Fishboy Read Online Free PDF Page B

gasoline, some matches dipped in wax, and a coil of lanyard hemp. I watched John fold his kite into a long rolled package like a longbow and quiver that he strapped to his back with his wagon-reinbelt.
Send these to the cleaners
, he said to Lonny, handing up the rough muleskin cloak and grunged white nightshirt.
    Until that time I had been feeling less than useless to the man I had set myself to be like a tick upon. I was sure there was no way I could ever be useful to such a man, who needed convicts for crew, mule meat to eat, kites built from the rigging of ships. I was figuring no way for me to fetch in with such a man until I heard and saw he wanted his cleaning done, and I could do it, I could boil and scrub that nightshirt cleaner than white, scrape that mulehide soft with a clamshell, and work the ragged poncho into a proper cloak. I could do it, would do it, and I knew it would be done in the right way, not what Lonny had done with it, not by just running it up the mainmast to dry out crisp and hairy in the sun.
    Now Fishboy would come down out of his nest. Hadn’t it been me, the human-being boy, who’d helped bury the dead cook? Had swabbed his slippery spillage? Had brought gas and water in which to bathe? And wasn’t it my cartonated encampment burnt down and my garden ruint and my work not to be done again at John’s own hands?
Yes sir
, I thought as I readied myself to come down and sign on aboard, I
am on you like a tick
.
    I was going to be on him like a tick until in a quick splash of time he disappeared. He had just been standingthere naked with his kite package on his tattooed back. He had just been standing there holding Lonny and Ira Dench apart arguing over the mulehead, Lonny wanting to use it as bait on a rope for eels, Ira Dench wanting to split it open to make sweetbread. John settled the matter by picking up the mulehead and piking it in the bow of the ship, a furry figurehead dripping thickly into the creek. John considered the mulehead for a moment, checked his shoulder-slung parcel, and took a breath that seemed to last for several minutes. He took a breath so deep that I watched his back bellows out so that the tattoos there grew and grayed, and then John dove straight into the stain on the creek the dripping head had made. For as long as I could watch down the creek I did watch, and I never saw him surface.
    Let’s not forget John’s nets
, I heard Lonny say,
or we’ll have to come all the way back for them
. I slunk back down in my nest wondering if I should go ahead and get aboard with Lonny and his crew, even knowing there had been something wrong with the way Lonny looked at me and talked to me as I scrubbed his back the first night with gasoline.
    Lonny had let the cratered lake people file out to the bus, there being no call for finish fish that day. All the finish fish were stacked in boxes on the deck of the ship. Lonny and the weeping man who said
Fuck
stripped thenets from the dugouts and robbed the net house, hauling purse seines, bottom nets, stake nets, and drift nets. Any scrap of webbing with a line and cable on it they put aboard their ship.
    Fishboy
was the whisper.
    It was close.
    Fishboy
was the whisper again.
    It was real close. The bottom of my osprey hideout began to fill with blue fog, blue fog blowing up the drainpipe, blue fog creeping around my knees. I leaned over the nest’s edge and looked down, and there she was, Big Miss Magine on her hands and knees, elephantine black and bare, Lonny having stripped her of her dropcloth floral sundress, her brown lips around the downspout of the drainpipe, blowing her blue breath up to me, then whispering
    Fishboy? Where my fìnish fìsh, Fishboy?
    She put her lips back around the drainspout and blew more blue fog up to me, then began to suck it out. I knew I wouldn’t be sucked through the bottom of the osprey nest and through the pipe but I stepped around trying to step out of the fog, and I must have stepped on a weak