Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon
Author: Cameron Pierce
Date: 2014-11-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Bizarro Fiction; Short Stories; Fiction; Literary Fiction
Description: Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is a book of fathers and sons, love lost and regained, haunted pasts, and snake smuggling. From kidnapping to bank robbing, pursuing rainbow trout to unspeakable monsters, from the deserts of Texas to the desolate forests of Oregon, Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is about the extreme measures people take to recapture the ones that got away. “Populated by talking fish, polite fish, sad fish, even fish masquerading as women, perhaps the very strangest thing about Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is its profound human empathy—which glows as onl
Publisher: Broken River Books

“Populated by talking fish, polite fish, sad fish, even fish masquerading as women, perhaps the very strangest thing about Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is its profound human empathy—which glows as only empathy can. From a girl on the run who trades her body for a safe place to sleep, to sisters who hold on for dear life to the memory of that one year everything was good, Cameron Pierce’s characters live in a gutted fairy-tale world, drowning in the darkest water of life. At the heart of this book is a good heart. It may belong to a fish or a human; the beauty is, we never will know.”

—Kate Bernheimer, author of How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales

“Beautiful and weird and bleakly funny as fuck, Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon picked up my love along the way and never dropped it off. I’m still riding inside the book’s zesty flesh, gaping through its lidless eyes at a world transformed.”

—John Skipp, New York Times bestselling author
of The Bridge (w/ Craig Spector)

“Cameron Pierce leaps Bizarro from the school of worldly fish tales, recalling Grimms’ talking catches, Ueda Akinari’s piscine transformations, and the weird and wonderful angling stories of Richard Brautigan, Robert Jones, and Annie Proulx. But Pierce’s work inhabits a stream of its own. Here are vivid, fantastic, unpredictable and beautifully told stories that swim the seam between achingly believable, heartbreaking human drama and violent bizarre hyper-action and fantasy. Imagine Quentin Tarantino remaking A River Runs Through It. Pierce understands what fascinates, enchants, terrifies and disgusts us about fish, and he brilliantly explores these deep creatures as psychological projections of our best and worst selves.”

—Henry Hughes, Oregon Book Award-winning
author and editor

“Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon seemed like stories Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe would write if they were fishing buddies: men turn into fish, women reveal themselves to be fish, men fall in love with other men while cooking fish in the jungles of Vietnam...and through it all Cameron Pierce guides you with taut prose and a kind of fucked up heart.”

—Elizabeth Ellen, author of Fast Machine

“Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is a book that only Cameron Pierce could write. He manages to masterfully blend the best parts of Bizarro & literary fiction to make something that is beautiful, creepy, tender, brutal, and completely and 100% unique.”

—Juliet Escoria, author of Black Cloud

“I like my short story collections like I like my men: thoughtful, funny, and talking often of fish.”

—Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird
and Threats

“Part Terry Bisson, part Cormac McCarthy, part rocket launcher—Pierce’s Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon brilliantly uses the fishing prism to examine loss, living without, and never having had.”

—Weston Ochse, author of SEAL Team 666

“I was submerged in every one of these stories. Sometimes terrified, sometimes sad, sometimes laughing hard. Some of the imaginings were insane. There were man-sized fish and talking fish and there were normal fish too. The fish brought messages of doom. But the world was familiar. A planet of disappointments and loss and whiskey and friends. That’s what I like so much about Cameron’s writing. That’s what I loved about this book.”

—Ben Brooks, author of Grow Up

“Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is Hemingway’s In Our Time re-mixed by Kafka and David Lynch—an enormous heart in a puddle of river water. It’s in the subtle distortions of reality in these stories we find the deeper truths reality can’t offer or even afford us. And in the not so subtle stories, we’re in for a thrill of a fucking ride.”

—Troy James Weaver, author of Wichita Stories

Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon

Sway

Drop the World

Short of Lundy

Help Me

The Bass Fisherman’s Wife

Three Fishermen

Floodland

The Incoming Tide

Trophies

Let Love In

Easiest Kites There Are to Fly

The Snakes of Boring

California Oregon

Where the Salmon Go

For my father, who taught me how to fish.

For my mother, who taught me how to read.

And for Kirsten, who taught me how to love.

The ducks in the lake were mechanical, but after all these years, all these disasters, the salmon remained flesh and blood. They carried battle scars. They hung out in the shade of overhanging trees and beneath the decaying dock, sighing once in a while in remembrance of all they’d gone through. Not to mention the fellow salmon lost along the way.

The salmon had officially retired about a decade before. I moved out of Oregon around the same time. I figured if I could no longer catch salmon in the lake where my grandmother had taught me to catch them, what was the point of living in a place. I returned because Grandma rang me up a few nights back and she said, “Greg, take me fishing one last time.” So I called in several sick days at the mill and packed my bags.

As we stood there on the shore of Desolation Lake, listening to the ducks quack robotic, I came face to face with the small distance we had traveled in our lives since the days when this lake greeted us like a cathedral made of fins and scales. Grandma could no longer walk. I had to push her in a rickety wooden wheelchair that she complained gave her splinters. As for myself, I was turning forty soon, pushing two-fifty on the scale. She was twice divorced. I was never married.

I figured she wouldn’t much notice the difference between our old salmon rods—nine-foot sabers with a whole lot of backbone and acrobatic tips—and the ultra-light Eagle Claw trout rods we were using today. What I didn’t anticipate was for Grandma to be mostly blind. She never mentioned it when we talked on the phone, but when I watched her, I just knew.

As I baited her up with some chartreuse PowerBait, she asked me, “So Greg, what are we fishing with today?”

“Herring,” I lied.

If she knew I was lying, she didn’t let on. I handed her the rod and stepped back about ten yards before her first cast. With her vision gone, I figured there’d be a good chance her bait-covered hook would end up in a tree. Or worse, in my skull. But Grandma cast out perfectly. The bait chased the split shots down into the lake. And before I could even cast my own line out, she had a fish on.

“Come on out, you bastard!” she shouted, muscling a trout toward the shore with her frail arms. That was Grandma. Crippled and blind, but totally mad for fish. My very own Captain Ahab.

The trout leaped out of the water and then dove down deep, making one last desperate dash for freedom, but Grandma kept the line taught. Soon, the trout flailed amongst the weeds that lined the shore. Grandma lifted the fish into her lap. It was a one pound stocker trout, nothing like the fifteen pound chromers we used to pull out of there. The trout’s rainbow stripes reflected in her dark and shiny eyes, but there was no way to tell whether she knew she’d caught a trout. Maybe she just thought it was a dinky jack.

The fish flopped out of her lap and into the dirt. “Better bonk ’em, Greg,” she said. “This here’s a firecracker.”

I nodded as I fetched a pair of needle-nose pliers, the mallet used to conk fish, and a nylon stringer.

I unhooked the trout and held its soft body in a firm grip. I lowered the fish to the ground, my hand pinning it against a flat rock.

The mallet came down too far up the fish’s skull and its eye popped out. Flecks of blood confettied my glasses.

I hammered down again, on target this time.

The fish stopped moving.

The errant eye lay on a rock. The dilated shock-gaze of being captured, of choking on oxygen, remained. A pool of black ringed by gold.

I flicked the eye into the lake.

With the dirty work out of the way, I baited Grandma up again and then finally prepared to cast out myself. I’d hardly flipped the reel’s bail when once again Grandma was rearing back on her rod.

“Fish on! Fish on!” The line unspooled from her reel like it’d gotten snagged around a Boeing 747 on a hasty flight heading for Japan. “It’s a big one, Greg!”

The biggest trout ever taken out of Desolation Lake couldn’t have pushed seven pounds. I wondered if Grandma might break that record now, but I also worried that the yellowed, frayed line on her pole might not stand up to a bigger fish. I’d been in too much of a hurry to hit the road and had failed to prepare the way I usually do. So now because of me, Grandma was going to lose her big fish.

I cranked in my line to keep it out of her way.

Her wheelchair lurched toward the waterline. The wheels sank into the mud.

The rod buckled in a horseshoe and she flexed her arms in spindly right angles, fighting to keep the rod tip up.

The scream of the line whirring off her reel could have set a forest ablaze.

And her wheelchair inched ever closer to the lapping water.

“Hold me back, Greg. It’s pulling me in.”

“Loosen the drag,” I said, licking sweat off my sandpaper upper lip. “Let the fish run.”

“Please, it’s pulling me in!”

Like a ventriloquist, I raised my arms and lowered my red-gloved hands onto the back of her splintered chair. Squeezed.

I held on.

My hands went numb. My boots sank into the mud.

Finally, she loosened the drag and the line unspooled ever-faster as the first raindrops pelted the water. At least, while the drag was loose, we could breathe, relieved of the threat of being pulled under.

The rain blew in slants that whipped our faces. I squinted out to where the fish was running, a tree-studded outlet where it could wrap around an underwater stump and snap the line.

A mechanical duck swam along the weed line in front of us and pecked at the floating eye. The duck gulped down the eye and floated on.

“Shit, she’s gonna strip me,” Grandma said. The tips of her fingers had been sliced. I’d been right. She was blind as shit. The only way she could keep track of how much line she had out was to keep her fingertips on it.

Sure enough, a mere thirty yards of yellowed, frayed line remained on the bail. I looked to where her line ran into the water. Her line was now a bloody red wire cutting through the gray-green of the water.

If we failed to act now, the fish was gone.

She tightened the drag to where the fish could no longer draw off more without exerting itself. I anchored my boots deeper in the mud, crouched over with my arms looped through the arms of Grandma’s wheelchair, ready for the fight to come.

“You may break me off or spit me out, but no son of a bitch strips me clean,” Grandma said to the fish.

She made one counterclockwise reel and waited to see what the fish would do.

Grandma’s musty rose perfume was made harsher by the rain. I tried to raise a hand to my nose to block a sneeze, but my arms were locked in her wheelchair. The sneeze was coming. No stopping it.

I tucked my head in like a turtle and sneezed into the wheelchair’s slatted backing. Grandma craned her neck. A mean scowl crossed her face.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Not as sorry as I,” she whispered.

I had no idea what she was sorry about, but before I could ask, all the tension vanished from her line.

“Hold on tight,” she said, beginning to crank the reel. “Big mama might decide to run.”

She licked the rain from her gray lips. Narrowed her clouded eyes in concentration. Cranked in more line.

The fish had given up, but the fight wasn’t over. The fish might recover. The hook might come loose. The line might get wrapped around submerged debris. Anything was possible in a fight with a lunker.

I hunkered down with my boots and butt in the mud, arms locked in the wheelchair’s arms. Even with the fish conceding like this, my anchoring weight was the only thing keeping Grandma ashore. The beast was that big.

She brought the fish in one crank at a time. The going was persistent but slow. The rain lessened and I took that as a good sign. My lower body was numb.

Finally, the fish surfaced. Twenty yards out, it burst out of the water and soared in a glorious arc like a dolphin.

“Grandma, do you see it?” I shouted. And then I wept because I knew she could not see the fish, and because the fish was so great.

She did not answer me, but there were tears in her eyes too.

A salmon had come out of retirement to do battle with Grandma. Not just any salmon, either. This was the queen mother of Desolation Lake. An ancient, five foot long, razor-toothed beauty. Only a true fisherman like Grandma could have fought such a fish on an ultra-light rod. The catch would be made even more glorious and bizarre, for it would be made on PowerBait, that foul-smelling artificial trout attractant that had never, in the history of fishing, yielded a salmon except in the lore of liars.

“Grandma, when you get the fish in closer, I’m gonna wade out and wrangle it ashore.”

“Don’t let go of me,” she said. “It’s too big.”

“I won’t let you go,” I told her, and I squeezed her wheelchair closer to me, just so she’d know.

But when the fish thrashed only a few yards out, I freed my arms from the wheelchair and lurched out of the mud. I sprang up and dashed through the weed layer and into the frigid water. Grandma shouted for me, but I was locked on the silver chaos.

In hip-deep water, I came to stand beside the salmon. I reached my arms around it but the fish knocked me backward with its powerful tail.

My head dipped and when I came up, my glasses were gone. I found my footing on the sandy bottom and looked all around. Grandma was shouting. Her wheelchair was empty in the weeds at the water’s edge. She’d been pulled out. She was a blur in the shallows, a broken lightning bolt in her hands.

I rushed for the salmon, pounced upon it. I got a grip on its lower jaw. Its teeth tore my calloused hands, but I took a deep breath and held on as we went under.

The fish thrashed against me, a thing of force and muscle. We rolled underwater as one.

I dug my fingers deep into its flesh and felt my other hand along its body to its gills, intending to rip them out.

I stabbed my hand beneath the gill plate like a knife, but the fish bucked away and suddenly was gone. I could hold my breath no longer, and surfaced.

Grandma was gone.

I dove under again, but in the gray-green I saw nothing. I called out. I waited. Eventually, I backed out of the lake, collapsing in the shallows, shivering.

My soaked clothes clung.

I crawled through the mud and heaved my body onto her overturned wheelchair in the weeds.

Was shooting gooks like target practice? No. That’s a load of horseshit. We were a bunch of stupid fucking boys who thought our beautiful smiles and strong arms could carry the weight of the world. Hell yes, motherfucker. Till the angels in heaven sing, hell yes.

We didn’t understand the chasms that could open up inside a man and swallow him whole and unless you were there in that jungle yourself, you may never understand the particular chasm we faced. So when people like you ask me what it was like, I try not to let my feelings known. And I sure as hell never tell them the story of the best man I ever knew. But I’m gonna tell you now, because sometimes the lie gets old.

We were on recon near Ben Cat when Larry discovered the landmine. Larry was our sergeant. He had a wife and three kids back home in California. Despite being about the same age as the rest of us, everyone in our platoon looked up to Larry like a father. His blue eyes shone fierce like eagle claws. He didn’t talk much because fuck talking. I do not believe Larry had a love for life. He was larger than life itself. Still, he loved us and that’s why he gave himself up so readily.

See, when Larry discovered the landmine, he threw his body over it and he told us to run like hell. We ran and we didn’t think twice. After the sick wet sound of his body going, some of us wanted to turn back and collect what we could of him, but the gooks were out there waiting. As soon as the landmine detonated, we found ourselves in crossfire coming from all directions. Now, it’s true the gooks couldn’t handle a firearm worth shit. That hardly mattered what with so many of us wandering like scared little children through the jungle they called home. Jesus Christ, we got our asses handed to us.

Anyway.

Larry saved my life, it’s true, but he did not lead me out of the dark.

Scared shitless, having just witnessed Larry, the man I looked up to like a father, get blown to pieces, I staggered through the jungle until no one was around. I walked and I walked until I found myself at the edge of a pond filled with big gray catfish. I knelt down and stuck my hand in the water. A catfish came and suckled on my fingers. I wondered if I had died.

“Sway,” a voice behind me said.

“Come again,” I said, staring down at the catfish nibbling on my fingers, confused and momentarily forgetting that the motherfucker speaking to me most likely had a bomb strapped to his chest and would not hesitate to kill us both for love of his country and people.

“Sway!”

“What the fuck you want me to sway for?”

I stood, ready for a fight.

“The fish, you fuckin’ dumbass. That’s what they’re called,” he said in perfect English.

“Sway,” I said.

“Come inside,” he said, heading toward his shack.

“Where’d you learn to speak English?” I asked.

“Where’d you learn to speak it?” he asked.

“In the U S of fucking A,” I told him. He emanated this calm energy, so I guess that’s why I didn’t just kill him then. Or maybe I was still reeling from Larry’s death.

He turned back to say something without breaking stride. “Come on. Dinner’s burning.”

I followed him into the shack. Part of me expected his gook family to jump out and tie me up in a rice sack or something, but he didn’t have any family. It was only him, living alone on this fish farm.

We ate dinner that night and after dinner we sat by a portable radio and listened to some dance music. He asked about my family and I told him I had none. I asked about his and he had none either.

I don’t know who held whose hands first. All I know is I didn’t protest. Neither did he. The heart just does what it wants sometimes.

The next morning, I woke early. I could’ve ducked out and headed into the jungle to find my people, but instead I hung around. We ate breakfast and then I helped him on the farm, feeding fish and netting fish and bleeding fish so they could be sold in the market. Once we had about a hundred pounds of fish in a sack, he heaved the sack over his shoulders.

“If anyone comes by, just stay quiet,” he said.

He marched away with his sack of fish to go sell at the market. If I went with him there’d be problems. Besides, I liked it there. I sat by one of the fish ponds and watched the big catfish swim lazily by. Sway, he called them. But it wasn’t pronounced or spelled that way.

Swai. That’s what they were.

That evening, he was hunched over the stove, cooking us a meal of catfish and rice. I sidled up behind him, singing, “Hey, good lookin’, what you got cookin’?” I put my hands on his hips and gently we swayed back and forth, like newlyweds.

I don’t know how long life continued like that. All I know is, it’s the closest I’ll ever come to Eden.

Then one day another platoon discovered the farm. They chucked dynamite in the pond and they killed those beautiful fish. He was returning from the market when they came. They intercepted him and placed a bullet in his head. I ran out of the house and they saw me and they asked, “Are you all right?” And even though I felt the rage and sadness of a thousand years, I told them I was fine. So they burned down the home of the catfish farmer.

I never knew his name and he never knew mine, and I’ll never be closer to completion than I was so very long ago, and I’ll never forget the two of us swaying in his kitchen night after night, but from the darkness he delivered me, and that’s about as much as a man can do for another man.

Hey, good lookin’, what you got cookin’?

Swai, motherfucker.

Swai.

It’s the top of round three in a four round fight. You’ve never been knocked out before, but when a vicious uppercut connects with your chin, you wonder if you’re about to find out how it feels. Your mind fights for control of your body. Your knees wobble. Ten minutes ago, you saw Olympic gold. You saw yourself standing triumphant over the broken body of Vicki Alvarez. Now the fight isn’t even halfway to the finish and you’re seeing stars. How could you gas so early? Your cardio routine is insane. How can you get hit like this? You’ve fought Vicki before. You know firsthand she only has one deadly punch. How can you fail to hit her? You’ve studied her fights so much in recent weeks, her body is practically a celluloid extension of your own. Physically, you’re the superior. You’re faster, stronger, and pack more muscle. Mentally, though, Vicki is a beast. You realize your strength means shit against a cerebral fighter like Vicki, one so remarkable in her plan of attack. Every punch feels scripted, like she’s a goddamn playwright. Or a ventriloquist. She moves, you move, and she puts you right where she wants you. That’s how good she is. At the end of round two, you’re positive you can’t lose another round or the fight’s hers. Houston tells you to get inside and keep your jab in her face. It won’t earn you many points on the score card, but it’ll teach her to respect your space. Then you can set to work chiseling away at her. You nod, gasping for water. The bell to begin round three dings and suddenly you have a taste for blood. You feel stronger now than you did before the fight. You do what you always do when the cards are down. You let your pain be a fortress.

Remember, you chose this for survival. You never did this for the glory or the status or the money. No, you chose this so that the next time someone tried to mug your ass or hurt your baby sister, you could fight back. Survival. But something happened between then and now. You find yourself floating amidst bright lights and screaming blurs that are probably human faces but might be indications that one of your retinas has come detached. You’re gassed. It’ll require all your strength and more just to stay standing for the remainder of the fight. Besides, your opponent, Vicki Alvarez, has never been knocked down in her career. You’ve faced her once before. She beat you then. She’ll beat you now. The difference? If you lose here, your shot at the Olympics ends now and forever. You’re seventeen and will likely never get another shot. Those dreams of a gold medal, they’ll be gone. But is that really what you did this for? No, you think, as you keep swinging, dodging, bobbing and weaving. You’re dog tired, know she’s almost broken you, but you’re not sloppy. Your mechanics have never failed. Your heart, that’s another story.

A year ago, you ran away from the foster home in Riverside, only to be returned when a knife wound landed you in the hospital. Some wannabe gangsters had tried to rob you and you lashed out. That was your first realization that your skills inside the ring would not always protect you outside of it.

You were raw talent, fury, survival. Shit for brains and lazy, but that didn’t matter yet. You’d destroyed the competition in regional tournaments, placing no worse than third in your weight class since strapping on a pair of gloves at the age of thirteen, when you first walked into PAL and asked to fight, when you still lived in Bakersfield. You, a shy little girl living in a world of hurt. With the proper training regimen, you’d be unstoppable, a beast.

It was in the foster home that you first began thinking seriously about the Olympics. If you qualified and went on to take the gold, not only could you claim Shelly as her legal guardian when you turned eighteen—which you’d be doing either way, regardless of results—you could give her a life outside Cottonwood and foster homes. Show her the good life. Buy a car, a home. Send her off to college. Be a real loving family together. You saw it crisp as a movie in your mind, you returning home every night, still sweaty from the gym, Shelly studying at the kitchen table. Maybe you’d order pizza and watch a movie together, or maybe you’d just chill.

This fight, it’s in Denver. Maybe that’s why it feels like you fall a mile when you drop. All you know is, one moment you’re in the fight, gassed and still down on the cards but confident, keeping that jab in her face. Then the next thing you know you’re scraping your screaming bones off the canvas. You’re crying because you’re through with acting tough, with putting on a mean face. There will be no Olympics, and that means your dreams are finished.

Yeah, she broke you.

Houston ushers you into the locker room, where he makes you look him in the eye. “You fought like a warrior,” he says, “but sometimes warriors have to lose. Listen, you fought hard. There’s nothing more you can ask for.”

“But what am I gonna do?” You’re sobbing, uncertain whether your words are comprehensible or buried in the briny mush of tears and snot, the bruises swelling your face.

Houston hears you. He always does. “You’re gonna fight. You’re gonna find a job, enroll in community college, and continue to fight.”

“I’m done fighting.”

“You can do that too.”

The next day, you fly back to Bakersfield.

You stand with Houston in silence by the conveyor belt in baggage claim. This is when the idea comes.

“I want to visit Shelly tomorrow,” you say. Houston had arranged for you to stay in his home—a two bedroom bungalow where he lived with his wife and three kids—for two nights, a Friday and Saturday, following the fight. Everything will work out, if only he says yes.

“I’ll think about it,” he says, which with him usually means yes.

You spend the evening watching horror movies in the living room. Houston takes his family out for Mexican food, but you decline the invitation to join them. You cook a frozen pizza for dinner, but three bites in you turn flush and blasts of heat and white light glaze over you. Your stomach flips like the time you ate an entire roll of Dramamine and you rush to the bathroom, dodging punches from phantoms that look like Vicki Alvarez the whole way. You throw up in the sink and feel better.

When Houston returns, he sits beside you on the couch and hands you the keys to his old Datsun pickup. “Be back by dark,” he says. “And just so you know, I’m proud of you. I’m proud of the way you fought.”

You go to sleep and dream about your sister, the life you’ll soon have together.

In the morning, you leave at daybreak.

You stop for coffee at McDonald’s but as you’re sitting in line at the drive-thru you decide you don’t need it, and when your turn comes up to place an order, you say, “I don’t want anything.”

The drive-thru employee fails to understand and repeats: “Welcome to McDonald’s. May I take your order?”

“I said I don’t want anything, bitch.”

“Excuse me?”

You slam your fists against the steering wheel, screaming, “I don’t want anything! I don’t want anything!” But there’s two cars waiting for their orders in front of you, so you say, “Okay, gimme a hash brown.”

You’re in tears as you pay for your lone hash brown. The cashier looks at you strangely, but you don’t care.

You toss the hash brown out the window as you hit the freeway on-ramp.

Eighty-five miles-per-hour puts you in Visalia before eight in the morning.

You should have called ahead to let Shelly’s foster home know you’re coming, but when you arrive, they don’t hassle you about it. After all, you’re her sister and you drove all this way. They give Shelly leave for the day as long as you return her by six o’clock. Enough time to get far away from this place.

Shelly is surprised to see you. At first she looks delighted, then a nervous expression crosses her face. You give her the biggest hug of your life, not because you miss her, but to silence her.

She doesn’t ask about your recent bout. She never asks about your life. You’re sisters and you mean the world to each other, but that doesn’t mean she has to give a rat’s ass about what you do. The bond between you stems from a common, anguished history. Yours is a love forged by the endurance of pain, not mutual interests or talking about your problems.

“So where’re we going for lunch?” she asks in the car.

“North of here,” you say. “Way north.”

That’s when Shelly finally gets it. “We’re not coming back, are we?” she says.

