Multiplex Fandango (17 page)

‘To hunt you, to kill you?’

It is the way.

‘Then what is the choice you speak of?’

Would you die for me?

‘For you?’

Trey was sure he didn’t understand the question.
Die for a fish?
For a catfish?
Why should he give his life up for a… but it wasn’t just a fish.
Could a fish do this?
Trey remembered what Greg had said about the Catfish Gods.
It was stupid, but he was alive and not breathing.
Only a God could make that happen.
He didn’t know what to say.
Trey thought of Billy Prescott.
Had he been asked the question?
Had he answered wrong?

‘I don’t understand.’

Would you die for me?

Trey stared hard at the fish hovering in the water before him, tender whiskers caressing his cheeks.
It was easily more than a hundred pounds.
Maybe ten times that.
Its eyes were bottomless black pools, but held strange warmth. Trey could not deny its majesty.
It was magnificent.
It would be perfect above the mantle of any fireplace, eclipsing the largest swordfish.
It would make a bass of any size appear to be a pathetic minnow.

Trey knew his answer was important, but he knew, as well, that the fish understood his every thought.

‘Why should I die for you?
I don’t understand.’
He
steeled
himself for death, but pleaded desperately for an answer.

Because I would die for you.

The answer surprised him.
A fish like this, powerful, magical… a Catfish God… would die for him?
Truly, he was nothing special.
Sure, he felt himself important, but in the greater world picture, he was nothing.
What would make this catfish die for him?
He knew his mother would die for him.
He knew his father would as well.
And his grandfather, the old man wouldn’t hesitate.
Till this day, as he was kneeling before the casket, Trey had never told anyone that he had begged God to take him instead; to let his grandfather live again.
If he died now… if he was to perish down in the depths of
Chickamauga
Reservoir… maybe then he could see his grandfather again.
Maybe he could make him some more martinis as the old man lorded over the world.
Maybe he would see him smile.

Trey stared deep into the eyes of the fish, alien, but mysteriously human, searching for the answer.
There, among the blackness, he saw the same look that Guinn, his mother, his father, his grandfather, even Greg on occasion, had given him.
It was the feeling that pervaded his being.
Instead of drowning, instead of feeling the quick burning warmth of a lungful of watery death, he felt the warmth of love.
Unconditional and pure, it was there for him, just for being alive.
Would grandfather want him to die for him?
He pictured the old man’s tall John Wayne features and knew the answer.

‘Yes.
I would die for you.’

Then you understand.
Go in peace and live long.

The firm grip of the weeds suddenly released him and Trey felt himself floating towards the surface.
He watched the imperious figure of the Catfish God until it had became one with the shadowy depths.
It wasn’t until his head bobbed to the surface that his body contracted and jackknifed.
He automatically relented and allowed his body to breathe in the sweetness of the putrid, yet life-giving air of the dock.

“Trey.
Trey.
Trey,” came the jubilant shouts.

He glanced up and saw Greg, cheeks puffy and hair matted as if the storm had come and gone.
His eyes were as red as his hair and his voice held the hoarseness of a widow.

“Trey.
I thought you were dead,” said the boy, tears renewing their slalom through his freckles.
“It’s been hours.”

“Hours?” asked Trey absently as he levered himself into the boat.
He examined the sky and noticed the sun setting.

“I… I couldn’t leave.
I… I thought you were dead.
I didn’t know what to tell people.”

Trey stared at his friend openly with a fondness that hadn’t been there before.
Greg noticed it and his eyes widened.
Then his face went serious and he wiped his cheeks.

“How can you be alive?”

Trey shook his head. “I have no idea, man.
All I know right now is that I love you for waiting.”

“Yecch,” Greg said, poking his tongue between his lips and smiling.
“You gay or something?”

Trey looked off toward the community dock and began to paddle.
“Naw.
Just happy to be here.”

His grandpa used to say that.

