Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish Page 4

  He did not smile back. His face began to crumple. “Why don’t you stay?”

  “I can’t, hon.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, pumpkin, the government’s just like a great, terrible ball, and when it starts rolling it crushes half of what it rolls over and picks up the other half. And it gets bigger and bigger and more powerful, and somebody’s got to stop it.”

  “Not you.”

  “I’ve got to try.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I don’t want to go either. I’m not even supposed to be here. I am risking arrest to sleep in my own bed and wash my hair in my own basin and kiss my own children good night.”

  “Then don’t go.”

  “I have to.”

  After she left the room, Warren crawled out of bed and listened as his mom and Aunt Pepper talked in the living room. He could hear only parts of the conversation—his mother was talking in a low excited voice—but he got the picture of things done at night, a kind of adult Halloween.

  There had been a raid on a nuclear plant. In his mind he could see his mother, face blackened, dark clothes, driving along in an old car at night, explosives in the trunk. He saw her slipping under barbed wire, over barricades, setting explosives while someone else, miles away, waiting in a phone booth, called in the bomb threat.

  “I have never hurt anybody,” she was telling Pepper.

  “Not even your kids?” Aunt Pepper asked.

  Warren glanced around the doorway then, startled at the question, and his mother’s face, scrubbed so clean it shone in the lamplight, was like it contained a light of its own.

  “The kids understand,” she answered.

  Warren had gone back to bed then, bent over because his stomach had started to hurt, yet knowing that his mother had to do these things. She was Joan of Arc. She alone could save the troubled world.

  But now … He glanced down at the postcards.

  “Dears—Today’s my birthday, so I decided to give myself a present. I went out and—”

  The bathroom door opened suddenly, and Warren’s head snapped up. There was his grandmother in the doorway. She turned on the light and started at the sight of him on the edge of the tub.

  “What are you doing in here?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” Blinking in the bright light, he palmed the postcards like a magician and held them flat against his thigh, out of sight. He got quickly to his feet. “I better get to bed. School tomorrow.”

  “What’s that you’re hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding anything. What?” He glanced around innocently, holding out his free hand. “Where?”

  “There!”

  With surprising strength she jerked up his arm, and the postcards from his mother clattered to the floor like old playing cards. His grandmother sighed. She knew what they were without looking down.

  She stared at Warren. The look in her eyes acknowledged his childish stupidity.

  Suddenly he felt a rush of anger. “Don’t look at me like that!”

  Her look did not change. She rested one hip against the basin and crossed her arms over her faded bathrobe, settling in for a long siege.

  “I said, don’t look at me like that!”

  He rushed across the cracked linoleum, his hands raised, clenched into fists. He was ready to strike her. “My mother is alive and she cares about me and she wants me and she’ll come get me when she can!”

  Her look did not change.

  His fists, raised on either side of his face, trembled, threatening to strike. He breathed in through his teeth. “You better not look at me like that!”

  “Well, if you don’t like the way I look, go ahead and hit me,” she said, her old voice surprisingly steady. “If this is what my life’s come to, you just go ahead and hit me.”

  “I will!”

  “If this is what my whole life boils down to—one daughter in Las Vegas I haven’t seen in two years, one who’s a wanted criminal, a granddaughter that thinks she’s too smart for me, and a grandson who waits in the bathroom in the middle of the night to strike me—well, if that’s what life is, just go ahead and strike!”

  Warren lowered his hands, rubbing his fingers uneasily over his thumbs. “I wasn’t waiting in here to hit you, you know that.”

  “I’ve worked all my life. I’ve raised my children and looked after my family and this is what it’s come to—being attacked by my own grandson.”

  “I’m not attacking you.” He stepped back. “You just took me by surprise. Look, don’t get upset.” It scared him when his grandmother got like this, agitated and resentful, winding herself up so tightly she would be awake all night, roaming the house, pressing her hands against her heart.

  Suddenly she sighed. “Oh, go to bed,” she said in a flat, tired voice. Warren nodded gratefully, glad to be dismissed.

  He stepped back and bent to pick up the postcards. In a sudden move his grandmother reached out and stepped on them, covering them firmly with her felt bedroom slipper.

  “Grandma!” He attempted to free one of the cards and tore off the corner. “Grandma!” He was truly distressed now. “These are postcards from Mom!” It was as if she were defiling something sacred. “Grandma!”

  She did not answer. Warren tugged at her ankle. “Let go!” But her leg was planted as firmly as a tree. “Let go!” There was more power in those doughlike ankles than he had thought.

  “Grandma!” He glanced up to see if she was playing some sort of painful, teasing game, to see if she was going to lift her foot on her own and say, “Take your cards, but the next time I find you in here …”

  It was no game. His grandmother was looking at him with eyes like steel. Her wrinkled face was set. “Go to bed,” she said.

  He looked at her for a moment, and then he got up slowly, accepting defeat. At the door he glanced back at his grandmother. Her head was raised, her chin high, her eyes stared so hard at the discolored tile that Warren felt her look went all the way through the wall to the street beyond.

