripping gobbets of crackling fat on the coals.

  “Kype.” D’Angelo’s voice echoed off the wet rock walls of the tiny cove and, reverberating, seemed to call Kype’s name from out at sea. “I’d say this is your spot.”

  “I’m not feeling it.”

  “You’re running out of choices, Buddha-boy.”

  “I think I’ll head back,” Kype said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “You can’t leave me out here.”

  “You can’t leave period,” Nell said.

  “Three’s a crowd. You guys enjoy the salmon.”

  “The trail’s under water,” Nell said. “You have to wait for the tide to change.”

  “Under water?”

  “Not forever. It goes back out, dontcha know? All you have to do is wait.”

  Kype pulled at the salmon with his fingers. The pink flesh was fatty and moist, with a smoky wood flavor. He folded the crisp skin in half and ate that, too. Finished, he picked his teeth with a white bone and said, “The old woman told me we were fish.”

  Nell said, “You were hearing things.”

  “I know what I heard,” Kype said.

  “She don’t talk.”

  “She talked to me.”

  “Well, I’m just a dumb injun,” Nell said. “Maybe it’s me that’s gone deaf.”

  Kype remembered how his own grandfather had gone selectively deaf in his last years, dialing down his hearing aid at dinner to cut out the highs, the yammering treble of his drunken daughter and Kype’s own adolescent screech, or blasting the volume on the television when the conversation bored him. In truth, he’d been a nasty old man most of Kype’s life, except in the early days. Then, briefly, out of pity for the fatherless boy, he’d mounted an effort, teaching him the sort of folksy wisdom and woodlore that was supposed to build character—in 1937 or whatever. Out camping, the vast gap in age between his grandfather and himself had left Kype with deep feelings of incompetence. Back home, the ancient objects in the house—the dim dusty lampshades, the brass doorknobs that had blackened with time, the monumental rolltop desk where the old man kept his leather-bound ledgers, even the quiver of sharpened pencils in their hammered pewter cup—filled him with a pervasive sorrow, as if the future itself were a legendary relic. He’d been raised to revere a forgotten, disappearing world, a tomorrow so filled with the glories of yesterday that he was forbidden to touch any of it. Nothing in that old house in the Highlands ever changed; in Kype’s memory, even the shadows seemed to have been nailed to the walls.

  “How long until the tide changes?” he asked.

  “Quit whining,” Nell said. “But, uh, you only bring that one bottle?”

  “Let’s do some shooting,” D’Angelo said.

  They left Nell by the fire, walking off thirty paces, arguing ballistics as they searched for an angle where they weren’t likely to get themselves killed by ricocheting bullets.

  Kype loaded the gun. “Let’s wager,” he said.

  “Oh, a wager, how delightful,” D’Angelo said, in a mocking hifalutin accent. “Well okay, old chap, old sport, let’s see—my harmonica against your Cadillac.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Fuck fair, Kype. You’re about to inherit a fortune. You’re done with fair.” He ran a hand through his greasy hair and said, “I’ll throw in my bolo.”

  “I want Nell.”

  “Oh,” D’Angelo said. “Okay.”

  Kype shot first and missed. He’d never used a gun before, and he had expected something monumental, a big bang and some kick, but the pistol was tiny, nearly a toy, and it only made a faint, insignificant pop against the waves resounding in the cove.

  “My turn,” D’Angelo said.

  “I only get one shot?”

  “If you miss it’s not your turn anymore.” D’Angelo frowned, shaking his head. “Everybody knows that.” He steadied the pistol at his side and then yanked it from an imaginary holster, popping off a shot that managed to plug the carton cleanly. “Oh yeah,” he said, stopping to watch the stream of milk bleed into the sand. “That’s the way you do it.” The next shot exploded in a spray of white. The tattered box fell into the river, spilling milk, and drifted away.

  “Never thought I’d be shooting milk when I left Brooklyn,” D’Angelo said.

  “Why’d you leave?” Kype asked.

  “I always had that dream, to hitchhike out west.”

  “I never did.”

  “Where the hell would you go?” D’Angelo said, sweeping the barrel of the gun across the horizon. “Swimming, I guess.”