“No, we’re not.”

You hit the highway to the coast, the one James Dean died on, slicing through arid mountains and cow pastures.

Shelly shrugs off your attempts at small talk. You attempt to turn on the radio but remember it’s broken. The silence should be comforting. Instead it hurts your heart.

Maybe you’re not paying attention. Maybe you are. All you know is one moment the clouds open up and light spills down in white rays that stab into the ground like swords of angels and the next, a car in the oncoming lane cuts into your lane, attempting to pass another car. The gap is too narrow. They’ll never make it, and that means neither will you.

“Hold on!” It’s your voice and you turn the wheel, sharp and to the right, hitting the hard dirt at the edge of the road and then overcorrecting, back onto the highway, but the truck’s tires catch on the lip of the road and the truck jerks hard to the right, through a barbwire fence, tumbling end over end.

The truck rolls once.

The truck rolls twice.

The roof caves in.

The windows shatter.

The truck stops right-side up in a field and the sun pours down so thick, you can feel the warmth rolling down your forehead like honey.

A cow stares at you with one big eye.

It turns its head and you see its other eye is missing.

The one-eyed cow can’t see you now.

You think that’s kind of funny.

You laugh a little at the one-eyed cow.

You laugh like you and Shelly are children again, back home, in that one year when everything was good.

“Shelly,” you say, “look at that cow.”

Shelly sits there, silent.

“Yeah, okay, you be a little bitch and ignore me,” you say.

She sits still beside you as your laughter turns to shrieks, as a white sword from above stabs you in the mouth and the sword is held by a fifty-foot-tall Vicki Alvarez. There’re people walking through the field, shambling toward the truck, and for a moment you panic. You think they’re here to eat your brains, but all they do is ask you questions. Are you all right? Does anything hurt? Can you move? And you want to tell them that you are not all right, that everything hurts, has always hurt, and that’s what you’re doing. Moving. Getting on with what’s become of you.

“I love you,” you say, and you hope that Shelly is listening as men and women in uniforms pry off the door and lift you out of the skeleton of the truck and lay you down on a stretcher. And you want to ask what that black bag is for, the one they put Shelly in, but what you want most of all is to know that she heard you, you want her to know how much you love her. Maybe it’s a trick of the light raining down from heaven, but you’re pretty sure her lips beneath the black bag mouth the words, “I love you too.”

Every summer my father and I would make the drive to the ghost town of Lundy near the Nevada border to fish the lake there. We’d wake early and get doughnuts at 7-11 and drive and every five miles my father would turn to me and say, “You gonna catch a Lundy lunker?”

I’d say, “Yeah, I’m gonna catch a Lundy lunker.”

Or I’d say, “No,” and he’d say, “What?” Then I’d say, “I’m gonna catch two Lundy lunkers,” and he’d chuckle and we’d high-five.

But year after year of trips through the Sierra Nevada mountain range, passing the great and desolate Mono Lake—the biggest salt lake west of Mormon country—my father and I never made it to Lundy Lake.

Every time without fail, fifteen miles past Mono Lake, he’d turn off at the fishing resort on June Lake. “We’ll stay here tonight,” he’d say. “Wake up early and drive up to Lundy.”

I’d nod and say yeah, that seems like a good idea. It would inevitably be getting dark and if we stopped off at June Lake, at least we could fish the evening bite. The next morning I’d wake up so damn excited to catch a Lundy lunker, but then my father would say, “I hear the bite here is pretty good this morning.” So we’d go out on June Lake and catch trout as fast as we could cast out. Trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout after trout. That’s how we did it at June Lake and who were we to deny these beautiful, willing fish? They weren’t no Lundy lunkers, though.

And then one year when I was getting older and our annual trip was coming up, I got to looking at a map of Mono County and I couldn’t believe what the map showed me. The distance between June Lake and Lundy was only twenty-five miles. We stopped twenty-five miles short of our destination every summer from the time I had to be strapped in a car seat all the way to the time my father let me take the wheel. Twenty-five miles.

Twenty-five miles.

I never asked him why we stopped short. Don’t think he’d have an answer if I did ask.

You may say, “Well of course you stopped short. The bite was on at June Lake.”

This is what I say to that: You weren’t in the car with my father all those years. You didn’t grow up your whole life hearing about those Lundy lunkers.

You see, Lundy lunkers are no ordinary trout. They come in incredible varieties and in sizes you just wouldn’t believe. For six, seven hours on the drive up north, my father recounted the half dozen or so types of trout in Lundy Lake. Oh how those Lundy lunkers made my mouth water and my heart go all fluttery like this girl Raimi did. They made me break out in a sweat. I loved them. I dreamed of them. Some of them I was scared of but I coveted them all the same. So now, on the occasion of my father’s birthday, I present to you a list of every trout he told me we might catch, if we fished Lundy Lake, which we never did, and may never do now.

A Complete Catalog of the Lundy Lunkers,

According to Kelly Dean

Alligator Trout: A predatory hybrid of alligator gar and brown trout. Mature alligator trout average four to five feet in length. They are the deadliest of all trout in the world. Stray cats are a pretty surefire bait to catch them.

Dolphin Trout: Invented in 1972 to celebrate the Miami Dolphins’ undefeated season, dolphin trout are native to Florida. They were stocked in Lundy Lake in 1984 to control the rampant alligator trout population. They are extremely intelligent and have bottle noses. Friendly too. Some you can even pet.

Howling Trout: The howling trout only comes out on full moons, when guess what, it howls at the moon. The howling trout is scary as shit. The unlucky men who’ve caught one have all died of fright or gotten mauled to death. Either way, all encounters with the howling trout end in death. The howling trout is the reason I slept at the foot of my father’s bed most nights throughout my childhood.

Cherry Blossom Trout: No one has ever successfully caught a cherry blossom trout. That’s because once they’re hooked, they make a final, lemming-like leap (only out of the water instead of into it) and explode into a hot pink mess. Their skin is coated in petals, not scales. The mating season of the cherry blossom trout is one of the undisputed wonders of the world. They mate in clear, shallow water and when you look down into that water, you will see a forest of cherry trees all in blossom, except they’re fish, not trees. The cherry blossom trout originated in the coastal rivers of Japan. Eventually some of them traveled across the Pacific to start a new life in Lundy, California, where the wives of gold miners used to admire their beauty.

Oyster Trout: You know what an oyster is. You know what a trout is. Now imagine the two together and you have yourself an oyster trout. My father used to tell about the one oyster trout he ever caught, fishing Lundy as a boy. He named her Mother Pearl and she was whiter than the snow is cold. He told me that if ever I catch an oyster trout to never let her go. I’m beginning to see what he means.

The Believer Trout: They call it fishing, not catching. They call it a living, not a life. Nothing will ever be handed to you without a fight, and when the odds are stacked against you there’s only one thing you can do. Believe. Believe. Believe. If you throw your shoulder to the wheel with all of your belief, if you fight past the point of fighting, then the believer trout will come to you, and it might not save you from death or misery or toil, but at least you’ll enjoy a dynamite meal, because the believer trout is the best-eating trout of all.

Moose Trout: Fishing for moose trout is more like hunting in that you need a gun to do it. Their rainbow antlers are among the most prized possessions of any big game collector lucky enough to bag one. Probably no more than a dozen moose trout are left in Lundy Lake, and even though they’re sighted often—when they feed just beneath the surface at dawn, you’ll see their antlers dance along the surface like ice skaters made of colorful bone—a moose trout has not been caught in years. They’re more elusive even than Big Lundy Brown.

Big Lundy Brown: Everybody knows brown trout grow big, but none grow bigger than Big Lundy Brown. He’s the size of a sea monster, give or take. In other words, it depends who you ask. Let’s just say when you see his dark spotted back passing beneath your boat, you’ll wet your shorts. Some people think they’ve got what it takes to catch Ol’ Big Lundy. Every year a couple of them even try. They drive cranes down to the lakefront and lower cows impaled on gargantuan hooks into the water. Big Lundy Brown is wise to them, but he’s got a taste for beef too, so this is what he does: Big Lundy Brown swallows the cow and gets himself hooked, then he lets the fisherman haul him up with the crane just enough to get the poor asshole’s hopes up. Once he’s in shallow enough water that his back is showing, he leaps entirely out of the water for the world to see and surges back to the deeps, dragging the crane with him. Big Lundy Brown drags the crane into the lake until he knows the man driving it is just praying for his life. And at that point he clenches his powerful jaws tight, grinding the hook to dust, and swims off, leaving the man free to reverse his crane out of the water and turn away in respect and fear, and from that day forward that man will tell everyone who’ll listen and some who won’t how he came face to face with Big Lundy Brown and lived to tell about it.

The fish struck hard, and Jim Mulligan was nearly pulled off his feet, into the surf that crashed around his waist. A halibut, or perhaps a small shark. Whatever tugged at his line was certainly larger than the rainbow perch he’d caught all morning. He loosened his drag and let the fish peel off line. Ten, twenty, thirty yards…then seventy, eighty, ninety. Within seconds, the fish nearly stripped his spool bare. It showed no sign of slowing.

Jim tightened the drag and began to reel. At first the fish resisted, but after several cranks it turned tail and swam in toward the furthest breakers, toward shore.

Jim’s heart thundered in his chest. His legs had gone numb from many hours taking a beating in the waves. Despite the perpetual gray of the sky, he had still managed to catch a sunburn. The dozen perch he’d landed would make a fine meal or two for himself, Jen, and their four-year-old boy, Jason, but to catch something bigger—that would make this whole vacation one to remember. A trophy lingcod. He licked his lips at the thought of the sweet, buttery meat.

The fish came in easily now. Maybe it wasn’t as big as he first judged. Even though he loved nothing more than the feel of a fish on the other end of the line, disappointment rose within him as he considered the possibility that it was just another perch. Not that he’d complain. He came out to the beach, ditching his family’s planned visit to Hearst Castle, in order to catch perch. Faced with the prospect of something better, though, he couldn’t help feeling cheated. By who or what, he did not know. He’d felt a similar sensation of being cheated when they learned last year that Jason was autistic. The guilt of entitlement wore heavy on him, and for the moment he felt sorry for this fish, which had made a hell of a run and should be appreciated for what it was, not for what it might have been.

A black dorsal fin spotted red slashed through the waves breaking closest to Jim. No fish he’d ever seen pictures of, let alone caught, possessed a fin like that.

He focused on the angle of his rod to the water, the buzzing of the spool sending his heart into his throat every time the fish held ground or fought to earn an extra few feet of line. Even though it feigned struggle, he knew it was gassed. The biggest risks now were it coming unhooked or a seal or shark swooping in for an easy meal.

He held his breath and prayed to the god all fishermen pray to.

Then a tail cut through a white-capped wave.

Holy fish gods in heaven—from the fork of the tail, Jim guessed the whole fish to be at least three feet long. Quite possibly four or five.

Some exotic type of giant rock bass? He did not have long to find out. The fight was almost finished.

He stepped backwards, then took another step, careful not to slip on any submerged rocks as he eased out of the sea and back to shore. To lose this fish now, especially after glimpsing that it was indeed something rare and wonderful, would be nothing less than tragic.

In spite of his cautiousness, his knees turned wobbly and he collapsed to the sand when he saw the thing.

He was not sure what hideous detail he took in first:

The fish’s humanoid arms and legs, clawing helplessly at the sand.

The razor-filled frown that ran like a knife gash across its cantaloupe-sized head.

The leathery, mottled skin, like that of a moray eel.

The dorsal fin that flitted open like a sail then shut again, timed to the hoarse breathing of the creature.

Its eyes, the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, that gazed at him with such despair.

Or perhaps before taking in any of the innumerable awful details of the creature before him, he registered that it spoke.

“Help me,” the fish croaked. “Help me.”

Pity for the creature swept over him, replacing the horror he initially felt. He fumbled about for his pliers and then set to removing the barbed hook from the creature’s jaw. The poor thing whimpered as he ripped out the hook.

“I’m sorry,” Jim said.

“Help me,” said the fish.

“Do you want me to drag you back into the water?”

The fish shook its head sadly.

“Then what do you want?”

“Help me,” it said.

“Help you how?”

“Take me home.”

“But you live in the ocean and I live in a town two hours from here. I’m on vacation with my family. I can’t take you home.”

“Take me with you.”

“I’m out here catching dinner, not finding new pets. We already have a dog. And a cat. What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Eat me if you must.”

“I’m not going to eat you.” Jim shuddered at the thought. “Just tell me what you want.”

“Help me.”

“Look, I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know that I can help you.”

“Let’s be friends.”

“This is ridiculous.”

The creature stared at Jim with its blue eyes and he tried in vain to ward off that nagging sense of pity. Blood trickled from the hook wound in the creature’s lip.

Jim packed up his fishing gear and hoisted the bucket, heavy with perch and seawater. He turned his back on the fish-thing and marched up the beach to his truck.

Then, sitting in his truck with his fishy hands clutching the steering wheel, he returned his gaze to the beach, where the sad creature still lay on the sand. Why did it not return to the sea? What the fuck was wrong with it?

Help me.

“Oh hell,” Jim said. He climbed out of the truck and marched down the beach. He took the fish in his arms and carried it back to the truck. He plopped it into the half-full bucket with the perch because even though it seemed to breathe air just fine, he figured it might need water. It was a futile gesture. Hardly a quarter of the creature fit inside the bucket. It clutched the sides of the bucket, staring down at the dead perch with a blank expression.

As Jim pulled back onto the highway and drove toward the Motel 6 in town, it occurred to him that fear should have been his initial response to the creature. Why did he not fear it?

Because it’s so pitiful, he thought. It’s just so damn pitiful. That’s why I don’t fear it.

Back at the motel, upon lifting the hatch on the camper shell, Jim discovered that the creature had slunk out of the bucket and now cowered in the furthest corner of the truck bed, covering its blue eyes with its unsettlingly human hands.

It feels shame, Jim thought.

He turned his attention to the bucket and realized why. The perch were gone. The damned thing had eaten them.

“You son of a bitch,” he said, and he dropped the tailgate and started to crawl into the back of the truck, prepared to beat the creature. But as he raised his left fist to pummel the thing, it whimpered and in a meek little voice said, “I’m sorry.”

Jim lowered his fist and shook his head. “That was dinner.”

“Eat me instead.”

“No, I can’t do that. What would my wife think if she saw you? What would you even taste like? What are you, anyway?”

“I’m a fish,” it said. “Like you.”

“No,” Jim said. “I’m not a fish. I’m a man.”

The creature uncovered its eyes as a crooked grin split across its face. A fleshy black tongue lolled out of its mouth and traced the peaks and valleys of its dagger teeth.

“Well then, I must be mistaken,” it said.

All at once, the pity Jim had felt for the thing was replaced by a sickening dread that weighed on his chest like a sack of stones.

But it was too late for him. Too late for all of them. His wife, his son, the motel staff, the residents and vacationers in San Simeon, the state of California, the whole Pacific coast, the country, the continent, the world. They would all meet their doom trying to help this hideous thing from the sea. Jim realized this now, as if the thought were implanted in his mind by the thing itself.

“W-what do you want with me?” Jim stammered.

The creature lashed out, crossing the truck bed and locking its clawed hands around Jim’s skull in a lightning flash. It must have weighed less than fifty pounds, and yet it was stronger than him, and it dragged him into the back of the truck with ease.

Darkness slid into the driver’s seat of his mind and Jim felt his chest collapse beneath the stones that seemed to weigh on him. His body turned out to be disposable, but he was too far gone to care.

He awoke some time later. The fading orange sunlight beamed through the windows of the truck. He felt cold anyhow. The creature knelt beside him. It smiled. He did not like that it smiled.

“Since you helped me, I have helped you,” it said.

“Helped me how?”

“I have made you beautiful.”

The creature held out the driver-side mirror for him to take. It must have crawled out of the truck and broken off the mirror. Jim wondered if anyone saw it. He guessed not. They would’ve shit themselves. No, he realized, they wouldn’t have. They would’ve helped it. Like I did.

“I don’t want to look,” Jim said. Even as he said it, he was snatching up the mirror. He was still human. He was sure of it. He still felt human. Why should he not look human too?

In the mirror, staring back at him, he saw the unnamable fish he’d pulled from the sea. The wretched creature he’d tried to help, that now sat there grinning at him like a fucking dummy.

“Help me,” he said. He said it again and again, louder and louder until he was screaming and thrashing about in the back of the truck, throwing himself against the windows and floor and ceiling, hoping to crush his own skeleton or whatever it was inside that made him so hideous to look upon.

If someone would just fucking help him.

Hotel staff and guests began to gather in the parking lot, pointing at the truck. Surely they heard his screams and noticed his thrashing. Why did they not help?

“Help me.”

All the while, the firstborn, as he thought of it now, remained completely still beside him, its eyes closed and an atonal thrum emanating from its lips, as if it were meditating.

“Help me!”

Then he saw her.

Jen.

She said something to the crowd and they shook their heads at her, refusing to help. Alone, carrying their son in her arms, she moved toward the truck. Jen, his sweet and tender wife, had come to help.

As she lifted the hatch of the camper shell, Jim licked his razor-sharp teeth and opened his blue eyes wide, for best effect. “Help me,” he said to his wife.

He was ready to return home.

The bass fisherman’s wife was a woman of many social graces. She mounted replicas of his trophy fish, filed the taxes on his tournament winnings, sent Christmas cards to all his sponsors and potential sponsors (and, in an extraordinary display of social grace, also to his competitors), maintained a weekly schedule with her husband’s groomer, tailor, and physical trainer so that he remained viable and appealing to his television show’s audience, hand-fed the bass in their several private ponds treats she home-baked in the shape and texture of lures from his popular lure line so that when he fished the ponds for commercials or live audiences the bass would more readily strike, and yes, it was a lot, and she did so much more. But the bass fisherman’s wife had a secret. When her husband was away for bass fishing tournaments, sometimes going as far as Japan, she would sit in her makeup chair and stare at herself in the wall-sized, three-sided mirror of her private bathroom, in the mansion which had been paid for in full thanks to the extraordinary earnings of her bass fisherman husband’s lure line, which sold well thanks to the voracious appetite of the bass in their private ponds for the baked treats she made in the image of her husband’s lures. She was an accomplished cook—accomplished in everything she had ever attempted—and loved her husband truly. Yet a secret ate at her.

She sat in her chair now, and she unzipped her human face. Her brown hair and pale bronze skin and perfect teeth and all the softness of her was shed like a snake trading in its old skin as a down payment on new skin so that it might celebrate the forthcoming season in style. But the bass fisherman’s wife wasn’t a snake. No. She was a bass. A Florida strain largemouth, to be exact. That’s why they got along so famously, why they understood each other so well. The bass fisherman had never suspected that beneath his wife’s perfect demeanor and perfect appearance lay anything beyond a normal human woman’s skeleton. Love existed between them and why question a perfect thing? The woman used to feel the same, but now, approaching the end of a bass’s natural lifespan—and sixteen years of marriage to the man—the woman wondered if maybe she ought to tell him that she was not in fact a woman, at least not a human one. They’d had no children and she was going to die soon. In her human life, she pretended at present to be forty-three, a premature age for human death, she understood. This is it, she thought, I must tell him what I am. She could not die knowing that the man she loved more than she loved herself, the man who loved her deeply and devotedly, did not comprehend the true nature of her being. So, sitting in her chair before a mirror with her human skin unzipped around her, misters blasting to keep her scales wet, the bass fisherman’s wife settled on a plan.

On the night the bass fisherman returned victorious from the latest tournament, he found the mansion candle-lit, each room bedded in the petals of a different flower. Finally, entering the master bedroom, he heard the shower running in the adjacent bathroom. He understood at once what the wife was wanting, or at least offering, and he stripped out of his sweaty sponsor-issued rags and loped, stiff and hunchbacked from a week sitting in a boat eighteen hours a day, to the shower door.

“Hell, honey. You never told me you were a bass,” the bass fisherman said.

The woman breathed a sigh of relief, but she was not out of the woods just yet. Even without her human skin, her husband recognized her. That was the first major, painfully crucial step. Now to explain how—and why—she’d been keeping her identity secret. For sixteen years they’d lived as man and wife. Could they live as man and bass? Surely he’d want to know about her motives. She suspected he’d suspect she was a spy for the bass empire, gleaning information on the secret happenings of bass fishermen everywhere. She suspected a lot of bad things about where this moment would lead and what it would come to, but now that the moment had arrived, she failed to recall the fears and insecurities that’d kept her awake so many nights. Because this was her, standing as a human-sized Florida strain largemouth bass under blossoming pellets of lukewarm water. This was really her.

Before she had a chance to speak a single word, feeling as if an hour had passed between her husband’s initial response to her unveiling of her true form, to the statement which came next from his stunned lips, the woman felt not only relief, but an entrenchment of their love that exceeded all the previous bonds of their relationship, an already good and healthy one by human standards.

“Honey,” said the bass fisherman, “there’s something you oughta know.”

As he said this, he unzipped his human skin, pulling from the crown of his head down over his forehead and lips and neck and heart and even further down, until his skin and clothes and mechanical human limbs fell to the floor. He too fell. The bass fisherman lay before his wife as what he really was: a man-sized earthworm.

Stripped of all barriers, the bass fisherman wriggled into the shower and awaited the final embrace of his tender, loving wife.

Harry Sandini

Harry was diabetic, and on account of his poor health, they’d amputated both his legs, first one and then the other. He looked like a wizard, what with his flowing white mane and white beard, his skeletal frame, and the silk robes that he wore in an effort to hide his stumps. My father and I used to fish every weekend with Harry, but after his second leg was amputated, he refused to go out anymore. He’d sit in his wheelchair at his kitchen table, consulting the I-Ching. If his wife, a kind lady named Virginia, disturbed him in any way, Harry would throw a fork at her from a bucket he kept by his side. I have never seen a man with so many forks, nor a person as quiet as Virginia, but Harry was always throwing forks at her. Then Virginia got cancer and died, and Harry couldn’t afford their house on his own. He asked my father if he could move into our garage and my father said no. So Harry took out a bed at the Salvation Army and sometimes we visited him. We’d drink burnt coffee and talk about all the fish we used to catch together, but the truth was, Harry never caught many fish. He was a lousy fisherman, mostly because he spent more time puking than fishing. Diabetics shouldn’t eat a half dozen doughnuts for breakfast every Saturday. Hell, nobody should. Still, I always liked Harry. He wasn’t a bad man even if he was sometimes unkind. The last time we visited him at the Salvation Army, he gave my father a present, a black and white illustration of a beautiful trout rising to nab a Green Drake floating down Beaverkill Creek. The picture was signed To the best fisherman and best man I ever knew. Thank you. “You always were a lousy fisherman, Harry,” my father said, but there were tears in his eyes and I could tell he was just trying to lighten the mood. When we left that day, we went straight out to buy a bed and a couch and some other things to convert the garage into a room for Harry. I guess my father figured that if he wasn’t good enough to rescue his old friend from a flea-ridden bed and bad meals at the Salvation Army, then he wasn’t much of a good man at all. We worked day and night for three days to clean out the garage and make it suitable for occupancy. My father wanted everything to be just right. Harry didn’t have long to live. That was obvious. My father wanted him to be comfortable in his waning days. The garage complete, we drove to the Salvation Army to take Harry home with us. It was supposed to be a big surprise. But when we showed up and asked to see Harry Sandini, they told us he wasn’t with them anymore. We asked for his new address and they told us he’d died. Later on, when I was in high school, I began hiding out in the garage to drink whiskey with my friends and make out with girls, but I don’t believe my father ever set foot in there again.

Bob

Bob’s favorite thing in the world was his own shit. Like, you’d be out fishing with Bob at the aqueduct and Bob would return after having been gone for a while, and he’d say, “Come here, I want to show you something.” And you knew Bob was about to show you the dump he just took. But Bob didn’t stop there. No, he liked to tell you what animals’ crap his dump most resembled.

“Look at that snake shit,” he might say, and then he’d fall to the dusty ground and writhe like a maniac, shouting, “It’s like I got scales or somethin’!”

Or he’d say, “That’s got the girth of a polar bear log, but the color’s off. Definitely grizzly. A big-ass grizzly bear.” Then Bob would raise his hands above his head like they were paws and he’d growl and smack you upside the head and you’d say, “Bob, what the fuck?”

