Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

Women wiped themselves off with towels. A few naked men stood nonchalantly in a huddle, asking one another about their itineraries, where they’d go next. Desiree’s skin had a stung, hectic appearance, and one of her ankles was still bound, the rope trailing after her as she moved about the set, saying her goodbyes.

RB was partly undressed, standing foolishly in his stocking feet and boxers and rayon shirt. He said to Ramage, “Greenwad fucked me.”

Ramage didn’t say anything.

“You get a bone on?” RB said, looking at Rigo. “You know what a bone is, right?” With a fist he feinted in the direction of Rigo’s crotch. “Huh, Harvard? A bone? A woody? Huh? You like seeing women tied up? That what you do in your country?”

Rigo reached for RB’s mouth as if to stop the flow of words, smashing it shut. An instant passed and then RB smiled, the gate of white teeth washed pink with blood. His lip was torn. RB slammed the butt of his palm against Rigo’s chin, shoving back on his jaw as though pounding open a door. It was a moment before anyone noticed, but then a circle gathered, and the onlookers, by their steady gazes, seemed to freeze the fight in tableau: Rigo fallen on the floor, RB smiling down on him. Rigo rose once more and rushed RB, and again RB knocked him to the ground. This time Ramage bent over Rigo and told him to stay down. RB’s hand filled with blood. He showed it to Ramage as if the substance puzzled him. “Fucking Harvard,” he said, and then he slowly wiped the blood off his hand, painting Rigo’s face with it.

After Greenfield paid him off, Ramage walked down to the pier, looking for Rigo. His encampment was on the lee side of a restroom; a picnic table tipped on its side formed a second wall of his shelter and he’d made a roof of the door he’d scrounged from the ocean. A small pit in the sand was filled with sticks of driftwood and wet ashes. Rigo was gone.

Desiree came by the motel later that evening, carrying her suitcase.

“Where to?” Ramage asked.

“Los Angeles,” she said. “Another job. You?”

“RB’s coming by,” Ramage said. “I’ve got to pay him. Then it’s over.”

“I had a dream about me and you last night. Somebody was taking us somewhere, they wanted to show us something. We were riding in the back seat of a limousine. There was a baby in it, this dead baby.”

Ramage waited. “And?”

“That’s it,” she said. “The baby was dead, but it wasn’t ugly and rotten or anything. It was just still.”

There was a hard rap on the door and Ramage answered.

“Oh boy, what do we have here?” RB said. He pointed to the bottle of rum. “Don’t mind if I do.”

Ramage found another plastic cup in the bathroom. He removed the safety seal and poured out a small measure of the rum and then watered it down. RB sat in the chair beside Desiree.

“I’ve got your money,” Ramage said.

“There’s no rush,” RB said.

RB fingered the arm of his chair, running a nail back and forth through the fretted grooves, blindly retracing a rosette. In a minute, Ramage decided, he would give RB his money. The bills were crisply folded into a small manila pay envelope Ramage had slipped into his shirt pocket.

RB finished his drink and tapped the plastic cup against the armchair. He looked at Desiree. “I was wondering, how is it you get paid? You get your money by the hour, or you get a salary, or what?”

“By the scene,” she said. She was looking at Ramage when she answered; her voice was barely audible.

“The scene? You mean what you do, how many times you do it, like that?”

“Will you call me a cab?” Desiree asked Ramage.

“Like two men — you do two men you get paid more?”

She nodded.

RB said, “I seen you in a movie with a midget. I figure a dwarf can do it, I can, too. You remember that guy, that midget?”

“Sure,” Desiree said.

“That was sick.”

She got up and went to the bathroom. RB and Ramage sat silently. Through the thin door, they could hear her peeing.

“Shouldn’t hang no hollow-core doors in a small room like this,” RB said. “No privacy.”

Ramage handed RB the envelope. “Here’s your money,” he said. “There’s a bonus.”

RB set the envelope aside.

“You all laid-in, you taken care of. Desiree Street, huh?”

“Take your money, RB.”

“Couldn’t have no nigger in on that.” RB counted his pay, tossing one of the bills to the floor. “I don’t want your bonus.”

Ramage dialed the phone and ordered a cab.

“Bitch taking a long-ass time in the bathroom,” RB said.

“Don’t make this a bad scene,” Ramage said. He twirled his drink as though there were ice in it.

Desiree came out of the bathroom. She sat on the bed and worked the strap of her sandals, refastening the tiny brass buckles.

RB said, “Why don’t we all make a movie?”

Desiree took a drink. Over the edge of her glass she said, “Where’s your camera?”

“In my head,” RB said.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You all got cameras in your head.”

“I’m not like all them.”

“None of you are like all of them.”

“In my movie,” RB said, “I wouldn’t tie you up and whip you or anything. I’d treat you right.”

“Sure you would,” Desiree said. “In your movie you’d send me flowers every day.”

Ramage followed Desiree out the door and through the empty lot to a waiting cab. She settled in the back seat and he waited, expecting her to roll down the window and say goodbye, but she didn’t. He went back to the room and gathered up his stuff, zipping his tool sack shut. RB had moved from the chair to the bed.

RB said, “I come here, I see you got your own little movie in progress. You didn’t want me in on your thing. You cut me out.”

“You’re wrong,” Ramage said. “There was no thing.”

“Spooky, man, how dumb do you think I am?”

He put his sack down in the motel lobby. Behind the glass, through a beaded curtain, he could see the blue glow of a television, could hear the snappy rhythm of sitcom repartee and the spurts of canned laughter. On top of the television, between a potted cactus and a jar of pennies, was a photograph of a young man and woman, circa 1950, the woman laughing, her light hair blown by some long-ago breeze, the man with a cigarette in his mouth and a collar upturned against the same stiff wind. Ramage couldn’t see where they were standing; the photo was overexposed and the background had bleached away. The desk clerk was asleep on the couch, her fat, heavy leg resting on a coffee table cluttered with magazines, a plastic bowl of popcorn, a can of diet soda, a spotless green ashtray. Ramage tapped the service bell.

“I’m checking out,” he said.

The woman looked through her files; she shrugged, hopeless.

“I can’t find your thing,” she said. “How long’ve you been here?”

“Three days,” Ramage said.

“Seems longer,” she said. She started the itemized math on a receipt.

Ramage separated seventy-five dollars from his pay and set the money on the counter. Outside, the motel’s blue vacancy sign was just beginning to glow in a halo of mist blowing up from the beach.

“Seventy-five,” the woman announced.

Ramage slid the money forward. “Kind of dead this time of year,” he said.

She gave him the receipt. “You know the others, that was next to you? They skipped out.”

“You should make people pay in advance,” Ramage said. They waited in an awkward frozen silence, staring at each other. Ramage rapped his knuckle on the counter, breaking the spell, and left.

He walked across the parking lot and dropped his tool sack at the foot of the palm tree. The brown fronds spread above him and the air smelled of cinnamon. Bruised and sore, he sat back against the trunk and unzipped his bag. He pulled out his clothes and groped along the bottom and then turned the sack over and emptied his tools into the sand. A car drove by, and in the wake of its passing everything was briefly quiet. The gun was gone. He considered the probable suspects and decided that RB had taken it. A moment later he was convinced that Rigo had stolen it. Then he wondered if it was Desiree. When his cab came, he repacked his things and stood to go. Behind him in the empty lot a string of tin cans his neighbors had cut loose lay twisted on the asphalt — too much clatter, he supposed, as they made their getaway. The desk clerk sat at the counter behind the sheet of bulletproof glass. He’d disturbed her sleep and now she was awake. She’d turned on a lamp and was reading, the white waste of her face set to the romance.