Foreigners (32 page)

“What the hell is that?” Bull asked.

“It's a fish,” Finnegan said.

“I can see that, Billy. What I want to know is why the hell you're throwing it in my garden?”

“I pulled it out of the old quarry.”

Billy Finnegan was a poacher. A not very good one, as far as Bull was concerned. During his time as a game warden,
before he became mayor, Bull had had many dealings with Finnegan. He was a sloppy trapper and moved through the bush like a bulldozer. It took very little effort for Bull to track him. And more often than not, Bull would find a thankful Billy waiting for him, his snare wire in a loop on his belt, his illegal game in a bag by his feet, himself lost in the woods. Billy Finnegan's sense of direction was atrocious.

“How many times I told you, Billy,” Bull said, stepping carefully between the rows, “to stay away from that place? Christ, the kids don't even go up there drinking any more.”

Finnegan shrugged and bent down for the fish. Two beanstalks succumbed to his heavy boots as he followed Bull.

“You know how many overgrown shafts there are out there?” Bull said, hiding his anger. “The duck hunters don't even bother with it.” Bull himself wouldn't venture out to the old marble quarry. The landscape was speckled with flues that had been dug in the last few years before the quarry shut down; they'd swallowed up enough good bird dogs to convince even the most fanatical hunters that the river was the place to shoot.

Bull offered Finnegan a seat, and watched as the weedy man misjudged the depth and landed with a thump that jarred the fish loose from his grasp. Finnegan left the fish in the grass and rubbed his buttocks.

“So, what can I do for you, Billy,” Bull asked, taking a seat beside him.

“It's this thing,” Finnegan said, pushing the fish toward Bull with the toe of his boot. “What do you make of it?”

“A trout,” Bull said, uninterested.

“Yeah,” Finnegan said, leaning forward. “But what kind? I ain't never seen anything like it.”

Bull took a closer look. There was no question that it was a trout. The sleek but strong body with its thick tail, the cut of the dorsal and caudal fins said as much. But the colours, Bull thought, weren't right. For a moment he considered it might be a brook, but there were no speckles or spots, and the olive green of its back was far too dark. Then there was the silver colouring on the leading edge of its pectoral fins. It was no brook trout.

“You say you caught it at the quarry?” Bull said.

“Yessir.”

“How did it fight?”

“Didn't fight at all. Thing was dead by the time I pulled it in.”

Sitting now on the porch steps, Bull can hear Darlene climbing down the lattice. The thin wood strains under her weight and the vines caught up in her clothes snap free from their hold. It's a wonder there is any ivy left, she's made the descent so often. His daughter is escaping later tonight than usual, owing to Bull's lingering in front of the television— an old black-and-white film he paid little attention to. He'd done so hoping Darlene might fall asleep in her bed and miss her late-night rendezvous. No such luck. His dawdling would succeed in nothing more than strengthening her ire. There seems little Bull can do to staunch his daughter's ill will. She loathed him even before the fish, but it was an expected malignity: parent and teenage child. Now her mordancy is feral. When she looks at him now there is not only contempt in her eyes, but abhorrence.

He watches her as she slips around the side of the house. Her long hair is tied in knots at the sides and top of her head. He can see the weak gleam of the stud she's pushed through the bottom of her lip. The skin must be still swollen and tender, he figures, seeing the awkward way she keeps her mouth open. She's cut the legs off her favourite pair of jeans and wears them over thick black leotards that disappear into an old pair of Darryl's workboots. An old cardigan of Marlene's is thrown overtop a newly torn black T-shirt. She must be very warm, Bull thinks.

At the street she stops and turns back to look at him. Bull waits for her to say something, another stinging insult that has become usual in the past few weeks. He misses the old taunts born of adolescent angst: harsh but never hurtful. The ones that made him feel like a father. Now she treats him like the enemy, and her scorn cuts deeply.

Bull waves. Darlene walks away without responding.

“Fantastic!” Morrow said, leaning close to the fish. “No, more than fantastic. Maybe a miracle, at least scientifically speaking. It's just so beautiful,” he cooed, stroking the stiff scales.

Bull hadn't wanted to come, but after exhausting his own guidebooks and those of the Marbleton library he didn't know where else to turn. Morrow was definitely the man. He called himself an aquatic biologist. Bull had no idea what that meant. Nor did Morrow fit with Bull's notion of a scientist: white lab coat, close-cut hard-parted hair, thick black-framed glasses—like the men from detergent commercials on the television, the ones who placed large checkmarks on their
clipboards. As far as Bull was concerned, Morrow looked like a bum, a vagrant off the street. His was gangly and wore a scrubby beard. His hair sprouted like a bush from his scalp, and his clothes looked stiff from lack of washing. Then there was his voice, which croaked and wavered like a pubescent teenager's. But for Bull, the most unnerving thing about the man was his odour. He smelled like a dead carp lying out in the sun. Granted, Morrow concentrated his efforts on fish, their physiology, cytology, histology and propagation—Bull had many times helped Morrow and his students count pickerel and set lamprey traps—but the tang seemed not to reside on his skin so much as emanate from within.