Now one thing you should know about Bob is that his shit only ever resembled land mammals. Never birds. Never fish. Never amphibians. Never insects. Never humans, either, if you were wondering.

One time, during the peak of striper season, Bob returned from his routine shit, but he didn’t beg me to come take a look at his dump. He just stood there, solemn. Finally I said, “What is it, Bob?”

“I’d like you to come look at this,” he said.

“Screw your shit, Bob. The bite’s red hot,” I said, and a fish struck my bait that very moment.

Bob waited for me to reel in the striper, which was a little too small to keep, and after I tossed the fish back into the aqueduct, he was still standing there.

“Fine,” I said. “Show me what you gotta show me.”

So he marched me over the ridge to his favorite shitting hole at the edge of the farmland, and he slowed as we approached a fist-sized mound of something red.

“Alright, what is it this time?” I asked, impatient to return to fishing.

Bob looked at me as if I should know.

“Come on, man,” I said. “I came out here to do some fishing, not stare at your weird craps.”

A hurt expression crossed his face. “They’re salmon eggs,” he said. “I’m gonna have babies.”

I scoffed. “You crazy motherfucker. Go to the doctor. Eat healthier. Stop obsessing about your shit. Do anything but what you’re doing.”

“I’m gonna have me some babies,” he said.

And the look in his eyes told me he was serious. He believed he was gonna have some babies. Bob was single and believed in the whole ‘wait until you’re married’ bullshit, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t knocked up some girl and this was his way of telling me.

I stood there, not sure what to believe, wondering how to help my friend out.

Then when I came up with nothing, he said, “Don’t judge me,” and he knelt down and sucked the salmon eggs into his mouth.

He climbed the ridge up and away from his shitting hole and I followed him. He went back to the aqueduct. He descended the steep concrete bank to the water’s edge, where the striper we’d caught and kept drifted dead on a stringer in the current. And what Bob did next was totally insane. He crept down to the slick algae line on the concrete lip and he plopped down on his butt and scooted into the cold, fast-moving water. He went under.

“Bob!” I shouted, but I wasn’t about to jump in after him. That water moved fast. It’d drown us both.

I cried to the folks who were fishing up-shore from us and they ran over to see what was the matter. I was muttering about salmon eggs and Bob and those stupid shits he always took. The folks up-shore had a cellphone and I didn’t so they called 911 and the police came and an ambulance came and a rescue team came, but there was nothing to be done. The aqueduct moved fast. Bob was most likely miles downstream. He was certainly dead.

A year passed and I felt not at all better about losing my best buddy in the whole wide world, but I fished twice as hard that year as ever before in my life. And I kid you not, when the striper season got into full swing on the aqueduct, I started catching salmon. Slender, hard-bodied, silver salmon. Nobody else caught them. None of the regulars who were as dedicated to fishing as me. I was the only one who could catch ’em. And as I pulled up salmon after salmon, all these guys and all these girls who were fishing that stretch of the aqueduct, they’d reel in their poles and lay them on the bank and they’d come crowd around me, to watch how it was done. I told them how to do it. I showed them my technique. I gave them my bait. But no matter what, nobody could pull a salmon out of the aqueduct but me. They came to calling me The Legend, and soon as I’d set foot out of my truck, I could hear them murmur, “Here comes The Legend,” and “It’s the guy who catches all those salmon.” The local paper even wrote a story about me. The Department of Fish and Wildlife got a warrant and searched my house. I guess they thought I’d taken to bucket biology and planted the salmon there myself. Nobody could figure it out. But that didn’t prevent me from catching salmon, the first and only to ever be caught in that stretch of the aqueduct.

Only I know how the salmon came to be there. Only I remember my friend Bob.

Mr. Tibbs

Jerry Tibbs. Better known as Mr. Tibbs’ Ribs in our community for his barbecue joint of the same name. I can still taste his ribs and the best goddamn cornbread in California, baked fresh every day by his wife, Patty Tibbs, who owned a real estate business. My daddy and I fished with Jerry on some small freshwater lakes when I was a youngster. We caught smallmouth bass together on several occasions. But fishing for smallmouth bass with my daddy and I is not what killed Mr. Tibbs. No, Mr. Tibbs was killed by a whale. It is one of those terrible fortunes of life, to go out fishing on the Pacific in the boat you own because you are successful, and after a good day’s fishing, the next thing you know, a whale breaches on your boat and you’re knocked overboard and swept out to sea in the dead of night and you’re screaming for help and you see the lights of the boat but you are hundreds of yards away, cold and wet and drowning fast and drifting further and nobody can find you nobody will ever find you. That was Mr. Tibbs’ fate. He died on the ocean. They never found his body. Friends say he caught a big halibut that day. They filleted it and served the meat at his wake the following week. My daddy and I were present and we enjoyed that halibut, but it didn’t hold a candle to Mr. Tibbs’ ribs. His wife and oldest son took to running Mr. Tibbs’ Ribs after his death, but the ribs just weren’t the same. There was a special way Mr. Tibbs’ secret sauce made you smack your lips. And oh boy these were still real good, but they weren’t lip-smacking good. The death weighed heavily on Patty Tibbs, too. She no longer cooked the cornbread fresh every day. You were lucky to get a piece fresher than two days old. It’s kind of funny because my daddy and I had been invited to go out on the ocean with Mr. Tibbs many times before, but my daddy thought I’d get seasick. So we’d always just gone out fishing for bass on local lakes with Mr. Tibbs. Kind of funny to think of Mr. Tibbs now. I can’t remember a word he ever spoke, only his barbecue. He was a kind man, I know. He must’ve had kind eyes and a kind voice and a kind smile, considering how often he invited my daddy and I out fishing, but I remember none of that. Only his barbecue and the yellow tables in his shop and for some reason a flier for his wife’s real estate company, showing you houses that were for sale in the neighborhood. Naïve as I was, I always expected my daddy to say, after ordering our barbecue, “And I’ll take that house too,” pointing to a house on one of the real estate fliers, as if you could buy ribs and cornbread and a house all from the same joint. But my daddy didn’t have the money for that, and that’s not how the world works. How the world works is that whales kill people. Lip-smacking. That’s how I’d describe it.

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.

Loveyoubye.

When he awoke in the morning, his wife was already gone. He got out of bed and dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before. He was late for work. He ate some sort of breakfast bar and left the house. On the highway, he missed his exit. Instead of getting off and turning back, he kept on going. He drove right out of town. When he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, he looked a little bit less like the man he’d become. He drove north. He stopped for gas and coffee somewhere, gas and a sandwich somewhere else. He tried to avoid seeing himself, but every couple hours he couldn’t help looking or catching a glimpse by accident. Every time, he looked different. The further north he drove, the more he resembled Doug. He guessed it was only natural to become himself, and left it at that. By the time he arrived in Portland, he’d become Doug again. He drove directly to the bait shop. He did not open up for business. Instead, he locked the door after him and went up to his room above the store. He climbed into bed and fell fast asleep even though his back ached from the miles on the road. He had driven very far.

Doug woke in his bed. The young man who’d caught the strange fish sat in a chair beside him. When the young man noticed Doug was awake, he put the book he was reading aside and asked, “How are you feeling?”

“How do I feel?” Doug said, and laughed painfully. “I feel as shitty as the day I was born.”

“You fainted, so I brought you up here.”

Doug shook his head, mumbled, “I didn’t faint. I became someone else.”

“What was that?” the young man said.

“Nothing. You didn’t call an ambulance, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t have health insurance. What time is it?”

The young man looked at his watch. “It’s four in the morning.”

“Good,” Doug said. He groaned and sat up in bed. “Then it’s about time we got started.”

“Started with what?”

“Fishing.”

“You can’t be serious—”

“Look, boy. You showed up here almost twenty-four hours ago with a freak fish in your ice chest. Next thing I know, I’ve lost a day of my life, and trust me, I ain’t got many left. You owe me for that day. You’re going fishing with me.”

But as soon as he’d said it, Doug realized the young man was not in the room with him. He was alone. He’d no idea how many days had passed, one or ten or none at all. He’d no idea how he’d managed to get upstairs to his room.

Gray light filtered in, but not enough to tell if it was early morning or late evening. He moved to the window and looked out. The young man’s Dodge was still in the parking lot. Now it was nearly submerged. Doug’s chest tightened. A flood had rolled in and swallowed the earth. His car had already gone under. He knew his shop was flooded. He’d lose his fish mounts and so much else. His only phone was down there, so that was gone. No chance of calling anyone. The rain continued falling heavy. Soon the truck would also vanish under the roiling waves. Somewhere in a distant town, a man who wasn’t Doug had a wife. Somewhere in this floodwater, the blue-eyed fish with human limbs and such sharp teeth must have dwelled. Maybe it was dead. Maybe not. Maybe a million more like it existed, ready to emerge from the river in this time of flood. Somehow he knew the creature had gotten the young man who’d caught it.

If only he could will himself to be that other man, but he could not. He locked the bedroom door and retrieved the Smith & Wesson from the safe. He sat in the rocking chair by the window, the revolver on his lap, staring out at the strangely desolate world. No people or rescue crews out there. Only dark water, dark sky.

I. The Best is the Worst

They chose to spend Christmas in Japan. She had longed to revisit Tokyo ever since a childhood trip, but cities exacerbated his anxiety, so they’d compromised. Two nights in Tokyo, drinking sake in clubs and eating the best ramen of their life, before traveling north to the island of Hokkaido, where they fished for yamame trout using tenkara rods. On Christmas morning, they walked down to the clear and frigid creek by the lodge. Within the hour they landed two trout apiece and returned to the lodge and cooked the trout over an open fire. They ate the trout with miso soup and green tea, and spent the rest of the day reading. They’d experienced a difficult year, a multitude of circumstances pushing their marriage to the brink. Each had at times threatened to walk away only to remain, as much out of fear as love. Somehow they persisted, and by Halloween they’d rediscovered parts of each other and themselves that had been lost—or at least inaccessible—for a decade. This vacation was well-earned then, and they’d both already proclaimed it the best time they’d had in all their dozen years together, maybe in their whole lives. It felt like growing old even though they were still young. So when he complained that evening of pains in his chest, they didn’t take it seriously. He took it easy on the plum wine and they called it an early night. Hokkaido was so quiet. Even the sound of the sea lapping at the shore seemed more peaceful, as if this side of the Pacific possessed some calming power that the Pacific off the coast of Oregon, where they lived, lacked. He awoke in the night unable to breathe. The constriction in his chest had swelled into his throat, like a large bird trapped inside his chest cavity thrashing about, attempting to peck its way up to freedom through his throat. He reached out for her in the dark. She seemed so far away even though she lay so close they almost touched. She stirred in her sleep. Her back felt warm as he brushed her with his fingers. Gasping for a breath, he shook her. She stirred in the starlight, turned sleepily and asked, “What’s wrong?” A more thorough darkness was compounding on the nighttime darkness of the room. And then the waves of the sea washed over their cabin, and if he was dying they’d never know, because they both drowned anyway.

II. Fishing and Beer

Frank knew as well as goddamn anyone that the Pacific was the Pacific. He’d grown up on it, learned to drink and fuck and fight on it. Still spent eighty hours a week on or near it, taking those who could afford it out for salmon and tuna and halibut and sturgeon and lings. Hell, he’d once stabbed a great white in the head with a knife. That’s how well he knew the Pacific. Everywhere it was the same. Dark and merciless, but willing to give back to those who sacrificed, to those whose skin had turned to leather, to those with salt in their blood.

He went outside and pulled a beer from the icebox on the porch. The fridge had died a month before and he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The beer was lukewarm, but strong and dark. The grass in the yard was overgrown. Dandelions swayed amidst the green.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife had eliminated all sturgeon retention for the foreseeable future and Frank had only managed to convince one client to go on a catch-and-release trip. The rest canceled. He was forced to return their deposits. The bitch of it was, he’d already spent all the deposit money. Fifteen years of back child support finally caught up to him and rather than face potential jail time, he paid it and prayed to God the state would leave those prehistoric fish for the slaughter. And it’d been a hell of a year, all right. Limits for every client, every day. It seemed everyone else had experienced similar success and the quota was exceeded. Retention would likely remain closed for several years. So now he found himself nearly ten grand in the hole, with several more weeks of nothing to do, at least nothing gainful. Aimless days of waste and wander. Drunk as fuck and restless. The least he could do was fix the refrigerator and mow the grass, maybe clean the place up, but the idea just pissed him off. Everything pissed him off these days. Everything except being out on the water. It didn’t even matter if he was on the ocean or river. He loved the treacherous nature of it all. There were times he considered buying a big enough boat to live on. The only thing keeping him anchored to land was Llewellyn Holloway. He hoped to someday make her Llewellyn Decker, even though she said the name didn’t have a good ring to it. Above all, he wanted to start a family with her. He was thirty-eight years old and felt the approach of his final chance to prove he was a good man.

The rain started up and he went back inside. He sat at the kitchen table, pushed aside the dirty dishes and opened up one of the pocket lunar charts he kept around. He stared at the moon’s cycle for the year, signified by dots shaded some amount of black and white. He closed his eyes and imagined the sea under a full moon in July, how much it differed from a full moon in December. He finished the beer and went for another. Then another. The rain pelted the tin roof so loud there wasn’t any use turning on the television or the radio. He wouldn’t be able to hear a damn thing anyway. “The moon don’t mean shit to me,” he said, after staring at the lunar chart for an hour more. He didn’t mean it. The moon was like a cold and distant god to him.

He thought about calling up Llewellyn, but she was tending bar at the Fighting Salmon. Besides, she could not cure the loneliness that ate at him. Only two things could save him now. Fishing or beer. And what remained of sturgeon fishing had been canceled.

III. The Stranger

The olive-skinned stranger in snakeskin boots entered the Fighting Salmon a quarter past eleven. He looked like he’d been sculpted out of finer materials than flesh and bone. He hung his leather bomber jacket up to dry at the coat rack by the door and approached the bar, set his motorcycle helmet—black, half-shell—on a barstool and sat down beside it. “Do you have like uh…a seafood stew?” he said.

“Sure do,” Llewellyn said. “Got a chowder with salmon, halibut, oysters, clams, mussels, and prawns. Comes in a bread bowl.”

“I’ll have that.”

“Can I see your ID, hon?”

No way was he younger than thirty, but Llewellyn was smitten. She wanted to know his name. He handed over his driver’s license. New Mexico.

“Anisedias. I’ve never heard a name like that before. What brings you all the way here from New Mexico?”

“I’m not from New Mexico,” he said.

“But your license is—”

Anisedias was not listening. He craned his head to watch the Trail Blazers game on the television behind the bar.

“Can I getcha anything to drink?” Llewellyn said.

“Water’s fine.”

She filled a pint glass with water and set it on the bar. As she went into the kitchen to tell Larry to ladle up the seafood stew, she could hardly contain herself.

Anisedias.

The name of a god.

And even though Llewellyn didn’t believe in true love, she wanted to believe this stranger was sent here for a reason. To carry her far away from this place, rescue her from settling down with Frank, who was fun to go with and not at all a bad guy, but marrying Frank and having children with him and slowly decaying with him would prove true the one fact she could never accept: that she was no different than everybody else who had never escaped this town. Born, raised, and laid to rest within sight of where the mighty Columbia met the Pacific. Neither river people nor ocean people, but a fucked-up thing that existed in between. Never knowing which way to go, so going nowhere at all.

Llewellyn filled a cup two-thirds full with ice and Diet Coke, then stepped into the freezer. The sweat on her brow cooled, turned frosty. She breathed in deep and didn’t mind that it hurt. Larry and the other cooks kept a stash of liquor behind the beef patties. They let Llewellyn and a few of their other favorite bartenders and waitresses in on it, so long as nobody ratted them out. Llewellyn moved aside a box of beef patties and grabbed the fifth of rum. She filled her cup to the rim.

Out of the freezer, she fit a plastic lid over the cup and punctured the lid’s starfish-shaped hole with a straw. The first sip was mostly rum.

IV. What Followed Him North

Roswell was a hell of a way from here. He’d jumped on his bike on Tuesday, driven straight through except for gas and bathroom breaks. He drank nothing but water. He never much cared for coffee or soda. Never even cracked the tab on an energy drink. Iced tea was alright, unsweetened.

Somewhere along the way, he acquired a five pound bag of beef jerky. Somewhere along the way, he reached into the bag and found it empty. He’d eaten five pounds of beef jerky and one banana since Tuesday. What day was it anyway?

The Trail Blazers clung to a narrow lead with less than three minutes remaining in the fourth. How would they let him down this time?

The bartender leaned against the serving window, staring at him, sucking on a drink spiked with something. The chemical sweetness of her Diet Coke did nothing to mask the scent of cheap liquor.

“Hey,” he said.

“You need somethin’, hon?”

“I think I’ll have a beer after all.”

“What’d you like?”

“What would you recommend?”

She filled a taster glass with a copper-colored beer and slid it in front of him. He threw back the taster like a shot. Citrus and bitterness crackled on his tongue.

“You keep it up like that, we might end up sleeping together,” the bartender said. She laughed while she said it, but she was already pouring him a pint of the same beer.

“What is it?” he said.

“Bitter Bitch,” she said. “Like me.”

He’d already traveled two-thousand miles to escape love. Somehow, it had followed him.

V. Shark Fishing in Hell

Frank Decker was three-fourths shit-faced when he launched his boat out of the East End Mooring Basin. Sea lions barked at the moon. The cargo ships anchored in the river were brightly lit but quiet, rocking back and forth on the waves, like slumbering giants. Frank swigged from a flask and gunned the boat out of the marina, out into the roiling current.

The lights of Astoria passed on his left in a blur. He crossed under the Astoria-Megler Bridge. A sandbar in the middle of the river had wrecked many ships, especially at night, so he kept to the shipping channel. The boat skidded over the chop and went airborne every couple seconds before crashing down again. The incoming tide would push baitfish into the Columbia River estuary. At certain times of the year, blue sharks schooled at the river mouth and followed prey upriver. Every year or so, a sturgeon or salmon fisherman reported hooking into something big that would saw through their braided leaders in seconds. These were usually blue sharks. Great whites, threshers, and salmon sharks also patrolled the Oregon coast, occasionally pursuing seals and schools of fish inland and close to shore. Predators did unpredictable things, which is why Frank identified so much with them. Nobody targeted them, but from time to time, when Frank was feeling especially lost or extremely drunk, he went out on the river at night to fish for sharks.

He eased up on the throttle as he approached Buoy 10. He anchored up and threaded a red label herring onto a large octopus hook. He lowered the bait into the water, pulling out on the line until the line counter notched fifty feet. He set the rod in the holder and sat back with the flask. He’d hardly begun to admire the chaos of the stars when the rod buckled over. He swiped it out of the rod holder and set the hook. The fish on the other end thrashed its head from side to side and took off, surging upriver. Frank released the anchor rope and buoy.

The way the fish pulled the boat like a sled, Frank felt convinced he’d hooked into an oversize sturgeon, probably an eight to ten footer. But when he finally fought the fish in and brought it alongside the boat, he discovered something else entirely. Not a shark, not a sturgeon, but something equally prehistoric. He found himself face to face with a dagger-mouthed fish with human hands. The fish had the bluest eyes Frank had ever seen, and as he gazed into those eyes, he was filled with a sense of love and belonging that not even Llewellyn made him feel. The fish spoke to Frank. The fish spoke words in a language no human could ever understand, but Frank knew they must be words of love, and so he removed the hook from the fish’s lip and, as the fish sat there breathing hoarsely, clutching the side of the boat with its human hands, Frank lowered himself into the dark water. By the time he reached the bottom, he was little more than a skeleton, and yet somehow he remained. Tragic as it was, the fish with human hands reassured him that he’d avoided something far worse, something coming soon. Fish hand in skeleton hand, they swam out of the river to the open sea, far from the bad thing about to happen.

VI. Klaskanine

“Staying in town a while, or just passing through?” Llewellyn asked.

“I’m at a campground on the Klaskanine.”

“Not much to do out that way.”

“I got lost.”

“You gonna be lost out there long?”

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“So long as you’re alone?”

Anisedias shrugged. “I don’t mind a little company.”

Llewellyn pursed her lips. She went over to the serving window. “Hey Larry,” she called into the kitchen. “You mind if I skip out?”

“Sure. Just one thing,” Larry said, coming out from the kitchen with an oyster shooter in each hand.

“What’s that?” Llewellyn already knew what he’d say next.

“Get me a date with your sister.”

“Get me out of this place and you can marry my sister.”

“I’m getting you out right now.” He downed one of the oyster shooters.

“I mean for good.”

“Why you wanna leave so bad, huh? This ain’t such a terrible place to live.”

“He’s right,” Anisedias said. “It’s not so bad.”

“You,” Llewellyn said, pointing at Anisedias, “you got here today, so your opinion on this place doesn’t count. And you—” She pointed at Larry, whose head was tilted back to let the second oyster shooter slide down his throat. “You stay quiet about this. If Frank finds out, I’ll know you were talking.”

Larry looked at her with this look like I didn’t see a thing. There was some cocktail sauce in his mustache. “Larry,” she said, “you’ve got cocktail sauce in your mustache. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“It means you can trust me, right?”

“It means you ain’t ever getting a date with my sister.”

She pulled two bottles of Bitter Bitch out of the cooler and gestured with one of the bottles toward the door. “Come on, Anise baby. Let’s see your ride.”

VII. Berserker

“Oh, a Rebel,” she had said, unable to mute her disappointment. Women always did that. When they found out he rode a bike, they assumed that meant a Harley. But Harleys were all branding and no muscle. Weak shit.

Swaying women in favor of his Honda Rebel took nothing more than a nighttime ride. Even with a chick hugging his waist, he could cut breakneck corners going sixty-five. Pure torque and acceleration, he’d named his bike S.S. Berserker, and he truly believed she had the power to sail on open seas, to ride on water, if the desire ever arose in her machine heart. She was the love of his life, but there had been others, and more would follow.

No.

In truth, the bike was a piece of shit. He’d stolen it from his sister’s ex-boyfriend, the one whose ass he’d kicked on Easter. The dude was a shithead and he drove a shitty bike, but it was Anisedias’s shitty bike now.

Although the storm had relented a little, they were both soaked by the time they arrived at the riverside campground. The ride had been dark. At one point, they came around a bend in the highway to find an elk, standing in the road. The elk’s antlers fell under the illumination of the bike’s headlight, but they were moving too fast to stop. Anisedias swerved right and hoped the elk moved in the other direction. Somehow they stayed upright, passing within inches of the elk, which remained still, as if it were made of stone. But he knew that if they’d hit it, they would have spilled blood. The elk’s, and also some of theirs. Llewellyn wasn’t at all shaken by the near-miss. Instead, she laughed.

Now they were in his tent, undressing out of their wet clothes. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her lips against his. He didn’t kiss her back. He wasn’t ready for that, not after what he left behind.

He turned his head into his shoulder, breaking her lips from his. She leaned back and looked at him in the dark. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

He flipped her around so she faced away from him. She made a confused sound as he pushed her onto all fours. Then a surprised sound as he slid up behind her and pushed his way inside. From that point forward she remained silent, right up until he collapsed on top of her. Then she said: “Now it’s my turn.”

She wriggled out from under him and turned over on her back. She grabbed a fistful of his long dark hair. “You gonna do what I say?” she said.

He nodded, wincing at the pain.

“I didn’t hear you,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then scootch down there and let me fuck your babyface.”

She spread her legs wide and he moved himself between them. She pushed his face into her crotch without ever letting go of his hair. His cum leaked out of her, coating his tongue as he licked. He found it hard to breathe with his face mashed into her like that. He tried to sit up to take a breath, but she twisted his hair so hard he cried out in pain. “Lick it, bitch,” she said. He buried his face again, slick with both their juices. For a while he lost himself in the smothering darkness. When he came to, he found that she was crying. Her head remained in her hands. Then he realized it was him who was crying, and she was no longer forcing his face into her crotch. She was soothing him. She was singing: “Hush little baby don’t you cry…”

VIII. Catostomus

And the small town on the big river slept.

On the hill that overlooked the river, the houses were dark, except for one Victorian brightly lit by golden pale Christmas lights that had not been taken down or turned off since the day they were stapled to the awning.

Anchored out on the Columbia, a young sailor shared a final cigarette with his captain. They passed the cigarette back and forth, watching the Christmas lights on the house on the hill, while miles away on the opposite shore, the forests of Washington stood dark.