***

Story Notes: Catfish Gods was written at one sitting during a thunderstorm in
1999
. Darktales had already approached me
about making Scary Rednecks
be their first published book (it ended up being the third book for marketing reasons) and I needed to write six stories in six weeks. Of course if writing were really as easy as writing a story a night, this wouldn’t be my first solo collection. But the idea of grandfathers and unconditional love had been sticking with me. I’d lost my grandfather a few years previously and was recently divorced and away from my kids. I knew the difference between unconditional love and conditional love and wanted to somehow tie it into fishing, which was a bond my grandfather and I held
(and also shared by my father and me, but that story has yet to be written)
.
The basis and the setup for the story really happened. Everything was exactly as it really was right up until the point where the character goes down deep into the water. Fans of
Scarecrow Gods
will also recognize the location.

NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 7

Forever Beneath

the
Scorpion
Tree

Starring Ba
o
-yu as a stranger in a strange land

“Yet another reason why the decadent West should be avoided at all costs. What happens to our good comrade could happen to us all.”

– People’s Liberation Army Magazine

A Matte Finished Film

The tree spoke, fed by memories. Soon, it would flower and blossom, become that which it was. Until then, it would need those like her, those who were desperate, lost, hurt and forgotten; those whose memories could nourish back to health that which had been torn asunder by the unfaithful servants of a fickle god.

***

She huddled beneath a cloak as the storm raged above her, two spinning, snapping, clawing clouds of light and dark, each whirling like a flock of birds, flipping, turning, twisting, biting. One moment they came together in a heart-stopping screech, the next they separated, spiraling away in opposite trajectories, soaring as if they’d never encountered one another, and free to never again be confronted.

***

Her name was Bao-yu, which meant
precious jade
in her native language. Her father had named her when she’d been born and had thought of her as anything but precious while he’d been alive. Finally the police had come and taken him. Then they sent a bill for his death along with the bullet they used to execute him. Then her mother had died in a fire. It hadn’t taken long for Bao-yu to realize that she was no longer precious. After all, how precious could she be if everyone who’d ever known her had died?

Still, she
was
rare, all the more because she was lost in a desert far across an ocean. She was Chinese, and desperate, and running, and the Mexican desert was the last place she thought she’d ever be.

“
¿Quieres un poco de agua?
” the old man had asked, while they both huddled in the shade of a giant boulder.

She’d stared at him incomprehensively, not understanding what he’d said, her eyes darting from his mouth to his hands, well aware that if he tried to do something, she’d be ill prepared to stop him. But he’d noticed her fear and had pressed his hands softly against the air as if to say,
I won’t do anything to harm you
. She’d had little choice but to believe him. Other than the two young Mexican men, he was the only one she’d seen after the rest were killed. Plus, he was a
Laoren
, an old man, and of all the people she’d traveled with during the long journey from northern
China
, he was the least threatening.

Her journey had begun like so many others. With nothing to lose and little to gain by staying in a country where her value was marked in heads of cabbage, she sought out those who made it their job to transport people. They called themselves Snakeheads and had decades of practice ‘
sliding immigrants under the noses of the fat Americans
,’ as one had said. All she had to pay them was $23,000, or work it off in a factory north of
Phoenix
. $23,000. Might as well have been a million. One had to be desperate to embrace such a debt, because with the Snakeheads, the debts were mortgaged in blood.

***

She found the cloth partially buried in the middle of a dry lakebed. The ground around it was hard, flaking away like the scales of a carp. The prickly things that grew in the desert stopped to within a dozen meters, either unable to, or unwilling to grow any nearer. As she approached, she felt its pull, as if it knew she was near and was causing her to move closer. But that couldn’t really have been happening
.
After all, it was a desert night, and a cold American wind cut through her, like the Siberian winds of her youth. It was she who wanted the cloth. All she wanted was to be warm. She had to tug it free from the sand. Although the moon shone high above her, there was no reflection in the oily black fabric, as if it wasn’t even there. Or as she’d learn later, as if the material inhaled the light.

