Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon (7 page)

Doug Marsh, proprietor of Hawthorne Bait and Tackle, was updating the catch report bulletin when a stranger entered the shop. Doug ground the chalk between his calloused fingers. “We don’t open till six,” he said to the young man, whose eyes were bloodshot, his clothes soaked.

“I think you’ll want to see this,” the man said.

Doug pocketed the chalk and took up his mug of steaming coffee, then followed the man—a teenager, really—out to the parking lot. He grumbled to himself about forgetting to lock the door again. Anglers, eager to hit the river, were always trying the door as early as four in the morning, even though the posted hours said Hawthorne Bait and Tackle opened at six sharp. Sometimes Doug found sleep troublesome. Nightmares awoke him, or else the dread of experiencing such nightmares resulted in him working through the night, repairing tackle, tying flies, molding lead weights, reading, sweeping, drinking coffee, drinking bourbon, shuffling up and down the musty aisles of the shop, gazing through his thick-framed glasses at the trophy fish mounted on the walls. With increasing frequency, owing either to his sleeplessness or age, Doug forgot to lock the shop door after smoking a cigarette out front. That was how the Eager Earls, as he referred to these non-store-hour-abiding folks, got in. But sometimes he let them buy what they needed anyhow. After all, he was awake and if he turned them away, they would just wait out in the parking lot until opening hour.

Never in his thirty-seven years running the bait shop had anyone ever barged in before six with a fresh catch to show him. At that hour, the night fishermen were heading home, too exhausted to pay Doug a visit, although they’d later bring in photos of any notable catches to tack on the bait shop walls. Most other diehard fishermen had either launched their boats by six or else they were swinging by Doug’s to pick up some essential item before hitting the water. This young man, with his claims of an extraordinary catch, had piqued Doug’s interest. He was probably some out-of-towner who’d caught a big sturgeon.

Doug sipped his coffee and approached the Dodge truck where the man stood, waving him over with frantic gestures.

“Well, what’ve you got?” Doug said.

The kid lifted the lid on a big red ice chest and Doug peered inside. The cigarette fell from his mouth when he saw what was in there. A blue-eyed fish with human-like arms and legs, a mouth full of jagged teeth like a shark’s, and a crimson dorsal fin that looked as if it were meant to cut through steel.

“Thought you’d want a look,” the kid said.

“Where in hell did you catch this?”

“The Harbor. Between Burnside and Steel Bridge. That hole where the water drops to ninety feet. I was fishing for sturgeon off the floating walkway there, the Esplanade.”

Night fishing for sturgeon was prohibited but never mind that. This was one weird-ass fish.

“So what do you think,” the man said.

Doug lit another cigarette and studied the young man, seeking any sign of a ruse, but the kid appeared to be telling the truth. He’d caught a weird-ass fish and he’d taken it to Doug. That was the beginning and the end of his story.

“So…”

“Odds are, this thing is one of a kind. Just another superfund mutation. Then again, maybe not. Maybe there’s more of them. So we’re gonna go inside and call ODFW. They won’t open for another couple hours and it likely won’t be a couple hours after that before an officer swings by. In the meantime, you’re gonna take me out and show me exactly how you caught this thing.”

The kid looked like a deer in the headlights. “I ain’t going out there again. I told you where I caught it. I’ll give you the rest of my bait if you want. I was just fishing a whole squid off the bottom, the way I always do for sturgeon. Nothing different.” He shook his head insistently. “I’m done fishing that goddamn river.” He pointed to the creature in the ice chest. “When I pulled it up—it spoke.”

“What do you mean it spoke?”

“Before I bonked it, the damned thing spoke to me.”

Doug scoffed, lit another cigarette.

And then, as if on cue, the creature raised its head from the bed of ice and spoke in perfect English.

Doug felt a hand on his elbow and he knew it belonged to the fish.

The fish with hands.

“Excuse me, sir?” So it was a polite fish. “Sir, are you all right?”

The young man was talking. The fish remained lifeless in the ice chest. Doug slammed the lid down and flipped the latch, sick of looking at the hideous thing.

“Are you okay?” the kid said.

“I’m fine,” Doug said, forcing a distant grin. The pain splintered his left arm like lightning, spreading up into his neck. His heart felt like it lay outside his chest, heavy as if ready to give birth, and the air surrounding it was made of pins and needles. His knees went wobbly. “Better call an ambulance,” he said.

As he plummeted to the cold gravel, he felt certain he caught a glimpse of the creature popping out of the ice chest like a jack in the box.

It’s not so bad
, he thought. Whether he referred to death, or the fish, or the pain within, he did not know.

After the pain broke, Doug found himself as someone else. He was driving on a strange road in an unfamiliar town. The truck was a Chevy with a good engine. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw leathery skin, wavy gray hair, and piercing blue eyes that scared even him. He did not look at himself again.

He turned on the radio to see what kind of music he listened to.

Old blues.

Hellhounds and shit.

Beside him on the bench seat, a cellphone rang. The screen said ‘Wife’ and he felt an involuntary flutter in his heart, though he could not definitively trace the sensation back to himself, Doug, who might be excited to see ‘Wife’ calling because he had never been married, only fantasized about the married life, or maybe this other person, whoever he had become, felt deep and abiding feelings for this ‘Wife.’ Whatever the source, he realized that he missed her.