IX. Cutthroat

She woke up cold, the tent empty. She drew her knees into her stomach and grabbed her bare feet, which were freezing, but warmth did not come. Finally the cold won out. She dressed in yesterday’s clothes while remaining under blankets. She unzipped the tent. She expected rain, and yet it was a clear and blinding day. The sun provided no warmth. Not even the frost on the grass had thawed. She had trouble focusing her eyes in all the brightness. The sharp pangs of an oncoming headache licked at the back of her skull. She hadn’t been awake long enough to know if she was tired or hungover.

An eagle soared high above, carried by an updraft.

The campground was empty with the exception of a gray-haired man working under the hood of an RV raised on cinderblocks. The man paused from his work to drink from a thermos. He saw her and waved. She smiled at him, or tried to anyway. Her face didn’t always form the expressions she wanted and she’d given up on worrying about it long ago. She waved to the man just in case. She could be sure of her hands.

For some reason, the man reminded her of her great-great uncle, a man named Harvey Van Norman. Or at least a photo she once saw of him. He’d been Mulholland’s right-hand man, taking over for him when the St. Francis Dam Disaster ruined Mulholland’s career. Llewellyn’s father once remarked that Harvey had been the only success the family ever produced. She’d always resented her father for saying that, considering she’d still harbored aspirations of being something at the time. The resentment had rubbed off on her thoughts about Harvey Van Norman, even though she’d never met him and it wasn’t his fault for being instrumental in the development of Los Angeles. She often wondered what she might have become if she’d lived in an age where anything was possible, like the twenties. She might have been a famous dancer, or the Amelia Earhart of the sea.

Anisedias emerged from the forest carrying a fishing pole and a stringer of small trout. He kissed Llewellyn on the forehead and started a fire. She warmed herself beside it while he cleaned the fish and wrapped each fish in tinfoil. He set the trout on the coals and they sat there in silence until the fish were ready to eat. Then, as they ate, a deafening sound encroached, followed by a wave of something white and blue, something so immense that it ate them up and made them part of it, transforming the world into a murky, tumultuous place. They were quickly separated by the force of the thing that had consumed them. That was okay too because love was never going to carry Llewellyn far away from this town, but this thing, this incoming tide, would take her wherever she wanted to go, on and on forever, even as she sank further under.

I was born a collector. From the ages of seven until about twelve, the heart of my angling fixation boiled down to one question: Can it be mounted? I wanted to hang a trophy on the wall beside my father’s ten pound bass and his pair of deep red Kern River rainbows. I collected action figures, football cards (at age ten, a list of mine was published in Beckett Football Monthly), Goosebumps books, and nearly anything else with the remotest collectability, so naturally I was also inclined to collect the fish kingdom as well. Sometimes my old collecting habit paid off. I convinced my father to drop thirty dollars on a hand-painted, hand-carved nine inch Castaic Lure Co. trout. That model, which ceased to be produced by hand in 1996, now goes for as much as three-hundred dollars. Mine remains in mint condition. My card collection, primarily consisting of rookie cards from the sixties through the early nineties, might be valued at several thousand dollars. And yet there was nothing I wanted to collect more than a trophy fish of my own to mount on the wall. In 1996, the same year as the value of my Castaic Lure Co. trout skyrocketed, my father made a promise he would soon regret.

We were fishing Buena Vista Lakes outside Bakersfield, California. Even though Lake Webb, the larger of the two lakes, was primarily known as a boating and jet ski lake, we tended to fish there instead because fishing pressure was lighter and the fish tended to be bigger and more plentiful. We spent innumerable days catching crappie and bluegill, brown trout and rainbow trout, largemouth bass and striped bass, blue catfish and channel catfish, with hardly anyone else fishing on Lake Webb. If we hiked around to the reed-lined far shore, we were pretty much guaranteed to have the shoreline to ourselves. We were doing just that one May evening in 1996. We walked along the bank, throwing six-inch white curly tail grubs between the reeds for largemouth bass. As daylight ran down, I pitched my grub out into the water and began retrieving it with subtle twitches. During the retrieval, a big fish boiled on top of it. The fish didn’t take, but that hardly mattered. I had its number now. I cast back out and almost as soon as the grub hit the water, the fish exploded on it. My rod buckled. The fight was on. I’d finally nailed it, a monster bass worth hanging beside my father’s bass. There was no way he could resist mounting it. The fish peeled line, making several impressive runs. We didn’t have a net, so my father stripped down to his underwear and waded out to his thighs. After several minutes, the fish tired out and resigned. My father stood in the water, ready to snatch up the bass of a lifetime. But when the fish finally surfaced, it flashed gold. It was a ten pound carp, not a ten pound bass. A beautiful fish, a hell of a fighter, and my first carp, but to a bass lover like my father, that’s the equivalent of catching a ten pound bag of dog shit.

“It’s just a big ol’ carp,” my father said.

“Can we mount it?” I said, hopeful.

“No, son. You can’t mount a carp.”

I pleaded. Look at the size of it. Look at the golden scales. Do fish get any prettier?

He’d always had a hard time telling me no, so he made me a deal.

“We’ll come out this weekend,” he said. “If you catch a bigger one, we’ll take it to the taxidermist.”

That sounded like a sweet deal to me, so we let my ten pound carp swim free. My father was a little pissed that he’d taken off his pants and waded out into the lake over a carp, but at least he’d avoided taking one home for the wall.

A couple days later, we returned with my stepbrother and my dad’s friend Harry, a diabetic with the flowing white hair of Gandalf. This time around, we fished with whole kernel sweet corn. We were getting serious about carp.

My stepbrother caught the first fish of the day. A five pound goldfish. After that, we caught a couple four to six pound carp, but nothing came close to dethroning the fish from the previous trip. Eventually, my dad grew bored of carp fishing and he and Harry wandered along the back shoreline to throw for bass, leaving my stepbrother and me alone in the pursuit of carp. We drank Pepsi and sat there sweating under the hot Central Valley sun. At some point, my pole popped out of the rod holder and smacked against the rocky shore, half in the water and half out. I ran over and started reeling. Something on the other end pulled back, something heavier than I’d ever felt. A minor population of sturgeon existed in Buena Vista Lakes, but I had never caught one, and I didn’t think they ate corn. All I knew was I had something big on.

I shouted for my father. He and Harry took their time returning, and by the time they arrived, whatever was on the other end of my line had stopped moving. My father took the rod from me and gave it a short, sharp jerk. “You’re snagged up,” he said.

“It’s a big one,” I said.

“Naw, it’s just a snag.” He attempted to free the rig from whatever rock or weed he believed it was caught on, and that’s when the fish made its first big run, burning off fifty yards in mere seconds.

He couldn’t believe it, and for a moment, neither could I. The fish was already halfway to the island in the middle of the lake. My father handed the rod back to me and rushed to clear the other lines to give me room to fight the goliath. A crowd gathered as the battle stretched beyond five minutes, then ten. A younger kid asked if he could net the fish if I landed it. We’d once again failed to bring a net, so we agreed. He ran off to borrow a net from some other fishermen, returning a short time later.

“Remember you said we’d get it mounted,” I told my father, confident that I was going to land this fish, and that it was bigger than my last.

“We’ll see,” he said.

Finally, twenty minutes after the fight began, we got a first look at what was on the other end.

A thirty-five pound carp, three and a half feet long.

The fish was netted and brought ashore. My father, my stepbrother, Harry, and I all took pictures with the big carp. I don’t think we caught another fish that day, but it didn’t matter. I’d gotten the fish I came for, the fish I could mount on the wall.

As we left the lake that day, a man offered me twenty dollars for the fish. He and his wife and three kids were out fishing for their dinner but they’d caught nothing. My father told him sorry, that I insisted on keeping it. “We’re getting it mounted,” I said.

That evening my father promised to call the taxidermist who’d mounted his bass and trout. The next time I was over at his house, I asked about the fish. “I sent it off to the taxidermist,” he said. “It’ll be a few months.”

I asked for updates every time I visited my father. I was relentless. Finally, after six months had passed, I received some news. “He’s having trouble with the eyes. Not many people mount carp, so he had to special order the eyes,” my father told me. That sounded plausible enough. Carp do have beautiful eyes.

Eventually a year passed. Then two. Sometimes my father said the carp was on its way, but it never came. I caught other big fish. Nice channel cats, monster crappie, fat rainbow trout, and yet I never gave much thought to mounting them because I knew my carp lay in a taxidermist’s workshop somewhere, and that if only I was patient, my fish would return to me, preserved to last a lifetime.

Years passed and we ceased speaking of the carp even though I still believed. Last year, while visiting my father, I finally asked him what really happened to the carp.

“I threw it in a field,” he said, with a laugh and a sheepish grin. “That was a big-ass fish. It was a shame to kill it. But you can’t mount a carp.”

Somewhere over the years, I lost my desire to mount a trophy on the wall. A hundred yards behind where I live now, a creek runs through the forest. Native cutthroats live there. I’m fine just watching them. I like to eat fish and nothing beats what you’ve caught yourself, yet many of the fish I catch are released without ever leaving the water. Sometimes, though, I think about that thirty-five pound carp and what it would’ve looked like above the fireplace. They say you can’t mount a carp, but someday, I think I will.

They hit Portland a little after sunrise, pull the car over in an industrial area and watch strange barges haul pyramids of dirt up and down the brown river that splits the green city in half.

Sarah sleeps beside Ryan. His arm is numb from her head resting on his shoulder.

“Wake up,” he says, “we’re here.”

She smiles at him through her sleepiness, lands a kiss on his scruff.

Even though they’re down to forty bucks and he’s still uncertain whether the mess they left behind in California will catch up to them or not, he decides right then that he’d go to hell and back for that smile.

He’d endure anything for this girl.

The first order on the agenda is to pawn the car. The second is to find a place to crash. After that, it’s just living. Staying on the down-low, earning money to live.

He has no idea if what they’re doing is the right thing to do. When he considers what they’ve done, all he feels is confused. He’d turn back now, to Bakersfield, if his bones didn’t ache with exhaustion—and if his future there promised to be any less bleak. He’d go to prison and she would too. At least here in Portland they stand a fighting chance at building a life together, if they can go undetected.

He drives, navigating the city streets like a bloodhound, seeking out a place where the car will merit question-free cash.

They strike gold on Southeast 82nd.

A car lot tucked behind a gun and pawn shop offers one-hundred cash for it, no questions asked. It’s less than he hoped for, but he accepts. The car was a piece of shit anyway.

They walk down 82nd Street, one-hundred forty dollars in his pocket.

It’s cold out.

The sky is like a gray egg yolk that seems to pulse, as if any second it will burst.

His mother used to tell him stories about gloomy Portland. It’s where she and his father lived before he was born. She talked of how she and his daddy were so happy here, so in love, that all the darkness seemed hopeful to them. Her stories are really the only reason why he chose this place. Hope that he and the woman he loves can find some of that same happiness.

It starts to rain.

Their clothes soak through in minutes and both of them are so beaten, with nowhere to go, they run inside the nearest establishment.

A hand-painted sign nailed to the side of the place reads FISH MARKET. They enter through a red door that creaks on rusty hinges.

Inside, they’re hit by an overwhelming fishy odor. He gags a little, the fishiness is so strong.

There’s a glass display case filled with a variety of whole fish. He grew up fishing in farm ponds and the California Aqueduct. His catch often provided the only food for his family for weeks at a time, so he’s familiar with some of the species in the case. The catfish and carp. But there are other kinds too. The one that catches his eye is long, gray, and plated, like some prehistoric amphibian. He has never seen a fish like this before and something about it scares him.

A door opens and a skeletal man with stringy black hair and leathery flesh appears behind the counter. The door swinging behind him reveals a little apartment with a bed and a small, dirty stove.

Before Ryan really knows what he’s saying, he blurts out, “We need a place to crash. Just for a night or two.”

He’s sleep-deprived, starved, and rain-soaked. It’s no surprise he sounds so desperate.

Motels will be out of the question. They were forced to leave in a hurry and didn’t think to grab Ryan’s stash of fake IDs. Besides, they need a place nobody will ever look for them. This could be that place.

The fishmonger stares at Sarah, as if she was the one who spoke.

Finally, the fishmonger says, “How much trouble are you in?”

“We just need to lie low for a bit,” Ryan says. “We can pay cash.”

The man appears unmoved. He sighs.

“Or if you want something more…” Sarah adds, and it’s painfully clear by her tone what she means by ‘something more.’

Ryan looks at her as if to say, What the fuck?

She grabs his hand and stares at him with a steady resolve. She doesn’t seem nervous. He realizes that she has done this before. He finds this discovery painful, so he shelves it away in his mind, to be ignored, possibly forever.

What else doesn’t he know about her?

The man nods once. “Okay, follow me.”

Ryan steps forward, debating in his mind how much to offer the man. He decides to scope out the situation first. If he’s offering a bed to sleep in, twenty a night. A floor, ten.

Then the man does the last thing Ryan would’ve expected him to do, and it stuns him.

He holds up a hand like a crossing guard and says, “Uh-uh, not you. The girl.”

Sarah unclasps her hand from Ryan’s even though he’s squeezing, desperate not to let go of her. She goes behind the fish counter. The man leads her into a back room and shuts the door. Ryan hears a deadbolt turn, followed by the clasp of a door chain sliding locked. The buzz of the yellowed overhead lights is all he’s left with, along with the gutted fish rotting on beds of melted ice.

When sex sounds start, he thinks he’s going to die. Flesh pounding flesh. The creak of bedsprings. An ass-smack. A pained gasp escaping Sarah.

He has never been so helpless in his entire life.

He thought he knew what they were doing.

He thought he was in control.

They had a plan for a life together.

He stands paralyzed.

Outside the rain comes down like a mist of acid that would burn his flesh if he stepped out into it, leaving him as a skeleton with dissolving organs, a heart pumping nothing into a network of vanished veins.

His eyes fail to focus and he’s trembling, so he makes a conscious effort to stare at the fish in the meat case. He fixates on the fish that scares him, the one with spikes on its gray back, its mouth more like a penis than a mouth.

“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me.” Ryan’s not sure who spoke until the bizarre fish raises its head and looks straight at him. “I said don’t you fuckin’ look at me.”

Its eyes are like a dog’s, and sad.

“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me, you little bitch,” the fish says, and then its head drops back down onto the ice with an audible smack.

Ryan takes up a fillet knife and moves toward the case, prepared to stab the fish if it raises its head again.

Minutes pass and the fish doesn’t move, so he positions himself to one side of the door. When the door opens, he will charge into the room and kill the man. He will kill him in place of the fish.

He’s hardly surprised when the door opens and he finds that he’s already set the knife down. He’s not a killer anymore.

The man moves past him as if Ryan is a ghost.

The man reaches into the case and sifts through a mound of catfish, testing the firmness of the fillets with his delicate fingers.

Sarah comes out of the back room and takes Ryan’s hand and he’s unable to withdraw. Even though he hates the slimy feel of her palm, he holds on.

The smile that crosses her face is sad, but maybe she always looks that way. “I love you, baby,” she says.

Yeah, that’s her normal smile. It’s always been sad. He just never noticed.

“I love you too,” he says, and he means it.

The man hovers over a deep-fryer, cooking up the catfish. “Have a drink,” he says, gesturing to a shelf lined with liquor bottles.

Sarah kisses Ryan on the cheek. She pulls down a bottle of whiskey, fills two dirty mugs. She hands one to Ryan. He throws back the mug, surprised how good the burn feels going down. She pours him some more and he relaxes enough to sit at the foldout table in the center of the shop.

He wonders if these things he thinks he’s learning reflect only his own doubts and insecurities, not anything about Sarah at all.

The man brings over a plate stacked high with fried catfish. He sits down in the third chair at the table as if the three of them have all done this before, shared this meal together in the waning light as darkness eats the day’s remains.

The fish is too hot and scalds Ryan’s mouth, but he digs in anyway. This is the beginning of their life together, not the life they’ve always dreamed of, but at least there’s love here. Love, or something like it.

The man swerves across the double yellow. His daddy dances in the road just ahead, dances on his leg stumps. His wife, she’s crying back at home. A bright woman. A beautiful woman. Did he steal this truck he’s driving? He stole this truck. Got to catch up with his daddy. He used to sell kites, this man swerving. Tiny kites. Children loved his tiny kites. Before that, he worked in the watermelon fields. He worked from sunup to noon in the fields and then he fished all day and drank whiskey and played guitar with his boys at night, but his boys all got married or got killed, so the music’s over. It’s all over. Where is he? He fights with his wife. He walks to Bear Naked, the nudie bar up the street. He gets drunk. He goes out for a cigarette, sees his daddy’s ghost run by at supersonic speed, unnatural for the ghost of an amputee. Must be chasing that big devil fish. He steals a truck to follow. He follows, sometimes closing his eyes as he drives because where else could his dead daddy lead him. To the lake, where he caught that thirty-five pound carp that got his picture in the newspaper. His daddy was so proud when he caught that carp. They caught so many fish in the lake together. Carp, channel catfish, blue catfish, largemouth and smallmouth bass, rainbow trout, brown trout, crappie, bluegill, and once a fish they never spoke of, a fish so unnatural it knifed a silence in their lives for weeks. They stomped its head in, made a blackened, burbling mush of it, and yet they knew it lived on somehow, and that it would return. And in recent times it had returned, fish head leering in windows, tormenting the man.

Tonight, the man thinks, tonight the fish we never spoke of will go back to that dark water.

His daddy’s ghost is there to lead him.

How did his daddy lose his legs? He lost them on account of the tiny kites his son used to sell. Selling tiny kites put the son in a state of constant agitation. The tiny kite business is more stressful than most people know. The son filled up with sadness and anxiety, and eventually, rage. He didn’t kill his daddy. No. Killing daddies is bad.

One Sunday evening, he and his daddy and his wife had themselves a summer barbecue. They barbecued catfish the man and his daddy had caught and they ate the catfish with potato salad and cornbread made by the wife. They ate slices of watermelon for dessert. They sat in plastic chairs on the front lawn and ate their food and drank mint juleps. This barbecue was held to celebrate the success of the man’s tiny kite business. In just over a month of selling tiny kites, he’d made his first thousand dollars. He was well on his way to becoming a premium salesman of tiny kites. He’d already coined his own pitch line. “Easiest kites there are to fly,” he’d say, flying two tiny kites at once. This sold him a lot of kites, but it also impacted his relationship with his wife and his daddy because he’d taken to saying it all the goddamn time. After making love to his wife, he’d roll over and lie on his back and sigh contentedly and exhale a long breath, then say in a voice just above a whisper, “Easiest kites there are to fly.” Out fishing with his daddy, every time he caught a fish, in this time when he was becoming a successful tiny kite salesman, he’d raise the fish by its lip, kiss it on its big old slimy head, and say, “Easiest kites there are to fly.” The man became obsessed in his first month of selling tiny kites, so that finally, on the night of the barbecue to celebrate his success, his daddy said to him, “Son, shut up about those stupid kites. They make you a living but a living’s not a life. There are more important things than tiny kites.”

Now, this was a thing the man knew. Of course there were more important things. But the man was not himself then. He was mad with mint juleps and even madder with tiny kites, so far gone in fact that he struck his daddy across the face. He said, “Daddy, don’t you trample on my success. I shed blood and tears to get to a point in my life where I can sell tiny kites. Don’t you trample that.”

His daddy rubbed his head. “I’m not trampling your success, son. I’m proud of you. You make me nothing but proud.”

“Proud my ass,” the man said, and he struck his father again, for his heart had been blinded by his ambition.

His wife screamed for him to stop but he kept on hitting his daddy, even as the old man scrambled across the lawn to his dinky-ass car in the driveway. The man chased his daddy’s car halfway down the block before turning back, and the expression of horror fixed on his wife’s face told him he was a poisoned man.

On his drive home from the barbecue, the man’s daddy was so distraught, so heartbroken, he wept into the steering wheel and in that way blew through a stop sign at a four way intersection and slammed into a minivan carrying a family on their way home from evening mass. The man’s daddy was drunk and got slapped with a DUI, but that was not the worst or even the second worst thing to happen. The front of his car caved in like it was made of tinfoil and his legs were crushed so bad they had to be amputated. And a boy in the back of the minivan wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, and upon impact he bounced around the inside of the minivan like a pinball, dying pretty much instantly. So upon his release from the hospital, the man’s daddy went straight to prison and served time for vehicular manslaughter, all because his son had let those tiny kites go to his head.

The man gave up selling tiny kites after that. He went into other lines of work. Going door to door for the Census Bureau. Installing solar panels on rich people’s houses. Freezing his ass off in an ice cream warehouse. The man found all sorts of work, although he really didn’t have to do all that much of it. The man and his wife lived a simple life. She worked at a pet store and he did his thing and that was that. They went dancing on Saturday nights and sometimes to a movie on Friday. He fished morning and night and sometimes fiddled with the guitar and she knitted and read romance novels and baked elaborate cakes that she entered in the county fair each autumn.

Excepting the period when the man went crazy with tiny kites, they lived a good and simple life. The man and his daddy reconciled once his daddy became a free man again. They fished on the lake, although now the man’s daddy was bound to a wheelchair and had to be pushed around. They still held the occasional barbecue on the front lawn. Everything was fine like that for a year or so, until one day when the man’s daddy’s heart failed and the old man dropped dead. It was a real shame too. The big trout opener had been coming up and the man’s daddy was looking forward to catching one of the trophy browns they were stocking in the lake. The man’s daddy had always wanted to catch a trophy brown.

After his daddy’s funeral, the man took to whiskey harder than he had since his days staying out late with his boys. He rarely went fishing. He sat on the edge of the bed facing the wall, absently strumming his out-of-tune guitar. He sang songs that made little sense to his wife. “Your songs don’t make any sense,” she’d tell him. “I don’t get it.”

The man didn’t get it either. Another darkness had entered his life. At his daddy’s funeral, an unexpected visitor had showed. That unspeakable fish they caught years before hovered above his daddy’s coffin. Nobody else noticed or acknowledged, but the man, he wept in fear. His wife squeezed his hand and wept harder herself. People around him issued little nods as if to say, “We feel you, son. We feel your pain.” When the fish lowered itself onto the coffin, sliming the lacquered lid, the man could no longer contain himself. He cried out, “Go away!”

People thought he spoke of pain and death. Go away, pain. Go away, death. But the man had no beef with pain or death. No move could ever be made in life without inflicting hurt on someone or something else. Every true fisherman knew that, and the man was a true fisherman. This evil fish they’d caught and killed and justifiably feared would live again, this fish juicing on his daddy’s coffin, lived beyond the human world of pain and death.

After he saw the devil fish at his daddy’s funeral, the only things the man could do besides play the guitar were smoke cigarettes and drink and sulk in the musty darkness of Bear Naked.

One day, he snubbed out his cigarette against the concrete foot of the bear-in-lingerie sculpture in the parking lot of Bear Naked, squinting against the white noonday sun. The butt fell to the pavement. He opened his pack for another, but he’d smoked his last.

A red Impala pulled into the parking lot right then, pulling into the empty space next to the man. The driver stepped out, glimmering in the hot light. The driver was the devil fish. The man stood on the opposite side of the Impala and could not see how the fish was standing. Whether it had grown human legs or floated, he did not know. The fish stared at the man. The man ran home.

He began seeing the fish everywhere—it stared in at him through the windows of the house at all hours of the night and day, at the bar, in the mirror. He withdrew as his condition advanced. He spoke not a word to his wife. He struggled to even communicate with her about so much as what to eat for dinner. He could not watch television, for the fish appeared in every sporting match and on every game show, in every sitcom and cartoon. Everywhere he looked, he encountered that unspeakable fish he and his daddy had caught and killed, and soon there was nowhere to retreat. The guitar now made him sad. Cigarettes and whiskey sickened him. So he stopped everything all together, resolved to sit and wait it out, blindfolded. If the fish was going to get him, he may as well let it happen. He spent most waking hours in bed, black bandana tied over his face, knotted behind, to shield his eyes, which remained squeezed painfully shut just in case the bandana slipped and leaked in light. Then one day his wife had had enough. She came home from work and said, “I can’t take it anymore. Either you get out of bed and you stay out or I’m leaving you.”

This was it. Either he confessed to her the state he was in, or she would leave, and he would be alone. So he heaved a sigh, slipped the bandana down around his neck, and said, “I have a confession.” Her silence said continue, so he continued. “I’m being followed by a fish.”

