by John Everson
Terry watched and nodded at the deceptive simplicity of the game. He saw how Wayne plotted to cut off the bartender’s pieces and soon decided that unless the one-armed man was really stupid, he was angling to lose. After only fifteen minutes the game was decided.
“Hey, hey!” Wayne yelled and came over to high-five Terry. Then he stepped up to Jasmine.
“So…do I get that date now?” he prodded.
Her eyes narrowed, but the corners of her lips lifted. She pulled a cigarette from her mouth and blew a cloud of smoke into his face. This time the smoke was lit.
“That was a practice round. See if you can beat your friend for the real thing.”
She reached down and picked up a turtle shell, shoving it into his hands.
Wayne quickly dragged Terry onto the playing field, and Bruce handed over his bag of starfish.
“Loser of this round goes in the tank,” the bartender warned.
“Fish bait,” the crowd yelled.
Something in Terry’s stomach clenched. A grizzled old man with a cane and a black eye-patch leaned forward and whispered something in Wayne’s ear.
Wayne smiled and nodded, looking up at Terry. “Gonna feed you to the fish,” he threatened.
“Keep thinking with your worm, and it’s going to get bit off,” Terry retorted and placed his first piece.
This time the game seemed to go longer. Terry struggled to stop the alcohol from clouding his mind. He pinched his side again and again, willing the pain to clear his head. He was determined not to let Wayne win, if for no other reason than because he’d forced him into this. Wayne always got the girl, and this time Terry aimed if not to get her, to at least stop Wayne from going there.
He drew a diagonal line across the board, and Wayne placed a series of disconnected turtle shells. But when they started filling in the holes, for a while it looked like Wayne had the game. At one point he cut off four of Terry’s starfish, and the crowd drew a collective breath. “Fish bait,” someone squealed. There was laughter.
But Terry had grown up playing chess, and this little diversion was something he’d counted on. This was a more fluid game than chess, but he was working toward a strategy; he had tried to focus Wayne on the small part of the map while he angled his attack. He ignored the loss of pieces and closed a line across the upper center of the grid.
“Give up,” Wayne enthused, closing another gap and missing the larger strategy that was about to encircle his pieces.
“Go fish,” Terry answered and dropped the last piece of his trap in place.
“No fuckin’ way!”
“Gotcha.” Terry grinned. Behind them the crowd began to chant.
“Fish bait. Fish bait. Fish bait!”
A heavyset man with a white goatee and piercing blue eyes stepped out of the crowd and put a hand on Wayne’s shoulder. He pushed him a step forward and pointed.
“Time to take a dip,” he said. His voice was low, but Terry could still hear it above the crowd’s chanting. “Take a walk through that door.”
The crowd surged forward onto the playing field. Bruce and the white-goateed man began to push Wayne forward.
“All right, all right!” he yelled, shrugging off their hands. “I’ll take my punishment.” Then he turned to Terry, a flare of anger lighting his eyes.
“Don’t think I won’t get you back for this,” he hissed. He’d always been a sore loser when it came to women.
Jasmine slipped past Terry then and put her arm around Wayne’s shoulders.
“I’ll dry you off,” she promised.
As she went by, Terry froze when he finally got a good look at the tattoo on her back. It was an octopus. But that wasn’t what made him freeze. The reason he hadn’t been able to make it out from a distance was because it was so twisted. It writhed in coils and strange twists across her lower back, one tentacle reaching its sucker cups toward the crack of her ass, another testing its way around her side, as if in search of her belly. And the reason it was so twisted was that it had been drawn to hide the scars.
The teeth marks.
Wayne’s frown slipped away with Jasmine’s promise, and he started through the doorway to the dunking tank.
Terry looked from the ragged pink lines of scar tissue across Jasmine’s back to Bruce, the one-armed bartender and the one-eyed old man next to him. He finally noticed that most of the people in the bar seemed to bear the track marks of life-threatening accidents. An Indian man shook his head as if in ecstasy, bobbing to a beat that no one else could hear. Not surprising, since he was missing an ear—and a quarter of his skull.
