Fishbone's Song

by Gary Paulsen

  And then strike.

  Sharp beak down, swift and down and through them. Hardly ever missed, almost no splash, and almost never missed. Then up, flip the frog or fish up in the air, and catch it and swallow, zip and gone.

  I drew the arrow when the chub was still, had forgotten I was there—I could have been a tree trunk—drew it back slowly, so slowly, aimed at the bottom edge of the chub, and released, clean and gone. The needle-sharp point of the cane caught him halfway up his side just in back of the gills and pinned him to the bottom.

  Got him, I said to Fishbone, and I held him down, wiggling, with the arrow, and reached down the shaft, took him in my hand and said, again, got him clean.

  Good, he said from the porch. That’s one for me, now get one for yourself and we’ll wrap them in flour and slice up some potatoes and melt a mite of grease and we’ll have a good bite of food before dark. When the stove is hot, we’ll make a pot of coffee and have hot coffee sipped through sugar lumps for dessert.

  He loved sugar lumps. Not a lot of them but now and again a lump of sugar between his gums, and he’d suck coffee through it. Said it settled his guts. Sometimes he’d do the same thing drinking ’shine. Just hold a sugar lump there in his gums and sipped the ’shine right through it. Never said if it settled his guts that way, but he sure liked it. He’d let me have coffee with water to thin it down the same way, through a sugar lump. Said I was too small to drink straight stove coffee the way he made it and no ’shine at all. Once when I was being the worst part of a know-it-all and he wasn’t looking, or maybe was and let me do it as another lesson on how it wasn’t good to be a smart mouth—once I drank a full cup of strong coffee through a sugar lump held in my teeth and I was up all night and must have peed ten times. I think I was six then or maybe seven or five. Didn’t like it much and I have never tried it with ’shine. Tried that sip of ’shine plain one time, just enough to touch my tongue, and it burned so bad I thought my mouth was on fire. Still don’t see how Fishbone can sit there and sip it steady from a jar like he does and it never seems to hurt him much. I did that and it would turn my brain to mush. ’Course I’m still young, maybe ten or eleven or twelve depending on which true story about how I came to be with Fishbone. Maybe you had to be older to take the ’shine and strong coffee even when they’re sucked through a sugar lump.

  Didn’t seem to hurt him much, the ’shine—mouth or brain or body—but then he’s old; old, he says, as dirt. That may be why. Like leather or hard wood or rust iron. Just plain tough.

  But it sure makes his songs come easier. The ’shine.

  Third Song: Barefoot Blues

  Two-dollar shoes,

  two-dollar shoes.

  Pinch my toes, make me sing the blues.

  Can’t do nothing,

  but moan and wail.

  Man come along and throw me in jail.

  All for stealing,

  them two-dollar shoes.

  Can’t do nothing but sing them blues.

  4

  * * *

  Stovesmoke

  Sometimes it was not hunting and it was more like going into something. Something you knew. Something you wore like part of you, like the trees and grass and the water in the creek and ponds and the brush were your clothes, your skin. You. It was all you.

  Tried to tell Fishbone about it, how it felt now that I had come into it, knew more about it. At first I thought it didn’t go in his thinking. He smiled a bit. No teeth smile; had his eyes closed like he was seeing something in there, in his thinking, and hadn’t heard a word I said.

  But I was wrong. Usually I was. Wrong. When it came to thinking that I was out ahead of Fishbone, I was almost always wrong.

  It can all be like that, he said, everything about you, your life, what you do, what you did, what you’re going to do. Everything you see, feel, hear—everything you do. Everything you are. Your life, all your life you’ll wear it, he said, if you do it right, right in how you see and know your own right, know it in how you think yourself.

  Everything, all that you are or ever going to be, will be like a cloak, he said and smiled—just as a cloak of many colors.

  • • •

  Arrows.

