Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

When I look at the photographs — old black-and-whites, with deckle edges and the date printed along the bottom border — I understand that my father was topping off the tank of his car at a filling station (in Tucson, my mother says) and I see that he was, apparently, quite a handsome man. My mother stands beside him, wearing a neat white scarf and squinting into the same harsh sun, but other than that, the photo yields nothing in the way of memories, nothing I might attach myself to, and my perspective on the scene, those rare, bemused times when I open the box and linger over its contents, is that of the anonymous man who, strolling down a sidewalk sometime in AUG 1961, was stopped by a young couple, handed a camera, and asked to press the button — a stranger on his way elsewhere.

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Jimmy’s car was nearly out of gas, so we took mine to town the next morning. The birthday party wasn’t until later that night. Jimmy figured we had some time to kill, and he wanted to see the sights, so we drove a back route, winding along the levee. There wasn’t much to see, the mountains were gone, the landscape blurred. The rain beat down hard and ragged shreds of mist and fog rose off the dark strips of harrowed earth. A dirt road ran along the top of the levee and here and there as we drove we saw men unloading sandbags off the back of flatbeds.

“I did that before,” Jimmy said. He wiped a clearing in the windshield and leaned forward. “Those bags are nothing but deadweight, nothing but sand. In the Philippines, half of the bags would be rotten from storage. There’d be sand spilling out everywhere when you tried to lift ’em.”

“How long were you overseas?”

“Two tours,” Jimmy said. “A year total.”

When we left the levee, Jimmy turned to watch it vanish. “You want to see some tired-ass people, talk to those guys tonight.”

The talk in town was of the flood, whether it would come or not, and, after that seemed beyond all reasonable doubt, when it would come, and how bad it would be. Comparisons were made to past floods, floods in memory, floods in history. We heard the news like we heard the rain, rumorous talk falling all around us, filling the air. We walked to Melvin’s and I fixed Jimmy up with a decent fly rod and a reel; I bought him a tackle box, too, and loaded that up with everything he’d need to get started — tapered leaders, flotant, flies, knife. Jimmy was like a kid, happy to be indulged. At the register, he picked up a net, and then at the last minute, already headed out the door, he added a duck-cloth cap to the inventory. Jimmy wore the cap, stretching it on as we left. “Gotta have my top,” he said. He hooked a fly in the crown, for the proper look.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

We walked to a bar called The Usual, a dark room with a jukebox of corny standards and stools fashioned from old tractor seats. It was empty except for a few older men. Jimmy seemed pensive and distant, as if slowly and vividly picturing to himself everything he said. As he spoke he rattled a fistful of peanuts in his hand like dice, stopping now and then to pop one in his mouth and wash it down with a swallow of beer. His upper arm flexed tightly each time. He had a tattoo of a blue dagger on it. A snake was wreathed around the shaft, a drop of red blood falling from its forked tongue, and the Marine motto, Semper fi, was etched across the hilt.

In conversation, he went back to the Philippines.

“I’ve never seen such a fucked-up place,” Jimmy said. “They do this thing, they get a young girl in a boat and dress her in white. Like a wedding dress. And she stands in the boat, spreading her arms out, like an angel. There’s boys in the boat, too, and you throw coins in the water, this canal, this dirty fucking canal with dead dogs and stinking fish, oil slicks, all this floating shit.” He pushed a peanut along the bar with the lid of a matchbook, then flipped the peanut into an ashtray. “The boys dive down in all that shit for the coins.”

I listened, letting him go on. He seemed to want to draw a picture for me.

“They all want to come to America,” he said. “But for twenty-five dollars a month you can get a straw hut and a whore to clean it. She cooks for you, washes your shit, fucks you. Then tour’s up, and it’s goodbye.”

“Where’d you meet Naga?” I asked.

Jimmy looked at me.

“Her people are different,” he said. “They’re sugar people. From the mountains. I met her at church.”

I said she was beautiful.

“She’s perfect,” Jimmy said. “The women over there are great, the good ones, at least. The man’s everything to them. When they get married, they get married, and that’s it. They know what it means. They don’t make you dive in a shit river, that’s for sure.”

I felt a sort of tender condescension toward Jimmy and his need for this purity. In Naga he’d found a girl too young for corruption, whose language was that of a child. She would never call him a dirty little boy.

“Meagan’s happy for you,” I said.

“You mean she’s happy things aren’t worse,” Jimmy said. He pushed his glass forward for another beer. “I’m trying to get this business started.”

“The janitor thing.”

“She probably had a good laugh about it.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“I need to borrow some money to get started.”

“You could get a small-business loan,” I suggested.

“Says who? I don’t even have gas money to get back to California. I was hoping you guys could help.”

“We’re stretched pretty thin, Jimmy.”

“You just bought a house,” he said. Jimmy looked down the dark length of the bar and out the window, a bleached gray square in the wall. Rain washed over the canvas awning; the streets were empty. “You must have some money.”

I didn’t know what to say, and I held my hands up, to show they were empty. Jimmy shrugged.

“Can I have the receipt?” he asked.

“The receipt?”

“For the fishing stuff. Just in case I have to return it.”

“We can return it now,” I said. “I’ll give you the cash.”

“Maybe Dad will give me a birthday check,” Jimmy said. “I don’t think he likes Naga.”

“He’ll come around.”

“I doubt it,” Jimmy said. “But who knows? It’s like with Joey. He cries all the time, and it’s a real pain in the ass. At first I thought to myself, Shit, man, I don’t want that! But now I look at him and think, That’s mine. All mine. I’m just as proud as any father. I’ll play ball with him. We’ll fish. We’ll do those things.”

We finished our beers. Jimmy stood slowly and made a show of fumbling for his wallet but I paid our tab and left a generous tip. The old bartender shuffled over as we left, saw the tip, and said, “Stay dry, fellas.”

Jimmy grabbed his tackle and went inside, and I ran up to the road on the levee for a quick look at the river. Normally an easy emerald green, the Skagit churned muddy brown, sweeping small uprooted trees and bone-gray logs away from its collapsing clay shores. The water was certainly rising. Mr. George’s dog, an old grizzled retriever, stood on the roof of the cabin, soaked and barking, and Mr. George himself, stumbling around under an oppressive olive-drab raincoat, loaded a spare dinghy with supplies and furniture from inside. The dinghy was tethered by a long slack rope to the roof of his house; in it he’d crammed a chair, a stool, a box of books, a lamp, an axe, a fruit crate stuffed with papers, a stack of wooden bowls, a chandelier and silverware and what looked like a toaster, several knotted plastic sacks, a golden trophy of some sort. I watched him lash a blue tarp over the boat. Anything that could be secured was tied down, covered in canvas or caught in fishnet, hung from the eaves of his tiny shack; things that wouldn’t fit in the net or float were left to fend for themselves. I yelled to Mr. George but my voice instantly vanished, lost in the pounding rain, and when he finally saw me on the levee he could only pantomime his helplessness, pointing to the river, and then raising both hands to the sky. I waved farewell and went back across the road to my house.