by Rick Bass
The boy aimed the steady silver trickle first at one side of the huge flapping gills and then the other, watering the inflamed and feathery, irritated crimson gill linings as he would a garden, while the catfish, his eyes bulging, lay otherwise motionless, save for those gasping gills: a perfect hostage, connected tenuously and utterly nonnegotiably to that slender thread of cold silver water, and to the boy who was providing it.
The boy rested, squatting on his heels in the dust, and studied the fish as he hosed him and thought of the money he would earn for caring for the fish—a few dollars, or maybe, if the oilmen had been drinking, ten or even twenty—and as he moved the steady stream of water up and down the fish’s broad back, the fish in turn studied the boy with its obsidian-round eyes, which had a gold lining to the perimeter, like pyrite. The fish panted and watched the boy, all that first day, and on through the dream of the night, and into the next day, while the heat built around them, rising steadily through the day. The heat gave birth in the summer-blue sky to beautiful white cumulus clouds, each one a distant world.
The boy grew dizzy in the heat on the second day—he was having to sit cross-legged now, had taken only the briefest of breaks to use the outhouse—and one of the cooks brought him a sandwich. A hypnosis began to overtake the boy, until it seemed to him that it was the trickling from his hose that was inflating the clouds; that he was watering the clouds as one would water a garden. And as the water trickled off the catfish’s slick gray back and passed over its gasping gills (which were pink now, no longer bright red), his slimy whiskers grew bedraggled and droopy, making him appear sad and defeated.
The water pooled and spread across the gravel parking lot before wandering into the desert beyond, where bright butterflies swarmed and fluttered, dabbing at the mud the water was making, and it seemed to the boy that he and the catfish were frozen in time, and that the great gasping hulk of the fish would forever be hanging on to life, and that he would forever be a small boy watering it and keeping it alive, and that the huge fish would forever be somehow creating, birthing, those beautiful clouds against the summer sky.
Throughout the afternoon, one or two of the geologists would wander over to examine and admire the monstrosity—Richard was out on a location, up in the foothills—and after a few words they would all sit there hunkered, watching and listening to that silver stream of water, and the fish’s gasping; and each time they gathered like that, the boy would guard himself, would become even more diligent, more perfect in the watering.
He would scowl at his task, trying to present himself as a man to them, so that he might be hired for more work at some near point, though he knew that the odds of the geologists noticing anything other than the fish were long. Nonetheless, the boy continued to glower, fierce and intent in the regularity of his task. He would be the best catfish-waterer they had ever seen; better than any they might ever have imagined. He would be the equal of the catfish. He would match his heart to it, and he would become its partner in its final days, and would destroy it.
Late on the second day—the boy bleary-eyed in his hypnosis, and falling asleep sometimes, the hose loose in his hand for long moments at a time—the first of the planes began to arrive, buzzing like dragonflies. Cars began arriving, too, dust plumes rising like a single long row of unfurling feathers, hurrying toward the oilmen’s camp, drawn from all directions. The planes began to stack up down at one end of the runway, and the long cars began to accumulate in the parking lot; and one by one and two by two, the visitors wandered out back to examine Tomás’s fish, and to ask questions about it; to be awed, terrified, revulsed.
For many of them—bankers, politicians, upper-class drifters—the sight of the fish would have been worth the journey alone; and it seemed to Tomás that some of them were even envious, and properly respectful of, his one task. It seemed to him that they lamented the lack of such a purpose in their own lives.
In the desert dusk, furry tarantulas crawled out from beneath their burrows and marched across the warmth of the gravel airstrip as the day finally cooled slightly. Some of the spiders were as large as a man’s fist, mammalian in their size and appearance; and likewise, seeking to extend the heat of the day, the rattlesnakes came sidewinding out onto the runway, milking the last of the airstrip’s warmth.
In the red dusk, for Tomás, the appearance of the tarantulas was as lulling as the constancy of a clock ticking in one’s own home each evening, as was the occasional, fretful buzzing of the snakes’ rattle-tipped tails as they slithered into and then negotiated their way around each other.
Each evening, all of his life, had been marked thus, so that it seemed to him the tarantulas’ appearance, and the snakes’, was more regular than the hands of time on any clock; that the tarantulas, each with their eight furry legs, were time, time itself becoming alive and creeping up from out of the ground, as were the snakes, and that the world of clocks and watches was but an abstract approximation, a crude representation of an infinitely more complex process.
He kept watering the fish, into and then through the second night, his head bobbing with fatigue. Sometimes he fell asleep so deeply and suddenly that he pitched forward, sprawling in the mud next to the fish; and for a while, on that second night, it began to seem to him that the fish was his friend, and that he had neither captured it nor found himself as its caretaker, but had in fact somehow created it, through his ceaseless watering, bringing it to life, up from out of the desert sand, like some miraculous gardener; and he began to consider how he might help the fish escape.