Petey, the bandleader, hobbled into the midst of the crowd on his one leg, the wooden stump of his fake foot clomping louder than the growing chants of “Fish bait.”
A woman in a blue tank top with frizzy brown hair pushed past Terry to be in the front of the spectators. When her left boob crushed warmly against his arm, he turned to look at her and saw the right half of her shirt hung loosely, with no flesh to hold it up.
There was almost nobody here, he realized, who wasn’t visibly, horribly disfigured. Something was very wrong in Winston.
“Wayne, don’t,” he suddenly screamed and pushed past the tank-top woman and the peg-legged bandleader.
But Wayne had stepped through the dark doorway.
“Keep going,” Bruce advised and put his hand on a switch at the side of the door.
“Is there a light in here?” Wayne called, and the bartender threw the switch.
The room came to life, and Terry could now see that Wayne stood at the end of a diving board. A plank of wood extended out over a vast pool of water. Lights blazed down from the unfinished beams of the ceiling spotlighting blue water. Terry pushed Jasmine out of the way and tried to see better. He couldn’t tell how deep it was, but the room looked like a poor man’s gymnasium. A narrow wooden walkway led around the long stretch of water. Somewhere a pump hummed.
Here was where the smell he’d noticed in the game room came from. That room had smelled, but this room stank. Of fish.
Rotting fish.
“Wayne, don’t,” he said again, pushing past the bartender to stand alone in the doorway.
“I’m going in,” Wayne said, holding his nose and dramatically waving with his one free hand as he fell backwards into the pool.
Two shadows darted out of the corners of the tank before Wayne even hit the water.
“Oh my God,” Terry whispered.
“Fish bait!” roared the crowd, who had filed around Terry to stand on opposite sides of the plank along the narrow walkway surrounding the tank.
He stood at the safe edge of the plank, just inside the room, and watched as the two dark shapes shot forward, the edge of one telltale fin breaking the top of the water just as Wayne’s face disappeared beneath the blue. His eyes were closed as he sank toward the bottom of the pool, holding his nose. But even from where he stood, Terry could see them pop open wide as the shapes converged on the bait. Wayne thrashed then, and his hand left his nose as he screamed beneath the water and tried to pull himself with one wild arm to the surface. Something dark colored the water where his other arm had been seconds before.
Terry could see the pale fingers of a hand disappear down the maw of one monstrous gray mouth. “Oh God, no,” he cried, falling to his knees at the edge of the plank in time to see the other shark bite down on Wayne’s midsection. The water bloomed bright in blood, and for a moment Terry couldn’t see a thing. Then the sharks wrestled the body to a clearer section of water, and he saw the winding coil of his friend’s guts unfurl as one hungry fish snapped at the delicate flesh and pulled.
“Fish bait!” roared the mangled crowd in appreciation.
Wayne’s head was shaking from side to side, his mouth wide and shrieking bubbles. But all Terry could hear was the crowd and the splash of shark t
ails as the hungry creatures breached the water and angled down for another bite.
In moments the water was still. Terry was weeping, utterly in shock, unable to move.
Someone touched his shoulder. He looked up into the unnaturally bright eyes of the goateed man.
“Sorry about that, son. They’ve really grown up, it seems. Used to be they just got a piece of you, not the whole package.”
Jasmine bent down to wipe the hair and tears from his eyes.
“I’m glad it was him and not you,” she said. “You’re a pretty good player. Wanna go another round? I’m sure someone will want to take you on, and since they’ve had dinner, the loser oughta be able to get dunked without losing a limb.”
“Get the fuck away from me, you freak!” Terry screamed and pushed her back.
“What is with you people?” he yelled, looking at the parade of limbless, scarred locals lined up around the pool. Until his outburst, some had been clapping and cheering. “How can you do this to someone?”
“Not much else to do out here.” Bruce shrugged. “Passes the time.”