The wife looked at him in a sad way then.

“Behind you. In the window. Don’t you see it?” he asked, for the fish was staring in at them as they spoke.
“What’s happened to you?” she said.

“I’m scared.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Please.”

“I just don’t know.”

“I see the fish everywhere, even in mirrors. Where I go, it goes. There’s no escaping this.”

The wife lifted the full-length mirror off the wall and swung it around so that before he had a chance to close his eyes he caught a glimpse of himself. He saw a different man than he thought himself to be, but there was no sign of the fish, just a man prematurely entering old age, nothing more.

“What do you see?” the wife said.

“I see me.”

“Do you see any fish?”

“No.”

“Then get out of the goddamn bed and get a grip.”

When the wife left the bedroom, he got out of the bed and dressed in clean clothes because he’d worn the same outfit for days. He went into the kitchen and the wife served up a dinner of pork chops and mashed potatoes and green beans. They spoke little during the meal but the words they did exchange were pleasant. Afterward, they made love. The wife said something about feeling glad to have the man back, that she’d missed him, and the man, feeling like he’d just touched down on earth after a prolonged journey through outer space, got it in his head that the best thing to do in that moment was to make a joke. He folded his hands behind his head and said, “Easiest kites there are to fly.” This did not go over well. The wife’s face turned to stone. She was furious. What ensued was this: an argument about everything that was ever argued about between two people who love each other. They covered all the bases. It was a real heavyweight title fight of an argument. When it ended, the woman sat crying on the kitchen floor, attempting to piece together the ruins of an antique teapot that had survived the great San Francisco earthquake and fire and which had been passed down to her from her grandmother. The man smashed it against the wall after the woman snapped the tip on his daddy’s old fishing rod. They hadn’t apologized for any of that. They simply reached a point where both were too wounded to carry on, so the woman cried and the man slammed the door and left the house, intent on getting plastered at Bear Naked, where he saw his daddy’s ghost race by. That is when and why he stole the truck.

Right now, he’s pulling up to the lake. Lights in the distance waver in the valley smog, which acts like a shield between the earth and the stars above.

Dark farmland.

Coyotes howl.

Somewhere, an owl picks off a mouse.

The man sits in the stolen truck with the headlights shining on the still black water, the radio sputtering the day’s baseball scores through static. His daddy’s ghost is out there somewhere, ready to face the unspeakable fish, the one they feared, the one they caught and killed out of fear, so many years ago. The man knows not what he has done, but he is ready to find out. He is ready to see his daddy again. It is time to return the darkness to its home. He kills the engine. No more lights, no more baseball scores. He opens the door and steps out.

A man drives a hearse down a desert highway, pursued by a police cruiser.

His name is Andrew.

Andrew owns a cellphone the size—but not the shape—of a personal watermelon.

Andrew talks into the phone as he drives.

He says, “Hey, it’s Andrew. I’m calling from my car phone.”

On the other end of the line: “Your what?”

It’s the mid-nineties.

In the mid-nineties in the desert, people did not know of such things as car phones.

Andrew says, “My car phone. They’re new. Listen, I got a copper on my trail. You mind if I stop by your place?”

On the other end: “What’s the copper want with you?”

“Look, I got a hot load. Will you be ready?”

“Will you show me that car phone?”

“Yeah, I’ll show you the car phone.”

***

The hearse squeals off the highway onto a farm road.

The hearse pulls up in front of a farmhouse, followed by the police car.

The policeman steps out of his car, gun drawn.

Then, boom.

The cop and the police car explode.

A man steps down from the farmhouse porch with a rocket launcher slung over his shoulder.

This man’s name is Jesse.

Jesse approaches the hearse.

Andrew rolls down the hearse’s window.

“Now let’s see this so-called car phone,” Jesse says.

***

Andrew and Jesse sit in the living room of the farmhouse, the car phone on the table between them.

The flaming police cruiser can be seen through the kitchen window, but they don’t care about that.

“My god, I think you’re right. It is a car phone. But what the hell is a car phone?” Jesse says, and then he shouts, “Myrtle! Get in here. I want you to see this.”

A pretty young woman enters the room.

This is Myrtle.

She’s Jesse’s fiancée.

She’s the love of Jesse’s life.

“What is it? Oh hey Andrew,” Myrtle says.

“It’s a car phone,” Jesse says. “Andrew’s car phone.”

Andrew stands in greeting.

“Afternoon, Myrtle,” he says.

“Where’d you get such a strange telephone?” Myrtle asks.

“I bought it off a guy. They’re new.”

“Can you call people on it?”

This is what Myrtle wants to know.

Andrew nods proudly and says, “Right you can, Myrtle.”

Jesse does not like the sound of this.

Jesse says, “Now don’t be going doing that. Might be bugged. Satellites in space could be beaming all your calls straight to the government…the police.”

“I want to make a call,” Myrtle says, almost too quiet.

“It’s not bugged,” Andrew says. “You go ahead, Myrtle. You call anyone you want. You just turn it on with that button, and dial the numbers like normal.”

Myrtle lifts the receiver like it’s a foreign object.

Myrtle says, “The stationary store isn’t supposed to have our save-the-date cards all printed out and ready to pick up until Tuesday, but I may as well give them a ring. Maybe some of this car telephone magic will get ’em done quicker.”

“Save-the-dates? Hell, congratulations to you both,” Andrew says.

Jesse nods. “The wedding’s July 4th.”

Myrtle speaks into the telephone now. “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? My name is Myrtle Mayberry. I’m calling about my save-the-dates. For my wedding.”

Jesse still seems nervous about the telephone.

Myrtle smiles. “Oh, you do. Well that’s just wonderful. My husband and I will be by to pick them up this afternoon. Thank you. Bye-bye.”

Myrtle makes a squealing noise as she sets down the phone.

She and Jesse embrace, kiss.

“I love you, honey,” Jesse says.

“You make me so happy,” Myrtle says.

Andrew picks up the phone and presses the END CALL button, which Myrtle failed to do, having never used a phone with an END CALL button before.

Andrew slides the car phone toward them.

“An early wedding present, in case I’m not around come July. May it bring you all the luck a car phone can bring a beautiful couple’a lovebirds like yourselves.”

“That car phone is magic, I swear. Those save-the-dates wouldn’t’ve been ready if I called on the regular phone. This calls for a celebration.”

“Not now, Myrtle. Andrew and I got some work to do. Whyon’t you drive into town and pick up our save-the-dates. We may not finish till after the store closes.”

“I feel overwhelmed with excitement,” Myrtle says. “Simply overwhelmed.”

“Me too, hon. Me too,” Jesse says.

Andrew gets up off the couch and stretches, heads to the door.

“Say we do it,” he says.

“Lead the way, Cap’n,” Jesse says.

***

Myrtle honks the horn, waving a hand frantically out the window in goodbye as she drives away from the farm.

She drives right past the flaming police cruiser like it’s nothing.

Andrew and Jesse stand near the rear of Andrew’s hearse, as if waiting for Myrtle to pull out onto the highway and be gone.

Jesse says, “So what’d you mean in there ’bout in case you’re not around in July? We’d be honored to have you at our wedding.”

“Think I’m gonna hit the road for a while,” Andrew says. “You know. Business.”

“Business, huh?” Jesse slams a palm against the top of the hearse. “What kind of business you in these days anyhow? Last we saw each other, you were as likely to put a person in the back of a hearse as you were to shake their hand.”

“My killing days are behind me, Jesse.”

“How’s a man like you pass his hours without shedding blood? It must drive you crazy.”

“I’m a healer now,” Andrew says.

“A healer in a hearse? Shit, you are crazy.”

Andrew opens the passenger-toting rear of the hearse, slides the coffin back there halfway out, and throws it open.

The coffin is full of snakes.

Jesse jumps away.

Probably shits himself.

Probably maybe.

He shouts, “Jesus fucking Christ. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“They’re medicine,” Andrew says, an emotionless expression on his face, his eyes downturned as if gazing into the snake-filled coffin but seeing right past it.

Jesse puts a hand on Andrew’s shoulder, fear giving way to concern.

“You a Satanist?” Jesse asks.

“The snakes are medicine,” Andrew says.

“I asked you a question. Now are you a Satanist or aren’t you?”

Andrew slams the coffin shut and turns, emits some words from between fixed rows of sharp teeth: “I’m no goddamn Satanist.”

“THEN WHY IN THE DEVIL ARE YOU DRIVING AROUND WITH A COFFIN FULL OF SNAKES? JESUS MAN, YOU’RE LIKE SATAN’S DELIVERY SERVICE.”

Andrew removes a flask from his back pocket, hands it to Jesse.

Jesse takes a long drink, then another.

Andrew takes a nip then replaces the flask.

“Here’s the deal,” Andrew says. “The hearse and the snakes are separate. Do not think of them together. I needed to lift a vehicle to haul the snakes. Not any vehicle would do either. I needed a vehicle with an enclosed storage space. You know, so the snakes didn’t get out.”

“And a coffin was the first thing you thought of.”

“Right.”

“So why in the hell did you need to haul the snakes? Are you a reptile man now? Don’t tell me you’re a reptile man.”

“Sick people need medicine,” Andrew says. “I supply their supplier with the source.”

“Snakes.”

“The venom from the snakes in that coffin could save hundreds of lives.”

“Shit, when did you start caring about saving lives?”

“When I looked behind me and realized the road was paved with blood.”

Jesse points at Andrew’s boots. “Still is.”

Andrew looks down, exhales a prolonged noise like someone’s just played a very good prank on him and he’d be impressed and amused if he weren’t so pissed.

He’s standing in a puddle of the policeman’s blood.

Andrew says, “Those were new boots.”

“Anyway, that’s a long way for some blood to leak,” Jesse says.

“You’re right, it is,” Andrew says, then marches over to the cop’s charred corpse and stomps the skull in, muttering obscenities.

Jesse looks on, the mortified expression on his face betrayed by a glimmer of excitement in his eye, as if he’s missed this.

When Andrew’s boot breaks through the cop’s chest cavity and praying mantises spill out, Jesse turns and walks inside.

Some men are just so full of insects.

***

Andrew enters the farmhouse, bare-footed.

Jesse pours him a whiskey, tops off the glass in front of himself.

“So’s the pay good at least?” Jesse asks.

“Let’s just say you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what I’m making.”

“Suppose that’s why you had to steal a car. ’Cause you’re loaded.”

Andrew takes the whiskey bottle and pours another three fingers’ worth, drains that one too.

“Money’s not mine yet,” he says, exhaling fire breath. “Paid in full upon delivery. This’ll be my first.”

“I wish the best of luck to you.”

“It’s getting lonely on the road, though.”

“That why you came here?”

Andrew leans forward, serious, locking eyes with Jesse, and says in a low voice, “I could use a partner.”

“What’d that cop wanna pull you over for anyway?”

“Speeding. Ten over.”

“Motherfucker. I should’ve known.”

“What do you say? You in?”

“Myrtle and me’re settled down now. We’re getting married.”

“There’d be a lot of money in it for you. Enough for you not to worry about money for a long time.”

“Give me a figure.”

“I’ll give you half of what’s coming to me for the trouble.”

“What’s coming to you?”

“How’d you like to feel up a seven-figured beauty?”

“You asking me how I’d feel about boinking a woman with, like, random mathematical angles pokin’ out of her, like she’s some kind of circus freak,” Jesse says. “Is that what you’re asking me. And if it is, are we talking seven tits or seven knees, or are these just weird growths or something.”

“Money, jackass. I mean money. Seven figures.”

Jesse is counting.

Andrew says, “Seven figures is a million. We’re talking a million dollars. Half for me, half for you and Myrtle. If you come with me.”

“All for droppin’ off some snakes?”

“It’s a long drive. It’s dangerous. But these people need their medicine.”

“What kind of illness do they got anyway?”

Andrew refills their glasses with whiskey and says, “You ask a lot of questions for a man about to make a lot of money.”

Jesses pushes the whiskey away.

“I’m sorry, Andrew. I’m not your man.”

Andrew slides the whiskey back in front of Jesse.

“I wouldn’t be here if you wasn’t my man, Jesse.”

Jesse seems to mull this over.

Snakes.

Money.

Love.

Death.

Whenever faced with a tough decision, Jesse’s father would tell a little story. He’d say in the center of the earth there’s a grinning angel, and if you ever chance to meet the grinning angel, she’ll show you that all life is precious, then as your eyes balloon out, filled with the knowledge of all that is holy in life, the angel will rip your heart out and eat it in front of you, grinning all the while.

And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it?

That’s the question to ask in times like these.

The million dollar question.

Is it worth it?

Jesse thinks it is. “I’m in, but only under one condition. Myrtle comes along.”

“Hell no,” Andrew says.

“Then I’m out.”

“You were never in.”

“Now I’m double outs.”

“Fine. Myrtle can come, but the profit split remains fifty fifty.” Andrew raises a toast to Jesse. “To partners.”

“To partners. And five-hundred motherfucking thousand dollars.”

***

Car lights shine through the window.

The police cruiser has finally burned itself out.

Andrew and Jesse are playing a song on guitar and harmonica, crooning in harmony, drunk as all get out, as Myrtle walks in through the front door.

“Looks like you boys started without me,” she says. “The save-the-dates turned out just fabulous.”

Myrtle tries to show the save-the-dates to Jesse, but he waves them away.

“Myrtle,” he says, “we’re gonna be millionaires.”

“Beg pardon.”

“Well, okay, not quite millionaires. But thousandaires, for sure. We’ll never worry about money for a long, long time. You can have a brand new wardrobe. Anything you want, you can have.”

Myrtle pours herself a glass of whiskey and shuffles through the save-the-dates, her forehead creased in concern. “And how is this, my sweet love?”

“I’m helpin’ Andrew with a little job. A big job. We’re partners again.”

Myrtle shoots Jesse the no-you-just-didn’t glare.

“I thought you’d put that life behind you, Jesse,” she says. “Shame on you, Andrew, for tempting him.”

Andrew twists the harmonica around in his fingers, as if nervous. “I apologize for treading on your turf, Myrtle. Really, I do. But this is a big job.”

“Half a million each,” Jesse says, “half a million.”

“Jesse’s right. And I want to let you two in on it.”

“Why?” Myrtle asks, suspicious.

“Because Jesse’s always had my back. He and I, we’ve always come out of everything alive.”

Myrtle nods, admitting this truth. “So what’s the job? Hauling dead bodies? Drugs?”

“Snakes,” Jesse says.

“Snakes?” Myrtle pretty much shouts.

Andrew nods. “Medicinal snakes. For sick people.”

“These snakes are worth a fortune. I saw ’em with my own eyes. All we gotta do is…well, you tell ’er, Andrew.”

“We deliver the snakes to the doctors, and then you two drive on home, half a million dollars richer.”

“Why are doctors ordering snakes from you?” Myrtle asks, still sorting through the save-the-dates, as if she can’t get over something, some wrong feeling.

“I’m just the delivery boy,” Andrew says, and then he grins. This is the question he’s been waiting for. “You see, there are some very sick people in this country who need a lot of help, but the government don’t want them to get better, so some very kind-hearted doctors have taken it into their hands to heal these sick people.”

“With snake venom,” Jesse says.

“With an antidote made from snake venom, yes. That is correct,” Andrew says.

Myrtle wants to know what it is about sick people needing snake venom. How come she’s never heard of them before? Is this sickness that’s got people needing snakes widespread and time-tested, or is it something new?

And Andrew, he has all the answers. “From what I hear it’s pretty localized, up in the Pacific Northwest. The government is very hush-hush. They won’t allow a single word about it to be mentioned in the news. Now I can’t tell you specifically where the dropoff will take place, but just so you know I ain’t bullshittin’, I’ll tell you it’s in Oregon.”

Jesse snaps his fingers. “Maybe that’s it. The disease—snake venom cures it ’cause they don’t got no snakes up in the cold weather states.”

“They have snakes in the Pacific Northwest, you nitwit. Just not these snakes, and these snakes is what they need.”

“Will we have to get near the sick people?” Myrtle asks.

“Absolutely not,” Andrew says. “We deliver the snakes to a perfectly sanitary medical facility and they fork over a big check. Simple as that. I figure we can drive to Oregon in two, three days tops, barring unforeseen circumstances.”

“Like what?”

“Come on, Myrtle, quit with all the questions,” Jesse says.

Andrew’s unperturbed, though. He says, “Like if the government is cracking down on folks trying to bring these medicinal snakes into Oregon.”

“Oh god.” Myrtle is just so astonished. “I can’t believe they’d keep the sick people from their medicine.”

“You know our government. They’d piss in their neighbor’s toilet after fucking their neighbor’s wife, but they wouldn’t spare a drop of piss to soothe the burns of a man on fire.”

Jesse leans forward. “So, Myrtle. What do you say?”

She finally sets down the save-the-dates and smiles the smile that set Jesse’s heart aflame when they first met. She says, “When do we start?”

“As soon as we sleep off this hangover,” Andrew says.

“Hangover? Maybe for your pansy ass,” Myrtle says, and she pours them all another round of drinks.

***

Good morning, sunshine.

There’s a knock on the bedroom door.

Jesse and Myrtle stir in bed.

Pained, squint-eyed expressions cross their faces as the knocking recurs, shave-and-a-haircut style.

Andrew calls from the other side of the door, “Time to get moving. Up and at ’em.”

Jesse sits up, shakes Myrtle. “Let’s go, little honeybee. Time to get rich.”

Myrtle pulls the covers over her head.

“Did I get hit by a train last night?” she says.

“That was just my penis, baby.”

“If I had a dollar for every time you said that.”

“You wouldn’t be half as rich as you’re gonna be. So come on, get up.”

***

Andrew and Jesse are in the living room, looking through the window at the hearse.

Myrtle is in the bedroom, packing for the trip like they’re going on vacation.

“Isn’t a hearse just a bit suspicious?” Jesse says.

Andrew frowns. “You got a better idea?”

“Yeah, actually I do.”

***

The garage door opens.

Inside: an ice cream truck.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Andrew says, stepping inside the garage.

“Bought it off some bean for next to nothing. He was in a hurry back to Mexico. I been fixing her up. Built a new engine and everything. She runs real good. Fast as hell.”

Andrew throws open the back doors of the ice cream truck, inspecting the space, weighing his options.

“You got the pink slip?” he asks.

“Sure do. It’s even insured.”

Andrew nods approval. “More than I can say about the deathmobile back there. Alright, let’s load the coffin and hit the road.”

Jesse, stoked, climbs into the ice cream truck. Andrew climbs in the back, shuts the doors, and Jesse backs the truck out of the garage, backing up to the rear of the hearse.

They hop out and proceed to attempt transferring the coffin full of snakes from the hearse to the ice cream truck.

Their attempts are met with failure.

“These snakes sure are heavy,” Jesse says.

Andrew grunts his agreement. “I hear their venom weighs ten times more than water.”

“Fat ol’ legless venom hogs. Shoo-wee.”

Finally, they give up.

“I’m gonna go find Myrtle. She’s got these workout videos. Damn things have made her stronger than an ox.”

Andrew wipes the sweat from his brow. “You do that,” he says, panting.

“Myrtle,” Jesse calls as he steps onto the porch.

Myrtle appears in the doorway, her face done up all pretty, her stockinged legs rising up into a sea-foam green dress like two candles stuck in a birthday cake. In each hand she holds a rectangular suitcase made of leather that’s been cracked and beaten by time.

Myrtle smiles at Jesse and instead of asking her to come help move the coffin full of snakes, Jesse says, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. “Now what is it you need me for.”

“It’s the snakes. They’re heavy. Venom weighs more than water.”

Myrtle purses her lips into a smile. “It does, does it?”

Together, the three of them get the coffin loaded into the ice cream truck.

Andrew retrieves his single bag from the hearse and Jesse loads the two suitcases into the back.

They pile in, Jesse driving, Andrew riding copilot, Myrtle in the back with the coffin.

They’re rolling down the dirt driveway to the highway that will take them far from here when Jesse hits the brakes.

“Huh,” he says.

Andrew turns in his seat. “What?”

“That hearse is stolen.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Seems like we might wanna do something about it before we go.”

***

Myrtle hoists the rocket launcher over her shoulder and takes aim.

There’s a great kaboom.

The hearse goes up in flames.

Jesse takes the rocket launcher from Myrtle as Andrew looks nervously from the highway to the charred remains of the police cruiser beside the flaming hearse. “You think anyone will spot the copper’s car from the highway?”

“Naw,” Jesse says. “It’s pretty burned out. But just in case…” He reloads the rocket launcher from a nearby case of missiles, hands the rocket launcher over to Andrew. “The honors are yours.”

Andrew blows up the already destroyed cruiser.

“I want to do it again,” Myrtle says.

“Fine by me, honey,” Jesse says, setting about reloading the rocket launcher for Myrtle.

Now Myrtle takes aim. There’s a second explosion from the hearse, something small inside exploding, and the sudden, unexpected noise is enough to startle Myrtle just a bit.

She pulls the trigger, sending a rocket straight through the front window of their house.

The house explodes and Myrtle sails backwards, landing in the dirt in her pretty dress.

Flames from the house lick the dead, dry grass.

“Think that might spread?” Andrew asks.

“Probably,” Jesse says.

“Figures,” Andrew says.

Jesse helps Myrtle to her feet and for a split moment, her arms around his neck, his hands on her waist, their home going up in flames, Jesse understands that what they have together is a thing that will endure beyond anything else. They have not lost a home because they are home, in each other. But the authorities don’t understand that kind of shit, so they get into the ice cream truck with the rocket launcher and the coffin and some luggage and they hit the highway fucking stat.

***

Myrtle’s weeping.

She speaks between gasping sobs. “Everything was in there and I burned it all down.” Gasp. “I shot a rocket launcher at our house.” Choking for air. “And now I’ll never remember what my mother looks like.” Biting her knuckles. “Her picture is gone. And our save-the-dates…” Eyes pinched shut as if to call back all her tears. “They were so beautiful.”

Jesse tries to soothe her. “Myrtle, it’s okay. We can buy another house and replace all that old junk. We’re gonna be rich, remember?”

“Really? We can buy another one?”

“Sure we can. Anywhere in the world you like.”

Myrtle smiles through her tears. “Can we move to Vegas?”

“Absolutely. Soon as we drop these snakes off, we’ll buy us a brand new Cadillac and cruise on down to Vegas, get hitched, maybe win some on blackjack, and buy ourselves a big-ass Las Vegas mansion.”

“And brand new wardrobes,” Myrtle says, even laughing a little.

“That’s right. All the dresses you can dream of.”

Myrtle wipes her nose on the sleeve of her dress, which between the hard fall she took from the rocket launcher, grime and spider webs in the ice cream truck, and her fit of tears, looks like something very old and very worn, but she doesn’t mind. The misery of the present is fading. A fantasy of the future begins to show. “Out-of-towners will see us cruising the strip, having cocktails with exotic dancers and casino owners, and they’ll say, ‘Look at those folks. They must be big important people in Las Vegas.’”

“That they will,” Jesse says. “We’ll be the cream of the Las Vegas crop.”

Andrew interrupts the reverie. “In the meantime, if it makes either of you feel any better, I remembered to grab the car phone. We can make telephone calls to anyone in the world.”

“I want to call the supermarket,” Myrtle says.

Jesse cranes his head to look at her. “What do you want to call the supermarket for?”

“I don’t know. Just because.”

“Forget the supermarket.”

Andrew dials a number and then holds the phone to his ear, an anticipatory smile on his face. “Hello, operator? Connect me to the nearest pet store.”

“Pet store?” Jesse says.

Andrew gestures for Jesse to be quiet, then speaks into the phone, “Hi, I’m just wonderin’ uh…what sorts of food do snakes eat?”

Andrew nods, listening to someone on the other end of the line, before responding. “Rats, fish, insects…okay. What about bacon?”

Andrew listens some more, says, “I mean snakes eat bacon, don’t they?”

He nods vigorously, as if impatient with the pet store employee on the other end. “So you think they might, but you can’t say. Okay, well thank you very much.”

He ends the call.

“What was that all about?” Jesse asks.

“It occurred to me the snakes might get hungry before we reach Oregon.”

Myrtle frowns. “The doctors didn’t tell you what to feed ’em?”

“I’m not in communication with the doctors,” Andrew says.

