Away with the Fishes (6 page)

When he was seven, he was struck by a terrible case of wanderlust. His feet itched so badly that he ran around the island quicker
than ever, which made his small island seem that much smaller. He knew every inch of it by heart and longed to explore the other islands he spotted off shore, adrift and beckoning and promising of adventure.

Though not every island boasts a dose of magic equal to that found on Oh, where it gushes about like so many raging rivers, each island has a trickle, a stream, a brook that springs to life now and again after an especially hearty rain. Quick’s island was no different. Right about the time that his feet were too itchy to bear, a droplet of magic with Quick’s name on it burst like silver fireworks in a still, dark sky, leaving Quick gaping wide-eyed in awe.

A ship had laid anchor off the island’s shore!

Quick had never seen anything like it. The biggest craft on
his
island were simple fishing boats. Once in a while some slightly bigger fishing boat arrived from he-knew-not-where with supplies and mail for the islanders, but those boats were mere toys compared to the one he stood staring at (a pirate ship, for sure!) on the day of the magic droplet. It wasn’t long before the monstrous craft lowered a smaller vessel into the water, filled with six white faces all capped with blond hair. So that’s what a pirate looks like! he said to himself.

A nearby clump of manchineel trees hid Quick from view as the pirates dragged their boat ashore and readied themselves to explore. They had sacks and spyglasses, compasses and charts, maps and blades. They spoke something close to Quick’s language, which didn’t startle or surprise him, for he was seven and words were words. That there might be other varieties of them never crossed his mind.

The so-called pirates were in fact nothing of the sort. They were sea-faring merchants and a scientist or two, who sought profit and specimens of leaf and bug to take back home—“home”
a great white bear of a faraway land that had once briefly hugged Quick’s black and tiny island in its colonial paws. So the men Quick spied on (or rather their troublesome grandfathers) were not entirely unknown to the sand on which they tread. And because the sins of the fathers are the missteps of the sons, the landing party had hardly covered fifty meters, when one of its men put his foot into a hole.

“Ow!” the unlucky devil cried out.

“What is it?” This question, as near as Quick could tell, came from the pirate leader.

“My ankle! I think it’s broken.”

“Take off your shoe. Let’s have a look,” said the man with the biggest sack of all.

Curious as he was to see the white, naked ankle, Quick’s wit and his legs conspired to other ends, forcing him from his hiding place while the men were distracted. What’s more, they sent him headlong into the men’s temporarily abandoned boat. While just a few yards away the man with the big sack poked and palpated his companion’s swelling foot, Quick rolled up his lithe little body and squeezed himself under the boat’s stern-most plank of bench.

His wits had told him in a flash that this ankle might mean trouble. It might send the landing party rushing back to the ship instead of reconnoitering on land, and Quick would lose his chance to stow away.

As usual, Quick’s wits were dead on, and outwitting a pack of pirates proved no more difficult than trapping a pair of rats. He had just tucked his knees up under his chin when he heard the men’s voices growing louder and closer.

“Leave me here. I’ll wait in the boat while you go have a look around,” said the injured man, presumably.

“It looks like rain anyway. What’s say we move on, Captain? These tiny islands are all the same. We’ve seen a dozen already and not one any different from the next. Can’t we cross this one off the list?”

The man’s words set off a flurry of questions in Quick’s speedy brain. To which of the remaining faces did this new voice belong? Was the captain the man that Quick had identified as the leader of the other pirates? What did the strange voice mean, all islands were the same? Why, even small and insignificant Quick knew this wasn’t true. He could see from the shores of his own island that the others around were different. One was tall and green, one flat. Another, a little bit of both.

Quick listened to the men debate and argue, back and forth. One of the group was especially vehement in his conviction that the island must be explored. His research would lose all credibility if incomplete, he said. But between the impending rain, the swelling (and now purplish) ankle, and the captain’s short temper (he hadn’t slept the night before on account of losing the last hand of cards), the man’s conviction was trampled on, as convictions often are, and the party left the island straightaway. Quick melted into the dark of his hiding place and left the island with them, the six men none the wiser.

