Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

RB shrugged. “Just do,” he said. “It’s from that cartoon.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Ramage said.

The head full of paint fumes, the numbness in the arms, the reluctant knees, the rigid back — the body’s memory: Ramage felt this, and no one else moved from the bed, as if the day’s work had brought them to a poise. Outside, there was nothing but the separateness of feeling used and spent, of rundown bones and sore muscles and another day and at the narrow end of it a tub of tepid water that would instantly turn tea-brown and drain away, leaving a ring of crud around the porcelain. His first day of work in two months had exhausted Ramage; he was spacey with fatigue; they all were, and for a moment Ramage wished that they might rest and sleep and dream together on this bed until morning.

Back at the motel, Ramage washed his hands and face at the sink, listening to the baby cry next door. He sponged his chest and armpits and put on his clean shirt.

Standing outside, he heard the baby, still crying, and knocked on the door. No one answered. He pushed the door open slowly and saw the baby alone in the room; a crib had been squeezed between the bed and the sliding doors of a closet. Clothes were scattered on the floor, over the nightstand, flung across the TV screen. An empty bottle of strawberry wine with its cap resealed lay in the wastebasket along with a condom wrapper and a plastic straw and a nest of black hair someone had cleaned from a comb. A calendar hung on the wall, but no one had bothered to turn the page since the end of summer.

The baby shrieked. Its tiny hands reached through the slatted cage of the crib, opening and then closing into tight fists. Ramage saw the pacifier that had fallen to the carpet. He picked it up and rinsed the hair and grit away under the faucet. He set the pacifier in the baby’s hand and the baby pitched it back to the floor. Ramage cleaned it off again, and this time stuck the rubber nipple in the baby’s mouth. The baby’s eyes softened and it sucked contentedly. The baby was maybe a year old. It was naked. It wasn’t even diapered. Ramage touched it; he pressed his thumb into the soft skin.

Outside, he saw Rigo working his way up from the beach, over the sand, past a lifeguard station that had been knocked down for the winter. He waited for him to cross the highway.

“Buy you a drink?” Ramage asked.

“Certainly,” Rigo said.

Certainly: it was one of Rigo’s words, a magniloquence in his otherwise lean vocabulary. Ramage ushered him into the bar. Sawdust had been strewn about the floor; oyster shells broke like bones underfoot. A few other people sat at the scattered tables. Ramage saw a man and a woman he thought might be his neighbors at the motel. They were bending into the yellow light of the jukebox, looking for a good song.

Ramage saluted Rigo with a nod of his bottle and they drank down their beers in unison.

“RB, he talk too much,” Rigo said.

“That’s just RB,” Ramage said. “He’s having fun, he’s goofing.”

“In Jersey City,” Rigo said, “outside my apartment, there is a telephone. All night, the niggers out there. They play their music, they talk their talk. I call police — nothing.”

Rigo finished his beer, ordered another round. Ramage insisted on paying; he considered it part of his position as foreman of the crew, a way of building esprit de corps.

“So I take care of business myself, as a man must,” Rigo said. “I chase them with a baseball bat. I chase them every night. They always come back.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Ramage said.

“RB is nigger, not me.”

“Don’t call him that. Not to his face, anyway.”

“He calls that to us, to our face.”

“What were you doing on the beach?” Ramage asked, changing the subject, although he knew the answer: Rigo was sleeping down there, saving the expense of a motel room, pocketing the modest per diem. RB’s riff on refugees had not been far off. Rigo wired a remittance every month to an uncle exiled in Honduras.

“I love the ocean, Ramage.” Rigo looked at his dirty hands, a little embarrassed. Then he said, “When I first come with my family to Jersey City, every day I fish. Every morning I go with my bucket to the park where I have a view of the Estatua — Estatua de la Libertad. They are cleaning her, she is — all everywhere — they put—”

“Scaffolding?” Ramage guessed.

“Scaffolding,” Rigo repeated, reciting the lesson. “I catch many fish. I bring fish home I do not know the name of.” Rigo broke off. He seemed bewildered, recalling the beginning, before names. “My wife, she no say the word ‘refrigerator’ so good. She just learning. She say it, ‘the dead fish museum.’ ”

“I like that,” Ramage said. “The dead fish museum.”

“We can no eat all that I catch.”

“I’m surprised you ate any of it,” Ramage said.

The bar door opened, and the blond star took up a stool near the register. Her drink came in a goblet and the bartender had produced a faded paper parasol, cocked over the frosted rim of the glass. It was a summer garnish, but in the dim slow bar the parasol failed to add much in the way of gaiety.

“In El Salvador,” Rigo said, “you go to the beach with the children, Sunday, you stay all day. The sand is clean and white and the man, he comes with las ostras for you. Limón, tabasco, pepper: you go down like nothing.”

“I can taste them now,” Ramage said.

“Certainly,” Rigo said. “Here, the beach is garbage. Everything wash up. Tonight, I find a door to the house. A door to the man’s house, Ramish.”

Rigo held his hands above the bar, staring into the empty space they created. He seemed to be picturing the thing his words had just described, trying to put his hands around the hallucination of it; they tensed with frustration; he could not hold the thing, and the picture in his mind floated away. Rigo grabbed his beer and finished it off. He ordered another.

“I no eat on the beach here,” he said. “But the ocean, she is the ocean still.”

They crossed the necks of their bottles together in a sloppy swashbuckling salute, and Ramage drank with the image of blue water, of open sea, before him. The soreness deep in his body had risen into a pleasant hum on the surface of his skin. He felt loose and shallow.

“I do not know what kind of movie this is,” Rigo said.

“No,” Ramage said. “I didn’t tell you.”

“Now I know,” Rigo said.

Rigo drank his whiskey and spun the empty shot glass like a top on a tilted axis. The glass wobbled violently; it stopped and he spun it again. He seemed torn between maintaining dignity and getting trashed. Each word was the end of a very long journey. Every sentence jeopardized his loyalties.

“I am surprise how things are,” Rigo said.

Ramage said, “It’s only three days.”

“Salvador,” Rigo said, raising his bottle.

“Salvador,” Ramage said.

They toasted each other, the bar, the empty tables, the jukebox that had fallen silent.

“Salvador,” Rigo said again.

Another drink, and another after that: Ramage couldn’t keep pace.

“I no choice. I must go away or die. I die, my family die. I come here. I don’t know to what. To what, Ramish— to what ?”

“You going back someday?” Ramage asked.

“They rape the women with rats,” Rigo said. “A man from my town has a nail”—he pounded the air—“in his head, his—” and with a balled fist he knocked on his forehead.

“His skull,” Ramage said.

Rigo shook his head. “Su cerebro.”

“His brain?”

“Yes, he can no speak with a nail in his brain.”