“Pass this, you fuck,” Terry screamed and barreled into the man, forcing him three steps down the plank. The bartender flailed for balance, reaching for the edge of the plank with the ghost of his hand and only catching the edge of it with the smooth scar of his stump as he tumbled headfirst into the bloody soup.
Goatee man leapt forward and punched Terry square in the face. The pain arced behind his eyes like a white-hot poker.
“You push someone in, you go in yourself,” his deathly voice boomed across the pool.
Terry fell backwards, slamming his head against the wood. He started to slip off the side but caught the edge of the plank with a foot as he struggled to clear the red stars from his eyes. His nose felt on fire, and his head pounded with heat. A heavy foot stomped on his calf and Terry screamed, kicking back blindly at his opponent, who only took the opportunity to kick him again.
“Give it to ’im, Gordon,” someone yelled. “Fish bait!”
He began to slide off the plank and grappled frantically with both hands and a foot to hold on. Below him he saw the sharks circling the bartender, who flailed about with purpose. Bruce rounded on the sharks and kept them at bay with a series of well-aimed underwater kicks and punches. Some of the crowd had gathered at the point closest to him and urged him on, calling to him and holding out their hands. Terry also caught a glimpse of Wayne beneath the water, eyes and mouth wide open, his face miraculously unharmed. The rest of him looked as raw and torn as if he’d been chain-sawed.
Then another kick sent his feet off the plank, and Terry dangled dangerously from his fingertips, his feet beneath the water.
Gordon’s voice boomed again. “Shoulda taken your winnings and gone.”
A heel ground into his left hand, and Terry screamed, yanking it away. But before the big man could crush his remaining grip, Terry pulled himself up as hard as he could with his remaining arm and managed to swing a leg back up to the board.
“No you don’t,” Gordon laughed, but Terry was fast.
He reached with both hands around the wood and pulled, levering himself back up to the topside of the board. As the burly man reached down to grab him and throw him off, Terry struck. He kicked as hard as he could, catching the man right in the kneecaps and then shimmying backwards toward the game room as Gordon yelled in agony and fell to a crouch.
Petey came from somewhere and tried to stop him, but Terry kneed him in the balls, collapsing the wiry bandleader awkwardly over his fake leg. He dove around the other doorway back into the bar, grabbed his backpack, and was almost out the door when Jasmine stepped in his way.
“Wait,” she implored. “We could have fun. This’ll blow over. Don’t leave.”
He shoved her back, but she grabbed a beer bottle from the bar and raised it over her head.
“Don’t make me use this,” she threatened. By now some of the rest of the crowd had piled back into the bar and were right behind her.
“I won’t,” he agreed, raising a hand in surrender before slumping his shoulders to let his pack rest on the floor. The Indian with the chunk missing from his head stepped toward them. Terry could see that whoever’d sewn him up had done a pretty poor job. His cheek and forehead were crisscrossed with leathery scars. He looked like Frankenstein’s monster.
Terry lunged out with one foot, kicking the sultry waitress right in the shark tattoo above her belly button. She gasped and fell backwards, disrupting the gathering crowd and bowling over Frankenstein. Terry yanked the door open and dashed out into the night. He dug around in his pack as he ran down the gravel of the main street and found the cool butt of the pistol they’d packed to hunt with. He pulled it out, shoved it into his waistband, and dropped the pack so he could move faster. They were right behind him.
“Fish bait!” they screamed. “Come back, worm!”
He ducked off the road into the forest and lay down behind a bush, hardly daring to breathe as he heard the tromp of several feet crash by. Then he stood up and slipped back toward the road. He knew he’d never survive out here if he got lost in the woods. And before he left this town, he had a debt to settle.
Terry slipped up around the side of the bar and listened at the voices arguing within. From the woods he heard the call and response of his hunters.
He stepped up to the wood porch of the bar and went back inside. Jasmine, Petey, and Gordon looked up as he came in.
“Take a walk,” Terry said and motioned toward the game room.
Gordon pointed at the swell of his knees. They’d had to cut off his pant legs and had been applying a towel filled with ice when he came in. “I ain’t walking nowhere thanks to you.”
