Tilted bookshelves hung along one wall of the shed, stuffed with a ragtag and water-eaten collection of the Journal of Amphibiana and Aquatic Evolution and a forty volume set of the vivisectionist Dr. Ignacio Narbondo’s Illustrated Experiments With Gilled Beasts which William Hastings had found on a high shelf at Bertram Smith’s Acres of Books for twenty dollars. Open on the table was a recent Scientific American discussing the experimental injection of water into the lungs of rats and subsequent failure of the rats to exhale it, the whole crowd of them drowning, finally, out of their own stubbornness. Edward thumbed the pages idly, thinking about his brother-in-law.
There in a heap on an old mission oak desk lay twenty or thirty little plastic replicas of aquatic plants, thin strips of lead wrapped around the base of each to prevent their floating in the water of an aquarium. Cleverly carved pieces of driftwood and a half-dozen shards of petrified wood had been placed along the avenues of the maze in order to trick the mice into supposing that they’d gotten into a particularly pleasant and reasonable stream for a swim. William had gone to great trouble to tie the plastic waterweeds to the end of a piece of driftwood with fishing line before being interrupted in his endeavors the previous weekend. It was vital, he’d insisted, that the subjects suppose themselves to be paddling through an authentic river. The failure of the experiments reported on in Scientific American were due, he was sure of it, to the rats having been unprepared, psychologically speaking, for the devolutionary leap from land mammal to aquatic. They could hardly have been expected to do anything but drown, given the circumstances.
Edward was only about half convinced. He routed a speckled axolotl past a chunk of petrified wood, the lumpy beast paddling happily and displaying a perfect lack of interest in the mouse that swam with frantic little strokes ahead of it. Whether the litter of mice had developed a maternal regard for the amphibian was impossible to say, although Edward conceded that such a bond was unlikely. The mice and axolotl remained unfortunately aloof from each other. And there was the vague possibility, of course, that they would achieve results entirely opposite from those intended — that the axolotl would be tainted by fraternizing with the mice and would insist on sleeping in a bed of shredded newspaper and shavings of aromatic cedar. Edward admitted to himself that the experiment was a failure. In fact, their three years of mouse experiments had yielded nothing but failures.
Edward became aware, as he swept the plastic seaweed into the drawer of the desk, of a distant jingling bell playing a double-time version of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” over and over again. He watched through a dusty casement window as a white panel truck slowed almost to a stop in front of the house, the driver’s face lost in the shadow of the cab, then rumbled off again, jingling into the distance.
Edward didn’t half like the look of it. “Something’s up,” he said aloud, then stopped himself with the thought that he was beginning to sound overmuch like William. He plucked the Jell-o-y axolotl out of the maze and returned him to a big aquarium, then rescued the hapless mouse, dabbed at him with a tea towel, and ran him back up the corridor and into his cage,
A muffled snickering erupted into a snort of nasal laughter behind him, and Edward turned to find the meaty face of Oscar Pallcheck leering in through the open casement. Oscar’s eyes were too small. Pig eyes, it seemed to Edward, that were almost lost in the pudding of his cheeks. He wasn’t particularly fat, but was stupidly beefy and had a strange sort of Midas touch for breaking everything he handled. He couldn’t take his eyes off the half-filled maze.
“Jim out here?” he asked, forcing back a snicker.
“No.”
“What’re you doing to those mice?”
“Nothing,” said Edward. “Experiments.”
“What was that big turd thing with the feathers in his neck? Another experiment?”
“An axolotl,” said Edward. “If you must know, it’s a sort of salamander. A very pleasant creature, actually.”
“Sure it is,” said Oscar. “What did you do to him?”
“Do to him? I didn’t do anything to him. That’s the way God made him. Inside out. I can’t say why. There’s a lot of God’s inventions that I don’t half understand, and that axolotl not the least of them.”
But Edward’s irony was lost on Oscar who was far gone in his snickering, and who turned at the sound of Jim and Gill coming up behind him. The three of them wandered away talking among themselves, Oscar emitting a snorted guffaw and commenting aloud about a “turd thing” that Jim’s crazy uncle was chasing a mouse with. Edward sighed and mopped up, then pulled down the third volume of Narbondo’s Gilled Beasts and sat at the desk, thumbing through until he came to the lengthy section on mermen. He began to read, for the tenth time, the account of a gilled corpse taken in the seventeenth century from the Sargasso Sea, tangled among the rubbery purple stalks and bladders of floating kelp. There was an unlikely drawing of a peculiar toad man on an adjoining plate, no doubt long dead, but with a wistful and tragic look in his eye, as if he wondered how he’d fallen out of Paradise and in among monsters.
“Pay me for it,” Oscar Pallcheck said, waving a notebook full of looseleaf pages at a silent and saddened Giles Peach. Jim waited and didn’t say anything. He wondered, though, whether he’d have to take Gill’s side against Oscar. The thought terrified him. If he kept silent perhaps everything would work out. Oscar would tire of the game and give Giles his journal. Jim plucked a tuft of grass from Gill’s front lawn, affecting nonchalance, watching the man across the street — Mr. Hasbro — crawling around the ground on his hands and knees, peering beneath an old, orange Metropolitan at its ruined muffler. Beside him was a new muffler, a chrome wonder of tubes and rivets and obscure oval boxes.
“Listen to this,” said Oscar to Jim, involving him in the fun.
Giles snatched at the notebook, a wild grab that missed its mark by a foot when Oscar, with a burst of laughter, yanked it back out of reach. “Listen.” He cleared his throat theatrically and, waving his free hand at Giles as if to ward him off, read:” ‘My father has gone away. I think to the center of the Earth. Why didn’t he take me? Has he turned entirely into a fish?’ “ Oscar guffawed. “A fish! Your old man’s a fish gone off to the center of the earth! Kee-rist! Talk about nuts. Wait, wait.” He ducked around behind the curb tree as Gill grabbed again for the journal, tears leaking from his eyes. He swung wildly at Oscar, managing to hit him weakly in the shoulder, and for a few moments the two of them circled the tree, Oscar shouting with laughter and Giles sobbing and lunging, the gills along his neck flaring and collapsing, something Jim watched half fascinated, half in fear, but which Oscar, in his mirth, was blessedly oblivious to.
Mr. Hasbro tugged the new muffler toward his car. From the altered angle the thing appeared to have metamorphosed into something almost magical. It glowed silver in the sunlight which played in rays off a sequence of bright wires stretched between two curved porcelain masts like strings on a harp. The whole thing, impossibly, seemed to be hovering a few inches off the ground.