Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Page 4

  “Honey,” said the bass fisherman, “there’s something you oughta know.”

  As he said this, he unzipped his human skin, pulling from the crown of his head down over his forehead and lips and neck and heart and even further down, until his skin and clothes and mechanical human limbs fell to the floor. He too fell. The bass fisherman lay before his wife as what he really was: a man-sized earthworm.

  Stripped of all barriers, the bass fisherman wriggled into the shower and awaited the final embrace of his tender, loving wife.

  Harry Sandini

  Harry was diabetic, and on account of his poor health, they’d amputated both his legs, first one and then the other. He looked like a wizard, what with his flowing white mane and white beard, his skeletal frame, and the silk robes that he wore in an effort to hide his stumps. My father and I used to fish every weekend with Harry, but after his second leg was amputated, he refused to go out anymore. He’d sit in his wheelchair at his kitchen table, consulting the I-Ching. If his wife, a kind lady named Virginia, disturbed him in any way, Harry would throw a fork at her from a bucket he kept by his side. I have never seen a man with so many forks, nor a person as quiet as Virginia, but Harry was always throwing forks at her. Then Virginia got cancer and died, and Harry couldn’t afford their house on his own. He asked my father if he could move into our garage and my father said no. So Harry took out a bed at the Salvation Army and sometimes we visited him. We’d drink burnt coffee and talk about all the fish we used to catch together, but the truth was, Harry never caught many fish. He was a lousy fisherman, mostly because he spent more time puking than fishing. Diabetics shouldn’t eat a half dozen doughnuts for breakfast every Saturday. Hell, nobody should. Still, I always liked Harry. He wasn’t a bad man even if he was sometimes unkind. The last time we visited him at the Salvation Army, he gave my father a present, a black and white illustration of a beautiful trout rising to nab a Green Drake floating down Beaverkill Creek. The picture was signed To the best fisherman and best man I ever knew. Thank you. “You always were a lousy fisherman, Harry,” my father said, but there were tears in his eyes and I could tell he was just trying to lighten the mood. When we left that day, we went straight out to buy a bed and a couch and some other things to convert the garage into a room for Harry. I guess my father figured that if he wasn’t good enough to rescue his old friend from a flea-ridden bed and bad meals at the Salvation Army, then he wasn’t much of a good man at all. We worked day and night for three days to clean out the garage and make it suitable for occupancy. My father wanted everything to be just right. Harry didn’t have long to live. That was obvious. My father wanted him to be comfortable in his waning days. The garage complete, we drove to the Salvation Army to take Harry home with us. It was supposed to be a big surprise. But when we showed up and asked to see Harry Sandini, they told us he wasn’t with them anymore. We asked for his new address and they told us he’d died. Later on, when I was in high school, I began hiding out in the garage to drink whiskey with my friends and make out with girls, but I don’t believe my father ever set foot in there again.

  Bob

  Bob’s favorite thing in the world was his own shit. Like, you’d be out fishing with Bob at the aqueduct and Bob would return after having been gone for a while, and he’d say, “Come here, I want to show you something.” And you knew Bob was about to show you the dump he just took. But Bob didn’t stop there. No, he liked to tell you what animals’ crap his dump most resembled.

  “Look at that snake shit,” he might say, and then he’d fall to the dusty ground and writhe like a maniac, shouting, “It’s like I got scales or somethin’!”

  Or he’d say, “That’s got the girth of a polar bear log, but the color’s off. Definitely grizzly. A big-ass grizzly bear.” Then Bob would raise his hands above his head like they were paws and he’d growl and smack you upside the head and you’d say, “Bob, what the fuck?”

  Now one thing you should know about Bob is that his shit only ever resembled land mammals. Never birds. Never fish. Never amphibians. Never insects. Never humans, either, if you were wondering.

  One time, during the peak of striper season, Bob returned from his routine shit, but he didn’t beg me to come take a look at his dump. He just stood there, solemn. Finally I said, “What is it, Bob?”

  “I’d like you to come look at this,” he said.

  “Screw your shit, Bob. The bite’s red hot,” I said, and a fish struck my bait that very moment.