“Help him,” Terry said to the other two. “I mean it.”
Petey got up and started toward Terry, who leveled the gun straight at his face. The bandleader thought better of the attempt and stopped. He helped Jasmine lever Gordon up.
“The others will be back here in a couple minutes to deal with you,” the injured man warned, white goatee wagging like a tail.
“Won’t matter,” Terry said. He herded them back to the game room. “Walk the plank,” he insisted.
“We won’t all fit,” Jasmine protested.
“Walk,” he said and fired a shot at their feet. The sound was like an explosion, and the trio jumped forward as one. Two others were across the room, bandaging a wound on the bartender’s half arm. They stood up.
“What’re you thinkin’?” an older woman said, hands on her hips. “That man has got no chance against the sharks with those knees. That’s not fair.”
“It wasn’t fair what you did to us,” Terry said, turning back to Gordon. “Get in.”
“No. You can shoot me if you want.”
Jasmine tried to grab at Terry, but he swatted her away with the barrel of the gun, catching her on the side of the face. She went down hard and rolled off the plank to splash into the water.
“Now,” he insisted. “Go now and I’ll give you a chance.”
Petey was crying. Terry aimed at his head, and the man lifted his fake leg over the edge and toppled in.
“Go.”
Gordon was the last man left, but he wasn’t standing. The big man began crawling toward Terry, pulling himself sideways to keep the weight on his hip instead of his knees. Terry aimed the gun and shot him in the thigh. Gordon screamed and grabbed at the wound. He rolled in agony, hit a swollen knee, and screamed again, and this time fell off the plank, making a satisfying splash.
The old woman was coming around the pool, and Terry aimed at her. “You too.”
Bruce lay in the arms of another woman across the pool and didn’t say a word as the old woman slid quietly into the water. Terry could hear someone crying.
The dark shapes came again from the corners, conv
erging on the fresh bait. There was a scream, and a cherry bomb exploded in the water. And then another.
Terry stood and watched for a moment and then aimed his pistol at the thrashing, watery fight. He pulled the trigger once, and then again. And then twice more, for good measure.
Terry thought of the Fourth of July. The smell of gunpowder overpowered the stink of fish temporarily. As the echo of the shots faded, four bodies moved as one toward the edge of the pool. Two gray shapes drifted motionless.
“You killed them.” The bartender’s whisper could be heard from across the pool.
Terry left the room and grabbed Wayne’s backpack from the bar. He risked a last glance back at the bloody pool, where Jasmine clutched a wounded leg and the other two were trying to pull Gordon’s bulk from the water.
“Fish bait,” he yelled. He didn’t realize that he was crying.
Then he slipped out of the bar and ran down the gravel road until the first rays of dawn shone on the horizon and he couldn’t run anymore. He yearned to see the headlights of a car, to hear the welcoming sounds of an FM radio. But the road was empty, and the woods remained still around him. In his head he only saw the face of his friend, wide-eyed and dying beneath the water. He only heard two words, repeating over and over and over.
“Fish bait.”
Camille Smiled
Camille smiled. I thought so, anyway.
And then she sighed.
It was faint, light as baby’s breath. But I swear I heard it.
I stroked a wisp of black hair from the marble-smooth slope of her forehead.
“Wake up, honey,” I whispered. “Talk to me, baby.”
It had been days since I’d last heard her voice, and the house felt deadly still without the sparkling tinkle of her laughter. As if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting. I didn’t know if I could stand another day of it.
Hour after hour I’d waited by her bedside, pacing, praying, bending to listen for her heart at her breast, holding a mirror to her lips to see if she breathed. I straightened the handwoven necklace that voodoo queen Madame Trevail had sold me, down in her tiny shop hidden near the French Quarter. I centered its small pouch of leaves and clippings and extracts of God only knew what until it rested like a teabag in the small of her neck. Then I reconsidered and moved it out of that pale hollow, thinking that its miniscule weight might choke her tiny throat as it rested in that most delicate of settings.