But all of these thoughts happened later… when she was in the crosshairs of the border guard, when she was about to die, when her entire world was about to change, like the night she learned that she hadn’t been the first born and the true value her father had placed on her head.

With shaking hands, Bao-yu wrapped the cloth around her trembling body. She didn’t even shake it clean and could feel the hard bits of sand and dirt pressing against her skin. She was thankful as she continued to shamble vaguely in the direction she thought was the way to
America
. She only stumbled once, a prickly cactus reaching out to jab at her legs. Eventually, when exhaustion overwhelmed her, she managed to find a low point in the ground that protected her from the wind. She curled herself into a ball and wrapped the cloth around her. She soon found sleep, and like she was once again in the womb, dreamed of what could be on the other side of the thin, pliable skein separating her from the rest of the universe.

***

Fifteen Chinese had been transferred from the shipping container. She’d lost track of the time the journey across the ocean had taken. All she knew was that when the doors had opened, the smell of clean air had made her weep with joy. The stench from the waste buckets was horrible, but nothing compared to the smell of the old woman who’d died on the third day.

Bao-yu had first smelled that smell when she was back in her home watching her mother make
baozi
with plum sauce. The sickly sweet scent always reminded her of childhood, even when she passed steam barrels on the streets of
Harbin
after her mother’s death. But the smell in the container had grown and deepened and became part of their every breath, reminding her not of something sweet, but of something dead. And when she’d been forced to use the buckets, she tried not to look at the body stuffed into the corner. She’d tried not to see the old woman’s ankles turn first blue, then black, then some color that blended too well with the dark.

They’d been separated into several moving vans. Hers was already crammed so full with equally terrified Mexicans that everyone was forced to stand. The truck ran hard up the side of a mountain, then back down the other side. To keep from breaking their necks, they were forced to hug each other, the van bucking and jumping over rocks and desert scrub, the metal walls anything but tender to their shoulders, elbows and heads. She’d lost count of the screams and shrieks, many of them her own, until the inevitable happened. The van rose one last time, then twisted in a way it hadn’t before, sending her and the others spiraling against each other in a free-for-all of broken bones and blood.

Through some laughable vicissitude of fate, she was able to crawl free, along with a pair of young Mexican men and an older Mexican man. The young men, who’d been traveling together, limped back the way the van had come. Bao-yu watched them go, then turned to follow the track north. She’d come so far and was loath to even take one backwards step. The
Laoren
followed her, and after a few hand signals, she allowed him to fall in beside her.

***

The storm buffeted the fabric as if it would tear it from her grasp. Screams of the dead and dying were born by the wind. Flashes of light and dark illuminated her dreams. The things that reminded her of flocks of birds had found each other once more, and they struck with thunderous crashes. Pieces fell away as the black flock grew smaller. Again and again the white flock attacked. Again and again pieces of the darkness fell to the earth. Soon all that was left was a single black bird-shaped thing, flying hard, darting left, then right, then swinging around in desperate geometric twists. But soon, it was overcome by the cloud of white, falling dead and lonely from the sky.

Then she saw the tree.

***

The smell of cooking woke her. She was starving.
Laoren
had a fire going and was cooking cactus pads on the ends of sticks. She held the fabric tightly around her, then hurried into the desert to find a place to use the bathroom. As she squatted, she stared at her fingers. She snapped them once, then twice. She remembered again the tree in her dream. There’d been a sound like the snapping of a hundred fingers. She remembered also that the ground around the tree was covered with bones. For some reason she smiled. And she held the smile all the way back to the fire.

Laoren
held one of the cactus pads out to her. “
Comer
,” he said.

She stared at the cactus and the viscous spines. She knew he wanted her to eat it, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

The
Loaren
made a drama out of chewing daintily on his own cactus pad. They dripped with watery juices. Occasionally, he’d use his fingers to pull out the spines, which had loosened with the cooking. He tried twice more to offer her a cactus pad on a stick, but each time she declined. Finally, he buried his head to the task and began to eat.

