Fish (fiction)

It’s always cold in the Bay Area. Something about the mountains and wind patterns; stuff I heard an egghead say once, but forgot. There wasn’t any sun coming through my curtains. It was going to rain, and it wasn’t going to stop. I left the vacuum of, what’s now only, my apartment today with my trench and my hat in hand.

I dunno who I was kidding. I didn’t have any place to go. No people to meet. No friends to share a few fingers of rye with. No dames to sweet talk. Maybe I was just trying to kid myself. If I got out of that hole in the wall I could pull it all together how I wanted it. See things in a new light… But it was raining. It always rains by the Bay. I walked the streets for some time. I walked up and down the wet streets of the Marina District. I snaked my way down Lombard Street, watching the rainwater gush down the gutters.  I wandered into The Fisherman’s Warf; my hands plunged into the pockets of my coat like they’d produce a sunny day if they dug deep enough.

Water was pooling and dribbling off the brim of my fedora when I finally sat down on a bench overlooking the water. I hadn’t been there more than a few minutes when an old man sat next to me. “What’s your story, kid?” he asked me in a tone that was both aloof and sympathetic.  “Just lookin’ at the bay, pops.” I said, somewhat mutedly, and turned away slightly. I’d hoped that would be the end of it, but the stiff sat next to me. “C’mon, what’s eatin’ you?” he continued. “You don’t look more than twenty-three. What could have a kid like you down?”

I twisted my shoulders and looked at him. The lines time had etched in his face were as many and as twisted as the rain drops running down the windows of the store fronts. He held himself with something I couldn’t push my brain to identify. There was slickness about him but he wasn’t a con like you saw on every corner. He had a rough, almost stern look worked into his face, but there was a level of compassion in his eyes that wouldn’t let itself be drowned out. I paused for several seconds, looking into his face. He looked right back at mine.

“I just got back from the War two months back.” I told him. He pursed his lips and nodded slightly. “My girl and I had been together through high school. When I graduated two years ago they sent me to Okinawa. I was there until the war ended. I got back home and it was just like those silent films you see of the G.I.s gettin’ home after the first Great War. I got off the boat and right away I spotted her in the middle of the crowd. I got over to her and picked her up in an embrace. I don’t think I’d been so happy to see a person in my life.” The old man was staring over the bay; a gray expanse of water against a gray expanse of sky.

I continued, “Things were great for the first weeks I was back, but one night we were listening to the radio, and she told me that while I was away she had gotten a job at a nearby office. She told me about how her and her lady friends had talked about how different it was working for the first time, and that she’d learned so much about herself. She told me that for the first time in her life she was living for herself. She learned that what she’d been told her entire life was wrong – she didn’t need a man to take care of her. She packed her bags and left the next day.”

He shifted on the bench and cleared his throat after my story had come to an end. “Look at the bay, kid. Those boats won’t pull in fish every day, but they’re going to come back each day, and keep trying.” He pointed to a new, freshly painted boat coming off dry dock. “Look at that new boat, kid. That boat may not get anything today. And it may well not get anything tomorrow. But it’s going to come back full of fish eventually. Even if it comes back empty a hundred times in a row, it has a long life at sea ahead of it.” He pointed at a second fishing boat on the dry dock; old, rusted, weathered, ready to be scrapped. “Look at that one now, kid. It’s over for that one. It has a little something left, but its fishing days are over.” He paused, and looked directly at me, “If it found itself dry docked by a new boat that wasn’t going out anymore, it would probably reach over and pop it right in the mouth for not appreciating the opportunity.”

I looked at him, and then at the bay. The rain was beginning to let up, and the sun was starting to make a stand against the wall of gray that held it back. “You know a lot about old boats, old man?” I finally managed to ask him. “Of course I do…” he said slowly, “My wife died in ’41.”