Away with the Fishes

by Stephanie Siciarz

  “Check in the village,” the shopkeeper suggested. “Maybe someone there can help.”

  For want of a better strategy, the officers obeyed. They left the string of houses behind them, walked back to their truck at the scene of the crime, and set off for the village closest by.

  Glutton Hill.

  They arrived after only a minute or two, leaving their vehicle at one end of the main road, which they planned to canvass on foot. Their first stop was the pharmacy, owned and run by a Nathan Broom. “Good morning,” he greeted them as they walked through the door. “Can I help?”

  “Hope so,” Joshua said. “You know anything about the bike accident that happened near here?”

  “Only what I read in the paper. Quite a mystery.”

  “So you didn’t see or hear anything unusual?” Arnold asked.

  “No.”

  “You know anyone around here owns a bike?” Joshua asked.

  “No.”

  “How about missing ladies? You know of any of those?” Arnold asked.

  “Now you mention it, I did hear someone say something about Rena Baker missing. Didn’t think much of it, though. Rena’s like that. Probably just went off to clear her head and couldn’t be bothered to tell anyone.”

  Arnold and Joshua looked at each other anxiously. “Did Rena ride a bike?” Joshua asked.

  “No. Never saw her ride one in my life. Rena’s a walker.”

  Arnold and Joshua thanked the pharmacist and continued their stroll down Glutton Hill’s main road. They visited a supermarket, a bar, a mechanic’s garage, and a seamstress’s shop before reaching the road’s other end. At every stop en route the conversation ensued much as it had at the pharmacy. No one knew anything, except that headstrong Rena Baker hadn’t been seen for a while. No one was especially concerned or in the least bit convinced that Rena had been riding the bike in question.

  Before turning back down the road again, Arnold and Joshua stopped to collect their thoughts. “What do you think of all that?” Arnold asked Joshua.

  “I think it’s obvious. We just found our missing lady.”

  “What about the bike? They all said she never rode a bike.”

  “You find that significant?” Joshua asked Arnold.

  “I don’t know. I guess not.”

  “Rena Baker is the only lady who’s missing. It had to be her who got knocked off that lady’s bike,” Joshua said.

  “So now what?” Arnold asked.

  “Now, we find out who it was who knocked her off.”

  They set off in reverse, stopping once more at the seamstress’s, the mechanic’s, the bar, the supermarket, the pharmacy. They asked everyone they encountered for more information about Rena Baker. What did she look like? What did she do? Who did she frequent? They found out that Rena was as stubborn as she was slender and dainty, with a teeny tiny waist and a great big heart. They discovered that she liked to take long walks around the island all alone. They learned that her boyfriend was a fisherman from town (that meant Port-St. Luke), whose name was Madison Fuller. And they learned that every day, rain or shine, Rena prepared her boyfriend Madison Fuller a picnic lunch, which she delivered to him at the Glutton Hill roundabout.

  They left Glutton Hill and returned to town, the next step in the investigation clear: Madison Fuller must be questioned, for he might very well know when Rena was last seen.

  “He might even have been the last one to see her,” Joshua suggested.

  “You mean before the accident?” asked Arnold, who was driving their truck.

  “I mean at the accident,” Joshua replied ominously.

  They rode in silence until the truck rolled up to the house where Madison lay sleeping. Arnold switched off the motor and looked over at Joshua. “You think he knocked her off that bike?”

  Joshua jumped out of the truck and slammed the door, then leaned in toward Arnold through the truck’s open window. “More than that,” he said. “I’d bet his fishing boat on it.”

  11

  Getting to Oh is tricky. There is one flight a day from neighboring Killig, and this, usually booked up by wealthy tourists—who fall in love with the island then fly out again, never to return. So getting away from Oh is tricky, too. The odd yacht lays anchor long enough to take on supplies, but is hardly likely to offer you passage. A fisherman might be more generous, but his fishing boat won’t get you very far. Still, if leaving Oh is a chore, then staying is even worse. Few outsiders boast the requisite patience or the gumption to endure Oh’s hardiness. The islanders are tough coconuts to crack.

