Fishboy by Mark Richard

Author:Mark Richard [Richard, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5055-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

Mr. Watt said it was bad luck to throw a piece of rope overboard when I told him what had happened. He said it was bad luck to throw rope overboard, bad luck to turn hatch covers over, bad luck to play cards while a net is out. He said there were always good reasons for superstitions, that rope can foul a propeller, that rogue waves could flood uncovered hatches, that a man with a strong poker hand will forget his nets and let them split with an abundance of fish. Mr. Watt said there was always a good reason for superstition, and I shouldn’t have thrown the knotted rope overboard.

But I didn’t throw the rope over, I said to him. I was smearing warm lard on the places the sun had burned his inside-out organs and flesh. I tried to tell him how the Idiot let go of the rope while we were trying to save the two men.

Yes, but you untied it in the first place, said Mr. Watt, and I could not deny that. I had not denied it, even when John had asked me out on deck if I had or not, and I nodded yes. It would have been hard to deny anyway with Ira Dench saying he saw me do it, he saw me do it while he and Lonny and the man who said Fuck were fighting the cook. Ira Dench said he saw me look over the rail at the poor men and then he saw me untie their knotted rope.

You are an evil little boy, John had said to me.

I told you he was evil, Ira Dench said, Ira Dench, John, Lonny, and the weeping Fuck man having subdued the rumored cook. It was John who finally laid the cook out with one punch, one punch squarely in the face, the force of it laying the cook neatly on his back, a great weight dropped from a small height. We stood around the cook and watched his rubbery face decompress the pit the punch had made. An amber liquid oozed from one nostril, then more amber liquid slid from the other.

I think you ruptured his brain bag, said Ira Dench, and John said he hadn’t thought he had hit him that hard.

Damn it, and I’m about to starve, Lonny said. Nice going, John, he said.

As we looked down at the cook and Lonny’s stomach rumbled, there was movement in the cook’s nose. It was not twitching like he was about to sneeze. The movement came from underneath the skin, like a mole tunneling through cropped grass.

The thing that crawled out of the cook’s nose threading through his nostril hairs fell dazed on the cook’s upper lip and swam on its back. It then lifted its wings and buzzed away. Another bee crawled from the other nostril, then two more, the makings of a small swarm, the last blown out by a snort, the last a large queen, trailing honey and a thread of snot.

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