You can imagine what brave, young Quick must have been thinking as his body lurched across the waves toward an unknown and exciting destiny. What would he eat? Would he fit in? Would there be people to talk to? Would they want to talk to him? He worried about these things, mind, because the real worries, the particulars of life off an island, like urgency and noise and too many people, were too foreign even to imagine. Could Quick have ever dreamed what he was in for?

He wondered, too, if when he returned to his island home, assuming he survived and made it back, the islanders would remember who he was. Poor Quick! He couldn’t know that they would mostly miss him when they smelled a rat.

And what of the island? As he sailed unknowing into the future, did he sense a faint breath of remorse on the breeze, a cool hint of lust from the isle that gave him life? Little matter, because another island entirely had set its sights on young Quick, and
that
island’s shifty winds would blow him rough-and-tumble onto her sunny, sandy shore.

9

T
revor’s Bakery buzzed like a beehive in the full of activity that next day when Bruce’s article on the hit-and-run appeared in the paper. The customers that hovered busy and curious around the counter and the open front door sought answers and explanations to go with their cakes and their honey croissants. In exchange they offered rumor and theory with their coins and rainbow bills. (Oh’s legal tender made up in color what it lacked in economic worth.)

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that headline!” Angela Ratte, elementary school teacher, exclaimed to Trevor, who was busy brushing butter on tops of bread loaves. “Just think of poor Randolph coming upon a lady in the middle of the road like that.”

“It didn’t happen so! It says that right here in the article,” chimed Buster Torrent, carpenter and especially fond of Trevor’s guava tarts. (He ate one every morning, sometimes two.) “‘Equally futile were their attempts to identify the injured young woman,’ it says.”

“Identifying the young woman and seeing her are two different things,” Angela rebutted. “Did Randolph see her or didn’t he?” she interrogated the baker.

“You can ask him yourself.” Trevor motioned with his head in the direction of the door, through which Randolph was entering, his arms piled high with large, empty bread baskets.

“Ask me what?” Randolph deposited his load on the floor behind the counter and slapped away the flour from his trousers.

The island, it seems, had no time for Angela’s queries, for it allowed her not to utter so much as a syllable in response, before police officer Arnold Tullsey busted, bellowing, through the bakery doorway, followed by fellow police officer Joshua Smart.

“Where’s that scoundrel, Bruce Kandele?! The door’s locked down at the
Crier
. Is he here?”

“Haven’t seen him yet today. Why’s he a scoundrel?” Trevor asked, arranging his loaves into lines on a long aluminum tray, while Angela, angry at having been supplanted in the conversation, picked up her pies and shuttled them home.

“Why, for half a dozen reasons!” Officer Smart said. “Undermining the law, disrupting an investigation, unauthorized tampering and photographing of evidence—”

“Just a minute,” Trevor stopped him. “Disrupting
which
investigation, would that be?”

“Trevor, you know very well which investigation,” Officer Tullsey continued. “This bike business. Bruce should have called in the police. All of you should have. How can we investigate a crime if no one tells us about it?”

“Alleged crime, Arnold,” Officer Smart corrected.

“Well, that’s exactly what Bruce did, isn’t it?” Trevor asked. “He told everyone about the crime at once. Easier that way, you don’t find?”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” Officer Tullsey replied. “He made us look like fools, ‘soon-to-be-ongoing investigation’! What are we supposed to say to that?”

“Can I get another guava tart?” Buster intervened. (Listening intently he had devoured the first one in record time.) He laid two large coins on the counter.

“Where’s the bike?” Officer Smart asked. “We should take that down to the station. We’ll need your statements, too.”

“Help yourselves. It’s out back in the shed,” Trevor said, and off the two officers went.

It must have been about the time that Officers Joshua Smart and Arnold Tullsey were puttering around in the shed—and Raoul was ruminating about magic at the port—that Branson ran into Bruce buying swordfish at the fish market. Branson, who had seen the early edition of the paper first thing that morning, chided Bruce for the inaccuracies in his hit-and-run article, but Bruce defended every last one.

“You didn’t even get Jarvis’s job right,” Branson told him. “He doesn’t drive the bus, Dodger does.”

