by Rick Bass
He had not remembered this in ages. Maybe his mind was coming back to him. Maybe he was getting better.
In Santiago, they boarded a bus that was the cleanest Wilson had ever ridden: a double-decker that, for less than ten dollars, would drive them southward, down the coast toward Patagonia, ever farther down-country, down toward the narrows, where the once-robust continent thinned to bits and fragments, a chain of islands, each lovely and distinct but isolate, and requiring ferries to reach. Often, the bus came to the end of land and had to board a ferry. The bus seats reclined into beds, and with the bus uncrowded, they all had their own spaces, with pillows and light blankets. They rode through the night, lulled and sleeping well, and awoke on Easter morning to a brilliant sunrise, the road still rumbling beneath them. A smiling bus stewardess brought them hot coffee and tortillas. Shortly thereafter, on the big overhead screen at the front of the bus, a showing of RoboCop began.
They got off the bus in Chilicote. Somehow, with all of the cabs, rental cars, the bus, and other logistics, he had gone almost a day and a half without drinking. That evening, they ate in an open courtyard just off the town square overlooking the ocean, dining on fried whole fish, every fin intact, the crumbs of the delicate batter that crusted it glistening in the late sunlight, the hot flesh white and clean—fish that only hours earlier had been swimming in the blue water they beheld. He did not order a beer, despite noticing the price: twenty-five cents for a liter.
He drank a cold Coke in the bottle instead, along with his daughters, and they admired the way the sunlight, so different in the Southern Hemisphere, caught the gleaming batter crumbs as well as the rinds of freshly cut lemons that decorated the heavy white plates.
Afterward they walked around the square, where young parents were pushing toddlers in strollers or taking their small children to get ice cream cones, as Wilson and Belinda had once done.
They walked back to their hotel, a mile outside of town and up a hill: past the crab nets drying in the late-day sun, the nets glinting with an occasional ungleaned minnow; past the dock where one- and two-man boats, all freshly painted—red, green, yellow, orange—lay overturned, brilliant as Easter eggs. In the blue water beyond, a bright red boat puttered away from the bay, a single fisherman heading out again, and Wilson imagined he could live this life, could be that man.
The air smelled extraordinarily clean.
Back at their room, which had two small beds and a kitchen with a white table, lace curtains fluttered from the breeze through the open windows, and they went out on the balcony and watched the bay—never were there more than two or three boats on it—and, after that, the sunset. He badly wanted a glass of wine but gave himself over to not drinking, as if opening his heart with a blade hewn of obsidian, and gave the girls his sobriety, if only for the evening.
After dark, they found a deck of cards in a drawer and played games they hadn’t in years—Speed, Battle, Paradise Lost, childhood games of chance. Then he read to them: the only book they had, which Lucy was reading for school.
Atticus sat looking at the floor for a long time. Finally he raised his head. “Scout,” he said, “Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?”
In the autumn light of southern South America that evening, here at the very bottom of the world, time seemed to be made of amber, as if they were all three only just now setting out on the great journey of their lives. He watched the comforting routine and leisure with which the girls prepared for bed—Stephanie brushing her teeth so carefully, and Lucy combing her hair almost carelessly, and yet at great length—as if time had lain down and stopped, while the curtains continued to stir.
When he went to sleep, Stephanie was at the small kitchen table, writing letters—one to Belinda, he was sure—like some Victorian traveler of yore. He thought about saying Tell your mom I said hey, but remained quiet, and slept well.
In the morning they pushed farther south, deeper into wonder. They boarded another ferry, bound for another, even smaller island—countless stony clumps of isolated landmass, surrounded by such sweet blue. They left the ferry’s observation room and stood on the deck, leaning over a railing, smiling in the sun and warm wind. He reminded the girls to put on sunblock. He put some on as well. His scratches from the guinea-pig woman barely stung. He felt strong. He was starting to breathe more easily; he thought his oft-cracked ribs were beginning slowly to knit back together.