Bull wasn't too keen on visiting the university either. First off there was the drive. Not that an hour on the road was overly long, but his old Dodge Ram wasn't in the greatest of shape. The transmission had been ready to give out for a few months already. So to be sure he could make it to the university and back, Bull drove at half the speed limit, which added another hour to the trip and attracted a wealth of horn blasts and raised fingers.

Neither was it a mean feat trying to find Morrow's office. First off, the university was not what he'd expected. Bull had imagined it like a high school, only bigger. He'd figured on walking into a reception office and having a secretary direct him down a hallway or two to his destination. Instead, he discovered what at first glance appeared to be a small city. Buildings, some low to the ground, others climbing several storeys into the air, were laid out over countless acres. And there was nothing in the way of signage that identified any of them. After finding a parking spot in one of the farthest lots, Bull made his way along a cinder
path that led finally to a wide concrete quadrangle. It was crowded with students, some passing from one building to the next, but most just reclining on benches, enjoying the late-summer sun. The first student Bull asked, a young man with a string of beads in his hair, looked at him and said, “Huh?” When Bull asked again, the man closed his eyes and shook his head. “Sorry, dude,” he said. “Don't know your guy.”

This happened several more times. It appeared to Bull that Morrow hadn't made much of an impression at the university, or maybe it was just so large that it was impossible to expect him to be readily known. At last someone offered assistance. A girl who looked to Bull as if she had something very bitter tasting in her mouth pointed to a Lego-like building across the river. “It's the Science Complex you want,” she said. “Just take the bridge over.” Bull thanked her and she smirked, or so it seemed to him.

A security guard laughed when Bull asked where he might find Dr Morrow's office. But when Bull did not respond, he directed him to a stairwell. “Even when you think you can't go any farther,” the security guard said, “just keep on going.” And he wasn't lying. More than once Bull thought he'd come to the end of the line, the subterranean corridor halting in a tangle of water pipes, heating vents and loose insulation, only to find that the passage continued. When it did finally terminate, Bull did not have to read the thin metal tag on the steel fireproof door to know that he'd at last found Dr Morrow. The smell had told him as much.

“Fantastic!” Morrow cried again, leaving the fish on his desk and moving to a cluttered bookshelf. “Help yourself to coffee,” he said to Bull.

The coffee machine, the kind Joe DiMaggio used to peddle, was on a small table in the corner of the room. Bull had to step around several piles of books and a crumpled pair of hip waders. Morrow's office was beyond messy. The wastebasket was overflowing and candy wrappers and pop cans littered most every surface. There were two recycling containers beside the small table, but both were empty. And the coffee looked as if it had been brewed days ago. Bull laid his hand on the side of the pot. It was cold.

“Yes,” Morrow called out from behind. “Yes, here it is.” He motioned Bull back to his desk. “Sit, sit, sit.”

Bull removed a stack of typewritten pages from a chair and sat down. Morrow spilled forth like an adolescent caffeine addict. Not only did Bull have trouble distinguishing words, but sentences too were lost to him. The snippets he did pick out made no sense to him. “Industrial Revolution . . . cargo liners . . . pleasure craft.” “Blasting” caught his ear only because of his constituency's former industry. Then Morrow stopped. It took Bull a moment to realize he'd gone silent: the professor's gibber still echoed in his ear.

“Mr Mayor,” Morrow said—he always referred to Bull by title. “Have you ever heard of the myotonic goat?”

Bull looked at him stupidly. “What does this have to do with a goat?”

“The myotonic goat,” Morrow went on, undeterred, “is a scientific, or rather genetic anomaly. It's called by some, ranchers mostly who like their names a little more colourful, the Tennessee Stiff-Leg. Here, look at this.”

Morrow pushed an open textbook across the desk, knocking a half-eaten Snickers to the floor. Bull looked at the
picture. A billy goat with straight horns and a beard, its markings fairly conventional black and white patches.

“Seems pretty regular to me,” Bull said.

“Yes,” Morrow said, his voice cracking with excitement. “But walk up behind this animal and clap your hands, Mr Mayor, and you will find it is anything but regular. In moments of alarm the body stiffens, the muscles actually seize, become as rigid as this desk, and the goat literally falls over in a faint. It is quite, quite fascinating. And if I am not mistaken sir,” Morrow said, a smile cracking his face as he laid his hand on the dead fish, “we are looking at the same here.”

The smart thing would have been to dig a hole in the garden and drop the bloody thing in, Bull thinks. Fish make good fertilizer. His mother used to pay the old man across the street to supply her with perch and sunfish. She'd lay them out in the sun for a couple of days, then till them into the soil around her peas and tomatoes and string beans. She never used them around the potatoes or carrots, though, believing the stink would get into the root vegetables. That's what I should have done, Bull tells himself. Instead, he'd wrapped it in Cellophane and newspaper and stuck it in the deep-freeze, under bags of rhubarb so Marlene wouldn't find it.