Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish

by Betsy Byars

  Weezie lifted her head, opened the door to the booth, and stepped out into the night air.

  “Who were you talking to?” Warren asked abruptly, counting on surprise to get an answer.

  Weezie spun around. She crossed the sidewalk in three steps. “What are you doing here?” She grabbed him by the upper arm.

  “Ow! Let go! Grandma sent me!”

  She stared at him and then abruptly let him free. He moved back a step, out of reach. He rubbed his arm. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Is that why you were crying?” he went on, sneering slightly. “Because it was nobody?”

  “I was not crying.”

  “Your cheeks are still wet.”

  “I was not crying!” She towered over him now, as menacing as anything he had ever created in his movies.

  “You were!”

  “And if you mention to Grandma, just mention, that I was on the phone …” She trailed off, leaving the threat hanging.

  “If I mention it to Grandma, then what?”

  “I promise you will be sorry.”

  She turned and started for home. He watched her, her high, straight back, her long legs. There was something so imposing in her walk—it reminded him of John Wayne—Warren decided not to say anything.

  “I’ll tell if I want to!” he yelled defiantly.

  She did not turn around, and after a moment he began to follow, the two-thousand-pound goldfish forgotten for the moment.

  “There’s something down there. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why. But there is something down there.”

  “And heaven help us if it ever decides to come up.”

  WARREN LAY IN BED, watching the reflection of car lights on the ceiling. He could not sleep. He could not get Weezie’s phone call out of his mind. He wanted to know who had made Weezie cry. It was no mere boyfriend, no girl friend. He was sure of that. It was no clerk at a store, no operator, no—

  And then it came to him. Weezie had been talking to their mother!

  He sat up in bed, mouth open, staring ahead without seeing. He didn’t know how it could be possible—everything told him it couldn’t be—and yet he knew, knew that’s who it had been.

  He leaned forward over his knees. He felt as if his entire body had been thrown into a higher gear, that his thoughts, his blood, everything was moving faster. His mother!

  For the past three years Warren had seen his mother only on the evening news and in newspaper pictures. The postcards she sent them were mailed from places where she had never been. This was in case the FBI was watching the mail. Warren’s mother lived in a fugitive world that Warren only half understood.

  Warren’s actual memory of his mother—drawn from the first five years of his life—was that of a woman always on the move, a woman with a sort of frantic urgency in her voice and movements. She carried signs protesting the Vietnam War in front of the White House. She lay down in front of nuclear power plants that polluted the environment. She was carried kicking and struggling to a patrol car to call attention to the dangers of pesticides.

  His mother took on the glow, the mystery, of Wonder Woman, a person bigger than life, strong enough to make the world right. He saw her as being like Atlas, with the entire world on her shoulders.

  When he was five, everything changed. Warren’s mother became part of a movement that was no longer peaceful. She went from putting stink bombs in the ventilating system of the Hilton, where a nuclear energy conference was being held, to pipe bombs exploded at night in chemical plants, Molotov cocktails thrown at executive limousines. And Warren’s mother became wanted by the FBI, and she could never come home again.

  Warren could no longer picture his mother in his mind. She had used so many names, worn so many disguises. Sometimes in newspaper pictures her hair was black, sometimes blond. Sometimes she wore white-rimmed Woolworth’s sunglasses, sometimes wire spectacles. Sometimes she was old, sometimes young. He was painfully aware that he would no longer recognize his mother if he passed her on the street.

  “Your mother is dead,” his grandmother would say flatly. She would not even allow her name to be mentioned in the apartment. “I only have two daughters now.”

  “You have three!” he used to protest. “Ginger and Pepper and Saffron!”

  Grandma had named her three daughters for spices. Aunt Pepper had told him that when Grandma used to call them from the window, she sounded like an old spice peddler. “Ginger! Pepper! Saffron!”

  Warren’s mom, Saffron, was the only one who had a nickname—Saffee, to him the most beautiful name in the world.

  And now Weezie had talked to her on the telephone! He was sure of that. He wanted to rush into her room and shake her awake. “You talked to Mom!”

  The impulse was so strong that he actually got up out of bed, against his will, like a sleepwalker. He took a few steps toward the door. He stopped.

  He knew how Weezie would react. She would be furious, and as usual her anger would be turned to scorn. Scorn was her best weapon. “Talking to Mom!” she would say, her voice adult and terrible. “Do you still hang on to the precious little dream that Mommie will come home, pick you up, kiss you, and make it all better?”

  He moved back and sat on the edge of his bed like someone who had taken a blow. He had hung on to that dream for a long time. He had hurried home from school again and again because he had a “feeling” that she would be there, had run up the steps with so much momentum that if she had been there to pick him up, they would have spun around like skaters.

  He lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over his shivering body. He stared up at the ceiling. He was as hurt as if his sister had actually said the words to him.