“Then whoever gave you the snakes. The snake suppliers. They must’a told you something or given you a bag of snake food. Come on, think man,” Jesse says.

“Maybe they’re like Gandhi and they don’t eat food,” Myrtle suggests.

“What kinda stupid idea is that?” Jesse says. “Snakes like Gandhi.”

Myrtle shrugs. “I don’t know. I just thought because they’re medical snakes…”

“Gandhi wasn’t a doctor anyway,” Jesse says.

Myrtle disagrees. “Gandhi was too a doctor. A healer.”

Jesse turns to Andrew. “A girl reads some magazines and suddenly she’s an authority on everything.”

“I didn’t learn about Gandhi from any stupid magazine. I learned in college.”

“You didn’t go to college.”

“My sister did, and sometimes when our mama was working, she took me to school with her.”

“Yeah, but you were just a little kid. You weren’t doing any learning.”

“I did too learn. Kids younger than five learn the most. That I did read in a magazine.”

Jesse’s face is reddening. He’s getting angry now. “If kids under five are the smartest learners, then why isn’t a five-year-old president of the United States? Huh? Answer me that, smartass.”

Andrew’s on the car phone again.

“Big Jer, it’s Andrew.

“Sure has been a long time, Big Jer. No, I don’t remember the money I owe you, but listen. I got a favor to ask.

“I knew you’d say that. Come on, Big Jer.

“That time in Dallas was an exception.

“That time in Tijuana don’t count.

“Hey, you and I remember that time in El Paso a little bit differently and frankly, I side with me.

“Look fine, I’ll put my cards on the table. I got a girl.

“Yeah, a real fine bitch.”

Jesse and Myrtle say together, “What?”

Andrew winks at them, continues. “Yeah, she’s real pretty. Young, blonde. Oh yeah, good tits.”

Jesse slaps Andrew in the arm, mouths, “Cut it out.”

But Andrew doesn’t cut it out. He’s still talking to Big Jer. “What I’m askin’ is simple. You got catfish. I got pussy. I’ll trade you ten cats, filleted and iced in a cooler, for half an hour with the broad.

“An hour? I’m askin’ for catfish, not honey-baked ham.

“Fine. Forty-five minutes. I’m an hour-twenty from your place. Be ready.

“You sick ol’ dog. Sure, I’ll warn her,” Andrew says, laughing and making a grossed-out face.

Andrew ends the call, still laughing.

“What the fuck was that?” Myrtle says.

“Yeah, what the fuck, man?” Jesse says.

Andrew raises his hands like presto, I just pulled a white rabbit out of a black hat. “That, folks, was my good friend Big Jer. You’ve been out of the game for a long time, Jesse, but if you’d stayed in another couple years, you woulda had the privilege to meet the greasy, gross specimen of a man known as Big Jer.”

“I don’t like this,” Myrtle says. “I don’t like this at all.”

“Calm down. Everything is under control,” Andrew says.

Jesse, who was already getting worked up over the Gandhi thing, is pissed. “Everything ain’t under control if you’re sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’.”

Andrew doesn’t back down. “Hey now, Big Jer may be greasy and gross, but that comes with his trade. He’s a catfish farmer. He ain’t no scumbag. He’s a trustworthy dude. Hell, if he wasn’t such a fatass, I may’ve invited him along on this adventure instead of you. Big Jer would be the one making a mint, not you. So you shut your mouth about Big Jer.”

Through gritted teeth, Jesse says, “Fine. Tell us the plan.”

“Here’s how it is. We need snake food and we need people food ’cause as you dummies might have noticed by now, we forgot to pack food for ourselves. I don’t know how much money you’ve got on you, but personally I’m broke. I’m assuming we’ll need all the cash you got in your wallets for gas. That means, if we want to keep these snakes alive and maybe eat a little somethin’ ourselves before we reach Oregon, we need to pull a favor or a robbery. Personally, I think favors tend to be a little less fun, but I never miss an opportunity to see Big Jer. Especially if I can fuck him over good.”

“Why bacon?” Myrtle asks.

“Pardon?”

“Why’d you ask the pet store if snakes ate bacon?”

“Oh, that. I was just curious if snakes ate bacon.”

“Do they?”

“Sometimes. Maybe. Nobody really knows for sure.”

Jesse makes a big ‘Mmmm’ sound and smacks his lips. “I could do for a bacon sandwich right about now.”

“Forget about bacon! I scored us all the catfish we can eat.”

“But what you’re not telling us is how. Goddamn, I’ll buy us all bacon sandwiches if it keeps my soon-to-be wife from fucking a catfish farmer. That’s not what I signed up for.”

Myrtle agrees. “It would make for a terrible honeymoon.”

“Right it would, honey.”

And so Andrew explains the plan. “Here’s how it goes down: Before we roll up in front of Big Jer’s farm, we’ll switch it up. Myrtle, you’ll drive. Jesse, you’ll sit in back, making sure the rocket launcher is out of sight. When we roll up, Myrtle, it’s important that you back up to take the delivery. Big Jer’ll waddle out and stand in front of his place, giving our ride the once-over. If he waves at you, you wave. I’ll step out and talk to him. Now it’s of utter importance that you two stay in the vehicle. He shouldn’t know about you yet, Jesse. If he finds out too early, he’ll smell something fishy and call the whole thing off.”

Jesse raises an eyebrow. “So it’s not fishy at all that you might be traveling with some pretty young thing and trade her ass for a little fish?”

Andrew ignores the remark, carries on. “I’ll tell Big Jer that we’re having some engine trouble and that my hot broad’s an ace mechanic—best I’ve ever seen—and that I want her to take a look at the engine before anyone bumps uglies. His men will have already bonked and cleaned ten catfish, each fine specimens because Big Jer is a fine man.”

“Men? His men?” Jesse says.

“Here’s where things get complicated. Big Jer doesn’t get laid a lot. He’s doesn’t like missing out on promised pussy either, especially when he’s upholding his end of the deal. He’ll have two men carry the cooler full of catfish out to our truck. Big Jer will escort us and he’ll most certainly be armed. Meanwhile, Myrtle, you’ve been pretending to inspect the engine. When we come around back with the cooler, you call out to us that the engine’s all good and that you’re just gonna hop in back to change out of your dirty rags into something clean. Big Jer will insist that we finalize the deal right then and there, in the ice cream truck. I’ll pretend to disagree, saying you’re a classy lady and all, but eventually I’ll give in under the condition that his men leave ’cause I don’t want them hearing Big Jer pounding my girl. He’ll give the okay and then I’ll open up the back. And here’s the real tricky part ’cause Big Jer’s a big guy. If we can get him in the truck without seeing Jesse, we’re golden. Myrtle, you scream when Big Jer climbs in back. Not too loud, but loud enough for his guys to hear. That way, when Big Jer screams next, they’ll think it’s just part of the fun. Myrtle, you’ll say something like ‘Sorry, you startled me. Let’s do it in this coffin.’ Big Jer will have his eyes fixed on you, but hopefully his lecherous stare will’ve been too fixed to move on to touchin’. When that coffin lid opens wide, that’s your cue to pop up and point that rocket launcher in his face, Jesse. Now, Jesse, it’s important that you say, ‘Don’t move, motherfucker’ or something to that effect as opposed to ‘Get the fuck out, motherfucker,’ because Big Jer has a fear of snakes—a snakeophobia or whatever you call it—so it will be much more piss-shittin’ scary to him for a man to point a gun at him and say ‘stay here with these snakes’ as opposed to a man pointing a gun saying ‘hey, get out and save yourself from these snakes,’ because then you’ll seem like a nice guy and he’ll realize we’re duping him before we can actually make our escape.”

“So then…”

“If he’s smart, which he is, he’ll hop out of the truck and run like Mexico’s invading Texas. Myrtle will slam the coffin shut, letting no snakes get loose, I’ll load the catfish cooler, and we’ll drive like bats out of hell.”

Myrtle stares ahead at the highway passing quickly by. “All this for some catfish,” she says.

Jesse doesn’t like the plan either. “We do got money. Why don’t we just buy some bacon sandwiches. The snakes eat bacon. You said so yourself.”

“I said they might eat bacon, sometimes. Nobody knows for sure.”

“Good enough for me. I mean…”

“Do you want the half mil or not?”

“Yeah, of course I do, man. But c’mon. At least let us count our cash.”

Jesse reaches into his back pocket, pulls out his wallet and hands it to Myrtle.

“Count our money, honey.”

Myrtle removes a wad of bills from Jesse’s wallet. She counts them aloud, finally arriving at the grand sum of ninety-three dollars.

“That’s a start,” Andrew says.

“Now what’s in your wallet, little bee?” Jesse says.

Myrtle pulls a lone dollar bill out of her coin purse.

She gives Jesse a look like she’s never been more heartbroken to see him disappointed. “Sweety, I’m sorry. I just got one left. Those save-the-dates weren’t cheap. Remember how we splurged on the fancy crème paper?”

Andrew pushes out his lips. His eyes roll down in the sockets, like he’s ogling his upper lip, but really he’s just thinking. “Ninety-four dollars will buy us a shit lot of gas, but we’ll still run dry before we reach Oregon.”

“Then I guess no bacon sandwiches,” Jesse says sadly.

Myrtle sighs. “I guess let’s do us some catfishin’.”

***

With Andrew driving, the ice cream truck pulls up out front of Big Jer’s catfish farm, which is prominently marked with a billboard-sized wooden sign featuring a crudely painted fat man standing arm in arm with a man-sized catfish and the words ‘BIG JER’S CATFISH FARM—WHERE CATFISH FROLIC IN THE FUN SUN.’

Everything is going precisely according to plan, with Jesse hiding in the back and Myrtle in the driver’s seat, pretending to be Andrew’s partner and mechanic, as Andrew steps out of the truck to greet Big Jer, who looks pretty much exactly like the man on the sign.

Thinning hair.

Beefy black mustache.

Plaid shirt.

Fatter than hell.

Andrew calls out in greeting, “Big Jer!”

“Andrew. Good to see you,” Big Jer says, almost solemn, as if he’s just waiting to see how he’ll be fucked over this time.

“Been a long time,” Andrew says, kicking at the dirt.

“It sure has, Andrew. It sure has.”

“How’s the catfish business?”

“Can’t complain. We’re farming only gook fish now. Striped pangasius. Swai. Meat’s cleaner and flakier than channel cats and I’m the only American farming them. One of them cocksucker health food chains has been buyin’ off me like crazy. They sell them as ‘white ruffy’ or some other such horseshit.”

“City folks will fall for anything.”

“And soon they’ll ruin everything. Damn, between the fish, the women, and the food, sometimes I think I should just pack it in and move to Vietnam. I liked it there.” He nods toward Myrtle, who’s gotten out of the ice cream truck and is presently under the hood, pretending to inspect the engine. “That your broad?”

“That’d be her.”

“Engine trouble, huh,” Big Jer says, the wariness returning to his voice.

“Wouldn’t likely be stopping otherwise.”

“Well I got all the tools you need. Sure she don’t need any help with that? I could have one of my men—”

Andrew holds up his hands in kind refusal. “She’s an ace. Best mechanic I ever saw. Truly. Vehicles practically burst with joy when she climbs under the hood.”

“She suck good dick?”

“Come on, Big Jer.”

“Aw, fuck it, let’s have a drink. I got something that might interest you.”

***

In the office, they sit down across from one another at Big Jer’s desk, a steel contraption that more closely resembles a Soviet era torture device than a place where one might conduct business.

Big Jer pours whiskey into two stained, disintegrating paper cups.

“Might want to gulp that down,” he says. “These cups have been through the wringer.”

Andrew raises his cup, which is dripping from the bottom, for a toast.

“To friendship,” he says.

“To friendship.”

They throw back their shots. Then Big Jer roots around in a desk drawer until he comes up with a thick, worn journal. He hands it across the desk to Andrew like it’s some kind of bible.

“Care now,” Big Jer says.

“What is it?”

Andrew opens the journal.

It’s hundreds of pages of log entries.

“I found this among my father’s possessions when he passed away last year. The first entries belong to my grandfather, then my father and his brother. That’s why the handwriting changes. Now if you turn to the most recent entries…” Big Jer thumbs pages for Andrew, finally arriving at the last filled-out page. “That’s me. I only got started a couple months ago. Hell, took me months just to read through my family’s good work, but now I got a good system going. Now I gotta finish the book.”

The journal is a record of fish plants, recording species, age, size, sex, weight, length, date, and locations.

“They marked every fish they released. That way, if they ever caught one of their own, they’d know to set it free again. Do you know my family’s mark?”

Andrew shakes his head no.

“They removed the left eye.”

“I guess you’ve got to take precautions not to eat your own.”

“Maybe. I been thinkin’ a lot about it, and I have another idea. I believe my grandfather and father and uncle removed the left eye because that leaves what? One path to follow. And what path is that, Andrew?”

Laughing, nervous about the tension growing in the room, Andrew says, “The path of the one-eyed catfish?”

Big Jer isn’t laughing. “The right path. The path of God. Now I gotta ask you, Andrew. Have you been following the right path?”

“Come on, Big Jer.”

Rising in his seat, Big Jer shouts, “Did the right path lead you here?”

Andrew is stern and firm in his response. “Yes.”

“Good.”

Big Jer relaxes.

Andrew hands the journal back to Big Jer, who stows it away in the drawer from which it came. He pours them another leaky cupful of whiskey.

“That’s some interesting work you’re doing there,” Andrew says.

Big Jer drains his cup and quickly pours another. “To be honest,” he says, “it’s what keeps me going. With the striped pangasius booming, business is better than ever. I mean, I’m rich. And yet money don’t feed the soul.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Big Jer leans forward conspiratorially, his watermelon-sized head hovering above the desk. “For a while after my father’s death, I was ready to blow my brains out. It was a godsend I found that journal. A goddamn godsend.”

There’s a silence in the office until Andrew, startled by the absence of noise, breaks. “So getting down to business. You got a cooler packed for us?”

“My boys are working on it. I’ma give you some of this striped pangasius for you to try for yourself. You’ll love it.”

“I’m sure I will. Your catfish always was a treat.”

“Well boy, this pangasius is something special.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I don’t think you truly understand.”

“Oh, but I’m sure I will.”

Big Jer nods. “I suppose you will. Anyway, about the girl. When she gets that engine done, I was thinking maybe she could come into the back room with me. It’s dark back there so she doesn’t have to see nothin’. ’Cause, you know, I’m a pig and she’s…pretty.”

Andrew dismisses the idea outright. “No can do. Gonna have to do your business in my truck. We’re on a tight schedule. Heading up to Omaha. Her ma’s sick. Old bitch’ll probably croak before we get there, but you know women.”

“A dying parent. That always is unfortunate.”

“So if you just fuck her in the back of the truck, it’d help us out. Maybe we’d get to Omaha in time.”

Big Jer appears to be mulling his options. “I suppose I could fuck her in the truck. But is there room in there to…you know…”

“Just say it, Big Jer.”

“Take her from behind.”

“Oh yeah, I fuck her in the ass just about every night.”

“Oh no, no, no. I’m not asking to sodomize her. I just want to fuck her like a dog.”

“Plenty of room in the ice cream truck to fuck her like a dog, or pretty much any way else you damn well please.”

“Is there anything she likes? Anything to make the experience special for her too?”

“Give it to her gentle.”

“Gentle.”

“And don’t spooge all over the truck.”

Big Jer collects their paper cups to refill them but they disintegrate in his hands.

He finds two more cups, fills them.

They raise in toast.

“To fucking bitches and stacking Benjamins,” Big Jer says.

“To bitches and Benjamins,” Andrew says.

That’s the moment Jesse chooses to burst into the office, the rocket launcher slung over his shoulder like he’s Rambo.

Jesse says, “Freeze, you fat fuck!”

Andrew spits out his whiskey in surprise.

Big Jer is none too happy about this development. “What the hell is this? Andrew, tell me what this is.”

“It’s a mistake is what it is. Jesse, put the gun down,” Andrew says.

Big Jer lowers a hand to his desk drawers.

“Put your hands where I can see ’em,” Jesse warns.

They’re sweating, measuring movements, every eyelash bat a potential death sentence.

“Everything is under control,” Andrew says. “I want everyone to remain calm.”

The clock on the wall ticks.

Their hearts go thud-thud, thud-thud.

In one swift motion, Big Jer pushes back in his chair, whipping out a Colt .45 that must’ve been attached to the underside of his desk, but before he can fire off a shot, an all-encompassing blast swallows the room.

Suddenly, Big Jer is gone.

Andrew stands, shuffles past Jesse, around the desk to where Big Jer sat moments before.

Andrew mutters, “Big Jer, hey man. Sorry about that. Just a misunderstanding. A little joke. You get it, right? You get the joke.”

But Big Jer is gone. There’s a massive hole in the back of his office wall and his heavy oak chair is utterly destroyed. On the floor behind Big Jer’s desk lie Big Jer’s legs.

Andrew can’t hear himself speak and Jesse can’t hear him either.

“You fuckin’ idiot, Jesse. What did I tell you?”

Jesse gestures that he can’t understand a damn word Andrew is saying, so Andrew finds a pencil and a notepad among the clutter on Big Jer’s desk and they have a conversation on paper.

Andrew: You fuckin’ idiot, Jesse. What did I tell you.

Jesse: Myrtle was scared.

Andrew: What did I tell you.

Jesse: Nobody fucks my wife but me.

Andrew: What did I tell you?

Jesse: To stay in the truck and not be seen.

Andrew. That’s right. I told you to stay in the truck and that everything would turn out fine if you listened to me.

Andrew searches the drawers until he finds Big Jer’s fish planting bible. He pockets it and hurries out of the office.

Their hearing is returning. No longer are they engulfed in silence. Now it’s just like they’re underwater.

“Come on, his men will be coming,” Andrew says.

Jesse lags after Andrew, lugging the rocket launcher. “What’s the new plan?” he shouts, louder than he probably intends.

“Convince them not to kill us. Now stay here. These guys know me.”

Andrew appears outside about the same time that five men are walking up from the rearing ponds. Andrew stands about ten feet from them, face to face, the men fanned out in a half circle.

One of the catfish farmers says, “If it isn’t Andrew Jackson all covered in blood.”

Andrew guffaws, pretending to be drunk. “Oh, shit. You guys just missed the funniest shit.”

The catfish farmers relax a little, no longer sensing immediate danger. They wait to hear about ‘the funniest shit,’ which Andrew tells. “I picked up a wounded dog on my way up here. Poor fucker’d had his leg snapped by a car. By the time I get here, the dog’s on his last breath, so Big Jer says he knows a way to, you know, put him out of his misery. Big Jer is drunk off his ass by this point. You know how he gets.”

The men nod in agreement, seeming to buy the story so far.

“So I bring the dog into Big Jer’s office and set him on the desk like it’s an operating table. And you know what Big Jer does? He shoves a bundle of M-80s down the dog’s throat with a single fuse hanging out like a serpent’s tongue longer than all your dicks stacked together. The dog is still breathing at this point, too. Big Jer lights the fuse and I’m all like tryin’ to back away, but Big Jer, he’s just laughing. He’s just laughing as the dog explodes all over his office.”

The catfish farmer who spoke first nods. “That’s funny shit. So where’s Big Jer now?”

Andrew points over his shoulder, “He’s cleanin’ himself off in the pisser. If you think I’m bloody, shoo-wee, you shoulda seen him. I was backed against the wall. Big Jer, he had front row seats to the action.”

“Why you have his book then?” one of the other men wants to know.

“Pardon?” Andrew says, touching his bloody fingertips to the book sticking out of his pocket.

“Big Jer don’t let no one touch that book. No one. So what makes you so special? Last I heard, he was pretty pissed at you.”

“Fellas. Didn’t Big Jer tell you I was comin’ over for some business?”

The catfish farmers close in.

One of them says, “Big Jer didn’t tell us shit.”

Another says, “I say we head into the office.”

Yet another says, “I wanna see this exploded dog.”

Jesse, standing out of sight inside the office, mutters to himself, “Fuck this shit.” He reloads the rocket launcher and bursts out of the office. “On the ground, motherfuckers!”

The catfish farmers look confused for a moment, but then quickly drop to the ground.

Andrew turns to Jesse, stunned but also grateful.

“Feel them for weapons,” Jesse says.

Andrew pats down the men for weapons while Jesse holds the rocket launcher trained on them.

“Try anything and you’re all dead,” Jesse says, and then he calls to Myrtle. “Little bee, you can come out now.”

Myrtle climbs out of the ice cream truck.

The men are unarmed except for a knife and a pistol.

With the knife, Andrew cuts the throats of the catfish farmers, one at a time. But when there’s only one man left, that man hops to his feet and bolts for a truck about thirty yards away.

Jesse trains the rocket launcher on the guy, but the guy is weaving back and forth. He’s not an easy target.

Andrew takes long, calm strides toward the truck, pistol in one hand and knife in the other. Big Jer’s book is still in his pocket.

The man starts the truck with no problem. He starts driving away and it really seems like he’s going to make it when no, he’s not going to make it. The truck goes boom.

Direct hit.

The score at the end of the day is:

Rocket Launcher: 1

Catfish Farmer: 0

“I suppose we better claim our catfish,” Andrew says.

***

The three of them stand over a tank full of catfish. Myrtle’s got a wheelbarrow, Andrew and Jesse each a knife.

“Big Jer spoke highly of his pangasius,” Andrew says.

Andrew reaches into a tank, comes up with a fish, and stabs it through the skull, into the brain, killing it instantly.

He tosses the fish into the wheelbarrow and repeats twice.

Jesse, trying to follow suit, attempts to grab a fish but misses.

Andrew has basically filled the whole wheelbarrow himself while Jesse continues to struggle.

They walk back to the ice cream truck, Myrtle pushing the wheelbarrow mounded over with Vietnamese catfish.

“Guess we should feed the snakes now,” Andrew says.

“I’m hungry as a motherfucker,” Myrtle says.

“How do we want to do this?” Jesse asks.

“You two open the coffin and I’ll toss in a fish, I guess,” Andrew says.

They proceed to do what Andrew suggests. It is terrifying. Then they pile the remaining fish on the coffin and hit the road.

***

The ice cream truck speeds down the highway in the evening desert light as stars come out. All three of them are laughing, passing a bottle of whiskey. They stop at a fill station somewhere along the way and filling the truck drains half their funds. Andrew drives the whole way.

“Goddamn, I forgot what a crazy motherfucker you are, Jesse,” Andrew says.

Myrtle punches Andrew on the arm. “Your plan sucked, Andrew. S.U.K.T.”

“Yeah, I’m Andrew,” Jesse says. “I know what I’m doing. Stay in the car while I convince a fat bastard fish farmer to fuck your beautiful wife while you hide in the back of an ice cream truck, totally helpless.”

Jesse makes a farting noise.

“Sucked big time,” Myrtle says.

Andrew says, “Ahhh, you guys. There’s one thing nobody can say about the great snake smuggle. Nobody had a bad time. I mean, this is fun, right? Everybody’s having fun. You having fun, Myrtle?”

“I’m having fun I guess,” Myrtle says.

“You having fun, Jesse?”

“Sure, I mean, it’s okay, but I’m retired from this line of work. Myrtle and I are getting married. We need a stable foundation and in order to do that—to do—money—baby—foundation—”

Jesse sometimes stumbles over his words, makes no sense, spouts nonsense. He does this sometimes.

“What he means is we’re only doing it for the money,” Myrtle says.

A pained look crosses Andrew’s face. “Sure, I guess. But money don’t feed the soul.”

“It sure do put food on the table, though,” Myrtle says.

Jesse nods in agreement. “If money wasn’t money, we wouldn’t’ve had to kill all those guys over a little catfish.”

“All I’m sayin’ is you start to go crazy without a little fun in your life. Am I right?” When Andrew gets no response, he repeats, “Am I right?”

“Yeah, Andrew. We’re having fun.” Jesse says it like he’s admitting defeat, but Andrew’s spirits pick up anyway.

“Good. That’s what I like to hear. Havin’ fun frickin’ times with fun frickin’ friends. The best friends. The only friends.”

“Think I’m gonna crawl on into the back and sit with Myrtle a while,” Jesse says. “You mind?”

“Go right ahead, my friend.”

As Jesse crawls in the back, Myrtle starts complaining about the smell.

“These fish are really starting to reek,” she says.