“I know that,” Bruce said, as if Branson had made the most idiotic of all possible observations. “I’m not a simpleton, am I? But every little bit counts in these cases.”

“These cases?”

“Getting people talking! The ‘inaccuracies,’ as you call them, are icebreakers. Someone says, ‘Hey, isn’t Jarvis a conductor, not a driver?’ and someone else agrees, and before you know it, they’ve examined the whole case and maybe come up with some idea or with a clue. How else are we gonna solve this mystery?”

“How can you be so sure you’ll hear every idea and clue they come up with?”

“That’s the easy part,” Bruce said. “I just hang around the bakery. Every piece of gossip worth chewing on comes out between a bun and a banana cake at Trevor’s. Same holds for clues and theories, good ones and bad ones alike.”

Flawless logic, Bruce’s, and so impossible to debate any further.

Fresh swordfish in hand, Branson and Bruce set off together for the bakery, where the police had already loaded the bike onto their truck and were taking statements from Trevor and Randolph. Buster had finished his second guava tart but lingered, relishing the spicy police conversation. While Officer Tullsey asked the questions, Officer Smart took notes.

“Please tell me exactly what happened.” Officer Tullsey directed the first question to Trevor.

“I was here at the bakery, chatting with Branson and with Raoul Orlean, when Randolph and Jarvis showed up. In the back of the bakery truck they had a mangled bike they found on the road to Thyme. I heard what the boys had to say, and then I called Bruce to take some pictures of it. After that we sat outside and drank some beer.”

“Did your son drink, too?” Officer Tullsey asked.

“He did.”

“Hmm.” Officer Tullsey rubbed his chin. “Okay. We’ll take his statement next. I hope he wasn’t so drunk that he’s forgotten what happened.” Officer Tullsey nudged Officer Smart. “You get all that?” he asked. “I’m going to question Randolph now.”

“Got it,” Officer Smart confirmed, scribbling on his notepad. “Drank beer. Drunk.”

Randolph opened his mouth to object, then shrugged his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets.

“Randolph, tell me what happened on the road up there,” Officer Tullsey began.

“Not much to tell,” Randolph said. “I was in the truck with Jarvis, coming back to town on the shortcut, to get help for Dodger. That’s when we found the bike in the road.”

“What happened next?” Officer Tullsey asked slowly, studying Randolph.

“Nothing. We picked up the bike and brought it home.”

“Did you search the scene for clues?”

“We had a look around. I don’t know for clues.”

“You find anything? See anyone nearby?” Officer Tullsey asked.

“Nah.”

“No young woman fleeing the scene, like the paper says?”

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

Officer Tullsey ran his fingers through his hair, frustrated, then dismissed Randolph with a wave of his hand.

Their civic duties seen to, Trevor and Randolph began to fill the empty bread baskets still resting on the floor. It was then that Branson and Bruce walked into the bakery.

“Well, well,” Officer Tullsey remarked as he looked at Bruce. “We just took Randolph’s and Trevor’s statements. I don’t know what’s worse, Bruce, the fact that you looked into the case without calling us, or the fact that you did such a shoddy job of it.”

“C’mon, Arnold, no hard feelings. I can’t sell papers full of rainbows forever, can I?”

“That article’s all wrong!” Officer Tullsey complained.

“It isn’t!” Bruce insisted, a staunch defender of his particular brand of journalism. “It’s one-hundred percent true to my intentions.”

“What about the facts of the case?” Officer Smart demanded. “That article was irresponsible, you know.”

But the island, it seems, had as much time for Joshua Smart’s demands as it had for Angela Ratte’s earlier queries. Before Bruce could utter a syllable in response, the widow Corinna arrived.

“Halloo, halloo! Good Morning! One pineapple cobbler, please.” The widow Corinna, nearly ninety years old and nearly deaf, pushed her way through the crowd of Officers Tullsey and Smart, the spectating Buster, a silenced Bruce, and ever-present Branson. She stood leaning on her walking stick in front of Trevor’s counter.

“Good morning, Corinna,” Trevor said. “I got one for you just now coming out of the oven.”

“Seven? I paid six last time!”

“No. I say it’s coming from the oven,” Trevor repeated, a bit louder.