  “Let me see the gun.”

  “I haven’t missed yet, Kype. It’s still my turn. Why don’t you get us some of that –what did you say your grandfather called it, that hootch? This shooting is giving me a thirst.”

  Kype went for the bottle but Nell refused to give it up and he returned empty-handed.

  “But this isn’t the West anymore,” D’Angelo said. “It’s like west of the West or something.”

  “Let me take a shot.”

  “Kype, if I have to tell you one more time, I’m going to shoot you.”

  Kype wondered if the new life awaiting him after probate would be like this, lived among strangers. He would inherit a fortune but never feel entirely at home—it was like a rider in his grandfather’s will.

  “I thought there’d be something else,” D’Angelo said. “It’s disappointing. It’s making me lonesome. Nothing but stinking fish and the ocean. It’s no wonder you can’t find your spot, Kype. From out here, you have to go east to get to the West.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We need to reload.” D’Angelo handed him the pistol. “But it’s still my turn.”

  “Why do you get the girl?”

  “Her pussy smells like fish,” D’Angelo said. “Just like everything else around here.”

  Kype fed a shell into each chamber and closed the cylinder and gave it a spin. Then he made a break for it. D’Angelo lunged for him, but Kype juked acro
ss the beach, and when he reached the log he shoved the barrel of the gun against the belly of the first carton and shot it. He shot the one next to it; and he shot the one next to that. He tossed one of the milks in the air and tried to shoot it on the wing, missing wildly as the carton zoomed out of the sky, but after it caromed off his head and came to rest in the sand, plopping at his feet, he shot it twice for good measure. He mowed them down, picking off carton after carton, and when he ran out of bullets he grabbed the hot barrel and beat the last few milks with the butt of the gun, hammering away until the seams burst and the waxed cardboard turned to pulp. He caught his breath, looking over the carnage. The milks were slaughtered, and his shirt was soaked. Downstream the dark humped backs of the migrating salmon stirred indifferently in water that had turned cloudy white.

  “Happy, Buddha-man?” D’Angelo brushed sand off his pleated pants and shook out the cuffs. “Now give me the gun.”

  “We’re out of milk, my friend,” Kype said. “I shot the last milk. They’re all dead.”

  “Some sport you are.”

  “There’s nothing left,” Kype said, handing over the gun and the crumpled box of ammo.

  “There’s you,” D’Angelo said. He cinched up his bolo tie, flexed the fingers of his right hand, and squinted at Kype. “And there’s these fucking fish.”

  His first shot pierced the eye of an old buck with a bony face and a long, grim snout that curled like a brass coat hook. It had been holding in some quiet water behind a rock, and when the bullet entered its brain, it merely gave up and let go and was borne gently downstream. D’Angelo knelt near the bank and bumped off two more of the weary, spent fish. They flopped in the shallows, their blood pouring out pink as it mixed with the milk. The stream was small, its narrow channel choked with salmon, and D’Angelo hardly bothered to aim. Every blind shot killed. He blasted the adipose fin off of a hen. He popped another fish in the belly. He shot one that was already dead, and the salmon dissolved, drifting away like a cloud. He stopped to reload, slipping the last shell into the chamber while eying Kype, who turned away and watched the stream flow by. The remaining fish, undisturbed, went about their business. The dying ones swam with a pathetic list, twisting in the current as if blown by the wind. Others were still fighting to make it home to their spawning ground. Upriver a mating pair wove in the current above a redd, braiding the water with their bodies, releasing eggs and milt as if pollinating a flower. The hen eventually dropped back to fan gravel over the nest and cover her fertilized eggs and D’Angelo raised the gun and fired and she died without much agony, just a shiver and then her slowly gaping mouth, faintly protesting, as the current drew her down to the sea.

  “I oughta make you fuckers eat those dead fish!” Nell said. She was holding the urn and the bottle of bourbon hostage in her lap. “Those are my ancestors, you know. You killed my people!”

  “I’m sorry about your fish,” D’Angelo said. “And I’m sorry about your ancestors, too, but I think we’re just gonna have to let bygones be bygones. I don’t see any other solution. Be reasonable.”

  “You be reasonable!” Nell shouted.