“Don’t worry,” Andrew says. “Soon enough, we can stop and camp out for the night and cook ourselves one hell of a feast.”

Myrtle slaps Jesse’s knee. “It’ll be like that time we went to Red Lobster. Remember, Jesse? They served up all that fancy seafood buffet-style. All you can eat. Shoot, you puked right there on the popcorn shrimp going back for about your fiftieth plate.”

“That was you who puked, Myrtle.”

“Was it?”

“Sure was,” Jesse says.

“Oh well. I knew one of us puked at Red Lobster.”

“Got us banned for life.”

“Sure was a good meal, though.”

Jesse nods. “Always loved me some Red Lobster.”

“We can eat there every night when we’re rich,” Myrtle says.

“That’s if your photo ain’t hangin’ up in every Red Lobster in the country. ‘Don’t let this girl eat here. She’ll puke on the shrimp.’”

Someone says I love you and someone else says I love you and outside in the big world the sun bleeds purple on the red rocks and burning sand and in the shadow of a cactus, a small mammal sleeps.

“You guys want some music?” Andrew asks.

“Sure,” Myrtle says.

So Andrew turns on some ice cream truck music.

And in the shadow of a cactus, a rattlesnake strikes a small, sleeping mammal.

***

Sitting around a campfire, each of them gnaw a whole charred catfish held between dirty hands.

Except for the sound of teeth and tongue tearing flesh from bone, they eat in silence.

When the meal is finished, they celebrate it like all good meals are celebrated. With a bottle of whiskey.

“So how’d you hook up with Big Jer anyway?” Jesse asks.

“He was a good friend of my father’s.”

“I remember your pa. He still kickin’?”

“Naw.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It was sort of a funny accident.”

“Funny ha-ha or funny sad?” Myrtle asks.

“A little of both. Myrtle, you never had a chance to meet my father, but all you need to know to understand the story of his end is that he came to be a fisherman of no little renown throughout this region. He could catch a shitload of fish, every day, no matter the weather or water or time of day, but what he loved catching most were largemouth bass. The only thing my old man was greater at than fishing was shit-talkin’. He could shit-talk, let me tell you. In his later years, he was out on the water every morning, often straight through till sundown. Big Jer was one of his fishing buddies. In fact, Big Jer was present when death came for my father. You see, my father’s reputation as a great fisherman had grown to such proportions that people came to call him The Legend. The moment they caught sight of his hunched figure on the crest over Buena Vista Lake, all fishermen began to murmur. ‘Look, it’s The Legend,’ they’d say, or if they weren’t hip to his nickname they’d say, ‘The largemouth bass man,’ or ‘That asshole who catches all the fish.’ My father didn’t mind so much where he fished, but he didn’t much like being around people. If a lake was crowded, he’d walk miles to the farthest shoreline just to be alone. But he was friendly too. He shared his lures. He shared his baits. He even shared techniques he’d learned throughout the years. If he saw a family catching nothing, he would offer them his catch so they would not go hungry. There was not a greater or more generous fisherman than my father, but that made some people jealous, even angry. The Legend was a god to many fishermen, but to one man in particular, he was a devil. This man’s name was Al Horn. He was a bad man and a worse fisherman. He envied my father like shit envies coal. One unseasonably warm April afternoon, the bass bite was on fire, and everybody on the lake was catching fish, especially my father and Big Jer. That is, everybody except Al Horn. Remember I told you my father liked to shit-talk? This particular day he pushed Al Horn past his breaking point. I don’t know what was said exactly. All I know is that my father ended up dead in the lake, Al Horn’s hunting knife stuck in his chest. Not a pretty way to die, but what a goddamn good day to go, huh? Beautiful spring day on the lake, everyone catching fish. I bet it made my old man happy, knife be damned.”

“What happened to Al Horn?”

“Big Jer saw Al kill my dad. That’s a fact. Big Jer had been fishing upshore from my pa when he heard shouting. He tried to hurry back, but shit, you saw the size of the guy. He wasn’t getting anywhere in a hurry. So Big Jer returns, sees my father floating in the water, bleeding like a stuck pig, and Al Horn is standing there on the shore. Big Jer did what any decent man would do. He put a gun to Al Horn’s skull and shot the worthless fuck dead.”

Myrtle covers her mouth, gasps, “Oh my god,” more disturbed by this story-violence than the real life violence she’d witnessed only hours before.

Jesse puts the whiskey bottle in Andrew’s hands, encouraging him to take a drink. “I never knew Big Jer avenged your dad. Fuck, I never knew Big Jer. I’m sorry.”

“Naw, it’s nothin’. Big Jer was a good man, but he lived a miserable life.”

“We been apart a long time, haven’t we?” Jesse says.

Andrew swigs deeply, then wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and exhales fire breath. “Us and all the rest of them.”

“I can’t believe I never heard about your dad.”

Andrew shrugs. “The desert’s that kind of place.”

Myrtle shivers and leans over, rests her head on Jesse’s shoulder. “I’m glad we’re on our way out of here. It’ll be exciting to start fresh, live somewhere new.”

Jesse takes the whiskey bottle again and raises it in a toast. “To fresh starts. And to Big Jer.”

A night in the desert is lonesome without music, even among friends, and so Andrew pulls out his harmonica and he plays. Jesse hums along at first, and then he begins to sing, pulling words out of the darkness, searching for a thing he cannot find.

When the whiskey runs dry, Jesse and Myrtle snuggle beneath an alpaca blanket and quietly make love. Andrew sits on the other side of the fire, awake, alone. He goes for a walk. It’s one of those walks where nothing much happens. Little thinking is done. It’s just a walk. Leave it alone.

By the time he returns, Jesse and Myrtle are fast asleep. He digs around in Jesse’s discarded pants and tosses their remaining cash into the fire. Then he adds a few more logs and pulls out Big Jer’s family fish bible. He begins to read.

***

In the morning light, on the road again. They’re a couple miles from a small town. Myrtle drives. Andrew sits in back with the coffin and the catfish.

“You got any whiskey left?” Andrew asks, digging through their luggage. “What we drank last night was my last bottle.”

“Naw, we’re all out,” Jesse says.

Myrtle, who appreciates the splendor of small towns, suggests stopping in the town ahead for more. “It’ll be a real bitch to sleep outside without it,” she says.

“Sounds good to me,” Jesse says. “What do you think?”

Andrew seems to weigh the question in his mind. “I’m afraid Myrtle’s right. Hell, this fish smell alone is tough to stomach without some hooch.”

Myrtle scowls, tightens her grip on the steering wheel. “Told you they was smelling something foul.”

Jesse reaches for his wallet, nodding, excited by the prospect of whiskey. “Let’s say we put twenty-five down on whiskey and the rest on gas.” When his wallet turns up empty, he shifts in his seat to face Andrew. “Did I give you the money?”

With a neutral expression on his face, Andrew says, “No, you had it. Remember the station clerk handing you change?”

“I remember that, but—”

“But what?” Myrtle says.

“The money’s not fucking there.”

“Not where?”

“Not in my wallet.”

“What do you mean it’s not in your wallet?”

Jesse slams a palm against the dashboard. “Stop parrotin’ me goddamnit and help me look.”

Myrtle shrugs helplessly. “I’m driving.”

“Then pull the wigwam over!”

The truck comes to a screeching halt on the side of the highway and the three of them begin a methodical search of everything they own.

“You didn’t somehow drop the money in the coffin, did you?” Andrew asks.

“How would I drop it in the coffin?”

Andrew shrugs. “Just covering the bases.”

“What now?” Myrtle says.

Jesse spits onto the pavement. His saliva sizzles and evaporates, it’s so hot out. He says, “We rob a liquor store and when we’re out of gas, we find a car to siphon.”

Andrew shakes his head, doubtful. “That plan may get us another hundred or even two-hundred miles, but it won’t get us to Oregon.”

“Then we’re fucked.” Jesse throws up his hands.

Myrtle has an idea. “We could sell those guns to a pawn shop. That’ll bring in enough for whiskey and gas, won’t it?”

Andrew and Jesse kind of look at each other, but the idea doesn’t float.

“What’s wrong with my idea?” Myrtle says.

“We don’t deal with pawn shops,” Andrew says.

“Why not?”

“Look, Myrtle. Andrew and I just have always had this thing,” Jesse says.

“A thing? Like a love affair?”

“It’s superstition is all,” Jesse says. “If your doings are unlawful, pawn shops are bad luck.”

“No pawn shops,” Andrew says.

Myrtle cannot believe this. “So you’ll kill a police offer and murder a bunch of guys over some stinking fish, but you won’t sell a gun to a pawn shop?”

Jesse nods. “That’s right.”

“No, it’s not right. It’s moronic. I’ll sell the guns myself if I have to.”

“I said no pawn shops,” Andrew says. He points a finger at Myrtle and iterates: “Never. Do business. With pawn shops. Understand?”

Myrtle pinches her lips tight, staring back at Andrew. Finally, she says, “I understand. No pawn shops.”

“Glad we’re clear on that,” Andrew says. “Now given our limitations, I think it’s in our best interest to rob a bank.”

“You flippin’ serious?” Jesse says.

“Why not?”

“Myrtle as our getaway driver in the Daytona 500 ice cream truck. You and me—two guys covered in human blood and sweat and fish guts—robbing a bank? We wouldn’t make it halfway across town before the pigs swarmed us.

“Myrtle, Jesse, hear me out.”

“No, I’m not stupid,” Jesse says. “We worked too hard and sacrificed too much already to piss away our riches over a stupid bank robbery. We’ve got too much coming to us.”

Myrtle agrees. “If we don’t do pawn shops, we don’t do banks either.”

“Snakes,” Andrew says. “We have one asset no other bank robbers ever had before. That is snakes.”

“I’m listening,” Jesse says.

Myrtle admonishes Jesse, calling him by his first, middle, and last name.

“Let the man speak,” Jesse tells her, and she relinquishes, so Andrew continues.

“It’s our job to deliver the snakes to Oregon, but nobody ever said we couldn’t use them to our advantage along the way. Besides, they been cooped up in that coffin since early yesterday. A little bank heist will be good. Let ’em stretch their snake legs.”

“So we rob a bank…with snakes,” Jesse says.

“Imagine you’re in line at the bank, ready to cash your big paycheck. Then suddenly some guys burst in and unleash snakes all throughout the bank. So now there’s snakes crawling around everywhere. The people will want to panic, but you’ve already told them, one move and your brains go bye-bye. If they move, they get shot. If they move, maybe a snake bites ’em. If they don’t move, well, maybe a snake bites ’em anyway. Point is, they’d all be so worried a snake was gonna crawl on ’em they wouldn’t even get a look at our faces or anything.”

This is all it takes to win Jesse over. “Sounds good to me,” he says. “I think we can do it.”

“Here’s the icing on the cake. We don’t get greedy. We already have the big payout coming to us when we get to Oregon. We just need enough to sustain us for the rest of the trip.”

Myrtle is still skeptical. “What about the police?”

“What about them?” Andrew says.

“Where will they be? Clearly you two dummies need to think this through.”

“Haha, please. Jesse and I have dogged many a small town like this. We’ll call in a bomb threat at the local high school. That’ll keep the whole task force occupied for at least a couple hours.”

Myrtle throws up her hands, giving in. “Sounds like you thought it all through. I guess we’re doing it then. We’re robbing a bank.” And suddenly there’s a newfound excitement in her voice. “Oh my god, I’ve never robbed a bank before.”

***

They pull up in front of the only bank in town. Andrew backs into a parking space that will allow them time to prepare inconspicuously but also permit a quick getaway. Andrew calls in a bomb threat to the high school on his car phone. Then they open the coffin, empty their suitcases, and load the suitcases full of snakes. What the snakes have done to the catfish makes Myrtle vomit. She sits at the wheel while Andrew and Jesse enter the bank, underwear fashioned into masks over their heads, armed with guns and carrying suitcases full of snakes. They dump the snakes on the floor, scattering them as much as possible.

Andrew, like a carnival barker, announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a bank robbery. Please get down on the ground.”

People scream as they fall to the floor.

“Except for you,” Andrew says, pointing to the lone teller. “And do not trigger the silent alarm. Is anyone else back there with you?”

The teller shakes her head no.

“Anyone who moves or disobeys our orders in any way will get shot in the fuckin’ face.”

“Or bit by a fuckin’ snake,” Jesse adds.

Andrew turns to Jesse. “Is that it? Did I cover all the bases?”

Jesse shouts, “And give us all your fucking money! Or at least a thousand bucks.”

“You want a thousand dollars?” the teller asks.

“Or two-thousand. It doesn’t matter.”

“A thousand is fine,” Andrew says. “We’re not greedy.”

“We only have ones,” the teller says.

Andrew looks at her. “A bank with only one dollar bills?”

“We only do small bill transactions on Saturday. The rest is locked in the vault, and I don’t have the key.”

“Well we’re not prejudiced, sweetheart. Just make it snappy.”

The teller feeds dollar bills into the bill counter while Andrew and Jesse monitor the crowd. The snakes are slithering amongst the people, doing everything they are supposed to do.

Jesse’s not so sure, though. He nudges Andrew. “You sure these are medicinal snakes? They look like regular old diamondbacks to me.”

“Medicinal as a can of whoop-ass if you don’t shut your trap,” Andrew warns.

An old man on the floor speaks up: “Sirs, please get this snake off me. I have a fear of them.”

Jesse steps toward the man. “You have a fear, do ya?”

“Yes.”

“Well let me help you with that.”

Jesse puts a bullet in the old man’s calf.

The man flails in agony, causing the snake on him to grow agitated and strike out, biting him.

“Now which hurt worse, the bullet or the snake?” Jesse turns to address the crowd. “If anyone else has a fear of snakes, guns, or anything else on God’s green earth, please let me know.”

Nobody has a fear of anything.

Andrew leans over the counter, asks the teller what the hell’s taking so long.

The teller panics. She tells Andrew that the bill counter has jammed up.

“Then fuck the counter and put it all in a bag.”

The teller stuffs several stacks of bills into a bag and places it on the counter. Andrew snatches it up, says to her, “Now come around here and lie down with the rest.”

The teller starts to weep, but she comes around the counter and lies down on the floor, as far from any snakes as possible, which is not very far away, because they’re everywhere.

Andrew bows to the crowd. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your cooperation. Please count to five-hundred before moving from your current position. If we come back to check on you and a single one’a you has moved so much as a finger, I swear to god we’ll kill you all.”

“Come on!” Jesse urges.

Andrew and Jesse flee the bank, run to where the ice cream truck is parked. They hop in and take the underwear masks off their heads.

“Did you get the cash?” Myrtle asks, on the verge of panic herself.

“We got the cash!” Jesse says.

Myrtle sits there, hand on the key but not quite turning it.

“Somethin’s missing,” she says.

“You drivin’ is what’s missin’. Now go, before the pigs come.”

“The snakes!” Myrtle shrieks.

Andrew and Jesse look dumbfounded.

“You idiots forgot the snakes in the bank.”

“Aw, fuck.”

“Horseshit.”

“Those snakes are the only reason we’re doing all this,” Myrtle says. “Don’t throw away our riches, Jesse.”

Andrew slides open the back door of the truck and hops out. “Come on, both of you. They should still be counting in there. Let’s collect the snakes and get the fuck away from this bumfuck no-good stinkin’ town.”

Myrtle’s still in the sea-foam green dress, filthy now, and Jesse’s in his gray Sears suit.

Inside the bank, the folks on the floor have just counted off two-hundred.

Andrew screams at them, “You’re counting too fast. Go back to zero.”

The people start counting over as the three of them gather up snakes, which is a difficult task, considering they’ve got to stuff them all in suitcases and not get bitten or allow others to get out, but they manage pretty well and they’ve almost collected all the snakes when—

Myrtle, dropping a suitcase full of snakes with a clatter, cries out, “Ow! The sumbitch bit me!”

At her feet, a rattlesnake coils for another strike.

“Myrtle!” It’s Jesse.

The snake strikes out, bites her again. She falls down as Jesse gets to her, stomping the snake’s head into pulp.

Around them, the people on the floor continue counting.

“Stop counting!” Jesse says.

Andrew, realizing the situation is unraveling, clasps Myrtle’s fallen suitcase as well as his own and makes for the door. “Grab her, man, and let’s go,” he says.

Jesse scoops Myrtle into his arms, whispering words of comfort to her. Andrew holds the door for them, then he tells the people to resume their counting. “Okay, you can start your counting again. Remember to go slow. It isn’t a footrace. And if we realize we left any snakes behind, we’ll be back, so don’t you fucking dare move. Have a nice day, folks.”

***

The ice cream truck whips out of the bank parking lot, driven by Andrew. Jesse’s in the back of the truck, sucking poison out of Myrtle. Andrew turns on the ice cream truck music, thinking it’ll make them seem less conspicuous, just a regular old ice cream truck passing through town. He’s sweating and the sweat stings his eyes but then they’re on the highway again and they’re flying.

Thirty miles down the road—

“Myrtle, stay with me honey,” Jesse says. Then to Andrew he says, “She’s not doing so good.”

Andrew keeps his eyes on the road. “What do you want us to do? We can’t take her to a hospital.”

“I don’t know, man. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“Shit, nothing’s ever supposed to happen, Jesse. Nothing ever happens unless you make it happen. Sometimes it just happens to go wrong.”

“Don’t philosophize me. This is your fault.”

“Fuckin’ whatever. I invited you to join me in something special. This is how you choose to repay me because your fiancée can’t bag a goddamn snake?”

“Stop the truck,” Jesse says.

“What?”

“Stop the truck. We’re done.”

“Who’s done what?”

“Myrtle and I are done with this. With you. We want out.”

Andrew says quietly, “If you want out, you can jump.”

Jesse sucker punches him in the side of the head, causing Andrew to jerk hard on the wheel. The truck swerves, hits a pothole in the road at a bad angle, destroying a tire. Andrew regains control but the tire is fucked and the wheel too.

“Pull over!”

“I can’t! The cops will be out looking for us. If we try walking along the highway, we’ll be sitting ducks.”

So they drive minus a tire, waiting for the whole thing to give out and the truck to wreck, killing them all, but it doesn’t, and they manage to pull over at the next rest stop and park safely.

At the rest stop, they situate their possessions—snakes and cash and catfish. The snakes stay locked up. The cash goes into Andrew’s duffel bag. The catfish find a new home in the dumpster. Andrew and Jesse take turns in the bathroom washing the blood and fish guts off them and changing clothes. When they are each wearing a clean Sears suit, they begin approaching truckers for a ride. Myrtle remains in the back of the ice cream truck, only semiconscious, but even without her presence, it isn’t long before a kind trucker sympathizes with their story of this poor man’s pretty young fiancée, bitten by a rattlesnake on a camping trip gone awry.

The trucker’s name is Harold Payton. He claims to be Walter Payton’s uncle. He says he owns a whole fleet of trucks and isn’t required to go out and drive himself, but sometimes he gets an itch to travel, so he takes on a route.

They finally escape the Lone Star State. Harold mostly talks while they listen. Myrtle starts recovering at some point along the drive and she asks about his wife, but he says he never married and never had children of his own. He moved to California when he was young to evade an unmentioned bad situation. If he could do anything different, he says, he’d become a youth guidance counselor, that in Sacramento he sees a lot of troubled young people who are into drugs and whatnot and just falling apart, and he feels he could offer them a certain perspective, be someone who would care and see that they implement change into their lives. “But alas, I run a trucking business. It’s a good living. I just wish I had someone to share it with. I ain’t religious so it’s not like I donate part of my living to a church.”

“Maybe you could donate to a charity,” Myrtle suggests.

Harold dismisses this idea. “They’re all crooks. I donated to what’s that sponsor a baby in Africa program. I donated to them for years. Then I found out rich white people pocket most of the money and almost none of it goes over to Africa.”

“I’m sure there’s an honest organization out there somewhere,” Myrtle says.

“I’m sure there is too,” Harold says. “I just haven’t found it yet.”

And then, while Jesse and Andrew crash in Harold’s sleeping quarters, Myrtle sits up front in the passenger seat and has a long conversation with Harold. She opens up about her vision for the future, the home she and Jesse will own, their future family full of babies, the clothes that she will wear and the clothes that she will dress her children in. She can smell the green lawn and the chocolate chip cookies and the leather seats of the good car in the driveway. Myrtle has a dream of safety and cleanliness, where nightmares are merely a thing you wake up from in your comfortable bed next to a husband who will comfort you.

“Do you believe in immortality?” Harold asks her.

Myrtle isn’t religious either, but she thinks about it, and she nods her head. She says, “Yeah, I think I do.”

When they stop in the darkness at a twenty-four hour roadside diner, Myrtle orders blueberry pancakes.

Andrew orders a whole steak and eggs breakfast with a side of bacon and when his food comes, he takes it with him into the bathroom along with both snake-filled suitcases. “Don’t wanna keep us any longer than I have to, so I’m just gonna eat while I freshen up,” he says, and he makes a beeline toward the bathroom, where he locks the door and sets the suitcases on the floor, and he breathes deeply to ease the heavy beating of his heart.

At the table, Jesse smiles like Andrew’s so amusing. “Some people like to eat in privacy, I guess. Haha.”

Harold focuses on his biscuits and gravy, shoveling food into his mouth in a slow, deliberate fashion. He looks up from his food, wipes his mouth with his napkin, and says, “Who am I to say what’s right?” Then he lowers his head again.

In the bathroom, Andrew scrapes steak and eggs into the two suitcases, sparing only the hash browns for himself.

The snakes are dying. Some have already passed and the ones that are still alive look limp. None even act pissed off that they’ve been cooped up in a suitcase. The snakes will not make it all the way to Boring.

***

They arrive in Sacramento.

Harold says to Andrew and Jesse, “You two are nice boys. If you plan on settling down in Sacramento and need work, let me know. Trucking ain’t easy, and it’s lonely for a lot of people, but you can provide a decent living for your family. I offer full benefits too. Medical, dental, you name it.”

They thank him but politely decline.

“Well, if you ever change your mind, or find yourself back in Sac-Town with no place to go, you call Harold Payton.” He hands each of them a card.

After parting ways with Harold, they spend eight-hundred dollars on a beater car. They spend twenty bucks on mice and a water dish at a pet store. They buy a drill and they drill some holes into the car’s trunk.

Andrew has the two of them go find a store for some food and beer so he can handle the snakes himself, because at this rate, they’re likely all dead.

“Want some whiskey too?” Jesse asks.

“Naw,” Andrew says. “California is a bunch of tight-asses about drinking and driving. Just grab us some beer.”

Andrew dumps the snakes out of the suitcases into the trunk. He watches them writhe. They have made a recovery. He drops the mice into the trunk and slams it shut.

He thinks maybe someday he’ll write a book on caring for snakes.

He’ll call it Snakes and Bacon.

***

The drive from Sacramento, California to Boring, Oregon takes nine hours. It’s a long time to pass in a car, but you can cover that distance in a single stretch, wasting only part of a day.

“Look at all the trees,” Myrtle says. “I have never seen so many trees in my life.”

“Yeah, that’s a lot of fuckin’ firewood,” Jesse says in agreement.

They’re passing through the redwoods in Northern California.

“Once, Texas had this many trees, but they cut them all down,” Andrew says.

“Did it?” Jesse says.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Seems like probably it did.”

“Doesn’t Bigfoot live up here?” Myrtle asks.

Jesse, who’s got a beer raised to his lips, pauses. He looks at his fiancée, smiles. “What do you know about Bigfoot?”

“I know he’s big and hairy, kind of like a human ape, that he kidnaps women and turns out blurry in photographs. And I know he lives in these here woods.”

“Girl sure knows a lot about Bigfoot,” Andrew says.

“It’s that college education of hers,” Jesse says, jokingly, but Myrtle doesn’t take it that way.

“Maybe if you two watched more of the Discovery Channel, you would know more about the world around you,” she says.

“I know about these parts,” Andrew says. “I know a lot about them.”

“Sure you do.”

“Naw, you see, my dad always wanted to fish up here. He used to talk about the salmon runs of the great Pacific Northwest like they was fairy tales. The Columbia, the Willamette, the Snake, the Rogue, the Deschutes, the Nestucca, the Skagit, the Snohomish, all the great rivers of Oregon and Washington. You name it, my father read about it. In fact, once we hit Oregon, I bet you I can name every river we pass.”

“Maybe with road signs,” Jesse says.

