Fishboy Read Online Free PDF

red-rimmed drunkard, who may have met it partway in his usual stumbles. When he met the stick it was with his eyes and in a moment he was blind.
    Now a club swung out from behind a plastic apronand caught the Idiot upside his head. Now a lead stick bent across his shoulders in a swing a woman would make. Now some knives came up and sliced at the Idiots arms as he hid his face, the Idiot letting off his awful bawl.
    Lonny, the weeping man who said
Fuck
, and Ira Dench rushed the fray with pistols and an ax and pulled the Idiot out of the gobble squall and inflictions. They could not calm the Idiot and he threw them off with tremendous strength.
Goddamnit
, said Lonny,
all he wanted was just a toy on a string
, and he ripped the nearest fetish from a woman’s neck and pressed it into the Idiot’s bloody hands. The Idiot beheld his new toy as Ira Dench bent to the red-rimmed drunkard spinning and kicking on the ground, grinding his fists into the deflated spaces of his empty eye sockets.
    Hope that never happens to me
, said Ira Dench.
    Careful, boys
, shouted John, still hunkered by the picnic,
they’re putting the evil eye and the whammy-jammy on you
.
    And it was true, all around, the women were hissing and clucking and making invocations. They were seized with spitting fits, and they broke open seedpods and salted Lonny, Ira Dench, and the man who said
Fuck
with dirt and powders.
    It put Lonny on a rage, and he swung his ax overtheir heads and herded them into the cutting shed.
Goddamnit
, I heard him say,
now give it up, give me all them toys
, and Ira Dench collected the fetishes first under shaky-handed pistol cover of the weeping man who said
Fuck
, then they stripped the people of their knives and then their clothes which they threw aboard the small dark ship by the bundle.
    Now stay in here till we’re done, won’t no more bodies get hurt
, Lonny said, Lonny and his crew backing out of the shed below me so close I could have leapt onto their shoulders.
    I watched them go aboard their ship and then brace ladders across the rail to the dock as if to lay siege to the shore.
    Don’t forget to get the nets
, John said to Lonny.
    Lonny and the crew carried aboard sacks of oysters snatched from the dugouts, boxes of fresh fish from the shallow-draft schooner. They carried away cartons of fresh gourds and tuber fruit from my ruined garden, fresh hackberries gathered by the hatful. They took pots of paint aboard that the Idiot immediately stepped in, tracking color across the deck; they took light bulbs twisted from their sockets, boxes of tacks, and bundles of shingles; from the bottom of the creek they hoisted up the soda machine and took that too. Where they saw a mound of coal and a wheelbarrow to haul it, they tookboth. They laid hoses from the fishhouse pumps and filled their tanks: fresh water, fuel oil, and kerosene. And when there wasn’t much else left to take, they pried open their aft hatches and the soft-skulled child, the one who I had built a step for so he could shuck and eat, the same one who had just been going down in my place to fetch cold sodas from the creek bottom for my nickels, the soft-skulled child showed them where to find the ice that he volunteered to go aboard and help them shovel. He was just about to go aboard and clean the ’tween-deck spaces with a rag on a stick when one of his mothers snatched him away and made him sit on the bus where Lonny was robbing the white-eyed driver of his clothes and a fishtooth comb.
    Don’t forget these nets
, John said, pointing down into the shallow-draft schooner.
Fire up the boilers, Master Chief
, John said to Black Master Chief Harold and his boiler monkeys. John set foot on the schooner and broke off its mast and split a spar over his knee. He crossed the mast and spar and covered it with sail, cinching the corners with thick cord. For his new kite he tied strips of dress rags from the cratered lake women’s clothing. He packed a flask of