Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

Nothing! he thought. Nothing!

“Now you’ve got to swim,” Nell said.

It was a shallow stream, but the current was strong, the water cold. Kype clawed the streambed, his belly scraping over rocks, his ribs jabbed by snags that jutted from the banks. The slither of salmon passing over his back or brushing by his face gave Kype the feeling that he was running a gauntlet and that hands were grabbing for him. He tried to fight his way upstream, but was tugged by his feet toward the sea. He took a deep breath and dunked below the surface. It was noisy, turbulent, not the quiet he had expected, and the water tasted like dirt. That surprised him, the faint scent, the trace of earth in the water, and it filled him with longing. As a lonely, disconsolate boy he would watch container ships and tankers turn with the tide, watch them all day long, out his grandfather’s window, as if in their slow turning they were the hands of a large clock, a clock madly trying to mark time on a face of water. Behind the ships, further west, he could see the headlands of an island. The island was privately owned and it appeared only in detailed nautical maps, but as a child Kype had believed it was his: everything that fell away, everything that died, all the broken promises and routine disappointments and lost hopes of his boyhood eventually washed up out there, or so he imagined. For him it was a kind of afterworld across the water, a combination of sacred ground and junkyard. The idea started when he reached the age where he understood that he had no father, and for weeks he’d consoled himself, imagining that his dad was a desperado who had lammed it across the bay to that island. Later he believed that all the cowboys and Indians had gone to that island, too. Lost marbles, broken toasters, snapped shoelaces, discarded razors, odd socks, old TVs, shopping carts, and an endless series of small pets found a final home out on the island. The words to the bedtime prayers he no longer said were out there. Anything he couldn’t explain was out there. People sang lyrics to forgotten songs and rediscovered the steps to old dances on that island. The good friends of his father’s who he called Uncle and one he called Druncle, men who came around for a while and then all of sudden didn’t, they’d all left for the island. Sometimes if he stared long enough he believed he saw bonfires burning above the headlands, flickering on the high, forested banks. The island was a new and an old world, it was always full and it was always empty, and it could accommodate everything. He hadn’t thought about it in years, but now, as he fought the current, it came back to him with all the vivid romance of his childhood, and he imagined that his grandfather, old Kype, had set sail for that island. And young Kype’s soul was out there, too, he was sure of it, and so he kept swimming.

Early the next morning, Kype stood in the dirt plaza outside the bait shop, picking blackberry thorns from his palm. His hands were bleeding and his arms were covered in fish scales, each hair holding a shimmering blue-and-pink sequin. The stink on his skin reminded him of the old jars of fertilizer his grandfather used in the rose garden. His stomach was scraped and scarred and a deep bruising beneath his ribs made it hard to breathe. Nell had been asleep, curled in the sand, and D’Angelo had been snoring next to a log, clinging to it, perhaps afraid that he’d be swept out to sea. Kype had left them there, dressing quickly, grabbing the gun and what remained of his grandfather’s ashes and his car keys, wading quietly into the teeming river, through the crowd of spawning salmon. He knelt in the water and held one of the battered fish by the belly and looked into its eye, wondering what it might be thinking. The gills worked lethargically, opening and closing like the wings of a butterfly, and he leaned in close, as if the fish might whisper to him. The stream was full, the dying still dying, the living continuing their run, while yesterday’s dead had been washed out to sea, making room for today’s. A couple of milk cartons hung in the reeds, but the water had cleared and was once again bright as crystal and shining with light. Kype bowed his head and placed a kiss on the salmon’s cold lips, and then he eased the fish back into the river, letting it slip through his fingers. It couldn’t find a quiet hold, and the stream carried it away, its exhausted body wholly given over to the current, its final rhythm on earth the rhythm of water flowing past.

Climbing out of the cove, winding his way up the crooked path, Kype got banged up pretty good, but he had his ashes and his gun, and over there, parked in front of the chief’s yard, was the Eldorado. He felt in his pocket for his car keys and found a couple of the hasty IOUs he’d written. In the light of a new day he was no longer able to imagine how Nell could possibly have believed that the bone game was for real. The whole fantastic ordeal seemed like a fevered dream, and as the remnants of last night’s hour of faith faded he felt strangely deserted. The sun rose over the water and the wind came up, blowing sand and dust across the plaza. The small white shacks started to glow. The old woman came outside and sat with her blanket and wicker hat, warming her face in the sun. The scene was as stubborn and enduring as a monument, and to Kype it seemed as if the dust rising in whorls off the road had claimed these people, all of them overtaken and turned to stone and standing around like statues, arranged just as they had been the day before. The little girl stood in the street, looking east, shielding her eyes against the rising sun. The old man walked by with the same hesitant shuffle, his feet dragging through the dust as he stooped forward and followed his shadow across the road. The engine swayed above the old DeSoto and the open toolbox and the coffee cup still rested on the fender, as if work might begin at any moment. Salmon season was over, but otherwise nothing had changed.

I would like to thank Carin Besser for her invaluable work on so many of these stories. Thanks as well to my longtime readers Mary Evans, Tom Grimes, and Jordan Pavlin.

The italicized passage on page 219 is taken from an oral account of the first Native American encounter with Captain Cook and is fairly well known to people who grew up in the Northwest. It can be found in many sources, but acknowledgment is owed to Mrs. Winnifred David, a Nuu-chah-nulth elder, who originally told the story. I stripped the historical references from the passage and slightly rewrote the sentences to suit my needs.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point, and Orphans, a collection of essays. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space.