“Or a map stapled to your ass,” Myrtle says.

Andrew just smiles to himself, and nostalgia for something he’s never experienced passes through his chest like heartburn. He’s entering the paradise his father always dreamed of but never experienced himself. Now Andrew will finally experience it, settle the demands of a restless ghost, if only he can navigate through the situation at hand.

“Once, in the time of the Indians and dinosaurs,” he says, “so many salmon filled the rivers they didn’t even need bridges. You could cross any river walking on the backs of salmon. When they were hungry, they just set a basket at the water’s edge and soon enough, a salmon would jump into the basket. The forests were full of tasty mushrooms like we’ve never seen. Berry bushes grew like weeds. And bald eagles were everywhere, man. Everywhere. Bald eagles were like their friends. And the bears. So many bears and wolves and deer. Hardly any snakes anywhere. Nothing that could poison you at all, really. And it never got too hot and it never got too cold. Perfect weather all the time. The salmon had some magic in them that made it all happen. An old Indian chief said so. He said that as long as the people loved the salmon and treated them with respect, the salmon would fill the rivers.”

“So what happened?” Myrtle says.

“Lewis and Clark happened.”

“Did Lewis and Clark kill Bigfoot’s family too?”

“Probably, knowing those sumbitches.”

The three of them nod knowingly, as if this is the way things are and must always be.

“Imagine being the last of your kind,” Myrtle says.

“It’d be lonely, for sure,” Jesse says.

“I’m not so sure. I think it might be kind of freeing,” Andrew says. “Like real freedom.”

“I don’t think it’d be lonely or freeing,” Myrtle says. “I think it’d be something else entirely.”

“Like what, baby?” Jesse says.

Before Myrtle can answer, they cross the Oregon border and throw up a little cheer.

“We’re in the home stretch now,” Jesse says. “So you sure everything’s still squared away for the drop-off?”

“We just gotta make a phone call when we get to where we’re going. They’ll tell us a time and where to go from there.”

Myrtle looks beautiful in the back seat.

She’s the last of her kind, for sure.

***

They’re almost out of money again, but it doesn’t matter now. They’re driving into Portland, Oregon. Boring is so close.

“So where’s the drop-off place?” Jesse asks.

“Hey man,” Andrew says, “I ever tell you how much I love strawberries?”

“Yeah, strawberries are pretty good, but how are we supposed to get paid for these snakes?”

“I just love them strawberries.”

“Sounds to me like he’s evading,” Myrtle says to Jesse.

“That’s bullshit. I ain’t evadin’,” Andrew says.

“Then tell us about the plan for these damn reptilians,” Jesse says.

“Fine, if you wanna know so bad. These scientist people, they expect to do the transaction with just one guy. That’s me. Means you two can’t be around when business goes down. The other thing to keep in mind is we might not be getting paid as much.”

“Why the hell not?” Myrtle says.

“We lost a lot of snakes when you got bit back there. Not to mention some have died along the way. We are dealing with what those in the service industry call damaged goods.”

“Shit, he’s right,” Jesse says.

“But riches ain’t all there is to life. There’s love, and there’s uh…” Andrew trails off. “I’m pretty fuckin’ tired.”

“Andrew,” Jesse says.

Andrew says nothing.

“Andrew.”

“Huh?”

“You not gonna fuck us over, are you? You splitting the money with us like we agreed?”

“Yeah, of course. You like my brother. You both’s family. I’d never do anything to hurt family. I just need to sleep, man. I just need to sleep is all.”

Andrew pulls off the freeway. They drive through an industrial district where mattresses, couches, tents, and hovels built out of shopping carts line the streets. They approach a bonfire surrounded by dirty faces. As they come near, the dirty faces look up at them.

“You got any beer?” Andrew says.

A young man in a wheelchair—one festering, infected foot looking like a white mushroom propped up on a milk crate—gestures to a red ice chest. “Help yourself,” he says.

Andrew, Jesse, and Myrtle stand by the fire and drink beer. They shoot the shit with the strangers and are even offered a couple couches to crash on for the night. Everyone’s having a good time, but nobody asks where they’re from, what they’re doing here. Everybody comes from the same place. Everybody ends up in the same place too.

Andrew excuses himself, says he’s going to find a payphone so he can call and make plans for delivering the snakes. He’s gone a good half hour, and upon his return, he appears restless.

Before they sleep, Andrew finally tells them the plan. He says, “In the morning, we drive out to Dodge Park, right on the Sandy River. That’s where we claim our riches.”

Jesse and Myrtle, spooning on a couch, hold each other closer. “We’re so close, baby,” Jesse whispers, and in the dark above their heads, their future kids can be seen playing on the green lawn of their future home.

***

The next morning, they head out for Boring.

They park on the side of a steep mountain road under a dense, rainforest-like canopy of trees. There’s a bridge that spans the river. Beneath the bridge, two fishermen stand thigh-deep in the white-capped water.

“This is exactly how it should be,” Andrew says. “The scientist we’re meeting here will be disguised as a fisherman.”

“How do you know which dude fishing is him?” Myrtle asks.

“I was told I’d know.”

Jesse and Myrtle watch from the car as Andrew takes the two suitcases—repacked with snakes—across the bridge and down to the fishermen. They’re too far away to hear the conversation as Andrew approaches them, but one of the fishermen reels in his line, wades back to shore, and follows Andrew into the woods downriver.

Five or ten minutes pass before the fisherman returns from the woods, but he isn’t toting the suitcases.

He goes back to fishing.

Alone in the forest, Andrew releases the rattlesnakes.

Another five or ten minutes pass before Andrew reemerges, toting the now-empty suitcases. He stomps back up the hill as if he’s pissed off, crosses the bridge.

“What happened?” Jesse asks.

“He wouldn’t take the snakes,” Andrew says.

“Why not?”

“He asked where the rest of them were. I told him we had complications, but then he started pointing out how the snakes were delivered in poor condition. He said they’d be useless to the sick people, and then he refused to pay.”

Jesse and Myrtle are visibly agitated, panicked. Andrew tries to keep them calm, but they’re too far embroiled to listen.

“Fuck this,” Jesse says. “If you won’t take care of this, I’ll do it myself.” And he storms away from the car, toward the bridge.

Myrtle remains by the car, biting her knuckles.

Andrew chases after Jesse, steps in front of him to block his path on the midway point of the bridge, with the clear river running beneath and moss-covered trees jutting up like spikes all around.

Andrew lays his hands on Jesse’s shoulders, looks the best friend he ever had straight in the eye.

“Let me go, Andrew. That man owes us. It’s our right to take what’s ours.”

“Listen,” Andrew says, and he realizes they’ve reached the end. There’s nowhere else to go from here. No desert to return to either. And so he spills forth a confession. “There are no medicinal snakes.”

“Bullshit. Of course there are. We took ’em all this way. We were gonna sell them for a million dollars.”

“There’s no such thing, Jesse. I made them up. I collected those snakes myself. Like you said when we were robbing that bank, they look just like regular old diamondbacks. That’s because they are. And now they’re loose in these woods. The ones that survived, at least.”

Jesse throws a wild, emotion-fueled punch, but Andrew is unprepared and takes it in the nose. There’s a crunch and then iron and wetness, a blossoming of something that should be pain but isn’t. It’s only heartbreak, an explosion inside both of them, as they tangle muscular arm in muscular arm, scars rubbing against scars, teeth grinding, feet twisted.

Myrtle is crying and the fisherman who’d gone into the woods drops his pole and runs up toward the bridge to stop the fight but as he’s running up there Jesse pulls out a gun and turns to shoot the person who’s pulling on his back, trying to tear him away from Andrew, but the person clawing at his back isn’t the fisherman. It’s Myrtle.

Jesse shoots her, not seeing until the trigger’s pulled, and the look of surprise on her face as she falls dead is the look of defeat. And the fisherman backs away, so Jesse shoots him too. And Jesse drops the gun and collapses in a heap beside Myrtle, cradling her, crying. And this is when Andrew peels his bloody skull off the concrete and scoops up Jesse’s discarded gun. And he walks up to Jesse, puts the gun to his head, and finishes him.

Andrew looks over the side of the bridge and the second fisherman who’d been down there is gone, so he hurries down and finds the man cowering under the bridge and he puts a bullet in his head too.

One of the men has caught a nice steelhead. The fish floats dead in the shallows, a green nylon stringer tied through its jaw. Andrew takes the steelhead and hurries back to the car. He drives away from Dodge Park. He drives straight through Boring, past the swampland and the dogs that chase his car. He passes a police cruiser on the narrow road that winds through farm and forest, but the sirens aren’t blaring and anyway he’ll soon be gone. Of course they’ll find the bodies, but the cop seems in no rush to get there. Probably thinks some fisherman or dumbass kid was just out target shooting by the river. Tell them to knock it off and move on to the next call. Poor bastard has no way to predict the nightmare that awaits him.

Andrew ditches the car near a rundown apartment project on SE 82nd with the doors unlocked and the windows rolled down. He breaks his own rule and sells the rest of their guns to a pawn shop for fifty bucks, then checks into a roach motel run by a senile Chinese man for two nights.

He turns on the news, and they sure have made it. Every cop in Texas is looking for Jesse and Myrtle, after the squad car was found at their burnt-down farmhouse. The catfish farm massacre has been discovered too, and cops suspect it’s all linked up to the bank robbery that shortly thereafter ensued, and the rocket launcher found in the back of an ice cream truck at a rest stop further on up the road. In addition to Texas, authorities in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California are on the lookout for Jesse and Myrtle. Oregon’s not in on it yet, and by some miracle of the lord, there’s no mention of a third suspect. Andrew tries not to think about the implications of that. But it won’t be long before the Texas boys get wind of Jesse and Myrtle’s bodies being found in Boring, at which point the Oregon police will be out in droves. Unless they bill it as a murder-suicide. Unlikely, but Andrew can hope.

He flips through the channels until eventually settling on a preseason game between the Houston Oilers and Seattle Seahawks. Steve McNair is a promising rookie and Oilers fans have high hopes that he can lead their team to glory, but Andrew just doesn’t know how he feels about a quarterback who tucks the ball under his arm and runs so often. Andrew believes in pocket passers. He hates the goddamn Dolphins, but Dan Marino, he’s what a quarterback ought to be. Nonetheless, Andrew roots for the Oilers because they’re his team, and if the coaches believe McNair is the man, well, shoot, Andrew believes it too.

The Boring murder-suicide story breaks during the midnight news. Once again, a third accomplice is never mentioned. Jesse and Myrtle are painted as psychotic redneck lovers.

Is it a miracle?

No.

It’s life.

***

In the morning, the news just replays all of last night’s stories, along with a weather report and something about a dog show happening in Portland that day.

Andrew goes to a dark sports bar across the street and orders a burger and a beer. On the television, an ESPN retrospective on Walter Payton is playing. There are plenty of pictures of Payton’s family, but Harold the truck driver is in none of them. Andrew wonders what Harold will think when he sees Jesse and Myrtle on the news. What will he think of that sweet young couple? Will he call the police and inform them of the other man accompanying them? Will Harold Payton be Andrew’s downfall? Andrew doesn’t know and presently doesn’t care. He’s feeling good, godlike.

But when Andrew returns to his motel room, he turns on the television to tune in to the evening news—and there, in the opening news previews, is a police witness sketch of Andrew. He about shits himself as commercials play and the news takes its time getting to the story. Finally, it does. Police are now looking for an unidentified male suspect connected to the crime spree in Texas and yesterday’s tragedy at Dodge Park. The man is believed to still be at large in the greater Portland area.

Andrew racks his brain. Where can he go? Canada? Out of the question. Out to sea? Also no. He’s still got ten bucks left, so he does what he does best. He waits until one in the morning, then goes out to the seediest bar he can find within a couple blocks of his motel. He buys a drink for the drunkest, loneliest woman in the bar. He talks her up and it doesn’t take much effort to convince her to take him home. So they go back to her shitty apartment where she lives alone and they drink some more and then as they’re stripping down, getting ready to do the thing, she passes out cold. Andrew waits a couple minutes to make sure she’s really out, then he tucks her into bed and erases all sign of his presence in her home. He finds her car keys (he’d asked at the bar what kind of car she drove then acted impressed when she named something shitty, and he said something like, “The kind of car a woman drives says a lot about her. I can tell you’re a classy lady,” even though she wasn’t).

He takes the whiskey bottle they were drinking from along with twenty dollars from her wallet and a package of hot dogs from the refrigerator.

He finds her car in the parking lot of the shitty apartment complex and he drives north on the I-5.

Somewhere in these green mountains, he will find a place where a man can disappear.

***

A decade has passed since all of that went down.

Andrew’s still on the lam, but he’s settled down, at least to the degree that he can. He works on a farm for people who don’t mind too much if he’s got a past about him. They don’t ask questions. There’s a woman he goes out dancing with every other Friday night, when her kids are at their father’s. Her name is Isabella.

Last year he took a drive back to Boring. He visited Dodge Park, and he nearly stepped on a baby rattler. Rattlesnakes weren’t native to this part of Oregon. He’d considered the ones he released good as dead, once the cold came. But the snakes held on. They began breeding up a storm, and ten years later, they’re still here. The snakes of Boring are real, although they’re not medicinal. The snakes of Boring are only full of poison.

Jesse was a good friend to chase this dream all the way up to Oregon, Andrew thinks, and Myrtle was a good woman. Andrew will never have a friend like Jesse again. It’ll just never happen. Maybe there’s justice in that. He probably doesn’t deserve one, but on nights and days when he’s feeling especially lonesome, he says aloud to himself, “I wish I had a friend like Jesse in my life.”

Then again, he’s not complaining.

You are born in August at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California. Your mother is a third grade teacher. Your father works for a beer distributor. Just a few months before your eighth birthday, they will file for divorce and you’ll be asked to make the biggest decision of your life. The choice is yours. Don’t worry. This isn’t about choosing a favorite. It’s about you. It was always about you.

Your mother keeps the house in Bakersfield. Your father moves north and buys a small riverside cabin in Oregon. Do you want to remain in Bakersfield, where you have your friends and the comfort of a familiar backdrop, or do you pack it in and rebuild with your father in Oregon? A single mother household or that eternal father-son fishing trip you always wanted. In a room full of strangers, you will be asked to decide.

If you choose to remain with your mother, go to BAKERSFIELD.

If you choose to move with your father, go to OREGON.

BAKERSFIELD: Two years later, your mom remarries. You move into a big new house in a nicer, newer part of town with your stepfather. He’s a businessman. The license plate on his Hummer: BSNSMAN. You’re not even in middle school yet, but suddenly you have a college savings account full of money for when you go off to college. Your mother no longer spends her nights at the kitchen table, weeping over a stack of overdue bills. You have nice new clothes. Those Air Jordans you always coveted? They’re yours now. And the swimming pool in the backyard is sure to attract a whole bunch of brand new friends. Life is shiny. Life is good. You’ve seen your real father once since the divorce, but maybe that’s for the best. You’re practically a different person now.

OREGON: You and your dad live in a one room cabin that backs up to a scenic river full of trout. It is cold and it is damp and it is lonesome out in the wilderness, but you love almost every second of it. You wake early in the morning to fish before school and afterward you fly down those backwoods roads on your ten-speed, anxious to wet your line. One autumn, in the year your muscles have started to develop, your father takes you out and teaches you to shoot a gun. You bag your first deer that season. You hang its antlers in the corner, above your little sweat-stained cot.

BAKERSFIELD: You meet a girl named Sarah. She has blonde hair and wears Abercrombie & Fitch. You go out to movies on the weekends and some nights her parents invite you over for dinner. Other nights she has dinner at your house, where you eat your favorite takeout. You share your first kiss together and maybe a little something more. Sarah is your first true love.

OREGON: You meet a girl named Sarah. She has blonde hair and climbs trees better than any boy. You explore the woods together and some nights her parents invite you over for dinner. Other nights she has dinner at your house, where you eat the fish that you have caught and the deer that you have hunted. You share your first kiss together and maybe a little something more. Sarah is your first true love.

BAKERSFIELD: You’ve just passed your driving test. Never mind that your stepfather is cheating on your mother and screams at her almost every night. He’s handing you the keys to a brand new BMW. You drop by Sarah’s place unexpectedly to take her out for a drive, and that’s when you receive the call.

OREGON: You’ve just passed your driving test. Never mind that you’ve been driving your father’s truck since you were thirteen, or that you drove yourself unaccompanied to the DMV to take the test. You’re legal now. You drop by Sarah’s place because the two of you are heading to Crater Lake for a weekend camping trip alone. You and her have taken drives in your father’s truck many times before, so that part is nothing new. What’s got your belly tingling is the prospect, the feeling, that maybe this weekend you two will go all the way. You don’t own a cellphone, but if you did, you’d be receiving that call about now.

BAKERSFIELD: Your father killed himself. You’d seen him what, three times since he moved to Oregon. He never remarried but he always sent you a birthday card with some recent pictures of fish he’d caught and a small check that your mother reminded you was a lot of money to him. They ship his body back to Bakersfield, where he’s buried in the same graveyard as his father, who died in Vietnam, who you never met.

OREGON: Your father killed himself. Apparently he wandered out onto the old country highway and put a bullet in his head, right there in the middle of the road. The gun was still warm when a farmer found him, but it was too late. You and Sarah have nearly left town when Sheriff Don pulls you over. You smirk because you’re legal now, but your palms are sweaty. You’ve never been pulled over. Sheriff Don asks you to follow him back to the station. You throw your hands up in protest and flash your license and that’s when he lays it on the line. “You’re father’s dead, son.”

BAKERSFIELD: Your mother asks if you’d like to take a trip up to Oregon to collect your father’s possessions, to experience the place he called home in his final years, but you decline.

OREGON: You’re still a minor, so they ship you a thousand miles away from Sarah, back to California, where you’re to live with your mother and a stepfather you’ve never met. They live in a million-dollar home. They are members of a country club. They tell you about the college savings fund they set up for you way back when. All these years they’ve been thinking of you, putting money away. They never once visited. Now they’ve torn you away from it all.

BAKERSFIELD: You’re not sure whether it’s the BMW or your estranged father’s death, but Sarah finally throws away notions of waiting until marriage. The way people talk to you, you know you’re expected to feel sad and hurt. In secret, you’re just stoked about driving and getting laid. You feel nothing for your father. You milk the sympathy, though. You learn that the grieving are granted certain privileges.

OREGON: You write letters to Sarah every day. You promise that you’ll return just as soon as you get yourself emancipated. Failing that, you’ll wait the two years until you turn eighteen and then you’ll move back to Oregon and marry her. She says she’d love nothing more than to marry you and have your children. You dream of your future life as a married couple, putting the pieces together in letter after letter. Your first child will be named Dean, after your father, if it’s a boy. Charlotte if it’s a girl. These letters from Sarah are the only thing that matter. They keep you going despite the isolation and the devastating weight of your father’s death, which squeezes your heart like a vise. You find it hard to breathe on the days when no new letter arrives. A few months later, the letters start to trickle off. First they drop in number, then they get shorter, then they come so infrequently that most days you don’t even bother checking the mail. You write to Sarah just as often, and twice as desperately. Then, after a hellish month of silence, the fateful letter arrives. The one you dreaded most. She hasn’t died. No, it’s worse than that. She’s started seeing someone else. She doesn’t say who, but she says you know him, that you’d approve, which of course you never would.

BAKERSFIELD: Life presents a myriad of choices. Driving drunk is one of them. That’s how your BMW ends up totaled. That’s how Sarah ends up leaving you.

OREGON: You take a swing at your stepfather for yelling at your mother. This is the final straw, they tell you. So the next day, you’re being shipped off to a school that’s more like a prison. And you thought the suburbs were bad.

BAKERSFIELD: They release you from jail after four days because you’re a privileged white kid who still has a bright future ahead. Your parents buy you a ten-year-old Lexus. “We hope you’ve learned your lesson,” they say.

OREGON: The only thing worse than military school is failing a suicide attempt at military school.

BAKERSFIELD: You’re out drinking by the river with some friends when one of them asks if you loved Sarah. You say you did, and what you’ve done finally hits you, and you break down in tears. You still love her. You will always love her. Your love for her is only surpassed by the hate you feel for yourself.

OREGON: Your hatred for this new place, this place worse than military school and the suburbs combined, is only usurped by the hate you feel for your father. The man loved you. He gave you everything. And then without warning, he took it all away.

BAKERSFIELD: Ten years later and the worst is over, but in secret, unbeknownst to everyone around you, you’re still climbing your way out of that deep, black hole you fell into when you were sixteen. You’re married now. You have a nice house and a good job and a baby. Funny thing is, you still love her.

OREGON: Ten years later and the worst isn’t over, but at least you’re back in Oregon. Your life is still in shambles, but you don’t love her anymore. She’s married to Dan Tannehill, the guy she said you’d approve of. She’s right, too. Dan was always a good guy. They have three kids together. You see them almost every week on account of it being a small town and them living just a few miles up the road from your father’s cabin, which you reclaimed from the bank with the money your mother gave you in the wake of her divorce. That was her way of saying sorry. You still smile when you remember how you laughed in her face. One of the few good memories among a lot of bad ones, the ones that keep you up at night, loading and unloading the chamber of the old suicide weapon, wondering if this is how your father felt. In the mornings, you fish alone. In the evenings, you drink whiskey and write letters to people you have known. You never mail a single letter. They make good kindling, though. Life is good in Oregon. It’s just too damn bad you ever had to leave.

And now we come to the place in the book where I pick up my fishing pole and we part ways, but if you ever get lonely, come find me by the river. I’ll be fishing for salmon or sturgeon or trout or walleye or catfish or bass or yellow perch or crappie or carp or peamouth or some new species only God has a name for. Or maybe I won’t be fishing at all. Maybe I’ll be staring into the deep, murky water, thinking about my love for you.

Salmon go away sometimes, but they always do come back. When we treat them right and with respect, they come back. Our love will come back too, you know. That’s how it has always been. Wherever the salmon go, we go too. They lead us to a love greater than ourselves. No matter how shallow the creek, no matter how high the dam, we must follow them. Now and forever, our love will go the way of the salmon. Now and forever, I love you.

Cameron Pierce is the author of eleven books, including the Wonderland Book Award-winning collection Lost in Cat Brain Land. His work has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Hobart, The Big Click, and Vol. I Brooklyn, and has been reviewed and featured on Comedy Central and The Guardian. He was also the author of the column Fishing and Beer, where he interviewed acclaimed angler Bill Dance and John Lurie of Fishing with John.

Pierce is the head editor of Lazy Fascist Press and has edited three anthologies, including The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade.

He lives with his wife in Astoria, Oregon.

Special thanks to Kirsten Alene Pierce, J. David Osborne, and John Skipp. Without them, this book would not exist. For the support, good times, and insight, thanks to the bizarro family, the Portland writing community, and everyone who has ever shared a body of water or a good fishing story with me. Thank you to Matthew Revert for the beautiful cover, and to the editors who originally published some of these stories: Tobias Carroll, Molly Tanzer, Elizabeth Ellen, Pela Via and the Booked. Podcast crew, Jesse Bullington, Ryan Bradford, Jarrett Haley, and Michael J. Seidlinger. Thanks to Kate Bernheimer, Henry Hughes, Weston Ochse, Amelia Gray, Juliet Escoria, Ben Brooks, and Troy James Weaver for their generous words and feedback on this book. Additional thanks to Jeremy Robert Johnson, Carlton Mellick III, Rose O’Keefe, Jeff Burk, Mykle Hansen, Brian Allen Carr, Alan M. Clark, Michael Kazepis, Stephen Graham Jones, Patrick Wensink, Scott McClanahan, Sam Pink, Noah Cicero, Ross E. Lockhart, Cody Goodfellow, Brian Keene, Kris Saknussemm, Gabino Iglesias, David Bowles, the Pierces, the Gwins, Tristan and Hoeru, and the sturgeon under Burnside Bridge.

“Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon” and an excerpt from “The Incoming Tide” first published in Vol. I Brooklyn

“Drop the World” first published in

The Big Click

“Short of Lundy” first published in Hobart

“Help Me” first published in Letters to Lovecraft

“The Bass Fisherman’s Wife” first published in Black Candies

“Three Fishermen” first published in BULL Fiction

“Easiest Kites There Are to Fly” first published in Everyday Genius

“California Oregon” first published in The Booked. Anthology

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