  “We’re just going around in circles here,” D’Angelo said. “Young Kype wants old Kype’s ashes back, and Nell, honey-bunch, what is it you want?”

  “I told you already.” She was sick of repeating herself. She scooped out a handful of ashes and broadcast them into the river as if sowing seed.

  “Please don’t throw any more of those ashes,” Kype said.

  “Those fish were all sick,” D’Angelo said.

  She shook the urn in their faces. “And this guy is dead! You want him back, this burned-up old Ashtray Man!”

  They had been fighting forever, shouting over the waves, screaming to be heard, as the cove filled like a bowl, first with shadows, then with night. Now the moon was directly above them, a nimbus floating in the fog, as vague as a coin at the bottom of a well. Kype was cold and shivering in his clammy shirt.

  “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  “Have some milk,” Nell said.

  D’Angelo coaxed heat from the fire, stirring the coals, and then drew the harmonica from his shirt pocket. He tapped spit from the blowholes and then twisted his gummy lips over the instrument, flapping his hands as if he were wailing the most homesick blues ever, but the miserable honking was no match for the sound of the crashing surf, and his song drowned. He threw the harmonica at Nell. “Might as well have that, too,” he said.

  “They come here so we can eat,” Nell said. “What if they don’t come back next year?” She looked at both men, waiting for an answer. “That old woman, my great-grandmother, came here to bathe and pray every morning of her life.”

  “I can’t swim,” D’Angelo said.

  Under cover of dark, Kype stared promiscuously at Nell. She had flat wide cheekbones like the Sphinx and he imagined that for a kiss all he would do was hold those bones, tip her head forward, and drink from her face.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

  “Smart man,” Nell said. “Otherwise bad spooky shit was gonna follow you everywhere and forever.”

  Nell muddled ash and bourbon in the palm of her hand and then dipped her finger in the paste and painted a thick line down the middle of Kype’s forehead. “After this,” she said, “we’ll play the bone game.” She traced two circles around his eyes, enlarging them, and then brushed a black streak across each temple, giving him pointed ears. “You can win back the rest of these ashes,” she said. “I’m giving you that chance.” She drew fangs on either side of his mouth and whiskers that dashed away from his nose. “And then you got to go in that stream and clean yourself up,” she said, unbuttoning Kype’s shirt, “because you stink real bad. The spirits won’t come near you.” On his belly she made a school of crude fish, each like a lopsided Möbius strip. They swam out of his navel toward his heart and then migrated across his collarbone and up his throat to his mouth.

  Kype lay still, hoping Nell would draw more fish on him.

  She said, “You got to get your soul back in your head. Somebody stole it, that’s my guess. Maybe it happened while you were sleeping. Or maybe you got a bad scare and it just jumped out of you. You ever feel the top of your head moving?”

  And just then, he did, as if the top of his skull had been opened like a jar. Calmed by the flutter of Nell’s fingers at his throat, Kype closed his eyes and heard her voice from a distance and strangely saw his grandfather slip a hand in his and lead him into the lobby of a home for retired sailors. It was the dark lobby of what had once been a very fine hotel where old mariners now sat day and night in stuffed chairs and dusty couches and a row of splintering church pews. That there were no more high-seas adventures in the offing, that the distant horizon had finally drawn near, seemed to drive the retired sailors toward extreme solutions—lunacy or silence. Collectively, there wasn’t a corner of the world these men hadn’t visited, not an ocean, a sea, or a river foreign to them, but now they rarely moved from the lobby. A single lamp was lit low beneath a torn shade and an ashtray of cut green glass held a smoldering cigarette from which smoke rose heavenward as slowly as a prayer. But only the rising smoke stirred; it was so quiet and deadstill in the lobby Kype suspected that even the hearts beating beneath the men’s soup-stained shirts pumped like old leather bellows and blew nothing but soft gray ash. No one conversed; no one spoke a word. A silence reigned as if these sailors had been drawn back through time and a private darkness were once again upon the face of the deep. All the waters of the world had retreated and finally gathered in their eyes, deep pools of black or blue or pearl white, glassy reflections that floated like mirages on the surface of their dry and deserted faces.