  “Anyway,” he said as he stumbled down the hall to his room, “I know them by heart.”

  He flopped onto his bed. He closed his eyes. In his next movie, he decided, his grandmother would be the first victim.

  “The monster, Chief, appears to go for old women,” the policeman who discovered her body would say.

  “Mean old women, from the looks of this one.”

  Exactly.

  “Do you smell what I smell?”

  “It smells like …”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  AT LAST SOMETHING WAS happening in his goldfish movie. He could always count on something happening in his movies during first period—Language Arts. Once, he had completed an entire and complicated movie about an enormous skunk that terrorized the residents of an isolated western community.

  Skunk! had been the title (although he had originally considered Phew!), and in Skunk!, one by one, the people tried to ride out of the endangered town and get badly needed help. It was like one of those westerns where the cowboys tried to ride through Indian lines to get the troops.

  Well, every time one of the unfortunate people rode out of town, the enormous skunk would be waiting at the pass. He would be hunched down, his white stripe gleaming in the moonlight, and then he would rise up and spray the horse and rider with a force so powerful they would roll across the desert like tumble weed. His spray had the force of a blast from a riot hose.

  And then, once the people had been sprayed, they changed into mutants, hairy creatures with stripes down their backs. The first warning of the presence of one of these mutants was the pervasive odor of skunk.

  “Do you smell what I smell?” the people of the town were always asking each other.

  “It smells like …”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  The movie had been timed so perfectly that, as Mrs. Gray was saying, “That’s all for today, class. Test on Friday,” the eno
rmous skunk and all the mutants were being attacked by crop dusters spraying a combination of Lysol and Ammoniated Top Job and Skunk-Away.

  As Warren had gathered up his books, the people, transformed again into humans, were returning to their town. And as the skunk walked away from the camera, his tail high, in bright red letters appeared “The End.”

  Warren smiled. Maybe there were a few loopholes, but for a movie created entirely during first period, it wasn’t bad.

  In his goldfish movie, the police commissioner had sent an investigating committee into the sewer. There were three men on the committee, accompanied by a good-looking woman reporter who was after a story.

  As the four made their way into the dark sewer, the reporter was saying into her tape recorder, “There is a damp stillness in the air, and there is a sense of something about to happen, or”—an uneasy pause, a glance around the creepy surroundings—“a sense of something that has already happened.”

  Deep within the sewer, Bubbles, who was sleeping in the slimy waters, awakened and stirred. In the short time she had been in the sewer, she had learned to sense when someone entered the sewer. It was the way a spider senses a victim approaching her web.

  Slowly, her long golden tail curling deep in the dark water, Bubbles let herself rise to the surface.

  “I don’t know why we have to spend a perfectly good Friday evening in the sewer!” one of the committee members was complaining. He shone his flashlight into the dark recesses. “We all know what’s happened. The sewer workers have been in a bar for the past three days celebrating the World Series.”

  “But sir, there was a young girl.” The reporter consulted her notes. “A Louise Otis. How do you account for her disappearance?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a young girl’s gone off on her own. Do you know how many young girls run away every—” He broke off. “What’s this? Look. A whole area here has been cleaned. It’s strange; as if some very powerful force, a vacuum cleaner perhaps, ingested all the slime from this circle here.”

  “Yes, and here’s another one.”

  They moved around the circles, skirting the clean spots because they might contain evidence. The girl reporter knelt and touched the inner circle.

  She looked at her finger. “Not even a trace of dirt. Something very powerful has—”

  “Has what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the awed silence that followed, one of the men said, “Listen, I’ve got to be at a Boy Scout Jamboree in an hour. Why don’t we split up? We’ll cover more ground. Let’s meet back here in a half hour.”

  Warren loved it when people split up. “You go this way and I’ll go that way” was when things really got scary, if a director knew what he was doing. And at this point Warren did.

  The fat member of the committee in the Boy Scout uniform would get it first, he decided. The man was moving into the tunnel where Bubbles waited. As he rounded the bend he began to whistle a campfire song to keep up his spirits.

  Below, Bubbles looked up through the murky water and caught sight of the formidable body moving along the side. The man’s footsteps echoed through the tunnel. Three hundred and fifty pounds of food wrapped in a brown uniform. And Bubbles was hungry. She had not eaten in three days. Her fantail swished with silent power through the water. Her bulging eyes blinked—

  Warren broke off, his head held to one side in thought. Did goldfish’s eyes blink? Did goldfish have eyelids?

  They would have to be very large eyelids—that was for sure—and Warren thought he would have noticed large eyelids. Still, he made a mental note to stop by the pet department at Woolworth’s on the way home from school and check it out. He liked to be authentic.

  Back in the sewer the fat man noticed something in the water—a swirling of golden color, veils turning below the surface.

  He was curious. He moved to the edge, holding his light out over the water. He saw an enormous shadow below. He couldn’t quite make it out. He leaned closer. He saw fins … eyes … a mouth. Why, it looked like a goldfish, but no goldfish could be that large. The thing had to weigh two thousand pounds!