  I got a little older, eight and up a bit, or maybe nine and up, and I came to where I could make them better, so they’d fly better and not turn all sideways. I was working near the bog swamp just down from the shack, looking for crayfish or bigger bullfrogs, and I found two big shypoke wings, a left and right, with the big end feathers still stuck on them. Fishbone said there were other names for the birds, big swamp birds that had long sharp beaks and ate frogs and small fish and now and then a small snake. Called them herons, he said, some people, and white ones were called egrets, but he said he had never heard them called anything but shypoke. Just lying there in the water-grass, the wing ends. One out to either side so you could almost see the big bird between them except it was gone. Head, guts, bones, legs—all gone. Small tracks around them, around the wings, like an Old Blue hound only much smaller. Maybe half the size of my palm where the Old Blue hounds made a track in soft water-grass or creek mud bigger than my whole hand. More than not a fox, red or gray, caught the bird and killed him to carry off, but the wings were too much to handle, so the fox took them off and left them.

  Feathers. In books. In one of them I came to see an old drawing of some men who ran with Robin Hood—just in the story of him, not for real—and they had arrow holders on their backs called quivers and in the drawing each arrow in the quiver had feathers on it.

  So I had the feathers from the shypoke wings and I wasn’t sure what they would do for the arrow, but every drawing showing arrows in the book showed them with feathers on the back end. There had to be something to them. And I had my cane arrows from the creek side. So all I needed to do was figure out how to put the feathers on the arrow.

  Not so easy. I could see the feathers had a center line and they would split easy on the line with a little pressure from a knife. So I had feathers with a soft vane sticking up off a flat bottom, and I sat by the lamp of an evening with a cane arrow and a piece of flat-bottomed feather and wondered how it could be attached. Wasn’t any glue or tape in the whole cabin. I had tried splitting a cane shaft and sliding the feather in the slit, but it flew out when I shot . . .

  Thread, Fishbone said. Take thread from the sewing box, split the feather with thread wound around the arrow and through little splits in the feather, do two feathers opposite each other, and tie the thread off with double knots. Make the feathers about as long as your finger and they’ll fly clean. True.

  How do you know that, I asked, and he said that’s how the Apaches did it.

  How do you know what the Apaches did, I asked, which put me on the edge of being the worst part of being a know-it-all since I was not even fairly sure I knew what an Apache was supposed to be. Didn’t find out until I was some older and the lady who sent books sent me one about American natives of the Southwest. They were a tribe of Native Americans who were so tough it took a whole army to stop them. But I didn’t know that when Fishbone said they did arrows with thread holding the feathers on, and I asked him again, how do you know that?

  But his eyes closed until only a little edge of white showed, and he smiled, and seemed to look off the way he did when he was moving around in his memories. His foot started to shuffle-pat the floor, and I knew he was gone. Or I thought he was gone, gone away to that other place, except that he got that dreamy look and smiled with his gums and said, stovesmoke.

  A word, one word that way, and I said, what’s that? What’s stovesmoke?

  The way you move, he said, the way you move in the woods through the trees like a knife through water, like fog, like the smoke from the stove on a damp morning, all low and sliding through the trees.

  Being.

  Watched you from the porch, low and sliding like smoke, all of it closing in back of you like you wasn’t there, wasn’t ever there before or after.

>   Like smoke.

  Like stovesmoke.

  Sometimes I didn’t know if Fishbone even saw me. Mostly his eyes seemed closed while he was swimming in his mind. As far as noticing me, watching me move through the trees from the porch, I would have bet he didn’t see me much at all.

  Was a time, he said, was a time when Jimmy Applecore showed up. Once long ago, and then again later. He moved like that. Always moved like stovesmoke. Even sitting at a table playing poker, he was like smoke, there and not there. Jimmy drank fancy ’shine. Sweet moonshine and old bourbon, so he stayed just under the cloud all the time.

  Except after Korea. That’s when the guv’ment treated him like a show pony. Sent him around to places where people had money. Used him to make nice about being a soldier. A hero for his country so rich people would give money to the guv’ment men walking Jimmy around, same as if he was on a rope.

