Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“You live that long,” D’Angelo said, “there just aren’t many people left to bury you. That’s why you’re out here, driving around like the Buddha, looking for the spot.”

Kype let the conversation die and navigated the old Cadillac Eldorado along the waterfront. The car had belonged to his grandfather, a tall, lean white-haired patriarch who had remained vigorous — still splitting and stacking his own cordwood, still fishing at dawn for kings and silvers off Camano Head — until one evening two weeks ago when he said, “I’m awfully goddamn tired,” and then sat down on the davenport, shut his eyes, and died. Later that night, sharply missing the old man, Kype had looked through his grandfather’s address book and seen something that resembled the score sheet of a high-200 bowler — all spares and strikes, thick black diagonal slashes and X’s drawn through name after name, as one by one all his friends had passed away.

The Eldorado was the last car let on the ferry. Kype and D’Angelo stood up front, gripping the gate chains, the stiff onshore wind whipping their faces.

“Maybe it’s this way,” Kype said. He gestured expansively, sweeping his hand west, the sky a wash of leached red as the sun began to set.

D’Angelo drew a dented Marine Band harmonica from his shirt pocket and tried desperately to turn “Home on the Range” into an upbeat blues number. It was the only song he knew, and it sounded awful. He played it incessantly, but Kype, in the two days since he’d picked up D’Angelo, hadn’t heard much improvement.

When the ferry’s horn blasted, Kype tossed a penny into the Sound, something he’d done for luck on every crossing since he was a kid.

D’Angelo said, “He couldn’t have been much of a dad to you.”

“You don’t know,” said Kype.

“You guys never played catch, I know that.”

“Yes we did,” Kype said.

“You got a fem throw,” D’Angelo said. “You got sissy muscles. Nobody ever showed you, I can tell.”

Kype futzed with the zipper of his thin yellow windbreaker, and said, “Throwing isn’t everything.”

“We’ll find the spot.”

The “spot” was the exact right place to cast loose the old man’s ashes. Kype didn’t know where it was exactly, not on any map at least, but he knew he’d recapture a certain feeling when he got there. He’d been traveling back and forth across the state for a week, retracing his grandfather’s steps, visiting his birthplace, his old haunts, looking for that feeling, that spot. Now Kype was headed for the ocean.

The funeral service — a society gala, a rather garish cross between the stilted air of a museum fund-raiser and the drunken sloppiness of a send-off — had seemed ludicrous to Kype — with everyone from old family friends to business cronies to newspaper reporters speculating about the life and times of ancient Henry Kype Green. His grandfather’s wealth came from sources deep in the history and raw materials of the region — trees and fish, mostly — and the old man had been something of a legend, a legend the local newspapers had been rehashing with sycophantic abandon for the past week. The last of the pioneers, the papers were calling him. True enough, during the Volstead days he’d run booze down the Strait of Haro, he’d been big in timber, the fisheries, he’d served a stint or two in the state legislature. Of his generation, he was certainly the last. Now that he was incinerated and resting in an ash urn, suddenly everyone was an authority. In several hectic days a substantial body of myth had collected around those pale gray ashes.

Kype sat beside his drunken mother in the front pew and listened to the encomiums with the same anxiety he’d felt all week when poring over the accounts that had washed up in the wake of what one journalist rather regally called his grandfather’s “demise.” The reverend mounted the pulpit and announced that for a man as great as Henry Kype Green death was a simple passage, a great reward for service rendered: old Kype, having done so much to improve the earthly garden, had long ago earned a providential seat in Paradise. It seemed to Kype a measure of his grandfather’s eminence in the community that the key passages for the sermon and eulogy were taken from the Book of Revelation— the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, the twenty of this, the seven of that, the angels, the trumpets ! — but then, too, the memorial service had been noisy with senile rumblings, old men and women muttering to themselves, calling out like dreamers, and the whole affair had been a little dotty and obscure and ultimately incomprehensible.

Following the service there was a lavish spread: crustless Walla Walla sweet onion sandwiches, poached sockeye salmon, Dungeness crab, Willapa Bay oysters shucked and bedded in a glacier of shaved ice, mountains of red Delicious apples, all gifts from friends delivered — half in homage, half in throwback to Roman taxation — from the various corners of the state. Kype gave several interviews, but he had the uneasy feeling his words were being reshaped and slotted into a story that had already been written. “My grandfather started out,” he told a reporter from the Times, “as a whistle punk in a donkey show.” The woman asking him questions brightened at the prospect of an unseemly revelation about old Kype’s obscure origins, but grew disappointed, then bored, when she learned that a whistle punk and donkey show had nothing to do with sex. Others were interested in Kype himself, the grandson rumored to be the primary beneficiary named in the will. Kype had never known his father, who’d drowned in a boating accident — waterskiing drunk, he’d neglected to let go of the rope and smashed into a dock — shortly before Kype was born. Kype had been raised in his grandfather’s house in the Highlands. With the reading of the will, he’d be filthy rich. The legacy he’d been raised to expect was about to arrive. This made people want to gawk at him, to see the mechanics of money, or wealth, grinding away inside.

Kype slipped out of the hall and walked next door to the church, where his grandfather’s ashes still rested in the urn. He tucked the urn under his arm like a football and quickly made his way out of the church, down the steps, to the corner where the old man’s car was parked. His mother planned to set the urn on a marble shelf in the family mausoleum, but Kype had other ideas, or thought he did, as he turned the key and started up the ancient Eldorado.

The big car’s headlights bored a tunnel through the dense overhang of cedar and blue spruce, a tunnel that opened briefly before them in a shaft of white light and closed immediately behind them in a darkness tinged red from the taillights. It was the dry season near the end of August and there hadn’t been any rain in weeks. In a few of the gypo outfits, makeshift mills set back from the road, they could see wheels of blue sparks spin from the saws and smell fresh-cut wood as the blades bit pulp. Every now and then they passed a crop of white crosses that marked the location of a deadly wreck. The Eldorado sailed along, its generous suspension floating around the bends and curves so that, although he was driving, Kype managed to give himself a touch of seasickness.

At a fork in the highway, a young woman appeared, holding her thumb out. She was wearing tight white shorts, ankle-strap sandals, and a man’s shirt with the tails knotted together high on her waist. She was leaning against a huge searock, an erratic scrawled over with Day-Glo declarations of love.

“Slow down, slow down,” D’Angelo said. “Let’s get a look.”

Kype eased the car onto the shoulder. The woman picked up a woven basket and hopped into the back seat. She didn’t even ask where they were going. She seemed to know.