“Fish with a soul?”
“Don’t go small-mind on me, boy. Look here: Some of the Indians I’ve talked to up north tell me about a thing they call the manitou. That’s a spirit. They believe everything has one. Rocks, trees, you name it. Even if the rock wears to dust or the tree gets cut to lumber, the manitou of it is still around.”
“Then why can’t you see these fish all the time?”
“Why can’t we see ghosts all the time? Why do some of us never see them? Time’s not right, that’s why. It’s a precious situation, and I figure it’s like some fancy time lock — like the banks use. The lock clicks open at the bank, and there’s the money. Here it ticks open and we get the fish of a world long gone.”
“Well, it’s something to think about,” the young man managed.
The old man grinned at him. “I don’t blame you for thinking what you’re thinking. But this happened to me twenty years ago and I’ve never forgotten it. I saw those fish for a good hour before they disappeared. A Navajo came along in an old pickup right after and I bummed a ride into town with him. I told him what I’d seen. He just looked at me and grunted. But I could tell he knew what I was talking about. He’d seen it too, and probably not for the first time.
“I’ve heard that Navajos don’t eat fish for some reason or another, and I bet it’s the fish in the desert that keep them from it. Maybe they hold them sacred. And why not? It was like being in the presence of the Creator; like crawling back inside your mother and being unborn again, just kicking around in the liquids with no cares in the world.”
“I don’t know. That sounds sort of…”
“Fishy?” The old man laughed. “It does, it does. So this Navajo drove me to town. Next day I got my car fixed and went on. I’ve never taken that cutoff again — until today, and I think that was more than accident. My subconscious was driving me. That night scared me, boy, and I don’t mind admitting it. But it was wonderful too, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind.”
The young man didn’t know what to say.
The old man looked at him and smiled. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “Not even a little bit. Maybe I am crazy.”
They sat awhile longer with the desert night, and the old man took his false teeth out and poured some of the warm water on them to clean them of coffee and cigarette residue.
“I hope we don’t need that water,” the young man said.
“You’re right. Stupid of me! We’ll sleep awhile, start walking before daylight. It’s not too far to the next town. Ten miles at best.” He put his teeth back in. “We’ll be just fine.”
The young man nodded.
No fish came. They did not discuss it. They crawled inside the car, the young man in the front seat, the old man in the back. They used their spare clothes to bundle under, to pad out the cold fingers of the night.
Near midnight the old man came awake suddenly and lay with his hands behind his head and looked up and out the window opposite him, studied the crisp desert sky.
And a fish swam by.
Long and lean and speckled with all the colors of the world, flicking its tail as if in goodbye. Then it was gone.
The old man sat up. Outside, all about, were the fish — all sizes, colors, and shapes.
“Hey, boy, wake up!”
The younger man moaned.
“Wake up!”
The young man, who had been resting face down on his arms, rolled over. “What’s the matter? Time to go?”
“The fish.”
“Not again.”
“Look!”
The young man sat up. His mouth fell open. His eyes bloated. Around and around the car, faster and faster in whirls of dark color, swam all manner of fish.
“Well, I’ll be… How?”
“I told you, I told you.”
The old man reached for the door handle, but before he could pull it a fish swam lazily through the back window glass, swirled about the car, once, twice, passed through the old man’s chest, whipped up and went out through the roof.
The old man cackled, jerked open the door. He bounced around beside the road. Leaped up to swat his hands through the spectral fish. “Like soap bubbles,” he said. “No. Like smoke!”
The young man, his mouth still agape, opened his door and got out. Even high up he could see the fish. Strange fish, like nothing he’d ever seen pictures of or imagined. They flitted and skirted about like flashes of light.
As he looked up, he saw, nearing the moon, a big dark cloud. The only cloud in the sky. That cloud tied him to reality suddenly, and he thanked the heavens for it. Normal things still happened. The whole world had not gone insane.
After a moment the old man quit hopping among the fish and came out to lean on the car and hold his hand to his fluttering chest.
“Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?”
And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea.
“How?” the young man said. “Why?”
“The time lock, boy. The locks clicked open and the fish are free. Fish from a time before man was man. Before civilization started weighing us down. I know it’s true. The truth’s been in me all the time. It’s in us all.”
“It’s like time travel,” the young man said. “From the past to the future, they’ve come all that way.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it… Why, if they can come to our world, why can’t we go to theirs? Release that spirit inside of us, tune into their time?”
“Now, wait a minute…”
“My God, that’s it! They’re pure, boy, pure. Clean and free of civilization’s trappings. That must be it! They’re pure and we’re not. We’re weighted down with technology. These clothes. That car.”
The old man started removing his clothes.
“Hey!” the young man said. “You’ll freeze.”
“If you’re pure, if you’re completely pure,” the old man mumbled, “that’s it…yeah, that’s the key.”
“You’ve gone crazy.”
“I won’t look at the car,” the old man yelled, running across the sand, trailing the last of his clothes behind him. He bounced about the desert like a jackrabbit. “God, God, nothing is happening, nothing,” he moaned. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and —”
The young man called the old man’s name. The old man did not seem to hear.
“I want to leave here!” the old man yelled. Suddenly he was springing about again. “The teeth!” he yelled. “It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder.
Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale, pink seal among the fish.
In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by.
The young man began to strip off his own clothes. Maybe he could nab him, pull him down, put the clothes on him. Something…God, something&.But, what if he couldn’t come back? And there were the fillings in his teeth, the metal rod in his back from a motorcycle accident. No, unlike the old man, this was his world and he was tied to it. There was nothing he could do.
A great shadow weaved in front of the moon, made a wriggling slat of darkness that caused the young man to let go of his shirt buttons and look up.