  Bob waited for me to reel in the striper, which was a little too small to keep, and after I tossed the fish back into the aqueduct, he was still standing there.

  “Fine,” I said. “Show me what you gotta show me.”

  So he marched me over the ridge to his favorite shitting hole at the edge of the farmland, and he slowed as we approached a fist-sized mound of something red.

  “Alright, what is it this time?” I asked, impatient to return to fishing.

  Bob looked at me as if I should know.

  “Come on, man,” I said. “I came out here to do some fishing, not stare at your weird craps.”

  A hurt expression crossed his face. “They’re salmon eggs,” he said. “I’m gonna have babies.”

  I scoffed. “You crazy motherfucker. Go to the doctor. Eat healthier. Stop obsessing about your shit. Do anything but what you’re doing.”

  “I’m gonna have me some babies,” he said.

  And the look in his eyes told me he was serious. He believed he was gonna have some babies. Bob was single and believed in the whole ‘wait until you’re married’ bullshit, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t knocked up some girl and this was his way of telling me.

  I stood there, not sure what to believe, wondering how to help my friend out.

  Then when I came up with nothing, he said, “Don’t judge me,” and he knelt down and sucked the salmon eggs into his mouth.

  He climbed the ridge up and away from his shitting hole and I followed him. He went back to the aqueduct. He descended the steep concrete bank to the water’s edge, where the striper we’d caught and kept drifted dead on a stringer in the current. And what Bob did next was totally insane. He crept down to the slick algae line on the concrete lip and he plopped down on his butt and scooted into the cold, fast-moving water. He went under.

  “Bob!” I shouted, but I wasn’t about to jump in after him. That water moved fast. It’d drown us both.

  I cried to the folks who were fishing up-shore from us and they ran over to see what was the matter. I was muttering about salmon eggs and Bob and those stupid shits he always took. The folks up-shore had a cellphone and I didn’t so they called 911 and the police came and an ambulance came and a rescue team came, but there was nothing to be done. The aqueduct moved fast. Bob was most likely miles downstream. He was certainly dead.

  A year passed and I felt not at all better about losing my best buddy in the whole wide world, but I fished twice as hard that year as ever before in my life. And I kid you not, when the striper season got into full swing on the aqueduct, I started catching salmon. Slender, hard-bodied, silver salmon. Nobody else caught them. None of the regulars who were as dedicated to fishing as me. I was the only one who could catch ’em. And as I pulled up salmon after salmon, all these guys and all these girls who were fishing that stretch of the aqueduct, they’d reel in their poles and lay them on the bank and they’d come crowd around me, to watch how it was done. I told them how to do it. I showed them my technique. I gave them my bait. But no matter what, nobody could pull a salmon out of the aqueduct but me. They came to calling me The Legend, and soon as I’d set foot out of my truck, I could hear them murmur, “Here comes The Legend,” and “It’s the guy who catches all those salmon.” The local paper even wrote a story about me. The Department of Fish and Wildlife got a warrant and searched my house. I guess they thought I’d taken to bucket biology and planted the salmon there myself. Nobody could figure it out. But that didn’t prevent me from catching salmon, the fir
st and only to ever be caught in that stretch of the aqueduct.

  Only I know how the salmon came to be there. Only I remember my friend Bob.

