Away with the Fishes (2 page)

Trevor and Branson had been as close as brothers in their boy days. They still were, though Branson’s time abroad, eight long years for his teacher’s training, left him feeling more an outsider than an islander. Time off an island will do that to you, take it from me. Without Trevor’s conspiring and enthusiastic ear, Branson’s experiences far from Oh were mostly insipid, and it was with great joy that he had returned—over fifteen years ago now—to take up his post at the Boys’ School, and his place at the edge of Trevor’s bakery counter at the end of every day.

Like most of the islanders, Officer Raoul Orlean, Head of Customs and Excise, made the occasional stop at Trevor’s Bakery, too, though his reasons for doing so were strictly professional. Raoul didn’t go in search of fritters or friends, but to sniff out facts and clues. He had a soft spot for what he called truths of the plain-as-noses-on-faces variety (as opposed to island magic), and more than once he had caught whiff of one at Trevor’s. His nose and his forty-odd years in the service of the island’s imports and exports had propelled him to the Office’s top rank (he started out a mere stamper of passports at the airport), and pushed him to the verge of retirement dozens of times. Though he threatened to leave his
job on a weekly basis, the case had yet to come up that would send him packing. He cursed every time a tough one arose, then didn’t sleep until he had solved it, each recovered tariff and levied fine a matter of personal and patriotic pride.

Bruce, on the other hand, checked in at the bakery at least once a day. He knew, as Raoul did, that the bakery was a hotbed of information and buns both, and unlike Raoul, whose wife Ms. Lila cooked up all a man could ask for, Bruce had an equal need for newsworthy gossip and pineapple cake.

Around the time that Bruce feared for what Oh had (or worse, maybe
didn’t
have) in store, he was not, as I said, the only one to sense the island’s troubles. Trevor and his customers did, too—with the exception of Raoul, who found it rather refreshing that the mosquitoes had stopped stinging and that the islanders had stopped discerning impossible whispers in the shimmy of the trees. While Bruce fretted and pleaded with the lazy stars, and while all the bakery’s patrons but Raoul talked of little else, Trevor, on the other hand, knew that nothing any of them said or did (or didn’t say or do) could hasten the island’s pace. He had spent his whole life on Oh, every single second of it minus those he spent swimming in the sea; he knew that the island would come around when it wanted—and not a minute before.

Trevor knew the island so well, in fact, that he perceived the exact moment when Oh’s tantrum was about to end. He announced it at the bakery one late, cloudy night, over hot bread, ginger beer, and a pair of lonely hearts.
Front-page
lonely hearts.

2

“O
ho!” Trevor snorted as he banged his hand on the bakery counter. “Now who do you suppose wrote that?!” He had just finished reading aloud, for the tenth time that day, the unusual (and already infamous) ad of the lovelorn man in the
Morning Crier
, the one with the fishing boat and seeking a bicycled bride who could cook.

“He put it in an envelope with money and slipped it under the door,” Bruce announced. “I don’t have any idea who it was.”

“But the front page, Bruce? Couldn’t you bury it somewhere inside the paper?” Branson asked.

“It’s better than a sunset,” he rebutted. “I thought it might give us all something to do. You know, we figure out who this fellow is and then we help him find a dainty-handed mate on two wheels. Preferably with a basket of macaroni pie dangling off the handlebars.”

Branson didn’t insist, for Bruce was loath ever to admit any error in journalistic judgment. Imagine his conviction when it appeared he had solved both of his problems in one fell swoop: the islanders were buying up the paper faster than Bruce could print it and they could talk of nothing else. The lonely fisherman
had become an instant local hero. As the customers filed through the bakery for their daily bread, they elevated him to near-saint status. A hard worker! A strong and decent young man! One of Oh’s finest, who sought nothing more than a dainty and capable woman with whom to go fish, to go forth and to multiply! (They never did figure where the bicycle fit in.) That such a man should be reduced to advertising his basic needs was a tragedy! A travesty! A testimony to the malevolence of every woman on Oh who would let such a catch bob sad, ignored, and unhitched in the gentle sea!

