Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

We didn’t know what on earth it was when the ship came into the harbor. So the chief, he sent out some warriors in a couple of canoes to see what it was. They were taking a good look at those white people on the deck there.

Kype raised his salmon by the gill and stared into its face as if it had spoken.

One white man had a real hooked nose, you know. And one of the men was saying to this other guy,” ‘See, see. He must have been a dog salmon, that guy there. He’s got a hooked nose.” The other guy was looking at him, and a man came out of the galley and he was a hunchback. And the other one said, “Yes! We’re right, we’re right. Look at that one. He’s a humpback. He’s a humpback salmon.”

Kype shook the urn at his ear but only heard the dice-like rattle of bones and teeth.

So they went ashore and they told the big chief, “You know what we saw? They’ve got white skin. But we’re pretty sure that those people on the floating thing there, they must have been fish. But they’ve come here as people.”

Kype looked at the old wooden woman, whose silver eyes had closed, the leather of her lids lowered like shades. He was still hearing the story, a steady somewhat distant drone of words, like the sound of an alarm in another room that’s heard from inside a dream. He swallowed hard to clear the pressure in his ears and reached for a lamp stand, trying to steady himself, but his hand clutched empty air as the house yawed and his rubbery legs buckled. He turned and bolted aft, up the steps to deck level, down the crooked gangway, through the cavernous tunnel and out. He ran into the middle of the road and waited in the white dusty light until Nell and D’Angelo emerged from the boat, blinking like tired children.

Nell led them to a corrugated-tin shed, where they found, in a walk-in refrigerator, cases of milk in pint cartons, stacked to the ceiling. D’Angelo hoisted one of the cases onto his shoulder and they marched off along a path spongy with duff and down a steep crooked slope with worn steps of rocks and exposed roots until they came to a tiny inlet. A small stream, not ten feet wide, spilled into an estuarial flat choked with eelgrass and then into the ocean. They forded the stream and came to a campsite. A bleached stick, pitted like old bone, had been jabbed in the sand. Bird feathers, clamshells, and the pinnate fronds of a sword fern, dried brown, were strung together, dangling from the stick and fluttering in the wind. Nell sat down and hitched her skirt up over her knees, gathering the loose folds in her hands.

“You can light a fire there,” she said.

Kype and D’Angelo stared at one another.

“Are you men or what?” Nell asked. “Gather wood and light a fire or we’re gonna freeze our asses when the sun goes down.”

They stripped moss and bark from the trees and hauled several loads of driftwood and then stopped by the stream for a drink. It was a beautiful little stream, the water pure and clear as crystal, shining with light, but the banks were stacked with dead fish. They were drying in the sand and swarming with flies, their skin baked a golden bronze by the sun, or they were caught up in the weeds along shore, rotting in the shallow water. Their eye sockets were ghostly accusing hollows like the gaze of a vacant mask and their long ragged teeth were bared as if to scare away scavengers. “I guess I’m not thirsty,” D’Angelo said. “What the fuck’s wrong with these fish?” The living didn’t look any better than the dead. They were thin and weak and mutilated, their flesh ripped and trailing from their bodies like rags. Their scales had coarsened, rough and crude as chain mail, and their gaunt skeletal faces were filled with sharp canine teeth. Some of these haunted fish were hardly motile, finning drowsily in the shallow stream, while others fought for position over the redds, weaving in and out, and others still, ravaged by parasites, were alive but so near death they were already decomposing.

“You gonna cook that salmon?” Nell asked, when the fire caught and began to bank up.

“Sure he is,” D’Angelo said.

Kype asked, “Who was that old woman?”

“That’s my great-grandma,” Nell said. “I bet she’s older ’n your grandpa and she ain’t in no jewelry box either.”

“She wasn’t what you’d call friendly.” Kype hadn’t brought a knife but he patted his pockets anyway.

“She probably didn’t even know you were there. She’s blind.”

“Bullshit,” Kype said.

“Bullshit you,” Nell said.

“She looked right at me. She knew I was there alright. She talked to me. She told me a story.”

“You maybe heard something, but you didn’t hear her. She doesn’t talk. She stopped a while back.”

“I’m telling you, she spoke to me.”

“Cut up that fish,” Nell said.

“I didn’t bring a knife.”

D’Angelo hopped to, arranging a row of the square pint cartons along the top of a gray driftlog. Empty shotgun shells and spent casings marked the location of an earlier milk massacre. Old cartons sat in the sand, bled dry but still giving off a soured reek.

“Gummerment milk,” Nell explained. “We don’t know what to do with it all. We drink a little and shoot the rest.”

D’Angelo said, “I can’t wait.”

“My grandfather got that gun out of the Everett morgue,” Kype said. “From a friend who worked there. He had a bucket of guns just laying around.”

D’Angelo said, “That musta been way back yonder in nineteen aught something or other, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Kype said glumly.

He removed his boat shoes and burrowed his pale pink feet in the sand. He stepped into the stream and started walking through the throng of dead and dying salmon toward the beach. A glassy wet margin of sand where the waves of a rising tide turned back left a wrack of sea lettuce and sand dollars and long whiplike ropes of kelp. Out to sea the lowering sun brought the craggy silhouettes of rocks into relief. Kype stood in the churning white froth, waves collapsing around him, growing cold; a blueness had crept into the light. Cormorants gathered on the rocks and dried their wings, a strange apostolate with their heads turned aside and their black wings outspread, like robed priests offering a benediction.

When Kype returned, Nell was gutting their salmon with the shell of a razor clam she’d whetted against a rock. He stood behind her and saw how the firelight brought the red in her hair to the surface. She’d been singing to herself and then she stopped and turned and said, “Hey, asshole.” He moved out of her light and her song resumed. Nell skewered the salmon with sticks, interlacing several deft sutures through the meat, and then she cantilevered the whole fish over the fire with a tree branch staked in the sand. The unadorned fillets began sizzling, the skin dripping gobbets of crackling fat on the coals.

“Kype.” D’Angelo’s voice echoed off the wet rock walls of the tiny cove and, reverberating, seemed to call Kype’s name from out at sea. “I’d say this is your spot.”

“I’m not feeling it.”

“You’re running out of choices, Buddha-boy.”

“I think I’ll head back,” Kype said. “It’s been a long day.”

“You can’t leave me out here.”

“You can’t leave period,” Nell said.

“Three’s a crowd. You guys enjoy the salmon.”

“The trail’s under water,” Nell said. “You have to wait for the tide to change.”

“Under water?”

“Not forever. It goes back out, dontcha know? All you have to do is wait.”

Kype pulled at the salmon with his fingers. The pink flesh was fatty and moist, with a smoky wood flavor. He folded the crisp skin in half and ate that, too. Finished, he picked his teeth with a white bone and said, “The old woman told me we were fish.”