  Which is not to say that once in a while someone doesn’t do it, find the right hammer, I mean, and enjoy the islanders’ softer insides. This someone might, say, buy a little piece of land, build a lovely house, and settle in for a perfectly lovely little life, confident that he’s dented the unyielding islander shells. And perhaps he will have done. At least for a little while.

  But what of the island itself? Will his hammer be steady enough to master that, too? Sometimes even a local admits defeat in the face of Oh’s trials—the nosey birds and the pungent, eavesdropping sugar cane—and hops a barge that will take her to freedom, wherever that may reside.

  The beauty of Oh is that it knows how to balance its subjects. Sun, moon, fish, flower, all in perfect measure. No bird has a feather too many, no forest a tree too few. And for every someone who hops a barge, someone else is forever bound.

  12

  Quick and his pirates reached the island of Oh after a sea journey of three days, during which Quick managed to live undetected on the ship. By day, he slept hidden under bunks or lay eavesdropping on the boat where he had first stowed away. At night, he crept about below deck, by light of a stolen candle, snatching food and marveling at the strange objects of the captain and his men (their books, their drawings, their scribbles and symbols). When the moon was full and the night crew drunk and dozy, Quick climbed amid the ropes the men maneuvered to control the ship. They enchanted him, those cords as big as his fist, wrapped around wood so smooth and polished he could see his warped reflection in its sheen.

  Quick relished every aspect of this lonely stowaway’s existence. He enjoyed being privy to the men’s private talks, enjoyed eating what tickled his tummy on any given night, enjoyed sleeping tucked up against wood that smelled of the sea. By day the men’s voices were his company, and by night, the stars and moon, who watched over and guided his travels without his ever knowing.

  When the ship got to Oh, the first stop it was to make since leaving Quick’s island on that cloudy day, Quick was eager and filled with glee. So eager that he could barely keep his body still under the stern-most plank of bench in the boat where he once again hid. So filled with glee that he almost giggled as the boat was lowered from the ship to the sea and began its short journey to the island. Once the boat was pulled ashore, he waited for the men in the party to disembark and collect their things and set out on their way. It seemed to him that one pirate took an eternity to find his leather notebook, and the pirate captain another ten years to decide if they should turn right or left at the mango tree that stood a stone’s throw from the sea’s edge.

  Decide he finally did, and as the men’s voices were lost to birdsong and windsong and the buzzing of bees, Quick crept out of the boat. His eyes didn’t know where to look first. There were mangoes and palms and papayas, bougainvilleas and buttercups, crabs in the sand and dogs in the shade. Everything he recognized from home. Yet Oh wasn’t his home at all. When he looked to the east he saw great rolling hills instead of the distant sea. And to the north there was no village of islanders in need of a trapper of rats. Here, the villages dotted the island’s southern tip. Quick was sharp enough to know that these differences must be just the tip of the iceberg, if you will, and so off his legs carried him to explore his first foreign land.

  He found waterfalls and rivers. His island had these, too, only they were different from the ones on Oh. Different in number and different in
depth. He found craters and hot springs, and the lushest forest he had ever seen, with a monkey atop every tree. His island certainly did not have one of those! Quick hoped that somewhere else on Oh just then the foolish pirate was realizing how wrong he’d been: islands are most definitely not all alike!

  Quick even talked to some of the islanders. He found a lady washing clothes in a river and greeted her, “Good morning!”

  “Good morning!” she replied. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a pirate, lady. I’m traveling all over the world in my ship.”

  “Whose boy are you, son? Where’s your mother?”

  “I don’t have a mother and I don’t have a father. I just have a ship. Good morning, lady.” And off his legs took him again.

  He found a boy roasting corn cobs over a fire and greeted him. “Hello!” he said. “I’m a pirate. Could I try some of your corn?”

  “You don’t look like a pirate to me.”

  “I am so a pirate! I even have a ship. The biggest ship you ever saw.”

  “If I give you some corn, will you show me your ship?”