Raoul, who, generally speaking, didn’t give a flying fish about lonely hearts ads, quietly took in the scene, paying particular attention to what Bruce had to say. Though Bruce and Raoul weren’t the closest of friends, they went back a long way, and Raoul consulted with Bruce on cases once in a while. When he heard Bruce mention the envelope surreptitiously slipped under the door, Raoul pricked up his ears. He, too, had found a strange, unsigned message that day, and it was precisely because of it that he had stopped in the bakery to sniff for clues. Was some anonymous island trouble-maker on the loose? And what did he mean dragging Raoul into whatever he was up to?

But by the time the evening drew to a close, Raoul had convinced himself that Bruce’s anonymous ad had nothing to do with Raoul’s own mysterious communication, for which there simply must be some perfectly reasonable—and plain—explanation. He wouldn’t give it another thought.

And yet.

Like a gnat, the strange message flitted inside Raoul’s head, and he could focus on little else. He nodded distractedly to Bruce as Bruce left. He listened to, but didn’t hear, the wave of talk that
swelled and engulfed the bakery, finally splashing Trevor’s customers out into the empty street. Through the glass of the storefront, it looked to Raoul as if they floated off into the dark, clinging eerily to their plump and plastic-wrapped loaves like castaways to buoys.

He had a very bad feeling that the gnat in his brain was about to become a fat and proper fly.

3

A
gnat on the brain was nothing new for Raoul Orlean. His problems always whizzed about his head like so many winged insects, the severity of each tribulation directly proportional to the size of the fly that denoted it. At any given time, Raoul was plagued by a flurry of critters representing his daily obligations: a fruitfly for the phone bill he had to pay at Oh-Tel, a midge for the letter of reprimand to a subordinate found drunk at his post, a whole dozen of gnats for the eggs his wife asked him to pick up at the market. There were houseflies (the kitchen windowframe in need of repair) and gardenflies (a rat that had his way with Ms. Lila’s melons). There were craneflies, blowflies, and bottleflies in blue and green. This day’s fly, though—this Tuesday fly that turned up at the bakery—was unusual even for Raoul. It was a shocking, mocking shade of hot pink.

To start, Tuesday was supposed to be Raoul’s day off. He spent every one of them at the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library, under the watchful eye of his librarian wife, relishing the plain-as-noses-on-faces truths the library shelves housed. Only the most demanding of Customs cases or the most imperative of personal chores could force
Raoul to skip his weekly visit. What kept him from his books on
this
Tuesday was a diplomatic affair, one of utmost importance. His wife, for weeks, had been pestering him to re-paint their chipped and flaking cottage, and marital tensions had risen to the point of stand-off. Ms. Lila had flat out refused to prepare Raoul’s breakfast until he started the task at hand. To emphasize her point, she had laid his place at the table that morning with brushes and scrapers and paint thinner, in lieu of his typical Tuesday coffee and oatmeal and milk. She instructed her husband to settle for a quick cup of tea and to get to work. The cottage, though expansive, was short and single-storied, and if he put his mind to it, she said as she dashed off to the library, he might get a first coat on all the way round.

Ms. Lila had decided the house could do with some brightening up while they were at it, and so she had chosen, to replace the pale yellow of its exterior, a vibrant, cheerful pink. From among the rainbow of offerings at Higgins Hardware, Home, and Garden, she had purchased what the salesman called “Playful Rose,” and had had big tins of it delivered. For the shutters and sills, she bought “Coconut Cloud.”

Because Ms. Lila generally demanded little, and because Raoul had learned early on what unhappy wives were capable of, he heaved a nostalgic sigh for the pages that would remain unread that day, put the kettle on, and fetched some tattered trousers and a worn-out shirt. In a corner of the yard, under an almond tree, he laid out his implements and paint tins, then he ducked back inside to sip his tea. His stomach would require more sustenance than that, but he would work for two or three hours first, then break for an early lunch.

As the sun climbed, Raoul scraped and sanded and stirred and got one whole wall completely covered in the bright, playful hue.
He stood back to admire his work, guessing by the sun’s position that noon had come and gone, and rubbing his grumbling tummy, told himself he had earned some bread and cheese. He was delighted to discover that Ms. Lila, who really was a good sport, had instead left him breaded fish for lunch, which he put between two slices of her homemade bread, chasing it with warm mango and cold beer.

