Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

Inside, Drummond snipped the twine on a new bundle of shop rags and began drying the boy off. He wiped his hair and ran the rag down his neck. He unbuttoned his shirt and toweled off his arms and chest, surprised, as always, to see the boy so hirsute. Drummond used to bathe him as an infant in the kitchen sink, and he remembered the yellow curtains Theresa had sewn, and the steamed window and the sill with the glossy green leaves of potted ivy. Drummond tried to bring back the feeling of those early winter twilights at the sink, he and the boy reflected in the window. He piled the wet rags, one after another, on the workbench, and when the boy was dry he said, “We’re going to close up.”

Pete nodded.

“Today’s not working out,” Drummond said. “Some days don’t.”

“My glasses,” the boy said.

“Okay,” Drummond said. “Okay.” He sat the boy in the recliner and went out to the sidewalk. Someone had stepped on the glasses. Drummond stared, mystified, at the empty gold frames glinting in the rain. The lenses had popped out. Back at his workbench, he tweaked the bridge of the glasses until it returned to its symmetrical curve and then he gently pressured the right earpiece down so that it was again parallel with the left. He ran a bead of glue around the frames and inserted the lenses, wiping them clean with a cloth diaper. “That’ll do you,” he said, handing them to Pete. Drummond pulled out a pocket comb and neatly parted the boy’s thinning hair and swept it back from his face. When the boy looked up at his father, faint stars of fluorescent light reflected off the glasses.

“Do your job now,” Drummond said.

“I think I’ll go outside,” the boy said.

“Please,” Drummond said under his breath. “Do your job first.”

Pete began pulling the old paper from the typewriters. He stacked the sheets in a pile, squaring the edges with a couple of sharp taps against the counter. Then he fed blank sheets of paper into the platens, returned the carriages, and hit the tab buttons for the proper indentation, ready for a new paragraph, ready for the next day.

Drummond was nearly done with the Olivetti. He found the nameplate he needed—“Olivetti Lettera 32”—and glued it in place. He squeezed a daub of car wax on the cloth diaper and wiped down the case, drawing luster out of the old enamel. He called the bookstore and told the kid that he was closing shop but his typewriter was ready.

While Drummond waited, he straightened up his workbench. The blank letter to his wife lay there. He crumpled the empty sheet and tossed it into the wastebasket.

When the kid came over, he could hardly believe it was the same machine. He typed the words everyone typed: “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their—”

“Is it ‘country’ or ‘party’?” he asked.

“I see it both ways,” Drummond said.

He wrote up a sales slip while the kid tapped the keys a couple of times more and looked down doubtfully at the machine. There was something off in its rightness and precision, an old and familiar antagonism gone, a testiness his fingers wanted to feel. He missed the adversity of typing across a platen pitted like a minefield, the resistance of the querulous keys that would bunch and clog. Drummond had seen this before. The kid wasn’t ready to say it yet, but half of him wanted the jalopy touch of his broken Olivetti back.

“It’s different,” he said.

“What’s the plot of your novel?” Drummond said.

“It’s hard to explain,” the kid said.

“Well, is it sci-fi?” he asked. “Romance? Detective thriller?”

Somewhat snobbily, the kid said, “It doesn’t really fit any of those categories.”

Pete laughed. Drummond felt the entire length of the day settle in his bones. He said, “Take the machine back and monkey with it. See how it feels. Give yourself some time to get used to it.”

“I don’t know,” the kid said.

“Look,” Drummond said. “I kept all the old parts. I could restore it back to broken in ten minutes. Or if you don’t like the way it works just throw it on the floor a few times. But first give it a fair chance.” He pushed the handwritten bill across the counter.

“Can I pay you tomorrow? It’s been a slow day.”

“Sure,” Drummond said. “Tomorrow.”

Drummond and the boy boarded the bus and took their usual seats on the bench in back. Drummond wore an old snap-brim hat with a red feather in the band and a beige overcoat belted at the waist. He pulled a packet of salted nuts from the pocket, sharing them with the boy as the bus made its way slowly through the rush hour. His wife had taken their old green Fiat wagon, and Drummond sometimes wondered if he was supposed to feel foolish, letting her keep it. But he didn’t really mind riding the bus, and during the past few months he and the boy had settled into a routine. They ate a snack and read what people had written during the day, and then, as they crossed the West Seattle Bridge, the boy would time the rest of the trip home, praying and telling the decades of his rosary.

“You want some?” Drummond asked, holding out the sort of small red box of raisins the boy liked. The boy shook his head indifferently, and Drummond slipped the box back into his pocket.

The boy pulled out the sheets of paper he’d taken from the typewriters. For the most part the sentences were nonsensical, the random crashing of keys, or the repetitive phrases people remembered from typing classes. But some were more interesting, when people typed tantalizing bits of autobiography or quoted a passage of meaningful philosophy. The boy slumped against the window and shuffled through the fluttering sheets while Drummond, looking over his shoulder, followed along.

“Now is the time for all good men.”

“The quick brown fox jumped over.”

“God is Dead.”

“zrtiENsoina;ldu?/ng;’a!”

“Tony chief Tony Tony.”

“Now is the time now.”

“Jaclyn was here.”

“???????????!!!!!!!”

“That interview didn’t work out so great,” Drummond said. The bus rose, crossing over the Duwamish River. A ferry on the Sound, its windows as bright as ingots of gold, seemed to be carting a load of light out of the city, making for the dark headlands of Bainbridge island. Drummond wondered if the boy would like a boat ride for his birthday, or maybe even to go fishing. His father had kept his tackle as meticulously as he had kept his typewriters, and it was still stored with his cane rod in the hall closet. After a trip to Westport or a day on the Sound, his father had sharpened his barbs with a hand file and dried and waxed the spoons and aught-six treble hooks until they shone as brightly as silverware. Nobody Drummond had ever known did that. Even now, a year after the old man’s death, his gear showed no sign of rusting.

Drummond opened the bottle of lotion and squeezed a dollop into his palm. The lotion was cold, and he massaged it between his hands until it warmed to the touch.

“Give me your hand,” he said to the boy.

He rubbed the boy’s hands, smoothing the dry, dead skin between his fingers, feeling the flaking scales soften between his own hands.

“Your birthday’s Monday,” Drummond said.

Pete laughed.

“Any idea what you’d like?”

“No,” the boy said.

Theresa would probably call home on Pete’s birthday. She’d always been good that way, calling or writing nice thank-you notes to people. For months Drummond had expected his wife to have a realization, although he was never sure what she’d realize. When they had eloped during his senior year — her sophomore — she was six months pregnant and beginning to show. She had never had a real honeymoon or even, she had told him bitterly, a real life. The boy had been a tremendous, bewildering amount of work for a girl of sixteen. Drummond supposed that at forty-one she was still a young woman. Now that she was gone, he found most of his social life at church. He was in charge of the coffee urn, and he picked up pastries from a bakery on California Avenue whose owner was an old crony of his father’s. He enjoyed the hour of fellowship after Mass, mingling with people he’d known all his life, people in whose aging faces he still recognized the shortstop from Catholic Youth ball or the remnant of a former May Day queen’s smile. There was one particular lady he thought he might consider asking out on a possible date when the time was right.