David Means: The Secret Goldfish

These short stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

A division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate 2012

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2005

Copyright © David Means 2004

David Means asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Some of the stories in this book appeared in the following publications:

‘The Secret Goldfish’ in the New Yorker; ‘Lightning Man’ in Esquire; ‘It Counts as Seeing’ in Harper’s; ‘Sault Ste. Marie’ in Harper’s; ‘Blown from the Bridge’ and ‘A Visit from Jesus’ (as ‘Two Folktales from Michigan’) in Witness; ‘Elyria Man’ in McSweeney’s; ‘The Project’ in the Alaska Quarterly Review and Harper’s; ‘Carnie’ in Witness and The Best American Mystery Stories, 2001

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Source ISBN: 9780007164875

EBook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN: 9780007405336

Version: 2016-07-25

To Genève

The pure products of America go crazy—

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Cover

Title Page DAVID MEANS The Secret Goldfish

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Lightning Man

Sault Ste. Marie

It Counts as Seeing

Blown from the Bridge

A Visit from Jesus

Petrouchka [With Omissions]

Elyria Man

The Project

Hunger

Counterparts

Dustman Appearances to Date

Carnie

The Nest

Michigan Death Trip

The Secret Goldfish

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

The first time, he was fishing with Danny. Fishing was a sacrament, and therefore, after the strike, when his head was clear, there was the blurry aftertaste of ritual: the casting of the spoon in lazy repetitions, the slow cranking, the utterance of the clicking reel, the baiting of the clean hook, and the cosmic intuitive troll for the deep pools of cool water beneath the gloss of a wind-dead afternoon. Each fish seemed to arrive as a miracle out of the silence: a largemouth bass gasping for air, gulping the sky, gyrating, twisting, turning against the leader’s force. But then he was struck by lightning and afterward felt like a fish on the end of the line. There was a paradigm shift: he identified purely—at least for a few months—with the fish, dangling, held by an invisible line tossed down from the heavens.

Lucy had languid arms and pearly-white skin—as smooth as the inside of a seashell, he liked to say—and he smelled, upon returning to the house on the Morrison farm one night, her peaty moistness on his fingers. He’d touched her—just swept his fingers into wetness—and now, unable to sleep, he’d gone outside to the porch swing to let the adrenaline subside. His hope was to score with her before he left for boot camp. A storm was coming. Sheets of heat lightning unfurled inside clouds to the west. Deep, laryngeal mumbles of thunder smothered the cricket noise. The bolt that hit him ricocheted off a fence twenty yards away. Later he would recall that he’d half-jokingly spoken to the storm, and even to God, in a surge of testosterone-driven delight. Come on, you bastards, give me what you’ve got—the same phraseology boys his age would soon be using to address incoming mortar rounds on East Asian battlefields. Come on, you bastard, try another one, he yelled just before the twin-forked purple-mauve bolt twisted down from the front edge of the squall line and tore off the fence at what—in flawed memory—seemed a squared right angle. It hit a bull’s-eye on his sternum, so far as the doctors could deduce, leaving a moon-crater burn that never really healed. His father came out shortly to lock up the barn before the storm began (too late), a cheroot lodged in his teeth—and found his son on his back, smoking slightly. During his two-week observational stay in the hospital his teeth ached and sang, although he wouldn’t pick up the apocryphal transmissions of those megawatt, over-the-border Mexican radio stations. Upon his return home, Lucy came to his house and—in the silence of a hot summer afternoon—ran her hand down under the band of his BVDs.

Just before the third strike, a few years later, he saw a stubby orphan bolt, a thumb of spark wagging at him from the fence. (Research would later confirm that these microbolts in truth existed.) When Life magazine ran a single-page photo montage entitled “Lightning Man,” the article said: “Nick Kelley claims he had a strange vision shortly before being struck. He was with two friends in a field a few hours south of Chicago, showing them some property he planned to develop. A small bolt of lightning was seen along a fence just before he was struck. Visions like this, possibly hallucinatory, have been reported by other eyewitnesses.” The photo montage showed him in the backyard with a barbecue fork, pointing it at a sky loaded with thick clouds. The report failed to mention the severe contusion along his cheek and certain neurological changes that would reveal themselves over the course of time. His love for Lucy had been obliterated after the second strike. With the third strike his friendship with Danny was vaporized. And in between the first two, he’d temporarily lost all desire to fish.