Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“I oughta make you fuckers eat those dead fish!” Nell said. She was holding the urn and the bottle of bourbon hostage in her lap. “Those are my ancestors, you know. You killed my people!”

“I’m sorry about your fish,” D’Angelo said. “And I’m sorry about your ancestors, too, but I think we’re just gonna have to let bygones be bygones. I don’t see any other solution. Be reasonable.”

“You be reasonable!” Nell shouted.

“We’re just going around in circles here,” D’Angelo said. “Young Kype wants old Kype’s ashes back, and Nell, honey-bunch, what is it you want?”

“I told you already.” She was sick of repeating herself. She scooped out a handful of ashes and broadcast them into the river as if sowing seed.

“Please don’t throw any more of those ashes,” Kype said.

“Those fish were all sick,” D’Angelo said.

She shook the urn in their faces. “And this guy is dead! You want him back, this burned-up old Ashtray Man!”

They had been fighting forever, shouting over the waves, screaming to be heard, as the cove filled like a bowl, first with shadows, then with night. Now the moon was directly above them, a nimbus floating in the fog, as vague as a coin at the bottom of a well. Kype was cold and shivering in his clammy shirt.

“I’m thirsty,” he said.

“Have some milk,” Nell said.

D’Angelo coaxed heat from the fire, stirring the coals, and then drew the harmonica from his shirt pocket. He tapped spit from the blowholes and then twisted his gummy lips over the instrument, flapping his hands as if he were wailing the most homesick blues ever, but the miserable honking was no match for the sound of the crashing surf, and his song drowned. He threw the harmonica at Nell. “Might as well have that, too,” he said.

“They come here so we can eat,” Nell said. “What if they don’t come back next year?” She looked at both men, waiting for an answer. “That old woman, my great-grandmother, came here to bathe and pray every morning of her life.”

“I can’t swim,” D’Angelo said.

Under cover of dark, Kype stared promiscuously at Nell. She had flat wide cheekbones like the Sphinx and he imagined that for a kiss all he would do was hold those bones, tip her head forward, and drink from her face.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

“Smart man,” Nell said. “Otherwise bad spooky shit was gonna follow you everywhere and forever.”

Nell muddled ash and bourbon in the palm of her hand and then dipped her finger in the paste and painted a thick line down the middle of Kype’s forehead. “After this,” she said, “we’ll play the bone game.” She traced two circles around his eyes, enlarging them, and then brushed a black streak across each temple, giving him pointed ears. “You can win back the rest of these ashes,” she said. “I’m giving you that chance.” She drew fangs on either side of his mouth and whiskers that dashed away from his nose. “And then you got to go in that stream and clean yourself up,” she said, unbuttoning Kype’s shirt, “because you stink real bad. The spirits won’t come near you.” On his belly she made a school of crude fish, each like a lopsided Möbius strip. They swam out of his navel toward his heart and then migrated across his collarbone and up his throat to his mouth.

Kype lay still, hoping Nell would draw more fish on him.

She said, “You got to get your soul back in your head. Somebody stole it, that’s my guess. Maybe it happened while you were sleeping. Or maybe you got a bad scare and it just jumped out of you. You ever feel the top of your head moving?”

And just then, he did, as if the top of his skull had been opened like a jar. Calmed by the flutter of Nell’s fingers at his throat, Kype closed his eyes and heard her voice from a distance and strangely saw his grandfather slip a hand in his and lead him into the lobby of a home for retired sailors. It was the dark lobby of what had once been a very fine hotel where old mariners now sat day and night in stuffed chairs and dusty couches and a row of splintering church pews. That there were no more high-seas adventures in the offing, that the distant horizon had finally drawn near, seemed to drive the retired sailors toward extreme solutions — lunacy or silence. Collectively, there wasn’t a corner of the world these men hadn’t visited, not an ocean, a sea, or a river foreign to them, but now they rarely moved from the lobby. A single lamp was lit low beneath a torn shade and an ashtray of cut green glass held a smoldering cigarette from which smoke rose heavenward as slowly as a prayer. But only the rising smoke stirred; it was so quiet and deadstill in the lobby Kype suspected that even the hearts beating beneath the men’s soup-stained shirts pumped like old leather bellows and blew nothing but soft gray ash. No one conversed; no one spoke a word. A silence reigned as if these sailors had been drawn back through time and a private darkness were once again upon the face of the deep. All the waters of the world had retreated and finally gathered in their eyes, deep pools of black or blue or pearl white, glassy reflections that floated like mirages on the surface of their dry and deserted faces.