  Kype was led by the hand up a set of stairs and down a long corridor and somehow he felt that he’d been promised this moment all his life. The hotel’s glory days still hung in the air, still haunted the rooms and halls. The velveteen wallpaper suggested a gay opulence gone seedy, empty lin
en closets lined the dark hallways, dumbwaiters rose from a kitchen full of cold stoves, and the rooms all had long braided cords, thick gold ropes that once rang service bells but now summoned nothing. A door to one of the rooms opened, and Kype stood outside where he watched an old sailor twist his service rope into a noose and hang himself. Had the bells been working, the old man might have lived, inadvertently calling for help as he swayed back and forth, but long ago the tongues had been clipped, and in the silence of that hotel the hoisted sailor strangled. Kype looked on hopelessly. In the mute corridors of the hotel he alone had a voice, but when he screamed for help a dove flushed from his mouth, crying alas, alas, and all Kype could do was stand in the hall and watch. This was a man who had circumnavigated the globe, who had seen the sun set in every hemisphere, and yet he died swinging, as if by a lanyard, in the empty air above his bed. The silence that settled in the room was like the moral at the end of a fable. Kype now felt that he knew what all the sailors in the lobby knew. And what they knew, because they had circled the world, was that the end is pretty much everywhere.

  When Kype opened his eyes, Nell was breaking a stick in half, marking one of the pieces with a band of black ash and leaving the other plain. He understood the rules even before she explained them, as if he’d played the bone game in a past life. Nell would shuffle the sticks behind her back and then all Kype had to do was point left or right and pick the one without the ash. For the first round, just to be fair, Nell agreed to put up her rhinestone hair clip against Kype’s Cadillac.

  “John Wayne gave it to my great-grandmother,” she said.

  “He just came up here and gave it to her?” D’Angelo said.

  “It used to belong to Pilar.”

  “Just pulled in and said, Hi ya, Grannie, I’m John Wayne, here’s a hair clip?”

  “All those guys used to sail up from Hollywood in their yachts. John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable. They came here to fish for salmon and they didn’t use no guns, either.”

  Nell hid her hands behind her back, shuffling the sticks, moving in tune to a song that seemed to have no real words and therefore, to Kype, at least, no beginning and no end. Over and over she sang he ha ya ho ho ha ya ho he, a loop of sound that made no more sense to Kype than the surf or the wind. He looked long and hard at her face, trying to see the truth, but his first guess was wrong and so was his second, and in a matter of a few minutes he’d lost his car and his boat shoes. She shuffled and sang and Kype pointed to Nell’s right hand, and she showed him, once again, the unmarked stick. Between rounds Nell drummed, beating Kype’s boat shoes against a log, but the cadence was off; it seemed crazy and disruptive, working against the heart’s rhythm. The jumbled pounding made Kype tense and excited, it confused and deranged him, and then Nell started weaving taunts into her song. “You’re blind, he ha ya ho,” Nell sang, “you can’t see, ho ha ya ho he.” As a game it seemed no more complicated than a coin toss, and Kype kept playing, believing the odds would naturally swing in his favor. All he needed was time. “He ha ya ho, your head’s got no top.” Nell now had the urn of ashes, the keys to the Eldorado, the bottle of bourbon, the dented harmonica, the gun, and the fishing pole. Kype had never won games or awards or prizes, although his life had always been vaguely presented to him as a kind of victory. He unbuckled his wristwatch. He lost his pants and the contents of his pockets. He discovered that losing didn’t really bother him. It wasn’t nearly the disaster he would have imagined. When his wallet was emptied of cash, he started writing IOUs on old credit card receipts. He pledged his collection of baseball cards, his Mickey Mantle, his Willie Mays, even pawning his autographed Don Mincher from the 1969 Seattle Pilots. Nell’s drumming drove time out of his mind. Unable to stop himself, he began to gamble away little pieces of his inheritance –an antique dining set and a muffineer and a box of costume jewelry that would complement Nell’s hair clip. He stood before her in his forlorn saggy white briefs but didn’t feel cold. He had nothing, like all the great men—like Gandhi. Nothing, like Jesus. Nothing, like the Buddha!