She stood and walked into the desert a few meters. Absently she snapped her fingers as she once again saw the tree. It had a wide trunk and tremendous shade, like a giant, old jacaranda. Things hung from its branches that she couldn’t quite make out. She snapped her fingers again, then picked up a rock.

She returned to the fire and walked straight to the
Laoren
. He glanced up as she neared and offered her a smile. His lips were chapped. He was missing several teeth. Green pulp from the cactus dribbled down his chin. He seemed incapable of offering any offense, which was why it surprised her when she brought the rock around in a hard swing, catching him on the side of the face. Blood flew into the fire as his head rocked back. He brought his hands up to ward off the next blow, but it never came. Instead, she dropped the rock and ran. And as she ran, she hugged the cloth more tightly around her. It felt like the arms of her mother. And she spoke to it, crying.

***

He’d had the look of her father. Was that why she’d hit him? She couldn’t figure out why it was that she would do such a thing. She’d never hit anyone in her life, not even as a child. She’d wanted to sometimes, but she’d never once converted that thought to action.

She remembered when she’d been her most angry. It had been after her father had died and her mother had spoken to her in a whisper one evening after too much
baijiou
. The white liquor had loosened her tongue and unlevered something that had been held too tightly and for too long. Bao-yu had learned that she’d had an older sister who’d died. The death had been sad, but since Bao-yu had never known her, it was hard to feel the sadness her mother felt. But when she’d learned what her father had done, her anger had filled her.

Somehow Bao-yo made a circle and was once again approaching the fire. The
Laoren
sat huddled beside it, cradling his face in his hands. He heard her and turned, bringing up a hand to ward her off. Without even thinking, she ran towards him, snatched up the rock, and began to pummel his face and head. He screamed for her to stop, and tried to push her away, but he hadn’t the strength of her fury.

She swung with an emotion that had begun to grow the night her mother had told her she hadn’t been the firstborn. She’d been the second born and been left in a back alley to die, her father’s desperate response to China’s One-Child Policy, its exception to allow two children if the first was a girl, and his selfishness at desiring a son. But the true tragedy of that day wasn’t her own. Within six hours of her father abandoning her to the harsh elements of a northern Chinese winter, her sister was struck by a bus as she kneeled on the sidewalk to tie her shoes in front of their apartment building. According to her mother’s tale, her father had gone back to search for her in the alley, finally finding her swathed in dirty blankets, rescued by a homeless porcelain repairman and his family. It had cost her father a week’s salary to buy her back, but the alternative had been impossible to comprehend. After all, he was willing to accept the loss of one girl, but not two. And her name? Her fucking
precious
name? She never did find out what she had been named when she was born. Instead, she’d been given the name of her dead sister. How precious could she really be if she was made of counterfeit jade?

She finally stopped swinging when
Laoren’s
face had gone to pulp. She could no longer recognize his features. Where his nose, eyes and mouth had been was now a topographical lesson in what stone could do to flesh. She squatted beside him. Absently she dropped the rock and grabbed one of the sticks of roasted cactus. She bit into it, suddenly ravenous. She didn’t even notice when the spines tore into her face. She was too intent on remembering her father, wondering what her sister would have looked like, and whether she would have traveled to
America
if she’d had a sister with whom to spend her life instead of being all alone in the northern Chinese city of
Harbin
.

She wondered what her name had really been.

***

The clicking drew Bao-yu through the darkness. She was surrounded by darkness. Before her was a portal of light. She walked towards it, but it didn’t seem to get any closer. Plodding, one foot in front of the other, plodding with her hands gripping the cloth, pulling it tight around her, plodding, as if it would take forever to reach wherever it was she was going. Then as suddenly as she’d thought about the tree, she was there.

The clicking was deafening. She tried to block her ears, but couldn’t because she refused to let go of the cloth. So her head wobbled left and right, first pressing into one shoulder, then the other, unable to find a place where the noise could be staunched. She scraped her cheeks where the cactus spines had found a home, sending shivers of pain through her lips. There must have been two dozen of them poking out of her. Odd that she’d never thought to remove them.