Kype was led by the hand up a set of stairs and down a long corridor and somehow he felt that he’d been promised this moment all his life. The hotel’s glory days still hung in the air, still haunted the rooms and halls. The velveteen wallpaper suggested a gay opulence gone seedy, empty linen closets lined the dark hallways, dumbwaiters rose from a kitchen full of cold stoves, and the rooms all had long braided cords, thick gold ropes that once rang service bells but now summoned nothing. A door to one of the rooms opened, and Kype stood outside where he watched an old sailor twist his service rope into a noose and hang himself. Had the bells been working, the old man might have lived, inadvertently calling for help as he swayed back and forth, but long ago the tongues had been clipped, and in the silence of that hotel the hoisted sailor strangled. Kype looked on hopelessly. In the mute corridors of the hotel he alone had a voice, but when he screamed for help a dove flushed from his mouth, crying alas, alas, and all Kype could do was stand in the hall and watch. This was a man who had circumnavigated the globe, who had seen the sun set in every hemisphere, and yet he died swinging, as if by a lanyard, in the empty air above his bed. The silence that settled in the room was like the moral at the end of a fable. Kype now felt that he knew what all the sailors in the lobby knew. And what they knew, because they had circled the world, was that the end is pretty much everywhere.

When Kype opened his eyes, Nell was breaking a stick in half, marking one of the pieces with a band of black ash and leaving the other plain. He understood the rules even before she explained them, as if he’d played the bone game in a past life. Nell would shuffle the sticks behind her back and then all Kype had to do was point left or right and pick the one without the ash. For the first round, just to be fair, Nell agreed to put up her rhinestone hair clip against Kype’s Cadillac.

“John Wayne gave it to my great-grandmother,” she said.

“He just came up here and gave it to her?” D’Angelo said.

“It used to belong to Pilar.”

“Just pulled in and said, Hi ya, Grannie, I’m John Wayne, here’s a hair clip?”

“All those guys used to sail up from Hollywood in their yachts. John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable. They came here to fish for salmon and they didn’t use no guns, either.”

Nell hid her hands behind her back, shuffling the sticks, moving in tune to a song that seemed to have no real words and therefore, to Kype, at least, no beginning and no end. Over and over she sang he ha ya ho ho ha ya ho he , a loop of sound that made no more sense to Kype than the surf or the wind. He looked long and hard at her face, trying to see the truth, but his first guess was wrong and so was his second, and in a matter of a few minutes he’d lost his car and his boat shoes. She shuffled and sang and Kype pointed to Nell’s right hand, and she showed him, once again, the unmarked stick. Between rounds Nell drummed, beating Kype’s boat shoes against a log, but the cadence was off; it seemed crazy and disruptive, working against the heart’s rhythm. The jumbled pounding made Kype tense and excited, it confused and deranged him, and then Nell started weaving taunts into her song. “You’re blind, he ha ya ho, ” Nell sang, “you can’t see, ho ha ya ho he. ” As a game it seemed no more complicated than a coin toss, and Kype kept playing, believing the odds would naturally swing in his favor. All he needed was time. “ He ha ya ho, your head’s got no top.” Nell now had the urn of ashes, the keys to the Eldorado, the bottle of bourbon, the dented harmonica, the gun, and the fishing pole. Kype had never won games or awards or prizes, although his life had always been vaguely presented to him as a kind of victory. He unbuckled his wristwatch. He lost his pants and the contents of his pockets. He discovered that losing didn’t really bother him. It wasn’t nearly the disaster he would have imagined. When his wallet was emptied of cash, he started writing IOUs on old credit card receipts. He pledged his collection of baseball cards, his Mickey Mantle, his Willie Mays, even pawning his autographed Don Mincher from the 1969 Seattle Pilots. Nell’s drumming drove time out of his mind. Unable to stop himself, he began to gamble away little pieces of his inheritance — an antique dining set and a muffineer and a box of costume jewelry that would complement Nell’s hair clip. He stood before her in his forlorn saggy white briefs but didn’t feel cold. He had nothing, like all the great men — like Gandhi. Nothing, like Jesus. Nothing, like the Buddha!