The Fisher Boy Read Online Free PDF

stormtroopers he brought with him? Where did they go? I guess they cut out early.” Ian’s tone conveyed both indignation and delight. The delight might have been due to the Christian Soldiers’ battle gear; Ian loved military history and could name divisions and commanding officers from wars most people had never heard of.
    “Spare change?” a girl with a foreign-sounding accent asked on Commercial Street, then Ian laughed and edged away. The girl had crinkly golden hair and sprays of coins dangling from her pierced ears. At first, I thought she was a foreign college student, hitchhiking around the States, then I saw that she was young, fifteen at most, barefoot and dirty, in a long dress of violet batik. She and her companion, her sister, I guessed, were smoking fat, hand-rolled cigarettes that generated a great many sparks.
    My pocket yielded two quarters, some pennies, and some lint. Roberto was about to give them a dollar bill when Miriam called out, “Stop! Don’t do that! Don’t give those girls a thing, they stole from me earlier this week!” Miriam’s nerves were obviously jangling—she’d been sick on Edward’s bouillabaisse, then, with me, discovered the bloated mutt on Arthur’s doorstep. “I recognize you both,” Miriam said, but the girls smiled as though she were telling them a riddle instead of accusing them of theft. “You,” she said to the older girl, “you tried to take an amber bracelet.” She pointed to the smaller girl. “And you tried to put a kaleidoscope into your handbag.”
    “We’re from Scandinavia,” the older girl said, in a singsong accent reminiscent of Abba.
    “Since the
Vasa
has come here, all young shoplifters are suddenly Scandinavians who speak English when it serves their interest,” Miriam told us. “But everyone knows that the crew of the
Vasa
hasn’t come ashore and you didn’t even know what amber was even though most of the world’s amber comes from the Baltic,” Miriam scolded the older girl.
    Both girls, smoking their fat, sparky cigarettes, laughed. The older girl took Roberto’s dollar, then they vanished.
    Miriam turned her irritation on me. “Why didn’t you say something at the meeting?” she said, the heiress pushing through her earth mother facade. “You’re an actor, you’re used to speaking in public.”
    “I’m not a resident. And I spoke on TV. Why didn’t you speak?” I asked her.
    She didn’t answer, but said seeing that obnoxious Hollings Fair had nauseated her as much as Edward’s bouillabaisse. And she was worried sick about Arthur. Like me, she’d called him dozens of times, only to get the “treasure” on the answering machine, repeating that they were “fine” but not up to receiving phone calls or visitors. “He’s not reaching out,” Miriam said. “Arthur isn’t asking for support. He might need his meds again.”
    We walked Miriam to her shop. Her daughter, Chloe, was behind the counter, not waiting on customers, of course, but leafing through a storybook,
The Magical Radish.
The little girl had Miriam’s auburn hair, but a smile that was more transforming. It lit up her being as she abandoned her book, calling, “Mum, mum, mum!”
    “Thank God you’re here!” the cashier said to Miriam.
    “Has Chloe been acting up?”
    The little girl came scampering out from behind the display case, from behind the shelves of amethysts and arrowheads, garnets and quartz and freshwater pearls, all sparkling among river stones dark like sea beans. She buried her head in Miriam’s skirt.
    “Chloe’s been fine, but we’ve had shoplifters.”
    “Two dirty-looking girls?”
    “A dirty boy. He almost made off with one of the paperweights.” The cashier, a high school girl, gestured at the shelf of blown glass paperweights, each with what looked like a sea anemone imprisoned inside. Expensive, imported from Scotland, the smallest cost fifty dollars.
    The cashier said a boy “who looked like he was allergic to soap