There was nowhere nearby for it to go but to the mud pit—even Tomás, with no understanding of the oil and gas industry, knew that the fish would not survive for long there—but it occurred to him that he might be able to somehow muscle it into the back of one of the jeeps, and steal the jeep, race the thirty miles to the river, splashing cup after cup of water onto the fish’s gills before releasing it into one of the deeper stretches of the Madeira.
The fish continued to scrutinize him, as it had all the days before—he could not be sure if it was requesting anything of him or not—and farther toward dawn, he considered again the needs of his family, and the expectations brought about by the job, and he made the decision not to free the fish, but kept watering it, still half-hypnotized by the sound of the cool water draining onto its back. And by the time the red light of day began to return to the desert and the mountains, and the tarantulas began crawling back off into the sagebrush to take refuge against the coming heat, it seemed to him that the fish had reached some state of transcendence itself, and understood now there would be no release, and was accepting of that fact; that it did not blame Tomás for having failed to deliver a miracle that was the equal of the fish.
On through the morning he watered—a fire seemed to be going out in the fish’s eyes, and an uncaringness seemed to be entering them; as if this was now just any old fish, instead of a great one. The cook who had taken to caring for the boy brought Tomás a burrito and sat with him for a short while, even held the hose for him while Tomás got up and went for a short walk to stretch his legs, and to visit the outhouse—and when Tomás returned, five minutes later, he was chagrined to see that the cook was haphazard with his watering, was sloshing the water over on one side of the fish and then the other—and the fish, discomforted by this erratic flow, was thrashing and shuddering, as if trying to swim some short distance farther forward to find once more that steady silver stream which the boy had been able to provide.
Tomás thanked the cook and took the hose from him and settled back in to his task; and eventually, the fish stilled itself again, relaxed back into its previous trance; and Tomás told himself that in this regard, he was being kind to the fish, in bringing it a few more moments of ease. It was not as great a gift to the fish as might have been a complete and daring escape, but it was a gift—another few hours.
On that third day, both Red Watkins and George Waller checked in on the fish. And although Tomás was
surprised, having previously thought that all of the oilmen were identical, godlike in their powers, he saw now that despite the power of their excessive appetites, they were no different, really, than perhaps any other grouping of mankind; that the insipid could stand shoulder to shoulder with the noble, and the virtuous next to the wicked. That although there was a sameness in all men, there was also always some wedge of difference, some rift or fracture into which the character of a man seeped, and took root, and then grew or died.
It was simple and evident in even a single spoken sentence—Red Watkins placing his old liver-spotted hand on the boy’s shoulder and asking him how he was doing, speaking to him in his own language, Cómo está?—while George Waller, having been absent during the entire process, was perturbed and critical of how bedraggled the fish looked, chagrined that it was not nearly as vibrant and formidable as it had been when he had first captured it, and disappointed that his guests might find it lacking, or less than he had described it.
“What have you done to him?” George Waller asked, then muttered “Fuck,” and might have kicked the boy had Red Watkins not been there; and Tomás knew a sadness and an anger then, that he had not ferried the fish back to the river, or at least tried to: though still his decision-making returned to the question of what was best for his family.
And sensing George Waller’s useless and to some degree unearned opulence, he hated him, and shifted on his heels as if adjusting himself to accommodate the new weight of his hatred. He did not discard it, and it burned bright in his dark eyes even as all light continued to drain from the catfish’s gold-rimmed eyes.
The two men left, with Red Watkins murmuring a few more words of encouragement, and abandoned Tomás to the heat of the day. The cook came back a short time later for the third time, bringing a bell pepper and Swiss cheese frittata with garlic and green onions, still steaming—which was so delicious that Tomás’s eyes filled with tears at his fortune, as well as the fish’s misfortune—and the cook also brought a little stump for Tomás to sit on, as he continued to water.
All through that last day, the guests continued to arrive, appearing like mirages from out of the desert heat, their droning planes wavering above the horizon, growing larger, then floating down onto the runway with a spray and clattering of gravel, the planes’ maneuverability mushy in the thin hot dry air; and the cars appearing tiny and vaporous in the far distance, but finally coalescing into their true size when they arrived, with the engines groaning and ticking in the heat, and the windshields and grilles splattered with grasshoppers, which Tomás would be asked to scrub clean later in the night, after the fish was flayed and fried, and while the party was going on—Tomás scrubbing with hot soapy water and a washcloth, cleaning every inch of chrome, removing the remains of tens of thousands of grasshoppers and butterflies like confetti, so that by daylight, after the party, all the cars and planes would be gleaming again, and the princes and princesses, the kings and queens who still slumbered in drunken haze, would be able to rise noonward and, blinking at the desert scald of brightness, be handed a bloody mary as they emerged from the air-conditioned bunkhouse and went out to their chariots, into which they would fold themselves before roaring off into the void.
On through the third day the arriving partygoers kept wandering around behind the bunkhouse to inspect the grotesquerie, the monstrosity, of their dinner, as Tomás kept watering the fish.