  He was now leaning over the water like one of the spectators at Sea World feeding the porpoises. He was just ready to call the others when suddenly the water was stirred by one enormous bubble. BLOOP! How interesting! The man—

  “Warren!”

  —went down on one knee to see better. And then the goldfish rose out of the water. The man’s eyes popped. His mouth dropped open. He fell back on the seat of his Boy Scout uniform. His lantern clattered to the ground. There was an enormous slurping sound S-L-U-R-P and—

  “Warren Otis!”

  He looked up. His lips were still forming the word “slurp.”

  “Me?” He pointed to himself.

  The movie had been so real, so vivid, that he had thought he was actually sitting in a theater. He was startled to see the classroom, the sun streaming in the window, the teacher moving down the aisle toward him.

  “Yes, Warren, you.”

  “What is it, Mrs. Gray?” he managed to ask in a normal voice.

  “I asked if you had finished your sentences.”

  “My what?”

  “Your sentences—the sentences using your spelling words.”

  “Oh, no, not quite.”

  “Let me see what you’ve done.”

  She came back and stood by his desk. “You scared me,” he explained weakly. “I slammed my notebook shut.” He made a pretense of opening the notebook, turning through the pages.

  There wasn’t much to turn through. It was an old notebook of Weezie’s, worn so thin on the corners that the cardboard showed through. He had fewer papers between his dividers than anybody in the class. “Well, it’s here somewhere,” he said. His face was beginning to burn.

  “Try to find it, Warren,” Mrs. Gray said. “It has to be turned in at the end of class.”

  “It will be.”

  As she moved to the front of the room, she said, “The reason I gave you this time to do your sentences, class, was so that you would have time tonight to watch the special ‘The Origin of Language’ on channel nine.”

  At the front of the room she turned. “If you aren’t going to use the time to good advantage, well, then next time …”

  As she trailed off Warren could feel students looking at him with open animosity. “Next time she gives us homework, it’s his fault,” a girl in the third row said, jerking her thumb in his direction.

  “What page are we on?” Warren asked the boy beside him. The boy showed him. “Could I borrow your book for a minute?”

  He turned to the girl on his other side. “Can I borrow a sheet of paper?” He liked to spread his borrowing around.

  “Don’t you ever have any paper?” she asked.

  “I’m getting some this afternoon.”

  “I’ve heard that before.” Disgusted, the girl ripped a sheet from her spiral notebook. Flecks of torn paper fluttered to the floor. “Here.”

  “Thanks.”

  With his eyes shifting rapidly from the spelling book to his paper, Warren began to write, carefully underlining each spelling word as he completed a sentence.

  Try to be sensible.

  Don’t be improper.

  He was lucky it was a list of adjectives. Even so, he knew his paper would be returned with a red zero at the top, but he didn’t care.

  Be diligent.

  Never be uninteresting.

  When the bell rang he sighed with relief. He had finished his last sentence. “Don’t call others ignorant.” He put a period at the end and dropped the paper on Mrs. Gray’s desk.

  “I usually enjoy your sentences,” Mrs. Gray said. “Sometimes they are very original.”

  “These are more like”—he paused—“like rules.” He gave her what he hoped was an appealing smile.

  As he left the room his smile faded. Head lowered, he made his way through the shuffling, shoving crowd to Science.


  “Things are quiet around here.”

  “Yeah, too quiet.”

  WARREN STOOD IN THE pet department of Woolworth’s, surrounded by the hum of gerbils on their exercise wheels, the cheep of birds in their cages. He was watching the goldfish. They did not have eyelids. He moved nearer, pressing his face so close to the aquarium that a mist formed on the glass from his breath.

  You believe that you know everything about goldfish, he was thinking, staring intently at the fish, but there’s always something to learn. He watched as one of the biggest goldfish, eyes bulging, fantail swirling, wiggled through the little oriental bridge at the bottom of the aquarium. His eyes lit with pleasure.

  Maybe at the bottom of the sewer was some sort of old structure, and in the movie Bubbles could hide there, under the slime-strewn archway.

  Suddenly Warren wished he had enough money to buy a goldfish. A goldfish of his own, he thought, would inspire him. And later, when he no longer needed inspiration, when the movie was over, he could—he smiled slightly—he could flush it into the sewer and into a new, fuller life of its own.

  Warren blinked. He focused his eyes on the goldfish. It would be the first time he had ever had a miniature model of one of his movie monsters. He lifted his head, his eyes bright. “How much are the goldfish with the big eyes?” he asked the clerk.

  “The Orientals? Seventy-nine.”

  “Oh.”

  She reached for the net to scoop one out. “Is there any particular one you’d like?”

  Warren’s hands opened and closed in his empty pockets. “Seventy-nine cents is a little out of my price range,” he said, using the phrase his grandmother used when she was broke.

  “The small ones are twenty-nine.”

  “I’ll think about it.” He wanted one of the big goldfish badly enough to steal it. He stepped back. However, stealing a goldfish was not practical, he thought, unless a person had a long arm and a waterproof pocket.

  He straightened, and with one final, regretful look at the aquarium, he walked past the garden tools and through the toy department to the front of the store.