He was better when he didn’t drink, he thought. So much better.
But oh, how good a cold beer would taste. It was only late morning but already the sun was warm.
Dolphins swam alongside the boat, and they seemed to Wilson to be smiling at him. He remembered the stories of how they would rescue sailors who had fallen overboard, and he leaned closer, studying the merriment in their eyes, imagining their hearts to be too large for the bird-size ribs that encased them. He admired the silvery way they knifed through the water, inhabiting it without resistance: liquid electricity, liquid joy.
Without a word, but with a euphoria so large in his heart it felt monstrous, Wilson climbed over the railing and leapt in.
The ripping splash that filled his ears did not at first seem to be in any way associated with him, but then he understood that it was. Underwater, everything felt immediately better than it already had.
The water was cold, and he gasped, swallowing some, then kicked for the surface and burst back to the top, cold, refreshed. Gasped louder, sputtering.
He was so thirsty he could drink the whole damn ocean, he thought. This was no good. The sweet feeling he’d had for a moment was slipping away. He would wait until it returned.
A small wave caught him unawares, and he swallowed more water, then spit it back out again, choking and coughing. It was saltier than other ocean water he’d tasted, and it made him even thirstier. He treaded water, admiring the blue sky, the blue sea. The blue ferry, only a short distance from him now. Not too far away yet. As long as I stay here, he thought, I’m safe. Maybe I’ll just stay here all day.
The girls appeared at the railing, at first panicked but then, when they saw he was all right, embarrassed and confused—had he fallen, or had he jumped? But when he smiled at them, they smiled back, and laughed. They studied him closely; and he, in turn, looked up at them. The ship’s captain had joined them, his hand on the round orange lifesaver buoy, prepared to toss it. More passengers appeared at the railing—some curious, some amused, others alarmed.
Everyone stood by, ready to help.
It was the beginning of Wilson’s spring, if no one else’s. Pretty much the first day. Never mind that it was already fall, down in Chile. As if months, even years, had passed by uncounted.
He continued to tread water and look up at the ship. All he had to do was raise up a hand and ask.
Fish Story
In the early 1960s my parents ran a service station about sixty miles west of Fort Worth. It was in the middle of the country, along a reddish, gravelly, rutted road on the way to nowhere. You could see someone coming from a long way off.
When I was ten years old one of my father’s customers caught a big catfish on a weekend trip to the Colorado River. It weighed eighty-six pounds, a swollen, gasping, grotesque netherworld creature pulled writhing and fighting up into the bright, hot, dusty world above.
The man had brought the fish, wrapped in wet burlap in the back of his car, all the way out to my father’s gas station. We were to have a big barbecue that weekend, and I was given the job of keeping the fish watered and alive until the time came to kill and cook it.
All day long—it was late August, school had not yet started—I knelt beside the gasping fish and kept it hosed down with a trickle of cool water, giving the fish life one silver gasp at a time, keeping its gills and its slick gray skin wet; the steady trickling of that hose, and nothing else, helping it stay alive.
We had no tub large enough to hold the fish, so I squatted beside it in the dust, resting on my heels, and studie
d it as I moved the silver stream of water up and down its back.
The fish, in turn, studied me with its round, obsidian eyes, which had a gold lining to their perimeter, like pyrite. The fish panted and watched me while the heat built all around us, rising steadily through the day from the fields, giving birth in the summer-blue sky to towering white cumulus clouds. I grew dizzy in the heat, and from the strange combination of the unblinking monotony and utter fascination of my task, until the trickling from my hose seemed to be inflating those clouds—I seemed to be watering those clouds as one would water a garden.
The water pooled and spread across the gravel parking lot before running in wandering rivulets out into the field beyond, where bright butterflies swarmed and fluttered, dabbing at the mud I was making.