At dusk, with the fish’s gasps coming more slowly than ever, and with the silver stream of water no longer seeming to bring him any relief—with every gulp of air a rasp of sandpaper against the fish’s gills, and no oxygen transfer to be gotten at all from that transaction—the tarantulas came out again, regular as clockwork.
The guests were sitting out in lawn chairs by the airstrip, drinking and watching the sunset, and Tomás heard the women shriek and the men hoot drunkenly as the arachnids revealed themselves, walking with delicate high-step deliberation—as if the remnant warmth of the airstrip was something to be savored, and as if each step, and each moment, was a calculation of utmost deliberation.
The cooks lit propane lanterns and set them up and down the airstrip, to guide any night-arriving flights, and lit candles and placed them on all of the picnic tables. Moths rose from out of the desert, swirling like a sandstorm, or like the ghosts and spirits of the grille-splattered grasshoppers reanimated. The moths swarmed those lanterns, burning their wings and falling crippled and smoking to the ground, half-cooked already, where the tarantulas found them, hunted them down, and began consuming them.
The cooks came and placed lanterns around Tomás and the fish, as well, and told him that his work was done, that he could stop watering the fish, though he only shook his head and told them that he would continue until the very last moment; and Sy Craven, who had come outside to view the fish, looked down at the boy and smiled at his grit and fury and focus, and thought how he would like to pluck this boy, too, wondered how he would like China, and pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his money clip and handed it to him; and Tomás took it, thanked him gratefully and enthusiastically, and folded it carefully with one hand into his shirt pocket: though still, he kept watering.
There were lanterns gathered around Tomás and the fish now like candelabras at a dinner setting. Tomás wished for the fish to die before the men began skinning him, but realized also that that was a child’s wish, not a man’s, and he would soon step away from and outgrow such trivialities as kindness or compassion for such irrelevances as a gritty, dying fish.
Moths cartwheeled off the lantern and landed charred and fuzz-singed upon the fish’s glistening back, where they stuck to his sticky skin like feathers, their wings still flapping.
Someone accused Tomás of wasting water, and finally he rose and turned the hose off; and immediately, or so it seemed to Tomás, 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.
The thin summer breeze, and the heat from the lanterns, seemed to be sucking the moisture from the skin already. It seemed to Tomás that the fish’s eyes searched for, then found, his. What was it like for the fish, Tomás wondered, straddling the land now between the living and the nonliving?
George Waller stepped up and pulled out a hunting knife. It was his fish to kill. He would not be the one to cook it, but it was important to him, Tomás and the others saw, to lay claim to it, and to remind everyone that he was the one who had caught it.
He made the first cut lightly around the 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, five 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, Tomás had not noticed how many men and women had been gathering. Now that he was standing he saw that there were dozens of them, and he wondered if the fish could feed them all. He saw Richard, who had just returned from the field, and, though he did not know him, scowled at him, disapproving that a man so young and still possessing the capability for fuller freedom should place himself in such company.
“Someone put that fish out of its misery,” a woman said, and a man stepped from out of the crowd with a pistol, aimed at the fish’s broad head, and fired—the noise was tremendous—and people yelled and screamed.
“Cut that shit out!” Red Watkins yelled, stepping toward the man with the gun, who retreated back into the crowd, grumbling an apology, then raised a bottle to his lips.
The bullet had made a dark hole in the fish’s head. The wound didn’t bleed and, like some mythic monster, the fish did not seem affected by it. It kept on breathing, and Tomás wanted very much to begin watering it again.
George Waller, with the knife, kept cutting. When he had all the cuts made, two other men helped him lift the fish.
They ran a rope through its cavernous mouth and out its gills and hoisted it up into a mesquite tree, where roosting birds rustled, then flew out of the branches and into the night.
The fish writhed, sucking for air, finding none, but 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 that sounded like a woman beating a wet rug with a baseball bat, and the man, who was drunk, was knocked down. His glass spilled and then broke when it landed.
“Give me that gun,” he shouted when he got up, and he took the gun from the man who’d fired it earlier and stepped up and put another bullet in the fish’s broad head, so that now a second, balanced, nostril appeared; and still the fish seemed unfazed.
Red Watkins intervened once more, grabbed the gun from the drunk man, knocked the man down yet again, then threw the gun out into the desert. Tomás’s eyes followed the arc of the gun beyond the candlelight into darkness, and he resolved, after the party had ended and the partygoers were lying comatose and tangled amongst one another, to go and search for, and claim, that pistol.
Another man passed through the crowd, pouring tequila from a bottle. Red Watkins’s knuckles were bleeding from where he had hit the man, who was still lying on the ground, not moving. The fish was making guttural sounds, and George Waller said, “Well, I guess it’s time to cook him.” He found a pair of pliers in the toolshed and came back out and gripped the skin with the pliers up behind the fish’s neck and then peeled the skin back, skinning the fish alive in that manner as if pulling the husk or wrapper from a thing to reveal that which had been hidden within.