His belly full, Raoul went back outside just before two o’clock. The first pink wall dried in the sun as he made his way past it and on to the next one. When he rounded the corner of the cottage, so engrossed was he in evaluating the morning’s work that he failed to see a paintbrush lying in his path and trod on it. It sent him stumbling off balance, and he fell.

“How the devil did that get there?” he wondered, certain he had not left any brushes lying about, especially not ones still dripping with paint.

“What in the…?” His train of thought, and the words it dragged behind it, stalled as Raoul caught sight of the yellow wall he was about to attend to. It appeared to be marred by some sort of bright pink graffiti. He looked around, but could see no mischievous youths running off, could hear no taunts and giggles from the bush behind his house. He leaned back and took in the marking on the wall. It was hastily painted and running and drippy. It seemed to say FIND A BAKER. Why would someone tell him to do
that
? Raoul had plenty of home-baked bread. And why with Playful Rose on a faded yellow wall?

He got up off the ground and backed away to take in the whole of the words. The spacing between the letters was uneven and sloppy, as were some of the letters themselves, but none of the readings he imposed on them made any more sense than FIND A BAKER.

“Stupid kids,” Raoul spat, sure that the words must be a reference to some silly teenage joke or some carnival song that eluded him. He would go on with his work and not give it another thought. Then he wondered, Should he paint over it? Might he be destroying evidence? Although he couldn’t answer when he asked himself “Evidence of what?” Raoul decided to skip the second of the cottage’s four sides and to go straight on to the third. Perhaps later his wife would see some sense in the writing on the wall.

Raoul hummed as he worked, scraping and smoothing the wood before him, but he couldn’t resist the urge to peer around the corner every so often, to see if the strange graffito was still there, and whether viewing it anew might yield any insight. He finally grew so preoccupied that he abandoned his work to search the immediate vicinity for clues.

He examined more closely the paint tins that stood under the almond tree and discovered behind one of them a small spill, into which someone—the vandal, presumably—had stepped. Not fully, not enough to leave behind proper footprints, but enough to leave a series of pink smears leading away from the yard. Raoul ran inside for his magnifying glass, but it was of no help in determining what sort of shoe or what sort of foot was attached to the guilty party. He followed the smears for as long as he could, but they gradually faded into nothing, the culprit’s heel wiped clean by the woodsy brush surrounding the cottage.

“Hmm,” Raoul said. He had come to the end of his property and found himself on the edge of the road parallel to his. He looked left, and he looked right, and he looked through his magnifying glass, which he held up to eye level, expecting to see heaven-knew-what sort of clue in thin air, but to no avail. He turned and
made his retreat. It was nearly evening, and Ms. Lila would soon be home.

While Raoul walked, he wondered who could have painted such a silly message on his house. He turned the strange rosy words over and over in his head, dismissing them in one instant, and theorizing about them in the next. Despite his wonderings and theories, when he got back to the cottage, the pink fly that would knock against Raoul’s brain later that night was still nothing more than a niggling gnat. It niggled sufficiently, however, to drive Raoul just a little bit mad. Mad enough that, without waiting to hear what Ms. Lila might make of the day’s events, he had put away his paint and brushes, spruced himself up, and gone to the bakery to look for the baker.

Alone there with Trevor and Branson (at the end of the night that had witnessed the debate about the love-starved fisherman), Raoul looked on from a few feet away as the two friends, under a bulb that hung bright and naked over the smudged glass counter, snacked on fresh, steamy bread with butter, and ice-cold ginger beer. (Raoul had declined a portion.)

“This is it, you know, Bran,” Trevor said, flatly tapping the folded newspaper with the lonely hearts ad against the counter’s edge.

“What is?” Raoul asked anxiously.

But before Trevor could answer that Oh was waking up, before he could explain to Raoul that the island was stretching and twisting and about to jump out of its bed, the wind, which had for months sat quietly in the yard and listened to their chatter, forced its way through the window with such violence that the lightbulb swung and crashed into the ceiling. In the new and sudden darkness, Raoul heard Trevor move and chuckle, crushing with his
trainers the bits of bulb that littered the floor. Raoul couldn’t see him but knew that Trevor was shaking his head, in relief and resignation.