  He closed his eyes and tried to get back into the mood of the sewer. He imagined himself walking beneath the dripping walls, shivering, his footsteps echoing hollowly down the long tunnels. He imagined that warning BLOOP, imagined swirling around as the golden form, majestic and terrible, rose from the dark waters, imagined his scream. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa …”

  Of course, not wishing to do away with himself so early in the film, he would somehow have to prevent Bubbles from actually ingesting him. Perhaps … His thoughts died from lack of interest.

  Usually his movies took him out of his world instantly. Sometimes a single sentence, spoken in a low tone: “No ordinary creature ate this whole herd of cattle.” Well, something like that, and he would be off.

  Tonight, nothing would work. Only an hour earlier the sewer had been the realest thing in the world. The sights, smells, and sounds had filled his mind completely. Now the sewer was as foreign as something out of a history lesson.

  All of a sudden Warren wanted his mom. And he wanted her in the old dreamlike way. He wanted to be scooped up in her thin arms, spun around, kissed. That was the only thing in the world that could take away this terrible feeling of loneliness.

  He threw back his limp covers and kicked them away. He walked slowly into the hall.

  He paused to listen. His grandmother was snoring in the living room. She had fallen asleep watching an Elvis Presley movie, and now there was nothing but snow on the screen. In the morning she would complain about missing the end.

  He went into Weezie’s room and stumbled over her shoes in the dark.

  “Who’s there?” she asked, sitting quickly up in bed.

  “It’s just me.”

  “What are you doing in here? Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “Is Grandma all right?”

  “I guess so. She’s snoring.”

  “Then go back to bed. You know I don’t like people in my room.”

  He stood a few feet away from her, on the latch-hooked rug his grandmother had made from a kit.

  “Go on, Warren.”

  Warren did not move. He usually avoided the bare floor. When he was little and home alone he would circle the entire apartment, leaping from chair to sofa, crawling over end tables
, onto the TV set, over kitchen counters, the stove, anything to keep from stepping on the floor. It was a game he played. All his games back then were escape games, even when the bare floor was all he had to escape. Now, out of habit, he waited on the rug.

  “Are you still there?” Weezie asked, her voice rising with irritation. “I do not like people watching me sleep!”

  “You weren’t drooling.”

  “Warren, get out of here. I mean it now.” She groped on the floor for something to throw at him.

  There was a pause. Warren curled his toes down into the soft wool of his grandmother’s rug for strength, a plant taking root. “Were you talking to Mom on the telephone tonight?”

  “Mom? Is that what you woke me up for? Mom? Don’t be ridiculous. Go back to bed.”

  She turned over, pulling the covers around her, and sighed. He continued to watch his sister. He knew she was not asleep.

  He shifted, rubbed one foot over the other. “Were you talking to Mom?”

  As Warren stood there, waiting for an answer, he felt as if he had spent most of his life pleading with women, waiting for answers. Usually, though, with Weezie, he just had to beg her to listen to his movies.

  “Want to hear a movie I’m planning?”

  “In a word—no.”

  “Please, Weezie, you’ll like this one. Please. It starts out with an explosion in the desert and some scientists come to investigate and they look down inside this enormous crack in the surface of the earth and they see something stirring. One of the scientists says, ‘There’s something down there. I don’t know what, and I don’t know why, but there is something down there.’ And the other one answers, ‘And heaven help us if it ever decides to come up.’ ”

  He hated to plead with people. It made him feel smaller somehow. He watched Weezie’s back. He cleared his throat and said again, “Was it Mom?”

  Suddenly Weezie came up out of the covers like a tornado. She whirled to face him, throwing back the sheet. Her hands fell on her hips as naturally as tree limbs spring back into place.

  “All right, just try to be sensible for once in your life,” she snapped. “How do you think I could be talking to Mom?” Her voice was more scornful than Warren had feared.

  “I don’t know … exactly.”

  “The last time we heard from her was four months ago, do you realize that? A postcard from California. ‘Having a wonderful time, glad you aren’t here.’ ”

  “That was the last time I heard from her,” he said pointedly.

  “So, do you think I have some secret line of communication? What? You think I send out pigeons? Smoke signals? Wireless messages? Voodoo drums? Call me tonight at sevennnnn.” Her hands fluttered mysteriously to make it all seem more impossible.

  “I think … somehow … the telephone.”

  Weezie exhaled with disgust. “Oh, go to bed, Warren.” She fell back onto her pillow to show that the conversation was over.

  Warren waited in silence. In his movies, discoveries came so easily. “These scorpions are from the Incan cave.” “This woman was squirted by radioactive milk with two percent butterfat.” It was only in real life that you couldn’t get answers. “I’m not going, Weezie, until you tell me who you were talking to.”

  “All right. I was talking to a girl from school.”

  “I don’t believe you. A girl from school made you cry? Come on. I’ve seen the girls at your school, and there’s not one who—”

  “All right, a boy from my school.”

  “I don’t believe that either.”

  “He was going to take me to the prom, and now he’s going to take Isolee Watkins.” She looked at him through her lashes. Then she raised her head. “Satisfied?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s all you’re going to get.”

  The way she looked at him then, with her eyes as hard as stone, her mouth set, told Warren it was hopeless. He had seen that look before.