  Quick was reluctant. “I guess so.” (He was possessive of his ship, but he was hungry, too.) The two boys ate and Quick was disappointed to note that the corn tasted just like the corn back home. When they had finished, he led the way to the shore beyond which the ship was anchored. His explorations had taken him from one end of the island to the other and it wasn’t until he saw the dark silhouette of the pirate ship against the setting sun that he realized just how long he’d been away. His heart was struck with terror. Had they returned to the ship without him? Had he missed the boat? From the tall hillside where the two boys stood, it was impossible to tell.

  Quick concentrated all his energies on stifling the tears that tried to spring to his eyes. A pirate couldn’t cry in front of an island boy who roasted corn! He looked toward the sun and held his breath. The yellow ball burned back at him, daring him not to turn away. He was sure he could hear it whisper in his ear. Crybaby Quick! it said over and over. Crybaby Quick!

  The sun on his island never did that.

  “Did you hear something?” Quick asked his new friend.

  “Hear what?”

  The sun started to laugh.

  Quick’s cheeks burned with anger. He would not cry. He was a pirate! He stared the sun in the face, his eyes open as wide as they would go. He knew if he closed them the tears would come—a satisfaction he would never give this taunting, foreign sun.

  The sun, which could have blinded him in an instant, backed down, or, rather, ducked behind a passing cloud, and as it did, Quick heard the faint voices of his pirate companions. Had he not still feared the sun’s jeers, he would have cried from sheer relief. He hadn’t missed the boat! The pirates hadn’t left without him!

  Quick turned abruptly and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Thanks for the corn,” he said. “I have to go.” He nearly tumbled down the hillside, so fast were his happy feet carrying him. His friend said nothing. He simply stood rooted in the dirt, in awe of the great ship that loomed in the distance and of the very first pirate he had ever met.

  Quick, on the other hand, barreled through brush and branches, scraping his skin in a dozen places. As he got closer to the familiar voices, the voices he usually heard from under a bench or a thick canvas tarpaulin, he was able to see the faces out of which each one came.

  “Nothing but a bunch of pineapples on this one,” a tall, bony man with a map and a cap said.

  “That’s no surprise. Oh’s known for ’em,” a hairy man furiously writing in a leather book said.

  “You ever taste one sweeter than what you had here?” asked the oldest pirate in the party, with a long cutlass hanging from his belt.

  How funny to see the voices embodied! Fat-sounding ones coming from thin men and ones that sounded clean-shaven exhaled past fuzzy, matted beards. Just in time, Quick fought the urge to shout out to the pirates and share the joke with them. He suddenly remembered that, though he considered them his companions, they hardly considered him theirs. Terror gripped his heart again as he realized that with the pirates in view, with them all so close to the boat, he had no way to sneak back into it before they rowed off to the ship.

  The mocking sun, which took its sweet time setting that night, shrugged off the cloud donned a few moments before and beamed into Quick’s crestfallen face. Still Quick didn’t cry. He would figure something out. He was smart and he was fast. If he just kept his eyes on the men, he would find a way to slip past them, like a furtive gust of wind. Closer and closer he positioned himself, never abandoning the cover of the woods that lined the shore. He listened and watched as they sniffed leaves, picked up shells, made notes, and collected samples placed gingerly into a sack. He watched for what seemed like hours (though in truth it was but a quarter of a one), and as he watched, his heart sank with the sun, its descent as long and as labored.

  Tears were all that Quick had left. It was getting dark (not dark enough for him to sneak past the pirates) and soon they would embark and row away from him forever. The sun snickered, the first tear tried to fall, and the moon, bless her, the moon rolled up her sleeves. She beamed so brightly of a sudden that the beach turned silvery white. Every leaf of every tree glowed. The men started. In awe, they turned from the coastline toward the woods, to pick the fruits that sparkled more beautifully by night than they had by day. The moonlight so illuminated the scene that Quick feared discovery as the men approached. Like a bullet, he shot up an almond tree, more uncertain than ever of his future. If the sun wasn’t laughing at him, the moon was betraying him. What a funny island, this!