  Mr. Tibbs

  Jerry Tibbs. Better known as Mr. Tibbs’ Ribs in our community for his barbecue joint of the same name. I can still taste his ribs and the best goddamn cornbread in California, baked fresh every day by his wife, Patty Tibbs, who owned a real estate business. My daddy and I fished with Jerry on some small freshwater lakes when I was a youngster. We caught smallmouth bass together on several occasions. But fishing for smallmouth bass with my daddy and I is not what killed Mr. Tibbs. No, Mr. Tibbs was killed by a whale. It is one of those terrible fortunes of life, to go out fishing on the Pacific in the boat you own because you are successful, and after a good day’s fishing, the next thing you know, a whale breaches on your boat and you’re knocked overboard and swept out to sea in the dead of night and you’re screaming for help and you see the lights of the boat but you are hundreds of yards away, cold and wet and drowning fast and drifting further and nobody can find you nobody will ever find you. That was Mr. Tibbs’ fate. He died on the ocean. They never found his body. Friends say he caught a big halibut that day. They filleted it and served the meat at his wake the following week. My daddy and I were present and we enjoyed that halibut, but it didn’t hold a candle to Mr. Tibbs’ ribs. His wife and oldest son took to running Mr. Tibbs’ Ribs after his death, but the ribs just weren’t the same. There was a special way Mr. Tibbs’ secret sauce made you smack your lips. And oh boy these were still real good, but they weren’t lip-smacking good. The death weighed heavily on Patty Tibbs, too. She no longer cooked the cornbread fresh every day. You were lucky to get a piece fresher than two days old. It’s kind of funny because my daddy and I had been invited to go out on the ocean with Mr. Tibbs many times before, but my daddy thought I’d get seasick. So we’d always just gone out fishing for bass on local lakes with Mr. Tibbs. Kind of funny to think of Mr. Tibbs now. I can’t remember a word he ever spoke, only his barbecue. He was a kind man, I know. He must’ve had kind eyes and a kind voice and a kind smile, considering how often he invited my daddy and I out fishing, but I remember none of that. Only his barbecue and the yellow tables in his shop and for some reason a flier for his wife’s real estate company, showing you houses that were for sale in the neighborhood. Naïve as I was, I always expected my daddy to say, after ordering our barbecue, “And I’ll take that house too,” pointing to a house on one of the real estate fliers, as if you could buy ribs and cornbread and a house all from the same joint. But my daddy didn’t have the money for that, and that’s not how the world works. How the world works is that whales kill people. Lip-smacking. That’s how I’d describe it.

  Doug Marsh, proprietor of Hawthorne Bait and Tackle, was updating the catch report bulletin when a stranger entered the shop. Doug ground the chalk between his calloused fingers. “We don’t open till six,” he said to the young man, whose eyes were bloodshot, his clothes soaked.

  “I think you’ll want to see this,” the man said.

  Doug pocketed the chalk and took up his mug of steaming coffee, then followed the man—a teenager, really—out to the parking lot. He grumbled to himself about forgetting to lock the door again. Anglers, eager to hit the river, were always trying the door as early as four in the morning, even though the posted hours said Hawthorne Bait and Tackle opened at six sharp. Sometimes Doug found sleep troublesome. Nightmares awoke him, or else the dread of experiencing such nightmares resulted in him working through the night, repairing tackle, tying flies, molding lead weights, reading, sweeping, drinking coffee, drinking bourbon, shuffling up and down the musty aisles of the shop, gazing through his thick-framed glasses at the trophy fish mounted on the walls. With increasing frequency, owing either to his sleeplessness or age, Doug forgot to lock the shop door after smoking a cigarette out front. That was how the Eager Earls, as he referred to these non-store-hour-abiding folks, got in. But sometimes he let them buy what they needed anyhow. After all, he was awake and if he turned them away, they would just wait out in the parking lot until opening hour.

  Never in his thirty-seven years running the bait shop had anyone ever barged in before six with a fresh catch to show him. At that hour, the night fishermen were heading home, too exhausted to pay Doug a visit, although they’d later bring in photos of any notable catches to tack on the bait shop walls. Most other diehard fishermen had either launched their boats by six or else they were swinging by Doug’s to pick up some essential item before hitting the water. This young man, with his claims of an extraordinary catch, had piqued Doug’s interest. He was probably some out-of-towner who’d caught a big sturgeon.

  Doug sipped his coffee and approached the Dodge truck where the man stood, waving him over with frantic gestures.

  “Well, what’ve you got?” Doug said.

  The kid lifted the lid on a big red ice chest and Doug peered inside. The cigarette fell from his mouth when he saw what was in there. A blue-eyed fish with human-like arms and legs, a mouth full of jagged teeth like a shark’s, and a crimson dorsal fin that looked as if it were meant to cut through steel.

  “Thought you’d want a look,” the kid said.

  “Where in hell did you catch this?”