  ’Til some man tell Jimmy he was lying about how he held a machine gun up in his hands to fire it even though he had the burn scars from the gun to prove it. Jimmy didn’t say nuthin’, just threw an apple from a bowl on the stage down into the audience so hard it knocked the man out, made the apple explode so there wasn’t nothing left but core. That’s how he got the name Jimmy Applecore. Prouder of the apple than he was of the medal. Didn’t hold on to the medal, but he carried the apple-throwing picture from the newspaper in his wallet.

  Met Jimmy when I was waiting to get patched up from being shot some in Korea. Took one look at me—bloody, puking, swearing—and he said he knew where there was a place in the ocean near Florida where the guv’ment dumped a whole barge full of new jeeps and trucks just to get rid of them. Dumped them in water only fifty feet deep, and he knew where to get a diving suit and an old boat to borrow, and we could get rich, he said, clean rich. I said how and he said tires. All the tires were new, made of pure rubber with good tubes, and full of air, so if we unscrewed the nuts holding them, they’d float up.

  Slick, Jimmy said. Slick as nose snot on a glass doorknob. It was like finding money, he told me, and wasn’t even stealing it. Guv’ment threw them all away so people would buy new cars and tires and not just use the old jeeps and trucks, and it all worked like Jimmy said. Took turns wearing the diving suit down, down in the blue, just popping the tires loose and letting them shoot up.

  Like stovesmoke, Fishbone said. Life going just that way, just as smoke through the trees. Everything working just exactly right. Just as Jimmy said, Fishbone said. Slick, and we did all the tires we could get to, pop and up, and only a little bother from sharks coming in closer and closer until you jammed their noses with a screwdriver and they’d jerk and wheel away, and then money. And more money. Money for pockets and extra money to keep down in the boot. More money than there ever was for us, good money, better money than ever was for Jimmy to buy a ’49 Ford with a big V8 motor almost new. Almost new. And fast. Snap your neck fast, crack your shoulders fast, screaming fast, lay rubber in two gears fast, so fast, so fast . . .

  So fast it took Jimmy out of all the rest of his life. Everything gone. Had met a woman, not just a whiskey woman but a woman he was going to marry and live with and have his life with, and he took her for a ride in the car, the hot car, the ’49 Ford with the big engine.

  Charlene with him in the car, fast in the car, beer drunk in the car but not whiskey drunk in the car, and it didn’t matter. Just the beer took Jimmy and Charlene, moving at a hundred miles and more in one hour, off the side of a bridge from loose gravel into a dirt embankment so hard, so hard . . .

  Jimmy Applecore was an Apache from out west. Went through the place called Korea with Fishbone, tied Fishbone on the hood of the jeep between the two frozen dead men so he didn’t die in the ice there, die in the cold there, saved Fishbone so he could live the rest of his life even though Jimmy couldn’t. Didn’t. Didn’t have any more life after the dirt embankment.

  You couldn’t tell, Fishbone said, you couldn’t tell where Jimmy and Charlene ended and the ’49 Ford began, all mixed in the dirt of the embankment. Gone. Gone same as the sister in the flour-sack shift dress wrapped in the binder canvas. Gone like the croup took them. Gone like the frozen two men on the hood of the jeep. Dead.

  Gone.

  But Jimmy had an old arrow. Warped piece of wood with a stone head and dried-up crackly feathers. Carried it all through Korea and drinking and diving for the tires and the end with the ’49 Ford, carried it wrapped in a piece of oiled soft deerskin leather, wrapped and tied with oiled leather thongs.

  Said it was his Medicine Arrow. Said it was from old, way old times, when all they had was stone arrowheads to hunt with, to live with, to be with. To be. And when Fishbone said he thought Jimmy was lying, when they were both drunk one night in a canvas tent in the army, said he thought Jimmy maybe carved the arrow shaft himself, Jimmy had just smiled. Held it out, held the arrow out, and said touch it. See it. Feel it. And you’ll know, you’ll feel-know how it is, how it was and will always be, and when Fishbone touched the arrow, it felt warm, seemed to send a warmness into him, through his hand.

  It is for the path, the path from the old ones, from before measured time, before White Time, before the path the old ones have made for us to follow in our lives. And after life, Jimmy told Fishbone, tells of the one true path we are all to take, shows us the way. The stone head of the arrow will show the way, point the one true way of the spirit road if you believe, believe in the magic of the arrow path.