Throughout the afternoon, some of the adults who were showing up wandered over to examine the monstrosity. Among them was an older boy, Jack, a fifteen-year-old who had been kicked out of school the year before for fighting. Jack waited until no adults were around and then came by and said that he wanted the fish, that it was his father’s—that his father had been the one who caught it—and that he would give me five dollars if I would let him have it.
“No,” I said, “my father told me to take care of it.”
Jack had me figured straightaway for a Goody Two-Shoes. “They’re just going to kill it,” he said. “It’s mine. Give it to me and I’ll let it go. I swear I will,” he said. “Give it to me or I’ll beat you up.”
People at school said he and I looked the same, but we did not.
As if intuiting or otherwise discerning trouble, my father appeared from around the corner and asked us how everything was going. Jack, scowling but saying nothing, tipped his cap at the fish, and walked away.
“What did he want?” my father asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “He was just looking at the fish.” I knew that if I told on Jack and he got in trouble, I would get pummeled.
“Did he say it was his fish?” my father asked. “Was he trying to claim it?”
“I think he said his father caught it.”
“His father owes us sixty-seven dollars,” my father said. “He gave me the fish instead. Don’t let Jack take that fish back.”
“I won’t,” I said.
The dusty orange sky faded to the cool purple of dusk. Stars appeared and fireflies emerged from the grass. I watched them, and listened to the drum and groan of the bullfrogs in the stock tank in the field below, and to the bellowing of the cattle. I kept watering the fish, and the fish kept watching me, with its gasps coming harder. From time to time I saw Jack loitering, but he didn’t come back over to where I was.
Later in the evening, before dark, but only barely, a woman I thought was probably Jack’s mother—I had seen her talking to him—came walking over and crouched beside me. She was dressed as if for a party of far greater celebration than ours, with sequins on her dress, and flat leather sandals. Her toenails were painted bright red, but her pale feet were speckled with dust, as if she had been walking a long time. I could smell the whiskey on her breath and on her clothes, I thought, and I hoped she would not try to engage me in conversation, though such was not to be my fortune.
“Thass a big fish,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, quietly. I dreaded that she was going to ask for the fish back.
“My boy and my old man caught that fish,” she said. “You’ll see. Gonna have their pictures in the newspaper.” She paused, descending into some distant, nether reverie, and stared at the fish as if in labored communication with it. “That fish is prolly worth a lot of money, you know?” she said.
I didn’t say anything. Her diction and odor were such that I would not take my first sip of alcohol until I was twenty-two.
Out in the field, my father was busy lighting the bonfire. A distant whoosh, a pyre of light, went up. The drunk woman turned her head, studied the sight with incomprehension, then said, slowly, “Wooo!” Then she turned her attention back to what she clearly thought was still her fish. She reached out an unsteady hand and touched the fish on its broad back, partly as if to reestablish ownership, and partly to keep from pitching over into the mud.
She had no guile about her; the liquor had opened her mind. I could see she was thinking about gripping the fish’s toothy jaw and dragging it away, though to where, I could not imagine. As if, given a second chance at wealth and power, she would not squander it. As if this fish were the greatest luck that had happened to them in ages.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” she asked. Wobbling even in her sandals, hunkered there.
“No, ma’am.”
“You know my boy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you think your father was right to take this fish from us? Do you think this fish is worth any piddling sixty-seven dollars?”
I didn’t say anything. I knew that anything I said would ignite her.
“I’m gonna go get my boy,” she said, turning and staring in the direction of the fire. Dusk was gone, the fire was bright in the night. She rose, stumbled, fell in the mud, cursed, and labored to her feet, then wandered off into the dark, away from the fish, and away from the fire. As if she lived in the darkness, had some secret sanctuary there. She hummed “The Yellow Rose of Texas” as she went.
I kept watering the fish. The gasps were coming slower and I felt that perhaps a fire was going out in the fish’s eyes. Lanterns were lit, and moths rose from the fields and swarmed those lanterns. Men came over and began to place the lanterns all around the fish, like candelabra at a dinner setting. I hoped that the fish would die before they began skinning it.