  Quick clung to a branch and waited. Perhaps if they dawdled long enough, the cloud that had blocked out the sun would block out the moon. Then in the dark he could trail them to the boat and slip inside it, he told himself, not ever believing he’d manage it. He knocked his fist against his head to stimulate some idea. He knocked it so hard that the branch on which he lay grappled swung and pitched and knocked a branch of the manchineel tree next to it, sending a wave of silvery green fruits cascading to the ground. The men rushed over, intrigued by the noise, and the captain, first to reach the attractive apple-like spheres, stretched out his hand, picked one up, and lifted it to his mouth.

  “Noooo!” With a ferocious shout and a leap out into the air, Quick threw himself from the almond tree, limbs flailing, and aimed his body for the captain’s head. “Doooooon’t!”

  In an instant he had landed spot on-target, his legs wrapped around the neck of the stunned and supine captain, his gangly arms entangled in the captain’s hair. For a moment nobody moved or said a word. You can imagine their surprise, attacked by a wriggling, roaring projectile from out of nowhere for picking up an apple. When they finally did collect themselves (all but the captain, whose head remained pinned by Quick’s midsection), the oldest pirate freed his cutlass from its sheath and held it ready; the tall, bony man bent forward, arms outstretched and hands wide open in defense; and the hairy man scribbled so fast he dropped his pencil.

  Quick sat on the captain’s neck, rather stunned himself, until the pencil knocked him on the head and snapped him out of it. He climbed off the captain and apologized, his voice dry and brittle with fear. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t want you to eat it.” He pointed to the apple that had fallen from the captain’s hand.

  “Why in God’s name not?” the captain asked, rolling onto his side and easing his shaken body upright. “Are they yours?”

  “No, not mine. They’re bad. You’ll be sick if you eat it.”

  “Bit green, they are, but not for an ache this belly can’t handle.” He was sitting now, the captain, his legs out in front of him, and he rubbed his head. Quick didn’t make a sound. He could only think that now he would never get back on the ship. Worse than that, he was trapped on Oh, with its pineapples and its corn and perhaps not a single rat at all. He hadn’t spotted one the whole day.

  While Quick fretted,
the hairy man (it turned out his name was Enoch) flipped through his leather book.

  “Captain! I believe the boy’s right, sir. Look!” He showed the captain a sketch. “The manchineel, sir. Common in these parts. The sap in that fruit would have blistered your insides and killed you.”

  “Fat lot of good those books of yours do us! I could have poisoned myself if the boy hadn’t come along! What’s your name, son?”

  “Quick, sir.”

  “Quick? What kind of a name is that?”

  “Don’t know, sir. I never had a real name.”

  “What do you mean you never had a real name? Where are your parents?”

  Quick explained that he had lost his parents even before he found them. He explained about the village and the rats, about his island and his itchy feet, about the broken ankle and his stowing away. He confessed to stealing candles, admitted to eavesdropping, and pleaded to re-join the other pirates on board the ship.

  The men looked from the boy to the captain to each other as Quick told his incredible tale.

  “Your name’s more believable by the minute,” the captain remarked. He rubbed Quick’s head and explained to him that his men weren’t pirates or on a pirate ship. They were merchants and scientists and they were on an expedition, he said. He explained what an expedition was and asked Quick again if he was sure he had no parents.

  “I’m sure.” And in the darkness that had finally fallen, he hung his head and cried.

  I should tell you that this particular captain, one Thomson Bowles, had set out on the expedition in question to run away from a ghost. Two ghosts, as a matter of fact. Captain Thomson had lost a wife and son to childbirth and everywhere he turned on land, any land, he saw the pair of them, mother and baby, cooing and cuddling. The vast sea and a creaking vessel (sturdy, but creaking) were the only things bleak enough not to call his departed family to mind. On the dry land of Oh, however, in the moonlight, they had shown themselves to him again. They splashed in the surf and softened his lonely heart to Quick’s desperate tears.