He picked up the phone and said, “Hey, honey. I’m on my way home.”

As if this were normal.

As if he knew where home was.

The wife asked him to pick up something for dinner on the way home. She didn’t feel like cooking. He told her that he would stop at Los Hermanos.

They said ‘I love you’ and they said ‘goodbye,’ but in the clipped, fast-forward way of people who are used to saying such things.

Loveyoubye.

When he stepped out of the truck outside the Mexican food restaurant, the heat took him by surprise. A tumbleweed rolled into traffic. On the other side of the four lane street, a kit fox stared at him from a field that had recently been razed to make way for a new housing development. The air was the color of Earl Grey tea. It smelled like cow shit and exhaust fumes. He went inside the restaurant and tried not to think about where he was, let alone why. He ordered some of his favorite dishes. He ordered some of his wife’s favorite dishes. He instinctively went to order some of his son’s favorites but stopped himself, found an absence in his chest that resided where his son used to be.
My son is gone
, he told himself, knowing how foolish it was, knowing he had never had a son. He ordered enough food so that he and his wife could take the leftovers to work tomorrow.

The drive home was uneventful except that he got stuck in traffic. He sat there wondering what a man like himself did in the evenings after work. Did he watch television with his wife? Did he go fishing, like he did in his real life? Did he go out to bars and drink beer and play pool with friends? With limited time and money, there were only so many ways a man could occupy his evening hours. He had never conceived of an evening that did not involve fishing. He recalled the pain he’d felt just before ending up here, and it was almost enough to bring it all back.

I’m a different man now
, he thought.
Just go with it
.

Eventually he pulled into the driveway of a ranch-style home in a suburban housing community named Pheasant Creek or Eagle Springs or some shit like that.

He brought the brown bag holding the Mexican food inside. In the living room, his wife sat on the couch with a laptop on her lap. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. She appeared to be playing Spider Solitaire, but he thought he’d detected the sudden closure of a browser window as he kissed her. He mined his emotional and experiential database and decided that he trusted her. She had never given him any reason not to.

“Come eat,” he said.

On the walls of the living room were photos of a young boy who shared the steely blue eyes he’d seen when he looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

My son is gone
.

Certain street and business signs had looked blurry to him as he drove home. At first he thought something must be wrong with his vision. Sunspots, maybe. After all, he was not used to such a bright place. Then he realized what it was. The name of the town. Whatever brought him here was obscuring from him the name of the town. Wherever it appeared, he saw a blur. He imagined that if he heard someone speak the name, he would hear a blur as well.

The fate of his son also remained a mystery. When he had absently begun to order his son’s favorite food, some new kind of sadness began to eat away at him. He’d experienced loss before, a range of it. The loss of a parent, the loss of a trophy fish. This was different. This hurt worse.

He sensed the same sadness in his wife as they sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat. They spoke about their days. The mundane things, the funny things, the frustrating things, some gossip, the happenings of the impending weekend. He wanted to ask about the son. Where was he? Was he around? Was he coming home soon? Away at college? In prison? Dead? There were only so many places a son might be, and none of them a father couldn’t reach.

After dinner they caught up on their favorite television show. The husband drank beer and the wife drank boxed red wine. Throughout the evening, she stepped outside three times for a cigarette. The first time, he touched his breast pocket, feeling for the pack of cigarettes he, Doug, kept there. The reassuring hardness of the rectangular pack was gone, and his fingers sank into the flab of his pectorals. He’d asked the wife for a cigarette and she’d looked at him strangely. He said never mind and told a joke that made no sense in that or any other context, then while she went outside to smoke her cigarette alone, he went into the kitchen to grab another beer. In there he felt dizzy. He found breathing difficult. Each lungful entered him like cotton. He thought of the bad air outside. He pressed a hand to his heart, wondered why its rhythm seemed so wrong, thought he counted off thirty seconds between beats, but his counting must have been wrong. When he heard the front door open, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and returned to the living room to continue watching television with his wife. Their favorite show. The second and third time she went outside for a cigarette, he did not ask her for one and he did not leave the couch. He’d grown afraid there in the kitchen. Afraid of what, he did not know.

In bed that night before they slept, his wife said ‘I love you’ in the dark.

It sounded so much like ‘goodbye’ that tears welled up in his eyes. He trembled and wept. His wife held him, her body soft beneath loose pajamas. She did not ask what was wrong. She only said kind and tender things. This calmed him, yes, but also worried him. The wife’s words and touch confirmed that all his pain was real. He’d wanted so badly for it to be make-believe. He wanted to be done with all this sadness and this fear. Her fingers combed through his hair and she kissed him on the mouth. Beneath the blankets she spread her legs, inviting him. He stirred despite himself. They did not make love so much as they applied a salve to their mutual pain.

Afterward, tangled in the sweaty sheets, he felt whole again. He laid a hand on his wife’s belly and wondered how long it would last. He opened his mouth to ask her a question, to propose that they try again, buy an RV, go on vacation, eat at that four star steakhouse they’d talked about for years—anything to fuel the calm he felt another mile. Something to look forward to. Something to feel good about. By the time he settled upon the ideal proposal, the wife was already asleep. He stayed up half the night and watched her sleep. Life and love had not been easy for them. Despite all that had transpired, in the gloaming she looked beautiful, happy, and at peace. He could not help but celebrate this quiet victory.