Moths cartwheeled off the lantern glass, wings singed, sometimes aflame—like poor, awkward imitations of fireflies—and landed fuzz-wrecked on the catfish’s glistening back, where they stuck to its skin like feathers, their wings still trembling.
A man’s voice came from behind me, saying, “Hey, you’re wasting water,” and he turned the hose off. Almost immediately, a fine wrinkling appeared on the previously taut gunmetal skin of the fish—a desiccation, like watching a time-lapse motion picture of a man’s or woman’s skin wrinkling as he or she ages, regardless of the man’s or woman’s wishes to the contrary.
The heat from the lanterns seemed to be sucking the moisture from the fish’s skin. The fish’s eyes seemed to search for mine.
The man who had turned off the water was Jack’s father, and he was holding a bowie knife. I tried to tell him to take the fish, but found myself speechless. Jack’s father’s eyes were red-drunk, and he wavered in such a manner as to seem in danger of falling over onto the dagger he gripped.
He beheld the fish for long moments. “Clarabelle wants me to take the fish home,” he said, and seemed to be studying the logistics of the command. “Shit,” he said, “I ain’t takin’ no fish home. Fuck her,” he said. “I pay my debts.”
He crouched beside the fish and made his first cut lightly around the fish’s wide neck with the long blade as if opening an envelope. He slid the knife in lengthwise beneath the skin and then ran an incision down the spine all the way to the tail, four feet distant. The fish stopped gasping for a moment, opened its giant mouth in shock and outrage, then began to gasp louder.
In watering the fish all day and into the evening, I had not noticed how many men and women had been gathering. Now when I straightened up to stretch, I saw that several of them had left the fire and come over to view the fish. Could the fish, like a small whale, feed them all? Most of them were drinking.
“Someone put that fish out of its misery,” a woman said, and a man stepped from out of the crowd with a pistol, aimed it at the fish’s broad head, and fired.
My father hurried over from the fire and shouted, “Stop shooting, damn it,” and the man grumbled an apology and retreated into the crowd.
The bullet had made a dark hole in the fish’s head. The wound didn’t bleed, and the fish, like some mythic monster, did n
ot seem affected by it. It kept on breathing, and I wanted very much to begin watering it again.
Jack’s father had paused only slightly during the shooting, and now kept cutting.
When he had all the cuts made, two other men helped him lift the fish. They ran a rope through its mouth and out its gills and hoisted it into a tree, where roosting birds rustled in alarm, then flew into the night.
The fish writhed, sucked for air, and, finding none, was somehow from far within able to summon and deliver enough power to flap its tail once, slapping one of the men in the ribs with a thwack! The fish was making guttural sounds now—that deep croaking they make when they are in distress—and Clarabelle said, “Well, I guess we need to cook him.”
Jack’s father had a pair of pliers in his pocket, and he gripped the skin with the pliers up behind the fish’s neck and then peeled the skin back, skinning the fish alive, as if pulling the husk or wrapper from a thing to reveal what had been hidden within.
The fish flapped and struggled and twisted, swinging wildly on the rope and croaking, but no relief was to be found. The croaking was loud and bothersome, and so the men lowered the fish, carried it over to the picnic table beside the fire, and began sawing the head off. When they had that done, the two pieces—head and torso—were still moving, but with less vigor. The fish’s body turned slowly on the table, and the mouth of the fish’s head opened and closed just as slowly; still the fish kept croaking, though more quietly, as if perhaps it had gotten something it had been asking for, and was now appeased.
The teeth of the saw were flecked with bone and fish muscle, gummed with cartilage and gray brain. “Here,” Jack’s father said, handing me the saw, “go down and wash that off.” I looked at my father, who nodded. Jack’s father pointed at the gasping head, with the rope still passed through the fish’s mouth and gills, and said, “Take the head down there, too, and feed it to the turtles—make it stop that noise.” He handed me the rope, the heavy croaking head still attached, and I took it down into the darkness toward the shining round pond.