  Believe.

  And Fishbone said he knew it then, knew that it was true and that he believed that it would work for Jimmy, and when Jimmy and Charlene hit the embankment and entered onto their journey on the spirit path, he knew, Fishbone knew, that the arrow would show them the way.

  After that the arrow was gone, disappeared, at least as far as Fishbone was aware, but he had seen it, seen the arrow and how it was made, how the feathers were tied on with thread wrapped through them, and so I did the same, the same as Fishbone showed me.

  I split and tied the shypoke feathers, cut short pieces of them, on the back of the cane arrows just ahead of where the bowstring took the shaft. And when I fired the bow, the arrows quit turning sideways, followed a path, a true path to the hunk of soft dirt I used for a practice target.

  So I could shoot longer now, a little farther, with a little more accuracy, and I cut a new willow and dried it for a stronger bow and became at least part of what Fishbone had said of me, became like stovesmoke. Moving.

  In a way . . .

  In a way I moved . . .

  In a way I moved out of the cabin and became even more a part of the trees, the leaves, the grass, all of everything that was all of the woods. I circled, bigger and bigger circles out away from the cabin, away from Fishbone, away from what I was, what I had been, and I became something . . . else. More. Something more and something better and something new. New.

  But not away in my thinking. Not really away from Fishbone in my thinking because I ended each circle, at the end of each day, hunting, seeing, learning, each day when the sun came down slower, came down at the end time, the closing time. Each day I wound up back at the cabin. Back with Fishbone, where I could tell him things I had seen and done and he could tell me the same. Things he had seen and done.

  Things to see . . .

  From me, things to see.

  Early morning, barely dawn, and I came on a small pond in a clearing. Perfect. Perfectly round with grass edges, and I slid my bare feet down through the wet grass, felt it between my toes and stopped, and there she was, a small doe. On the other side of the pond, taking a drink, raising her head as I was there, seeing me but not running.

  Just standing. Still. And I was still. Sunlight just coming over the pond to catch her standing there. Her head raised and two drops of water left her lips and fell. Fell almost in slow time, fell back into the pond, where they made two perfect circles of ripples that looked like jewels.

  Perfect jewels. Round jewel-ripples spreading out in light
and she stared at me forever, forever after in my mind, a picture that filled my brain and would always be there, always be part of my thinking.

  I could taste her, smell-taste her. She was meat and I was a hunter now, and forever after a hunter, and I could smell-taste her on the sides of my tongue, in my breath, but I could not shoot. Wrong shot, wrong arrows. Just cane sharpened to points with no blades, not good enough, no sharp edges to cut and not strong enough for bigger animals and so, no. Not this time. No shot. But still there for me, still tasting her and always after caught in my mind-taste-smell so I owned her even as she turned and walked back into the trees. She was mine.

  Always would be mine.

  Always.

  Always I would be a hunter moving like stovesmoke, and always in all ways she would be mine. To bring up and see and taste and smell. All ways.

  And I told Fishbone about it that evening. Sitting on the porch in the lamplight I tried to tell him that when I was hunting and came upon the deer by the pond, even though I couldn’t shoot her, couldn’t make the kill, still she was mine because I had seen-smelled-felt-tasted her, knew her, knew her and would always know her. And he told me of his second Forever Woman that came after the first Forever Woman who left him while he was in Korea getting shot some.

  A second Forever Woman who stole his heart away, stole his soul away, and left him broken and open inside.

  But never was.

  Never was his second Forever Woman at all. Same as I never shot the doe, that doe, same as.

  Name of Judith Eve.

  Story about Judith Eve.

  But stories, he said, are never just stories alone by themselves.

  Shuffle-pat, shuffle-pat, the old shoes on the worn porch boards, worn and polished.

  Shuffle-pat, shuffle-pat, and a sip of ’shine. Worn boards making an almost-sound of their own. Like a baby drum. Babydrum, babydrum, shuffle-pat, shuffle-pat . . .