  He turned and walked to his room, past the living room where the blank TV crackled. As he lay down and turned his face to the wall, his mouth was as set as hers.

  “No, no, it can’t be. No goldfish can weigh two thousand pounds. Why, a goldfish that big could ingest …”

  “Go ahead and finish, Chief. Could ingest two sewer workers.”

  “GET UP IF YOU’RE going to Pepper’s,” his grandmother called from the doorway.

  “What?”

  “Get up.”

  Warren lay blinking in the sunlight from the window. All night he had suffered through one dream after another. He was never lucky enough to have good scary dreams with monsters and space creatures.

  In his dreams he searched for lost homework, was sent to a blackboard too tall to reach, worked with pencils that squealed and caused students to laugh, and wrote on paper that spread across his desk like milk. Now he lay on his dirty sheets, more tired than if he had not slept at all.

  “Is Weezie going?” he called.

  “To Pepper’s? No.”

  “Then I’m not going either.”

  “Well, then you’ll be here all day by yourself.”

  He rose on one elbow, alert at last. “Why? Where’s Weezie?”

  “She went out. Now come on, get dressed. We’ll miss the bus.”

  “Where did Weezie go?”

  “I don’t know. To the library.”

  “The library’s not open on Sunday morning.”

  “Well, I don’t know. She said she was going to study with somebody. Maria maybe. Or Isolee.”

  In one move he was on the floor, looking out the window at the street below.

  The sidewalks were empty except for two dogs lying in front of the corner grocery store. These two dogs made up the neighborhood pack. The dog warden had been trying to catch them for years, but they were too smart for him. They knew the crawl spaces under every house, the broken slats in every fence. Now, sensing it was Sunday, the warden’s day off, they lay openly soaking up the morning sun.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Weezie was going out?” He struck the windowsill with his fists.

  “Why all this sudden interest in Weezie’s goings and comings?”

  “Nothing. I just like to know what she’s doing.”

  “She’s studying.”

  “She says she’s studying.”

  He turned away from the sunny window and looked at his grandmother. She watched him for a moment and then shrugged. “Weezie’s generally doing what she says she’s doing.”

  “A lot you know.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me something about your sister?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  “Then get dressed and let’s go.”

  Warren stood on the dusty floor. His grandmother thought it was a waste of energy to sweep floors more than once a month. He pulled on his clothes, the same he had worn yesterday. His grandmother didn’t believe in washing clothes often either.

  Then he continued to stand in the middle of the floor, his teeth clamped tightly together, wondering where his sister was, what she was doing. He had the feeling she was contacting his mother, phoning her, maybe even going to see her. He struck an imaginary windowsill.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He went out of the apartment and down the stairs behind his grandmother. She took the steps slowly, one by one, like a child.

  Warren paused on the landing. He put on his aviator sunglasses, hiding the fury in his eyes. Never before, in all the years of his mother’s absence—years in which he had missed her and longed for her and wept more tears for her than anybody—never in all those years had he even considered the possibility of finding her. If he had thought it was possible he would have been roaming the earth like a nomad.

  And now Weezie had—

  “Come on. I hear the bus,” his grandmother called up, holding the door open. “It’s coming.”

  He ran down the rest of the steps and out onto the sidewalk. His grandmother was at
the curb, ready to board.

  And now, he thought, Weezie had done that. She had somehow found their mother, had talked to her, maybe at this very moment was on her way to see her.

  “How’s it going?” his grandmother asked the driver as she climbed up. She always sat behind the driver, ignoring the signs, and spent the time chatting. “My daughter Pepper’s having us to dinner. You know Pepper?” she asked as she settled herself in the side seat.

  “No’m.”

  “She rides this bus—a tall girl, light red hair?”

  “Lots of redheads on this route.”

  “I thought you might remember her because when she was living in New York she had a part in a soap opera.”

  “My wife might. She watches all them shows.”

  “I remember when Pepper got the part. I sat back and thought, Well, now I’ll have the pleasure of watching my daughter every afternoon. She’ll get married and divorced and go crazy and attempt suicide. Only guess what?”

  The driver shook his head.

  “She was on seven episodes and got killed in a car crash. Burned up. They never found the body.”

  “My, my.”

  “For a while I hoped she didn’t really get killed, just thrown clear of the wreck and was wandering around somewhere with amnesia. Only it’s been three years now, so I guess it won’t happen.”

  “Don’t look like it.”

  “I have two daughters.” She glanced sideways at Warren. “The other daughter’s a singer in—Oh, here’s our stop.” She got up and Warren followed. She went down the steps slowly. “I got bad legs,” she explained to the driver.

  “Take your time,” he answered.

  They walked the block to Pepper’s apartment while his grandmother talked about bus drivers. She liked them. No bus driver had ever—in her fifty years of riding buses—been rude to her.

  She shuffled along the sidewalk. She wore her best bedroom slippers. “And I’m not the ideal fare,” she admitted. “I don’t get on fast. Half the time I don’t have the right change. I—” She paused to ring the bell to Pepper’s apartment.