  “The Harbor. Between Burnside and Steel Bridge. That hole where the water drops to ninety feet. I was fishing for sturgeon off the floating walkway there, the Esplanade.”

  Night fishing for sturgeon was prohibited but never mind that. This was one weird-ass fish.

  “So what do you think,” the man said.

  Doug lit another cigarette and studied the young man, seeking any sign of a ruse, but the kid appeared to be telling the truth. He’d caught a weird-ass fish and he’d taken it to Doug. That was the beginning and the end of his story.

  “So…”

  “Odds are, this thing is one of a kind. Just another superfund mutation. Then again, maybe not. Maybe there’s more of them. So we’re gonna go inside and call ODFW. They won’t open for another couple hours and it likely won’t be a couple hours after that before an officer swings by. In the meantime, you’re gonna take me out and show me exactly how you caught this thing.”

  The kid looked like a deer in the headlights. “I ain’t going out there again. I told you where I caught it. I’ll give you the rest of my bait if you want. I was just fishing a whole squid off the bottom, the way I always do for sturgeon. Nothing different.” He shook his head insistently. “I’m done fishing that goddamn river.” He pointed to the creature in the ice chest. “When I pulled it up—it spoke.”

  “What do you mean it spoke?”

  “Before I bonked it, the damned thing spoke to me.”

  Doug scoffed, lit another cigarette.

  And then, as if on cue, the creature raised its head from the bed of ice and spoke in perfect English.

  Doug felt a hand on his elbow and he knew it belonged to the fish.

  The fish with hands.

  “Excuse me, sir?” So it was a polite fish. “Sir, are you all right?”

  The young man was talking. The fish remained lifeless in the ice chest. Doug slammed the lid down and flipped the latch, sick of looking at the hideous thing.

  “Are you okay?” the kid said.

  “I’m fine,” Doug said, forcing a distant grin. The pain splintered his left arm like lightning, spreading up into his neck. His heart felt like it lay outside his chest, heavy as if ready to give birth, and the air surrounding it was made of pins and needles. His knees went wobbly. “Better call an ambulance,” he said.

  As he plummeted to the cold gravel, he felt certain he caught a glimpse of the creature popping out of the ice chest like a jack in the box.

  It’s not so bad, he thought. Whether he referred to death, or the fish, or the pain within, he did not know.

  After the pain broke, Doug found himself as someone else. He was driving on a strange road in an unfamiliar town. The truck was a Chevy with a good engi
ne. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw leathery skin, wavy gray hair, and piercing blue eyes that scared even him. He did not look at himself again.

  He turned on the radio to see what kind of music he listened to.

  Old blues.

  Hellhounds and shit.

  Beside him on the bench seat, a cellphone rang. The screen said ‘Wife’ and he felt an involuntary flutter in his heart, though he could not definitively trace the sensation back to himself, Doug, who might be excited to see ‘Wife’ calling because he had never been married, only fantasized about the married life, or maybe this other person, whoever he had become, felt deep and abiding feelings for this ‘Wife.’ Whatever the source, he realized that he missed her.

  He picked up the phone and said, “Hey, honey. I’m on my way home.”

  As if this were normal.

  As if he knew where home was.

  The wife asked him to pick up something for dinner on the way home. She didn’t feel like cooking. He told her that he would stop at Los Hermanos.

  They said ‘I love you’ and they said ‘goodbye,’ but in the clipped, fast-forward way of people who are used to saying such things.

  Loveyoubye.

  When he stepped out of the truck outside the Mexican food restaurant, the heat took him by surprise. A tumbleweed rolled into traffic. On the other side of the four lane street, a kit fox stared at him from a field that had recently been razed to make way for a new housing development. The air was the color of Earl Grey tea. It smelled like cow shit and exhaust fumes. He went inside the restaurant and tried not to think about where he was, let alone why. He ordered some of his favorite dishes. He ordered some of his wife’s favorite dishes. He instinctively went to order some of his son’s favorites but stopped himself, found an absence in his chest that resided where his son used to be. My son is gone, he told himself, knowing how foolish it was, knowing he had never had a son. He ordered enough food so that he and his wife could take the leftovers to work tomorrow.