The Dead Fish Museum Read Online Free Page A

white shadow, a green light. It’s not really a star. That’s a planet—that’s Venus, Mr. Cheetam said. The goddess of love.
    That’s just a myth, Donny said, looking at his father. Bastard.
    I didn’t hear you, Mr. Cheetam said. What did you say?
    Nothing, Donny said.
    Nothing? It didn’t sound like nothing to me.
    I pitched another rock in the lake, way out there, as far as possible. We all listened. Across the water a circle spread out, wider and wider. Then, shaking with cold, Donny folded his arms around himself and yelled out, Hey, and we heard back, Hey, hey, hey, and then I yelled out, Hey, and even Mr. Cheetam joined in, and we kept hearing back, Hey, hey, hey, like there were millions of us everywhere.

 
     
 
 

     
 
    Drummond & Son
     
    Drummond opened the shop every morning at seven so he and his boy could eat breakfast while the first dropoffs were coming in. The boy liked cereal and sat at the workbench in back, slurping his milk, while Drummond occasionally hustled out to the curb to help a secretary haul a cumbersome IBM from the back seat of a car. The front of the store was a showroom for refurbished machines, displayed on shelves, each with a fresh sheet of white bond rolled into the platen, while the back was a chaos of wrecked typewriters Drummond would either salvage or cannibalize for parts someday. There were two stools and two lamps at the workbench for the rare times when the son felt like joining his father, cleaning keys, but generally after breakfast the boy spent the rest of the day sitting behind Drummond in an old Naugahyde recliner, laughing to himself and saying prayers, or wandering out to the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette. That he step outside to smoke was the only major request Drummond ever made of his son.
    “Next week’s your birthday,” Drummond said.
    “Next week.” The boy finished his cereal, plunking the spoon against the empty bowl. He said, “I think I’ll go outside.”
    “How about rinsing your bowl?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “It’s raining pretty hard out.”
    “That’s okay,” Pete said, grabbing a broken umbrella he’d found in the street, a batty contraption of bent spokes and torn black fabric.
    A clear-plastic curtain separated the two parts of the store, and Drummond kept a careful eye on his son from the bench. Drummond had acquired sole ownership of the business after his father died of emphysema, and he still remembered those last months beside him on the bench, the faint whisper as the plastic tube fed the old man oxygen. He knew the tank was pumping air through his dad’s nose and into his lungs, but day after day it sounded as though the life were leaking out of him. The elder Drummond had just cleaned his glasses with a purple shop rag and nudged them back on the bridge of his nose when he died, and it was as if, for a lingering moment, he were looking over the workbench, among a lifetime’s clutter of keys and type bars, dental tools and unraveling ribbons, for his last breath.
    Shortly after his dad died, Drummond had started bringing Pete to the shop, and he sometimes guessed that his wife, free of the boy for the first time in years, had discovered she liked living without the burden. She had hinted as much in a letter he recently received, postmarked from her new address in Portland, suggesting that he meet with a social worker to discuss “the future.” He missed his wife tremendously when he opened the envelope and saw the beautiful loops of blue cursive running across the page. He hadn’t written back yet, because he wasn’t sure what to say to this woman whose absence rendered his life so strange. They had eloped during his senior year at West Seattle High, and this would have been their silver anniversary. Without her he felt lonely, but he wasn’t angry, and he wondered if their marriage, after twenty-five years, had simply run its course.
    The sheets of white paper in the twenty or so typewriters on display waved in